What became of us

‘we were only borrowing them. It was a kind of dare. I’d never seen the sunrise on May the 1st and he had only done it with an alarm clock, and we had to keep ourselves awake, so...’
    Ian stepped back hard on her foot.
    ‘Can I ask if you’ve been drinking, sir?’
    The policeman continued to address Ian.
    ‘A couple glasses of wine at dinner, officer.’
    The policeman looked suspiciously at Annie, as though he was trying to call up a computergenerated image of a suspect rather than the publicity photo of a sitcom star. From experience, she knew that it would take about a minute for his brain to click through the options and finally remember where he had seen her before. She knew that there was a wonderfully witty line waiting to be said to him, but she couldn’t think what it was. Seconds of silence felt like hours spent staring at the screen of her word processor when she was blocked. Then, like a miraculous piece of inspiration, the policeman’s radio began talking to him. He continued to stare at them, ignoring the nonsensical blasts of buzz, and then he cautioned them humourlessly, as if they were students who spent their lives performing dangerous pranks:
    ‘I’m going to let you off with a warning on this occasion, but I don’t want to see you without lights again and I shall remind you that it is an offence to be drunk in charge of a pedal cycle.’
    ‘Now just a minute...’ Annie began to protest, but Ian interrupted.
    ‘That’s very kind of you, officer. Thank you for being so understanding. We’ll walk back to town, shall we?’
    ‘If you wouldn’t mind, sir.’
    The policeman looked at Ian, then at her. Annie opened her mouth to say something, but Ian was quicker.
    ‘Come on darling, let’s do as the officer says, shall we?’ he said, taking her arm. He and the officer exchanged a look of sympathy as if it were part of a man’s suffering to put up with silly women. The policeman gave her another frown, and then turned and walked away.
    ‘Be quiet!’ Ian hissed under his breath.
    ‘What a bloody nerve!’
    Ian smiled and waved as the police car drove away. Then, as soon as it disappeared from view they both got back on their bikes and began to pedal along side by side at a leisurely pace.
    ‘I don’t believe that drunk in charge of a pedal cycle is really a proper charge,’ Annie said.
    ‘I think it is.’
    ‘So, would they breathalyse you?’
    ‘I don’t know. I remember a friend of mine had a friend who was done for it. He was cycling on the pavement and this police car was crawling along beside him, but he was so wrecked that he thought that they were having a race...’
    ‘That happened to a friend of a friend of mine too,’ Annie said.
    ‘Perhaps it was the same one?’
    ‘I think it was probably one of those apocryphal Oxford stories.’
    ‘Like the one about the philosophy student who went to his final exam and the question was “Is this a question?” and he wrote, “If it is, then this is the answer”.’
    ‘Yeah, and the one about the student who telephoned his college on Christmas Day and said “Is that Jesus?” and when the porter said yes, he said “Happy Birthday!” ’
    They shrieked with laughter as they pedalled past their old college.
    ‘Hey, have you noticed something,’ Annie shouted.
    ‘No, what?’ he asked.
    ‘It’s light. We’ve missed the bloody dawn again. And it was all your fault for chatting to that bloody policeman... “oh thank you so much, officer, you’ve been so understanding, officer...” ’ She put a finger in her mouth and pretended to puke.
    ‘If I’d let you deal with it, we’d have been charged with theft by now,’ Ian defended himself.
    ‘I thought he was bound to have a report of the theft. I was only trying to offer our mitigating circumstances straight away.’
    ‘Don’t you remember the guys we stole the bikes from? Did they really look as if they would have gone straight to the police?’
    ‘Oh all right,’ Annie conceded, as they pedalled the last stretch of St Giles. ‘So since you’re so clever, what are we going to do with them now?’
    ‘Put them back where we found them,’ Ian suggested.

    Cornmarket was deserted. They rested the two bikes against the lamp-post outside McDonald’s.
    ‘They’re going to think it was one hell of a trip they were on when they find them again,’ Annie said with a smile, which turned instantly into a wince of pain.
    ‘What’s the problem?’ Ian