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clever, aren’t you? Jack bloody know-it-all Vail.’
    The conversation went on, desultorily, in this vein for a few more miles while our speed died away until we were nudging no more than 20 mph. A convoy of army lorries and armoured half-tracks, lights blazing, overtook us, sturdy bronzed young men in voluminous camouflage drill noting our snail’s progress with patronising indifference on their torpid moon-round beef-fed faces. A machine-gun was set up in the back of one of the lorries, manned by a red-headed soldier with a fledgling moustache making practice sweeps across the three lanes of the motorway.
    There was no alternative: we would have to stop to allow thebelching green bastard time to cool down. The inside of the cab was like an oven; stripped down as I was to my T-shirt, sweat bathed my chest and ran down from my arm-pits.
    I climbed out of my seat and went to have a look at Bev. She was sleeping soundly, her livid suppurating face in repose. Her eyelids were like two raw peeled slugs. At least we couldn’t argue, Mira and me, without disturbing her.
    â€˜Are you coming outside?’
    â€˜No,’ Mira said. ‘I’ll stay here and watch her.’ Her eyes were like slits under her streaky gold dark-brown hair which was parted and swept back as if formed into a bow-wave by her wide forehead. ‘Try not to finish the bottle. I don’t think I could drive this thing,’ she said as I opened the side door and stepped outside.
    I walked along the hard shoulder to a concrete culvert built into the embankment. It was cooler here, shielded from the sun, and I was hidden from the motorway. The bottom of the culvert was dry, brittle sticks and bleached stones and gravel piled up into little hillocks by the passage of water. Lower down these dry runnels disappeared into an iron grille which led to a drainage conduit under the motorway itself.
    After the third swallow I began to feel blearily benign and lulled by the smear of traffic sliding past. I didn’t give a shit what Mira thought and loved her with all my heart. She blamed me for our predicament, which hurt me deeply, because she was right. I felt stricken and ashamed by the knowledge and bitterly defiant, – more, angry, incensed, choked up to boiling point. Worst of all I had lost her respect. I saw myself through her eyes and could hardly bear the agony. Why were women so strong? Their abiding strength was an affront, a perpetual sneer. What had they to be so damned complacent about? True enough, they shouldered all the burdens, took all the crass crap of men with a gently patient smile, were battered and bruised into submission,
and yet were not defeated!
Not only not defeated, but triumphant, victorious. Could you beat that? Could you credit it? What hope was there for the male gender when faced with an indefatigable, accusing, reproachful, infinitely pliant and forbearing enemysuch as that? How could you possibly win? Where was the justice in that? Justice? Don’t make me laugh.
    I took another drink to dilute the tears and a hollow voice said, ‘I need help and you need help. If you help me I’ll help you. Is it a deal?’
    The man in the culvert was Urban Brown (his real name I swear, not a made-up one) and he was on the run, you could tell that at once by his face and his shoes. He was wearing a grimy corduroy shirt and filthy jeans with holes in the knees and arse, and carrying a heavy thick black overcoat wrapped into a bundle and tied up with string. He had a triangular sallow face and prominent bones, deep vertical creases in his cheeks, and a dark-blue jawline that could never look clean-shaven even five minutes after the expert attentions of a barber with a cut-throat razor. To categorise him: a starved crafty working-class face: insolent too; harbouring grudges and zealously storing up slights, real and imagined. Like many left-wing activists he was more interested in revenge than