“Sounds pretty good, Ruth. I’ll take that.” I rub my eye.
“Are you going to miss it all,” asks Brendan, “after July?”
“After June,” says Holly, cheerfully.
No one sees me squirm. I hope. “When it happens,” I tell Brendan, “I’ll let you know how I feel.”
“So have you got anything lined up, workwise?” asks Dave.
“Ed’s got a lot of strings to his bow, Dad,” says Holly. “Maybe with the print media, or the BBC, and the Internet’s really shaking up the news world. One of Ed’s ex-editors at the FTis lecturing at UCL, now.”
“Well, I think it’s greatyou’ll be settling in London for good, Ed,” says Kath. “We do worry, when you’re away. I’ve seen pictures of this Fallujah place—those bodies they strung up on the bridge! Shocking. And baffling. I thought the Americans won, months ago. I thought the Iraqis hated Saddam. I thought he was a monster.”
“Iraq’s a lot more complicated than the Masters of War realized, Kath. Or wanted to realize.”
Dave claps his hands. “Now we’ve got the chitchat out of the way, let’s get down to the serious stuff: Ed, are you joining us on Pete’s stag do tonight? Kath’ll babysit for Aoife, so you’ve got no excuse.”
Pete tells me, “A few mates from work are meeting me at the Cricketers—a lovely pub, just round the corner. Then—”
“I’d rather stay blissfully ignorant about ‘then,’ ” says Sharon.
“Oh, right,” says Brendan, “as if the hens are going to play Scrabble all evening.” In a stage whisper he tells me, “Male strippers at the Brighton Pavilion followed by a crack den at the end of the pier.”
Ruth play-cuffs him: “You slanderer, Brendan Sykes!”
“Too right,” says Holly. “You wouldn’t catch respectable ladies like us going anywhere near a Scrabble board.”
“Remind me what you’re really up to again,” says Dave.
“A sedate wine tasting,” replies Sharon, “with tapas, at a bar owned by one of Pete’s oldest friends.”
“Wine-tasting session,” scoffs Brendan. “Back in Gravesend they call a piss-up a piss-up. So how about it, Ed?”
Holly’s giving me a go-ahead face, but I’d better start proving what a great father I am while Holly’s still talking to me. “No offense, Pete, but I’m going to wuss out. The jet lag’s catching up with me, and it’ll be nice to spend time with Aoife. Even if she will be fast asleep. That way Kath can join the wine-tasting session, too.”
“Oh, I don’t mind babysitting, pet,” says Kath. “I’ve got to watch my blood pressure, anyway.”
“No, really, Kath.” I finish my Scotch, enjoying the blast-off. “You spend as much time as you can with your relatives from Cork—and I’ll grab an early night, otherwise I’ll be one giant yawn-in-a-suit at the church today. I mean tomorrow. God, see what I mean?”
“All right, then,” says Kath. “If you’re really sure …”
“Absolutely sure,” I tell her, rubbing my itchy eye.
“Don’t rub it, Ed,” Holly tells me. “You’ll make it worse.”
ELEVEN O’CLOCK AT night, and all’s well, kind of, for now. Olive Sun wants me flying out again by Thursday at the latest, so I’ll have to tell Holly soon. Tonight, really, so she doesn’t make plans for the three of us next week. Fallujah is the biggest deployment of marines since the battle for Hue City in Vietnam, and I’m stuck here on the Sussex coast. Holly’ll hit the frigging roof, but I’d better get it over and done with, and she’ll have to calm down for Sharon’s wedding tomorrow. Aoife’s asleep in the single bed in the corner of our hotel room. I only got here after her bedtime, so I still haven’t said hi to my daughter, but the First Rule of Parenting states that you never wake a peacefully sleeping child. I wonder how Nasser’s girls are sleeping tonight, with dogs barking and gunfire crackling and marines kicking down doors. CNN’s on the flat-screen TV with the sound down, showing footage of marines under fire on rooftops in Fallujah. I’ve seen it five times or more and even the pundits can’t think of anything fresh to say until the news cycle starts up again in a few hours, when Iraq begins a new day. Holly texted a quarter of an hour ago to say she and the other hens’ll be heading back to the hotel soon. “Soon” could mean anything in the context of a wine bar, though. I switch off the TV, to prove I’m no war junkie, and go to the window. Brighton Pier’s all lit up like Fairyland on Friday night, and pop music booms from the fairground at the far end. By English standards it’s a warm spring evening, and the restaurants and bars on the promenade are at the end of a busy evening. Couples walk hand in hand. Night buses trundle. Traffic obeys the traffic laws, by and large. I don’t knock a peaceful and well-functioning society. I enjoy it, for a few days, weeks, even. But I know that, after a couple of months, a well-ordered life tastes like a flat, nonalcoholic lager. Which isn’t the same as saying I’m addicted to war zones, as Brendan helpfully implied earlier. That’s as ridiculous as accusing David Beckham of being addicted to playing soccer. Just as soccer is Beckham’s art and his craft, reporting from hot spots is my art and my craft. I wish I’d said that to the clan earlier.
