legs, then against the bag's bottom stitching and heaved his weight against her.
She grimaced. 'I've never done it like this before – get sand in me and I'll kill you.'
She reached behind him and dragged up as much of the zip as she could, and they were pressed together.
He felt the hardness of the pistol barrel gouge at his skin and the angles of the binoculars; he took his finger from her mouth and kissed her. He held her head, and her eyes did not close – as if the moment were too vital to go unseen – and his lips found hers and he tasted her breath and his own blood. He remembered what she had said to him, on a bench in a park of spring flowers: Do it like you mean it… Don't get any bloody ideas. He had done as he was told. It had not entered his mind that she had kissed him, under the blossom and watched by the search party, from affection. She squirmed in the bag.
'God, aren't you going to help? Do I have to do it all?'
There were zips and eyelets, buttons, belts and hooks, and they writhed together to free themselves.
He did not think it was love… but need.
'I don't have one, don't suppose you do – not to worry, not that time of the month. I can feel that bloody sand.'
The need was bred on emptiness, Malachy recognized it. The void of his life and a corresponding chasm in hers. Each of them with an unspoken loneliness burdening them. He felt her skin, its coldness, had his hands under her waterproof coat, her sweater and blouse, and his fingers moved with wonderment, as if privilege was given him, and she caught the hand where the wound had been and forced it lower. Their loneliness made it desperate. He heard the zipper of the bag torn open as he came across her. They clung to each other, and she stroked him and he buried himself in her, and then the motion calmed. She moaned. She bucked under him. It was as he had never known it before. She cried out, piercing, as the gulls did over them and he felt the ecstasy of it… It was for need, hers and his, and they fell apart. She had said: Do it like you mean it. He had, and he cradled her head. He thought it took them nowhere.
He crawled out of the bag. She swivelled on to her side and her back was to him. He did up the zips and buttons, reefed in his belt. He did not know of any future, only that emptiness must be filled. He lifted the binoculars, scanned and tracked.
'What can you see?'
He said, 'Only the waves and the clouds and the birds – but they'll come, I know i t… Thank you.'
'Crazy, isn't it? You being my friend, me not being your enemy. Mad, isn't it? If you saw me where you come from, whatever place it is, I'd be your enemy – and if you'd just pitched up in Bevin Close I wouldn't be your friend. But we're here.'
The voice dripped in his ear.
'Your thing is killing people… What's mine? I'm not bloody proud -1 do heroin from Afghanistan, and cocaine from Venezuela… Dean, have you been in Afghanistan? Sorry, sorry, not for me to ask. Forget that. We're friends and we don't ask, don't need to know. I often wonder what Afghanistan's like. It comes on the TV but that shows you nothing, just ruins and old tanks and kids without shoes and women who cover themselves. I tell you, straight up, I've made big money out of Afghanistan, five times the money I make out of Venezuela. I'm not hating you because you kill people, and you're not judging me for what I do.'
The voice rambled, incoherent. He let him talk. He understood most of what Ricky Capel said, and he tolerated it. He took help where he could find it, and when the usefulness of the help was finished he discarded it. He had put the fool's socks against the skin of his crotch and let them dry out against his body warmth, and then he had peeled them on to the feet he had massaged, then put the shoes back on the idiot's feet, pulled the laces tight and knotted them for him. It was critical to him to have the imbecile's help.
The voice droned.
He remembered Iyad, the true friend, who had given up his life that time could be bought, a proven fighter who never bragged. On their journey there had been long hours between them of valued silence.
