The Dead Yard by Adrian McKinty Page A

be waiting at the End of the State, you won’t get an

opportunity like this again," she pleaded.
    "Ok, fine. I’ll change. No big deal. Why don’t you come back to my flat; I’ll shower, get

dressed, you can look through my CD collection and make snotty remarks about it," I said.
    "Sounds like fun," Kit replied.
    "Everything we’ll do together is going to be fun," I said, and if that wasn’t the lie of the

year I don’t know what was.

    In the time it had taken me to shower, a thunderstorm had rolled down the Merrimack River

valley. A common occurrence in the week I’d been here. Hot during the day, thunderstorms at

night. Sometimes Simon and I would go on the roof, drink Sam Adams, watch lightning hit the dome

of the nuclear power station and half hope for some kind of atomic emergency to relieve the

tedium.
    I toweled off, changed into a shirt and jeans. Kit was looking at my bookshelves. She ignored

the books, barely pretending to skim through them, but she couldn’t conceal how much she coveted

my CDs, which were cool English music, a year or two ahead of similar American trends. The covers

she found to be fascinating objects. I stared at her for a minute and she caught me looking. I

pretended to be checking out the weather behind her head.
    "It’s raining," I said.
    Kit hadn’t noticed. She peered out the window, nodded absently.
    The apartment was small. Two tiny bedrooms, a living room that connected to a minute kitchen.

A sofa, a couple of deck chairs. No aircon but a bit of a breeze from the Atlantic out the

window.
    "What are these like?" she asked finally, holding up a handful of the CDs.
    "They’re good," I said.
    "What type of music?"
    "It’s a thing called Britpop, somewhere between pop and rock, I don’t think there’s really an

American equivalent. I suppose REM would be the closest thing," I said.
    "I like REM," she said, her big eyes shadowed black, blinking slowly, seductively, without

meaning to be seductive.
    The blue of cornflowers in a black orchid bouquet, you could say, if you were so inclined. And

I wasn’t. It wouldn’t do to get carried away.
    "Who else do you like?" I asked, to break the silence.
    "Nirvana, Pearl Jam, that kind of thing," she said.
    "You might like Oasis," I said. "Take the CD with you. You can borrow it."
    "Is that your favorite?" she asked.
    "Nah, Radiohead is what’s happening at the moment," I said.
    "Can I listen?" she asked.
    I put on
OK Computer,
which had just been released that week. After only a few tracks

I could tell that Kit loved it. I was pleased. She’d already called me an old geezer once and I

wanted her to think I wasn’t completely unhip. I brought a couple of Sams from the fridge. We

drank, listened to a bit of the record, and watched the rain. Kit found herself edging towards me

on the rattan sofa, realized what she was doing, stopped herself, shifted away. She made an

obvious play of looking at her watch.
    "Oh, we better head up to the bar," she said.
    I pulled on a pair of socks and grabbed my Stanley boots. After Samantha’s foot stab, I found

that I felt safer in shoes with steel toe caps even despite the god-awful heat. Kit watched me

pull the boot on over my plastic left foot.
    "What happened to your foot?" she asked. "I noticed when you were wearing that skirt that you

have a pro, pro, what’s it called?"
    "Prosthesis," I said unself-consciously. I was used to it by now. I didn’t even think about it

anymore.
    "
Prosthesis
. That’s a good word. What happened to you?" she asked, her face radiating

concern and curiosity.
    I smiled at her.
    "Motorcycle accident when I was nineteen. I was going way too fast, I fell off, the bike came

down on top of me, my left foot went into one of the wheels. It was my fault, I was speeding, the

road was slick, and no one else was involved," I said.
    A nice wee invention with just a little bit of gore and not one-tenth as bad as the real