Right, so I lied to you in my intro to Little Silhouetto. I almost named this one Khashoggi’s Ship, but then I decided puns were impertinent. Ben Elton owns character and situation, though the more I write, the more they become MINE. Mwah-hah-hah-hah. The music belongs to Mercury, Taylor, Deacon and May and will never become mine. Also, nod to Sofia Coppola, because I watched Lost in Translation as I was revising this and had to borrow some atmosphere. Likewise, one line is closely paraphrased from S.L. Farrell’s novel Holder of Lighting for a similar reason. I sincerely hope the large number of Meat/Brit fans who post here don’t kidnap me and force me to watch Boy band music videos or anything equally appalling.

Former Commander Khashoggi entered the bar like a man who is accustomed to attracting attention. He was, as it happened. Once Supreme Commander of an elite police force he was now something quite different...and working for the other side. On entering the smoky interior he removed his tinted glasses out of necessity and paused to size up his reflection in the mirrored walls. No matter what he did or represented, he still looked the same. He appreciated the irony, though he could only think of two others who would agree with him. He liked what he saw: pale gray suit with polished dark shoes and no tie, his hair – always prematurely white in places and now completely silver, thanks to his prison time – immaculately cut and styled. He tilted his chin and leaned closer to his reflection. In his two months out of prison, most of his cuts and scrapes had healed, but there was a stubborn gash over his left cheekbone which he was probably stuck with. A voice in his head which wasn’t his muttered about vanity and he smiled. Strange how she invaded his thoughts these days.

He turned away from the wall and entered the bar proper, plunging into the dimly-lit, smoky room full of half-visible patrons and their disembodied laughter and perfumes. He looked around, glimpsing some faces he knew and many he didn’t. For the most part, young people in groups, some as friends, some as something more. He turned away from one barbarously-dressed couple engaged in kissing so intense Khashoggi felt it somewhat inappropriate for a public place. One of the friends yelled, “get a room” and another whistled. Here the prisoners, Bohemians, and a few confused, former Gaga kids met in their groups to drink together. Companionship at its bare minimum. Again, Khashoggi appreciated the irony that they, of all people, met here. It was not the sort of place to come alone, nor was it a place particularly friendly to him; but then most places weren’t. He ignored the glares, the pauses in conversations which then started again in irregular eddies when he passed. After 20 years as a high-level professional in a competitive field, he was used to shrugging off the stares, gossip, criticism, whispers. He was used to not trusting people; used to being watched; used to being distant.

The smoke swirled as Khashoggi reached the bar, and he noticed, six seats down from him, a small figure resting her elbows on the smooth plastic of the bar. She was conspicuously NOT waiting for him, and he, of course, had not automatically looked for her there. Of course not. It was part of their game.

“The usual?” asked the Librarian, pulling two glasses from below the bar. The man’s voice had been growing fractionally less hostile during the two months in which Khashoggi had patronized his establishment.. Khashoggi caught sight of a pyramid of bottles on the wall behind the Librarian, and paused, his attention attracted by another irony. “No,” he said, deciding he could afford to be whimsical. “A bottle of the Moët and Chandon back there.”

She was aware of Khashoggi almost from the moment he came in the room. No one else moved quite like he did, with the posture of an authority he didn’t have any more. He found it ironic; Meat Loaf found it characteristic. Khashoggi made his own authority and commanded respect from sheer force of character. He was a natural leader, rather like – but no, that wasn’t fair. She shouldn’t – couldn’t – compare then like that. Not if she wanted to keep the dreams at bay; not if she wanted to hold onto her sanity.

He was talking to Pop. Buying drinks; the conciliatory gesture that was part of their meetings and one of their unspoken rules. At first it had been meeting in the bar by accident. After the third time, it was meeting not-by-accident, but by a tacit agreement. The drinks were a hold over from their first meeting, which Meat still remembered clearly.

She had been sitting at the bar, tears standing in her eyes, partly from the cheap gin and partly from the growing grief and the knowledge hammered home to her over and over again that she was alone. Khashoggi had sunk down next to her cradling his drink and she hadn’t moved because she remembered peace in the circle of light at Wembley a few days before. There had been between them a silence which was not quite companionable. Then – “Christ, are you drinking gin?” Khashoggi had asked.

