A Drink After Work.

Perhaps you'd read on if I wrote this in the present tense. More immediate, more visceral. Tough; it all happened a long time ago. Microscope with the present and you'll get the detail, but you'll miss the picture.

Friday was on my mind, as it happened. Not least because it was; a Friday, that is. Or, more specifically, Friday evening was uppermost in my hungover thoughts. I was hiding in my boss's office. He was hiding behind an almost-lie on the whiteboard in that office. He'd written 'COURSE' in wavery green capitals. The green marker-ink was probably a joke, since it was a Golf Course. Still, we both knew the Russians weren't going to invade that day; they hadn't in forty years and they wouldn't any time soon. Most of us kept that to ourselves.

May Day was Sunday; nobody was going to fly even a tatty old Fishbed before the big parade. All our shift workers would stand down at mid-day. I was going to stay until four in the afternoon. 16.00 hours local, out loud. The price of a day job. Besides, I had graphs to draw, sorties to count, trends to identify: a monumental waste of time, ever since a few free-spirited Berliners had danced atop the wall, sounding the beat with sledgehammers. Still, it didn't do to say you were wasting your time, although that's what military life is, away from the battlefield. Especially in intelligence.

At about 15.45, Jock poked his head around the door,

'Beer on the way home?' He winked.

'Home? Let's just go for a beer.'

After the IRA attacks 'down the zone', as we still called West Germany, we had to travel to and from the 'Berg in civvies. This edict had gained us all a usable locker after twenty years of cramming things into something the size of a shoe-box. I shut down the computer, and its outmoded green screen took its obsolescent time about winking out. Jock and I were changed and out the door at 16.00 on the dot. Military time-keeping is a habit. We scrounged a lift down the 'Berg with a USAF Sergeant he knew from the last Anglo-American Friendship Day. We learned quite a bit about Joseph Smith, before leaping out of the car at the S-Bahn station on the corner of the Heerstraße.

'Kaiser Friedrich?' I asked.

'Mons.' Jock said.

'Not again.'

We went. Late afternoon was a good time to talk to the girls. Business was slow, there was only a desultory effort at doing the show. Even Mme Stradivarius' fiddling was unaccompanied by any chorally simulated orgasm. The beers came, Charlottenburger Pils. Possibly the worst brew in Berlin.

I lifted my glass,

'To the Free World,' I said.

'Fuck 'em,' Jock said.