

## Hell and High Water

## Tony Nash

Copyright © Tony Nash 2014

ISBN 9781631737688

Smashwords Edition

Other works by Tony Nash:

The Tony Dyce thrillers:

Murder on Tiptoes

Murder by Proxy

Murder on the Chess Board

Murder on the High 'C'

Murder on the Back Burner

The John Hunter thrillers:

Carve Up

Single to Infinity

The Most Unkindest Cut

The Iago Factor

Other books:

The Devil Deals Death

The Makepeace Manifesto

The World's Worst Joke Book

Panic

The Last Laugh

Historical saga:

A Handful of Dust

A Handful of Salt

A Handful of Courage

And The Harry Page Thrillers:

Tripled Exposure

Unseemly Exposure

This is a work of pure fiction, and any similarity between any character in it and any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional. Where actual places, buildings and locations are named, they are used fictionally.

" _To die; to sleep; no more; and, by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.....Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns puzzles the will..."_ Shakespeare Hamlet Act 3

TOM

Oh, boy, he's there again. I'm in big trouble, at least as far as this life is concerned.

He has been there whenever my life has hung by a thread, but now, for only the second time, I can see him clearly, though I still can't describe his features. They seem to change from second to second, encompassing the attributes of every human face I have ever seen; every colour of hair, every shape of nose, lips and eyes, every complexion, every national trait, every expression, and in essence they hold all the wisdom of the ages.

The last occasion was bad enough. It was the first time he had appeared really close to me; close enough to touch in fact, if only I'd recognised him and been able to concentrate; the day before my seventy-third birthday, one I so nearly failed to see, but at that point I was in no fit state to recognise him, or anyone else for that matter. From the hazy, semi-conscious fragments I remember of the quarter hour I spent in his presence that day he had the appearance of an old man; a par for the three others. On every other occasion he has been young, as he is today, but the circumstances made that necessary: he had to fit in; a young man would have stood out like a sore thumb in that scenario.

My first glimpse of him, so transitory that at the time it seemed never to have happened, or was imagination, heightened by childish terror, was on the fourth of August 1941; yet another beautiful, hot sunny day, the air so still and humid that even breathing became difficult, the sky painted a vivid, ethereal blue no earthly artist could possibly match, the only trace of cloud half a dozen barely visible, wispy mare's tails of mile-high alto-cirrus on the far eastern horizon, over the sea that lay twenty miles away. One of a long string of similar days, each of them with not the slightest hint of a breeze, and afternoon temperatures in the high eighties, in a blazingly hot summer that seemed to go on for ever, as the summers always did in those first years of the war, an early harvest almost completed. We boys, all in short grey trousers, as was the style in those days, with knee-length socks that had been made to 'go to bed', as we tried to emulate our youthful hero, Just William, had spent many happy, sweaty hours whooping with glee as we chased the rabbits that broke from cover, frightened out of their wits and disorientated, not knowing which way to run as the combine harvester closed in on the last few rows of corn, hoping, and often managing to crack them over the head with the knobbly ends of our sticks as they dodged between our feet, to give a welcome addition to the meat ration; a yearly treat for us, bloodthirsty little terrors that we were; typical small boys, with boundless energy and enthusiasm for everything in the big outdoors, where we spent every waking minute except for meals, and they were grudgingly bolted down before we dashed outside again.

Hot sun beaming down from a clear blue sky, repeatedly reflected from the bouncing blades of the antiquated harvester, worn shiny from constant contact with the strong wheat and barley stalks; fine chaff filling the air, impregnating our hair and clothes, making us look like moving haystacks; chaff that would take a week to comb out of our hair and have us scratching the itches those tiny, needle-sharp pieces stuck fast in our clothes caused; the excited cries, thick home-made cheese sandwiches with pickles, and cold tea from a pop bottle with one of those clamp-down Corona ceramic tops, the war and everything else temporarily forgotten. For us boys, Heaven on earth. There were no handheld toys to divert our attention in those days, unless you counted home-made catapults, whizz-sticks and conkers. If we missed the bunnies with our sticks there were always men around the edges of the field with twelve bore shotguns, They were all good shots and no rabbit ever got away. If we didn't managed to clobber one we would always be given one that had been shot to take home and boast to our parents that we had. We were congratulated for our prowess and it went in the pot. Mother would remove any pellets she found when she cleaned and skinned it, and say nothing, but the truth always came out when Dad's teeth connected with a bit of lead at the table. He had been a regular soldier for sixteen years in his youth and had retained the colourful vocabulary, never calling a spade anything other than 'a bloody shovel', though I never heard him use the 'F'-word, even in the latter stages of his massively spread cancer.

Back at school in the autumn, boasting of our success, we lorded it over the city boys, whose hols we rated insipid compared with ours.

One of my older sisters, Cissie; Mary, really, though no one ever called her that, was taking my newborn baby sister, Jane, out for a walk in the beautiful Silver Cross pram, the Rolls Royce of prams, a classic, and so unlike the brash, utilitarian buggies that babies are pushed around in today, and I had said I wanted to go with her to show her where the bits from the damaged Blenheim had fallen on some houses near the Boundary, knocking off some tiles, as the badly wounded navigator jettisoned everything he could move, trying desperately to help the aircraft maintain height long enough to reach the runway, only half a mile but at that moment possibly an eternity away. They had barely made it, limping over rooftops just feet below them, though the navigator and the air signaller had died from their wounds after they'd landed. At least they died on English soil. So many planes didn't come back at all. We'd count them off and count them back in, and it was rare for them all to return from a mission. Once, on quite a big raid, none of them did. We boys stood a long time in the dusk, half a dozen of us, late for tea and shivering as the evening chill came on, hoping they'd run short of fuel and landed on another 'drome, but we heard the next day that they had all been lost. It was nothing unusual. If we thought of death at all it was in the abstract.

I really wanted to go with Cissie to show off my new blazer; a prize possession and my ninth birthday present from Mum and Dad, though whether there would be anyone out and about to see it I didn't know and didn't really care. New clothes were a rarity. It had used up a lot of clothing coupons.

We lived on Cromer Road, a couple of houses up from The Firs pub and the RAF guardroom, which they'd built on the road leading into St Faiths aerodrome, where our three lodgers, Bill, Graham and John, who worked for the Bristol Aircraft Company, toiled for long hours every day, trying to keep their Blenheim aircraft flying, despite the sometimes terrible damage they came back with from raids. The workers had come back to the house yesterday with a great story: an aircraft from our aerodrome had gone to attack a power station at Gosnay, in the Pas de Calais, and on the way had dropped a container on the airfield at St Omer-Longeunesse, which had in it a new pair of artificial legs for one of our great heroes, Douglas Bader, whose other tin legs had been lost when he was shot down a short while before. He had, for a time, been stationed close by, at RAF Coltishall, and I and my fellow schoolboys knew all about his exploits, and hoped one day to emulate them.

Like all my friends I desperately wanted to grow up quickly to be a pilot, hoping, stupidly, as small boys do, that the war would go on long enough for us to achieve our goal. We spent hours watching the planes that flew over us at chimney height, waving frantically to the pilots as they passed, and knew many of them by sight, and some of their names. As well as the Blenheims of 110 and 114 Squadrons, there were also Spitfires of No.19 and No.66 Squadrons and Boulton and Paul Defiants of A Flight, 264 Squadron based at Horsham St Faiths, the latter made by the Boulton and Paul factory only a few miles from us on the outskirts of Norwich. We loved the Spitfires most, with their wonderfully ear-splitting Rolls Royce Merlin engines, and the incredible aerobatics the pilots often indulged in over our heads, though we'd been told they had been ordered not to. With their life expectancy they didn't give a damn and must have thought it was better to go out with a bang. We worshipped them.

They were not the only planes we got to know well; there were others that had swastikas on their wings: the Heinkel 111s, the Junkers 52s, the Focke-Wulf 190s and the Dornier 17s, the latter so easily recognised by their shape. The Germans called the aircraft the ' _Fliegender Bleistift': the 'Flying pencil'._ Its strange 'Wump-wump' engine noise told us what was flying above us even in the dark. Those were the bombers, and we saw them regularly enough when they bombed the airfield in daylight, and heard them even more often when we were huddled at night inside the steel grilled Morrison shelter that the Ministry men had delivered and that Dad had erected under our oak dining room table. We were fortunate, huddled tight together indoors, bodies touching and warm: not for us the outside corrugated iron Anderson shelters where some of our neighbours had to spend the bitter winter nights, desperately cold, their teeth chattering, their bodies shivering and hoping like mad that the 'All Clear' would soon be sounded. There were other benefits, as I discovered a couple of years later, when puberty made me only too aware of the close proximity of my sixteen year-old cousin's female body; her of the large breasts I had spied through the bathroom door she had left partly open the day after she arrived to stay with us, and the conspicuous love-bites she always flaunted like hard-won medals. She must have been clearly conscious of those contacts, since she once, on a night I would never forget, when father was out doing his air raid warden duty and mother was poorly and had stayed in their bed upstairs, slowly and surreptitiously slid her hand under my dressing gown and through the fly of my pyjamas, took a good hold of my penis, pulled back the foreskin and squeezed hard, causing an immediate ejaculation. She held it until the pulsing ended then gave it a possessive pat, as if to tell it it was a good boy, before removing her hand. The next day I dare not look her in the eyes, but as I passed her she reached out, placed her hand under my chin, lifted it and turned my head towards her. With a lascivious smile she gave me a big wink. Even now I can not believe the number of sleepless nights I spent with a throbbing erection, hoping for a repeat, twice managing to wiggle close enough to push that erection hard against her buttocks, so that she had to be able to feel it, but I was to be disappointed: there was never a repeat performance. That sole contact was to be my masturbatory memory for the next twelve months, until I genuinely lost my cherry. I learnt a couple of years later that she was known as the village bike where she lived, and that she had been sent to stay with us to remove the ever-present stigma from the family. When the Yanks arrived at Horsham St Faiths she had a ball for a while, playing the field, then married one and went to live in California. They had five kids and apparently had a lasting, loving relationship until she died two years ago. Later in life I was to meet other women like her, who genuinely loved life and romance, freely giving of themselves to all and sundry; open hearted, open handed, and, it has to be admitted, open legged. Though many other women abjure them they are the very salt of the earth.

At his seventieth birthday party I asked my younger brother if she had also honoured him with her attentions. He was highly indignant and exclaimed, 'You dirty, lucky bastard! No, she bloody well didn't, and I fancied her something rotten.'

The bombers were a regular occurrence, but then there were also the cheeky fighters, the Messerschmitts, that came in almost daily to attack the planes on the ground, crossing the coast at zero feet and hedge-hopping all the way until they reached their target to avoid detection, often arriving before our fighters could scramble. It was the early days of radar, and the warnings always came too late. It was certainly lively, living on the edge of the airfield!

Cissie settled Jane in the pram and wheeled it out of the front door. It was blistering hot in the sun and I soon started to sweat; wearing the blazer had not been the best idea in the world, but once we reached the shade of the huge trees dotted along the pavement a little further up the road it was not so bad, and we walked the half mile to the Boundary, enjoying the walk, Cissie gabbling almost incessant baby talk to Jane, which I thought was stupid: a month-old baby would not know what the words meant. There was no traffic; petrol rationing ensured that, and no pedestrians, everyone staying indoors out of the debilitating sunshine. The road was empty.

We bought three quarters of a pound of bully beef at the butcher's shop at the Boundary, all of our meat ration for that week. I liked the picture of the shaggy head of the bull on the huge Fray Bentos tin; it always amazed me that the meat came from so far away in South America. Most people hated bully beef, but I loved the taste and the texture, and always wanted more.

We began to walk home, but the siren sounded when we had gone only a couple of hundred yards, and Cissie said, 'It's all right, they'll still be over the coast. We can get home before they get here.'

With a German fighter's top speed of 450 miles per hour, that would have given us only about three minutes, but before the last word left her lips we heard the screaming engine as the aircraft dived, and the stutter of machine guns down at the aerodrome. We began to run, still under the trees.

The Messerschmitt 109 pilot obviously didn't appreciate the flak he was flying through over the airfield and decided to shoot up a few houses that wouldn't shoot back instead. We saw him turn directly towards us, no more than fifty feet above the ground.

Cissie made the correct instant decision and cleverly pushed the pram behind the trunk of one of the huge horse chestnut trees, its panicles of red-spotted white flowers gone; changed by the marvels of nature to the immature spiked seed capsules that would, in a few short weeks, provide the conkers I and the rest of the boys would be searching through, collecting those we thought could, by soaking in vinegar, baking in the oven and other famously top secret, carefully guarded recipes, produce 'sixers' and more in our games to the death in the playground. Behind it, Cissie and the baby were shielded completely from the oncoming aircraft.

Being a stupid nine-year-old I decided instead to run, and where, for God's sake? Out into the road and directly down the middle of it! I heard my sister's screaming shouts but took no notice, fear driving my feet.

The pilot, seeing something moving he could shoot at, veered the path of his aircraft slightly and a stream of bullets from his machine guns began stitching their way along the road surface towards me. I kept pounding away, straight down the middle of that road, and when the bullets reached where I was I felt the sting of tiny pieces of road surface and hot tar hit my bare legs as the slugs missed me by inches.

I saw the pilot's face clearly. He didn't look much older than me. He had pushed off his oxygen mask and I could see him grinning; a true son of the Thousand Year Reich, the thought of killing a small English boy with a couple of hundred marks' worth of bullets must have been truly amusing. His engine noise almost deafened me as it passed so close above me.

I kept running, the sound of the Messerschmitt becoming weaker behind me, but then the noise increased again: he had turned back!

I was only a couple of hundred yards from home when the guns began again. The bastard Hun, not content with one attempt, was having another go.

It was then that I saw him, standing in the road directly in front of me, about fifty yards away; a man about thirty, good looking, tall, with a serious expression, but the funny thing was that I could see the road and grass and trees right through him. He jerked his head to the right, and as if I had been forced to I swerved left a yard or two, still running hard.

The bullets slammed into the tarmac beside me, again missing by mere inches and splashing more tar on me, striking exactly where I would have been had I not gone left, and I watched them hit, stitching a ragged line in the surface of the road, and right through the fading figure in front of me.

The Messerschmitt was even lower as it hurtled over me, and the noise made me crouch as I ran. I could see every rivet in the fuselage. Having had enough fun for one day, the pilot climbed hard into the blue sky and disappeared in the direction of Yarmouth and the coast. I guessed at the kind of report he would make and the number of aircraft he would claim to have destroyed on the ground. I knew there would be no mention of a small boy, or the fact that his shooting even then had been inaccurate.

I stopped running, a painful stitch in my side and completely out of breath, lifted my head again, and looked for the man, but he was nowhere to be seen, and, with a small boy's urgency for the present, he was immediately expunged from my mind, as if he had never existed.

When Cissie arrived home I was scolded for minutes long and had my backside slapped hard, for being a stupid, stupid boy. My mother and my sister were both sobbing. I had no idea that both the punishment and the tears were signs of massive relief. Though I lived with them, women were a foreign country at that time in my life, though that would, in short order, change.

That was the first time I saw him, or almost saw him, and with a nine-year-old's urgent need to live life I quickly forgot all about him. The adventure kept me popular in the school playground for all of one day, and of course he did not get a mention. Everyone had a tale to tell, some of the boys having been bombed out and had relatives killed and missing, and even my friends were disbelieving until I showed them the bullet holes in the road.

Though he must have been there I didn't see him the following year, when my brother, in a rage because I had broken his catapult, threw a house brick over the garden fence. It was a good shot and just about brained me. Unconscious, I was whisked off to hospital in an ambulance, and, so I've been told, was operated on for several hours by a surgeon and then kept in the emergency ward for almost a week.

When I came to from the coma, one of the pretty nurses told me that one or another member of the family had sat at my bedside for most of the time that I had been blacked out. I had been aware of them the last day before I fully woke up, but I had sensed another presence during the long night when I was struggling up from the depths of unconsciousness.

Move on twelve months: I had all the naughtiness of a typical eleven-year-old, and it almost finished me off.

A police sergeant lived two doors down from us, and in his back garden he had an apple tree, and on that apple tree he had two apples; huge, red, obviously juicy, sweet apples; the biggest apples we had ever seen, at least five inches in diameter.

My brother and I looked at them every day, drooling, and an urgent, insistent small voice was forcing its insidious message into our brains.

Our land ran behind his and although he had a chicken-wire fence along the back of his property, there was a loose bit at one point.

I pulled it up to make a gap, but though I tried to crawl under it was too tight for my body to go through. My brother Michael was smaller and I talked him into it.

He took just the larger of the two apples, crawled back under the fence and we ran off and went into the shed to eat it.

Though it was the reddest apple I had ever seen, it was the sourest apple I had ever tasted, and we threw it away behind the muckheap after just one bite each.

That evening I had a bad stomach-ache, made far worse when a knock came at the door and I heard angry voices.

Mum came in, followed by the big, beefy sergeant, in his police uniform.

I could see that she was embarrassed, 'Did you steal an apple from the sergeant's garden today, Tom?'

I denied it, of course, but was not believed by either of them. The sergeant asked if he could take both my and my brother's shoes to make plaster casts, and my mother agreed.

The next day the stomach-ache was far worse, and we had another visit from the sergeant.

'The prints of the shoes match those in my garden exactly. What do you say now, young man?'

What could I say, except, 'It was such a nice looking apple. I'm sorry.'

Though I couldn't believe it I could see he was having a hard job not to grin, 'It was pretty sour, wasn't it?'

I grimaced, 'It was awful.'

'Well, it serves you jolly well right. It looks as if it has given you a bellyache. Perhaps next time you'll think twice about stealing. You've had your punishment. I'm going to let you off this time with a warning, but I'll be watching you, and if you ever steal again, you'll go to prison. That I promise you.'

When he'd gone, Mum told me that he had grown those two apples for a show, and had been sure of winning first prize.

By Sunday the pain in my stomach was so bad I could not eat. Dad was upstairs in bed, having smashed his patella when his horse had shied, and he had been thrown out of the cart. Petrol rationing meant that the car stayed in the garage. The doctor came twice a week, and this was his day. I heard Mum answer the front door and take him upstairs to change the dressing.

When they came down again, she was saying goodbye to the doctor at the door when I groaned with the pain, and the doctor asked, 'Who is that?'

My mother, though flexible in many ways, was intransigent in one respect: any ailments in our house came under just two headings: indigestion and imagination. In this instance, mine was imagination.

I heard her say, 'Oh, that's just Tom. He thinks he's got a tummy ache.'

The doctor, thank God, muttered, 'I might as well take a look at him while I'm here.'

He came in, asked where the pain was, and touched me on what I later found out was called McBurney's Point. I almost climbed the wall.

Forty-five minutes later, after another mad ambulance dash, I was slashed open by the Senior Surgeon, Mr Noon, at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, and when I came round from the anaesthetic I heard him tell my parents that had I been admitted ten minutes later I would have died before he could save me. My appendix had been hugely distended and on the very point of bursting.

No, I didn't see him that time, but he was there, I know.

I passed the eleven plus somehow or other and went up to the grammar school, where I palled up with Joe Closely; a bit of a wild card, like me, and John Teasdale, whom we nicknamed 'Tease'. I could never understand why he wanted to be pals with Joe and me. We were not swots; in fact we skived whenever we could, but Tease put his nose to the grindstone and came top of everything. He was a great lad, with a quirky sense of humour. His parents, and I guess he also, were members of the Jehovah's Witnesses, and that was another difference. Joe and I were so-called Christians, but we didn't go to church. I think he ran around with us because he needed some excitement in his life. We were great burly lumps and he was small and neat. He had to rush home every afternoon to do his homework, but on Saturdays he was allowed out and got into all sorts of scrapes with us. It was to lead to his downfall, and a disaster.

We always cycled out to aircraft crash sites; there were plenty of them, and we knew that a Mosquito had crashed during the night in the woods a few miles away from where we lived, at Haveringland. We all got on our bikes and went to the scene. There were no bodies, but plenty of bits and pieces for our collections. Live ammunition lay everywhere and we helped ourselves to several half-inch canon shells. They had different markings; red, blue and green bands around the heads, and we took some of each. We knew, of course, that some had high explosive heads, but not which colour denoted it.

Not content with just taking the ammo, when we got back to Joe's place, his parents being out, we put some of the shells in the vice and worked the bullet part out of the casings. We took out the cordite and used it to start a fire and decided to put a couple of the bullets on the fire to see if they would explode. Really clever!

Joe and I stood right up close to the fire, but Tease was not happy about it and stood well back behind a thick wood fence.

When the fire got hot one of the shells exploded and Joe and I were splattered with dozens of bits of red-hot metal, causing lots of bleeding cuts to our faces, arms and legs. We were lucky they missed our eyes. One tiny, tiny piece went through the wood of the fence and lodged in the skin of Tease's leg. He pulled it out and thought nothing more about it. Joe and I knew we were in for a belting for being so stupid. We were bleeding all over.

We rode back to my house and had a sandwich, and then Tease rode home.

He died of gangrene just after midnight, and at the inquest I found out that he could have been saved if they had amputated his leg in time, but his religion did not allow it.

His death devastated me. He was such a good person in every way; far superior to me, and he did not deserve to die. I felt it was my fault: he would never have done something stupid like that if he had not been with us. It seemed incredible that we had so many pieces of shrapnel that had to be picked out of our skin and he had had just the one, but it seems our shrapnel was clean because it was red-hot and straight from the fire, whereas that tiny sliver that hit him had picked up the badness from the wood of the fence. The irony was that if he had stood out with us he would have lived.

I learned several lessons that day: life always hangs by a thread; luck plays a great part in whether we live or die; the good do die young.

Even now I often think of him and regret so much our stupidity. I hope his own guardian angel was with him at the end and took him to the place he so richly deserved.

The rest of my early teenage years were punctuated at intervals with all sorts of injuries, some serious, but not life threatening, and I managed to make it through to fourteen before my next brush with death.

It was another red-hot summer, and seven of us boys went down to the river at Hellesdon, where the river bends sharply, and where we could park our bikes. The water at that point is more than ten feet deep, the bottom and the sides under the banks having been scored out by the water, and though we did not know it, the huge trees that grew, and still grow by that bend, have tangled roots that grow out into the water.

We dived and swam, dived and swam, and were having a terrific time, splashing each other and generally whooping it up.

I dived in for what must have been the twentieth time and went very deep. Suddenly I found myself fighting what seemed like an octopus, its arms winding around my body. I struggled and struggled, and that was all I remember. Everything went black.

The next thing I knew I was lying on my back on the muddy bank, coughing up water, surrounded by my friends, all on their knees and looking worried..

I had lost minutes of my life; a total blank.

When I'd finished coughing up water and was breathing almost normally again, I asked, 'What happened?'

Malcolm Blake, my best friend and neighbour, told me, 'You didn't come up and we didn't know what to do. We dived in looking for you, but couldn't see you anywhere. Then this man just turned up, dived in and pulled you out.'

'Where is he?' I asked.

They looked puzzled, and Malcolm told me, 'He just walked off.'

'Did he say anything?'

'No, not a word. Just walked off.'

'Did he dive in with his clothes on?'

He nodded.

'Wasn't he wet?'

Malcolm frowned, 'No, I don't think so. That's funny, that is. There was no water dripping off him.'

'What was he like?'

'Dunno, really.' He looked around to see if any of the others had any idea, but there were blank stares and shrugs. They had all been concentrating on me.

I hadn't seen him myself, but the others had. Or had they?

The rest of the teenage years raced past, the main activity testosterone-fuelled chasing of girls, but I managed to reach seventeen and joined the RAF as a pilot/navigator on the first of December, nineteen-forty-nine, finally achieving that aim we had all had as small boys. That war was over, thank God, but there was, hopefully, always the chance of another.

I was ordered to report to 5 PDU, Hednesford, on the third of January, for allocation to a training unit, but on the twentieth of December I felt terribly sick. I could not face food, and the smell of fat cooking had me leaning over the toilet bowl. The pain in my stomach was horrendous.

It hurt too much to ride my bicycle to the doctor's surgery, just over a mile away, so I walked, stumbling along in agony every step of the way.

The waiting room was full, and I had to sit for over an hour to see Doctor Hinshalwood. When I finally went in he asked just one question, 'What colour are your faeces?' I misheard him, his slight Scots accent not helping, and not knowing the word at that point asked, 'My face?' I thought it was a stupid question: he could see that for himself. He sighed and repeated the question in the vernacular, 'What colour's your shit?'

That I did understand and answered, 'Bright yellow.'

He nodded and asked me to pull up my shirt and loosen my trousers.

When I'd done so he very gently touched my stomach.

'How did you get here?' He asked. I told him I'd walked.

'You could have died any step of the way. Your spleen is close to six times normal size and very close to bursting. Come through.'

He took my arm and helped me through another door into his house, where he made me lie on a couch.

'Don't move, at all. I'll take you to the hospital in my car when I've finished with the rest of the patients.'

He saved my life.

Twice in the first two days I was in Lincoln Ward I was sure I saw that face, looking in the window of the door at the end of the ward, but when I looked more carefully it was gone. I was there almost a fortnight before being discharged.

The first six months of ground training was at RAF Jurby in the Isle of Man, and then, for flying training, I was posted to Gwelo, one of the airfields of the Rhodesian Air Training group in what was then Southern Rhodesia, where a few months later I walked away from a bad crash in the little Morgan 4x4 I was so proud of, writing it off. He was absent that day. Obviously it was not my time.

The next brush came when the aircraft in which we were returning to the UK had engine trouble, and we were dropped off in Aden.

There was little to do, except collect our pay once a week and drift around, looking for things to do.

One, which in retrospect was probably the stupidest thing I've ever done, and there were plenty of those to choose from, was to hire dugout canoes from the beach at Steamer Point. They were, literally, hollowed out tree trunks, and completely unwieldy. The paddles were just roughly shaped lengths of wood.

One of my oppos, Bill Grundy, grinned as he suggested, 'Let's paddle out to that American destroyer and shout, 'Daddy!' at the sailors.'

As soon said as done. He took one canoe, a single-seater, and Graham Tusk and I took a two-seater, and away we went.

The American ship was anchored a long way out, in fact almost a mile and a half. We got there, pretty tired by that time; the craft we were in were so unwieldy, and there were no sailors looking over the side that we could shout at, so we headed back.

We were paddling along, minding our own business, enjoying being out on the water, until I went to dip the paddle in the water again and hit something hard, something that had reared up out of the water, something much longer than the canoe!

We learned later that the Red Sea sharks had cleverly learned how to find a good dinner; they came up alongside a canoe, reared most of their body out of the water, then slumped back down again, making the canoe, which was unstable enough to begin with, completely unstable, turning it over.

The canoe rocked dangerously, and Graham shouted over his shoulder, 'What the fuck are you doing, Tom?'

I shouted, or tried to shout, 'Shark!'

No sound came from my lips, none at all, only a gasp of air. The shock had robbed me of my voice.

I smacked him on the shoulder and he turned round to look at me. I tried again and again, and he kept asking, 'What?'

Just as he was asking for the fourth time, the shark came up and did its thing once again. That time we both had to lean frantically to stop the canoe going over.

Still a mile offshore we began paddling for our lives.

As we went past Bill we tried to shout 'Shark!' at him, but no sound came from our lips. Both of us had lost the power of speech.

We kept trying to shout, paddling like mad. Bill could see we were agitated and he also kept shouting, 'What?'

Had there been an onlooker it would have seemed like something from one of those early slapstick comedy films, but it was not in the least funny from our seats in the front row.

After several silent, 'Sharks!' and several loud 'Whats' the shark came up alongside us again, and Bill's mouth fell open.

I would like to say that we had those tree trunks up on first-degree planes, with the way we paddled, but it would be a lie. They wallowed in the water, but we moved them as fast as we could.

The whole way in the shark continued its attack.

I guess we were thinking we were going to make it when we reached just a hundred yards from the shore, now full of Arabs, watching the display and obviously enjoying it, probably hoping to see us taken and torn to bits; their equivalent of a Saturday afternoon at the three-penny fleapit cinema. With what happened later in Aden it would probably have made their day.

Suddenly, the worst happened. Whether the shark realised how near the shore we were, made a mistake or had become cleverer I'll never know, but it changed its tactics and came up right under the canoe throwing it up into the air, tossing both of us out into the water.

We began swimming for our lives, each second expecting to be engulfed in a giant maw and dragged down into the deep to a watery grave, our arms and legs moving frantically.

I was more frightened then than I had ever been before or have been since, with an atavistic fear that filled my whole being, not just of drowning, but of being eaten slowly, feeling those terrible teeth tearing me to pieces.

Bill, bless him, drove that single canoe right up to us and stayed alongside as we swam, not thinking about saving himself.

We heard, but did not register, huge splashes behind us, as the stupid shark, having got its dinner into the water, kept attacking the canoe we'd left behind.

That hundred yards seemed to take forever, but finally we touched sand and eager hands helped us up onto the beach.

I looked up at the huge crowd on the sea wall and for just half a dozen seconds before it disappeared saw a smiling white face I thought I recognised among all the brown ones. I knew it was him.

I learned later that there are more dangerous sharks per square mile in the Red Sea than anywhere else on Earth. Only three weeks after our little episode one found the only small hole in the thick steel wire fence that enclosed the British forces Lido, a 'safe' area of the sea for swimming, wiggled its way through and killed the wife of the station commander, while other bathers screamed and scrambled out of the water.

From Aden we were taken in an ancient Mark 19 Avro Anson, which seemed to be held together with baling wire and string, its wings flapping almost as much as a seagull in flight, as far as Khartoum, where again we were dropped off for a fortnight. We were certainly having a Cook's Tour, courtesy of the Royal Air Force. On our first day there I almost caused a riot by calling a bus driver 'Boy'; the term used for all natives in Rhodesia, where apartheid was even stronger than in South Africa. We quickly learnt that things were vastly different in that part of Africa, and it was only months after that that the country was plunged into dreadful civil war, with the Mau Mau atrocities some of the worst the world has ever seen, though they are being matched again now in Syria and Iraq, by ISIS. I always imagined that the bus driver had left his seat and joined them. He was certainly militant minded!