“Yeah, so?” she had answered.

“I can smell it from here. Can’t you get pissed on decent alcohol?”

“Why?” she had asked, dully. It was not a question she’d ever considered. “Two hours from now I’ll still be pissed.”

“So will I,” said Khashoggi, “but I’ll have enjoyed it. What do you want?”

She was drunk enough to laugh. “Are you trying to pick me up? Huh?”

“Hardly,” he had said. “I’m doing this for my own peace.”

He had been buying the first round “for his own peace” for the past two months in these strange meetings. They talked – more now than at the beginning, but it was never more than surface topics. What they had done during the day, gossip, the occasional anecdote. Anything more personal, such as the reasons why a staunch Bohemian and the former Commander of the Secret Police should actively seek each other’s company, was strictly off-limits. And in spite of that it felt, oh so slightly, like friendship.

Now, Khashoggi sat down beside her. “Piss off,” she said. The established ritual required this hostility from her just as it required him to blandly ignore it. He placed a champagne flute in front of her. “I don’t want company.”

“Neither do I,” said Khashoggi.

She turned to face him now, good-humored irritation raising her from her torpor. She laughed seldom these days, though mock anger often wakened a little of the spirit he knew she had in her. Khashoggi saw the change and sighed inwardly. Guilt was not an emotion he was familiar with – or he hadn’t been, until two months ago when this girl attacked him and burst into tears on his shoulder. She was fair and pale, too pale still, and wearing tawdry Bohemian motley under the large trench coat. She looked quite pathetic, with the eyeliner smudged under green eyes giving her a lost look.

He raised his glass. “Cheers.” Meat Loaf echoed him doubtfully.

She sipped, tasting the bubbles and austerity of good champagne. “What is this?” she asked, putting it down again.

The cyber world had crashed, but Galileo’s new song had spread by word of mouth and it was unlikely she didn’t know it. “Moët and Chandon,” said Khashoggi, deadpan.

“Oh, ha, very ha,” said Meat. She had heard it. “Is this your idea of avoiding complications?”

“No, this is my idea of not caring less.”

“Well, no one is going to call you extraordinarily nice, so don’t wait for it.”

“God, I hope not,” he said with feeling. “I’ve had enough of dynamite with a laser beam as well.”

Meat giggled and drank again. The bubbles fizzed inside her mouth with the cool, dry taste of alcohol. Champagne had an innate elegance to it. “Never mind,” she said. “It suits you.”

He raised one eyebrow and saluted her with his glass. “Flattery; how unexpected. Why thank you.”

They sat in a calm silence for a little. Khashoggi looked at the bottom of his glass and wondered how long this tenuous time-filling was going to continue. Champagne for a special occasion. Well, why not. He might as well break their agreement and just ask. God knows, cheating was sometimes necessary, even if you had made the rules yourself. He didn’t mind limbo, but she... she should be elsewhere. Occupied. Active. He thought again of what Scaramouche had said on leaving the office, and why she might have said it, and the speculative look in her eyes. She knew, he suspected, very well what was going on. Why not? Why the hell not? “Why exactly are you here?” he said.

Meat blinked at the casual side-stepping of their agreement and mumbled something about not liking to be alone at night.

“But you don’t have to be alone at night,” he said. “You lot are not exactly – monogamous.”

Her head snapped up. ‘They’re just playing. Brit and I were in love.”

“Love,” echoed Khashoggi. “I suspect it of being over-rated. A fiction for your precious music.”

“You’re such a cynic,” Meat cried, frustrated.

“And you’re such a romantic.” Khashoggi swallowed a generous measure of champagne.

There was a long pause. Meat poured herself another glass and then swiveled it, watching the bubbles. Two months of patience. She felt she owed him an answer. Finally she said, “I think I’m here because I haven’t found a reason to – to not be here.” He didn’t answer, his eyes fixed on the back wall of the bar, looking at something else, farther away than her. What was he looking at? What was he thinking? Meat found herself buoyed up by a thread of anger. He was willing to take her secrets but there was no return. He was opaque, strange. A cipher. “How old are you?” she asked, irrelevantly.

