LITMIR.BIZ

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back again, eh?’

      Another delay. Like Ground Control to Mars.

      ‘Not until New Year.’ She began attacking the cigarette machine. Wheeze. Puff. Jangle. ‘Not getting laid up over Christmas.’

      The barman offered no response, forcing her to continue the conversation on her own. ‘I guess I’m gonna go one of three ways. Lung cancer, cirrhosis of the liver or a broken heart.’ She paused to catch her breath. ‘Think I’ll give up men. Too damn dangerous. Hell, I’m only sixty-four. Lotta life left in me yet.’ The guppy jaw dropped several times while she hitched up her sagging support tights through the folds of her woollen cardigan. The barman polished glasses.

      ‘They better have a cigarette waiting for me at the door of the hospital. And a drink. Going in and coming out.’

      The barman raised an eyebrow; she heaved her sack and her tights slipped once more. She paused to light another cigarette from a second pack in her pocket, not a cigarillo this time but menthol. Her attempt at safe smoking, cutting the risks. Then she dragged her sack in the direction of the condom machines in the men’s toilet, barging through the door without knocking.

      As her sagging frame disappeared, Devereux laughed inside. Not at her, but with her. She knew she was ludicrous, spicing her nicotine with the occasional menthol in the pretence of delaying or avoiding the inevitable process of consumption inside her lungs, but she was doing it her way and would go out on her own terms. Unlike most politicians. Unlike his father.

      Know thyself, and thy weaknesses, the better to understand and if necessary to exploit the weaknesses of others, he muttered. The old woman was a hag, but no broken reed. His father, at his bitter end, would have envied her.

      Devereux turned the whisky around in his glass. Life was full of challenges and risks; it took an exceptional man to confront and vanquish them and, in vanquishing, to become great. He was an exceptional man, and would become great. He wouldn’t be his failed father’s son forever.

      But one challenge at a time. He finished off his drink, ordered another, and gazed with interest and anticipation at the two women who were arranging themselves at the next table.

      

      Izzy was pissed off. Deeply pissed off, in the way that gets you out of bed in the morning in spite of hospital routine.

      Every day she would find herself waiting with growing anticipation for the videotapes of yesterday’s WCN newscasts, and this morning she’d set it up, punched the appropriate buttons and settled back in her chair.

      And seethed. The tape had included a major slot from the new Mafia corruption trials in Palermo, the one involving a cardinal, an actress and two former prime ministers. Her territory. Now being squatted by that testicularly challenged little jerk of a producer.

      She was jealous, hacked off with the producer, but mostly with herself, surprised that even from a hospital bed it could matter so much.

      The door to her old world was beginning to open a fraction. Then K.C. Craven arrived and kicked the bloody thing off its hinges.

      K.C. was black, doe-eyed and had flown in that morning from Washington DC. She was Eldred Grubb’s assistant, by far the finest of his few redeeming features. In her first week at WCN, with innuendo sweeping the newsroom as to why the foreign editor had hired an attractive mahogany-skinned assistant who was both taller and graduated from a far better university than he, she had been asked to explain her name.

      ‘Katherine? Connie?’ a colleague had enquired.

      ‘Why, bless you child. No,’ K.C. had responded in a mock Southern drawl, lashes fluttering. She enjoyed being theatrical; the entire newsroom was listening. ‘I was named K.C. ‘cause my mamma said she conceived me during an unscheduled time-out with a basketball player during play-offs in Kansas City. Best time of her life, she said. So even if she forgets who, ain’t never gonna forget where.’

      Later Izzy discovered that K.C.’s father was a much-respected doctor in Minneapolis and her librarian mother had never been to Kansas City in her life, but Izzy was sworn to silence. K.C. was a good friend and the first enjoyable recollection to come alive for Izzy from what seemed like another, distant life.

      ‘It’s great you could come,’ Izzy said, not for the first time, as they walked arm-in-arm through the gardens.

      She was making her first trip outside the hospital walls and Izzy had found the air unexpectedly damp, her mind still unadjusted to the lost weeks and changing seasons. The last few days had been frozen crisp, clean, the leaves on the old oak guarding the hospital entrance hung limp in the still air. But a storm was on the way, heralded by a tumultuous sky that seemed as though Turner had thrown his entire palette of paints across the heavens.

      K.C. wrapped herself more tightly in her cloak. She had been careful to explain that Grubb had sent her, she couldn’t stay more than a few hours, yet to Izzy it was as though her friend had trekked alone across the Antarctic.

      ‘You’re the first thing from my life before the accident which hasn’t brought me pain. The divorce. Bella. Watching Fido pretend he can do my job.’ Even as she spoke she realized that her life was still a jumble of conflicting priorities. That, at least, had not changed.

      ‘What do you feel about the divorce?’

      Izzy shook her head. ‘What’s to feel? Not angry, just – empty. I’ve always known he was unfaithful, got his brain in his boxers and his privates forever on parade, but funny thing is I’m finding it hard to be bitter. The marriage was a mistake, I think I can see that now.’

      ‘How a mistake?’

      ‘I was feeling pressured. Well into my thirties. The clock was ticking, the tubes beginning to get tired. Time was running out on me. I didn’t know how to handle it; everything else in my life had been planned, set into neat periods. College, grad school, internship, climb the ladder, PA, producer, correspondent … but this wasn’t going to be so tidy. The hormones were nagging away: do your bit for posterity, time to stretch the flesh. The job meant everything to me, yet suddenly … it wasn’t enough. I wanted the job and the kids. After Gaza it became something of an obsession.’

      ‘What happened in Gaza?’ K.C. pressed, wrapping the cloak still more tightly around her. As the day and its more spectacular hues began to fade, the wind was creeping in to claim its place. The storm was gathering.

      ‘It was during the Intifada, just before your time. The Palestinian riots had flared up again and I was over there with Dan Morrison from NBC to get an Arab’s-eye view. Interviews with local leaders, mullahs, the teenagers who were causing the trouble, that sort of thing. Lots of pictures of the rioting from behind Arab lines as they were throwing stones, petrol bombs. Nothing we hadn’t done a thousand times before.’

      ‘Dan Morrison?’ K.C. puckered her brows. ‘Was he one of us?’

      ‘That’s one hell of an epitaph,’ Izzy rebuked. ‘But you’re right. What do any of us leave behind? That’s really my point. Dan was like a big brother to me, we’d covered so many stories together. Never once got out of hand, the closest I got to his bed was the times I laid him out on it when he’d got blind drunk. Which was pretty often.’

      She tried to smile at the memory, but there was no joy in her face.

      ‘Dan and I were shooting from pretty much the same location, great position where the camera could see it all over our shoulders, the Arab kids throwing stones and burning barricades right up to the Israeli lines beyond. Someone had to go first, we tossed a coin and he cheated. The sonofabitch was always cheating me, but only on silly things. Said he liked getting me riled, best entertainment he could find in a foxhole.’

      She drew in a deep breath full of sorrow. ‘So, he stepped out half a pace to give his cameraman the full perspective and started to roll. He was talking about religion, about how both sides invoked divine justice and from their knees proclaimed their devout interest in peace. So long as it was their peace, of course.

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