The next step took us out to Wadi Haifa, in the middle of the desert, this time in an old Dakota DC3 that we reckoned must have been flying since Pontius was a pilot. It gave up the ghost with mag drops and worse, and that left us, as the saying goes, 'Out in the Ooloo'. There was sand, and then there was sand, and when you got fed up with that, there was more sand. By the time we left there I reckoned we'd seen the crazy film ' _Hellzapoppin'_ at least forty times in that grotty little tin hut they used for the cinema, the 16 millimetre film breaking at least once every half hour.

Eventually, a Hastings, Number 527, with a few empty seats, picked some of us up and took us to Egypt, just as the trouble was starting there.

Being supernumerary yet again, we were allocated to escort duty on the daily three-and-a-half-tonners that trundled up and down the Canal Road between Port Said and Port Fouad, dropping off supplies to the various army and air force bases along the Road.

We were issued with and had to sign for a Lee Enfield and nine rounds of ammunition each time, with the admonition, 'Do not use the rifle. If you fire a round, there has to be a court of inquiry, and you will be stuck here for months.'

Enough said; we wanted to get back to Blighty. I never loaded the weapon, avoiding the temptation.

The locals shot out the perimeter lights around the camp regularly every night, and shot at every truck that went along the Canal Road.

We came back after every trip with holes in the bodywork of the vehicles, but no one had ever been injured. The rifles they were using were mainly over a hundred years old, and they were terrible marksmen. The amazing thing is that you never saw the shooters. All there was out there where the bullets were coming from was that bloody sand!

It had to be me that had the honour of being injured, when a slightly more accurate stray bullet hit the window beside me, showering my scalp and face with tiny glass shards, some of which were still coming out of my skin ten years later. What was left of the bullet itself just skimmed my forehead, taking the skin and a tiny bit of flesh with it, leaving me with an interesting, permanent scar.

He was not there that day. I guess on that occasion there was no likelihood that I would reach Head Office, though there was a fair amount of blood.

After six weeks in Egypt we were finally given transport back to the UK, and my life returned to normal.

The rest of my RAF service was uneventful health-wise, though highly interesting and diverse, including a long spell working as a spy, intercepting and triangulating the transmissions of Russian spies in West Germany, before graduating to dodging and avoiding the tails the Russians always put on Brixmis (British Military Mission) cars when they crossed to the East. The cars were as tuned up as any Formula 1 buggy, and their Ladas could never keep up. As soon as we were out of sight round a corner it was, 'To the woods!', and I spent many happy hours belting along tiny forest tracks at over seventy miles an hour, branches slapping at the windscreen and sides, so that we could get near one of the many aerodromes surrounding Berlin and count and watch the Migs as they took off, carried out various exercises, like calibrating the SAM missile radars, and landed. Just after that period I met and married my lovely wife, Dorothy, and left the RAF to begin civilian life, buying a house with three acres of land that was as rough as it could be. The guy who had owned it before kept pigs, and the brick bases of the pigsties were still there, covered in weeds. I began to chop down a load of self-sown blackthorn trees, not imagining for one second that they could be dangerous.

No one had told me that Norfolk soil is the most dangerous in the country.

As a branch came down, one of the blackthorns penetrated the knuckle of my right index finger. I pulled it out with my teeth and forgot about it. Just another scratch!

During the night I was in a high fever. At one point I opened my eyes wide and saw him standing by the bed, watching me. I closed my eyes and opened them again and he was gone. Later in the night I imagined a strangely familiar male nurse mopping my brow, though later Dorothy told me is was she who had done the mopping. I wondered if she had done it all.

At six am she called the doctor, who arrived unshaven in double-quick time.

He felt the huge lump under my armpit and asked, 'When did you last have a tetanus jab?'

I told him we had all had to have one every year in the RAF and he smiled grimly, 'You are one very lucky man. You have a bad case of tetanus, but if you hadn't had that jab you would have been a dead man several hours ago. You are still alive now, so you will live, though it will be painful.'

I wondered if 'he' had been instrumental in giving me that last injection.

That blackthorn was an annoyance in more than one way: I had been learning to play the accordion for two years, and was getting quite good at it. The pain from my right elbow when I lifted it was so bad that I had to give the instrument up, and switched to the piano.

Five years later he had a field day:

We had moved to Long Stratton, and on a beautiful June morning I climbed into the 'Wasp', my yellow Cortina with a black bonnet, and started the engine, waiting for my wife to join me for the morning run into work in Norwich.

Just as she left the house my daughter arrived, asking for the recipe for our favourite scallops dish.

We were running late, and I was in a hurry, so my daughter told me to go in on my own, and she would bring her mother a few minutes later.

I enjoyed the drive more than usual: the Ipswich Road at rush hour was always crammed with traffic, but that morning, amazingly, there was nothing whatsoever on my side of the road, and only a couple heading towards Ipswich.

At the top of the long gradient leading down to the river and the Milk Marketing Board buildings there was not another car in sight.

There was, at that time, a narrow lane to Keswick, which came out onto the Ipswich Road near where the Tesco supermarket is now.

As I descended the hill, travelling easily at the National Speed Limit of sixty miles per hour, I saw a maroon coloured Morris travelling along that lane towards the main road. The driver braked and stopped at the double white lines, as I expected him to. He looked right, towards me, then left, then right again, looking almost into my eyes. He then accelerated out into the main road, right in front of me and less than twenty-five yards ahead.

I had been a rally driver for years, and my reactions were very fast. I braked for an emergency stop, while instantly assessing the situation. I had two choices: there were two large oak trees on the right, which would certainly not give way if I hit them. His car would at least move. I skidded into his car, writing off both vehicles.

With no seatbelt fitted I went through the windscreen onto the bonnet, breaking three ribs and cutting my head open badly.

I must have become unconscious, because the next thing I knew I was sitting with my back to one of those oak trees, holding a bloody handkerchief that someone had supplied to my head. I could not see; both eyes were running in blood.

A woman's voice ordered peremptorily, 'I'm a nurse, let me look at your head!'

She pulled my hand away from the wound, and I could hear the horror in her voice as she uttered, 'Eughh!'

I thought, 'I'm a gonner! If she's a nurse she must know what she's talking about.'

In fact, apart from the ribs, all that had happened was due to the glass taking all the flesh off my forehead down to the bone, and left a flap of it hanging down over my eye. Once it was stitched back up it healed really well. The interesting thing was that the scar was in the exact same place as the one from the Egyptian bullet.

Just before she pushed the handkerchief back over my head and eyes I caught a glimpse of him between two other men who had got out of their cars.

The worst thing about that accident was that my wife and daughter were in the fourth car to arrive on the scene, and seeing the totalled vehicles and my seriously bloody body propped up by the tree they were sure I had been killed. One thing was certain: had my wife been a passenger she would definitely have died. Her guardian angel had arranged for my daughter to ask for that recipe at just that time. I had the steering wheel to take some of the impact; she would just have flown through the windscreen into the other vehicle and broken her neck.

There was a little comedy attached to that episode: at the hospital they had used a new type of see-through dressing over the wound, which was still weeping.

Not being one to hang back I presented myself at the claims department of Norwich Union to organise buying back the wreck to repair myself. The horrified looks of the ladies behind their desks as they hurried out of the room had me stifling a grin, and the guy who had come to the counter said, 'You'll have to excuse them; we don't usually see clients with the blood still on them.'

Fast forward a lot of years; years during which I injured myself badly pretty regularly one way or another, usually with hand tools, bleeding copiously at times, and almost losing limbs and fingers, but never close to dying.

I'd forgotten all about him, but he had not forgotten about me.

Maybe he was close during the almost fatal asthma attacks I suffered in my sixties. I guessed he probably was. During those episodes my eyes, like my windpipe, were just about closed.

Retired, I became as mad about fishing as I had been when a boy, and started flying round the world, looking for the best angling available.

One year I was in British Columbia, and it looked as if my wish to catch a steelhead trout was up the creek. It was early May, the day before my seventy-third birthday, and the weather was totally wrong for that area and that time of the year. Instead of cold, clear days, with temperatures around twelve to fourteen, it was up in the mid twenties. The snow on the tops of the mountains, usually there until July, was melting fast, and the river water was swirling brown, like a thick cup of milky coffee. The Nile at Khartoum was a good comparison.

Though the advice was to stay at the base, we insisted on going out, hoping to find a small tributary with clearer water to fish.

The river, always a fast one, where jet boats were necessary, was moving at thirty miles an hour plus, and the water temperature was three and a half degrees Centigrade.

We went six miles upriver; the only people stupid enough to leave the basin, all the rest of the boats staying tied up; their owners with their feet up at home, but there were benefits: two miles from town we saw a brown bear with her two young ones on the left bank. Twice we passed a bald eagle sitting on the very top of a dead pine; ones that had not returned to the coast with the thousands of others that overwinter in BC, and we caught sight of a grizzly bear heading away from the river as we neared the place where we were going to land.

We tried fishing, but the moment the fly landed on the water it shot along so fast that it was a useless waste of time.

The boatman, whom I shall call Ray, decided to make a move and rang base to tell them where we were going. He pushed off into the stream and went to start the engine.

After more than twenty abortive attempts he shouted, 'Throw the anchor over.'

I did so, and we came to an abrupt stop in the middle of rapids, for all of about ten seconds, and then that almost new inch-thick rope snapped like a piece of cheap string and we went careering off again. The power of that water flow was tremendous.

He shouted, 'Don't let us hit that tree!'

I looked where he was pointing, and saw the tall fir, which had fallen out into the river, just at our height.

Of course we hit, and the boat turned over.

I went down fast, hit the bottom and pushed myself off, coming up spluttering with water I had ingested. I went down again, and up again, twice, before managing to grab hold of the two-inch high strake on the back of the upturned boat, which at that point was lodged under the tree.

Ray was hanging onto the bow. We were already shaking with the severe cold.

The other member of the party, a German friend, Heinz, had somehow managed to reach the shore.

Suddenly the current took us, and we shot off into the middle of the river,with me hanging on the back, Ray on the front.

We hit a long series of rapids, and Ray shouted, 'How are you doing, Tom?' They were the last words he would ever say.

I managed, 'Not so good, Ray.' I was still coughing water, and finding it difficult to breath. In the middle of the rapids, with the water creaming over our heads, the engine, hanging down below the upturned boat, hit a rock on the riverbed and we stopped like a car hitting a concrete wall.

Ray disappeared into the swirling water, and did not come back up. He was found five miles down the river, his body badly smashed by rocks.

The smash did me something of a favour by throwing my body up onto the bottom of the boat a little.

I struggled up further and managed to bring my body around until I was sitting on the boat, my legs out in front of me. I was shaking badly with hypothermia, the water coming over my head and making breathing without taking in more very difficult.

Each time I tried to move my backside or my legs there came a grinding noise from below me, and I was afraid that the boat would take off again.

In a moment of completely cold clarity I told myself, 'You are a dead man. You are obviously going to die.' What amazed me was that I was not in the least afraid. Death in very short order was a fact, and I accepted it, just like that. The only thought that worried me in that instant was that I had not cleared the garage out, as my wife had asked me to.

I pulled my arm up and looked at my watch. It was ten past ten. No other boats were out fishing and we would not be missed until after six pm. I had no hope.

I pulled my mobile out of my pocket; dead! Full of water in that supposedly watertight container I'd paid six pounds for. Watertight? Huh!

Shaking more than I could have believed possible, I considered my chances: nil!

My mind was still as clear as at any time in my life, and I tried to think what I could possibly do to last as long as possible.

I was going to die, that was certain, but I was not going to go under without a struggle. There were two things that would kill me: my heart or my brain. I had to keep both going as long as possible, and there was only one way to do that: I decided to bang my arms across my chest, flinging them out wide on the outswing, trying to keep to a steady beat of once every second, and as I did so I began to count out loud, ignoring the water crashing into my arms as I did so, and that coming over my head.

I reached six thousand eight hundred and eleven; I remember that distinctly, when the count came to a sudden end, and I had to concentrate hard. I tried again, but thinking was like trying to move through thick mud, and it was something like 'thirteen...sixty-two...eleven...three...'

I had enough savvy left to know that my brain was shutting down, and I knew it was the end. I had possibly two minutes to live, maximum!

Unbelievably, and that is the only word possible, unless you include its synonym incredibly, something appeared around the bend in the river a quarter of a mile away. I thought it was a mirage; it had to be.

I peered short-sightedly at it; a boat? It could not be; all the local boats were silver, and that thing was green.

It began to turn away, and I knew then that it was indeed a boat. I tried to lift my arms above my head, but had not the strength.

My body fell forward, I remember that, and the next thing I remember is a bump as the other boat came up alongside.

Willing arms pulled me in.

I somehow told the four old men about Heinz, and though I don't remember it, being only marginally aware of what was going on, in a kind of light coma, shaking madly under the tarpaulin they'd thrown over me for warmth, they rescued him from the shore and began hurtling down river towards the town, doing almost fifty miles an hour with the jet helping the flow of the current.

They must have rung in, though I heard no call being made, because an ambulance was standing on the quay, with an RCMP car alongside it.

Heinz and I were carried to the ambulance, where we were stripped and covered in blankets with warmth pads near our bodies. Only gradual warming was possible; too fast and a heart attack would end it all very quickly.

The doctor asked how long I had been in the water, and I told him, 'An hour and fifty-five minutes.'

Both he and the RCMP looked at me as if they wanted to scream, 'Bullshit! You're a bloody liar!' but the doctor said quietly, obviously thinking I was delusional, which I was, but not on that score, 'You must be wrong, sir. No one lasts more than ten minutes in water of that temperature.'

I told them that the boatman had rung in to base just as we pushed off from the shore, and how many seconds I had counted off.

They rang to check and after the doctor had asked the question and received the answer he looked astonished and told me, 'All I can say, Sir, is that you are a walking miracle.'

He took my body temperature just after I had drunk a cup of coffee, and it was four degrees below normal, even with a warm mouth. Heinz was almost the same. It took them two days to bring our body temperatures back to normal.

When we were more or less recovered I called the RCMP office and asked if they could give me the names of the four old men who had rescued us.

I was told categorically that there were only two. Definitely not four. I asked Heinz how many he had seen, and he told me, 'Four.'

His guardian angel had been there too.

We got the story of our rescue eventually: the two old men owned the boat and wanted to sell it. They decided to test the engine before advertising the craft, and to do so they drove the boat six miles upriver against that thirty mile an hour current, to arrive at that precise time, when one minute more would have ensured my death.

The only word possible: unbelievable, and yet true.

I knew who had made them do what they did, and when they did it.

I'd seen him, but I hadn't seen him, just as now. I can see him clearly, standing next to the bed, but my eyes are closed. He looks now exactly as I remember him from 1941; light hair, piercing, hypnotic eyes, a pleasant smile on a handsome face.

Would he speak when the time came, or would his hand come out to take mine?

Well, where there's life... I had to hope this was another abortive visit for him; there were a lot more salmon and trout out there waiting to be tempted onto my fly. I knew he had all the time in the world, but he was probably on a winner this time. Although the odds had been stacked sky-high before, even I wouldn't bet a plugged nickel on my chances now.

I wondered how other people faced their last few minutes on Earth: with fear, happiness, sorrow at unfinished business, relief, anger? Probably a mixture, but I knew that for me it was a time to be glad, not sad. I had enjoyed a great life, despite its ups and downs, and now there was one thing I knew for certain: it was not the end. The final destination was anyone's guess, but he was here to take me Somewhere...

JOAN

That woman looks angry. I don't know why: I haven't done anything.

She's saying something, but I can't understand the words. Now she's lifting my head and repeating them just inches in front of my face, her words enunciated one word at a time, like an exasperated teacher remonstrating with a recalcitrant, half-deaf child, trying to make it understand:

'You...have...messed...yourself...again.'

I hadn't noticed. I often don't lately; there's no feeling down there.

Goodness knows who she is, but she looks somehow familiar. Maybe in a minute or two I'll ask her, but she's so grumpy. What gives her the right to speak to me like that? She should respect my age. Mind you, she does look a bit like my sister Alice, come to think of it.

'I'm sorry, Alice.'

'I'm not Alice; she is dead. I'm Lisa.'

I'm being pushed up out of my funny chair that lifts when they press a lever. I don't like it. I'll fall. Again. Was it yesterday I fell and they took me to hospital to have my leg stitched, or was it last week? I can see it's bandaged. My head hurts too and I must have fallen and hit it sometime recently, though I can't remember.

She has me in her arms and lowers me into the wheelchair.

'Where are we going?'

'To the bathroom. I've got to clean you up and change your clothes again, Mum.'

Mum? Cheeky monkey! Who does she think she is? I used to call the mistress 'Mum' when I was in service, but she hasn't got a maid's dress on, and she's wearing makeup, a wristwatch and little pearl earrings. That wouldn't be allowed.

I can't have her calling me that, 'I'm not your mum!'

The woman is sighing. I don't think I like her one bit, or what she's doing now. She's undressing me. I don't like being naked. Now she's washing me. Eugh! What a smell and mess. It must be her. She must have had wind. It can't be me, can it? I wish I could think clearly; everything is so fuzzy all the time.

Now there's another one of them, come to see what all the fuss is. Is she my other sister, Elizabeth? No, unless Elizabeth has had her hair dyed. What some women will do nowadays. Flighty young things.

'She's done it again, has she?'

'Yes, the third time today. It's getting worse all the time. Yesterday we sat talking about the tennis championships and the trainer of the Derby winner. She was fine and lucid. Today she doesn't even know who I am.'

'It's the water infection. Jason had to clean her up four times yesterday.'

Was that the young man who took liberties? It had to be. He put his hand where only Daniel's had been.

Daniel? What made me think of a Daniel? Who is he? Do I know a Daniel? Maybe he was Daniel, but that woman called him Jason. I get so mixed up.

'Probably, but she's been having the antibiotics for five days now; she should be getting better.'

'She improved a lot when the doctor cut her tablets down to eighteen a day and stopped three of them altogether, but she's gone downhill a lot since then. I wasn't on the staff when she came here. How long ago was it?'

'Five years next month. It happened very quickly; two months before that she was still living in her own house in Middlesbrough. Due to one thing and another she couldn't clean very well, but she was cooking and looking after herself. I used to drive there and stay for a week out of every month to clean the house and do the garden. She couldn't knit any more because of the terrible arthritis in her hands, but she had lots of friends round, enjoyed the television and the newspapers, and still regularly went to the regimental charity meetings and played an important part in them.

Just before the eleventh anniversary of Dad's sudden death in Australia I decided to bring her home with me for a holiday, so that she didn't sit at home lonely and brood on it.

We arrived at our house late afternoon on the Saturday. She ate a good-sized tea and really enjoyed it, and went to bed early, at nine o'clock.

An hour later we heard loud groans from the spare bedroom. She was in terrible agony and I called an ambulance. The paramedics took us to the hospital, where she saw a doctor in A&E. He called a surgeon and without much more ado she was taken into the theatre. It was just before midnight. Before he went into the theatre the surgeon told me, "She has a less than one percent chance of living through the operation, but we are going to try to save her."

They operated for three hours...'

Is she talking about my operation? I remember that. That's when I saw the light all around me for the first time: a brilliant white light that obscured everything else; a light that seemed to absorb me into it, and I could hear Daniel's voice, urging me on, though I couldn't see him. I felt weightless, as if I were flying and kept travelling through the light, hearing his voice all the time. I seemed to fly miles, until suddenly everything went black, and I could hear him no longer.

I woke up in a lot of pain, and when I opened my eyes I saw my daughter Lisa standing by the bed, looking worried.

I tried to smile, 'I'm still here.'

She nodded, 'Yes, you are. You're a miracle, do you know that?' She started to cry.

I said, 'I am, aren't I? I'm sorry I smacked you so much when you were a little g...' and went to sleep.

Three days later, when I should have been getting better, I contracted the MRSA virus. Because I was so weak it hit me hard, and I was so ill for a while that I was engulfed in the white light and heard Daniel's voice again, twice, but gradually the antibiotics worked and the virus and the light left me.

The day before I was to leave hospital I caught the 'flu bug that was going round the wards. That quickly turned into pneumonia and pleurisy. The hospital was trying hard to kill me, and very nearly succeeded.

Then the Norovirus hit.

I finally left the hospital five weeks and two days after the operation. The surgeon personally presented me with the gallstone that had caused all the trouble. It was as big as a hen's egg, and he said it was the largest he had ever seen in his twenty-three years of operating on gall bladders. He also repeated that I was very lucky to be alive. Even then I wished I had died on the operating table, with that wonderful light all around me, and Daniel near me; I still missed him so much. He had been my whole life and I was devastated when he died so quickly, in just seconds, of a massive embolism, sitting next to me in our Australian friend's car in the outback, on the first day of our holiday. Now I knew I could be with him again, if only I could die.

They told me I could never go back to my house again, nor stay with my daughter. Her accommodation was not suitable due to the steep stairs, and I needed full care. I had to go into a home.

I hated them for that. I was all right. A home? The thing I dreaded most. I might just as well be dead.

But I wasn't; all right or dead. The first didn't matter, but I so much hankered after death.

That first home stank of stale pee the moment you walked through the front door. The carpets and walls reeked of it and it almost made me gag. I had always been fastidious and you could have eaten a meal off any of the floors in my house until the arthritis got so bad. Now I had to live with a bunch of old fogies who couldn't control their bladders. Ah, me! Little did I know then that I would so very soon be one of them, and other newcomers would be turning their noses up at my stale pee. And worse!

They gave me a room on my own, and I was pleased I didn't have to share, but it was tiny; just room for the bed and a bedside locker. The meals were communal and reasonably well cooked, and some of the old dears were quite pleasant and wanted me to stay, but my departure from that place could not come quickly enough.

I tried to argue with Lisa, but she was adamant: the hospital had insisted on a place with full care as a halfway house until I fully recovered, but she told me, 'It will only be temporary; as soon as you are fit enough we can find a proper home for you, where you can have your own flat and furniture.'

That took two months, but she was true to her word and found me the place I'm in now; Wheatsheaf Court. It was called 'Housing with care' and was different from the other 'Full care' home. I have a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen and a bathroom fitted out for a disabled person. Disabled person; that description certainly fits me now. Wheelchair bound and useless. I heard on the television the other day that they want to legalise euthanasia. I wish they would. I keep asking the carers and anyone else who will listen for something I can take, but no one will give me anything. I would slice my veins, but I can't hold a knife, let alone use one.

Lisa and her husband, Tom, fetched my bits and pieces from Middlesborough and furnished and decorated the flat. They'd done an excellent job and it wasn't bad, with some of my own things around me, but I longed for my own house. It hurt me most that it had to be sold to pay for my care, after Daniel and I had scraped and saved all our lives to pay for it, and paid our taxes. It was where we had lived after he left the Army, and where many of my memories of him were: the garden he had laid out, the shelves he had put up, the walls he had decorated. Many of the other old dears in the home paid nothing for their accommodation and shelter. They had spent their money and enjoyed it, or hidden it in some cases, making sure they apparently had none when they needed care at the end of their days, so that the Government could take care of them. We must have been the mugs.

My darling Daniel; I could remember the day I met him as clearly as if it were yesterday:

I had left service as soon as I was old enough, not wanting to live my whole life as a maid, at someone else's beck and call, although the family I worked for had been kind to me; far kinder than my own parents. I took the bus down to Douglas on my day off to join up at the local recruiting office, and joined the ATS, whose name was changed to the WRAC on the first of February the following year, and was given travel warrants for the ferry and the railway and told to report to the barracks in Guildford. It was June 1948, and the first time I had ever left my home village on the Isle of Man.

Like all my friends I'd never had much money for buying clothes, let alone good quality ones, and many of my dresses were my sister Alice's altered hand-me-downs. My favourite, in fact, was third hand, originally my eldest sister Elizabeth's best, but they were infinitely better than the service uniform, whose serge material irritated my flesh wherever it touched. The khaki shirts, which had separate collars, like the men's, itched too, as did the seriously unattractive khaki lisle stockings. Worst of all were those dreadful, dreadful knickers, baggy, loose and long-legged passion-killers if ever I saw any, unlike those issued to female officers, which were Aertex. Not that I knew anything about passion at that time, except the stilted, unbelievable, half-hearted kisses I'd seen at the Royalty or the Crescent cinemas in Douglas. I'd only been kissed once, by Billy Grand, and that was cut off tout-suite, just as he was trying to get his tongue through my lips, when my mother yelled out of the window, 'Joan! What _do_ you think you're doing? Come inside this minute!'

Once inside I got a vicious slap on the cheek and a fifteen-minute lecture on the dire consequences of frivolous kissing, and what happened to unfortunate girls who allowed it.

I kept hoping Billy would kiss me again, quite happy to take the consequences, but he seemed frightened to come near me, and I could understand why: my mother was an intimidating woman. No, I must be honest, she was more than that: she was a spiteful, nagging, conniving bitch, who had never said a kind word to me in my life, and who it was obvious took a sadistic pleasure in the regular beatings she doled out to all her children, often with no reason whatsoever; someone I was delighted to leave behind me and never see again.

Moving into a hut with fifteen other young and not so young girls was an education in itself. My school on the Isle of Man had its small clique of not so nice girls, who sometimes used the words 'bloody', 'shit', 'bastard' and 'bugger' for effect, but I was now surrounded by girls who were of an entirely different calibre, and who with reckless abandon used the 'F' and 'C' words, the latter of which I had never before then heard and did not, for a very short while until it was used in an unmistakable context, understand the meaning. It shocked me to the core. The worst I had heard it called before was 'a twat'. The usual word used among the schoolgirls was 'fanny', and I had never said even that word out loud. I could believe it of the few that were rough, with terrible manners, but there were two very well educated girls who used the words in almost every sentence. They were 'terribly too-too' as my aunt Chloe used to say, and came from good families. One of them disappeared from the squad as we entered our third week, and there were dark rumours about lesbianism, something else with which I had no acquaintance or understanding.

After square bashing for the six weeks initial training, which we girls had to undergo just like the men, learning to march with our arms all up at the same height and fully in step, we were allowed weekend passes, and went into town on Saturdays, sometimes splashing out on a frothy coffee or Horlicks on Harvey's roof garden, but always finishing up either at the local hop at the Borough Hall, or the Atlanta, over the Co-op, which was a bit of a dive, but so popular that there was hardly room to move, let alone dance, bodies touching bodies continually and the occasional hand that you couldn't reach down to wandering across or pinching your bottom, but it did sometimes have a top-of-the-pops band playing. If you wanted to do the foxtrot or the quickstep though you had to go to the Borough Hall, where they had a regular live band; five local boys who were pretty good, and plenty of room to dance. It was advertised as 'the dance venue with the best sprung floor in England'. They played all the Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman big band hits and a lot of my favourite trad jazz. The entrance fee was six pence, half a day's pay, but value for money.

On my fifth visit, accompanied by three of the other girls, I was almost knocked over as I went in by a tall lad in army uniform rushing out, with an unlighted cigarette in his mouth, which he obviously intended lighting outside. Why he'd want to do that he could never explain, since inside the hall you didn't need to have a cigarette in your mouth in order to take in your fill of tobacco; the fug was so thick it was difficult to see across the hall clearly. Every dance hall was the same in those days, as were the cinemas. He stopped me from falling by grabbing both my arms, which had the effect of bringing us close together, chest to chest.

I looked up into his deep brown spaniel's eyes and was lost.

He was seven inches taller than I, at six feet nothing, and stood ramrod straight, his hair cut in the severe military style insisted upon by the powers-that-be. I fell in love with him at that instant.

I realised that he was speaking to me, apologising, but I was tongue-tied and couldn't answer.

He laughed and said, 'You must be concussed. Come on, let me sit you down and buy you a drink.'

Three gin and tonics later I knew most of his life history, and he mine.

We were married eight weeks later, with twelve of Daniel's mates as a guard of honour, in full dress uniform. We walked along the path from the church door to the lych gate under crossed swords, just like royalty, and I felt on top of the world.

Marriage spelt the end of my career in the army: married girls were not allowed to serve, although of course they are now.

It was not the end of my personal attachment to the army, however. I became more involved with it than ever, working most of every day with the Soldiers' Sailors' and Airmen's Families Association, SSAFA, and the Regimental Families Association. It kept me busy when Daniel was on service overseas, and I enjoyed helping people.

Even after Daniel died I carried on with that work, right up to the day I had the big problem. Just a year before that I had been invited to the Palace and received the MBE from the hands of the Queen, bless her heart, for the years of charity work.

We had a wonderful life, Daniel and I, though it had its ups and downs, as any marriage will. Only five months after the wedding he was posted to Japan to serve with the BCOF, the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces, stationed in the west of the country. Daniel's base was in Okinawa, and he wrote saying they were having a great time, with extra overseas' allowance and cheap fags and booze in the Naafi. I couldn't help thinking of him consorting with those infamous geishas, though whether he did or not I never found out, and in his letters he insistently refuted any such suggestions. The wives' 'Cats' Club' meetings back at the Regiment had different ideas: they were like a witches' cabal, stirring up trouble and discontent.

Four months after he flew out to Japan I gave birth to Martin, a bouncing baby boy of seven and a half pounds. Like any mother I doted on him, and to my shame always loved him much more than my daughter. Foolishly I still do, though he cannot be bothered to come and see me, or even telephone, and Lisa spends half her time looking after me, as she has done for years. She and Tom have not been able to have a holiday together for over fifteen years because of me. I should be grateful, but all I can do is crib and complain. If I were she, I would have abandoned me years ago. She is a saint. Why can't I tell her so?

I went into a period of deep depression during the first months of Martin's life, which I was told later was post-natal depression, a quite well known phenomenon, and it nearly brought a calamity.

