Neill shrugged. His stomach was queasy and the malaria symptoms persisted. Nearly every day he'd taken his Paludrine; what the Hell more did they want? “Maybe she will. I've wondered, lately, what it would have been like...”
“What? Her and you? Total Hell.”
“I'm going to see her brother, that ugly beast Hamid. Or maybe I can get in through Amal.”
“Amal? If you're talking to Hezbollah, Amal will shoot you. So will the Israelis, the Christians ... He's a popular guy.”
“Like I keep saying, he's not that bad.”
“Nobody could be. Anyway, he's gone missing.”
“Since?”
“Few days. Done it before, apparently. Some new woman, some meeting.”
“While I'm there I want you guys to know where I am, and I'm going to tell her you know.”
“She couldn't give a shit.” Mick slapped the table.
“Shit!” Neill raised his arm, wiped coffee off his sleeve.
“If you'd stuck with her, mate, look where you'd be now. In the thick of it.”
“Maybe I still am. Maybe because we couldn't finish it, or live it, whichever, we never got unhooked. In Bratislava I was thinking,” Neill brought his chair forward, “that maybe losing her, us both losing each other, broke my heart for good.”
“Nah. Hearts are far too resilient.”
“I've been seeing this other woman, in Amsterdam. Inneka. She's a little younger than Bev, divorced – we fit really well together.”
“What are you going to say to the kids?”
“They don't care, Mick. You don't understand.”
“I never lived with my kids. They're just out there, somewhere.”
“That's no kind of life.”
“I've got a wonderful life. I've got married women and unmarried women and girls and a forty-two-year-old cabinet minister's wife who fucks like a cat. You ever see cats fuck? They leap on each other and yowl and claw for three minutes and it's over. Then she wants to get dressed and go home. Her driver waits outside – poor guy, doesn't even have time for a smoke.” Mick flicked ash. “I've got all the illicit substances I want, wine, women, song.”
“So?”
Mick looked at Neill, smiled. “Remember Daisy?”
“Daisy...”
“When you came down to Rome and threw up in the Trevi Fountain.”
“Not the Trevi – the one that runs down beside the Spanish Steps. It was my twentieth birthday or something.”
“Daisy was the girl we ended up with that night. In some incredibly cold little room up six floors somewhere – Jesus, it was cold!”
“Not my fault I was born in January.”
Mick rubbed his crossed arms. “We got in the one bed, with her in the middle, remember? You and I both wanted to fuck her and each kept waiting for the other to go to sleep.”
“This I don’t remember.”
“And finally I heard you snoring so I reached for her. She starts playing with my hand, starts squeezing it, hard, and I'm thinking Jesus, she is hot. Her fingers are playing with mine, you know, and I'm thinking this is it, I'm going to fuck this superb blonde – and then I felt up her wrist and there was all this thick hair and I realized, holy Jesus, it was you! And all the time we each thought the other was her, she was lying there snoring.”
“You're making this up.”
“You were drunk.”
“When weren't you?”
“Later she told me she'd fallen asleep waiting for us to make a move. She would've screwed us both.”
“The tall and slender one? Curly hair and freckles?”
“Daisy. After you went to Beirut she and I got real tight. She was doing research, Roman agricultural systems, some shit like that, pollen and seeds and old plant species. Then I get reassigned, Helsinki of all places. My last day in Rome she and I are sitting in this café with a fountain and music and the sun coming down, and I think, hey, why don't I just stay here with Daisy? Why don't I say no to this job, do something real – that's how I thought, then – and I looked at Daisy with the bright sun on her freckled nose and I realized I loved her. But you know what? She was too unusual, I didn't dare marry her, didn't dare ask. See how fucked up we get about women?”
“Trying to get back up where we came from. Doesn't work.”
“Man I'm just driven by sex. It's not a choice – yes, it is. I could say, OK, no more fucking. But why? It's the best thing there is. But it's a drive, see, has nothing to do with me. Just my genes pushing, these sperm saying, hey, we need to get out, fertilize somebody.”
“Paradise, that.”
“What?”
“Our longing for paradise – I just realized it's nothing more than the cell's memory of the sperm and egg finding each other.”
“The one sperm beating out all the others.”
“It’s a lovely place, between a woman's legs. The source of life. Her magnificent breasts that feed life. Her lovely slender body that carries life into the world ... No wonder we're entranced by it, can't get enough.” Neill felt foolish, as if he'd revealed too much. “My grandmother used to toss me on her knee and sing Gaelic lullabies about all the young men the English killed. The very first thing I knew in life was to hate the English. Maybe we hate to make our women love us.”
“That's crap.”
“I've got over it; if anything, now, I hate the IRA, but I still like to tell that story, and someday I'll tell it to some kid whose mind is looking for something to do with his life and, bang, I've helped to start a war.” Neill emptied dregs of spilled coffee from the saucer back into his cup.
“Without war we'd be back with the animals. Hand to mouth, jabbering at each other. War's brought us progress, scientific genius, creature comforts.” Mick shrugged. “Made us what we are.”
“But I'm afraid of this one.”
“So don't go.” Mick spat a tobacco shred. “What d'you think you've bloody got? Some invisible shield? Like the guy who thinks if he closes his eyes the bullets won't hit him?”
“We all think that.” Neill reached across the table, elbow in sticky coffee, hand on Mick's hairy wrist. Absurdly it reminded him of Mick's story how they'd held hands that night, each thinking the other was Daisy. “We're getting old, Mick. Fearing what we never used to fear.”
“Then don't go!”
“I want to interview Mohammed. Something, a sixth sense – he's got something to say.”
“Ask him about those bloody hash shipments out of the Bekaa.”
“Everybody's running drugs in this war, not just Hezbollah.”
“You've gone soft on the sodding ragheads.”
“I'm not soft on anybody, Mick. That's my problem.”
“And I say to you, true believers, take not the Jews or Christians for your friends...”
“Doesn't apply to me. Anyway, that sura is contested.”
Elbows on the table, raised hands clasped in a double fist, Mick leaned toward him. “These ragheads,” he glanced round the café at the men in keffiyahs talking at other tables, “it's against their sodding