Saturday by Ian McEwan

word, like a weight too heavy to lift, doesn't move from her tongue. He feels her body warmth through the silk of her pyjamas spread across his chest and groin. Walking up three flights of stairs has revived him, his eyes are wide open in the dark; the exertion, his minimally raised blood pressure, is causing local excitement on his retina, so that ghostly swarms of purple and iridescent green are migrating across his view of a boundless steppe, then rolling in on themselves to become bolts of cloth, swathes of swagged velvet, drawing back like theatre curtains on new scenes, new thoughts. He doesn't want any thoughts at all, but now he's alert. His workless day lies ahead of him, a track across the steppe; after his squash game, which insomnia is already losing for him, he must visit his mother. Her face as it is now eludes him. He sees instead the county champion swimmer of forty years ago - he's remembering from photographs - that floral rubber cap that gave her the appearance of an eager seal. He was proud of her even as she tormented his childhood, dragging him on winter evenings to loud municipal pools on whose concrete changing-room floors discarded sticking plasters with their pink and purplish stains stewed in lukewarm puddles. She made him follow her into sinister green lakes and the grey North Sea before season. It was another element, she used to say, as if it were an explanation or an enticement. Another element was precisely what he objected to lowering
    37 Ian McEwan
    his skinny freckled frame into. It was the division between the elements that hurt most, the unfriendly surface, rising in a bitter cutting edge up his sunken goosefleshed belly as he advanced on tiptoe, to please her, into the unclear waters of the Essex coast in early June. He could never throw himself in, the way she did, the way she wanted him to. Submersion in another element, every day, making every day special, was what she wanted and thought he should have. Well, he was fine with that now, as long as the other element wasn't cold water.
    The bedroom air is fresh in his nostrils, he's half-aroused sexually as he moves closer to Rosalind. He can hear the first stirring of steady traffic on the Huston Road, like a breeze moving through a forest of firs. People who have to be at work by six on a Saturday. The thought of them doesn't make him feel sleepy, as it often does. He thinks of sex. If the world was configured precisely to his needs, he would be making love to Rosalind now, without preliminaries, to a very willing Rosalind, and afterwards falling in a clear-headed swoon towards sleep. But even despotic kings, even the ancient gods, couldn't always dream the world to their convenience. It's only children, in fact, only infants who feel a wish and its fulfilment as one; perhaps this is what gives tyrants their childish air. They reach back for what they can't have. When they meet frustration, the man-slaying tantrum is never far away. Saddam, for example, doesn't simply look like a heavy jowled brute. He gives the impression of an overgrown, disappointed boy with a pudgy hangdog look, and dark eyes a little baffled by all that he still can't ordain. Absolute power and its pleasures are just beyond reach and keep receding. He knows that another fawning general dispatched to the torture rooms, another bullet in the head of a relative won't deliver the satisfaction it once did.
    Perowne shifts position and nuzzles the back of Rosalind's head, inhaling the faint tang of perfumed soap mingled with the scent of warm skin and shampooed hair. What a stroke
    38 Saturday
    of luck, that the woman he loves is also his wife. But how quickly he's drifted from the erotic to Saddam - who belongs in a mess, a stew of many ingredients, of foreboding and preoccupation. Sleepless in the early hours, you make a nest out of your own fears - there must have been survival advantage in dreaming up bad outcomes and scheming to avoid them. This trick of dark