Who's Sorry Now? Read Online Free

eyeliner pencil and a couple of tightly rolled condoms – what did that say?
    â€˜My fucking right of way!’ Kreitman yelled after him. ‘Try that again, you moron, and I’ll have you in the fucking gutter!’
    Almost out of sight by now, for Kreitman delivered long sentences, the cyclist put one of his free hands behind his back and showed Kreitman his finger. Was it painted?
    â€˜Make me Mayor of London for just five minutes, Charlie,’ Kreitman fumed, ‘invest me with the power and I’ll have every sanctimonious fucking faggot cyclist in the capital in clink.’
    â€˜Only the faggot ones?’
    â€˜What gets me is they think they’ve got some God-given dispensation, the lot of them, just because they’re not punching holes in the ozone layer. I’ve seen the future, Charlie – we fetishise these arseholes and they run us down! Serves us right.’
    What amazed Charlie was how furious Kreitman had become, how quickly and seamlessly furious, given the smallness of the offence and the number of reasons (five plus four) Kreitman had to be happy.
    This didn’t happen every time the two men lunched late intown. Mostly they would plunge back peaceably into twilit Soho, enjoying the nightly handover, the silver cans of film spilling stardust as they skipped between production houses, the workers leaking home and the theatregoers nosing out, the shops shuttering, the rubbish piling, the bars starting to fill, the daytime beggars leaving with their sleeping bags over their shoulders, ceding to the night shift, and the mobs of inflamed teenage boys from penurious countries, bound in a sort of helix of indecision, drifting apart but always attached to one another, like the arms of a kindergarten mobile. In their different ways, both Marvin Kreitman and Charlie Merriweather felt at home here; nothing to do with the film and television industry, or the wholesale jewellery trade, or the silk merchants, or the Lithuanian lowlifes; what they enjoyed was the peculiarly English early-evening melancholy, the sensible damped-down expectancy, the scruffiness taking from the excitement, unless scruffiness happened to be what excited you …
    â€˜What I can’t decide,’ Kreitman said, ‘is whether it’s like peeling off an expensive whore and finding cheap cotton underwear, or undressing a scrubber and finding La Perla.’
    â€˜I wouldn’t know,’ said Merriweather, setting his big chin. ‘I wouldn’t know either way.’
    Whereupon they would decrease their pace, ring their wives on their mobiles, and decide on somewhere to have dinner.
    Tonight, and it was to be a night different from all other nights for both of them, they chose a big noisy Italian which Kreitman’s window dresser had told him about and where, therefore, he couldn’t take her mother – one of the new steel-cool New York Italians, sans napery and sans space between the tables, in which, supposing they let you in, you were laughed at if you asked for
fegato
or
tiramisu
and waitresses as touchy as grenades took you through pastas named after eminent Mafiosi.
    â€˜Christ, Charlie, what’s
cavatappi?
’
    â€˜Ask the waitress.’
    â€˜I’m frightened to. But it comes with a sauce of smoked turkey, seared leeks and brandied shallots. Nice and light. I’ll have that. You?’
    â€˜
Elicoidali
with five cheeses.’
    â€˜What’s
elicoidali?
’
    â€˜What it sounds like. Italian for coronary.’
    â€˜Then don’t have it.’
    â€˜Too late to start worrying about that.’
    He rubbed his great dog’s-paw hands together, daring death. Charlie the high-risk voluptuary. Around food he was still the prep-school glutton, smacking his chops and popping his cheeks to cram in one more lolly. Be the same around the you-know-what, Kreitman thought, deliberately courting ugliness, not himself yet, not recovered from the