One of my neighbours, Rosa, began to come round every day to see how I was and to try to cheer me up, and she began to bring her husband, Joe, with her after a while. Then one day she said suddenly that she had to dash back to look after something that was on the stove. Joe stayed, making small talk, but he moved over to the sofa next to me and started to talk about men and women, and their desires. I felt uncomfortable with the subject, but still was not worried that it was anything serious, since he had not tried to touch me. He said how frustrating it must be for a woman in her prime, with a woman's natural needs, to be without a man and asked how I was managing without Daniel. I just shrugged; I did not want to answer. Then he made me blush by asking how often I masturbated. That was too much. I gasped, 'Stop it Joe, now!' and tried to get up, but then he grabbed me, pulled me down, and tried to kiss me. When I turned my head away he began slobbering wet kisses over my neck and his hands started tearing at my clothes. I fought him, but he was far stronger than I and I was soon on the floor, with him on top of me, holding me down. He had my dress up round my waist and pulled my knickers down to my knees, trying to force them apart, then he pulled open his flies, took out his penis and tried to force it between my legs.

I was screaming out for him to stop, but he was deaf to my pleas. Not being able to force himself inside with my knickers still on, he tore them right off and forced my legs open, dropping his body in between them. I could feel the hot end of his penis as he probed for entry.

I closed my eyes, knowing I had lost, then Rosa's voice screamed, 'Joe! What the fuck are you doing? Get off her!'

He rolled off me and jumped up, his penis shrivelling and dashed out of the house.

Rosa stayed with me for the rest of that day, assuring me that she was going to divorce the bastard and report him to the Adjutant.

I asked her not to report it. Daniel would hear about it if she did, and that I did not want.

I'd had a lucky escape, and Rosa lost her husband. She kicked him out of the house and started divorce proceedings.

It would be three years before his father saw Martin, because from Japan Daniel was posted to Korea in 1947, where he stayed for fourteen months. I worried myself silly every moment he was there, listening to the horrendous reports of the fighting and the deaths; many of them in the Regiment, but eventually he came home to me, fit and well, except that he had a look in his eyes that I had never seen before. He would not talk about it, but I guessed, and later heard from other wives, whose husbands had talked to them, that he had been in the thick of the fighting, and had seen several of his best friends killed and maimed.

We stayed in quarters at Regimental Headquarters until 1951, when we had our first posting to Germany, where the extra allowances made life much easier for us. The quarters were much grander than we were used to, and we had a maid, paid for by the Germans as part of reparations. She was good with Martin, and it allowed me time for my SSAFA work. A maid, yet! I felt like Lady Muck!

Of course it didn't last, and coming back to Blighty when the posting ended was like a cold douche. Austerity Britain and tightened belts!

Martin started school and I found myself pregnant again.

I had severe complications and a great deal of pain, meaning that marital relations were impossible, and it was then that Daniel had his one affair, with my then best friend, Sadie, who couldn't help it, having been born a slut.

I knew almost the moment it started. Always thoughtful and attentive, Daniel's attentiveness reached new heights, and he fussed around me constantly, with insistent questions regarding my possible lack of warmth, comfort, food, drink, sleep and what have you. I felt like telling him I knew, so that he would relax his efforts to please me. I knew it was a passing thing. He was always a lusty man and needed his marital comforts. Sadie had no doubt thrown herself at him, and I didn't blame him one little bit. She was doing me, and him, a favour. The crafty minx kept coming round to see me every day to ask if I needed anything, and was all sweetness and light, oh, and of course innocence. Butter wouldn't melt! She was good, I had to give her that. Best of all, she was better than a prostitute, though she had put it about a bit, and I worried that Daniel might bring something home that I would not want. Knowing my Daniel I was sure he would always use a condom for safety, and found a packet in his wallet when he was taking a shower. We never used them, so I knew they were for her and it reassured me.

After Lisa was born and I was able to satisfy him again the affair fizzled out, as I knew it would. I forgave him completely, and he was never aware that I knew. Sadie's husband, Jack, was not so forgiving, and they divorced a few months later, after he had come home unexpectedly and found her in their marital bed with two of his corporals. After the birth problems and warnings from the obstetrician we decided that two children was enough, and made sure it was.

The Regiment was posted to Germany twice more, the last time to Berlin in 1966, where the quarters were even grander than they had been in Hanover and Bielefeld. With the children at boarding school and college back in the UK I had time on my hands and took a part-time job with the NAAFI. The pay for three days' easy work equalled Daniel's pay for a week. It was paid by the Berlin government, and was four times the rate in the Western Zone of Germany. What we didn't realize at the time was that we would be entitled to a German pension for life for the few hours we had worked, and I still have that paid into my account. Unbelievably it is almost two hundred pounds a month, for just three years' of part-time work; almost half as much as an English teacher's pension after twenty years' service during the same period. German pensions are so much better than ours.

Daniel served his full time with the Regiment and was kept on twice over the age limit. He had reached Regimental Sergeant Major rank, and they believed him indispensable, but eventually they were unable to give him another extension, and he had to leave.

Since we lived in Middlesborough he found a job as Head of Security with a large car manufacturer, and was still working for them at the time of his death.

God, how I miss him and want to be with him!

The spell in hospital had somehow affected my already bad arthritis, and I was starting to have difficulty picking things up. The operation in the Middlesborough hospital, when they removed all my knuckles, had worked for a time, but now things were as bad as they had been before that operation. Lisa first changed me to drinking from a baby's cup, with its extended lip and closed top, but now I am reduced to drinking through a straw, and even that is difficult; I can't pick the cup up.

I keep hoping that one day they will mix up my medication and give me enough of something to see me off. That's when I am lucid, as now. There are so many times when I know I am not. It's like a fog. The people are often different. My mother comes to see me often now, and my older brothers and aunts. My grandfather came the other day too. When I can think clearly I know they cannot be there, but at other times they are so real.

Every time I tell Lisa about my visitors she tells me they have all been dead a long time, but I know they are not. They sit down and talk to me and bring me things. She thinks she's a know-all. She knows nothing!

Yesterday was another strange day. I found myself somewhere I couldn't recognise. They had taken me away and put me in a room I didn't recognise. I dialled 999 and told the police I had been abducted, but they didn't come. A woman who said she was Beatrice, one of the senior carers, came into the room and told me I was at home in my own flat. I'd never seen her before and didn't believe her. Perhaps she was a policewoman in disguise. Maybe I should have rung them again to check. The operator was very nice. She had a soothing voice. The Beatrice woman put me to bed and I cried, because it was not my bed. It smelled too: someone had been incontinent in it. Disgusting!

I must have slept well, because the sun is shining through my bedroom window, and I can hear the blackbirds singing their hearts out to welcome the day. I feel so good that maybe I'll ask them to take me down for breakfast for a change, instead of eating in my room. I can't remember what I did yesterday. What day was yesterday, anyway? I wonder if I had visitors? It was the day before when I saw the Queen.

Ah! Here comes somebody.

'Morning, Joan. How are we today?'

'Fine, thank you, Sheila.'

The carer's nose wrinkles, 'I think we'd better get you on the commode, and then into the shower, Joan.'

Oh, dear. 'Have I...?'

'You have.'

'I am sorry. I wish...'

'You can't help it, Joan. It's just something we have to get used to.'

I know she is just trying to be kind, but I'll never get used to it when I'm like I am today. The fog helps. Then I don't know.

'Can I go down to breakfast?'

'Of course. We'll get you cleaned up and dressed and I'll take you down in the chair.'

All the old dears are pleased to see me, particularly my friends Dot, Irene and Julie, and I can't get a word in edgewise for several minutes. I always used to come down, but for some reason it seems I haven't done so for some time. The fog must have lasted longer than I thought. When they stopped talking I told them I had seen the Queen twice during the week, once at the Palace and then at Sandringham. They gave me some funny looks, but I don't know why.

The bacon and egg and toast taste better in the canteen than they do in my room. Sheila has cut them up into little pieces for me so that I can manage. I'll come down again tomorrow. I feel good.

My daughter Lisa arrives just as I'm finishing breakfast. She looks surprised as she bends to give me a peck on the cheek.

'Hello, Mum. You've come down for once.'

I had to tell her the news, 'I saw the Queen again yesterday, when I went to Sandringham. The second time in a week.'

'Did you really? What was she wearing?'

'A pretty green coat and hat. She stopped to speak to me. She remembered me from the Palace.'

'That was nice. How was the food?'

'At Sandringham?'

'No, here, this morning.'

'The breakfast tasted good.'

'And you've finished it all. Well done. I'll take you back up then.'

She didn't seem in the least interested in my having seen the Queen again. She came with me to the Palace for the investiture, so she knows I know Her Majesty. I don't want to go back to my room. I know that the second we get there she will put me on the commode, and I don't need to go on the commode. I don't!

She does, the minute we are inside the door. I tell her that I don't want to go, but she insists. I have so many accidents that maybe she is right.

She cleans the flat and we chat about the family.

I asked her, 'When is Martin coming to see me?' and her face clouds over.

'He's very busy, Mum.'

'When did he come last time?'

'Last year. Do you remember? He stayed two days.'

My first-born and he can't be bothered to come and see me. He only lives four hours away by road. I should feel bad that I always favoured him above Lisa, but I don't.

'Now you are lucid, Mum, we need to talk about your condition. You know you are getting worse, and though the senior carers say that you can stay at the moment, with all these falls you're having, and them now having to use a hoist to get you into and out of bed, we may have to move you back into full care. Your dementia is becoming a big problem too now. Until a few months ago there were only the odd days when you were away with the fairies, but you've called 999 four times recently, wasting police time, and often when I come here you think I'm your sister Alice, who's been dead almost twenty years. It's always worse when you have a water infection, but you seem to get them all the time.'

'I don't want to talk about it. Have I changed my will? I want to change my will! Martin won't come to see me. I want him out of my will!'

'We did that three years ago, Mum. Don't you remember? We had the doctor certify that you were compos mentis, so that there could never be any question about the terms of the will.'

'I think so.' I don't, but I'm not going to tell her. I feel a little dizzy and the room is becoming a bit foggy again. Who is she, anyway? She looks like my sister Alice.

Will she give me something? I can only try, 'I want to die. I want to see the light. I want to be with Daniel. Please!'

'I know you do, Mum. With all the falls you have and the trips to hospital with heart problems I don't know how you can still be here, but you are.'

She just does not understand. One more try, 'But I want to die, Alice. I want to be dead like you.'

# JOHN

'He looks peaceful; in fact more peaceful than I've ever seen him. He was always such a human dynamo, even until last week, when he had the fall _;_ his motto was, _"forty-eight hours out of every twenty-four"_. He is comfortable, isn't he, not in any pain?'

As if I'm not here.

I wanted to shout, 'Hey, you blind buggers, look at me, over here on the bloody bed! I'm still alive!' I wished I could open my eyes, but they seemed glued shut. My brain on the other hand was wide awake, on high alert, as sharp as at any time when I'd been in desperate danger.

'He's as comfortable as we can make him, Mrs Fisher. He is on the highest dose of morphine now, and quite pain free.' Caroline, the nurse, was right about one thing: I was high as a kite; as high as when they'd given us hallucinatory drugs and interrogated us during training. Her voice contained just enough politeness to cover her annoyance. I knew how tired she must be: it was four-forty, and she'd been on duty since eight, her mind only half on the job, worrying all the time about home. She'd done her best for me, poor love, and I'm sure on one of my better days I would have really enjoyed the tender bed baths she'd given me, not avoiding washing the precious little parts, like some nurses do, but from the conversations I'd overheard she had troubles enough, with a wandering husband and a severely disabled young son, left with a mother who herself was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. If I could, I'd remake my will and leave it all to them, as long as Caroline left that conniving bastard of a spouse. My daughter Claire and her brother could go hang for all the time they'd given me during the last ten years. I would have loved to see their faces when the will was read. Clive had not even shifted his arse to come and see me once in the last two years, when I could have told him things he needed to know, with a few home truths thrown in for good measure. Worse, while I nursed Elsa through the final five months, as the raging cancer ate into her once beautiful body, he had rung only twice to ask how she was.

Change my will? If only I could. The way things were I doubted I would ever hold a pen again. I was already three days overdue for the long sleep, according to the miserable sod of a doctor doing his rounds that morning, complaining at the continued occupation of the bed. He thought I was deaf too. I wondered how many other poor bastards, not as strong as I, heard their pronouncement of death in such a cavalier fashion every day, in every hospital in the land. Someone should come back from the other side and tell them to shut up near terminal patients. Or was it that they just didn't care? Probably.

Me? I was so far past my sell-by date that I was more than ready to go. When you can no longer do the things that make life worth living there's no point in hanging on, being a bloody nuisance to folk and costing God knows how much to keep alive, occupying a bed that some other poor bastard badly needs. If I hadn't had the fall that incapacitated me I would have taken the easy way out. I had the means. I'd determined long ago never to wind up in one of those old people's homes, staring at the walls until I went completely gaga. We had made plans, Elsa and I, promising to help one another on the way if it got that far, and I had, in the end, helped her when she made the decision. It was her call, and she died with some dignity left, holding my hand and gazing into my eyes with thanks. Our doctor, bless his heart, guessed I'm sure, but turned a blind eye, signing off her death as from the cancer, and avoiding an autopsy, which would have been embarrassing to say the least. Like me, he probably believed in legalised euthanasia. Many doctors do.

My daughter, the female predator, fifty-five and always trying to look thirty; probably wearing an expensive, well tailored little black number that had cost a bomb and stopped three inches above her knees, hoping the flash of thigh would bring another unsuspecting, rampant male stud to her door, oversize gold earrings dangling from her lobes no doubt, suggested for the fifth time that week in my hearing, 'Couldn't you help him out; you know, give him something?'

I heard the huge sigh that Caroline was not able to hold back, preceding the explosion: 'Mrs Fisher!'

I could just imagine Claire holding up both hands in surrender, her face carrying her well-practised expression of sweetness and light, in one of her trademark gestures, 'I know. I'm sorry, nurse, I just hate to see him like this.'

In a pig's ear, I thought, trying to flicker my eyebrows without success, wanting her to know I could hear her insincere piety; you just want me gone, so that you can get your greedy little hands on my hard earned loot. That's why you're wearing black, hoping the show of mourning will help me on my way. If you want to help me, go and find the Glock 17 I stashed behind the bookcase all those years ago and come in and empty the whole fucking magazine into me! It's fully loaded, with one up the spout. All you need to do is push the safety off and squeeze the trigger.

Five times in the last ten years she had come to me with a sob story, dressed like little Orphan Annie, the whole sackcloth and ashes bit: some man or other had taken her for a ride and left her penniless. I had bailed her out each time, not believing her once: she was too bloody clever for that. If anyone had been taken for a ride it was the man each time, and I felt sorry for every one of them. What the hell, it was only money, and I had more than I could ever use, though her depredations had stopped me from achieving one of the few aims in life I had left: reaching that elusive million. I was close, but not quite there. Now she was hoping for the lot, believing she had poisoned me against her brother. I had to give her some credit though: she had done my weekly shopping and basic-cleaned the house for the last two years, not without continuously complaining, however, and no doubt thinking of the main chance the while. I could imagine my darling Elsa turning in her grave. What monsters we had spawned, but then, with the modern world the way it is, I guess they were about par for the course.

I wanted to tell both of them that I would love someone to give me the death pill: I was more than ready to step through that final door and find whatever there might be behind it. Like everyone else I'd thought about it and wondered where I would end up, if anywhere. God knows, I had been close enough to that door plenty of times during those years I carried that pill on my person; Ministry nomenclature: ' _Pill, cyanide, operatives for the use of'_ , ready for instant use. My body might be dead, but my mind was still as active as ever, and I thought back to the first time I'd almost used that pill...

It was pretty gorgeous for late spring in Berlin, that year of nineteen-fifty-eight, and I was a little too warm, even dressed in the cheap, lightweight garments of an East German building worker, the rough cap on my head making my scalp sweat, the drab sacking bag with the tools of the trade heavy in my hand. It was just one of the many disguises I'd used in the four years I'd been operating in the City. God knows there was enough reconstruction work do be done.

I passed a Vopo on the corner of Schönhauser Allee, his eyes alert, scanning me from top to toe, and the usual tingle crept down my spine. I'd checked myself carefully in the mirror before leaving the safe house, but the members of the Volkspolizei were a law unto themselves and like all minor minions of despotic states enjoyed exerting their power, making their already downtrodden fellow citizens squirm, even when they were completely innocent.

Apart from the document securely hidden in the tight fitting handle of my bricklaying trowel, the one thing that could give me away was my haircut, or rather the lack of it. I'd had my head all but shaved before leaving the West, going for a style that would fit anywhere, and it had grown about an inch. It was now neither one thing nor the other, but was not usual for the East.

I thought I had got away with it once I was ten yards past him, but it was a false hope.

'Halt! Kommen Sie herhier!'

There were other pedestrians on the sidewalks, but none near. It had to be me he was shouting at.

I turned and saw him walking towards me, his hand on the butt of his pistol.

He came up close, toe to toe, and shoved his face so near mine that I could smell the Bratwurst and beer he'd had for lunch, and the cloying stink of crappy East German tobacco.

'Ausweiss!' There was no 'bitte'; he was not intending to be polite.

I weighed up the situation. It would be no trouble to kill him: the triple strike to the Adam's Apple with the flat of the hand, to the solar plexus with the pointed fingers and to the shin of a leg with the steel side of my shoe, followed by the rabbit punch as the body fell. I'd done it often enough during the last few years, but it was not the place to do it and get clean away; there were too many eyes watching the little drama, including half a dozen mongoloid-looking Russian enlisted men strolling along the pavement a hundred yards away, their peasant faces looking my way.

I took the crumpled and stained, seemingly well-worn forgery from my inside pocket and handed it over, hoping like hell that our people had done a good enough job. The Volksministerium had recently changed the style and layout yet again, with different paper, and it had been something of a rush job to finish the replacement for my old one in time for me to cross to the East for this mission. It was the first time I'd had to show it, and this would be the acid test.

He opened it and looked at the details.

'Sie heissen?' Did the stupid sod think I wouldn't know my own name?

'Friedrich Stolz'

'Anschrift?'

'Achtzehn, Eichhörnchenallee, Peenemunde.'

'Sie sind ziemlich weit von zu Hause.' He was right; it was a bloody long way away.

'Jawohl. Unsere Firma baut oft hier in Berlin. Ich habe im Moment ein Zimmer in Moabit.'

'Wo bauen Sie nun?'

'Wilhelm Pleck Strasse, ein Neubau.' I'd been past and seen the men beavering away like dozens of ants on the big structure. It would check out, as long as he didn't ask there if I was one of the listed workers.

'Und wohin gehen Sie jetzt?'

'Zur U-bahn. Ich fahre nach Hause.'

His eyes still held suspicion.

'Schauen Sie mir was Sie tragen.'

I put the bag down and opened it. He rummaged through the tools, but could see nothing obviously amiss and looked peeved that he had to let me go.

'Sie können gehen.'

I felt his eyes on me, following my progress as I turned into Metzer Strasse. I'd decided to use side streets to avoid the ever-present street checkpoint at the northern end of Tor Strasse, but I needed to cross it to get to the meeting in Hartenstrasse, near the Rosa-Lux U-bahn station. It was getting close to the arranged time, and I increased my pace. To run was to invite trouble; there were no keep-fit joggers in those days, at least not in East Berlin.

I stopped by the entrance to the station and bent to pretend to re-tie my shoelace, my head cocked sideways to observe the road ahead, up to and past the house.

It looked clear; only two women standing talking together a few yards past the gateway of the house on this side and an old man walking a dog further away on the other. There was a military Kubelwagen parked a couple of hundred yards further on, facing the other way, and a dirty Lada saloon that looked as if it hadn't been moved for months close to where the old man was walking. The women were dressed like Hausfraus but looked too young for the part. The bobbed hairstyle of the one nearest me looked like a professional job that was definitely not in keeping with the part she was playing; something wasn't kosher, and I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck start to tingle.

I left the pavement and began to cross the road as nonchalantly as possible, not appearing to look at them, but watching out of the corner of my eye for signs of interest.

I was only a couple of yards from the far pavement when out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the women move. She was reaching under her arm.

I turned and saw the pistol she was drawing and started to run.

She was no sluggard with a hand weapon: six slugs missed me by inches, and at seventy to eighty yards with a moving target that was bloody good shooting.

I didn't turn to look, but guessed the other woman had drawn her weapon too.

There was no time to worry about who had betrayed us, or whether they had already arrested Hans and Alfons, the two guys I had to meet.

The doors of the Kubelwagen were opening and there was movement inside.

I reached the corner, and immediately after going round it, out of sight of my pursuers, I threw the bag into an overgrown garden.

There were pedestrians on both sidewalks and I noticed two men, wearing the ubiquitous secret police long raincoats, walk out into the road a hundred yards in front of me and put their hands inside their clothing.

Feet were pounding on the road behind. It was a no-hoper. Rather than be shot I stopped and held my hands up.

My arms were pulled down from behind and I was handcuffed. Not a word was spoken.

The driver of the Kubelwagen had stayed at the wheel and drove up beside us.

I was pushed into the back and one of my captors climbed in beside me, while another got into the front in the passenger seat.

We drove off in silence and twenty minutes later arrived at the Licthtenburg Headquarters of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit; the Stasi; the most sophisticated secret police outside Russia. Blazoned on a banner in letters five feet tall outside was their logo, " _Schild und Schwert der Partei_ ": the shield and sword of the party. Its manner of operation was well known and feared by every member of the populace.

I was pushed out of the vehicle, across the sidewalk and into the building. A tall, cadaverous individual standing near the lift jerked his head to indicate that my captors should enter it and I was taken down to the cells below, where the handcuffs were removed before I was thrown bodily into one of them.

Inside it there was nothing but a plastic bucket with no handle and a thin palliasse.

I sat down, thinking furiously. My boss, Patrick Sheen, would not know that I had been taken for several days. To avoid interception by the ever-alert Stasi wireless service, equally as good as our 'Y' service, directed by GCHQ, we had stopped using radio for contacts with base, using instead coded international phone messages on an irregular basis. My next was due in three days time, by which time I imagined I would be dead.

They would try to get out of me what they could, and would then kill me. Three of our agents had met that end in the previous six months, and that was part of the reason I had been sent over; to try to find the leak, and plug it permanently. Instead, the traitor had betrayed me.

I put my hand up to the collar of my jacket, where the pill resided, hesitating fractionally. If I was going to take it, now was the time. There might not be a chance later. I smiled: when I woke up that morning I had no inkling that it might be my last. It was a hell of a decision to make, and it needed resolve; resolve that I had. I began to pull at the loose stitch which would release it.

The door burst open. I hadn't heard footsteps. They had been watching through the peephole. Fuck!

The long streak of piss who'd been standing by the lift when we entered the building and who looked more like an advert for euthanasia than a secret police official bustled in and grabbed at the collar of the jacket.

'Ach, nein, Herr Mason, so leicht wird's nicht sein. Entschuldigung!'

They had even been told my name. It told me there were only three possible traitors, none of which I would ever have suspected. There seemed at that point little chance that I would ever be able to pass on that particular snippet of information.

My route of escape was gone. I should have managed somehow to take the pill during the journey in the Kubelwagen. No, that was stupid thinking; how could I, with my hands behind my back? Even if they had been free I would probably have been stopped; these people were well briefed. It was so easy in lectures to follow a course of action; it was another thing entirely out there in the field.

Two others followed the first one in, both burly, muscular individuals, a man and a woman, both in their mid-thirties I reckoned. Looking at their faces, I would rather have taken on the man than the woman any day. Her expression reminded me of a horse's arse while the beast was farting.

It was her who did the talking, 'Die Uhr!'

Did they think it was a James Bond model? I slipped it off my wrist and handed it over.

'Zieh dich aus! Schnell!' The use of the familiar was intentionally derogative.

I stripped down to my underpants and she slapped my face hard, 'Ausziehen bedeutet ausziehen! Alles! Denkst Du 'was zu haben, was ich nicht vorher gesehen habe? Oder ist dein Schwanz etwas ausserordentlich?'

I took off the underpants.

She regarded my wedding tackle, grimacing, 'Nein, ganz normal, vieleicht ein bisschen klein, aber dass ist besser. Nun musst du spartanisch leben, Mr Feiner Pinkel.' Without warning she kicked me in the balls.

The living corpse showed a bit of humour, 'So lange er lebt.' They all laughed on their way out of the cell, while I curled up on the floor, hurting badly.

Without a watch and a view of daylight I had no idea of the passage of time. I slept for what must have been seven or eight hours and woke up hungry. I'd had a continental breakfast on the day they arrested me. I guessed it was twenty-four hours later.

There were no visits and I found myself sleeping for long periods, guessing how long I had been there. The hunger and thirst became severe, and though I'd used the bucket the first day, my insides had dried up, and the chance I'd had of drinking my own urine had gone. The bucket smelt foul.

I was almost delirious when they finally came for me, and through a kind of mist I realised that I must have been left for at least three days. The human body can go for up to a fortnight without food, but only for three days without water.

I was in no condition to resist, and the burly man and woman took one arm each and frog-marched me to another kind of cell, where they sat me down on a steel chair with arms that had straps; straps that they then fastened around my wrists. The steel sheet I sat on was covered in ice that burnt my backside. It was refrigerated!

The woman brought over a tin mug about one third full and held it to my lips. The water was warm and had a funny taste, but I drank it, not caring if they had loaded it with drugs. I had to have liquid.

I heard the door open behind me and a cultured voice intoned, 'Good of you to join us, John. We only want the answers to two questions and then you can be returned to the bosom of your loved ones.'

'I guess it must be " _The man without a face"_.' Markus Wolf, second only to the infamous and much despised Chief of the Stasi, Erich Mielter, was renowned for never having been photographed.

A chuckle preceded the words, 'Well observed, John.'

'You know I will tell you nothing, Markus.'

Another chuckle, 'Do you know, John, although it sounds a little like a cliché, they do all say that. Not many of them speak the truth, and those that do are sadly, for the most part, dearly departed, as I believe your English expression has it.'

'You might as well kill me now.'

'Oh, no, John, and spoil Inge's sport? She would never forgive me. Would you like to try those two questions before the pain begins?'

I gave him a simple, 'No', though I would have loved to tell him to 'Fuck off!' Not only would it serve no purpose; it would show him that I was not as cool as I made out.

I felt a little dizzy and guessed that the water had been spiked, or was it just the lack of sustenance?

'Could I have a little more water, please?'

He must have nodded, because Inge brought over about the same amount, having run it from a tap in the corner, and held it to my lips. It was much cooler than the first lot and tasted a whole lot better. I wondered if she had peed in the first lot; it would go with the persona.

I heard pages turning and Wolf told me, 'From your dossier I note that you have no phobias. That is unfortunate, because we have to move to phase three. You have, I see, undergone a similar experience under training, but with much reduced amperage.'

I knew exactly what was coming; electrodes on the testicles. He was right that I had experienced it, but as he said, our instructors had used a minimal charge.

Inge dragged over a heavy steel cabinet that had a number of dials on the front, and two heavy duty cables, with clamps attached to each end. The red one she clamped round my left testicle and the black on the right, twisting each one as she did so, deliberately adding to the pain.

'Try five amps.'

She set the dial and moved a rheostat.

My body felt like a sheet of red-hot flame, whose furnace was between my legs. Every muscle strained in an automatic reaction. Sweat poured from my brow, leaking badly needed moisture.

She turned it off and he told her, 'Not enough, go to fifteen.'

Fifteen bloody amps? Enough to kill me.

The pain hit and I lost consciousness.

I came to when a pail of water was thrown over me, licking my lips furiously when I realised what I was missing.

'Are you ready to talk now, John?' His tone of voice was that of a friend asking if one wanted a drink.

I managed to gasp, 'No.'

'Again, Inge.'

Four times it was repeated, each time followed by unconsciousness and more thrown water.

Each time I said, 'No.'

If I had hoped to hear a little desperation in his voice I was doomed to disappointment. He was an old and practised hand at the game, and had all the patience in the world. Time was on his side.

'This one you have heard about, but have not experienced.'

Inge had been briefed, or else it was a standard follow-on. She picked up a pair of unusual pliers and got hold of the end of the nail on my right index finger.

'Still no, John?' The insidious voice behind me would have been soporific if I had not been in such pain.

I did not answer.

The nail was torn off, and I had never in my life felt pain like it. I'd heard tell that fingers can be the most painful parts of the body when injured and I had just had it confirmed in the hardest possible way.

She tore four off before he called time.

'You are a brave man, John, if a stupid one. Would you not like to just hear the questions you are refusing to answer?'

'No.'

'Give him some water.'

This time she brought the tin mug full and I drank it to the last drop. She returned to the tap and refilled it and I drank that too, wondering what came next.

The restraints were removed from my wriss and I was pulled out of the chair. A blindfold was wrapped round my eyes and my arms were handcuffed behind me again.

'You will be taken to a different cell this time, John. One in which you will not be able to sleep. Apart from one small area, large enough to stand on, the floor is covered with sharp, minute spikes, which will not exsanguinate you if you lie on them, but will make you bleed from hundreds of tiny spots. Oh, and they have on their tips the juice of stinging nettles, for extra comfort. There will be continuous music at ninety-five decibels. You understand the system, I know. You will be there for ten days, if you live that long.'

Sleep deprivation and disorientation. We had undergone that kind of thing, but only for three days. That had been horrific enough. I knew that if they continued with the no food, no drink regime I would not last even that long.

'Are you sure you do not want to talk?'

'You know I am.'

'Yes, I know. We will not break you, but you will die.'

'I look forward to it.'

I heard his sigh, 'I actually believe you do.'

I woke up, believing I was dead, surrounded by white: white ceiling, white walls, white curtain, and white clothed people.

If Heaven was like this I was all for it.

'He's coming to.' I heard a young female voice say, and a few moments later I was able to see the face of the person from whom it had come.

She was blond, blue eyed, devastatingly pretty, and the finest sight I had ever seen in my life.

Beside her stood Dick Breen, my immediate boss, looking pleased as Punch.

I tried to speak, but only managed a croak, and Dick urged, 'Don't ask, John. I'll tell you what you want to know: we did an exchange: that agent of theirs, Felix Langstrom, the one we caught six months ago, for you. We'd soaked him for what he had, and made a deal. He'll work for us, with the promise that we'll extract him and his wife after a year. I spoke to Wolf himself on the phone and he told me what a brave man you were. It was touch and go: you were in a coma, dehydrated and malnourished, and I thought we were too late, but here you are. Welcome back to the land of the living.'

