Free Crisis Four by Andy McNab

it. I’ve got to go to work. Oh, come on, Kelly, cheer up.’
    What the fuck was I saying? I always hated this. I didn’t know what to do or say, and to make things worse I reckoned I was starting to sound like my Auntie Pauline.
    The cry had become heart-rending sobs. ‘But I don’t want you to go… I want to stay here and be a sailor… I want you to stay here… I don’t want to sleep on this boat without you.’
    ‘Ah,’ I said, and the way I said it was sufficiently ominous to make her look up. ‘You won’t be sleeping on the ship. I’m going to take you to see Granny and Grandad. Listen, I promise, I really do promise, I’ll make this up to you.’
    She stared at me long and hard, then slowly shook her head from side to side, deeply wounded. She’d been sold down the river, and she knew it. I wondered if she’d ever trust me again.
    There was nothing I could say, because actually she was right. Just to make sure I avoided the issue, I walked across to the bosun. ‘We’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘Family problem.’ He nodded; who gives a fuck, he just gets paid to wear the hat and growl.
    Josh came back. His kids were halfway through a lesson on how to hoist the sails. I said, ‘We’ve got to go, mate.’
    I tried to pat Kelly’s head, but she flinched away from my hand. I said, ‘Do you want to go downstairs and change? You can say goodbye in a minute. Go on, off you go.’
    As she disappeared I looked at Josh and shrugged. ‘What can I say, I’ve got to go to work.’ And then, before he had the chance to come up with all sorts of different ways that he could help, I said, ‘I’m going to take her down to her grandmother’s now, then I’m off. I’m really sorry about this, mate.’
    ‘Hey, chill, it doesn’t matter. These things happen. It was just really good to see you.’
    He was right. It had been really good to see him, too. ‘Same here. Have a good flight back. I’ll give you a call as soon as I’ve finished this job, and we’ll come to you next time.’
    ‘Like I told you, the beds are always made up. The coffee, white and flat, is always hot.’
    It took me a moment to understand the white and flat bit. ‘Is that some kind of Airborne saying?’
    ‘Kinda.’
    I said goodbye to his kids and they got back to pulling ropes and getting bollocked by the bosun. Then I went down below and changed.

2
    We stopped at a pedestrian crossing to let a blue-haired New Age guy saunter across. I laughed. ‘Kelly, look at that bloke there! Isn’t he weird!’ He had big lumps of metal sticking out of his nose, lips, eyebrows, all sorts. I said, ‘I bet he wouldn’t dare walk past a magnet factory.’
    I laughed at my own joke. She didn’t, possibly because it was so bad. ‘You shouldn’t make personal remarks like that,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I bet he’s been to the Bloody Tower.’ Her school work might be suffering a bit but she was still as sharp as her old man.
    I looked across at her in the passenger seat and felt yet another pang of guilt. She was reading about how wonderful London was from a flyer we had in our hire car; she was sulking away, probably wondering what could be so important in my life that instead of taking her to see the Crown Jewels, I was dumping her back with her dreary old grandparents who she already saw enough of during the weekends out from her boarding school.
    We drove through Docklands in the East End of London, past the outrageously tall office block on Canary Wharf; then, as we followed signs for the Blackwall Tunnel, the Millennium Dome, still under construction, came into view across the Thames. Trying anything to lighten the mood, I said, ‘Hey, look, the world’s biggest Burger King hat!’
    At last I got a reaction; a slight movement of the lips, accompanied by a determined refusal to laugh.
    Still heading towards the tunnel that took us under the Thames and south, we came to a petrol station just past the Burger King dome. I needed to call her