Bar None Read Online Free Page A

were all old and decayed. "And there were fat rats," he says. "Dead cows, skeletal chickens, fat rats."
    Someone pops another lid from a bottle of beer, and that metallic snick becomes the mark between one conversation and the next.
    Michael mentions that he has seen other people. I pause with a bottle half-raised to my lips. "But they're not like you," he says.
    "How do you mean?" I ask. The fire crackles, and a log spits as a bubble of sap explodes. Jacqueline, sitting close to the fire so that there are no shadows about her, reaches out one lazy foot and stomps on the ember sizzling into the carpet.
    "Different," Michael says. "Moved on."
    I don't like what he is saying, nor his tone of voice, and I ask, "What in the name of fuckery does 'moved on' mean?"
    He looks right at me. He has been calm and casual all this time. But now I am the centre of his attention, and it feels as though I am being scrutinised by something massive and way, way beyond my comprehension. "I'm not sure yet," he says. "Isn't that wonderful?"
    I look away and take another swig of beer. I close my eyes. The conversation continues, but I think of Michael's watery eyes and the sense that his gaze could bore straight to the centre of my fractured soul.
     
    Theakston's Old Peculier, deep and dark and heavy, a smooth roasty beer with a hint of chocolate and an unmistakeable vinous aftertaste, a complex beer, rich and powerful and as familiar to my tongue as the taste of Ashley's skin, the hint of her breath, the tang of sweat on her neck as we make love. Theakston's Old Peculier, the brown bottle still wet and cold even though we had been sitting in Paul's back garden for over an hour, watching him cook and listening to his band's new demo, and Ashley was beside me, drinking her own drink and making me the centre of her universe by never looking at me. That's how I marked the depth of our love: we could be together so completely without touching or saying anything. We breathed the same air.
    Paul cooked steak and chicken quarters and pork loin chops on the gas barbeque. I could feel the heat of it from where I sat, but even on that hot summer day it was not uncomfortable. He sprinkled spiced oil over the steak and stood back when a gush of flame licked upward for a few seconds, sealing the meat. The pork was thickly coated in a peanut glaze, slowly bubbling and turning dark.
    "You honestly think they'll close it?" Ashley said. We had been talking about the recent outbreak of bird flu in France, and the Prime Minister's comments about closing the channel tunnel. There had been a lot of piss-taking in the media about that: a threat from the skies, so the PM proposes protecting his nation by closing a tunnel beneath the sea. But as ever, Paul had theories about it that seemed to hold water. He spent a lot of time on the 'net, mixing with other conspiracy-theory fanatics and picking up information from sources I wouldn't even know how to find. Most people thought he was plain nuts. I'd known him long enough to know that was not entirely true.
    More often than not, Paul was right. Ashley had only known him for as long as she'd known me, almost a year. I believed she was beginning to see what Paul was all about.
    "I'm sure they will," he said, turning a steak. "It's just a matter of time. The flu's already jumped from bird to human in fifteen cases. Now if it starts getting passed from person to person, we'll have to take advantage of our island state. And an island doesn't have a direct link to the mainland. The tunnel's always been a bad idea. I know a guy who worked on it, old bloke down the pub, and he and I have had lots of chats about it. It's common knowledge they left the tunnelling machines buried in the walls down there, and most people believe it's because it would have been too expensive to bring them back out."
    "And that isn't the reason?" Ashley asked.
    Paul shook his head. "'Course not. The real reason is, those machines carry nukes. One code,