I convalesced for two months and wanted to get back into the action. I'd told them whom I suspected and they had sealed the gap with a 'wet' operation. Knowing how the Stasi worked they had probably already got a replacement.

When I returned to duty I expected to go back into the field, but was told that now I was blown any work I did would have to be at a desk. That would have been anathema to me and I told Dick in words of one syllable what they could do with it.

I quit the adrenalin-high job I loved and went on a course to be a deep sea diver; the occupation with the highest death rate in the world. After Markus Wolf anything a great white shark could do would be an anticlimax!

It was a different world but one I enjoyed, despite, or perhaps because of the dangers, but now here I am, faced with that same future I had with Markus Wolf. When I had been in that coma, close to death, I saw nothing like other people have described seeing; only blackness. I know for sure there is nothing out there; no life after death, just the disintegration of the body, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, but I don't care. They say life is a circle. I believe that. We go back to where we came from. We only fear death while we are living anyway, and I lost that fear years ago. I've had a hell of a good life, and I regret not one single minute of it. Goodbye world, you'll have to manage without me. At least my passing will please two people. I hope they don't fritter away my hard-earned rewards, but hey! Why the hell should I care?

# Monsignor 'X'

'Can you hear me, father?'

I am trying to nod, but my head will not move. This must be a really bad dose of 'flu. There is one thing I can still do though...

'Ah, yes, he can. He has opened his eyes. Blink if you can hear me, father.'

Can I? I opened my eyes, surely I can close them again. There.

'I think he blinked.' The voice rose several decibels, 'You have only a short while left, father. Would you like me to administer the last rights now?'

There are two of them. I can just make them out in the fog. Young, though they are both wearing the cloth. I don't know either of them. At least, I don't think so. What is the young nincompoop on about? Short while, last rights? Anyone would think I am about to pop my clogs. I can't die. I must not. I am mightily afraid of death. If I go it will be to Hell, and Hell will be...hellish. I know: I have visited.

'Come along, Patrick, don't dawdle, boy! Catch the others up quickly and into the showers.'

Scatty, Mr Scatterswick, hates me, I know. He's always shouting at me. Well, all right, I admit sometimes I do deserve it.

I hate the showers. I have no hairs like the other boys and they always make fun of me. Twelve years old and not a follicle in sight. Some have only a few little wispy ones, and those on the light haired boys are scarcely visible, but at least they have made a start. My stomach is as bald as a billiard ball, and my penis is small, very small, the smallest in the class, and not much bigger than my little finger. Kirk is only six months older than me and he has a thick black bush three inches across over his penis, and that is four times the size of any of the others. He makes it stand up in the showers to show off, as do some of the other boys, and then it must be four inches long. I grow weak just looking at it when it is normal size, but when it stands up like that I think that I am about to faint. My insides turn to jelly. I don't know why. It must be jealousy. He and some of the others go every break time to the toilets to masturbate together, and even if I am bursting to wee I stay away. For some reason my penis will not stand up like theirs.

'Hurry up, boy. Get those clothes off now!'

Scatty has come in behind me. I know he will not go outside: he will stand and watch the boys shower, and particularly me for some reason, and he always seems to be looking at their bottoms or their penises, running his tongue over his lips as he does so. He always lifts his hand and pretends he is rubbing his forehead, but I can see he is peeping, either under his hand or through his open fingers. When he looks at my penis I can't help blushing all over. It doesn't seem right, but he is the senior master, and can do no wrong.

I wash as quickly as I can, turning my back to wash my privates, but I can feel his eyes, boring into my back, gazing at my bum.

Jacko Williams, one of Kirk's close pals shouts, 'Come on, Patrick, don't stand there playing with it; show us how big it is!'

Oh, no. Here it goes again; just like the last time.

They all come and stand in a circle around me. I am the smallest one there, and I am so scared that my penis dwindles to nothing and almost disappears inside me.

'Look, lads, he's not a boy at all! He hasn't got a willy; he's a girl. We all want a girl, don't we? Who are you going to have first, Patsy? Can't call you Patrick any more, can we?'

I feel hands on my bum and others groping for my penis. Though I am scared I feel a kind of excitement.

Scatty saves me, 'That's enough, lads. Leave him alone. He has enough of a cross to bear without you lot laying it on thick. Come over here, Patrick.'

I rush over to pick my towel up and cover myself before I go to him, wrapping it around my middle.

He is licking his lips again as he asks, 'Do they do any of that after lights out in the dorm?'

'No.'

'Not yet, eh? Well, when they do, and they will, Patrick, they will, come and tell me about it and we'll sort it out.'

I hardly dared ask him, but I had to, 'Do you mean they will try to...' I could not say it out loud.

I needn't have worried; he said it for me, 'Fuck you? Yes, they will, sooner or later. I hate to say it, Patrick, and you may not have realised it yet, but you are a queer, a nonce, a pansy-boy, a shirt-lifter. Nothing to be ashamed of; you were born that way. Your parents should have recognised the fact and known better than to send you to boarding school.

'My father is a...'

'Missionary. I know, and your mother has gone out to darkest Africa with him. They had to put you somewhere, and they chose here. You would get the same treatment as a boarder anywhere, so I suppose here is as good as anywhere.'

He couldn't know it, but I had spent no more than four months with my parents since my birth, having been left in England to be brought up by a succession of nannies until I was old enough for boarding school.

The lower school had been fine and I fitted in well and enjoyed it. I was the same as everyone else, and felt one of the crowd. When we showered after games no one looked different. We all had small penises and bald tummies.

When I moved up to the senior school on the other side of town I expected it to be no different, but almost immediately I had been bullied and jeered at by my peers. One night, at the end of the first week, I was taken from my bed by half a dozen older boys, who took off my pyjamas and tarred and feathered my privates. That wasn't too bad, because they did the same thing to three other newcomers. Getting the tar off was painful, and the matron who did it complained again to the Headmaster. His response was, 'Boys will be boys, matron. It's almost a tradition here.'

That was the first time I heard the term 'nancy-boy'. At the time I had no idea what it meant.

From the gossip I knew that Kirk was lusting after one of the young maids who worked in the canteen and served the masters. He said she had been giving him the eye, and he was going to sneak out of the dorm, climb down a drainpipe and go to meet her on Friday night.

We all watched him go in the moonlight that drifted in through the open curtains, accompanied by lots of hoarsely whispered cries of, 'Good luck', 'Fuck her for me' and 'You lucky bastard'.

We all stayed awake, eager for the news, but when he came back only ten minutes later he was in a rage.

'That bloody matron saw her waiting outside and made her go in before I could get near her.'

The cries now were, 'Bad luck', 'Tough titty' and 'Fucking Nora!'

I turned over to go to sleep, but just as I was drifting off a naked body slid into bed with me and I felt something rock hard against my bum.

I started to cry out, but a hand came over my mouth and Kirk's voice whispered in my ear, 'You keep quiet, Patsy, or you'll go out of a window.'

The covers were thrown off and I felt my pyjama bottoms ripped down.

I was jelly again; scared stiff, but excited beyond belief.

'Turn on your belly.'

I did as he asked, my heart pounding fit to burst.

'Now kneel.'

I scrabbled up onto my knees.

I felt the cheeks of my bum pulled apart and then a red-hot spear of pain as he forced his way inside.

Then he was banging away at me, his hot belly slapping against my bum, his testicles flapping between my legs, the pain coming in exotic waves, until he collapsed onto me, gasping for breath, pushing my body down straight. I could feel his cock pulsing inside me, pulsing, pulsing. It seemed to go on for a long time.

He pulled out, and I turned over, and found a dozen pairs of eyes looking at me. All the boys had got out of bed and come to watch.

Kirk was laughing and joking with them, 'He's all right, is Patsy. Not as good as Colleen would have been, but a good second. Tight!'

Jacko asked, 'Can I...?'

Kirk shook his head, 'No. Poor little bastard's had enough for one night. He'll need to heal up after what I've done to him. Leave him alone.'

Heal up? What did he mean? I could feel my bum wet, but I thought that was from him.

I got up off the bed and stood. The wetness was running down my legs.

Walking felt strange, but I made it to the lavs, where there were weak blue lights on at night, and pulled some toilet paper off a roll.

I wiped at my bum and looked at the paper. There was a lot of dark liquid, and I knew I was bleeding.

I used the tap in one of the sinks to wash myself, and dried using toilet paper, not the towel.

Going back to my bed I knew what I was, and what I was bound to be.

Examinations came easy to me, and 'A'-levels were followed by University, where I could and did choose my own liaisons. We were legally consenting adults, and after a couple of transient affairs I fell in love for the first time, with Adrian. He was completely different to Kirk, who had almost black hair and eyes, and a hard, muscular body. Adrian was like a tender flower; a slender, soft body with long, curly blond hair and sky-blue eyes that seemed to see into my very soul. He loved the same music, poetry and food as I did, had a similar sense of humour, and was as gentle as a young maiden.

We were both reading Law and Divinity, and soon realised that we were soul mates.

The loving was so much different from the raw sex I had been inflicted with before, and our love flowered into a grand passion. My penis, and with it my libido, had developed a little later than most boys, but it would now give Karl's a good run for its money, and though my pubic hair was not black, like his, it was just as flourishing. Sex, once a one-way system, was now well and truly two-way, and much more enjoyable.

Like most of our peers we fooled around with illegal substances, but after smoking and snorting for a while I developed an aversion to drugs of any sort. I had at last regained control of my own body, and I saw how some of my quite respectable fellow students lost all inhibition when under the influence. I determined that it was not going to happen to me. Adrian, however, despite my exhortations, not only continued experimenting, but went deeper, with harder drugs.

I worried for him. Our loving and his studies suffered, but his body suffered the most.

He almost stopped eating, merely pecking at his food, even his favourite pizza, and weight dropped off him until his clothes hung on him like garments on a shop rail. He had always been flush, with the large allowance his parents gave him, but he began regularly tapping me for cash to feed his habit. He was missing almost all his lectures and was pulled in for a warning by the Dean. He took no notice.

I came back from a rare, uncomfortable weekend with my parents, who were making a short visit to the UK to attend to some urgent family business before returning to Africa, and found him spread-eagled on the floor of our lodgings. He was cold and had been dead for at least a day. I foolishly blamed myself for leaving him alone, though in retrospect his death from drugs was a foregone conclusion, which I could only have temporarily delayed.

I cried for two days, missing my lectures and one-on-ones for the very first time.

I had a visit from Father Mulcanney, our resident priest, who sat me down and spoke to me for over an hour. He talked what I considered at the time to be a load of nonsense about God's will and how Adrian was happy in His arms, but I was impressed with the calm way he tried to make me feel better after facing disaster, and I thought it a wonderful thing to be able to do. I had given no thought to my future employment. I knew for sure that I did not want to follow in my parents' footsteps. Africa and other world trouble spots held no appeal to me. Equally, I had never considered the priesthood; I had taken Divinity purely to fall in with my father's wishes, and now it seemed a lucky choice.

With a reference from Father Mulcanney I was invited for interview and came before a board of three men who grilled me on my birth, parentage, religious and, strangely to my mind, political beliefs. When I told them I was apolitical it seemed to give the all clear for my entrance into the priesthood. It was much later that I came to realise just how much influence the church has on that particular sphere of our lives; in my opinion a sphere it should stay completely out of, but I would not dare mention that when church ears are listening.

I enjoyed the seminary, finding the brainwork part of it very easy, as usual.

I and the other newcomers were told that we should try to experience the same feelings as the Twelve Apostles during our years in the seminary, by study, prayer and simulated pastoral situations, so that we would become an integral part of the community. Each of us was urged to look for God's will in our lives, to be sure that Jesus desired us to become priests. Abstinence from sexual practices was a given, although several of my fellow novitiates and a couple of our mentors had that certain look about them I had learnt to recognise. I also smelt semen in the bathroom quite often, and more than once found traces of it that had not been cleaned up. It was obvious that in some cases the abstinence was not absolute.

The study and the prayer were quite intense, and we prayed together and a great deal alone, seeking self-awareness and a path to a deep relationship with Jesus. Much of my time alone I found my mind dwelling on periods of past sexual experience, reliving it over and over, instead of in prayer. I should have been strong and admitted my failings, but if I did not become a priest I could not see what else I could be, and I thought that even if I were not worthy I could do a good enough job out there in the community. In short, I was a coward yet again.

For the first four years there was no teaching on how to conduct oneself as a priest after leaving the seminary. Canon 652 was drummed into us daily. It was a time for looking inward, always inward. I tried; oh, how I tried, but if my peers found their way to God, I did not, but I put up a brave front; a good enough front that it was accepted that I had found the Light. Confession was frequent and Holy Communion daily. We followed full canonical hours, worked in the gardens and in the small factory, and were required to show humility at all times.

I found going through the motions easy. I actually enjoyed the strictness of the daily routine and could happily have stayed there for the rest of my life, but at the end of the fifth year I was sent to complete my devotional learning at a monastery in Spain.

I spoke the language quite well, having come top in it at school, with an 'A' at 'A'-level, and quite looked forward to spending time there, but it was the beginning of my downfall towards Hell.

Life was less intense there, although the daily rituals were observed. To begin with, my hours were spent in prayer and self-searching. At least once a day we were scourged; stripped to the waist and beaten with birch twigs, each man taking turns at giving and receiving punishment. I came to enjoy the sessions greatly when being beaten, realising that I was not only a homosexual, but also a masochist. I was not alone, and realised, seeing the expressions of those being beaten, that many of them enjoyed it as much as I. Were they, then, also homosexuals? I was sure that some were, but inside the buildings it was not going to be possible to find out. One of the strictly enforced rules was that no other person could enter one's cell at any time. There were no doors to allow privacy. The possibility of sexual depravity was therefore greatly reduced. I personally tried hard for a time to resist, but soon gave in to the need to masturbate at least once a day, always with the heightened excitement of possible discovery: the moccasins we wore made almost no noise on the stone floor of the corridors, and someone could have approached my cell completely unheard.

Much of the work of the monastery, however, was out among the public, and after four months of being cooped up inside, I was allowed out to participate in that work. Being a foreigner, though one who spoke the language, I had to be accompanied by another monk, in my case Brother Frederico. He was four years my senior, and one of the inmates I had recognised as a fellow masochist.

The same height as myself, he managed to be somewhat overweight even on the meagre food allowance of the monestary, and had light green eyes and an open, friendly countenance, spoiled somewhat by the drooping, petulant lips of a pervert.

Conversation of any kind at the monastery was openly discouraged, and we had, until that day, not exchanged a dozen words, but the moment that the gate clanged shut behind us he laughed aloud and did a little jig.

'Libertad, mi hijo! Libertad!'

I had to grin at his antics, and he was right: it was freedom, and I was as glad of it as he.

Just being outside on that beautiful, sunny day was a delight. The pleasant, light easterly breeze had just enough coolness to make the walk comfortable, and from the top of the hill where the monastery sat the view was magnificent: the scores of similar mounds, like abandoned giant anthills, sparsely dotted with olive trees and stunted pines, and increasing in height, rolled away in uneven ranks to the snow-capped mountains in the far distance, their slopes shading from a bright pink below the snow line, reflecting the sun, through shades of red to deep purple, where the tops of the higher foothills, out of the direct path of the sunlight, merged indistinctly with them.

On the way down the long, dusty slope into the small town Frederico regaled me with stories of some of the 'clients' we would be meeting, detailing their problems and little foibles, and his personal ways of dealing with them, usually using, when all else failed, the priest's standard get out: it was God's will. God had a hell of a lot to answer for, in my experience.

At one point, a hundred yards short of the first building he stopped, turned towards me, his head on one side and a quizzical look on his face, not saying a word for some seconds, then he asked, 'You like boys?'

I gulped. He did not mess around. Did he mean boys, or had I misunderstood, and he meant himself.

He could see my indecision and grinned, as he put his hand out at boy's head height, raising his eyebrows.

I took a deep breath and to my shame nodded.

'Buena. Se encontrarȧ mi pequeño amigo, Pietro.'

Was the roaring torrent of noise in my ears at that moment the howling of the hounds of hell? Probably. And this being in front of me was no doubt the Dark Angel.

My mouth and throat were suddenly dry, and I gulped, trying to moisten them.

I knew I had stepped over the line.

The next few hours sped by and my memories of them were of moist hands, many tears and just as many meaningless platitudes, as we did what we could to alleviate the suffering of peasants to whom suffering was a way of life, their entire existence from birth to death one long, unrelieved struggle to maintain a basic level of subsistence, with not a single luxury to alleviate the drab boredom. The whole time I had an erection, my mind unable or unwilling to give up the image of a naked boy.

As we walked up to the front of what Brother Frederico told me was the last house I would call at that day, he added that I was to minister to the occupant alone. He was going to a house further down the street, and I was to meet him in one hour at the bottom of the hill.

I tapped on the door and it was answered by an angelic looking boy, with rumpled, straw-coloured, curly hair and enchanting, light blue eyes. His round face reminded me so much of the pictures of cherubs I had seen in famous paintings. He could be no more than ten years old.

Surely this could not be the Pietro the brother meant? This beautiful youth could be nothing but good. My companion had fooled me; wanted to make me look an idiot. I had been had.

I began to turn away, but a small hand was placed in mine and with a tug I was told to 'Come in'.

My heart was beating loudly enough to hear, and my mouth had gone even dryer than before.

Somehow I was moving along the corridor and the front door had been closed behind me.

I found myself in a room furnished in typical Spanish peasant style: clean, with rough wooden table and chairs, woven threadbare carpets on the floor, another less so hanging on one wall, and a low bench-like seat, with a thick palliasse on top of it, where I was invited to sit.

I was jittery.

'Tu madre no es en el casa?' I asked him.

He laughed, 'No, señor, no es aqui. Ella no volverȧ.'

He sat down beside me, looking up into my face, searching it for something, but what? He nodded to himself and without another word placed his hand on my crotch, groping for and finding my erect penis through the folds of the robe, smiling an angelic smile, and I was lost...

Pietro was the first brick in my oh, so smooth road to Hell, and I realised much later that looking into his face I had been looking directly into the face of the Devil. The teaching is all wrong. There are no horns on the beast and he is not dressed all in black, with red eyes and a vicious smile; he wears an innocent look, in order to draw in the unwary. And Brother Frederico was his disciple.

Outside the house I looked up towards the monastery. Was it pure imagination that the anguiform path leading down from it towards me appeared like Eve's original serpent?

The last glowing curve of the dying sun slipped behind the snow-capped peaks of the far distant mountains as we retraced our steps to the monastery, leaving the closer hills in bas-relief, their arroyos and stunted, malformed pines and olive trees darker, browner shadows on a darkly purple-tinged canvas, hiding the bleak coarseness of the land, wispy threads of mist rising like dying smoke signals in the dusk. In the far distance, over the mountains, lightning forked through thick black clouds. As the darkness deepened my mind began playing tricks: I saw blood running down those hills; the blood of innumerable innocent campesinos spilled by invading marauders: Goths, Phoenicians, Moors, Romans. The land I stood on was steeped in blood. I shivered, although the evening was warm, and was relieved to reach the heavy oak doors of the retreat.

That night I woke around two am, soaked in sweat, after a nightmare such as I had never believed possible: I was torn along on a journey, my body blazing with pain from hundreds of cuts and puss-filled sores, my penis on fire, with a wicked, loud, roaring flame bursting from its orifice, every limb broken multiple times, into an inferno that seared the flesh from my bones, already showing through the crisped skin until they broke out, one rib after another, my leg and arm bones, the digits of my hands and feet, my skull, the pain incredible, and there I was pounced upon by dozens of black, bloodshot-eyed beasts with horns, part hound, part devil, that tore into me and feasted on my burning flesh, with other malformed creatures, their sinuous, slippery limbs reaching out for me, the octopus-like suckers on their digits tearing at my body and their fiery mouths open, pouring fetid, unbelievably noxious breath over me, until my eyes burst asunder from my head and my entrails boiled and spilt from my gut, and there was nothing left of me but searing pain.

Yes, I had seen Hell, but I fear it did not cure me.

I visited Pietro daily for the rest of my time there, and never saw his mother, if indeed he had one, though the house seemed well cared for. He sobbed for almost an hour and was inconsolable when I told him I had to leave.

As I sat in the Fokker Friendship on the last leg of the journey home I made a firm, solemn vow that I would never, ever touch another boy.

I seduced Archie three weeks later. He was twelve, and it was his first sexual experience.

Seventy-three others followed him. Three times I was the subject of parents' complaints, and three times I was moved to a different area, twice with promotion. The senior clergy were well aware of the problem, and knew if they sacked all the homosexual predators there would be a disastrous shortage of priests. We were fireproof, on this earth, at least, but in the next...

Jamie was the latest of my special devotees.

When his father came into my study pointing a revolver I stood up to receive my just reward. I knew he was about to send me to Hell...

KYLIE

Is that really me he's strangling? Why aren't I screaming? And what am I doing, up here on the ceiling?

This must be a bad dream. That cheddar must have been off, or the vodka was beefed up with antifreeze.

Look! My eyes are closing and my legs are kicking; I can see my tongue. It _is_ me! That bastard! Oh, God! I don't want to die. I'm too young, and I'm scared I'll go down below. I don't deserve to go to Heaven.

I've always been a naughty girl. I can't help it; I have these irresistible impulses to do bad things, and haven't the strength of character to resist them. I read a book once where the writer maintained that naughty children are made that way because their mother upset the fairies when she was pregnant. Believe what you like, but that's my excuse and I'm sticking with it! Anyway, it's much more fun to give in to those impulses, but I do get into a lot of trouble. In another book, by a guy called Tony Nash, I found a phrase that suits me to a 'T'; in fact I reckon it should be up there at the Lord Chamberlain's with my name on it: _"Get thee behind me, Satan...AND PUSH LIKE HELL!"_

My mother, of course, took no notice of my peccadilloes and bragged to her friends that I was 'advanced for my age' when anyone pointed out something I'd done. I don't think she knew the word 'precocious'. To her I could do no wrong, and I guess I can blame her, at least in part, for what I've become, quite apart from what she must have done to those bloody fairies.

The first time an outsider became involved was on my fifth birthday, which coincided with my first day at school.

I used a bright blue crayon to write a rude word on the immaculate wall of the infant school toilet. It was one I'd heard the older girls in the street use, and began with 'F'. I even spelt it right; see, I _was_ precocious.

Anyone would think I'd burnt the place down, the furore it caused.

My mother was immediately summoned to the school and shown the offending word. School having finished for the day I was surrounded by scowling teachers.

'Rubbish!' She declared, 'Kylie could not possibly know that word! She is just a little child. How do you know it was her?'

Miss Salmons took hold of my hand and held it up. My fingers were stained the same colour blue as the writing on the wall. I had stupidly not washed them after committing the act.

That's me: stupid! They never change, do we?

With her usual well-practised sour cream voice the head told mother, 'We would normally punish an offence such as this, but since it is her fifth birthday I will accept an apology from her.'

Mother shook my arm roughly, 'Apologise, Kylie.'

I did not want to. I shook my head and stamped my foot. For the very first time I saw anger in my mother's eyes. She had never hit me, but I could see in her eyes that this might well be that camel's straw.

Her voice was quieter than I'd ever heard it, and full of menace, 'Do it, Kylie. Now!'

I was a clever little minx even at that age. I knew when to change my tune. I put on my most demure look and said, 'Sorry, Miss Salmons.'

I got a big smile from her and from the other teachers, 'Then we'll forget all about it, and you will forget that word, won't you, Kylie, and never, ever use it again?.'

I simpered. 'Yes, Miss Salmons.' I had no idea what it meant then, but it had made a huge impression on the grownups, and even on my mother, so it must be something important and not for young ears. I made up my mind at that very moment that it was going to play a big part in my vocabulary and that every girl in the school would know it by the end of the week. What I didn't know at that age was what a huge part it would play in my life!

I learnt another important lesson that day, the most important lesson I ever learnt: never get caught.

All the other naughty things I did while at that school, and there were many, went unpunished, although I was often questioned about them, and saw the way teachers would look askance at me, knowing I was guilty but unable to prove it. I had become crafty.

By the time I was eleven I had gone into a cornfield with a boy and done the 'Show me yours and I'll show you mine' routine. I even let him touch and fondle me, and afterwards held his penis in my fist and he showed me how to make the foreskin move up and down. I enjoyed the whole experience, and knew from the pleasurable feelings his touch produced that I would do it again.

Moving to the comprehensive gave me a lot more scope. There were boys in the class with us girls and plenty of opportunity to get into scrapes.

They taught us about the birds and the bees in the science classes, along with dire warnings about promiscuity; a new word for me, and for the first time I really understood what it was all about and was intrigued. The boys showed us how to get into the porn sites on the computer during IT lessons, and often wanked under the desks in the back row next to us, and we soon learned all about the other side of sex, the dirty side, and were more than ready to try it, though not some of the things they did. No way did I want boy's stuff sprayed all over my face, thank you very much! Yuck! We very quickly lost our virginities, in my case to one of the seniors in the back of his father's Jaguar. When he pulled out he flipped his finger through the air, as if making a mental mark up on his bed post, then pushed the door open and told me to fuck off. That taught me another valuable lesson. I made sure it was me in charge of things after that.

Gale, Elaine and I were almost twelve and known already at the senior school as the 'terrible triplets', after we'd spent so many trips to the head's study to stand on the carpet for a lecture. I can still picture that room now: airy, with two large floor to ceiling windows, dark blue carpet and curtains, Two small chairs for guests stood against the wall to the right, ready to be brought out if needed, and the Head's large armchair stood behind an antique mahogany partners' desk with nothing on it except a telephone and one small clear glass vase with one carnation in it. It was always a carnation, and I guessed it was to remind the old girl of her wedding and her husband. He had died some years before we attended the school. The smell in the room was always slightly scented, as if the carnation were giving off its scent, but the school cleaner told me a couple of years later that the head used a scented spray several times a day, obviously trying to keep the scent of the carnation part of her everyday life.

Why we were called the triplets I couldn't imagine, we were so different to look at: Elaine was mousy; it was the only word to describe her; a small girl with untidy gingerish hair in an unruly mop that always looked untended; a round face with a squashed up nose and millions of freckles. She wore a permanent big-lipped grin, even when being told off, and was one of the most genuine people I've ever met. Gale, on the other hand, was like a junior model: slightly on the skinny side, like me, but with better bone structure and a natural grace, which is something I could never aspire to; dark, almost black hair cut in a pageboy style. She had to wear spectacles for reading, but kept them hidden in an inside pocket at all other times. She also smiled a lot, but it was restrained and covered up a shed load of craftiness. Gale was one of my best friends, and even I would not have trusted her to the end of the road. I was, at the age of twelve, just that bit taller than either of them, blond, with what I thought were attractive blue eyes and clear skin.

We shared one other thing in common: none of us had at that time started our periods. The science classes taught us that you couldn't get pregnant if you weren't ovulating, and we made the most of it. We had bets which of us could shag the entire year of boys first.

Being of a practical turn of mind, I started at 'A', and worked my way through, with a different boy every day, sometimes two, one during the dinner hour in the bushes at the back of the playing field, and another after school. Dirty little sods they were, and with most of them it was all over in a few seconds. Some even shot their load before they put it in. It was a long time before I learnt that it was called 'premature ejaculation', and even affected some men, including a couple of the losers I later went out with. Looking back it seems strange that none of them turned us down, meaning that none of them were queers, which is somewhat unbelievable, because I seem to have proved since that at least five percent of all men are, and more like thirty percent if you restrict it to the good looking ones.

Well before the end of the year we had all achieved our goal, and were steadily working our way through the rest of the upper school. With our year Elaine beat me by a day, because I'd had 'flu in May and was off school for three days, bugger it! We were also putting on weight, all three of us. My mother congratulated me, because I had always been skinny, but when something inside my belly started kicking the hell out of me I knew those science lessons had not been right. Only later did I realise that I hadn't noticed because I got pregnant during my first month of ovulating, so never had that first period. With the amount of lively little wriggling things I had inside me every day it was no wonder.

I'll give her credit; Mum didn't tell me off for being pregnant, just for being silly.

She was silly too: she asked a very silly question, 'Who is the father?'

I had to stop myself from laughing, though a little giggle came through as I told her, 'I don't know which one it was, Mum. There were two.' More like two fucking hundred really, but I wasn't about to impart that delicious little nugget.

The baby was taken away the day I had it, screaming my head off with the pain. I didn't know where it went and didn't care. I was not ready to be a mother, like some of those stupid girls who kept theirs, sometimes bringing them to school, to be cooed over by their equally stupid pals, stuck for life with a kid that would hold them back from having a normal life. That is, apart from the few who had deliberately become pregnant in order to get a council flat and leave parents where they had been abused. I knew one girl who'd had four kids before she was seventeen. She lorded it outside the school gates every afternoon, chain-smoking and chatting up the boys, looking to find a father for the fifth and bragging that she would never have to do a day's work as long as she lived. The State would pay for everything. She was far from being the only one. What a life! Not for me, though.

My mother might have been a bit naïve, but she wasn't all that thick. From the day I gave birth she made sure I had a ready supply of condoms and even tried to explain how to put them on, but I saved her blushes and told her that it had been covered in class. From her horrified look I think for a minute she thought we had practised on the boys or a teacher, but I told her it had been on a plastic penis that the teacher provided. They'd separated the sexes for that class, or there would have been a riot. There was plenty of hilarity and lots of ribald comments as it was, and Miss Simmons, who taught science, looked very hot under the collar. Most of us were already experienced little sluts, who could have taught her a thing or two. She was unmarried, and we thought she was an old maid, and probably a virgin. If she was, she had had plenty of practice with the condoms and that plastic prick. We giggled, imagining her taking it home and to bed with her every night, discussing how she might use it and whether she'd put a condom on it first! Wicked little bastards we were.

It was just after I had the kid that I stole my first packet of cigarettes from the shop on the corner for a dare. We'd all been smoking since we were eleven, and Elaine had started at ten, though she hadn't told us at the time.

Poor Mr Patel, he had no chance with accomplished little sods like us. I stayed near the counter, picking up cheap packets of sweets and putting them on the counter top as if I were going to buy up the entire shop. Gale and Elaine went to the back of the shop and started what looked like a vicious fight, with lots of screaming and hair pulling.