Aoife giggles in her sleep, then groans sharply.
I go over. “You okay, Aoife? It’s only a dream.”
Unconscious Aoife complains, “No, silly! The lemonone.” Then her eyes flip open like a doll’s in a horror movie: “We’re going to a hotel in Brighton later, ’cause Aunty Sharon’s marrying Uncle Pete, and we’ll meet you there, Daddy. I’m a bridesmaid.”
I try not to laugh, and stroke Aoife’s hair back from her face. “I know, love. We’re all here now, so you go back to sleep. I’ll be here in the morning and we’ll all have a brilliant day.”
“Good,” Aoife pronounces, teetering on the brink of sleep …
… she’s gone. I pull the duvet over her My Little Pony pajama top and kiss her forehead, remembering the week in 1997 when Holly and I made this precious no-longer-quite-so-little life-form. The Hale-Bopp Comet was adorning the night sky, and thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide in San Diego so their souls could be picked up by a UFO in the comet’s tail and be transported to a higher state of consciousness beyond human. I rented a cottage in Northumbria and we had plans to go hiking along Hadrian’s Wall, but hiking didn’t turn out to be the principal activity of the week. Now look at her. I wonder how she sees me. A bristly giant who teleports into her life and teleports out again for mystifying reasons, perhaps—not so different from how I saw my own father, I guess, except while I’m away on various assignments, Dad went away to various prisons. I’d love to know how Dad saw me when I was a kid. I’d love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I’d be one day to look inside it.
When I was back in February she was having her period.
I hear Holly’s key in the door. I feel vaguely guilty.
Not half as guilty as she’ll make me feel, though.
Holly’s having trouble with the lock so I go over, put the chain on, and open it up a crack. “Sorry, sweetheart,” I tell her, in my Michael Caine voice. “I never ordered no kinky massage. Try next door.”
“Let me in,” says Holly, sweetly, “or I’ll kick you in the nuts.”
“Nope, I didn’t order no kick in the nuts, neither. Try—”
Not so sweetly: “Brubeck, I need to use the loo!”
“Oh, all right, then.” I unchain the door and stand aside. “Even if you have come home too plastered to use a key, you dirty stop out.”
“The locks in this hotel are all fancy and burglar-proofed. You need a PhD to open the damn things.” Holly bustles past to the bathroom, peering down at Aoife in passing. “Plus I only had a fewglasses of wine. Mam was there as well, remember.”
“Right, as if Kath Sykes was ever a girl to put the dampeners on a ‘wine-tasting session.’ ”
Holly closes the bathroom door. “Was Aoife okay?”
“She woke up for a second, otherwise not a squeak.”
“Good. She was soexcited on the train down, I was afraid she was going to be up all night dancing on the ceiling.” Holly flushes the toilet to provide a bit of noise cover. I go over to the window again. The funfair at the end of the pier is winding down, by the look of it. Such a lovely night. My proposed six-month extension for Spyglassin Iraq is going to wreck it, I know. Holly opens the bathroom door, smiling at me and drying her hands. “How did you spend your quiet night in? Snoozing, writing?”