The Walking Dead

The man seemed so calm. It was like, Banks reflected, his Principal was indifferent to having had petrol splashed into his living room and lit. Banks would have been mental with fury at such violation of his territory. He realized that he understood so little about the man. He had not managed to dig his way into the school teacher's trust — that was why he had won no normal, predictable reactions. But they called him a hero. There, perhaps, he fitted a pattern. A hero, in David Banks's world, was not a special forces' trooper — up a mountain in Afghanistan with all the high-tech gear hooked on his webbing — but the little man, ordinary as sin, who was confronted, from nowhere, with acute danger to himself and others. His hero was a man who made a bridge of his body for many to crawl over when a ferry-boat turned turtle, in darkness with panic around him. His hero, man or woman, young or old, had gone back into the smoke and toxic hell of a bombed Underground train, deep in a tunnel, to help those so badly injured they could not make their own escape. His hero was Cecil Darke, without water and with the smell of the dead round him, on the ridge of Mosquito Hill. They came in all shapes, all sizes and fitted no stereotype, and what made them so special was their lack of preparation for what they would endure. He felt, rare for him, a keen admiration. Whatever his emotions, Wright had them successfully bottled and corked. What did they say? They said, 'Don't make a drama out of a crisis.' The man was now identified by twin echelons of organized crime, had acquired the enmity of two brutal clans, would live with that weight on his shoulders — and his family's — for years to come. He had stood up and been counted against the forces of corruption and intimidation. Not bad for a bloody school teacher, but the mark of a nobody who was found to be a hero, too true. Maybe the man was in shock.

Banks said kindly, 'I can rustle up a cup of tea if you'd like one'

His Principal rolled over in the bed, away from him. 'I'd prefer it if you got lost and let me go back to sleep — switch the light off on your way out.'

He did, and shut the door quietly behind him.

Another day was starting, and Banks did not know what it would bring — if anything.

* * *

In a Belgravia hotel room, where the street below the window reverberated with a road-cleansing lorry, a couple made love. They had barely slept.

He thought the younger woman was clumsy through inexperience but relished her passion.

She thought the older man was now almost drained of his strength and doing it from long unused memory cards but was childishly eager.

An opened champagne bottle, its contents going flat, was tilted in a silver bucket. She'd said she was teetotal and didn't need the stimulation of alcohol, and he'd followed suit but the wasted bottle would be on his bill.

She was astride him and he was on his back, and the sheets were nicked off the bed and on the carpet with their scattered clothes. He was in her, and his hands reached up for her breasts. He talked and she listened. Then, when he was flaccid, limp — between times — she talked and he listened, but mostly it was him who talked and while he did she helped him to get ready for it again. A wife, Gertrud, who had been a childhood sweetheart, and a divorce of twenty years ago that had come through, final papers, on a fax machine in a foreign city. A boyfriend at university who had only shagged her on Saturday nights when the hail of residence was heaving in unison. A secretary where he worked who cared for him but as a younger sister and didn't share a bed with him. A young man, a staffer at the Home Office, whom she'd ended up with after a Christmas party.

For too long he hadn't done it; not often enough she hadn't.

He bounced his buttocks on the bed and heaved into her.

She thought him a cob horse who'd remembered what it was about.

He didn't know whether it was spontaneous.

She didn't know whether he'd planned it.

He felt privileged; and she felt damn, damn good.

There was no relationship for the future. They were ships that passed.

She felt him shrink and wriggled off him. She lay beside him and heard his breathing, harsh but regular, and he had nothing to say…Silence, and the road-cleansing lorry had moved on. Quiet…No one who knew her where she worked would have believed she had copulated three times in a night with a man nearly old enough to be her father and gloried in it. No one who knew him would have reckoned him capable of giving and taking acute pleasure. She was off the bed and walked naked to the side-table, her feet kicking aside a drift of sheets and clothing. She switched on the electric kettle and tore open coffee sachets. It was the first time, afterwards, that he had not spoken about his wife, his secretary, his life or work.

'You all right?'

'Just thinking.'

'What were you thinking about?' she asked.

'Oh, mistakes and good luck.'

'I don't regard this, what's happened, as a mistake, and…'