MARTIN

Everyone bloody knew everything about me, so I didn't see the point of this lark, and I told them that.

'Oh, come on, man,' said JJ, in his irritating American way. It doesn't take long, I find, to be irritated by Yanks. I know they're our friends and everything, and they respect success over there, unlike the ungrateful natives of this bloody chippy dump, but all that cool-daddio stuff gets on my wick. I mean, you should have seen him. You'd have thought he was on the roof to promote his latest movie. You certainly wouldn't think he'd been puttering around Archway delivering pizzas.

'We just want to hear your side of it,' said Jess.

'There isn't a "my side". I was a bloody idiot and I'm paying the price.'

'So you don't want to defend yourself? Because you're among friends here,' said JJ.

'She just spat at me,' I pointed out. 'What kind of a friend is that?'

'Oh, don't be such a baby,' said Jess. 'My friends are always spitting at me. I never take it personally.'

'Maybe you should. Perhaps that's how your friends intend it to be taken.'

Jess snorted. 'If I took it personally, I wouldn't have any friends left.'

We let that one hang in the air.

'So what do you want to know, that you don't know already?'

There are two sides to every story,' said Jess. 'We only know the bad side.'

'I didn't know she was fifteen,' I said. 'She told me she was eighteen. She looked eighteen.' That was it. That was the good side of the story.

'So if she'd been, like, six months older you wouldn't be up here?'

'I don't suppose I would, no. Because I wouldn't have broken the law. Wouldn't have gone to prison. Wouldn't have lost my job, my wife wouldn't have found out…'

'So you're saying it was just bad luck.'

'I'd say there was a certain degree of culpability involved.' This was, I need hardly tell you, an attempt at dry understatement; I didn't know then that Jess is at her happiest wallowing in the marshland of the bleeding obvious.

'Just because you've swallowed a fucking dictionary, it doesn't mean you've done nothing wrong,' said Jess.

'That's what "culpability"…'

'Because some married men wouldn't have shagged her no matter how old she was. And you've got kids a............