Barking Read Free Page B

uninsulated wires in the back of his mind brushed together, and he thought, Ferris and something. Luke Ferris —
    A big smile, full of teeth and good humour; he could picture it now. He could picture himself, all spots and elbows, trying to punch it through the back of its proprietor’s neck, and always missing. ‘I thought it must be you,’ the voice said, and fifteen years crumpled up like the front end of a Volvo. ‘I saw your name on this sheet of letterhead - down at the bottom of the cast list, I couldn’t help noticing, in with the lighting assistants and the location caterers - and I thought, could that possibly be my old mate Duncan Hughes, who fell off the edge of the world fifteen years ago and was never heard of again? So,’ the voice added, ‘how are you?’
    Duncan thought long and hard before answering. ‘Oh, fine,’ he said. ‘And you?’
    â€˜A bit like the Mary Rose ,’ the voice replied. ‘In remarkably good shape, all things considered. Look, is it true what it says on your firm’s notepaper?’
    Duncan frowned. ‘Depends,’ he said.
    â€˜You’re at 32 Fortescue Place, EC2?’
    No harm in admitting that. ‘Basically, yes.’
    â€˜Upper storey? Facing the street?’
    â€˜If I could see through walls.’
    â€˜Ah. Well, if you were to climb up on the roof and look sort of east, you’d see a big black glass thing a couple of blocks over, sort of like a minimalist Borg cube. 97 Mortmain Street. That’s us.’
    Us, Duncan repeated to himself; Ferris and somebody, note the word order. ‘Small world,’ he heard himself say.
    â€˜Fucking tiny,’ the voice replied. ‘And talking of geography, doesn’t it strike you as significant that the Bunch of Grapes in Voulge Street is exactly halfway between your place and mine?’
    â€˜Well, not—’
    â€˜See you there, then. One-fifteen?’
    â€˜No,’ Duncan started to say, but the disconnected-line buzz drowned him out. Which proved, if there was any residual doubt about it, that he’d just been talking to the authentic Luke Ferris, who never took no for an answer, or gave a shit about anybody else’s—
    Hang on, he thought.
    To test out a theory, he asked himself a question: define Luke Ferris in no more than five words. Easy: my best friend at school . The fact that he’d never been able to stand him for more than ten minutes without wanting to hit him had, somehow, never been incompatible with that definition. A more precise and informative version would’ve been not an easy person to get on with , but that was eight words, not five. All right, then; how about a complete pain in the— Nope, six.
    So he glanced at his diary: one-fifteen. Of course, he had mountains of work to be getting on with, and although slipping out of the office for a bit at lunchtime wasn’t exactly forbidden, it was more frowned-on than the foot of Mount Rushmore. On the other hand: my best friend at school. What harm could it possibly do?
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    You go through life thinking of yourself as a tall person - brushing snow out of your hair in summer and ducking in the late afternoon to avoid nutting yourself on the setting sun - and then you come across someone who makes you realise you’re merely a slightly elongated hobbit.
    â€˜You’ve grown,’ Duncan said.
    Luke raised an eyebrow. ‘You sound just like my aunt,’ he said. ‘What’re you having?’
    â€˜You have grown.’ Duncan wasn’t quite sure why he needed an admission at this point, but he knew somehow that it was important. ‘I mean, at school you were a tall bastard and a hazard to aviation, but -’ He shrugged. Luke was looking through him; the way Jenny Sidmouth had done, like management . ‘Coke, please,’ he said.
    A slight frown; then Luke turned to the barman (who’d materialised out of