“Thirty-four,” Khashoggi answered, then paused and added, almost surprised, “Nearly thirty-five.” He answered her questioning silence. “I started young. And I was uncommonly good at what I did.” He glanced at her and took another drink. “My name’s Andrei, though I can’t imagine why you want to know. And you’re twenty-six.”

“I – How did you know that?” Indignation fueled the anger.

“Contrary to assumption, I have a very good memory for records.”

He didn’t looked thirty-four. He didn’t act thirty-four. He was ageless: courtly, with an irony deepening to cynicism. And why, oh why, should he continue to sit in this bar? Sheer boredom? Some kind of twisted pleasure? She came because she was lonely. Perhaps – Meat paused – perhaps he came for the same reason. She sighed. “I like it here because when I’m surrounded by people I can feel like I’m one of them. I don’t have to think to much, you know?” Khashoggi’s sleek gray shoulder was about as responsive as the counter. “I don’t like being alone at night because I dream about Brit,” she said, and then wondered why she’d said it.

“And I dream about Killer Queen,” answered Khashoggi, eyes still fixed on something else.

“That’s not the same thing!”

“No, of course not.”

Another pause. “Why are you here?”

Khashoggi transferred his gaze to his glass. “I have nothing better to do,” he said mildly, the cool voice daring her to challenge.

“Don’t you have – friends, or something?”

He finally turned the gaze on her, heavily ironic. “Me – friends? I don’t think I’ve had friends since I was twelve. And who would I be friends with? The aging Librarian, who I’ve put in prison three times? Scaramouche, who only tolerates me because I know about software? Galileo, your dreamer, who is still angry I used him? Or you, Meat Loaf? I’ve locked you up, slaughtered your lover, and now I buy you vodka so you don’t rot yourself on cheap gin. Thus far, dear lady, does my charity extend.” He shrugged, then added, “And I wouldn’t know what to do with friends if I had them.”

Meat found she was unable to hold that dark gaze and dropped her eyes. It wasn’t fair. She faced a lifetime without Brit; she dreamed of him nearly every night and replayed, over and over, in his head the sound of lasers cutting through flesh ad bone and a wordless howl. It wasn’t fair that she should now be presented with his killer – complex, cynical and yet so hard to blame. Or rather, she had blamed him. It was no longer his responsibility for Brit’s death which distressed her, but the overwhelming fact of the death itself. She had separated cause and effect, though she didn’t know how. It worried her, as did her growing concern for Khashoggi who, she was growing to realize, was as damaged as she.

It wasn’t fair. And there wasn’t anybody she could tell, either. Brit was the one to sort complex ideas, not her. Brit could tell her what to do and – no, that was wrong. Brit could have told her. She hated that past tense. He wasn’t here anymore. Her thoughts ran in circles, these days, and they always ended up here. The despair welled up again, and welled over again, and she put her head on the table and sobbed for a loss that she still couldn’t get used to.

“Oh, Christ,” said Khashoggi, from what seemed like a long way away. “Haven’t you learned to stop wearing mascara by this point?” She started to cry harder, misery, confusion, desperation pushing past the barriers she’d built and the rules she’d made to prevent just this from happening. She felt an arm around her shoulders and one about her waist. “Come on,” he said. “We’re leaving.”

“Don’t want to – to be alone. He’s not there and I - ” She couldn’t see, and stumbled over something – the step at the door?

“Of course he’s not there, Meat Loaf” said Khashoggi. The outside air brushed over her face gently. “He’ll never be there.”

“But it hurts. God, it hurts so much.”

“Of course it does. It will always hurt – you can’t get away from that. You’ll hear a sound or smell something, and it will remind you of him and you’ll feel the loss all over again. But it will stop hurting you so much. The best you can do it keep going, keep walking.” Khashoggi sighed. “That, my dear, is life.”