'You must be thinking, Dean – natural you would – can Ricky Capel keep his mouth shut? You have no worries. Back home, we got police and they don't get a sniff on me. Up where I am, and I reckon I'm big enough, we have the spies that are supposed to go after high-value targets – they got bugs and tracker sensors and cameras so bloody small you can't see them. What they haven't got is me. Why? Because I'm sharper than them. They've never had me… Never been charged. All of that lot queuing up, after me because I'm a high-value target, and they haven't ever been able to lay a charge against me. I was in once, three years back, and was held for forty-eight hours, and a good half of that was in the interview room. I never said nothing. Four sessions, maybe six hours each. I took an eyeline on the floor and one on the ceiling, one on the table, one on the door. I said nothing, never spoke, but had a different eyeline each time. You should have seen them, Dean, and they were going fucking spare, believe it… You can rely on it, I don't talk, and I don't reckon you would – it's why we're friends, can depend on each other.'
In his mind, irritated by the voice, he recalled codenames given him and addresses too sensitive to be written down, and the words of the Book that he would use and the responses that would be made.
'You want to know anything, Dean, about sensors and bugs, cameras and audio, or phones – me, I never use them – then I'm your man to ask. I got a guy, clever little sod, and I pay him well, and he's ahead of their game – better than the spies. I know everything they put against me and how to block it. Didn't have an education but I'm not stupid – you've seen that. I aim to stay safe and anyone who's my friend will stay safe. It's why we've got the boat coming. An old trawler flogging around the fishing banks and putting in to port often enough for it to be familiar, clever that.
You're all right with me.'
He thought of the places he had been – while the voice nagged at him – and of the young men and the young woman, all martyrs, whom he had sent out on the road to Paradise, and their cheerfulness to him and their gratitude that they were chosen, and he had been long gone from Taba, Cairo and Riyadh when their pictures were put in newspapers with the images of what they had done.
'What I like about you, Dean, is that you show respect for me. And I'm telling you, it's two-way. I don't mean respect because I'm a big man. Most who give me respect back home, it's because they're frightened of me. Men I do business with, most of them, they give me respect because of fear. I'm not afraid of you, you're not afraid of me, but there's respect because we're equals and friends. Right now, when I get back there's a matter of respect – it's disrespect – to be sorted. That old bastard, Rahman, he didn't give me it, and he has a nephew, a flash little prick, and he's ready for a lesson in respect. Off the boat and I'll be working on i t… I got my cousins, I got people who watch my back, and will watch it when I sort out disrespect…'
He suggested, softly and soothing, that it might be the right time to make the radio link with the boat, and reached out, took a cold hand and squeezed it in reassurance – because he was the equal of Ricky Capel, his friend – and felt no guilt at the deceit.
'If you didn't know it, the weather out here is foul,'
Harry shouted at the microphone. The trawler shook, then cascaded into the trough. Walls of water climbed higher than the wheel-house windows, then hit a solid, ungiving mass, and the Anneliese Royal seemed to stop. 'About as foul as I've known it.'
For a moment she was dead in the sea and lurched to port. He clung, white-knuckled hands, to the wheel, and for endless seconds she seemed to go over, then the stabilizers dragged her upright. But at the limit of the trough a wave made a cliff face and she collided with it. He heard the boy, his grandson, cry out behind him in stark fear. Now Harry saw nothing beyond the windows as sheets of spray covered them, and rivers of the damn stuff would be sluicing on to the decks, weighing her down, and he could hear the roar of the weather and the engine's howl, and the distorted voice of Ricky Capel, and the questions coming more frantic… When was he going to be there? What time? Why so long? A rogue wave could come as one in ten or one in a hundred. A rogue wave could not be ridden by a trawler.
They went on through it and the wheel-house seemed to go dark, seemed as though night came, of blackened blue and green. Then they burst clear. Light where there had been darkness and the Anneliese Royal steadied and Harry knew he would not be pitched over on to the wheel-house plank floor. He loosened his hold on the wheel, and the sweat spilled down the nape of his neck and on his throat. He looked behind him, and the boy hung in misery from the rail round the wheel-house's sides, and the door to the deck had come unfastened in the impact and hammered backwards and forwards. The sea came in and cleaned some of the boy's sickness. Harry