Mr Patel rushed round the display racks to try to separate them and I just slipped behind the counter, picked up a packet of Players, slipped them in my pocket and nipped back round the front, looking demure and innocent.

The two other girls were shooed back to the front of the shop and Mr Patel, a really nice, jolly man, whom we all liked, made them apologise to each other in front of me. They both enjoyed doing so, with simpering voices and winks when he wasn't looking. We waited till we were a hundred yards away before we let go, laughing like drains and almost wetting ourselves, but looking back it was not really funny. More like puerile, but that was us then.

We'd all sampled alcohol too, but couldn't get a regular supply. My mother drank a bit when she went out, but kept no alcohol in the house. Elaine's mother had plenty, being a lush, but kept hers locked, and the key on her.

Gale was luckier. Her father was an alcoholic and there was always some hard stuff in the house, which she managed to 'milk', bringing small amounts of whisky, gin and brandy, which burnt our mouths and throats and made us cough, but we stuck it out gamely, saying always how good it was, even though we hated it, with watery eyes and rough voices. Her dad kept a close eye on the levels in the bottles, however, so it had to be small doses, and we wanted more.

That meant learning new tricks. Mr Patel didn't have a liquor licence, and although we dressed older than our years we certainly didn't look old enough to drink legally, so buying it ourselves in an off-licence was out of the question.

We chatted up a lot of the boys in the fifth form, some we'd already had sex with, but they were in the same boat, always looking to get more.

There was nothing for it, one of us had to shag an older man.

Guess who volunteered?

I started hanging around near the local pub, waiting for an ideal victim, and found one on the second day.

He was about thirty-five, almost like a granddad to me, and nicely dressed in a grey suit and tie. What impressed me most were his highly polished shoes and the way he held his drink.

I watched him carefully step along the pavement, obviously pissed, but trying to look sober.

I followed him for a couple of hundred yards and then caught up with him.

'Excuse me, mister.' I said sweetly, 'Could you help me?'

He stopped and gave me a bleary glance, 'Depends what with, sweetie.'

I dropped my voice, 'Do you want a fuck?'

That got a belly laugh, 'And go to jail for five years? How old are you, twelve?'

It made me angry, 'No, I bloody well am not! I'm thirteen, nearly fourteen.'

'Same bloody difference.' He looked me up and down, staring thoughtfully for several seconds at my breasts, which had come along nicely after I'd had the baby. 'To answer you truthfully: yes, I would love to, but I'm not going to, for the stated reason. Why would you want me to anyway?'

I sighed, 'To be honest, mister, I and my mates need some alcohol, and I thought if I let you have sex with me you might oblige.'

He shook his head, 'Jesus H. Christ! You must be bloody desperate!'

'We are.'

'I could get into almost as much hot water for doing that. What's your name anyway?'

'Kylie.' Damn! My big mouth!

'Well, look, Kylie, my love, I'm no paedophile, though I must say you're a fine looking girl, and I shall have wildly exotic dreams about you tonight, but since you're that desperate I will get you some. What do you want?'

'Vodka?'

He shrugged, 'Vodka it is. There's an off-licence in the next street. You stay well out of the way while I go and buy it, then follow me at a distance. When there's no one about I'll drop it off somewhere, in a hedge or something, and when I've disappeared round the corner you can pick it up, okay?'

I squeezed his arm, 'You're a gent. What's your name?'

'Brian.'

'Thanks, Brian.' I hesitated only a second before asking, 'Do you use that pub much?'

That got another laugh, 'You're not slow in coming forward, are you, Kylie? I use it almost every day, but I don't usually get as pissed as I am today. I got promoted and did some celebrating.'

'Maybe I'll see you again then, Brian. Here's the money.' I took out a ten-pound note I'd pinched out of my mother's purse.

He shook his head, 'Not this time, Kylie. Have this one on me.'

It worked perfectly, and the girls congratulated me. We got rat-arsed three evenings running and felt terrible in the mornings.

I did see Brian again, and again, and again. He wasn't a paedophile to start with, but he very soon became one.

He was my first adult man, and a wonderful lover; another first, and very considerate of a girl's needs. Being in his lovely soft bed was totally different to the quick bangs standing up against a fence or a wall that I was used to with the boys. I was devastated when he told me seven months later that his bank had posted him to Hong Kong. When I asked him, he swore that he had not asked for the posting, but to this day I believe he did, to get out of a situation that could easily have destroyed him. I think I was almost in love with him, though I didn't know how to recognise it at the time. Come to think of it I still don't. Maybe he had been falling for me, and knew which way that had to end. When he went I was desperately sad and fed up for several weeks, not wanting to go out or do anything. It must have been love.

Elaine and Gale had branched out too, and had got into bad company.

They were shagging two boys of about eighteen, Pakistanis, who were running with one of the local gangs, and were introduced to drugs and orgies, where a lot of much older men used them when they were high. They stopped going to school, and looked like hell every time I saw them. They were getting little sleep and a hell of a lot of sex, drugs and booze. Elaine admitted that she didn't like it, but they had been threatened with disfigurement if they tried to leave. A month later Gale told me she was pregnant again, and hadn't a clue who the father was, but knew the baby wouldn't be white. Both of them got the clap and had to have injections.

That was another lesson I learnt: don't take up with gangsters. There were plenty about where we lived, and I had been approached after Elaine told her boyfriend about me. I told him to piss off; I wasn't interested.

It was then that I made my first real mistake: I tried the pub again, hoping to find another Brian, but the man I found was something else.

He said immediately that he would like to shag me and would get me some booze. He was much older than Brian and not as well or as cleanly dressed, but looked all right, if a little shifty; his eyes everywhere while he was speaking to me.

'I just have a little job to do first, so come with me while I do that, and I'll go to the off-licence for you.'

I went along with him and we turned into the gateway of a big house.

'Is this your house?' I asked.

'In a manner of speaking. Come on.'

Instead of going up to the front door he went round the side of the house to the back. There were French doors with a marble-floored patio in front of them.

He picked up a flowerpot and used it to smash the glass near the lock.

I screamed and turned to run away, but he grabbed my arm and held it so tight that it bruised. He pulled me to the door, shoved his hand inside and turned the handle, then pulled the door open. I hadn't noticed till then that he was wearing gloves.

He pushed me inside and said, 'Grab anything that looks valuable. Put it is this bag.'

'No, I fucking well won't!'

He nearly took my head off with the thump he gave me with his fist. 'Do it!'

I ran round the house, looking for valuables, frantic to finish the job and get out. I found a gold watch in a drawer upstairs, along with some nice jewellery. I grabbed the watch and a handful of the other stuff, and then saw a pair of glittery earrings that looked as if they might be real diamonds. I liked the look of them and slipped them in my pocket.

I ran downstairs and handed the loot to him. He had a small holdall and put them in with the other stuff he'd collected.

'Come on. Let's get out of here.'

His hand came out to grab my collar, but I ducked, shot out of the door first, started to run, and kept running.

He shouted a couple of times, but fear put wings on my feet and I ran the whole way home without stopping.

Once I had the front door closed behind me I locked it to make sure he couldn't get in and went to the loo. I badly needed to pee and was lucky to have made it home without wet knickers.

I knew enough not to wear the earrings to school. Stupid I might be, but not that stupid. I looked at them every day, but knew they would have to stay in the drawer, probably for ever. What had made me take them I didn't know, and I wanted so badly to take them back, but knew that was impossible too.

A week later two uniformed policemen came to the school and walked into each classroom, looking over the girls, who gave them a bit of verbal stick; enough to make a poor copper blush, but they didn't. I tried to look sweet and innocent. Hah! Some hope!

Two days after that two plainclothes dicks came; a man and a woman, and with them an old, grey-haired lady with a wart on her nose, wearing flatties and a faded two-piece beige suit of a style that went out in the fifties.

They went into every class and walked up and down the aisles, looking at every girl. The boys were taking the piss, knowing they were not at risk.

When they came to our classroom they stopped near one of the front desks, and one of the dicks spoke quietly to the woman, who was looking at Aileen Green, a goodie-goodie, who as far as I could tell was not only still a virgin, but had never been out with a boy.

What worried me was that Aileen had the same colour hair as I did, and was similar looking, though she wore spectacles.

I saw them speak to her and she took them off. The woman looked again and shook her head, and the little group moved on.

I was in the last row, near the back, as always, where we could hide our misdeeds from the teacher, even masturbating sometimes behind the desks, like the boys.

They had stopped to look at two other girls on their way, but now they were coming towards me.

I couldn't help it, I blushed crimson.

They stopped again just in front of my desk and the male detective looked at the woman and raised his eyebrows.

I had never been looked at so closely before. It was like being the specimen under a microscope lens.

I found out later that the woman had been a head teacher at a large comprehensive school before she retired. She had seen it all and, like most teachers, remembered every pupil she had ever taught; the type that would never forget a face.

She put her head on one side as she studied me and time seemed to stand still, until she suddenly said, 'Yes, this is the girl.'

'Any doubt?' The man asked.

'None whatsoever.'

'Thank you, Mrs Williams. We'll be in touch.'

As the woman turned to leave, he asked me, 'What is your name?'

My throat was dry but I told him, 'Kylie.'

'Kylie...?'

'Greaves.'

'We would like you to come with us, Kylie.'

I felt every pair of eyes in the classroom on me and the blush deepened. I was in the shit; fucking deep in the shit.

They asked for my address and after I'd given it drove me to the house and told my mother they needed her to accompany me to the station. They also asked permission to search the house. Stupid woman, she gave it. They said they'd send a team with us when we went home. That gave me some hope; they were not going to lock me up!

On the drive I had time to consider the options: lie through my back teeth and deny I was ever anywhere near wherever it was that whatever it was had happened, or own up.

After they'd taken my fingerprints I owned up, but instead of saying I'd offered the burglar sex, I told them the man had grabbed me in the street and made me help him. I knew they would find out the truth from him, but I didn't want my mother hearing. She knew perfectly well what a slut her daughter was, but why twist the dagger?

They brought a woman in who asked me to describe him. It wasn't difficult: Almost six feet tall, well-built, in fact almost fat, dark straight hair that needed cutting and fell over his face, dark eyes, probably brown, a fat nose and big ears.

While I spoke she drew and when I'd finished she held the sketch out for me to look at.

I gasped, 'It's him! How did you do that?'

She handed it to the detective, whose name I now knew was John Hunter.

He nodded, 'Charlie Yeates. I might have known.'

'There's just one other thing, Kylie; did you keep anything from the house?'

There was that blush again. I nodded, 'A pair of earrings. They're in a drawer in my bedroom.'

'Are you sure that's all?'

'Yes, Inspector.'

'Good, that will save a lot of time. When we take you home you can fetch them for us.'

Mother asked, 'What will happen to her?'

He sighed, 'That will be up to the Crown Prosecution Service, but since she is under age and did not instigate the robbery, I should imagine she will be let off with a caution.' He turned to me, 'You were a very foolish girl, Kylie. Keep away from men like Charlie. He is bad news, and has a history of violence. You could have been badly hurt.'

A month later we received a letter saying that no further action was to be taken against me, but that the incident would remain on my record, and that if I were ever to be involved in anything criminal in future it would be taken into account.

I stayed away from the pub after that: sod the alcohol!

I went back to shagging boys, but with GCSEs coming up decided to do some belated studying. I had learnt that where sex is concerned do-it-yourself is often just as good, and sometimes better; at least my hand knew more what I wanted than most of the boys I'd known. It gave me much more time with the books.

Though the three of us had always been dunces we stuck at it for almost five months and were surprised when the results came through. There were no 'A's, but I had three 'B's and two 'C's, and Gale and Elaine's results were similar.

We'd done work experience, and one of the places I'd been allocated to was what the owner, an old-time barber, called his 'tonsorial parlour', which had now been changed over to a ladies' hairdressers.

It was nothing fancy, but I had learned to wash and dry hair, and had been shown a couple of the tricks of the trade, so I went and asked for a job.

Linda Green, the senior, a natural blond woman in her early forties, who would have been beautiful except for her right eye, which was glass, the real one having been lost in a riding accident when she was a teenager, had taken to me and had a word with 'his nibs', as she called him. They decided to put in another chair, and I was in.

The pay for an apprentice was pretty poor, but I had more money in my pocket that ever before and was able to afford to start clubbing, with my old friends and two new ones, Carla and Sheila, the other young hairdressers.

Now there was plenty of booze, and plenty of the 'other', with a different bloke every night. It wasn't long before I had a bad case of chlamydia, which put me off sex for a while. Peeing was painful as hell and the discharge was disgusting.

Partying without going to bed with the last partner of the night was bloody difficult and caused quite a few scenes with blokes who naturally expected to get their end away, and after a while I gave it up for a bit. I did let up once, thinking it was his own bloody fault if he caught it, but it was so bloody painful that I pushed him off halfway through. After that I left it till I was clear again. The clubs had to do without my five-pennyworth for a while. Waking up with a clear head was only one of the benefits.

It was while working at the salon that I did the worst thing I ever did in my bad, bad life: I committed murder.

Linda Green had never married: her missing eye had always made her feel inferior, and though she had dated a few times, there had never been anyone of note in her life after her parents died.

She was always pleasant, but restrained, and when she suddenly became jolly, making jokes and smiling all day long we knew there was a man in her life.

She kept him hidden for several months, but then let us know that she was going out with someone and he had asked her to marry him. He began to pick her up after work.

I loved him the moment I saw him. His name was Lucien Taylor and he was almost the spitting image of Brian, and ten years younger than Linda.

I admit I went out of my way to give him the eye, moving my body suggestively every time he looked my way.

I found out where he lived and started to hang around on the off chance of seeing him.

Weeks went by and I was getting frustrated. Without him ever giving me the slightest indication that he was interested in me I had become obsessed, although I hated myself for it. Linda had been more of a mother to me than my own ever had been.

The wedding date was announced. I knew I would have to do something drastic and knocked on his door half an hour before leaving off time on my day off.

He answered the door in shirtsleeves, towelling wet hair.

'Kylie, what's wrong? There's nothing the matter with...'

He didn't get any further: I pushed through the door and took his head in both hands. I gave him a deep throat kiss that had years of experience behind it.

He fought against it for almost half a minute before he gave in and kissed me back.

We tore each other's clothes off and didn't even reach the bedroom, winding up on the carpet in the lounge.

It was over very quickly and we hadn't used a condom.

After he'd come he was struck with guilt and jumped up.

'Oh, Kylie! What have we done?'

I gave him a big smile from the floor, 'Exactly what I wanted to do, Lucien.'

'But I didn't! Linda must never know, Kylie! Never! You understand?'

I was hurt, but took it like a soldier. 'If you say so, Lucien.'

'And it must never happen again. You're a lovely girl, but far too young for me, and I really do love Linda.'

'But you love shagging me.'

He shrugged, 'It was a one-off.' He suddenly went stiff, 'Are you on the pill?'

I shook my head, 'It'll be funny if I have a little bun in the oven, won't it?'

'You can take the morning-after pill. Here, I'll give you some money to pay for it.'

I got up, pulling my knickers back on, 'No thanks, Lucien. Come what may.'

As I left the house I looked back at him and saw that he was crying. I didn't even feel like a heel.

Things went back to normal, except that I missed my period.

A week before the wedding I managed to whisper to him that I was pregnant. I carried on past him, so could not see the look on his face.

Linda was not at work the next morning, and had not rung in. I started to feel bad. He must have told her. Christ, how could I face her and work with her? I'd have to leave and find another place.

At ten past ten a police car stopped outside and a uniformed copper came in to tell us that Ms Green had hanged herself the evening before.

I had killed her as efficiently as if I had tied the noose. What a rotten, rotten bastard I was.

I had reached the lowest ebb in a life full of low ebbs.

The day of the funeral it poured from dawn to dusk. At three-thirty I stood behind a tree a hundred yards away, no coat on, soaked to the skin and not caring. I deserved it, every bit of it. I had not dared to go in to work and had called in with stomach problems. Believe me, they were not all invented.

There were about three dozen mourners. I knew she had been well liked and was a keen churchgoer. Lucien was facing my way and I could see him sobbing his eyes out.

I had destroyed not one, but two human beings. I booked an abortion and destroyed a third. I felt like destroying myself.

I left the salon and started doing hair at home. I got so many customers by referral that I couldn't cope and took out the lease on a shop that had previously been used as a hairdressers' before it became a poodle salon. That had gone bust, but the previous use meant that it was easy to change the usage back.

I started to make serious money and within a year had four chairs.

Everything was rosy except for one thing: I wanted to find love and couldn't.

I looked, oh, how I looked. I dated dozens of men who seemed at first sight to be eminently suitable, but who all turned out to be either tossers or losers, many of them married bastards who just wanted a bit on the side, pretending they were single.

After half a dozen like that I employed a cheap private eye to check them out and got rid of a lot of deadwood that way.

All the good guys seemed to have been taken.

My good friend Gale, now married with three kids under five, urged me to try the Internet.

'You can read between the lines and choose one you want. There's no hurry: you can keep them hanging on for months if you want.

That sounded all right. She meant well, but I have her to thank for the mess I'm in now.

I chatted half a dozen men up for several weeks, but there was always something off-putting about them. Then along came Felix.

He told me he was too shy to speak to a woman directly.

" _The Internet lets me say things I could never say out loud to a lady."_ That got my interest immediately: being called a lady for the first time ever. Whatever next?

"I'm not looking for a relationship, my dear, I could not handle that. I just want a lady to talk to, to discuss things with. Would that be all right with you, or are you looking for a physical relationship, leading to marriage?"

There he was with that 'lady' bit again. Just chatting would suit me fine, for a while at least, though I still needed my 'physical fixes'. While I was chatting online with him, I could always depend on one or another of my 'regulars' for that little job.

"I think that would be just great, Felix. I would love to just chat with you."

" _Could I tell you about my pets?"_

Oh, bloody terrific! Just the thing I'm most interested in. _"Of course, Felix. I love animals."_ In a pig's ear!

I got half a page, with ailments and vet's visits thrown in for good measure, and then, at the bottom, something that caught my interest, _"I had some good luck today. One of the companies whose shares I own was bought out by an American company, and I made a cool half million profit."_

_One_ of the companies? He was another wanker, telling huge fibs. He was probably a dole-wallah, without a bean to his name.

"You just made a big mistake, Felix. I've heard those kinds of stories before. I think we'd better call the whole thing off."

" _Oh, I am sorry. I should not have mentioned them, but just to show that it is true I am attaching a picture of the share certificate, so that you can see for yourself. I do not lie, Kylie. I never have. I am an honest person, although I admit rather a strange one."_

I looked at the image and it was pretty obvious that the certificate was a genuine one. Gulp!

"I am so very sorry, Felix. My bad! Please accept my apologies for doubting you."

" _Not at all, my dear. Anyone would have done so. Now, more about my pet rabbit, Lopears..."_

That sort of thing went on for over five weeks, and we got no nearer to my goals. I was just about at the point of giving the whole Internet thing up when he seemed to get up courage: _"Do you think we could meet? Purely as friends, of course. We could have a meal or visit the theatre; whatever you like."_

A disco would be more my scene, but we had to start somewhere. We had not exchanged photographs and so I sent, _"Could you send a photograph, Felix?. I would like to see what you look like. Here's one of me.'_ I sent him the best one I had, taken by a photographer I'd bedded a year before. It made me look a million dollars, and a lot of it was Photoshop, but it was basically a picture of me.

His came through and I was put off immediately. He looked a bit weedy, with a thin face and nose and a bit of a squint, with sparse sandy hair and a wispy sort of goatee on a chin that seemed to jut out. I'd always used lips to gauge a man's sexuality, and his were thin and not sexy at all. In the photo he was smiling, a closed-mouth smile, which helped a bit.

" _What do you think, Kylie?"_

Christ! I couldn't tell him what I thought, could I? I looked at the picture again. If I was honest I'd have to admit that I'd woken up to find worse looking faces next to me on the pillow. Oh, what the hell.

" _You'll do, Felix, but only as a friend. No hanky-panky."_ Who was I kidding?

" _You know I want nothing more."_

We agreed to meet after work Thursday in the park.

He was there waiting, with a huge bunch of red roses. I'd never been given so much as one bloom before, and began to think of him as a bit of a sweetie. He was a bit of a weed, though, and unlike anything I'd ever been with before.

It was a pleasant, warm afternoon and we sat on one of the benches and talked about all sorts of things. I quickly found out that he was a long way above me intelligence-wise. I reckoned he must be mensa-level, though he tried hard to hide it, obviously not wanting to show me up. He took me to the late afternoon showing of a film I wanted to see, though I could see from his face when I glanced at it from time to time that he was not a bit interested in werewolves and the living dead, and afterwards he took me to dinner at the swellest restaurant in town, where he told me to order anything I wanted, and bought a bottle of champagne whose price almost gave me a heart attack.

At the station he shook my hand again, 'It has been wonderful, Kylie. I do hope we can do it again.'

It had been a new experience for me, being treated like royalty, with nothing expected in return.

'Of course, Felix. Any time you like. I've enjoyed myself.'

He went to catch his train and turned just before entering the compartment. There was no blown kiss, just a wave.

I didn't know if I liked him or not. He was strange, but not as strange as some I'd known, and his company had been easy. I was looking forward to the next time.

On our fourth day together he asked if I really liked the kind of film we went to. It was the 'in' thing, and like most people my age, I went along with what was fashionable, but I couldn't say I really enjoyed them.

'I suppose so, Felix. There isn't much else, is there?'

'Do you like classical music?'

'Oh, God, no.'

'There are other things, you know.'

'You mean museums and art galleries; that kind of stuff?'

'Those and others.'

'Not my scene.'

'Well, since you seemed to like those films, I have created a set for you to enjoy if you wish to.'

What was he talking about?

'What do you mean?'

'I have not told you this, but one of my hobbies is photography. I have created a set like those in the films, and have purchased garments for you to wear to look part of the scene, so that I can photograph you, but only if you would like to do it.'

It sounded different and I've always been one for a dare.

'Why not?'

'Good. Let us meet tomorrow at the same time and I will take you there.'

I didn't sleep very well, wondering if I should have agreed, but he'd been nothing but a gentleman from the first, and had never made a wrong move.

We met in the park as usual and he took me first to the multi-storey car park alongside. We rode up to the top floor, which rather surprised me, but now I know that it was because all the other floors had security cameras, whereas there were none on the roof.

A white Rolls Royce with current year plates stood on its own and I was astonished when he walked over to it and opened the passenger door for me.

'Is this yours, Felix?'

'Of course. I use it very seldom, preferring the Jaguar for everyday use.'

Bloody hell, a multi-car owner. What had I got myself into. He must be worth millions.

The drive took us out of town and into the country about twenty miles. After a while, on side roads, I lost all sense of direction, but at last we approached tall, intricately-worked metal gates, which opened just before we reached them, and drove down a long drive to a house that looked just like Downton Abbey. It was as big!

He came around to open the door for me to get out and led me with his hand on my arm to the front door, which he opened without using a key.

He must have seen my grin, because he asked, 'Is something funny, my dear?'

'I expected a major-domo with white gloves.' I told him.

'And on any other day that is exactly what you would have seen, but today is the servants' day off, when I normally go into town to the club to dine. I thought perhaps you would prefer it that no one saw you with me.'

I could see his point. I began to realise that I could easily marry this man and be set up for life. If it had been Gail she would have been all over him with that end in mind. I wasn't sure I wanted it. I had a mental image of him on top of me, banging away, and realised that while I was willing to put up with it, I probably wouldn't enjoy it.

The hall was large enough for a couple of bungalows, and at the end of it a white marble staircase led up to the upper floors. Deep burgundy carpet deadened the sound of our footsteps and on either side there were huge antique Oriental vases, big enough for Ali-Baba to be hidden inside, suits of armour and busts on plinths. Serious money on show.

He led me into a library lined on three sides with mahogany bookshelves, full of leather-bound volumes and had me sit down in an armchair that wrapped itself around me like a lover enfolding me in his arms.

He mixed martinis and poured one for each of us, 'To the future.' He toasted.

'To the future.' I was beginning to wonder what it held for me, but it definitely looked rosy.

We drank and he refilled the glasses twice, then said, 'We must not have any more yet. I want us both to be fully aware of the experience we are about to share.'

He helped me out of the armchair and led me to a door that led down to the cellars.

He must have detected the slight frisson of fright that passed through me, because he squeezed my arm a little tighter and assured me, 'It is just as light down here in my movie theatre, Kylie. You have no need to worry.'

We reached the bottom and I looked around. He had, as he had said, created a perfect scene for a lady's boudoir of a couple of centuries earlier at the right hand end of the room. There were three large cameras, including a professional video job, on rolling stands, and lights and reflectors over to the left

'Your clothes are on a hanger, behind the screen, if you would like to go and put them on.'

I had been wondering if he would want to watch me change, but it seemed not. Still the perfect gent!

I had also wondered if the garments would fit, but I needn't have worried: he had done his homework and they were as perfect as if they had been made for me: a voluminous red velvet creation that flowed in perfect lines as I stood in it, décolleté enough for any old roué. The style managed cleverly to accentuate my bust. There were satin sandals, exactly my size, and a black choker, with what looked like a genuine diamond clip worth a king's ransom, to go round my neck.

I admired myself in the full-length swivel mirror and stepped out.

He stood at the other end of the room with his cameras, shaking his head slowly, 'Magnificent! Absolutely magnificent! Could you lie on the chaise longue, my dear, please, and smile languorously at the camera?'

I did as he asked and he made me make one or two minor adjustments before starting to film.

He moved the camera he was using to several different viewpoints and had me change position and pose several times.

'And now, my dear, I wonder if I could prevail upon you to pretend that you are a courtesan, with the lower part of the dress pulled up to reveal some of your legs?'

Aha! I thought, so he is a little kinky after all.

I pulled the dress up so far that my knickers were visible. If he wanted courtesan that was what he was going to get. I wondered if he would want them off in a minute or two.

'That is a little too much, Kylie. We want to hint at wantonness, without making it obvious.'

I pulled the dress down a little and he filmed some more.

'Now, if you would rather not do this I would quite understand. I would like to take a few shots with a breast exposed. I will look the other way while you arrange it, and only look through the viewfinder.'

I laughed, 'If that's all you want, Felix, be my guest; look all you want.' I stuck my hand into the dress and pulled one out.

He went into it frantically, clicking away, and I could see that he had a hard on. So he was a normal man after all. I wondered if I would get out of there without having to take him on, but it was no big deal. I had shagged men for much less than he had already given me.

'Now, Kylie, I would like you to replace the breast and when I switch on the video camera to bring it once more into view, but slowly and provocatively, as if tempting a lover.'

He switched on the video and I did as he asked.

'And now both, please.'

I was actually enjoying it, I found, and was becoming excited and a little breathless. Something different in my little mundane world.

'Now if it does not worry you, I would like to join you on the chaise.'

'Be my guest.'

He walked over very slowly and sat beside me, looking into my eyes. His breath was coming in short gasps and I knew how excited he was.

'May I touch?'

Poor bastard: he'd probably never had a woman before. 'Of course you can. Whatever you like.'

He fondled each one, holding them in his hand like melons in a greengrocer's, then moved up to the nipples. After working on them for a minute I was as excited as he was and put my hand on his dick.

It was as if I had burned him. He leapt up, glaring at me, and shouted, 'Don't do that!'

I held both hands up, 'Sorry. I thought it was what you wanted.'

He calmed down, 'Of course. I am sorry, my dear.' He sat down again, 'May we continue?'

He went back to the nipples and began to knead them again. I felt the wetness between my legs. My nipples have always been the most sensitive part of me, even more so than the lower equipment, though that has its moments too. If this kept on long I'd have to go to the loo and masturbate, he was getting me so horny.

He left the breasts and began to caress my neck, cooing like a dove. It was only then that I noticed he seemed to be in some kind of a trance, and that's when I should have hit him with something heavy, jumped up and run, but I was too late.

His hands went around my neck and his thumbs began to exert pressure. I'm feeling light-headed.

I don't want to die: I'm a bad girl and I will go to Hell; I know I will.

He's leaning down to kiss my neck. What is this, a kind of auto-erotica?

His lips are opening for the first time since I've known him.

Christ! Those are fangs! No wonder he didn't smile!

MAXIMILIAN THE GREAT

My fifth birthday; the worst day of my life.

For weeks I'd been making hints about presents, and getting secretive looks and smiles between my parents.

I so badly wanted a bike; all my friends had one except Geoffrey, and he had no dad around to earn money. If not a bike, a more advanced magic kit; I'd exhausted all the tricks of the one they'd bought me when I was four; they were pretty stupid, easy tricks, most of them made of tatty cardboard, with a wand that had fallen to pieces the third time I used it. Grandpa had taught me three tricks with coins and I had practised and practised until I could do them as well as he could, and he had been on the stage for years with his magic show, billed as The Wizard Merlin, but they didn't take me to see him any more; they said he was ill, but Peter Rose, whose grandfather was in the same old people's home, told me my grandad had gone bonkers, had tried to set fire to the place and was kept locked up in his room.

I was awake before five, itching to wake them up, so that I could have my present, but not wanting to upset them. I crept downstairs and helped myself to a plate of cornflakes and milk.

That's where Mum found me when she came down at seven, my head down next to my plate, sound asleep.

Though she was quiet as she got the breakfast things ready, I woke up when Dad came in and started laughing loudly.

I sat up, rubbing my eyes and asked, 'Is it in the house?' thinking that if it was a bike it might have been left in the coal shed.

They exchanged secret smiles again and Mum said, 'No, not yet, Max. When you're washed and dressed we'll take you out to get your present.'

I rushed around and was ready before them, but they were not in a hurry.

Mum said, 'We can't arrive before nine, Max. They won't be ready for us.'

'Who won't be ready? Oh, please, tell me the secret. Please.'

They looked at each other questioningly, and Dad said, 'You'd better tell him, Lucy. He'll drive us mad otherwise.'

Mum smiled again and said, 'You know you've always said you'd like a little brother, haven't you, Max?'

