He brought up his whisky to his mouth and sipped just a bit, then reached out to the little table and left the glass there. He thought about some crisps.
A few seconds passed. No crisps. Whisky was bad enough.
Then Eddie's attention was interrupted.
He looked at the screen. His face had been pointing towards it all along, but now, for the first time, he looked. He really looked.
A woman, a young woman, was standing in the middle of a mass of dried mud, her face exhibiting no easily defined expression. She was trying to recover her bearings, said the reporter, but failing.
The mass of dried mud was her hometown, said the woman, clumsily dubbed. It was where she had grown up, where her family had lived, her mother and her father and her brothers and her sisters, where her family had lived until yesterday. When they all died.
Eddie felt the whisky burn at the back of his throat. He had to swallow to relieve the soreness where the whisky had tickled.
Soon the woman was no longer standing in the hard mud. She had gone, maybe never to be thought of again, replaced by the weather and, in a minute, the cricket.
Eddie was no longer thinking about the woman or the weather or the cricket. There was not a thought in his head, just a futile tear falling from each of his eyes and a tight stiff swelling trapped somewhere in his chest.
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