Bar None Read Online Free Page B

one button, one finger, and the tunnel is closed forever."
    Ashley glanced at me and raised an eyebrow, but I just shrugged.
    "You don't believe me?" Paul said.
    "It's not that," Ashley said, "it's just that . . . it seems so unlikely."
    "Why?" A pork joint was spitting fat and flaming, but Paul's attention was distracted. He hated it when people doubted him. I was one of the few who could see past his fanaticism to the inherent truth in many of his beliefs, and very often that scared me.
    "Well, who'd do something like that?"
    "The government. The military. Whoever owns them."
    "All three?"
    "Believe me, sweet cakes, they're all one." Paul went back to cooking, and Ashley moved closer to me so that she could put her hand on my knee.
    It turned into one of those afternoons and evenings that you remember forever. At the time it's just another drink, another meal, another long chat with good friends, and you don't perceive the special sheen to the day until much, much later. Then you look back on it and realise that it was one of the days of your life. How could you have not realised what was happening? How can the look in your lover's eye have escaped you, or the sense of peaceful kinship between you and the guy who'd been your friend since you were nine, and who would die thirty years later, just two days before the woman you had loved all that time? But that's the thing about these most special of days: you can't make them special. You can't sit there and think to yourself, Right, this is going to be a day I remember forever. They just imprint themselves on your brain: the way your girl looks at you, something your friends says, the taste of a steak, the sensation of getting pleasantly drunk while the world goes on about you. You may forget that day for ten years, but then you'll be grocery shopping, agonising over what to have for dinner, and a particular moment from that day will leap into your head, a snapshot accompanied by an intense emotional recollection. It's as powerful as déjà vu, and you'll say to yourself, Damn, that was a fucking good time! I wish it could all be like that again.
    But wishing cannot make it so. And you may think that times are worse than they once were, but you know what? Another ten years on, you'll have a flashback to that shopping trip and the evening that followed it when you ate a good curry and drank Wolf Blass and watched the God-awful remake of The Haunting , and that too will become one of the days of your life.
    Sometimes days age like a good wine, and only time can make them special.
     

Three: Double Drop
    We offer Michael the bed-settee in the old games room. It's back past the kitchen, tucked in between the utility room and a store room stacked with old, bad family portraits. Michael is grateful, and as he stands to wish us goodnight I think he sheds a tear. "Goodnight," he says, and I nod. The Theakston's has made a blur of my senses. I like that.
    He leaves the room, and we all fall quiet as we hear his footsteps retreat along the hallway. He must feel very uncomfortable , I think. Waiting to hear us start talking about him . But something strange happens: none of us begins. The room remains silent but for the spit and crackle of logs settling in the fire.
    I rise at the same time as Cordell. "I'm hitting the sack," I say. I smile at the others and leave the room. I think back to that long-ago time with Ashley in Paul's back garden, and remember the day twelve months ago when an explosion ripped the channel tunnel apart, killing thousands and making Britain an island once again. It had not worked, of course. Paul had called me that very evening to say he'd found a sore on his chest.
    I walk upstairs, listening to the resounding silence of the people I have come to think of, very quickly, as the last friends I will ever have. And I wonder whether I will live long enough for this to become one of the days of my life.
     
    I meet Jessica on the landing. I am the only one who