A little br...? I might have done a couple of years ago, when I didn't know any better, but I hadn't mentioned anything like that since. I liked having all the attention on my own.

'What do you mean, Mum?'

'Your Dad and I have tried to have another baby, so that you would have someone to play with, but we know now that we can't; I can't, so we are adopting a little boy, Charles. He's four and a half, just six months younger than you, so you will be the best of pals.'

My little world suddenly collapsed. I loved them, I loved the house, I loved my life and if I didn't love my friends, at least I liked them. The thought of a stranger coming to share their love and my space was the worst thing I could possibly imagine.

I shouted at them, something I had never done before, 'I don't want a brother! I don't want a brother!' I started to sob, huge tears rolling down my cheeks.

Both their faces showed total shock.

Mum began to cry too and asked Dad, 'What have we done? Oh, what have we done?'

Dad stood for no nonsense at any time, 'We did what was necessary. He'll just have to like it or lump it. Once Charles is here he will see how good it is.' He came over and picked me up to cuddle me, even though I was a great fat lump. I felt safe on his shoulder and gradually quietened.

'That's better, Max. I promise you it will turn out well, and you will like him. He is a real little gentleman.'

I started to howl again; I knew I was no little gentleman, and if he was he would make me look sick.

Mum came and joined in the cuddling, and because I felt safe in their arms I stopped crying.

All the way to the house where he was being fostered I had the feeling I was in a sort of time warp, where there might be any number of endings, but that came to an end when we turned into the drive of the house and stopped.

Dad opened the back door of the car to let me out and we all went up to the porch. They must have been watching, because the front door opened just before we reached it and a smiling, middle-aged woman stood there holding her hand out.

They shook hands and then she led us into the lounge.

A little boy with wavy ginger hair and bright green eyes with long lashes, who had been sitting on one of the easy chairs, got up to greet us. I hated him on sight: he was much better looking than I, and his manners were better. I wouldn't have stood up for visitors; wouldn't have even thought about it. Grrr!

'Good morning, Lucy. Good morning, Doug.' The little bastard was holding his right hand out to them, simpering, and they were taking it, Mum first. Cheeky sod, calling them by their first names! Well, I was bigger than him, and they were my parents, not his. Once I'd got him home I was going to teach him a few lessons, and they would not be gentlemanly.

'And you must be Maximilian, or should I call you Max? How do you do?'

I growled something and caught the disapproving looks on all three adults' faces. I knew I was doing it all wrong but couldn't help it.

They collected his grip with his bits and pieces in and somehow managed to get us into the back of the car. He sat upright, looking out of the window as if he owned the world, and we set off.

He was obviously watching the backs of their heads and the rear view mirror, because when we turned a corner and he knew their attention was distracted his hand came out and he pinched my arm hard. It hurt!

I let out a howl and turned to bash him with my fist, but Mum turned and saw what I was going to do.

She shouted, 'Max, don't you dare!' She had never shouted at me before.

I looked at him and he was simpering again, looking as innocent as a pussy cat, a look he must have practised till he had it off to perfection.

I somehow knew what my life was going to be like from that point on: he would always be the innocent one and I the guilty, whatever happened. He would worm his way into their affections and try and ruin theirs for me. The little sod must have been reading T.S.Eliot! I had my very own Macavity; the Napoleon of Crime. His hair was even the same bloody colour!

I felt a little better when we got home, and before we went into the house Dad called us over to the garage. Mum followed. When he lifted the door there were two identical blue Raleigh bikes, just our size. On the crossbars red transfers spelt our names.

Before I could say anything the little bastard had burst into tears, speaking through his sobs, 'Oh, Lucy, Doug, no one has ever given me anything before. I have never had a present. I am so, so grateful.' The sobs deepened, with intervals of great jagged influxes of breath, as if he were completely overcome. What a liar, and what an actor!

I managed a gruff, 'Thanks, Mum, thanks, Dad.'

Dad asked, 'Don't you want to try them out?'

I rushed forward and grabbed mine. I'd learnt how to ride one, using the one Geoffrey had got for his birthday, two months before, and hoped to show off my prowess, thinking Charles would not know how to, but of course he bloody well did. My riding was pretty careful and pedestrian, but he showed how cleverly he could swerve and brake to a halt with panache.

Mum, of course, had to praise him, 'Well done, Charles.'

I threw my bike down on the drive and ran for the garden swing. I didn't want them to see my tears.

Over my shoulder I heard Dad ask, 'Whatever's the matter with him?'

And Mum's reply, 'Oh, he's only putting on his parts. He'll get over it.'

But I didn't, and I found out that being bigger didn't help much. Charles knew a lot more about fighting than I did from the waifs' and strays' home he'd been in, and knew how to bruise where it didn't show. I more or less held my own, but he usually came out best, and was never once caught hitting or pinching me, whereas I was regularly seen. He made sure of that.

Although they tried, I knew he became their favourite. He was so smarmy and so polite when being watched, whereas I became more introspective and surly.

Soon after we got the bikes mine had a flat tyre when I went to use it, and thick scratches kept appearing on the paintwork, causing tuts of concern from Mum and Dad, while his remained pristine. I didn't need to ask where those scratches came from.

I think the thing that annoyed me most of all was that he had delved into my magic box and learned all the tricks very quickly, and worse, when I tried to boast by showing him Grandad's coin tricks, he practised day and night until he could do them as well.

My parents noticed how keen we were on magic and for our sixth birthdays we were both bought the same advanced kits. We were soon producing flowers and coloured handkerchiefs from nowhere, and coins from my parents' ears, losing dice from under plastic beakers and finding them in either Mum's or Dad's pockets. There were sets of those beakers that disappeared into one another, where you could make ten out of one, or one out of ten, and a similar set of bottles; coloured balls that you could put on an upturned beaker and make them disappear, and a different coloured one to be found underneath; sets of cards that changed colour and design, loaded dice, the penny to shilling trick and the best of all: making weird coloured smoke come out of your finger. Some of them needed two people to work the trick, and we developed a sort of armed truce. I still hated him, but had come to realise that I had to make at least a show of brotherly attachment or I would be the eventual loser.

Mum and Dad must have heaved a sigh of relief, but on our parts it was all sham, as sham as the magic we were doing. The tricks had taught us a great deal about deception, and we had both learnt it well.

By the age of seven we were doing a show for our friends, and charging them a few pennies to watch it. Magic became the big spare time occupation for the kids at school, whom we managed to mystify every time.

The tricks became more sophisticated as we grew up and asked for and were bought quite expensive tricks, and I even started inventing a few of my own. I seemed to have a natural flair for it. Charles didn't have the ability, though he did try, but each one he tried to invent went wrong. I could see the flaws but wouldn't point them out to him. At last I was able to lord it over him just a little, and he knew that as far as magic was concerned, at least, he was below my standard. Outside of magic, we were almost strangers. I had poisoned his chances with my friends right from the start, though he tried to break in, so when we were not practising our stuff our lives were very different, surrounded by different people.

Even so, when we left school there was only one possible career, and it meant that we had to work together. It was all we knew, and we were pretty damned good on stage. Two young men who hated each other – partners! What a laugh.

We began in working men's clubs, the only place to start, and had some difficult venues, once being chucked out for not being entertaining enough. We'd been warned in advance how difficult that audience was and got our own back by leaving two small, innocuous looking coloured parcels on the stage as we rushed out and jumped in our old jalopy. As we drove away we saw in the mirrors the men who had barracked us streaming out of the club, heaving their guts up and surrounded by a thick green fog. We heard later that it had taken two days with the doors and windows open to get the hydrogen sulphide smell dispersed enough to have the clientele back in the club.

Our act became well known and we took on an agent, who began to get us into small theatres, large hotels and better class clubs. We also took on a bit of glamour in the shape of Carly Wright. She came to us as a gawky seventeen-year-old, the best of a tatty bunch who turned up for the interview; understandable with the wages we were able to offer. She was an inch taller than either of us, with almost a male haircut, which suited her pretty oval face. Her eyes, which at first seemed hazel with a touch of green, were really almost all that second colour, with flecks of brown. She had a pert little turned up nose and some of the sexiest lips I'd ever set eyes on. Her costume for the act had to be manufactured; we couldn't afford a professional job. My aunt Flo came to the rescue and knocked up a pair of tiny sequinned sexy knickers and a matching top, and we found a feathered headdress that had come from a local theatre company in a second hand shop. Carly tried on the costume behind a closed door and came out trying ineffectually to cover herself with her hands.

'I can't let people see me like this. It's like I've got nothing on.'

I couldn't help noticing that a quite a few pubic hairs were showing outside the edges of the knickers.

Charles asked her, 'Do you ever go swimming?'

She nodded.

'It's no more revealing than a swimsuit, is it?'

'Well, no. But on stage...'

'They'll be watching us, not you. You're just part of the scenery.'

She wasn't sure, but she said, 'I suppose so', borrowed a pair of her mum's high heels and we were away. She told me much later that she had shaved before wearing the costume on stage.The first night she found that far from being part of the scenery it seemed from the noise coming from the audience that she was the main attraction and highly appreciated in her skimpy outfit, so much so that she tripped as she came onto the stage and wound up flat on the floor, hitting it with a crash that made me wince and pale under my make-up. It seemed to me she might have done herself some permanent harm. I'd fallen in love with her the minute I first set eyes on her, and even if the other applicants had been stunners I would have insisted on her for the part.

The audience thought it was part of the act and applauded wildly. We wanted to make it a permanent thing, providing it could be practised as a pratfall, so that she didn't hurt herself, seeing how successful it was, but Carly vetoed the idea. She told us we were a pair of male chauvinist pigs, showing us her bruises, which took weeks to completely disappear. For the first few nights she regularly handed one or other of us the wrong prop, but gradually got it right and began to enjoy the wolf whistles and catcalls. Within a year she had been cut in half, pierced with half a dozen swords, and had her head cut off a couple of hundred times, and was dressed in genuine professional gear, even skimpier than the first lot. We called ourselves Magic Incorporated, though occasionally we took on individual gigs, where I was Maximilian the Great, as always, and Charles billed himself as The Magic King. Though I insisted he didn't use my speciality acts he invariably did, and we had row after row about it.

Carly and I became an item, but she told me she was an old fashioned girl, and didn't believe in sex before marriage. She knew how badly I wanted her and did, at least, go as far as hand relief, which more or less kept me happy, although I wanted more, as you do. We were very happy and set a date for the wedding, just a few months away.

We were earning good money, and Charles began taking drugs, working his way up from cannabis to heroin in quick time. He worried me and I repeatedly told him what a fool he was.

I went to see the act of a touring, top-of-the-bill American magician, who had a tremendous final trick, where he set fire to a cabinet on stage, opened the door, walked inside through the flames, and closed the door. After about thirty seconds two men came on with fire extinguishers and put out the flames. When they opened the door of the cabinet, all they found inside was the magician's hat, well alight and almost consumed. I negotiated with him for the trick. It cost me almost all my savings, and I had to give an undertaking not to use it until he had returned to the States, but I bought it.

Charles had a gig in a famous hotel two nights later, and I went in to watch his act.

As a finale I saw my cabinet being wheeled in. I wanted to scream at him, but had to sit and watch him use it. That did it! We had the most blazing row, and I told him we were finished as an act.

Unfortunately, we had six weeks of bookings for the double act, and in show business cancelling for personal reasons, or for any bloody reason for that matter, is the death knell. I was stuck. The American magician came looking for my blood, threatening to take me for every penny I was going to earn for the next ten years. It took me a lot of fast talking and the free gift of two of my own tricks he hadn't seen before to get him to let me off with it, explaining my background with Charles, and telling him I was giving him the heave-ho when the six week run ended.

I came back to our digs after a visit to the bank a week later and walked into his room to tell him the result, to find him naked on the carpet, banging away on top of Carly, who was in the same state, her clothes flung willy-nilly on the floor nearby.

I screamed and shouted and kicked his arse so hard my shoe went in three inches.

After the fourth kick he rolled off but instead of looking guilty stared guffawing with laughter. Carly lay where she had been under him, not attempting to cover herself. Her buttocks were running with bright red blood. Her eyes were blank and I could see she was spaced out.

His laughter eased and he spat out spitefully, 'You stupid bastard! All it took was a little rohypnol in her Coke.'

I wanted to kill him there and then, but he wasn't worth it. I determined that I would get my revenge, no matter how long it took.

I helped Carly up, sat her on the bed and managed somehow to get her clothes on her. She was so out of it that she was no help, her body flopping as if she had no control over it.

Charles lay in the same spot, watching, silent, but his eyes showed what he felt.

I lifted Carly and gritted, 'You'd better get dressed. The police will be here in a few minutes.'

That got through the drug haze, 'You wouldn't, Max? I'll be jailed.'

'You should have thought of that before you touched her.'

I took Carly into my room and called the cop shop. They came inside ten minutes, a male detective and two women, the tallest of whom was carrying a small medical bag, and told me she was trained in rape cases. I told them what I'd found and was asked to wait outside while the rape expert examined Carly, who had just begun to come round. The other two left her to it, exited the room with me, then knocked and entered Charles' room.

I could hear his raised voice and a little later he came out, handcuffed to the male copper. As they passed me my erstwhile stage partner looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, 'Sorry, Max. It was the drugs.' I didn't believe the tears for a second; he'd always been able to produce them at will.

Macavity again. I stared at him, hatred blotting out all other feelings.

A SOCO team arrived shortly after that and started doing their thing in his room. The woman copper took my statement and had me sign it. She then went in to get one from Carly.

I sat on the hard chair in the hall and waited.

After about forty minutes the rape case woman opened the door and called me in. Carly was on her feet and moving under her own steam, but tears were running down her cheeks, and when she saw me she burst into heavy sobs.

I took her in my arms and cuddled her, nodding to the two officers, who left us to it, one of them murmuring, 'We'll be in touch.'

I sat Carly on the bed and told her not to worry, I loved her.

'But you can't! Not now. Not after that.'

'It was not your fault, darling. He'll pay for what he did to you.'

'I never thought that Charles....he just gave me a drink of Coke...'

'I know. I know. Ssshh.'

In the event he didn't pay. He told a cock and bull story about a silly game with a willing Carly that got out of control, and the DPP decided not to prosecute, much to the chagrin of the police, who apologised profusely. They were furiously angry that a rapist, caught in the act, with all the forensic evidence piled against him, could get away scot free, but as the copper told me, 'Our hands are tied, mate, and it happens just too bloody often.'

'But what about the drug paraphernalia and drugs you found in his room?'

'We thought we had him bang to rights on the rape, and although we reported the drugs the DPP didn't follow it up.'

'So he walks away scot free!'

'I'm afraid so, Sir.'

'Not your fault, I know.'

I married Carly three weeks later, and she gradually got over the rape, though our sex life for the first few months was decidedly shaky.

I went on as a solo act for the stage appearances we'd had booked, and found I enjoyed it as well as, if not better than, the dual act. Once Carly had recovered enough to join me it was even better.

We heard nothing about Charles, and he seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth, but then a comedian we shared a bill with told me he'd worked the same show as him in Montreal a month before.

My show got better and better and we were always in demand, playing most of the top theatres in the country over the years and earning good money.

Eventually Charles returned to the UK and was working the same circuit, with a woman he'd picked up somewhere abroad. We found bills with his stage name three or four down in the listings at various venues we played. We had either top or second billing, which made me feel good, but then he had never been a natural when it came to magic. He was a plodder, and his solo acts were stale, whereas I was always looking for something new and exciting to develop the act.

Eighteen years after we married Carly found a lump in her left breast. A visit to the doctor got her an immediate hospital appointment, where she was told she had cancer that had spread to her lymph glands.

They tried their best, and she went through hell with the radiation and chemo treatments, but she died seven months later. The love of my life had gone.

I did not remarry. The first time had been too good, and anyway the roving life of a magician did not suit many women. If I wanted sex it was easy: there were always women hanging around and almost throwing themselves at the performers. It suited my mood perfectly: one-night stands with no comeback, and often no exchanging of names.

I soldiered on, hardly changing my act after that, except for inventing one or two new routines, one of which I kept a total secret. I had invented it with just one end in view: revenge, and I knew exactly what I was going to do with it.

In order to exact that revenge I made a point of getting in touch with Charles again.

I spoke to him on the phone at his digs and told him, 'A lot of water has gone under the bridge, Charles, and things that were once so black and white are pretty fogged round the edges now. I'm an old man with no friends, and we were close once. I thought you might like to meet up and have a drink for old times' sake.'

He didn't hesitate, foolishly accepting that my hate had mellowed with the years, 'I'd like that, Max.'

We met at his suggestion in the bar of a pub in Huddersfield. I think he wanted to be in public view in case I attacked him, but I played it all sweetness and light.

He was sitting at a table by the rear wall, a pint of Guinness in front of him, and as I approached with a stern face he looked both worried and guilty.

I sat down without offering my hand and as an opening gambit told him, 'Fuck me, Charles, you look a right mess.'

His face and body were ravaged by the years of drug abuse and he looked at least ten years older than me.

'I know. I don't even need to look in the mirror. I was close to death at one point and spent six months in rehab. Since then I've been clean.'

'Good for you. You'd better stay off the stuff for good.'

I was determined not to let him die before me. I needed him alive at the end.

'We're a couple of old fools, Charles. We had a bloody good act together, didn't we?' I played up to his memories of the good times.

'We certainly did.' There were tears forming at the corners of his eyes, the maudlin old bastard, but I pushed on, 'We're both old men, and, like you, I am tired. Every show really takes it out of me, and I'll bet you find the same thing. Doing everything yourself is getting just too much. I've been looking around for a partner, and I've interviewed a few guys, but I haven't found anyone I could work with. They all wanted to learn from me, and then I could see them going off with all my tricks and setting up on their own. I thought of you. You're too fucking old to be able to do that. That's why I got in touch. We can never be the friends we once were, but we could work together. I suggest we should combine again as a duo. It's up to you, Charles. I'll quite understand if you don't want to do it. You can think about it.' I stood up, as if to go.

'No, Max. I don't need to think about it. I'd love to!'

The fool took the offer at face value, obviously keen to get top billing. I had never dreamt it would be so easy, but then Charles had never been blessed with too much brain power.

'All right then; partners.' I put my hand out grudgingly, and he took it and tried to hold on to it too long. I pulled it out of his grasp.

'I'm at the Alhambra next week. Cancel what bookings you've got and start with me there. We'll do some of the old routines and you can help out with the ones you don't know and learn them on the job.'

The tears were back again, 'You don't know what this means to me, Max.'

I looked him straight in the eyes, 'Oh, yes, Charles. I think I do.'

We were tired and some of the routines were old, but the audiences seemed to still love us.

The cough I developed five years later, when we were playing Leeds, had got much worse by the time we got to Brighton, and I knew even before consulting a doctor that it was the big one.

Cancer of the oesophagus, which had spread throughout just about everything in my body. Eight weeks at most, according to the specialist I saw, without telling Charles anything about it.

We were about to play Southampton and I told him about a fabulous new routine I had invented. He listened as I described it and thought it was a terrific idea for the final routine of the performances.

I showed him the revolver and the blanks and even had him fire it, so that he had it off to perfection when the time came.

The act went brilliantly and I let him announce the final routine, 'Maximilian the Great will now defy death as you have never seen it defied before.'

The wardrobe like box was wheeled onto the stage on its tall wheels, so that the audience could see quite clearly that there was nothing underneath. It was a box similar to many that we had used in other disappearing routines, with a light wooden door on the front. We went through the usual rigmarole before I stepped into the box and closed the door behind me, feeling every day of my age.

He spoke the magic word, pulled the revolver from an inside pocket and began firing at the door, whose wood splintered as the bullets hit it, the box disappearing in a sudden explosion of thick, bright red and yellow mist with lightning effects running through it as he fired the sixth shot.

The evidence of his hatred of me, with forged, threatening letters from him, containing his genuine signature, obtained by deception when he thought he was signing other innocuous documents, written since we'd been back working together but dated back over many years, sent to the police by special messenger to arrive the next day, and his fingerprints on the revolver, along with my bullet-ridden body in the cellar under the stage, would cook his goose for good and all. He would end his days in a prison cell.

I went the way a magician should – in a puff of smoke.

I'd left a 'thank you' card stuck to the mirror in our dressing room: _"With best wishes for the future, from Carly and Max."_

THE 'COLONEL'

This dilapidated room is like too many the colonel seems to have spent most of the last ten years in, what glamour there was long forgotten, eradicated from most minds, though he was not alone in clinging to the last vestiges of hope. The room is illuminated weakly by sunlight struggling to penetrate that part of the broken, filthy single window that is not covered by the sheet of heavy cardboard that has been put up to cover the hole.

Filthy, stained bare floorboards, faded, torn wallpaper, peeling paint and a discoloured, almost all-over brown ceiling, every trace of its original whiteness wiped out by the thousands of cigarettes that have been smoked under it, a naked bulb hanging from a piece of frayed cord that had not been changed since it was first installed in the 1930s, a blatant fire risk if the electricity were ever to be switched on again.

The furniture is no better: a battered, heavy oak office desk with three drawers on one side, a dilapidated three-ply cupboard against the far wall, with two deep, crazed dents in one of the doors, where an angry fist had landed, and three cheap, hard, upright chairs, one behind the desk, the other two opposite it.

On top of the desk there is an old, Second World War vintage field telephone, its wires trailing across the floor and out through the doorway. Next to it he has laid the envelope on the desk top, ready, and the Browning .270 rifle, with Svarovski telescopic sights and one round of expanding ammunition. He has pinned the photograph of the target on the back of the door. The officer in the picture is in the same non-uniform uniform he'll be wearing today and riding in the back of the same car. The colonel is in the same sort of non-uniform: grey sports trousers, a khaki-coloured shirt with epaulettes and a subdued, military-style, diagonally barred necktie. Though normally fastidious about his appearance, the trousers and shirt have deliberately been made to look grubby. His jacket is hanging over the back of the chair, so that the revolver in the shoulder holster is fully visible. His walking stick is resting against the window sill.

He takes another swig from the half-filled, half-pint tumbler in his hand. He could never admit it openly, but the task is getting damnably difficult since the cease-fire.

His coarse, scarred features have a slightly amused, cynical expression, which hardens slowly into a look of bitter hatred.

He suddenly lifts the glass and without looking at it throws the whole lot down his throat, swallowing the contents in one gulp, spilling some over his chin and shirt. He ignores the spillage, lowers the glass again, holding it loosely, so that the last few drops run out onto the floor.

He glares hatred out of the window for a short while longer, before turning, to hobble over to the desk, using the stick, which he slaps down on the desk with a bang, followed by the glass.

As he looks at the rifle his expression changes again, becoming one almost of adoration. He strokes the butt lovingly, then runs his fingers caressingly back and forth along its length. Very slowly he lifts it up, hefts its weight, draws back the bolt, then slides it forward slowly, sensuously. He repeats the action, then again and again, faster and faster, his breathing and facial changes matching the actions of a man in the act of open masturbation, leading up to a mental orgasm, when his head sinks onto the rifle as his breathing slows in post-orgasmic recovery.

He lifts his head, smiling, then draws back the bolt slowly and closes it again firmly. He raises the rifle to his shoulder, swinging it slowly to aim first at the light-bulb, then the door knob, and finally towards the photograph pinned on the back of the door, taking up the aim until the centre of the graticule is exactly over a point just between the eyebrows of the target.

In slow-frame he imagines the strike of the bullet, the red-rimmed hole appearing in the forehead, the body slumping, lifeless.

He gloats, imagining.

There are footsteps on the stairs and he moves the point of aim to the centre of the door at head height.

When the gentle knock comes at the door he calls, 'Come.'

He uses the soft burr of his home county when on duty.

He deliberately changes his expression to a vicious snarl as the door opens and John takes a step into the room. He stops dead in his tracks.

A well dressed, well educated man in his early 40s, with fine sensibilities, John is a weak character, a trifle effeminate, though not too obviously so. The sight of the rifle aimed at his head has him dropping to his knees, shaking.

'Please...no...I've done what you wanted...everything you wanted...please.'

The colonel shakes his head, disgusted. He lowers the rifle slowly.

'Aaaah! Get up, will you, before I puke!'

He puts the rifle down on the desk, sits down on his chair, picks up the bottle and pours two inches of whisky into the glass, as John climbs in undignified manner to his feet, looking white and shaken, breathing heavily and not far from tears.

'Sit down.'

'I think I'd rather...'

'Sit down!' He pushes the glass over as John takes his seat. 'Get that down; you look as if you need it. Who knows, it might put some fire in your guts.'

John eyes the tumbler with obvious distaste, 'No, really...'

'Drink, damn you!'

The visitor picks up the glass, turns it round in his hand, looking for the cleanest part, then draws a neatly-folded handkerchief from his trouser pocket and unfolds it to clean the rim. He starts to do so.

'dé cabhru me! What the feck are you afraid of, a few germs? The whisky'll kill 'em!'

John sips a tiny amount carefully, trying to avoid touching the rim with his lips. He does not notice the colonel reach for his stick, which he uses to push the bottom of the glass, so that it jams hard into John's mouth, making him swallow much more than he intends and splashing his clothes with spillage.

He shudders, splutters, drops the glass onto the desk, staggers to his feet, coughing, his eyes running with the effect of the unaccustomed liquor on his throat.

While he has the coughing fit the colonel roars with laughter, banging his stick on the desk.

When the coughing dies down, John tries to dry his face and clothes with the handkerchief, looking terribly upset.

'You really are a beast.'

'Beast? You don't mean beast, you mean bastard! Why don't you say the word? Bastard! Why not? Eh? Why not? You bloody gentlemen with fine sensibilities make me sick to the guts, with your plum-lined gobs and your 'toujours la fucking politesse'! You think you're so bloody marvellous! Marvellous? You're the real anarchists, not us! The high road to decadence, with your maggot-rotten morals and holier-than-thou doctrine. Bastard! Bastard! That's what I am, and proud of it; a born, bred and well trained bastard, and you'd best not forget it. Still, 'beast'; not very strong, I'll grant you, but it'll do for a start; I told you the booze would give you courage.' His expression becomes vicious, 'Now sit down, and shut up!'

John sits, deflated.

'You've got him?'

John nods.

'Where?'

'Downstairs...with...'

'Good!' The colonel stands and walks slowly round the desk, using it as a support, rather than the stick. He speaks soothingly, 'There are times when I wonder why I put up with you, John, but you have your uses, laddie.' He strokes the back of John's neck.

John tries to move his head away, but the hand follows, stroking behind his ear.

John closes his eyes and his breathing becomes heavy.

Suddenly, the colonel grabs a handful of John's hair, twists hard to lift the younger man's face up. He bends, puckering up as if to kiss John full on the lips, stopping only half an inch short. He lets go of the hair and begins to laugh, a deep, side-slapping, belly laugh.

John jumps clumsily to his feet, goes to the other end of the desk, both hands flat on it, ready to move again quickly if necessary.

'Hahahaha! Oh, yes, John, you do have your uses, hahaha.' He stops the false laughter abruptly and his expression changes to one of brisk authority, 'The boy; how much does he know?'

John sulks, not speaking.

'Well?'

The young man draws himself up with as much dignity as he can muster.

'No.'

'No? What the hell is that supposed to mean?'

'It means that I will no longer be a procurer of cannon-fodder for a nihilistic opportunist; no longer a party to your more than doubtful political aspirations. Go ahead, ring your murderous colleagues and tell them to follow and shoot me. It will be a welcome release from the mental torment I've suffered these last three years.'

'Well, my God! It walks, it talks, it fornicates, and now it actually begins to sound like a man.' He starts moving round the desk towards John, who retreats to the far wall. The colonel grabs his stick and hobbles after him, stopping a bare foot away.

'Fine sentiments, my young friend. There must have been more courage in that glass than I allowed for. So you want to die?' He nods to himself, 'That could doubtless be arranged, but why do you think I need to do it? You're in this with me up to the neck, boy; a word to the pigs and you'll be dead enough without my finger on the trigger, and never a wet eye at your funeral.'

'But I haven't...'

'No, you haven't, have you? But just think what you have done. Remember Peter?'

John closes his eyes and lowers his head.

'Aye, a bonny lad was Peter. Remember those clear blue eyes? Innocent eyes, they were; trusting eyes; eyes that couldn't see, deep down, the devious, black-hearted soul of his lover-man, and just think of that soft golden hair you loved to run your tainted fingers through...'

John whimpers, 'Please...don't...'

'D'you know what they found of him?' He begins to shout, 'Do you? Do you?' He grabs John's shoulders and shakes him hard. 'His bloody hand! That's all they found, and that with two fingers missing!'

John is sobbing now, his face distorted with torment.

'No...never...'

'And blood and guts...man, the blood and guts filled the street and the gutters, and splattered the walls and windows for a hundred yards; that was all that was left of your golden boy. And you're the dirty bastard who set him up! And you call me an opportunist! Well, you used your opportunities, didn't you, you disgusting, child-seducing sodomite?' He hits John across the face with his open hand.

John finally loses his temper. He lifts his head, eyes blazing, looks at the revolver in the colonel's holster, lunges for it and takes it, knocking the colonel off-balance backwards onto the floor, his stick landing some distance away from him.

John levels the pistol in two hands, pointing it at the colonel's head, his finger squeezing hard on the trigger. It is obvious he has never held a gun in his life.

The colonel smiles grimly, 'That's right, squeeze hard, John. Harder! What are you waiting for, man? Go ahead, shoot! You hate me enough; kill me. You can get away easily enough over the roof. Come on, get it over!'

John makes an obvious effort, his expression changing from burning hatred, through doubt, to dismay at the realisation that he cannot do it. He pulls even harder on the trigger, but the gun will not shoot. He bursts into frustrated sobs and turns to hide his head in his hands against the wall, the revolver hanging loosely in his hand.

The colonel smirks and shakes his head. He pulls himself to his feet, using a chair and the desk for supports, leaving his stick where it fell, and hobbles over to John. He puts his arm around the young man's shoulders, guides him to the nearest chair and onto it, takes the weapon from his hand and hobbles round to his own chair and sits down, playing absent-mindedly with the hammer of the weapon as he does so, pulling it back and easing it forward.

