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beg of you; whatever you do, don’t drink it.’
    I half-heartedly considered trying to get to within bottle-handing-out range of him, but the press of people was too great.
    I turned to Amy and held up my hands.
    ‘Never mind,’ she said.
    We leaned back against the east-facing parapet. She put out her hand to shake. ‘Good new game, Ken.’ She looked flushed, excited.
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said, keeping hold of her hand. ‘I liked it more in the old days.’
    ‘Really?’
    More big cheers as the full Cava bottles hit with satisfyingly loud thuds and booms. ‘Shake them first! Shake them up first!’ somebody was shouting.
    ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Call me a purist, but I feel the soul kind of went out of it when we switched from fruit and lost our amateur status.’
    ‘You can’t live in the past, Ken.’
    ‘I suppose.’
    ‘We should be proud we were there at the start.’
    ‘You’re right. Was it my idea or yours?’ I asked.
    ‘Maybe we had it together.’
    ‘Indeed.’
    ‘Absolutely.’
    ‘Great minds.’
    ‘Idea; time had come.’
    ‘Not about ownership; about result.’
    ‘Destiny.’
    ‘-’s Child.’
    ‘Synchronicity.’
    ‘The Police,’ I said, just as my mobile went (I keep mine on vibrate, too). As I pulled it out of my jacket, Amy’s ring-tone sounded; something classical I knew but couldn’t name.
    ‘Ha-ha,’ she said. ‘Synchronicity indeed.’
    I laughed and looked at the display on my phone; my producer, calling from the office. I heard one or two other phones going off around the place and thought I could hear the land-line in the apartment too and wondered hazily whether for some bizarre reason everybody here had something urgent they had set alarms for, a little after two o’clock on a Tuesday in September.
    ‘Yo, Phil,’ I said. Amy answered her call too.
    ‘What?’
    ‘ What? ’
    ‘New York?’
    ‘The what?’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘The World Trade Center? Isn’t that—?’
    ‘A plane? What, a big plane, like a Jumbo or something?’
    ‘You mean, like, the two big, um, skyscrapers?’
    Kulwinder was walking back through the crowd of people as more phones went off and faces started to look puzzled and the atmosphere began to change and chill around us. He was heading for the loft’s main space again, talking to somebody on his phone. ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll put the TV on …’

Two
    DRESS-DOWN WEDNESDAY

    ‘Half Man Half Limp Bizkit there. Their Mission Impossible theme-ette. Hasn’t been on the play list for a while, Phil. You attempting to make some sort of point with that title?’
    ‘Not me, boss.’
    ‘You sure, Phil?’ I looked across the desk at him. We were in our usual studio at Capital Live!. I sat surrounded by screens, buttons and keyboards like some sort of commodities dealer, because that’s the way studios have gone, even in the relatively short time that I’ve been in the wonderful world of radio broadcasting; you had to search for the two CD players - in this studio, up to my right between the e-mail screen and the callers’ details screen - to reassure yourself that you weren’t some suit playing the futures market. Only the microphone, angle-poised out from the main console, gave the game away.
    ‘Positive,’ Phil said, blinking behind his glasses. Phil’s glasses had thick black frames, like Michael Caine as Harry Palmer, or Woody Allen as himself. Phil Ashby was a big, gentle, rumpled-looking guy with thick, unruly, prematurely salt-and-pepper hair (the grey entirely down to me, he said, though I had photographic evidence to the contrary) and a slight West-country burr to his voice; he had a relatively slow, drawly, almost sleepy delivery, which, though I’d never admit it to him, complemented my own voice. A running joke we’ve used is that he’s on permanent Valium while I’m forever speeding, and one day we’ll swap drugs and just both sound normal. Phil had been my producer for the last year here at Capital Live!. Another two