Suzy wasn't deterred by no response: she kept prattling on regardless. 'Yeah, he was only here for a while. He wanted to join the Navy, but they shoved him into the Army Catering Corps and sent him out here.'

I gave a grunt of acknowledgement, not really listening. Our holiday wasn't going badly, apart from her chain-smoking. She didn't do it in the room, but I was sure she'd like to, just to annoy me.

'He only stayed for a couple of months, then did a runner. Couldn't stand frying all those eggs, I s'pose. I guess he's still technically AWOL, still a deserter,' she said. 'Even though he's dead.'

I turned my head and gave her a quick smile. Most of her dark brown shoulder-length hair dropped forwards round her face as she looked down to avoid falling into the storm drain that ran parallel with the pavement. The rest of it was stuck to her neck by small beads of sweat.

We were nine days into a two-week romantic break after a chance meeting in a London bar a couple of months ago. I'd been sitting nursing a beer, and when she came up to give her order I made fun of her accent. She told me she was 'Bovis class' and proud of it – it meant she was one rung up from Barrett, apparently, several above Wimpey, and a whole ladderful ahead of me. We got talking, and I ended up with her number.

She worked in a travel agent's but, apart from that, I didn't know too much about her. Her parents were dead and she was an only child. She shared a flat with two other women in Shepherd's Bush. She didn't like tomatoes or the size of her feet – and that was about it.

Now that the war was over and the looting of Baghdad and Basra had calmed down a bit, SARS was really grabbing the headlines. Fuck knows why – I'd read in Newsweek that other forms of pneumonia killed more than forty thousand a year in the USA alone, malaria nearly three million worldwide, and tuberculosis about the same. Not to mention the fifteen hundred who died each year in the UK falling downstairs. But every cloud has a silver lining – that was how we'd come by the holiday so quickly and cheaply.