Pulse

‘And … why did you feel like it?’
    ‘Because I did.’
    No, he must have misheard, or misunderstood, or something. ‘Look, sorry, maybe I walked you too hard –’
    ‘I’m fine, I said.’
    ‘Was it because –’
    ‘I told you, I felt like it.’
    They walked away from the gritstone edge and then down, in silence, to where they’d left the car. As he began unlacing his boots, she lit a cigarette. Well, he was sorry, but he was going to get to the bottom of it.
    ‘Was it something to do with me?’
    ‘No, it was something to do with me. I’m the one who screamed.’
    ‘Do you feel like doing it again? Now?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I mean, if you felt like screaming again, now, what would it feel like?’
    ‘Geoff, it would feel like wanting to scream again, now.’
    ‘And when do you think you’ll do it again?’
    She didn’t answer that, and neither of them was surprised. She stamped out her Silk Cut beneath a Supalite, and began to undo the laces, flicking bits of bracken on to the tarmac.
    ‘4 hrs inc lunch Grouse,’ he wrote in his walking log. ‘Weather fine.’ He added a red L in the final column, beneath a constant vertical of red Ls. In bed, that night, he slept diagonally, and jolly good luck to him, he thought. The next morning, over breakfast, he leafed through a copy of Country Walking and filled out the application form to join the Ramblers. It said he could pay either by cheque or direct debit. He thought about this for a while, and chose direct debit.

At Phil & Joanna’s 4: One in Five
    IT WAS LATE October, but Phil was determined to light a fire with some apple logs they’d brought back from the country. The chimney, rarely used, didn’t draw fully, and from time to time aromatic smoke drifted back into the room. We had talked yet again about bankers’ bonuses and Obama’s continuing troubles, and the fact that the Mayor of London didn’t seem to have decommissioned any bendy buses, so were almost relieved to get on to the subject of Joanna’s new maplewood work surface.
    ‘No, it’s good-looking and really hard-wearing.’
    ‘Like the rest of us.’
    ‘Do you have to oil it a lot?’
    ‘There’s a formula: once a day for a week, once a week for a month, once a month for a year, and thereafter whenever you feel like it.’
    ‘Sounds like the formula for married sex.’
    ‘Dick, you beast.’
    ‘No wonder you got married so often, my friend.’
    ‘Which reminds me –’
    ‘Don’t you think those are the three most sinister words in the English language – “Which reminds me”?’
    ‘… are we going to report on the homework we were set last time?’
    ‘Homework?’
    ‘Whether you made the beast with two backs when you got home.’
    ‘Were we meant to? I don’t remember.’
    ‘Oh, let’s skip this.’
    ‘Yes, do you mind if we have a moratorium on sex-talk just for one evening?’
    ‘Only if you first answer the following question. Do you think – present company excepted – that people lie more about sex than about anything else?’
    ‘Is that supposed to be the case?’
    ‘There’s good anecdotal evidence, I’d say.’
    ‘And, I think, scientific evidence.’
    ‘You mean, people admitting to social surveys that they’d lied about sex in previous surveys?’
    ‘There’s no one else present, after all.’
    ‘Not unless you go dogging.’
    ‘Dogging?’
    ‘Don’t you have that in the States, Larry? A couple doing it in the car in a lay-by or somewhere public, so that other people can creep up and watch. It’s an old English custom, like morris dancing.’
    ‘Well, maybe in West Virginia …’
    ‘OK, that’s enough, boys.’
    ‘The wider point is, how would we know if they were telling the truth?’
    ‘How do we know anything’s true?’
    ‘Is that a high-philosophical question?’
    ‘More a low-practical one. In general. How do we know exactly? I remember some intellectual on the radio discussing the start of the Second World War, and coming to the conclusion that all you could say for certain was, “ Something happened.” I was very struck by that.’
    ‘Oh, come on. We’ll be in Did Six Million Die? territory at this rate. Or, the moon-landing shots were faked because of that supposedly impossible shadow. Or, 9/11 was planned by the Bush administration.’
    ‘Well, only fascists question the first and only nutters believe the second.’
    ‘And the 9/11 attacks couldn’t have been planned by the Bush