The Bridge

The 1985 Festival couldn't even revive his spirits. Andrea was there for part of it, but even when she was with him, in the next seat at a hall or cinema, or in the passenger's seat in the car, or beside him in bed, she wasn't really with him, not all of her. Part of the woman's thoughts were not free, not for him. She still didn't want to talk about it. He heard circuitously that there were complications to Gustave's MS; he tried to bring the subject up but she would not co-operate. It dismayed him there were things they could not talk about. It was his own fault; he never had wanted to talk about Gustave. You couldn't change the rules now.

He had dreams about the dying man in the other city, and sometimes thought he could see him, lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by machines.

Andrea went back to Paris half-way through the Festival. He couldn't face the cultural equivalent of a thousand-bomber raid alone, so he borrowed a friend's Bo

It rained.

The company went from strength to strength, but he was starting to lose interest. What, in the end, am I really doing? he asked himself. Just another fucking brick in the wall, just another cog in the machine, if a little better oiled than most. I make money for oil companies and their shareholders and for governments that spend it on weapons that can kill us all a thousand times over instead of just five hundred; I don't even operate at the level of an ordinary decent worker, like my dad did; I'm a fucking boss, I employ, I have real drive and initiative (or I used to); I actually make it all run just that little bit better than it might if I wasn't here.

He cut the whisky out again, spent some time drinking only mineral water. He gave up dope almost completely once he realised he wasn't enjoying it any more. The only time he did smoke was when he went over to see Stewart. Then it was like old times.

He started to take coke regularly; it got to be a Monday morning ritual and the natural start to an evening out until one night he was watching the television news and cutting up a couple of generous lines before he went out drinking. There was a follow-up report on the African famine being shown. He looked away from a child with dead eyes and skin like a bat's wing; he looked down to the mirror on the table he was hunkered over and saw his own face looking back at him through the shining granules of white powder. He'd stuffed three hundred pounds' worth of this stuff up his nose the previous week. He threw the razor down. Shit, he said to himself.

A bad year, he told himself. Just another bad year. He started smoking cigarettes. He finally accepted he needed glasses. The bald patch on his head was the size of a bath plug-hole. He seemed to feel the restlessness of youth and the last-chance urgency of age at the same time. He was thirty-six years old, but he felt like eighteen going on seventy-two.

In November Andrea told him she was thinking of going to stay in Paris, to look after Gustave. They might have to get married, if his family insisted. She hoped he understood. 'I'm sorry kid,' she said, dull voiced.

'Yeah,' he said. 'Me too.'

Ah shit, I suppose I ca

Anyway, here I am, sitting up in the bed, watching the closed-circuit TV screens and thinking dirty thoughts, trying to get a hard-on. I'm remembering Angharie

Maybe it was for the best, you never know. Doubt I'd have lived this long without him; some of his ideas were pretty smart. His first was to go back to see that young witch I'd been doing the business with no long before I rescued the familiar from Hades. Angharie

'What are you doing? Trying to raise the dead already?'

'Shut up you; none of your business.'

'Of course it is my business; what if you have a heart attack or something?'

'Well why no magic up one of them whouris for me then?'

'Certainly not; you'd be sure to peg out then. Just stop that; it's so unseemly in a man of your age. Your brain may still be retarded but your years are advanced.'

'It's my willy and it's my life.'

'It's my life too and you can't play with one if it means playing with the other as well. Have a sense of proportion, man.'

'Och, I'm no really wanting a wank, just to see if I can get it up still. Go on; show us a dirty video, eh?'

'No. Keep watching the screens.'

'What for?'

'Just keep watching. You never know what might happen. All is not yet lost.'

'We should have kept looking for that Fountain of Youth, so we should.'

'Ah ... you'd probably just have pissed in it.'