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within her. Irresistible. I understood exactly his excitement. God help me, I still picture the gold thread she had woven into her hair.
    When Tariq gave her the chocolate her eyes grew even wider. Like a schoolgirl’s. The sanctions meant the people were starving. There were beggars on the street and malnutrition in Baghdad. One of the world’s great cities. It was unheard of.
    Tariq, I thought. She will pull you back. She will hang chains on your soul when you need to be free. Those eyes will work a spell.
    What happened to Tariq? I ask.
    Oh, another irony, says Mohammed. Irony followed him until the end. He became a tank commander, in charge of a T-72, the Arad Babil. You know what that is in English? The Lion of Babylon.
    I gaze at the gods on the glass shelves. I’m still unsure how Mohammed reached the UK, but he senses the unspoken question.
    Yes, this is home now, he says. Maybe Amman was a little fraught. Eventually I hired other drivers and took my belongings to Beirut where I have a friend. Then, when the money started to come in, I decided to travel. See the world. This is a pleasant apartment, no?
    Canford Cliffs means money’s no problem today, I say. But it was in Baghdad.
    Mohammed looks hard at me. He is a man of sixty now, his moustache grey.
    I apologise, he says. For crying that is. How crass it must have seemed.
    Those were strange times.
    No, my friend. Those were good times. Well, better times, despite the embargo. These are the strange times. The dangerous times. He whose name we could never speak, he whose photograph was in every room, he was maybe not so mad after all.
    You miss those times?
    The certainties? Yes. Being able to sit in a restaurant or walk down the street without some imbecile blowing his useless carcass up beside you? Yes I miss those times.
    There are no terrorists in Poole, I laugh.
    Not on the London Underground either, he says.
    We’re silent for a while. Mohammed has served almond biscuits. They’re too hard for my teeth.
    You know, he laughs, they bombed our national archive. Most of the old documents went up in flames. What was left was put into freezers but the electricity was always off. On, off. Then, a little later, the Americans arrived in Babylon. They built a helipad there. Bulldozers flattened a site in the immemorial earth. America, the stupid country, the new Mongols, brought history to an end.
    We’re quiet again and I’m still looking around. The leather, the tiny gods. On the plasma widescreen a dancer in a yellow bodystocking is silently circling on a black stage. She looks like an ash key falling to earth. Round and round in the darkness she goes.
    Mohammed has made the best of things, I think, glancing up. He understood what was valuable. The time to stay, the time to leave. But when have I ever done that? That Lottery job would have sorted me out. Given me a chance to show my strengths. And the bloody film. All those hours we recorded were reduced to a fragment. At night in Baghdad I would lie awake and look at the green light on the battery charger. If it winked I would panic. But the film we cut doesn’t tell the story. How could it? Ten hours of tape wait unseen in an attic and nobody gives a damn. It might have been a masterpiece. Maybe it still could.
    There was a doctor I filmed. He took us to view the terrible twins. These had just been born and lay together in an incubator. Something was wrong with them and they weren’t going to live. They looked like two halves of a walnut.
    In my experience, the doctor said, they are unique.
    I remember their wizened faces. Ugly as cicadas. Whatever their illnesses, we thought uranium was responsible. When we arrived home we offered the footage to all the news channels but nobody wanted to know. The parents lived north of Basra. That was where Prettyboy and his mates had been chucking DU around.
    There is an intercom buzz. Mohammed’s lunch is arriving. Steak and salad from