Little Triggers Read Online Free Page A

probably would. But I just wanted to let you know. That’s all.”
    “Thank you.”
    They both sat there for what seemed like a century. Eventually Larkin stood up.
    “Well, I have to go now,
Dave.
I’ve got the prejudices of Middle England to confirm. Thanks for the chat.” Larkin turned to go.
    “Great, great. We must grab a beer sometime.”
    Grab a beer?
“Yeah,
Dave
, smashing. I’ll see if I’ve got a window. Sometime.”
    “Steve.”
    Larkin turned around.
    “You are all right, aren’t you? I mean …
all right
?”
    Larkin looked at Bolland. The smug-bastard mask had slipped away, leaving an expression of genuine concern.
    “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”
    “Good. I know work can be a help, taking your mind off things and all that, but … well, if you’re not, well, you know, old friends and everything…” He seemed to be having difficulty in finding the right words. Larkin was almost touched.
    “Thanks, Dave. You’re a good mate.”
    And he left the office and went to work.

3: Deep Pools Of Truth
    Larkin drove down to Scotswood. If the Golf looked conspicuous behind the Central Station, then here it stood out like a Sunderland fan at a Newcastle game.
    The area consisted of one dilapadated concrete monolith after another, with a few rows of two-storey houses thrown in: a half-hearted stab at community. But most of them had boarded up windows and doors sporting huge padlocks. That, and the blackened fronts, marked them out as easy, but pointless, targets for roaming gangs.
    Brightly-coloured boards announced the imminence of urban renewal and promised a safe new future funded by EC money. But the glib declarations had the hollow and hopeless ring of a politician at election time. The Rebirth Of The Region didn’t extend to here, noted Larkin.
    Although the sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue, announcing the last burst of a dying summer, it couldn’t make Scotswood look jovial. Larkin didn’t know how Jane could bear to live here. He didn’t know how anyone could. He rounded another corner, dodging the craters in the road, and thought back to his morning.
    He’d just returned to the office from his conversation with the rabid landowning squire and found the message from Jane waiting. But before he could phone her, Bolland had asked him how the encounter had gone.
    To describe the bloke as right-wing, Larkin had informed him, was to say that Hitler liked to start a bit of trouble. He had started off ranting about the bypass protesters; his diatribe had gone on to embrace the benefits of National Service, the wonders of capitalpunishment, the laxity of the immigration laws and the evils of homosexuality. In no particular order.
    “Wonderful,” Bolland had replied. “Extreme opinions, irrespective of the truth, make the best copy.” He habitually spoke in epigrams.
    “Yeah,” said Larkin. “It was when he started on compulsory sterilisation for the poor and the unemployed that it got me.”
    Bolland smiled. “Not as bizarre a suggestion as you would think, Steve. Even that well-known vegetarian and left-wing intellectual George Bernard Shaw once vigorously championed the idea.”
    “Really?”
    “Oh, yes. I’ve found that no one is ever fully good. And no one is ever fully bad. And nothing is black and white.” He turned to go. “Oh, and Steve?”
    “Yes?”
    “Make it angry. The
Mail
will pay more.”
    He had hated writing the article; hated putting his name to something he patently didn’t agree with. He had consoled himself by running over the events of the previous evening as the article took shape. The more he thought about it, the more justified he felt his actions had been. At least it was a way to make a difference, he thought, as he wrote. And he clung to that fact like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood.
    And started to think about Jane Howell.
    He had met her over six months ago, just after his return to Newcastle. It had been a boring party; she’d livened it up for