Dying for Millions Read Free

up.’ He broke some nan, scooped a mouthful of dhal. ‘You know, for the party afterwards – you’ll be there?’
    â€˜Try and keep me away. Shall I bring someone?’ Chris, the policeman with whom I had an on-off relationship, might be up from Bramshill for the weekend.
    â€˜Thought you might like to see who you could pull. There’s always Duck.’
    Duck might be one of the best lighting engineers in Europe but he had a walk like Lady Thatcher’s and halitosised for England.
    â€˜Gee, thanks.’ Time to change the subject: he’d give me a fistful of passes anyway. Perhaps I could give Karen one – and her mother. I topped up my lager. ‘Mwandara’s got to you, has it?’
    â€˜Not just the hospital – the whole of the country. Well, the Third World in general, to be honest. Jesus, Sophie – the waste, the poverty, the corruption, the sheer indifference … I have to do something.’ All the laughlines had solidified into frustrated anger.
    I nodded; I’d seen it coming. ‘Aren’t you more use to Mwandara as a pop star attracting attention and funds than as just another pair of hands – unskilled hands at that?’
    â€˜I shan’t be spending any more time there. Not as a field worker, anyway. UNICEF have asked me to become a goodwill ambassador. Yes, despite my past! Don’t forget – I’ve been squeaky-clean for years now.’ He smiled ironically, but he had reason to be proud of himself. He’d probably succumbed to all the temptations going, and invented a few more along the way, but he’d come through it all and if he looked back he never showed it, even to me. He’d gone further, been prominent in campaigns against drugs ever since he’d dried out. Some people said he was like a younger Cliff Richard in zealousness – though without the religious bit, I was relieved to say. His crusading image didn’t fit his music: once a violent, primitive rock – though always, as Karen’s mother had rightly observed, with an accessible melody – and nowadays a much more sophisticated affair, with lots of African rhythms. Nelson Mandela was known to be a fan, and had attended the opening of the township cricket club which had asked Andy to be its Patron.
    â€˜Will you miss it? The music, I mean?’
    â€˜Some of it. The roar of the grease-paint, the smell of the crowd … Same as you’d miss teaching, I suppose.’ Suddenly he yawned, showing all those expensively capped teeth. ‘No, no coffee for me, thanks. Sophie?’
    â€˜Sophie doesn’t drink it at this time of night,’ said Ahmed paternally, giving me the bill.

Chapter Two
    Andy was hurtling along imaginary roads on my exercise bike when I took a mug of tea into him the next morning. He was also singing along to the radio, sharing Robert Merrill’s baritone part in the famous duet from Bizet’s
Pearlfishers
; his voice was still pleasing, if huskier these days. He peered at the tea, as if suspicious, but grinned when he saw it was milkless.
    I was about to apologise – I never seem to remember to put the milk in the fridge.
    â€˜No, I prefer it like that. Remember that diet I was telling you about? It’s best to avoid milk when you’re on it. Don’t know why – can’t be bothered with the philosophy. Just know it works.’
    He certainly looked well. He’d never been anything other than slender, apart from during his early twenties, when he was drinking as if he expected them to ration it. But now muscles showed finely under healthy skin. You certainly wouldn’t have guessed he was just concluding a gruelling world tour.
    I thought of my own body, dull-skinned and flabby after a jogging-less, knee-troubled couple of months, and made a note, when I wasn’t late for work, to ask him more about his diet. It wouldn’t be today, though. Before I got home,