The Drop

was I hadn’t shagged Sarah and I was starting to feel more than a little aggrieved with Laura. To use her phrase, she had not been there for me last night and Sarah had. Now she was treating me like a bad boy and I’d done fuck-all to deserve it. I didn’t count the occasional fleeting thought about what Sarah looked like under my football shirt.
    I was going to argue the toss but I felt indescribably weary. Watching Laura virtually foaming at the mouth as she continued to bollock Sarah, I suddenly got a vivid insight into my future; a sexless, mundane place, punctuated by meaningless rows over nothing on the way back from Ikea. I knew deep down that, if we still had something worth saving, I could have turned things around. I could have forced her to listen, told her I loved her, made her see that Sarah and I were little more than longstanding, platonic friends. I could have got her to believe me. I was sure of it. I just didn’t want to. In fact, all of a sudden, I didn’t give a shit.
    Sarah was fighting her corner. ‘I only stayed to make sure he didn’t have a concussion. That’s meant to be your job, but you didn’t care!’
    ‘Don’t give me that, you little slag. Do you think I don’t know what’s been going on? That I haven’t seen the way you look at him, like you want to have his bloody babies!’
    Sarah’s face reddened. She looked like she was just about to explode and knock Laura out. It was time to intervene.
    ‘Laura,’ I said it very calmly and very quietly and because of that they both turned to listen to me, ‘I realise you are upset but what you think has happened hasn’t happened, though that’s not even what’s important right now.’
    ‘What?’ she asked me incredulously, ‘what do you mean it’s not important?’
    ‘No,’ I assured her, ‘the important thing is this; if you keep calling my good friend Sarah here a slag, very soon she is going to get really tired of it. She is going to walk over there and grab you by the hair then she is going to bitch-slap you all round my apartment and throw you out.’ For the second time that morning Laura’s mouth gaped open. She looked at me, then she looked at Sarah who nodded at her slowly for emphasis, but I wasn’t finished. ‘More to the point, I’m going to do sod-all to stop her. Have you got that?’
    Laura broke down then. Her body seemed to crumple, her face sagged and the tears flowed freely. I was surprised by the fact that I didn’t care about her tears any more. There had been a time when I would have done anything to stop her from crying. Now I think I had become immune to them. I just wanted her to shut up and go away.
    ‘You can come back tonight for your things, I won’t be in,’ I told her as she turned away from me, ‘make sure you take your candles, your throws and all of your bloody cushions with you.’ Then I added for good measure, ‘now fuck off out of my flat.’
    When she finally stopped sobbing long enough to say something, she turned back to me and wailed, ‘don’t you love me any more?’
    ‘Love you?’ I asked her as if she was completely mad, ‘I don’t even like you!’
    Laura went without another word.

TWENTY-FIVE
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    S harp brought a bloke down to my flat to make an identikit drawing, so I didn’t have to go into the station. He told the artist it was for my protection.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I gave him some bullshit about you being an innocent caught up in a gangland feud.’
    ‘I am,’ I said, which made him laugh out loud though that wasn’t my intention.
    The artist quizzed me about every aspect of my attacker’s features, as his hand skimmed over his pad. With a last confident stroke of his pencil, he finished and turned it round to show me the result. There, looking right back at me, was an unmistakeable likeness of Weasel-face. I noted with satisfaction that if you knew him you would have recognised him, except now that same face would be sporting stitches where the broken shard of urn had sliced deep into his skin.
    After the identikit guy had gone, I asked Sharp, ‘what next?’
    ‘Officially, I’ll be circulating his image round all the nicks in the area. On the assumption he’s an outsider, I’ll be concentrating on other forces. I can’t see a local villain wanting to rob one of Bobby Mahoney’s men,’ he shrugged, ‘might as well dig his own grave.’
    ‘And unofficially?’
    ‘I’ll