One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night by Christopher Brookmyre

psychological loose ends. It was presumably their record of mauling and disfiguring the English language that made them feel they had nothing to lose when it came to conveying things other cultures had written off as inexpressible in words. The results were seldom elegant, but you always knew what they were getting at. However, in this case closure seemed wrong: to him this was more about openings, beginnings.
    Seek no absolution.
    He couldn’t change who he’d been, what he’d done. He didn’t want to ask their forgiveness. He just wanted to know them again.
    He watched the road go by, listened to the chat around him. Familiar names were mentioned, incidents recalled, characters reassassinated, old jokes revisited. He wasn’t ready yet, but he would be. By the time they got to their destination, he definitely would be.
    There was only one wee thing still bothering him.
    In common with both Eddie and Charlie, the name Gavin Hutchison meant absolutely nothing to him.
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■ 12:23 ■ floating island paradise resort ■ behind a great man ■
    Simone Hutchison knew that nothing made a party memorable quite so much as a surprise. Her husband, Gavin, had of late devoted almost all of his spare time and energy towards making that evening’s soirée the biggest social event of his life, so she felt it was the least she could do to match that with the biggest surprise of his life. She estimated that standing up before the assembled throng and announcing she was leaving him should probably do the trick. At the very least, it would be a honey of an ice‐
breaker.
    The key word was ‘almost’. Almost all his spare time, almost all his spare energy, almost all his spare cash. Almost. As in not absolutely. As in still leaving enough of all three to send his dick on frequent fact‐
finding trips to foreign genitals.
    She wasn’t leaving him because of the affair; she hadn’t left him over any of the previous ones, and although this one was simply overflowing with signposts and significance, when it came down to the fundamentals there was nothing new to get especially upset about. The betrayal and the humiliation might have seemed unusually poignant, given the latest away‐
day fuck’s identity, if Simone hadn’t recognised them as a mere pastiche of the greater betrayal and humiliation that characterised her entire marriage.
    That was why she had been biding her time, waiting for tonight instead of confronting him with it weeks back: not just because it would be embarrassingly public, but because the occasion represented everything that was wrong with Gavin, and there could be no more appropriate moment to serve up his balls on a plate.
    He’d been like a kid on Christmas Eve all the way up the road, so uncontainably jumpy with anticipation that she’d feared he might wet the car seat if they drove over a bump. Ordinarily, she’d have found it pathetic, but she lapped it up that morning, entertained by the knowledge that the more inflated he got, the bigger the bang when she burst his bubble. He thought the reunion would be his triumph. He was wrong.
    It would be her revenge.
    He had, typically, no inkling that his daft‐
but‐
sweet wee wife could be harbouring any mischief. With him driving (of course), she had control of the Lexus’s stereo, and he’d failed, for instance, to detect any significance to her repeating the same track several times as they journeyed north, other than to ask whether there was something wrong with the CD player. It was a Ben Folds Five song, a typically rinky‐
dinky number entitled ‘One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces’, about a guy who was bullied at school coming back to lord it over his former classmates, now that he’s grown up and become a success. The parallel escaped Gavin, but then he seldom paid much attention to Simone’s music purchases anyway, frequently opining that if a record wasn’t available at Tesco’s, then there was probably a damn good reason. The same