“Yeah; same to you.” Bob poured a drop of brandy each into their flask-tea.
“I suppose what I mean, Bob, is that, just when it seems as if it’s cold enough to snow, it suddenly gets too cold and then it can’t snow. Like the sky needs unblocking.”
“Yeah, right.” Bob looked at his watch. “Not much traffic.”
“Just as well.” Bob’s mate sniffed, loud and long. Bob, who wasn’t usually sensitive about that kind of thing, shuddered. Sometimes it was hard work, traffic duty. Sitting long hours over the dashboard together, out in the night. Even tonight. Some of the married blokes down the station said they saw their wives less than their traffic-duty partners.
It was a long, lonely job. Traffic duty does not encourage a vital inner life. But partners on these jobs developed a different rapport and adapted to one another’s bodily presence. They, for example, know how often the other had to go to the toilet. Tonight Bob and his mate had been taking turns to nip down the road to piss in the Burn. Traffic police even had to learn to fart without compunction sitting next to each other and, on cold nights like this, unwilling to wind down the windows. Luckily this night was a quiet one; it was a widely held belief in the force that the more exciting the car chase, the greater amount of farting went on. That’s something they never tell you on the telly, Bob thought.
He said, “This road’ll be icing up tonight. Look at the mist. God help them if they come speeding down here tonight, the piss-heads. They’ll be straight in the Burn.” Thoughtfully he rubbed at his itching chin; his five o’clock shadow was now seven hours old.
“I hope they don’t bump into us,” said his friend.
“We can nip out of the way.”
His friend looked sceptical.
“I’ve been in the thick of some nasty dos,” Bob insisted. “Not a mark on me.”
Nervously his mate went on fiddling with the remaining item in his lunch box, a very large orange he had left till last because it had been an unpromising look about it. He unpeeled it morosely, stopping to whisper “Shit!” when the all-in-one-piece rind fell to pieces in his hands. He asked, “Do you reckon I could get the whole of this orange in me gob, all in one go?”
Bob sighed. “Shall we see what’s on the radio?” he asked as his mate prised the fruit into his mouth.
Two women were talking.
“…hairy. I know. I said. You know what it’s like.”
“Where does she live then?”
“Up the posh end. Past Shildon. Near that pub where you sit outside and they bring you sausages.”
“Like the continentals do?”
“She had a conservatory put on.”
“Has she, now?”
“But when you go past on the bus you can see right the way through her house because of it. All the way to her front passage. Silly cow! How they could make her detective inspector when her house is a burglar’s paradise…”
“It’s a select area, isn’t it?”
“I’d never have selected it. There’s horses and all sorts in the fields there.”
Irritably Bob switched them off. Beside him, his mate was moaning. He’s having a heart attack, Bob thought. Fuck! I wanted an exciting life on the force and here it is. Gossip and coronaries; fucking hell.
Bob looked at his friend, who was now sitting quite still in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead as if he had seen something breathtaking in the middle of the black windscreen. Bob might have been tempted to check that nothing was out there, but he could see straight away what the problem was.
“You’ve locked your bloody jaw, haven’t you?”
His mate gave a terse nod, eyes bulging out only slightly less than the waxy orange half stuck out of his mouth. His lips were stretched like elastic bands, looking as if they were about to split. Bob felt like just getting out of the car and walking away.
“You’re not having me on, are you?”
Bob’s mate looked at him with the first signs of an angry panic snorting up in his nose. He stopped short, as if realising how close he was to suffocation.
“Bloody hell! We’ll have to go to casualty.”
His mate waved his hands no and spent some moments finding a pen to scribble on the back of a charge sheet, “You’ll have to suck it out.”
“It’s an orange, not snake fucking venom.”
The rising panic in his mate’s eyes, made worse by the dashboard’s baleful glare, seemed almost pleading to Bob. With an embarrassed cough and a glance around, Bob repositioned himself in the driver’s seat, cupped a hand round his mate’s neck for support, and hesitated, inching forward, over where to bite in first.
WAITING UP FOR SAM, MARK, IRIS AND PEGGY WERE BECOMING A TOUCH maudlin.
“The thought I can’t stand,” Peggy was saying, and the others listened carefully, “is that we…oh, I dunno…fool ourselves into making compromises. You know.”
They all thought about this. Somewhere at the back of his mind, as he rubbed a forefinger into a square of eyeshadow, Mark was wondering how appropriate a conversation this was to be having just now. It wasn’t the sort of thing to be discussed between partners with others present, and he felt it might touch too rawly on his doings with Sam. Nevertheless, as these conversations most often tend to, it rumbled on under its own momentum.
“What do you mean?” asked Mark, greasing the cogs.
“Well…” Peggy stirred herself to be self-revelatory, quite forgetting that even as recently as this morning she had thought of Mark as less than trustworthy. “What I mean is that whatever we assume is good, whatever we think works, what we think we’re happy in…What if, really, we’re lying to ourselves?”
“Oh, God!” Iris said, quietly aghast for a number of reasons.
Mark bided his time, expecting to hear the groans of a
