Pheasants

She can drive. She can drive rally, takes bends real tight, hitting the accelerator off the top of the curve just a treat, zipping up behind. She knows those Scottish back roads well enough to be her own navigator, which bend goes blind, which opens out to offer a space and get on past where I will flinch and brake. As we slide by, I will turn, ugly and cold, to look at the scared creased shaking faces of the drivers we were too closely passing, up beside them before they had looked in the rear view. She is very literary and likes to listen to very literary talking books as we drive, though sometimes she will change to a tape of the "Doors", the best of, with "Riders on the Storm" as the last track.

We came around that bend very fast, there was a crunching of gravel beneath the passenger side wheel, tight that one, even by her standards, a brown lochan ready to swallow, car overturned, a hiss of steam, water too cold to get out in time. It was October, the shooters were already gathered in the field. Three pheasants were in the road, blood red plumage. They ran left then right, she neither slowed or swerved, maybe if anything a touch more welly for stability as we took up the hundred metres of straight road before the next. There was one crunch, the other two went under the chassis. I looked behind, a purple carnage and scattered plume marked her road kill.

She said, so correctly, "They are bred to be killed".

Further on a group of four people walked the kerb in single file. They were a family configuration, a man, a woman, two smaller figures. All were very fat, wobbling, swaying and rolling but they did not turn to look as we drew near

Quietly spoken "More people have started to walk along this road. It is very dangerous. "

I think I tensed a bit, I did look for the gap, it was chasmic, she moved out very wide at the end, cutting back quickly, a firmer hold of the steering wheel, a push to feel resistance some surge to get traction as we turned back against the camber. I perspired a bit, kept quiet though, listened to the talking book narrator painting his other world, it was that day, Platform" by Houlbeq.

We did a few jobs together, in those old days, after the first of the big bombs, the one at the US Embassy in Dar, between the time that the Mossad girls were there, since only that lot saw the threat, but before the swamping the Brits and Yankees did once the Horsemen had been taken to be the next big thing. I did the transport, logistics, driving then, she always did the trigger stuff. It was said she kept cool, comfortable, morally sure when the moment in the cross hairs came: meant mostly in a metaphorical sense. Partly it was because she was better cover. She is a writer between jobs; plays, reviews, short stories, teaches too, does workshops and schools, a very literary background melded with a diplomatic manner. Good opinions too, green, left liberal, practical aid, all expressed with elegance and a refined care for language. She is a person everyone is pleased to know, admires, appreciates. It was thus better she did the trigger stuff, because as the other Michael remarked, there is too much "ug" about me, enough for people to say, when musing about who dun it "I don't have any evidence but I would not put it past him".

This cool made her matter of fact about the passions of life, took them naturally. Besides the cars she has a motorbike, now as then, a big one, some 750 HP of Yamaha,with all the leathers and space helmet. I liked the thrill when she said good bye: "see you down there then", straddled, one foot on the running board, enjoying how the engine purred up the vibrations. I liked her bed style too, enthusiastic, natural, uninhibited, a healthy way without the speeches. Even then she was always professionally alert, kept her eyes open all the time even at the moment of the shrieking. In that way she is like the the Mossad girls were but in all other of the professional she has more sophistication, more panache. For all the efficiency with which the Mossad girls honey trapped the minor dealers, then disappeared, job done, there was a certain gaucheness in their style. They were always just a bit too expert at what they pretended to know nothing, of too much vapidity in the brooding silences. This one, with all her books, is a better covered pheasant killer.