Bokelskere.no

His life so far, he decided, had prepared him perfectly for a job in Securities, for shopping at the supermarket, for watching football on the telly at the weekends, for turning on a heater if he got cold. It had magnificently failed to prepare him for a life as an un-person on the roofs and in the sewers of London, for a life in the cold and the wet and the dark.

"Is there anything, really, to be scared of?" "Only the night on the bridge," she said. "The kind in armour?" "The kind that comes when days is over."

She looked at him rather sadly, like a mother trying to explain to an infant that, yes this flame was hot, too. All flames were hot. Trust her, please.

He watched a little Sunday afternoon television and constructed conversations with Jessica in his head. At the end of each mental conversation they would make wild, angry, tearstained and passionate love; and then everything would be all right.

Richard was thunderstruck: it had been like watching Emma Peel, Bruce Lee and a particularly vicious tornado all rolled into one and sprinkled with a generous helping of footage he had once seen on a wildlife programme of a mongoose killing a king cobra. That was how she had moved.

Richard turned to the Marquis, who was watching the fight intently, "What's happening?" he asked.
The Marquis spared him a glance, and then returned his gaze to the action in front of them. "You," he said, "are out of your depth, in deep shit, and, I would imagine, a few hours away from an untimely and undoubtedly messy end."

Richard put his head on one side. "Excuse me," he said. "I know this is a personal question. But are you clinically insane?"
"Possible, but very unlikely. Why?"
"Well," said Richard. "One of us must be."

Richard had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.

Jessica stood there on the pavement, watching him ruin her big evening, and her eyes stung with tears. After a while he was out of sight, and then, and only then, did she say, loudly and distinctly, an unladylike 'Shit', and fling her handbag as hard as she could on the ground, hard enough to to scatter her mobile phone and her lipstick and her diary and a handful of tampons across the concrete. And then, because there was nothing else to do, she picked them all up and put them back into her handbag and walked back down to the restaurant, to wait for Mr Stockton. Later, as she sipped her white wine, she tried to come up with a plausible reasons why her fiancé was not with her, and found herself wondering desperately wheter or not she could simply claim that Richard was dead. 'It was very sudden,' said Jessica, wistfully, under her breath.