Free Dust and Desire by Conrad Williams Page A

because I had gone into something of a decline. I drank a lot, I stopped shaving, I stopped washing. I stopped caring. Because what I cared about wasn’t there any more. And maybe that thought, filling my mind like a black sun, blinding me to anything else, meant that Sarah’s leaving became inevitable. She must have noticed how much I marginalised her when I was trying to deal with what had happened. And I was writing on a very small page, so of course she was going to fall off the edge. What I cared about, a big chunk of what I cared about, was still there, but my wallowing wouldn’t allow me to see it like that. How must she have been feeling? I never asked. I still don’t know. I’m too scared, too much of a chicken to even begin to guess. Instead, I tried to find other Rebeccas in bars so dark that even a passing resemblance was enough for me. When I woke up next to them in the morning, I left before they could ask me if I really meant what I’d said, and if something that happened so fast really could be it . And Sarah witnessed it all. I wasn’t The One for anybody (I should have been, first and foremost, to my daughter) and I felt like that for a long time, until Keith pulled me out of the mire and asked me to spy on his wife.
    Since then I’d done some gritty, shitty jobs, but every one of them rates a ten next to the zero involving cheap, crease-free shirts and an hour for your lunch. I’d done mobile, static and covert surveillance; traced witnesses, fleeing debtors and missing persons; investigated insurance claims; executed company searches and pre-employment checks. I’ve proved infidelities. I’ve been punched, shot at (admittedly with an airgun), run over, and now I’ve been clouted around the loaf with a cosh. I’ve waded through each and every different type of manure, and at the end of it I’ve taken my shoes off and cleaned them without a peep of complaint. The worst thing about this type of work is the hanging around, and following that is having to listen to the inane gas that flies out of people’s mouths while you’re hanging around. You have to listen to a lot. And I was listening to it now.
    Two gym-slim blokes. One in a green woollen three-piece, one in a navy pinstripe silk-mix, a pair of Loewe shades resting on his head. Both of them, you could tell, played squash, or badminton, every lunchtime and the sense of competition was deep and hot inside them, like bile eating up their insides. They were now playing I’ve been to more places than you , and each sentence, more or less, began like this: ‘When I was in Mogadishu…’
    The jaw-clench-per-minute ratio was sky-rocketing.
    ‘If you’re ever in Warsaw,’ Silk-Mix was saying, ‘you have to stay at the Hotel Bristol. How could you not? I mean, it was opened by Maggie Thatcher, but don’t let that put you off.’
    Three-Piece took a big, punctuative swallow of his Strongbow and, nodding, replied: ‘I won’t go to Nigeria again, no way. I got shot at. That really put me off the place. Billy clubs studded with nails. People carrying them in the street.’
    Silk-Mix: ‘You know, some years ago I was in Sierra Leone. Believe it. The most dangerous place on Earth. The front line was between two villages and they’re called, you’ll never guess, Somerset and Winston. Believe it. That’s why there were British troops over there. That’s the only reason.’
    Nathan appeared at the bar again. I think he had added to his keys in the hour or so since he was gone. He was walking with a fucking list . I pushed unsteadily past Three-Piece and said to them: ‘In Morecambe they’ve got this pub with a sign that says “No nuclear weapons”, yeah. No, really .’
    God, I was more pissed than I’d given myself credit for. ‘Nathan,’ I called out, approaching the bar. ‘Nate. Nat. Natters .’
    He was looking at me as though I had just sold his grandmother for a handful of turds. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked.
    ‘No, but you