Free Country of the Blind by Christopher Brookmyre Page B

about. Whether it's cops and robbers or cops and terrorists, I don't care. Either way it's cops and very dangerous people, and that's my principal consideration."
    His eyes were on the screen, but he wasn't watching the movie. He'd seen it a dozen times and he'd see it a dozen more when he would be paying attention. But what was weird was that it wasn't the Voss murder that was distracting him; it was the fact that the Voss murder wasn't distracting him. Sure, there were a few tantalising contradictions and enticing inconsistencies in the information being issued, but somehow none of it seemed enough any more to have him sliding down the Batpole and into action. Not off this settee with the scent of Sarah's hair in his nostrils, the warmth of her shoulders in his lap and his left palm rested on her left breast, pressed into place against her T-shirt by her own right hand.
    He realised that all of this meant he was changing; indeed had changed, and he wasn't even sure whether he should feel sad about that. He felt a confusing mixture of excitement, envy and comfort when he thought about Nicole Carrow, recklessly playing cat-and-mouse with the cops, driven by a belief in some unknowable cause, running on adrenalin and hiding her fear behind a glistening sheen of arrogance. Excitement at recognising someone he once knew, someone that age, who had shown the same raw, enervating energy and promise, with a glint in the eye that said "I'll find out all your secrets, but you'll never know mine." Envy that that person still had so many exciting paths to explore back then; at the thought of what was to follow. And comfort at the thought that someone from the Resignation Generation actually looked like picking up the torch.
    "We're going to fuck you up the arse," said the government, all the time. In his adolescence the collective response was: "Come ahead and try it, ya bass. See what you get." These days they would just drop their trousers then drop some eckies so that their acquiescent complicity was a fun and trippy experience.
    But maybe it was the sight of Nicole Carrow that had underlined the detachment of his position: it wasn't his fight any more. He liked to think that it was Sarah that had changed him. All the hackneyed old bollocks actually applied . He had never met a woman who made him feel this way. He was feeling emotions not only that he had never experienced before, but that he had previously concluded were not applicable in his case. (So many things had seemed not applicable in his case, which was itself part 44
    of the greater problem.)
    However, the fear was that it was because he had already changed that he felt this way about Sarah. That at another time she would have passed him right by, no possibility of him recognising what could lie before them. Or, more simply, that he would have blown it. The thought of having missed her, of her not being there, was a shivering cold one. And along with it came the attendant doubt that he might well have already met women who would have made him feel like this, but. . .
    No. That way madness lay.
    But did it matter? Either way, this was how he felt, this was how it was. They were together now - fate, serendipity or whatever. Unfortunately it did matter. Because he still wasn't entirely sure why he was content to be sitting on his settee at a time like this. He'd like it to be all the right reasons, all the cute, cosy and even mature, adult ones, but he wanted to know how big a factor fear was in the equation. What had he said? It was cops and very dangerous people, and that was his principal consideration. It never used to be.
    Once upon a time it had been all and anything for a bloody story. The risks, the gambles, the dangers. The death threats. All for the scoop, for the exclusive. Oh yeah, and THE TRUTH, of course, in hundred-foot letters of fire, burning high on a mountainside. That idol he had made so many sacrifices to. Parlabane had never been afraid of dying, he had