Leading her through the streets, Khashoggi was surprised – as he had been two months ago – at how fragile she seemed. It wasn’t her height, but something in her build which was vital, alive. Her personality was bigger than she was. Not for the first time, Khashoggi cursed the waking of his hibernating conscience. Their destination was the half-destroyed apartment block he called home. This was for the simple reason that he didn’t know where she lived, and doubted very much that Galileo and Scaramouche – the only other two who would be able to look after her now – wanted to be disturbed right now. On entering, he guided her to sit on the edge of the bed, then settled beside her and waited, resting, while she cried herself out and finally lay still.

He was sitting on the bed, watching her. She raised herself to sit and blotted her eyes delicately. Their silence was tangible, as firm and present as anything that could be said. Gently tentative, Khashoggi reached forward to touch her cheek and she leaned, for a moment, into the curve of his palm.

“I wish I could sleep,” she said. “Stay here.” Khashoggi, stuck silent by a generosity he’d never expected, stayed, close enough to hear her breathing until she slept.

Later in the warm darkness, she drifted closer to the waking world and felt a warm body next to her, half reclining. Sleepily, she closed her arms about him and cried quietly for one loving man who was dead, and one lonely one who was alive. And Khashoggi, awake, stared into the dark listening to the soft, halted breathing and a softer heartbeat and felt his cheeks wet for a reason he barely understood. And he held her close until it was unclear who was giving comfort and who was receiving it.

Khashoggi woke first in the morning, since he was the one unused to waking to a warm heartbeat beside him. He made twice as much coffee and left quietly, obscurely happy for no particular reason. He continued to be so all day, through the mind-dulling work of sorting crashed computer programmes and morsels of information scattered by the explosion of the Planet Mall network. Rebuilding was useful, and he was one most qualified to do it, but it was normally boring as hell, even with the daily comedy that could be wrung from working in close proximity to Scaramouche.

As he left their impromptu headquarters he saw Meat Loaf in the street, quite obviously waiting for him. She was standing in the gathering twilight, her hands in the pockets of her large jacket. She waved and as he got closer, he saw that her makeup was redone – eyes outlined in their dark kohl again. Did she never learn?

She gave him a tremulous smile. “I – um. Thanks.” She looked away, then, a little embarrassed. “I always seem to lose control when you’re around.” She seemed to shake a little and then faced him with more assurance. “I think it’s – I’ve been part of a duo do long I don’t know how to function alone.” Her chin tipped up with more than a shadow of an old assurance she was trying to reclaim.

And I, thought Khashoggi, have been alone so long that I don’t know how to function with other people. He remembered what Scaramouche had told him. “We’re starting a band, but we need a drummer.” The bright glimmer behind her eyes added, Meat Loaf can play the drums. Can you ask her if...? He looked down at Meat and thought of peace and a steady heartbeat in the dark, and said, “Scaramouche is looking for a drummer. I think you should talk to her.” Meat blinked; long gold lashes descended over green eyes for a moment and Khashoggi swallowed.

Then she smiled, brilliantly. “Thanks, Andrei,” and the words fell like pebbles into the odd quietness of his mind.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile before,” said Khashoggi, then damned himself for a sentimental fool.

“And I don’t think I’ve ever seen you stop sneering,” said Meat Loaf, with a touch of the smile still lingering. Another pause. “I’ll go and find Scara; I think I heard her over there.” And she moved away, walking a little faster than before.

There was no word about whether he would see her at the bar, but there wouldn’t be – that was their game and they would keep playing it for a little longer.

From the open door came conversation and the inevitable argument of Galileo and Scaramouche. “Yeah, it’s great, Gazz...if it’s written as prose. Can’t you count?”

“Duh. I’m a musician.”

“OK, so you can count to four. Or maybe two. Big help. Look, can you tell how many feet you have in that line? The refrain sucks.”

The boy’s voice rose over the girl’s. “Nuh-uh. There aren’t too many feet. Listen:” and he began to sing, eerily a capella in the uncertain purple evening. “It’s so easy: all you have to is fall in love. Play the game, play the game, play the game; everybody play the game called love.”

Khashoggi glanced at the three figures in the doorway and the light glinting off fair hair. “God damn you, Freddie Mercury,” he said to no one in particular.