The phone cries on the bed-side locker and by the second jingle I know it’s her.
‘We’re winning,’ she says. ’Channel 5 – switch it on now.’
The static on the television jerks for a little while before adjusting itself to the broadcast. For a brief moment I’m pulled back to a book I once read, some tome on cosmology, and how static charge on your television – those illimitable black and white dots – is left-over radiation from the Big Bang.
   ‘See, I told you,’ she says ‘Apocalypse is coming, baby.’
The world, she had told me in an earlier email, was on the brink. That was the full email.
It was debris from a storming discussion earlier; we’d hit a few bars, guzzled some shots, argued for the zillionth time on the ongoing war. She’d said the outcry from 9/11 was not a justified reason to support the blitzing of people and towns in distant places. I hadn’t agreed. Outraged, she slammed her fist on a bar-stool and wanted to know why. A cousin – a distant cousin – was a fire-fighter, I had said, and he died a hero trying to save those burning inside. She apologised, and we sat in silence for an hour.
  ‘Still’, she said, breaking the silence, ‘don’t you think you’re biased?’
        It made me smile so I leaned over and kissed her. We both laughed.
On the screen now a line of soldiers are knee-deep in a river running through what looks like the surface of the moon. They are all smiling and chanting what appears to be an African mantra, which doesn’t seem right. A yellow bar running along the bottom of the screen reports the location: Helmand Province. A side-bar tells everyone in capitals that today’s death-toll has just reached 17. ‘Press the red button,’ the anchor says, ‘to find out which celebrity has outed themselves as homosexual’. ‘Or press the blue,’ he says ‘to access tomorrow’s weather.’
  ‘Should have seen it earlier,’ she says. ‘The report was gruesome. AWFUL.’
            ‘Go on,’ I say. ‘Hit me with it all. You’ll tell me anyway.’
She laughs at this, pauses briefly, and then says: ‘Some reporter came on air – Colin, maybe Clint, was his first name. Can’t remember the second part. Comes on, says he and the crew had been out that morning filming and they came across a body, some local kid, slung over a wall, and the head was across the street held up by a spiked rail. Crazy shit, eh?’
  ‘Thanks, Eve’ I say. ‘I needed that.’
I dart my eyes from the television to the windows and see I’ve forgotten to close the curtains. The illuminated digits on the counter-clock glow 3:07 and outside the sky is starless and craving for the moon. I think of F. Scott Fitzgerald – some dead writer we studied in school – and that quote he had, something like: In a real dark night of the soul, it is always 3 o’clock in the morning. The room’s silence is only killed by my heart-beat.
  ‘Come over,’ I say. ‘We’ll watch the sun rise and you can talk some more about headless kids.’
She laughs one more and says: ‘Be 10 minutes, I’ll bring some beer.’
hen she arrives she’s carrying an 8-pack of Tiger under one arm and a quilt embroidered with scores of little pink stars under the other. Her face – cheeks a shade of crimson from the cold – is half-cocooned in a swathe of printed silk from the nose down, but I can tell by the radiance in her eyes that underneath a smile has formed. She heaves a sigh and sits in front of the television, unspools the scarf to reveal I was right. Cracks open two cans, hands me one.

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