The Leopard(218)

The organ came in the refrain, a whine, cutting through like a circular saw.

Øystein leaned his head to the side while flicking ash. And Harry was almost moved to tears. Simply because he saw the years that had become their lives, that had become them, in the way his friend flicked ash as he had always done, leaning to the side as if the cigarette were too heavy, his head angled as if he liked the world better from a slanted perspective, the ash on the floor of the smokers’ shed at school, down an empty beer bottle at a party they had gatecrashed, on the cold, rough concrete of a bunker.

‘Anyway, you’re beginning to get old, Harry.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘When men start quoting their fathers, they’re old. The race has been run.’

And then Harry found it. The answer to her question about what he most wanted right now. He wanted an armoured heart.