John's sobs gradually diminish and he lifts his head and regards the colonel wearily. The colonel shrugs, grinning cynically and raising his eyebrows.

'Don't feel too bad about it, John; we can't all have the killer instinct. Just imagine what the world would be like if we had: dog eat dog, till no one was left, but just in case you ever come that close again, do remember to release the safety catch on the weapon before you pull the trigger. The pistol might fire then.' He lifts the weapon, shows John how to move the catch, causing him to close his eyes in frustration.

'No, John, you are no killer, but don't worry about it; some would say you are far worse, with the talents you employ...'

'I have tried, really I have...for you.'

'Strange as it may seem, John, I believe you. You are not all bad. The trouble is that you don't understand the game of life and death...can't be expected to. For those of us who do, the rules are plain.' He opens the chambers of the revolver and removes all but one bullet, then closes it again and spins the cylinder. 'You must have head of this game, John, Russian roulette? We take turns, and just to show what a gentleman I really am I shall go first.' He lifts the weapon to his ear and slowly pulls the trigger. Before lifting it he has glanced at the cylinder to make sure that the bullet is not next in line to come under the firing pin. Had it been, he would have spun the cylinder again, but John is not to know that.

The hammer goes back and then slams forward with a loud 'click'.

He lowers the revolver slowly, spins the cylinder again, very deliberately, and then points it between John's eyes.

'Ready?'

To begin with the young man looks scared stiff, staring directly down the barrel, but suddenly a smile of relief appears on his face. He suppresses it quickly, but the colonel realises that he has lost the advantage.

'I'm ready.'

The colonel lowers the pistol, regarding John with grudging admiration and not a little puzzlement.

'You've got more guts than I gave you credit for.' He spins the cylinder again, with the barrel facing him so that he can check where the bullet lies, lifts it very quickly to his head, waits about ten seconds, then pulls the trigger. After the 'click' he lowers the weapon, 'Get's monotonous, doesn't it?' He smashes the revolver down on the desk and picks up the field telephone receiver and turns the generator handle. He listens, says, 'Wait one minute then send the boy up.' He hangs up the receiver, then opens the cylinder of the revolver and reloads it with the bullets lying on top of the desk. When it is loaded he replaces it in his holster.

'Does he know what he has to do?'

Johns eyes close and he sighs heavily, 'He will do whatever I ask.'

'I'll just bet he will, but is he up to it? Has he got the nerve?'

John sighs again, 'I think so.'

'You _think_ so? What bloody good is that? We stay alive by being sure, not by bloody guesswork.'

'He'll do it.'

'We'll see, but if he does, it will be for me and not for you. That bastard Armstrong...'

He stops speaking as he hears footsteps on the stairs. He stands, slips on his jacket, sits again. He opens the drawer of the desk and puts the whisky bottle and glass inside it, before pushing it to again.

At the light knock he shouts, 'Come!'

The boy enters and stops just inside the door, looking down at the rifle on the desk, his expression showing his reaction: one of scarcely hidden belligerence. He is tall for his age, fifteen, and handsome, with dark wavy hair cut short above his ears and intelligent hazel eyes. A strong character, he has decided to make a stand, and not give in to demands.

The colonel's face does not give away his own reaction after his rapid appraisal of the boy, or his equally rapid decision on a plan of action to destroy the boy's obvious antagonism, and make him lower his guard.

The colonel rises, and speaking jovially and more carefully than usual he limps forward as if he can scarcely walk, hand outstretched in greeting. 'Come in, lad, come in and sit here, next to John. Pleased to meet you, my boy. I'm the Colonel.' He staggers and falls heavily onto the boy, who grabs him to stop him falling, looking concerned.

'Careful, Si...' He bites off the word.

'Thank you, lad, thank you. If you could just help me back? Ah, thanks, I hadn't my stick, d'you see?'

'Let me get it for you.' He picks it up from the floor and hands it over.

'Thank you again. I can see now why John chose you especially for this important mission.'

'But I'm not...'

'You're something of a marksman, I believe?'

The boy hesitates, eyeing the rifle suspiciously.

'At least, John tells me so.'

'Eh? Oh, yes, I suppose.'

'And what do you think of this fine example?' He pushes the rifle across the desk top.

'It's a very fine rifle.'

'Could you handle it?'

'I suppose so.'

'So do I, lad, so do I, but could you kill a man with it?'

'It's powerful enough.'

'Aye lad, but are you man enough to do it?'

The boy is silent, his face reflecting his emotions at the situation he is in.

'No?'

'As a hypothetical answer to that question I would give an unequivocal 'Yes', but...'

'Fine. That's fine. It's a pleasure dealing with an educated man. You're a lucky fellow, you know. My own education was...interrupted. We had to fight, for the liberty and survival of our beliefs; no freedom of choice as you have.'

The boy looks surprised and glances enquiringly at John, who shrugs his shoulders and lifts his eyebrows, equally puzzled.

'You seem surprised, lad. Did you think you'd been asked to come here to be coerced? Forced to do something you did not want to do?'

'Well...'

'Aye, John does tend to overdramatize. No, lad, nothing could be further from the truth. You...'

The boy interrupts, 'I had made up my mind that I would not, in any case...er, Sir.'

The colonel feigns surprise, 'You had, eh?'

'Yes, Sir. Mr En...er, John told me you had threatened to expose us, but I have thought it over very carefully and I am willing to take that risk, and if necessary my punishment. It would not be the end of the world, the way things are now, and if I go abroad no one would know about it and I could live my life any way I wished. My parents are fully aware of my sexual orientation and would back me in whatever course I wished to take. In any case, what possible proof could you have?'

The colonel leans back in his chair, regarding the boy in silence, with the smiling, sad look of the worldly-wise man for the naïve innocent. The boy reacts, becoming inflamed at the look and the lack of answer. He lifts himself half out of his chair. 'Well?'

John places a hand on the boy's arm to stop him, but is unable to do so.

The colonel's smile has deepened, 'No, John, let him tell me, if he can.' He pushes the envelope across the desk towards the boy, nodding to indicate that he should look inside it. The boy looks uncertain, but picks up the envelope as if it contains a bomb, and very slowly draws out the contents. There are six ten by eight close-ups of two naked bodies, sexually coupled.

The boy's face shows his deeply shocked reaction, and eventually he lifts his eyes wearily.

The colonel nods matter-of-factly, 'You see, lad, were I a vindictive man, I could certainly carry out any threat I might make, and...and it's only a technical point, mind you, you are, in the eyes of the law at least, below the age of consent, and would therefore be protected with all the force of that law, whereas John...' He paused for long moments, shaking his head slowly, admonishingly, looking at John, '...a man in his position...'

'But it wasn't his fault! Really! It just...'

'Happened. Of course it did, lad, but no matter; I am not placed here in judgement over you; not here to pontificate.' He clambers out of the chair, grunting with supposed exertion, and begins to 'march' erratically around the room as he speaks, punctuating he remarks with the stick, waving it in the air and banging it on the floor, 'Lord, myself I've done things that would curl your hair; put words like vampire, viper, vulture on your lips. We can't take pride in all we do; can't always be the masters of our destiny, but now and then there comes a chance to even up the balance just a wee bit, when duty shows clear ahead of us. Forget those things.' He points his stick at the photographs, 'Take them...destroy them! They served their only purpose: to bring you here, so that we could meet, discuss, and, I hope, have you join us as a free agent, your own man, doing what you feel is right to serve your country, to save your family; mother, sisters, friends, from mental and physical slavery for the rest of their lives. You are now in the same position we were; young men, tens of thousands of us, little older than you are now, some younger, marching off to war with a song on their lips and in their hearts, ready to serve their country when she needed them; hopes and spirits high; gone the months of waiting; itching now to get into battle; to do or die. Imagine the send-off by those left behind...an infectious enthusiasm that engulfed the heart and the mind, an excitement, an intoxication deep enough to subdue fear; to let a man, for a while at least, die with a smile on his face and a song in his heart. But it wasn't all spit and polish, lad; not all clean, honourable fighting. There were the trenches and there was mud and filth, and pain, and death, and degradation; bodies maimed and broken; blood and muck and noise, lad; the screaming, bloody noise of war; enough to send a man insane.' He sighed heavily, 'Aye, lad, there surely came a time when smile and song and intoxication were gone even from the memory, but all the while we knew that what we did was right, and good, and necessary...to keep the light of truth alive...to keep us free.' He paused as if reflecting, remembering his fear as he cowered in the bottom of the trench as his comrades went over the top, and his subsequent court martial.

'That was war, lad; something you could see and understand; something you could get your teeth into and chew. You'd have gone too, I know, and done your bit; laid down your young life, like as not; you're hero stuff, I can see that well. You're an educated man; you've read the war poems: Sassoon, Brooke, Owen?'

The boy shakes his head.

'You should, lad, you should. They knew about war, those men, and the call of patriotism. You are a patriot? You love your country?'

'Of course, Sir.'

'Then you'll know what Owen meant, when he wrote _"Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori"_?'

The boy nods.

'Tell me, lad, tell me. They're words that stir me to the soul.'

'It means, _"It is sweet and just to die for one's country".'_

'Aye. Sweet and just it is, lad.' He starts to 'march' around the room again then stops suddenly, pointing his stick at the boy, 'And you say you are a patriot?'

The boy hesitates before stuttering, 'Yyyes, I...'

'Ready to die for your country?'

'If I thought it necessary.'

'It may be more necessary than you know, lad. Have you wondered how I got this leg that makes me ask healthy young patriots like yourself to do what must be done; what I would give my life not to have to ask; would do myself, if only...' He breaks off, turning his head away suddenly, as if overcome with emotion, holding his leg.

'Well...'

The colonel cuts in fiercely, brushing away a non-existent tear, apparently terribly upset, 'Not in the war, laddie, not in the war! Oh, no. That would have been honourable, just, dulce et decorum. No!' He bangs the stick on the floor, 'I got this in the peace!The pigs! That's who gave me this leg! The pigs!' He recommences his thumping progress around the room, 'Legalised butchers; removing unwanted obstacles; patriots like you and me; laying the foundations of a totalitarian state, from which there will be no return! No return!'

The boy is looking incredulous. The colonel sees his look and stops dead, 'You don't believe me, lad?'

'I find it difficult...'

The colonel interrupts, using his stick to punctuate his words, 'Of course you do! You're part of the great, blind public; brainwashed into seeing only what you're told to see; hearing what you want to hear: the blatant lies and propaganda of an horrific pseudo-democracy, committing crimes so vile under the guise of justice as to beggar description. You won't believe me, but John, tell him; the reporter killed on Friday. Murdered because he found out too much about an important man, right?'

John is about to protest; he knows that the colonel was responsible for that man's death, 'Yes, but...'

'You see, lad! And the five men killed in the baker's shop explosion last Tuesday; according to the media a bomb factory. I can tell you, lad, how they died, those five good friends of mine: a legalised bomb, thrown by a legalised hand. The pigs again! They're everywhere; infiltrated into every factory and workshop, in every pub and office, watching, watching; looking for the slightest thing, so that they can pounce. You too! You're a marked man now. They'll know you're with us; one of us. But you at least are lucky, with only your own life to lose.

The boy is still hesitant, 'Sir, if I could....'

The colonel cuts him off again, 'I lost my wife!' He ignores the look of indignation on John's face. John knows she was murdered by her husband.

'Raped and murdered by a dozen pigs in the name of justice. I escaped myself only by the skin of my teeth, and it cost me this!' He slams his leg with his hand. 'Can you imagine, lad, a beautiful young girl, wed but for a few months, a girl with sweet young breasts and peaches and cream in her cheeks, with a laughing smile and warm, loving body, eager and aching for her man, her body juices alight at his touch. Have you known a girl like that, lad?'

The boy blushes bright red, 'I...'

The colonel glances sideways at John and shrugs, 'No, of course not! A shame. Could you go back downstairs, lad, for a few moments. I need to confer with John here.'

The boy looks doubtful, but complies with the request.

The moment he is out of the room John twists rapidly, jumping out of his chair and making a grab for the prints. The colonel lifts them out of his reach. They are nose to nose, John furious, the colonel enjoying himself.

John grits out, 'You just had to do that, didn't you? You had to! Malicious; malevolent...'

The colonel cuts in, using a parody of John's educated voice, mimicking, 'Adulterine cad? You sum me up so well, John.'

'Spiteful...'

'Sputum! No need to get carried away, John.'

'You use everyone, twist everything, to suit your own ends. And you, a colonel? You didn't even make corporal, _and_ you were drafted. How impressed would he be if he knew it was really _private;_ _dishonourably discharged?'_

The colonel retains his good humour. He smiles at John, opens the desk, takes out the whisky and glass and pours half a tumbler full. He goes to the window and looks out, ignoring the other man. He throws half the drink down his throat with one gulp.

John's eyes are blazing, 'You can't answer, can you? Can't reply when the truth is staring you in the face? You exist in and on a tissue of lies; a pathological mythomania! My God, to be able to quote Owen, the greatest anti-war poet ever, as a patriotic warmonger...unbelievable! And your wife; d'you think the boy would listen for one second if he knew you'd battered her to death in a drunken rage and broke your leg escaping from the police? Using it as an excuse for lifelong alcoholism. All your hypocritical façade, crocodile tears, tongue-in-cheek lip homage to a patriotism you, for one, have never believed in can't cover up the real you: a vile and vicious anarchist, bent on destroying everything and everyone in your blind hatred of authority. I despise you and hate you, and everything you stand for...' His voice tails off and he closes his eyes and lowers his head.

'Have you quite finished, John? I can't pretend to be proud of my early life. I made mistakes; we all do. You think of me as a violent man. Well, I was born into violence. Imagine a filthy slum, seven to a room, and not a decent bog or scarce a bite between us.' He refills his glass and drinks as he talks, almost introspectively. 'My earliest memories are of my father coming home from the pub, knocking my mother, who was always pregnant, like my older sisters, senseless and then raping her in front of the kids, night after night, and after he'd finished with her, he'd start on us, beating the boys and raping the girls. I can't remember one day of my childhood that I wasn't black and blue, but no one took the slightest notice. There were more kids at school with black eyes than without. We used to wear them like medals of honour, and if we hadn't got enough, the teachers and pigs would add their share. It was a bloody hard life; d'you wonder some of it rubbed off.' He drinks again, 'But then how could you understand, from a clean, well kept home, a full belly, doting parents, frilled antimacassars, and every day smelling like Sunday?'

'And little girl's dresses till I was five.'

'It figures. We're all victims of our upbringing, but I used mine. Violence and ruthlessness; valuable commodities in our modern society. Pimps are ten a penny, but killers! Oh, John, real, cold-blooded killers are at a premium. That dishonourable discharge which you see as a stigma was earned honourably: our leaders had their eyes on me even before I was conscripted. That officer had been a senior pig before the war and would be again after it. He was just one of many we eliminated while they were still vulnerable.'

'You mean...'

'Deliberate murder? Now why should that make you squirm, John? The court-marshal verdict justified the means: they found me guilty of gross negligence, but it was no mistake, and I've never looked back. They taught me well in those years of exile.'

'But your wife. She was a....'

'Dirty, treacherous cow! Sold me out; blew the whistle on me herself, and damned nearly finished me, but I made bloody sure she wouldn't shop anyone else.'

'No. I don't believe it. You're lying again. Why do you have to lie to me?'

'Believe what you like; it makes no difference. With all your blather about violence, extortion and killing, you need us as much as we need you. You're an outcast from society, like me, even though up to now you've been lucky enough not to be found out. A trick-cyclist would have a field day with you. You have a deep-rooted need to conform, to belong, and for better or worse, me boy, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, you belong to us. Your reasons may not be patriotic, but they're just as valid. Am I right?'

'Damn you!'

The colonel finishes the whisky in the glass , crosses to the desk and tips in what is left in the bottle. He drinks again.

'You surprise me rarely, John. Like most men you are entirely predictable, but one little thing did surprise me: you called Owen an anti-war poet. For a man of your erudition that strikes a sour note. Surely you've read him?'

'Of course I have. In depth. He utterly destroys the myth of your mis-quoted Latin.'

'Voilà the judgement of the civilian. So you accept his viewpoint at face value?'

'Don't you?'

'Read it again, John. Behind the façade behind the façade you will find he believes, just as I do, that there is something of honour in war, even in the kind of way we wage it. It's why you're here today.'

'But he's so young.'

'Yes.'

The one word, combined with the look and the raised eyebrow, has John colouring up.

'Couldn't I....?' He looks at the rifle.

The colonel shakes his head, 'You have neither the expertise nor the guts, John, and besides which, we shall be needing your special talents again.'

'You mean he will not...'

'Be coming back? Unfortunately not, John. Sorry. He could lead them directly to us.' He uses the field telephone and asks for the boy to be sent up again.

A door closes downstairs and slow footsteps approach.

The boy enters and the colonel beams at him, 'Good! Good! Now, time is short. Are you ready to do this little errand for us?

The boy's face clouds, 'Sir, I'm not sure if I can...'

The colonel cuts him off, 'Of course you can! Look, come over here. Here's the rifle.' He picks up the weapon, draws back the bolt and then closes it, slips the safety catch off and hands the rifle to the boy, who hesitates to take it.

The colonel pretends that it is slipping out of his hand, 'Here, quickly!'

He almost throws the weapon at the lad and begins to rub his leg, a look of pain on his face.

The boy holds the rifle as if it were red hot.

'Now, aim it at the head of that man in the picture over there.'

The boy hesitates,

'Go on!'

The rifle is lifted and then lowered again.

'Sir, I can't! I know him!'

'Oh, and who is he?'

'It's Sir Desmond Armstrong; Chief Commissioner of Police. He gave a lecture at my school.'

'Oh, he did, did he? And he told you all, of course, about his other job: Chief of the Government Secret Police, with authority to kill poor ignorant folk without question, wherever and whenever he feels it 'necessary'? Authority to torture, drug, brainwash?'

'No, Sir.'

'No. He wouldn't, would he, the dirty bastard? But I can tell you true stories of children killed, young men like yourself dragged away to be tortured and disposed of in unmarked graves, while he's so cocksure of himself; the cock of the walk, that he rides about in an open car. He _must_ be stopped.'

'I don't know...I'm still confused.' He looks at John, 'Do you want me to?'

John nods and the boy lifts the weapon into the aim again. He lines up the graticule of the telescopic sight until he is aiming at the forehead of the man in the photo. He squeezes the trigger.

The 'click' seems to freeze the scene, all three of them aware that the boy is actually capable of committing the act after all.

'That's all you have to do, lad. One shot, drop the rifle, destroy it and run. John will be waiting for you at his house, won't you, John?'

'Eh...yes...'

'But why do we have to kill? To fight?'

'There's no time now, lad, but let me quote you Adolf Hitler; whatever else you can say about him one of the greatest warriors of all time: _"The idea of struggle is as old as life itself; life is only preserved because other living things perish through struggle...and in that struggle, the stronger, the more able win, while the less able, the weaker, lose...not by the principles of humanity does man live or is able to preserve himself above the animal kingdom, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle"._ You want me to go on?'

The boy shakes his head.

The telephone rings and the colonel picks up the receiver.

'Yes? Where? Coming down from the roof? How many? Right, we'll be ready, but do what you can.' He hangs up.

'Whether you like it or not, lad, you're in the battle now. Two men searching the building, and it's us or them.' He picks the bullet up from the table and holds it out to the boy. 'Here, load the rifle and be ready to shoot the second the door opens. Don't hesitate; they won't. You, John, over by the wall to the left of the door, and stay out of the way.' He takes the revolver from his holster and releases the safety catch.

The loud footsteps of two men are heard descending the stairs and the crash of doors being kicked open.

'Ready, lad?' He aims at the door and the boy does the same.

There are muffled shouts and the sound of two shots, falling bodies and the cries of the dying.

A disembodied voice calls, 'All clear, Colonel.'

The colonel shouts, 'Thanks, Collins. Get rid of them.'

There are thumping sounds as of bodies being dragged down the stairs. The boy shows relief, believing what he has heard, but John knows it has been staged for the youth's benefit.

The colonel keeps a straight face, 'Now, off you go to the room directly above this one. From the window you will see the target, exactly as he is in the photograph, in...six minutes from now.' He opens the map, points to a spot. 'We are here. He will drive along Preston Avenue, turn left into Rosslyn Road; that's the road that runs alongside this building, then left again into Pyke Street, and that's where you get him. Shoot, drop the weapon, and run. But before you do...' He takes a matchbox from his pocket, 'Push this open and lay it beside the rifle. It will destroy the weapon and any fingerprints you have left on it.' He hands the matchbox to the boy.

John's face shows his horror; he knows what is in the box.

'Sir, there is just one thing: since John tells me so, I accept that we are patriots, but what are we exactly? Are we left, or right, fascists, communists, revolutionaries, nationalists...what?'

The colonel hesitates before answering, 'We believe in freedom.'

'Yes, Sir, but what is freedom?'

'That is a question that needs far more time to answer than we have now, but I will give you an answer when we meet tomorrow. Away you go now, and...steady hand!'

The boy backs away towards the door. He stops, unsure, his eyes seeming to implore John for guidance. John smiles as encouragingly as he is able, and nods for the boy to comply.

'I'll see you soon then, John.'

The colonel watches triumphantly as the boy reaches the door, his aim achieved, but his look turns to one of horror as his intended worm turns.

I level the rifle and without the slightest hesitation fire the single round into his heart, while John looks on, delighted. Our plan had worked perfectly.

The colonel's anger of betrayal is overwhelmed by the pain, but the pain is nothing compared to the terror. He knows that Hell awaits.

I may one day go to the same place, but not, I hope, until I am a hundred. I am not ready to die. I am too young. That was what he did not understand.

I wipe my prints from the rifle, put it down and take John's hand. We kiss and leave, ignoring the piece of rubbish on the floor.

GRAHAM

I'd give a wry smile if my facial muscles would let me, but I no longer have control over anything. That smile would be for the ridiculously unexpected manner of my imminent departure, after everything...

My life's path was determined on my fourth birthday, when my main present turned out to be a Coronet box camera. Fixed focal length lens and basically yes or no shutter speed. Within days my parents realised what a huge mistake they'd made: the three rolls of film they'd given me with the camera didn't last twenty-four hours, and nor did the next three. I was snapping mad, driving the whole family up the wall with my demands for posing. The cost of processing was even worse, and I was soon restricted to one roll a week, but the die was cast.

Through the years, by doing any little thing that I could to earn money, I progressed through better and better equipment: the first real camera after the box was an Agfa Isolette II folding camera, with adjustable focus and several shutter speeds, working up via a twin-lens Rolleicord on my thirteenth birthday (I wanted the Rolleiflex, but just couldn't persuade Dad to cough up the necessary) to my then dream camera: a single lens reflex Pentax with 50mm standard, 35mm wide angle and 300mm telephoto lenses on my sixteenth. I lusted after a Hasselblad even more than I lusted after Lucy Gray, next door, but that was only an impossible dream. (Lucy Gray, luckily, was much more attainable, and I soon found out how to focus her!)

Growing up I'd won dozens of small prizes in juvenile photographic competitions, and had half a dozen photographs printed in the local newspapers, of events and accidents I'd happened across by pure chance, like the old fox which had fallen into a steep-sided dyke and was swimming backwards and forwards, trying to get out, with a panicked look on its face that no one had ever captured before, and the old lady who was sat down right in the middle of the busy road, her flower-covered hat at a ridiculous angle on her head, blind drunk and unable to get up. That was one hell of a shot. After I'd taken the photograph I helped her to the pavement and sat her down on a wall. The fox I couldn't help; I'd have gone into the dyke and not got out myself. I felt like a photographic success even if I wasn't. What I wanted to be was a photographic reporter, one of the important paparazzi, getting that shot that no one else could. Easy to say; hard to do. I had no money to start off on my own.

During my last year at school I'd taken a great interest in televised newscasts and outside broadcasts, particularly of the natural world and animal kingdom, looking at the clever camera angles and photographic tricks that had been used, and imagining myself behind the camera. From wanting to be a photographer I changed to wanting to be a cameraman. I read up on everything to do with television studios: the types of cameras used, the lighting styles, the personnel.

My exam results were not good enough for university entrance; I'd spent too many hours behind the lens, and I left school after 'O'-levels, much against my parents' wishes. Their plans had included Uni and a hundred grand starting salary. Fine chance!

My first task was to write letters to every television studio in the UK and all the independents, asking for a job, with a CV loaded heavily with my photographic achievements, real and imagined. I didn't get one reply. I found an old copy of that CV recently and reading it I knew I wouldn't have given me a job either.

My ego began to suffer; couldn't they recognise talent when they saw it?

Despite dire imprecations from my Dad about being thrown out of the house (he was grinning at the time, which sort of nullified the intended effect), I made no attempt to get a job, but hung around the main entrance of our local TV studio almost from dawn to dusk every day, getting soaked when it poured, as it often does in our part of the UK, watching the personnel going in and coming out; regularly seeing the newscasters and the weather woman, and occasionally the odd famous actor or actress, too full of their own importance to notice one benighted, eager youth. On the first day I managed to get past the doorman by holding up an envelope, as if delivering it, and up to the reception desk to ask about a job. The well stacked, (I noticed, there being nothing wrong with my testosterone levels) blonde bombshell behind the fake black marble smiled, taking pity on me, and told me that all jobs at the studio were advertised in the press, and I'd have to keep a lookout for them and apply when I saw one. She also told me that they would not look at anyone for a cameraman's job unless he or she had at least one degree in cinematography, or had a minimum of three years' experience. I scoured the classifieds every evening when I got home, but never saw one advertisement.

I'd been outside the studios every day for almost a month when a boy just a bit older than I, whom I'd seen every day, stopped, his head on one side, regarding me quizzically.

'You still 'ere, mate? Wot'yer after, one of the bints?'

I told him exactly what I was after and he guffawed, 'You'll be fuckin' lucky, mate! Never in a million fuckin' years.'

I was desperate, 'Isn't there any job I could get?'

He stood thinking for a few moments and then nodded, 'There might jus' be. One o' my mates is goin' orf to join the fuckin' Army next week, stupid sod. Get 'isself fuckin' killed, 'e will. I keep tellin' 'im, but 'e won't listen. If I tell the boss I've got a mate who wants a job we might be able to get yer in on the nod.'

'Oh, do you think you could?'

A crafty look came over his face, 'For half your wages for the first six months.'

'What?' Unbelievable!

'You 'eard me. Can't do nuffin fer nuffin, can yer?'

'What's the pay?'

'Bloody basic, mate.'

I heaved a huge sigh; Dad and Mum would go apeshit if I told them, but I was between the rock and the not so soft place. I told him yes.

'Wot's yer name then, mate?'

'Graham Steele.'

'Righto, Graham. They call me Flooch. Be 'ere tomorrer an' I'll let yer know.'

On the way home I wanted to do a song and a dance, but tempered my enthusiasm. It wasn't cut and dried.

Mum was surprised to see me home before lunchtime and said, 'You're looking chipper, Graham; what's happened?'

I told her, but not about the half pay. 'If I get the job, and it's by no means certain yet, I'll be on probation for the first six months, so it will only be pocket money. After that, if they like me, I'll be on normal youth's wages.'

'Well at least you'll be in employment, which will please your father.'

Flooch, whose real name, Abraham, which he hated, I discovered by accident two years later, was as good as his word, obviously thinking about the money. He took me in with him, giving the nod to the doorman, who grinned at him, and through to a sort of canteen, where I could see behind the counter three women and a man preparing food for lunch.

'This'll be more or less your office, mate. You're called a junior, but you're really a tea-boy, or coffee-boy more often than not, an' yer better bloody get it right, not one sugar when they want two, or strong instead of weak, or you'll 'ave yer tabs chewed off, partic'ly by them fuckin' actors; think they're so bloody high and mighty. Come on, I'll take you to see Glen. An' keep yer 'and over yer arse!'

We'd had a few lads at school who played for the other eleven, but they never flaunted it, and I'd never come across a man so camp, except in comedy films.

He held out a limp hand that was so warmly damp that I wanted to go and wash my own, but I surreptitiously managed to wipe it on my trouser leg as we talked.

'Flooch tells me that you want Peter's job when he leaves.'

I laid it on thick, 'I certainly would like to work for _you_.'

It did the trick, 'For _me_? Personally? Oh, my goodness. Well, Graham, the job is yours then, and I do look forward to having you here with us on the first of the month.'

I thanked him profusely and Flooch walked back to the front door with me. On the way he looked at me with a seeming higher regard and grunted, 'There's hidden depths to you, Graham me boy. I'll have to watch out. Yer'll be after my job.'

I was in seventh heaven, and the ten days until the beginning of the month flew by.

I came down to earth with a bang when I started the job. Far from being able to watch the production of any programme, I spent every day ferrying drinks and sandwiches between the canteen and the various offices. It was Boredom Incorporated! The actual studios were in the other side of the H-shaped building, connected to the one I was in by an overhead, glass-enclosed walkway, and there were other lads employed there for the job that I was doing. I got to know them when we congregated in the canteen for our own meal, which was two hours after the rest of the organisation had eaten, and laid my plans for when one of them left.

I'd long since finished paying off Flooch when the opportunity arose.

The police arrived one day and arrested one of the studio runners. The word quickly got out that he'd been selling drugs on the side. I'd carefully avoided being alone with Glen at any time, and had smilingly let him down softly when he had made regular overtures, so was in his good books. I went to him and asked if he could put in a good word for me, putting my hand over his as I asked and squeezing gently. (I had learnt a thing or two in those months I'd been working there).

He positively shook, 'Oh, my dear, of course I will. For you.'

I was in! When I entered that main studio I almost fainted with pleasure. The gantries, the pneumatic pedestals, the multicore cables connecting the equipment snaking all over the floor and oh, those cameras!

They were big, ugly things in those days, weighing around three hundred pounds, nothing like the lightweight jobs they use today in the studio, connected by fibre optic or Triax, but gosh, how I loved them. Just being close to them made me feel weak. There were four in total in the studio, and I must have stopped dead, with my mouth hanging open, because a tall skinny guy, dressed in smart grey slacks and an open-neck white shirt, with earphones draped over his shoulders asked, 'Are you okay, son?'

