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hour. Phil had taken his glasses off. ‘Wrap him in pigskin and bury him under Fort Knox. I can even tell you how deep: thirteen hundred and fifty feet. That’s one hundred and ten storeys.’ Another pause. ‘Don’t worry about that noise, listeners, it’s just the sound of my producer’s head gently thumping on the desk. Oh, one last thing: as it stands, what happened last week wasn’t an attack on democracy; if it was they’d have crashed a plane into Al Gore’s house. That’s it for today. Talk to you tomorrow, if I’m still here. News next after these vital pieces of consumerist propaganda.’
     
    ‘I was in Bond Street this morning. DKNY had no normal stock that I could see at all. Do you know what they had instead, Kenneth?’
    ‘No, I don’t know, Ceel. Why don’t you tell me?’
    ‘They had five thousand red T-shirts with the twin towers on them. Five thousand. Red. That was all. In the whole shop. It was like an art gallery, not a shop. I thought, Hey, that’s really touching, really artistic. I also thought, They’ll never sell all those, but somehow it didn’t matter.’ She turned in the bed and looked at me. ‘Everything seems so quiet, so spooky, don’t you think?’ She turned back again.
    I stroked away a rope of her long brown hair and licked at the valley between her shoulder blades. That hollow was the colour of milk chocolate and tasted of salt. I breathed in the warm scent of her skin, senses swimming, losing myself in the sweet, heady microclimate of her long, slim body.
    ‘It’s the planes,’ I said at last, smoothing a hand down her flank, over waist and hip to thigh. Her body, so light for somebody so definitely black, looked dark as old mahogany against the startling whiteness of the hotel sheets.
    ‘The planes?’ she asked, taking my hand and holding it in hers.
    ‘They’ve stopped them flying over the city on the way into Heathrow. So another Mr Atta can’t crash-dive into the Canary Wharf tower or the Houses of Parliament. Makes the whole place seem quieter.’
    (That day, sitting in the ruins of the abandoned party at Faye and Kulwinder’s, while it slowly dawned on those two that they would not be going to NYC for their honeymoon, at least not the following day and probably for many days, we kept going out onto the terrace to look at the Canary Wharf towers, tall against the skyline less than a mile away, half expecting to see them hit by a plane and crumble with the same awful grandeur as the first tower. ‘It’s Pearl Harbor II,’ we said. ‘They’ll fucking nuke Baghdad.’ ‘I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe I’m seeing this.’ ‘Where’s Superman? Where’s Batman? Where’s Spiderman?’ ‘Where’s Bruce Willis, or Tom Cruise, or Arnie, or Stallone?’ ‘The barbarians have seized the narrative.’ ‘Fuck, the bad guys are re-writing the scripts … !’ ‘ Challenger and Chernobyl were SF, Aum Shinrikyo and the Tokyo Underground was manga; this is a disaster movie directed by Satan.’
    Switching channels, some man on the Beeb was saying that when people claimed they’d seen people jumping from the towers they were really only seeing cladding falling off. Then you switched back and saw the bits of cladding holding hands as they jumped together, skirts blowing up around their bodies. Then the second tower collapsed, and there was no more jumping or falling to be done, just the catching up with the additional fragments of atrocity popping up and ploughing in elsewhere in America.)
    ‘I see,’ Celia said softly, turning away again. ‘You’re right.’ She stroked my hand. ‘But I mean it’s really quieter, too, Kenneth.’ Ceel was the only person apart from my mother who ever called me Kenneth. (Well, also apart from Ed, who sometimes called me Kennif, and Ed’s mum, who’s been known to call me Kennit, but that doesn’t count.) ‘Less … fewer people. Especially in places like Mayfair and Knightsbridge, and Chelsea,