The Last Hundred Days by McGuinness Patrick

Author:McGuinness, Patrick [McGuinness, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781854115614
Publisher: Seren
Published: 2011-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

We spent the afternoon on his files. Our routine: first I fished the day’s file from the computer’s virtual trash can. Then I scrolled down paragraph by paragraph, while Trofim, sitting to my right, dictated his additions. It usually took us two or three hours. I then copied everything onto a diskette and replaced it in the trash, before taking the files to be printed in the British Council library, a tatty prefab building inside the embassy grounds.

Today, as I left the building with the printed sheets, Giles Wintersmith loomed up behind me. ‘The draught,’ Leo called him, a reference not just to his ability to chill a room, but to the ripple of shivers by which one sensed his imminence. I had that now, and turned to face him: grey watery eyes, pale oily skin polished to translucence, a sharp thin beard and hair that grew a sheen of grease even as you watched. Since the ambassador, like some public school headmaster, had declared summertime ‘shirtsleeve order’, Wintersmith wore a white short-sleeved shirt with brown semicircles of sweat under the arms. The inside of his open collar looked like the ring of dirt in a bath. His arms were white and pimpled, crossed over his chest and bent upwards like deep-frozen chicken wings.

We were now on page 180 of Trofim’s memoirs. I held the day’s papers to me, fifteen pages, the only copies of the latest instalment. Beside them, the diskette with the first two thirds of the book. Wintersmith noticed me clutching the satchel.

‘Drink?’ He tried for a smile: a thin, vampiric leer of yellow teeth.

I sat in the Shit and Hassle while Wintersmith ordered at the bar. The place smelled of sweat and smoke and old lager. Beer towels hung sweating but never drying over bar pumps: Worthington’s, Skol, Guinness. The tabletops were streaked with bullet-shaped burn marks where forgotten cigarettes had consumed themselves on the veneer. The windows were open but the air had no intention of clearing. There was a darts board with one drooping arrow stuck in the bullseye, and an Aunt Sally range that doubled as a children’s play area. A calendar of Page 3 Lovelies was pinned behind the bar. We might have been in any pub in middle England, but this was like a film set; you half-expected the scenery to clatter to the ground. To counterbalance the diplomats, there was a different crowd of Brits: Embassy security guards, ex-police or ex-army; construction workers or decorators sent from home to do up this or that wing of the compound; a few businessmen on foreign sales trips thirsty for a familiar brand. A few tables away a Geordie handyman, beyond tipsy, was loudly going through a roster of people in line for one of his Glasgow kisses. At the back of the room an embassy wife, pale and graceful and etherealised with boredom, watched her children squabbling over last month’s Beano. A Friday afternoon in the Home Counties.

Wintersmith sat down. ‘You’ve rather

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