I came to, 'My first sight of an RCA TK11. I just had to stop and look at it.'

I could see the surprise on his face, 'You know this camera?'

I nodded and gabbled so fast the words were almost joined together in my enthusiasm, 'I've known everything about it since it was first manufactured: the TK11 is the studio version, the TK31 is the portable, and that can be used with the TK10/30 CCUs. It's got a three inch Orthicon tube and a four-lens turret which uses Kodak Ektacon lenses.' I had to stop for breath.

'Jesus, we've got a genius for a tea-boy. What's your name, genius?'

'Graham Steele.'

He put his hand out, 'Put it there, Graham. I'm Steve Campion, one of the four cameramen around the place.' He grinned, 'I take it you don't want to be a tea-boy all your life?'

I blurted out, 'I want to be a roving cameraman, Steve. I want it so much it hurts.'

He laughed, 'A tall order, Graham, from where you are now, but you play your cards right, keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut, with other people at least, and you never know. If I have some spare time now and then and you are not delivering tea I'll give you some instruction.'

He was as good as his word: over the next four years he took every opportunity to tutor me. By that time I'd left the tea-boy job behind and had worked on the teleprompter, on lighting, and on titling, and had sat in with the audio tech and the DVD operator. For the last six months I had been sitting in with the producer, learning his job from the bottom up. Steve had put the word out and John Stannard, the studio boss, had decided to see how I coped with the different jobs.

One day he sent for me and when I entered his office he asked me to sit down. For a minute I thought I was going to be sacked, but he smiled, something he was not renowned for.

'I understand you want to be a roving cameraman, Graham.' Christ, he called me Graham!

'Yes, Sir, I do, more than anything else in the world.'

'Well, I've watched you tackle the various jobs we have and you've come out with flying colours. Apart from that, you seem to have a way with people: they like you. That is the most important ability for a reporter. Without personal contact there's often no story. There is just one question, would you be willing to go to places that are highly dangerous to do the job?'

I didn't hesitate, 'As long as I have that camera on my shoulder, Sir, I'll go to the gates of Hell.'

He shrugged, 'It might well come to that, Graham. We are talking war zones here, insurrections, coups, sieges, real battles, going out with the troops, talking to insurgents, hob-knobbing with dangerous criminals on the trail of a story.'

'I'm your man, Sir.'

'Then you will go out with Claire for the next four weeks, covering anything we need in the UK. As you know, a camera team is usually made up of three people: the reporter, the cameraman and the producer. Sandy has always done both the latter jobs, and I'd like to see if you can do the same. At the end of that time I shall look at all your take and decide if it is up to my standards. If you manage that all right you will become one of the station's foreign correspondents, with, of course, a commensurate salary.'

I knew roughly how much that was and could imagine Dad's face when I told him I'd reached his target salary for me, even though it was several years later than he'd imagined.

'I can't thank you enough, Sir.'

His smile was more guarded as he said, 'Let's hope you don't regret it. Reporters have been killed out there, as I'm sure you know.' He hesitated for a few moments before adding, 'There is something else: Claire has threatened to resign rather than work with you. Have you done anything to upset her?'

I was astounded, 'Absolutely not. I've only spoken to her the once, and then she didn't answer.'

He nodded, 'It must be the other thing then. Well, we'll see. I wish you the very best of luck.'

I wished he'd explained what the other thing was.

I'd been introduced to Sandy Blake and Claire Remoser by Steve a month before, and now I knew why. They were irregular visitors, working all over the world as they did, and their stuff normally came in over the wire. Sandy was quite famous for his camerawork, but was looking pretty jaded. He had that kind of greyish-yellow colour in his face that I've always associated with cancer, after seeing an uncle suffering with the disease. I didn't know how old he was, but estimated that he was either in his late fifties or early sixties. Claire, on the other hand, looked no more than twenty-five, a highly attractive brunette, with striking green eyes and a strong jaw line, but there was something about her eyes: they seemed to have a dead quality, as if nothing around her was getting through to her brain. In the studio she was taciturn and her manner was brusque in the extreme, but when she was interviewing she came alive; her whole approach was warm and matched that of whoever was being interviewed, even to the extent of varying her accent. I'd heard her speak fluent French to women in Senegal and German to survivors of an avalanche in Austria. She struck me as a very clever young woman, but I didn't know how I was going to be able to work with her. When we were introduced Sandy shook my hand and spoke effusively about the job. Claire ignored my proffered hand and merely nodded, saying nothing, and in fact turned half away, deliberately ignoring me. Maybe they had been briefed on my future, because Sandy seemed to accept me as an equal, even if she did not.

After they'd left the studio Steve came over to speak to me.

'I know what you're thinking, Graham, but you'll find you can work with her. I did, for six months. Her nickname is the Ice Maiden, and you'll think she's as hard as nails, but please look after her, that ice is terribly brittle. Your problem is that you're so...no, don't worry about it. Just ignore her attitude with you, and you'll get on fine. She will expect perfection every time, but I know you're up to standard.'

I wondered what he had been about to say when he changed his mind. I was so what?

The first day tested me to the limit, and not for my camera work.

Though I'd passed my test I was not asked if I wanted to drive. I met her in the car park and she merely grunted, 'Get in.' She was standing by the open driver's door.

We'd got out of the city when I made my first effort at conversation, but I got only two words out when she blurted, 'My rules, Gee: you don't fucking speak so I don't have to fucking listen. Got it?'

I shrugged and nodded. Even reducing my name to a cipher told me what she thought of me. I was miffed enough to give her some of her own medicine. Actually, her rules suited me fine. I preferred introspection to pointless conversation, even though I would have liked to get to know her.

The first time I had that camera on my shoulder, as Claire interviewed the two policemen who had arrested Peter Sutcliffe, the 'Yorkshire Ripper', I felt ten feet tall and made sure that, although it was not a dangerous situation, my camera angles would do Claire and the two coppers justice. I had not been following the story before, but became really interested during the interview, when they talked about how lucky it was that chance had them stop to question Sutcliffe about being in a car with a prostitute and then finding that the registration plates he was using were false. If it hadn't been for that chance he might still be killing today. It made me start thinking about fate, and I've thought about it a whole lot since, and the way it has affected my own life. I'm thinking about it now, and how!

That interview was the high spot of the month, because for the rest of it we covered mainly sports events of all kinds; a far cry from the danger that John Stannard had spoken about, but I didn't care; I was perfecting my trade. One thing that stands out was filming India's dismissal for 63 runs in a one-day International.

Any conversation we had was one-sided; on her side monosyllabic, and for her shooting requirements not even that: when she wanted wide-angle she opened her first two fingers; zoom she held them together, and for background shots both hands held wide.

John Stannard congratulated me himself on the quality of my takes, 'I've decided that you will be teamed up with Claire on a permanent basis. Sandy needs to retire, and you two seem to get on well.'

As far as the job went we did. She was bang down to earth, with a vocabulary that would have stopped a charging rhino, and had several times during that month pulled the car into the side on country roads and hopped out for a pee on the verge, close to the car, without bothering to go behind a bush, dropping her trousers to show her bare arse, and it was a decidedly beautiful arse. I'd never seen a woman pee before and found it highly erotic. Each time when she got back into the car she glanced at my groin without smiling, almost as if it were something she was researching, and after the first time I made sure I had my hands folded over the huge bulge in my pants. When I went out of sight for my own relief she gave me the old lifted eyebrow bit when I got back in.

For the whole of that month we'd returned every night to the studio, so had not spent any off time together, apart from restaurant meals, when she spent every minute she was not eating scribbling in her voluminous notebooks about interviews we'd finished or were about to do. Driving along I often glanced at her, wondering what her favourite music was and so on, or if she liked music at all; she never turned the radio on except to listen to the news; she liked to drive in silence, and after a while I got used to it. She was a good driver and I started to read novels while we were on the road.

Our first 'overseas' stint, if you could call it that, was when Protestant gunmen shot and wounded Bernadette Devlin McAliskey and her husband at their home in Coalisland, County Tyrone.

Claire, as usual, had done her homework and passed on the titbit that McAliskey had once been a Member of Parliament and was famous for slapping the Home Secretary, Richard Maudling, because of his remarks about Bloody Sunday. It was before my time, and I knew nothing about the woman.

The gunmen had shot her seven times, and yet, although she was in intensive care, it still looked as if she was going to make it. She did, in fact, and carried on with her political work.

It was mundane stuff, and the interviews were of the 'after the horse has bolted' variety, since, of course, we could not interview the injured, but the visit stands out in my mind as a high point of my life.

When we got to the hotel Claire asked for our room key. I thought my ears had deceived me, and I started to ask about my room.

She put her hands on her hips, scowled, and spoke the longest sentence I'd heard from her up to that point, 'Are you a fucking woofter then?'

There were two other guests waiting at the desk and the receptionist behind it, and Claire had not spoken quietly.

I shook my head, 'No, of course not.' I was blushing violently.

'Then come on. I need to fuck and you're the only thing available.'

Three pairs of incredulous eyes followed us to the lift.

Once inside the room she started throwing off her clothes and told me, 'Get 'em off, it's been a hard day, I'll just have a pee and then you can join me in the shower. You ever fucked in a shower?'

I couldn't speak. I just shook my head.

'There's a first time for everything.' She was not smiling.

I suppose I should have rejoiced: we were actually conversing!

That was the finest shower I've ever taken in my life, and though it was to be repeated, with all kinds of variations, over the years we've worked together, it was definitely the greatest, and took me into a whole new world of sexual experience. For a start off I had never been completely naked with a woman before, and most of my coital experience consisted of knee-tremblers up against some wall or another. Of course I had watched a good few porno flicks, but watching her soap herself all over just a foot away from me was the sexiest thing I had ever seen in my life, and my body responded accordingly. When she'd finished soaping and stood under the flow to wash it off she turned her back and bent over double. I stood there not knowing what she expected, even though it seemed fairly obvious. I thought there would be kissing and foreplay.

Her voice came over her shoulder, 'What are you fucking waiting for, fucking Christmas?'

It was the first time I had ever played the two-backed beast and it was bloody wonderful.

After a good dinner she wanted it again, this time on top of the bed, and afterwards she pushed me off, got up without a word and went into the bathroom to clean her teeth and get ready for sleep.

She got into bed still naked and turned her back. I couldn't sleep, but lay perfectly still and was astonished to hear, about twenty minutes later, deep heart-rending sobbing, interspersed with sharp, jagged intakes of breath. It went on for a long time before she became quiet. I realised that Steve had been right, though what she was crying about I couldn't for the life of me understand.

I woke once more during the night and found that our two bodies were curled in the bed together like two spoons, her body tight into mine, and her arm was snug around me. It was at that moment that I knew I was in love with her. I also realised how stupid the idea was.

When I woke just after dawn I was on my back and being raped. I liked it, and the idea of calling the cops didn't enter my mind.

It felt like Christmas, and I thought it would make all the difference to our relationship. I couldn't have been more wrong. If anything, she was even more distant. I was mightily puzzled. Whatever else she might be, she was one hell of an enigma.

We continued to cover some stories in the UK, only travelling abroad when an important event cropped up. We covered the match that Ivan Lendl threw to avoid playing Bjorn Borg and two or three other sporting and minor political events, such as the comments from a British minister on Ronald Reagan's inauguration. I would never be able to think of him except as the poor half of the duo in _"Bedtime for_ _Bonzo",_ where I reckoned the monkey stole the show. My opinion of him as presidential material would need to be censored!

Things were happening around the world that we were too late to cover, and the studios used material from CNN and other top agencies. France, the USA and the USSR seemed to be trying to outdo each other with nuclear tests, a coup in Spain failed, with the same result for one in Surinam.

The next time we went abroad was to Kosovo to cover the disturbances between the police and Albanian demonstrators, and it was the first time we were in any danger.

The arrival at Prishtina International was delayed for thirty-five minutes. The students had decided to have a go there, but apparently it had been just a small bunch, dispersed quickly by the police, and when we landed the airport arrivals lounge was quiet. The passport people eyed us suspiciously and wanted to check the camera, but we were through fairly quickly, and the studio had arranged for a Merc and driver to be waiting for us.

The streets were full of police in riot gear, with one of their vehicles on almost every corner, but we had no trouble getting to the Grand Hotel, on Mother Theresa, where all the other journalists were staying.

The food and the service were good, and several of the other diners nodded to Claire. As usual all they got back was a nod if they were lucky. I was sure what happened in Ireland would not be repeated, though I was on tenterhooks hoping it would.

It turned out to be an almost identical performance, and it was to be repeated every time we spent a night together.

That time she did not cry, but again cuddled up to me in the night.

It was in Pristina that the trouble had started as a relatively small demonstration by a couple of thousand students who wanted better quality food, dished up quicker. The police had overreacted, arresting a hundred or so of them. That had been three weeks before we were sent there. It seemed the students' enthusiasm for demos had been extinguished, but it had gone underground, and then escalated exponentially, with several thousand out on the streets screaming out nationalist slogans. That time the police went over the top, injured over thirty of them and arrested many more.

And that's where we came in, but we were in the wrong place: on April Fools' Day there were huge demonstrations in Kosovo, which the police could not control. The Army was sent in with tanks.

The whole press corps moved to Kosovo in three buses.

For three weeks we interviewed and shot, interviewed and shot: the student leaders, with their seemingly reasonable demands, bloodied students and soldiers on the front line, and running battles, in one of which I was nearly knocked out by a flying bottle, and then the government brought in a ban on all foreign reporting, and we went back to the UK.

That was my first immersion of fire, if you could call it that. There was danger: four journalists had been injured, and several cameras had been smashed one way and another, but it was pretty mild stuff compared with what came after.

The big news just after that was Ronald Reagan being shot and wounded. Who'd be President of the USA?

Next we were off to East Lebanon, where the Christian militia were having a right old go with the Syrian army. That was definitely more hairy as far as we were concerned, and though we were wearing body armour and headgear we were with units that were under heavy fire several times. John Stannard had got it right, but I found I was in my element, actually enjoying the adrenalin buzz and the high sense of excitement. Claire was even more taciturn than usual, and more than once I saw her biting her lip. I didn't know if it was fear or just concentration on the job in hand.

Being there we missed out on a bit of home entertainment, with the Brixton riots. The studio's other team actually fared worse than we did, the reporter being knocked over and badly trampled by the crowd, trying to get away from the police. Fate yet again!

After East Lebanon we had another spell in Ireland after five soldiers were killed by a Provo bomb, then Barcelona, where 200-odd people had been taken hostage, and my first visit to India, where a train crash had killed hundreds, some said over a thousand.

One amusing interlude was watching John McEnroe putting on his parts at Wimbledon. His 'You can't be serious' is one of the phrases that is etched on all tennis lovers' minds.

Shortly after that we were sent to Beirut for the first time, after Israeli bombers flattened the PLO/Al Fatah HQ, and it was there that I found out about Claire.

She was always careful what she ate in the Middle East, as I was, and only ever drank bottled water, but somehow she'd got the bug, and for once I was eating alone when Cindy and Max, the reporter and cameraman for a South African network, came and asked if they could join me, the hotel restaurant being pretty full. I agreed immediately. We'd been introduced the previous year, and they had seemed to be a great couple, except that Cindy had looked shocked at the time, and I didn't know why.

We made small talk over the starter and main course, and were halfway through the melon when Cindy asked, 'How do you and Claire...?'

Max interrupted her, 'Claire!'

She shrugged, 'Okay, sorry, Graham. I promised this big lug I wouldn't.'

I was intrigued; she seemed to know something, and I rather guessed that it might have been why they'd joined me, 'I don't mind, Cindy. I take it you were going to ask how we got on together.'

She looked at Max before answering and he shrugged resignedly.

'I was.'

I sighed, 'I guess you'd say pretty well, but I'd have to add 'considering', if you know what I mean.'

'I know exactly. When I saw you together for the first time I almost fainted. You're the spitting image of Peter.'

Now I was intrigued, 'Peter? Peter who?'

She put her hand to her mouth, 'Oh, fuck! Me and my big mouth.'

'Please tell me.'

Now it was her turn to sigh, 'Peter Wright was Claire's cameraman when she first started reporting. They were a full item, if you know what I mean; head over heels in love. She was the life and soul of the party, and kept everyone entertained with her funny stories. Peter thought the sun shone out of her. On a shoot in Marseilles, something to do with a regatta, they were just in the wrong place when the police were chasing a gangster. The police were shooting at him, and he was shooting back. Peter was caught in the cross-fire and was shot in the head, standing right next to her. She held him while he died, and something seemed to die inside her. She mourned for weeks, not working, and we all thought she was finished, but then she bounced back and her stuff was even better than before. She put all her effort into it, but as a person she's never been the same since. How she can work with you, looking so much like Peter, I don't know. I couldn't, if I were in her shoes.'

It explained everything: the loveless sex, the tears, the cuddling in the night, the dead look in her eyes, and even the biting of the lip: she was afraid for me, not for her.

I reached across the table and took Cindy's hand, squeezing it hard, 'You don't know what it means to me to know that. Thank you, Cindy. Thank you.'

When I got back to the room I felt very differently towards Claire.

She looked a poor thing, lying under the covers, her complexion far paler than normal.

There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead, and I went to the box of tissues on the bedside table and carefully wiped her skin.

As I finished she opened her eyes. At first they were blank, as usual, but then they smiled before she closed them again. I know it's a funny thing to say, but that was the impression I had. For a while I put it down to heightened emotion, but it wasn't. At that moment she acknowledged me as a part of her life, though it was the only sign that I was to get for a very long time.

The next morning, since she was still ill, I made arrangements with a local newspaper reporter who spoke English to do the interviews, which were pretty much 'after the event' jobs again, while I did the filming. It was nowhere up to Claire's standard, but it sufficed.

When I woke the next day I found her lying facing me. Her colour was back to normal and her eyes were focussed on mine. The blank expression was back.

I decided it was time, 'Cindy told me about Peter.'

Instead of the no reply or the one word put-off I got, 'You had to find out sometime, Gee.' Her voice, so full of sadness, reached into my soul.

'Why didn't you tell me?'

'How could I? That on an ordinary day, in an ordinary, peaceful town, standing among ordinary people, going about our ordinary business, my life was totally destroyed? Peter was my first love, my whole life. It almost finished me, and I several times considered suicide. It took months before I could work again. I'd somehow managed to pull the pieces back together, immersing myself in work to kill the pain, when you appeared, his reincarnation. How would you expect me to react? I hated you as much as I wanted to love you. Even your damned voice and accent are like his, and some of your mannerisms. I wanted your body, so that I could make believe it was Peter inside me, but I didn't want you. I still don't want you, not like this, every minute worrying about seeing you dead in my arms. I can never love you, you know.'

It was the longest speech she'd ever made to me by far, and not a hint of the 'F'-word. I realised then that her use of bad language was for her a 'keep-off-the-grass' defence mechanism.

She sighed, 'Oh, come on, Gee. Make love to me, but please, kiss me to bits first.'

We stayed on an extra day after the mass of press corps left, so that she could recover completely, and made love twice more before we left the hotel. The kissing was the best. And then we flew home.

Life for me became wonderful. When we were at home we lived in her flat, a top-floor job overlooking open fields on the outskirts of the city. We fitted each other perfectly, and she began to teach me how to cook.

We went to Syria again and came under fire, and then the Falklands war came along.

Despite every effort by John Stannard he found it was impossible for civilian war correspondents to be allowed anywhere near the hostilities, which were covered by military cameramen. It was one war we had to miss.

A highlight of that year was the visit of Pope John Paul II to the UK, and we were among the dozens of crews trying to get the best shots. It would have been nice to believe that he could help the world be at peace, but we knew differently.

We finally managed to get to the Falklands when Margaret Thatcher went out there, as part of the press corps accompanying the visit. Most of the mess had been cleared up by that time.

War in the world is never far away, particularly in the Middle East, and shortly afterwards we were off to West Beirut again. The Israelis had gone into South Lebanon again and surrounded the PLO. We finagled out way in through the back door to try to get the PLO side of the story, and found the city under heavy bombardment. On the second morning, just after we awoke, the hotel we were in was hit by shelling, and we were thrown out of bed, choking on dust, one wall of our bedroom gone. Another close call. War correspondents' perks! Shortly afterwards the PLO were allowed safe passage out, arranged by US Special Envoy Philip Habib, and they went off to recoup in Tripoli, with Yasser Arafat. Once again, nothing had been settled, but no doubt the munitions manufacturers were rubbing their hands and admiring their profit margins.

One morning back in the UK, when nothing much seemed to need our attention, I happened across a piece in a newspaper about a tiny island off the north coast of Scotland, just one and a half acres, with a tumbledown croft on it. It was up for sale and offers were being asked for. I showed it to Claire and she looked at me as if I were totally mad.

'You can't be serious, Gee.'

But I was, 'Think of it, Claire, how we spend our lives; under fire, in danger, surrounded by people that are not always our friends; how wonderful it would be to go somewhere so divorced from all that for a week or so at a time. Chill out. Just us.'

'Let me see that.' She took the paper and read the article, frowning.

'Christ, Gee, it's tumbledown, no water, no electricity, no fuck all in fact. Sixty miles from the nearest town and only accessible by boat.'

'But it's only two hundred yards from the mainland.'

'And think about the weather up there; gales and pissing with rain all the time. You'd sink nine times out of ten, and look at those cliffs.'

'I wasn't thinking of using a boat. We could commute by helicopter, using one of the firms that ferry the oil workers about. We could get builders there, have an artesian well drilled, install a generator. I've never spent any of the money I've earned on the job. I might as well spend it on something.'

'You make it sound like a lovely idea, but it is just an idea, right?'

It took me three days, but eventually I talked her into letting me put in an offer; a ridiculously low one, which was accepted by return of post. I guessed it had been the only one.

The work took almost a year, and left me with very little in the bank, but eventually we were dropped off by Paddy Prendergast, the pilot we'd got to know very well on the regular visits we made to check progress, and spent an idyllic ten days there. We'd made the decision not to have satellite television or phone and there was no mobile signal; it was wonderful isolation. Just to be on the safe side, however, I had bought a short-wave battery powered transceiver.

It was the first of dozens of periods we spent there, and as we heard the helicopter coming to pick us up at the end of that first visit Claire admitted, 'I was wrong. Buying this place was the best idea you've ever had, Gee.'

I wanted to tell her that she was the best, but that kind of declaration would have gone down like a lead brick. The sensitivity had not disappeared.

We went back to the grind, spending a dozen hours a week in the air, travelling all over the world, often in danger, but together. We spent more time in the Middle East than anywhere, with some kind of skirmish always happening, including, at that time the Iran/Iraq war.

The croft was our anchor, and gave us back the feeling that maybe, despite all we saw at work, the world might not be that bad a place after all.

Great things were happening, and we had a grandstand seat: the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and, to us much more important, the Berlin Wall coming down. We were there for a fortnight, staying at the Kempinski, and I had the chance to hear just how good Claire's German was, as she interviewed one person after another. The feeling of jubilation was everywhere, but didn't last too long, as the West Germans, who'd had it too good for too long, found out just how much they were going to have to pay for reunification.

Desert Storm saw us back in Iraq with the soldiers, and had the bullets flying round us once more. An interesting day during that little debacle, depending on one's point of view, was when we were in a helicopter that crashed after being clipped by gunfire. Luckily the pilot did a magnificent job, controlling the spiralling aircraft enough to bring it to the ground with the least force possible, and we all got out all right, though we found ourselves in the middle of a gunfight until rescued by a team of half-tracks, firing their machine guns the entire time while we embarked. I even managed to shoot most of the action, and it was so good it was nominated for an award, though it was beaten by a video of some puppies, saved from a bombed house. Huh!

We were there again for the 2003 invasion, feeling almost at home, though living in the quickly thrown up compounds used by the press corps and some units of the armed forces alike, was basic in the extreme: army rations and the latrines just holes in the ground, with waist-high, mainly cloth partitions between them. I asked Claire how she managed, and in typical Claire style she told me, 'If the sight of my fanny with crap coming out of it gives them a thrill then fucking good luck to them. They must be sick bastards.'

Though the press was generally kept out of the thick of it, things could go wrong, and we several times found ourselves under fire again, and this time my number was on one of the bullets. I was filming one of our units attacking a building where a bunch of the enemy was holed up, and the friendlies were not having it all their own way. They pulled back to the end of the street, and we found ourselves cut off in the middle. I kept shooting footage of the friendly force, since we were well sheltered from the enemy fire, when a burst from behind smacked into our shelter and I took one in the head.

I opened my eyes to find Claire astride my body, sobbing her heart out, her eyes closed. I moved my hand onto hers and she opened her eyes, sat bolt upright, glared at me, then began hitting me and shouting over and over again, 'You fucking, fucking bastard! I thought you were dead!' God alone knows what she would have done to me if I had died! The two stretcher bearers who had come to pick up the corpse stood looking on open=mouthed. The bullet had creased me on the very top of my head, which was bleeding heavily enough to cover my face in blood, but was, in fact, only a flesh wound. I had been knocked out by its force. The incident was enlightening in one way: it told me that she did actually love me.

I was not the only media casualty of friendly fire by any means: American Apache helicopters actually killed one Reuters correspondent and injured another in the Al-Amin al-Thaniyah district of New Baghdad. We earned our money.

The war ended, but there was always something for us to get our teeth into.

We'd done investigative work on AIDs several times, finding out just how bad it was in countries all over the world, surprisingly finding out that it was in Russia and its old satellites that the death rates were the worst, due to increasing drug problems, dirty needles and drugs diluted with all manner of dangerous substances, including blood, but when Ebola hit the headlines it was a new one for us, and we were one of the first teams into Sierra Leone, very quickly wishing we were anywhere else!

Luckily, we'd taken the best advice available before travelling, and had all the necessary gear for protection, but the whole thing was horrendous. We were quite inured to seeing mutilated dead bodies and parts of bodies, in all states of decomposition, but seeing living human beings virtually dissolve before your eyes, blood coming from every orifice, was something new, something vile and inhuman, and utterly, utterly terrifying. After just two weeks, when we had covered the course of the disease thoroughly, we were pulled out by Peter Chagwell, who had taken over from John Stannard when he retired.

To be sure we were free of the virus we stayed up-country in a top-rated medical facility for a month, being checked daily that we were free from infection, before flying home.

As we heard news of how the disease was spreading we were both damned pleased that we were no longer there; it seemed out of control.

Although it was second-hand reporting, we continued covering the outbreak by interviewing people who had just returned from there, including a senior doctor, who had been at the centre of things almost since day one, and he painted a bleak picture.

As we were packing up our gear after that interview Claire's mobile rang, and I watched her face pale as she listened.

At the end she said, 'I'll be there as quickly as I can. Don't worry, I'll take care of everything.'

She sighed, 'That was Father's housekeeper, Mrs Lions. He collapsed in the street and was taken to hospital, but he's stable and they've sent him home. Late stage cancer, and he's kept it a complete secret. Like me, she had no idea. I'll have to go and care for him.'

'Of course you will, Claire. We're due time off. I'll go up to the croft and stay there until...'

'Until it's over. Thanks, Gee.'

We told Peter Chagwell and he was as supportive as usual, 'Take as long as you like. There's nothing major happening at the moment, except the Ebola, and we can cover that from the wires.'

We kissed goodbye and I watched Claire drive off to her nursing duties. I rang Paddy Prendergast and told him I'd need him the day after next, then went off shopping, buying enough basics for a week.

Just before we took off from Aberdeen airport I rang Claire and got the news. Her father's specialist had told her that the old man had at best three months left to live. He was on high doses of morphine and not in any pain. I wanted to tell her I loved her, but knew how she would react. She knew anyway. I merely said, 'Bye, love.' And she replied, 'Bye, Gee.'

For once the little island was basking in bright sunlight under a brilliant blue sky and there was just a light, warm breeze from the west when we landed. Paddy helped me unpack the provisions and take them into the croft. We shared a cuppa before he left, and I arranged for a re-stocking seven days later and gave him a list.

After he'd gone I poured myself two fingers of Glenlivet and settled down to read _'Murder on Tiptoes'_ , the latest murder mystery by my favourite author.

Peace!

When Paddy returned with the new provisions he told me Claire had rung him and told him 'No change'. He seemed to have a bit of a cold, his voice sounding nasally.

We sat chatting for a while as I compiled another list for his next visit, and we agreed that he would come eight days later, since he had a flight booked to one of the oil rigs the day before.

Two days after his visit I had what seemed like cold or flu symptoms too and cursed him for bringing his damned infections into my idyllic life. What I did not realise was that far from being infected by him, he had been infected by me.

The next day I took to my bed, not feeling well at all. The thermometer in the medical kit I kept in the kitchen cupboard told me my temperature was a hundred and two, and every muscle in my body hurt as badly as if I had been kicked all over, but I still thought it was flu.

The worse problems started with diarrhoea during that night, and then in the morning at the other end, vomiting until I brought up blood. Even then I did not realise what it was.

When I came out in a severe body rash and found blood in my urine I suddenly woke up to the inescapable facts: I had contracted Ebola from that doctor, and now Paddy was out there spreading it around. I had to contact the authorities and now wished I'd installed a satellite phone, but the transceiver was in the cupboard, where it had been for the last fifteen years. It would do the trick.

Weak as I was I pulled it out and switched it on. No 'power' light. I'd never changed the batteries, and they were not rechargeable, but I kept spares, so took the battery panel off to change them. They had virtually disintegrated, and the acidy blue-grey deposit from them had burnt its way through the contacts, leaving nothing but ash. There was no way to connect them. Useless!

As I tinkered with the radio blood ran from my nose, and I knew there was little time left. I had flirted with death all over the world with immunity, and now a tiny bug had got me. Claire might have it too, but I sincerely hoped not; I had shaken the doctor's hand; she had not. When Paddy found my body, if he was well enough to fly there, he would not know what had killed me, and neither would the forensic people who came to investigate my death, and who would not take the necessary precautions in dealing with my corpse. That doctor had brought the disease to Britain. He would have realised in time that he had it and would have been isolated, but now my body was about to make it a UK epidemic. Before that happened I was going somewhere even I had never been before. A wry grin would not even begin to cover it...

