So I'd gone dripping wet into a phone-box and tried four numbers before I could find anyone with enough time on their hands to take in a nerve-case who wanted a woman and wanted her badly because he knew that once the mission was running he wouldn't get another chance and that if somewhere along the line a wheel came off she'd be the last one he'd ever have.

'You're quiet.'

'I was watching you,' I said.

She smiled again, just a lazy movement along her mouth. 'You weren't.'

Her name was Corinne. I'd only seen her twice before but we liked things the same way, it was a kind of natural. 'There's another job,' I said, and found my clothes

'How long for?'

'You can't ever tell.'

She got her cigarettes and held one out and I shook my head and she lit up. 'Where is it this time?'

' Italy. Whole coach-load, want to see the Tower of Pisa before the bloody thing falls down.'

I dropped my keys and she picked them up, stooping naked in the light, giving them to me, smiling with her brilliant eyes. 'I just can't see you doing it.'

'Why not?'

'I just can't see you standing up with a microphone and saying on the left there's the statue of Marco Polo and on the right there's the Co-operative Spaghetti Works.'

'Well, I've got to do something for a living.'

The smoke curled across the slanting light, quickening to an air current from the window.

'I wish I was going with you.'

On a coach-trip in a heatwave?'

'It'd be a different kind of grind, and there'd be you.' She moved around the room, unconsciously making stylized turns on her slim bare feet. 'You know something? It isn't the cutthroat bitchiness of the competition that gets us down in the end, it's the strain on the shoulders, lifting our arms to get in and out of the dresses. You're right on the point of throwing it in, then you get a break and see your face on the front ofGo-Girl so you think you've hit it big, and you're back in the grind again.'