17

By morning Karim had emailed him his mother’s recipes, along with a picture of her outside the Grand Mosque in Damascus where John the Baptist was buried. She was smiling at the camera. He wondered where she was now, if she had left Syria, like Karim. The pictures of the shattered cities of Homs and Aleppo had vanished from the news. There were no more pictures of civilians choking on gas. Perhaps she was in a desert camp. Perhaps she was trapped somewhere. He wondered whether, if Obama bombed Damascus, John the Baptist’s head would blow right into the air like a football. American style. Would anyone be there to catch it? Touchdown in the end zone with no interception. The end of an era.

He got a drink of water from the kitchen, then came back to the computer and deleted half the sugar from Karim’s recipes, credited the café and set out for his appointment with Brenda. ‘It’s 07.05,’ she said, when he ran up. ‘You’re late.’ The sky was pink and blue with thin wisps of cloud drifting across its face.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It won’t happen again.’

‘You’re lucky I’m in a good mood.’ She pulled her ear-plugs out and pocketed her phone. ‘The best news: it looks like Miliband is going to lose Labour the next election. He’s gone all Red Ed, freezing fuel prices and stopping the swing voters in their tracks. Until his conference speech, they were all set to vote him back in. He’s sent the seventeen per cent drift from the Con–Dem coalition running back to Cameron with their tails between their legs. Cheers, Ed.’ She gave a mock salute. ‘Shall we get started? I know, shouldn’t mix politics and pleasure. Just had to share.’

He tried to smile, moved his lips back over his teeth and then looked down, unable to relax his cheeks. He drew a deep breath. ‘I want you to pretend you’re exercising in water,’ he said. ‘Take the warm-up slow, and stretch through the length of the muscle.’ He jumped his feet wide, raised his arms in a starburst across his face in slow motion and lifted his chest up. ‘Lift the chest to open. Chin to chest and then open your arms out to the side and repeat. Now, drop the heel of the back leg to stretch the calf.’

‘Let’s skip the warm-up,’ she said, ‘I have a meeting at eight thirty.’

Archie ignored her comment. ‘Imagine the water is up to your chest.’

She folded her arms. ‘I don’t buy this water metaphor. It’s fitness class not a rehearsal for global warming. Talking of which, did you see that intergovernmental report, the IPCC; claims we’re ninety-five per cent responsible. The sea will be up eighty centimetres by the end of the century. Lucky we won’t be here.’

A picture of his son floating past in orange arm-bands popped into his mind. He laughed. He had been the only dad at the water babies class.

‘Sometimes I wonder about you,’ she said. ‘You don’t seem quite right.’

He stopped waving his arms about. ‘Let’s run,’ he said.

‘Amen to that,’ replied Brenda.