Thicker Than Water

Because last night we’d been down in Peckham at the Ice-Maker’s, for the third time this week, and when we got back Pen had been too wired to sleep. So we’d talked until the early hours, about old times and counter-factual worlds, until the alcohol drowned the adrenalin and we finally staggered off to our beds.

Half a bottle of Courvoisier XO on an empty stomach, and less than two hours’ sleep: the perfect way to start the day, if you want it to feel as long as two days and be filled end-to-end with pain.

I don’t have a dressing gown, but I am the proud owner of a Russian army greatcoat - the latest in a long lineage - so I made that do instead.

The bare boards of the stairs were cool under my feet as I trudged down from my attic roost, feeling like something simultaneously thin and fragile and flammable. What time was it, anyway? It had to be well past four o’clock; but, since the half-moon of grubby glass over the door was pitch black, it was still before dawn. Either that or I’d been woken up in the middle of a total eclipse. Someone was going to pay for this, if only in the coinage of over-the-top invective.

Pen came out of her bedroom just as I got to the first-floor landing. She was wearing a black silk kimono with a motif of cranes and floating islands. The raven on her shoulder looked like someone’s sardonic comment on the twee chinoiserie, but it still set off her long red hair to good effect: no pallid bust of Pallas ever made as good a perch as incendiary Pen.

She looked spooked, though, and I knew why it was that she hadn’t just rolled over in bed and ignored the door knocker’s peremptory summons.

‘Fix, don’t answer it!’ she said, her voice hoarse from sleep. ‘It’s got to be the police. They’ve found out!’"

"I put my hands on her shoulders to stiffen her moral fibre - not usually necessary with Pen, but these were special circumstances. ‘You didn’t do anything illegal,’ I reminded her. ‘I did, but they probably won’t be able to pin it on me - and you’re clean even if they do.

Anyway, it’s been two weeks now. If they’d had anything on us, they would have dragged us in for questioning ages ago. So whoever it is that’s down there waking up the neighbours, it’s not about Rafi. Why don’t you go back to bed and let me deal with it?’ I made my tone as emollient as I could: I’d only become Pen’s lodger again a couple of months before, and I was anxious not to spoil the warm afterglow of our reconciliation.

‘Bugger that,’ Pen snapped back.