PAIN HAS A PERMANENT ADDRESS - READ BETWEEN THE LIES

PAIN HAS A PERMANENT ADDRESS -EPISODE EIGHT

  I parked the Peugeot on the road outside Kira’s house and took a brief look at the sorry remains of her abode.  It was not a pretty sight with its blackened walls standing alone and roofless, pointing upwards at the grey damp sky above.  We turned away and went to knock on Kira’s neighbour’s door.  She answered not in her pink ensemble of last night but in a green tweed skirt with a long-sleeved creamed jumper and sensible brown shoes.  Her hair was neat as before but, this time, without the hairnet.

  “Oh hello, you two,” she said, smiling.  She looked at the bouquet.  “Oh, are those for me?  They’re lovely.  Come on in.”

  Kira gave her the flowers, and she headed back towards the kitchen.  I closed the front door and followed them both and settling at the, now familiar kitchen table.

  “Would you two like teas?” she said, as she placed the flowers in a vase by the sink.

  “We’d love some,” Kira answered on our behalf.

  She set the kettle to boil and fussed around with her flowers until she liked the arrangement.

  “There,” she said at length.  “So beautiful.  Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” Kira answered.  “I’m not sure what we would have done without your help last night.”

  “Nonsense.  I was only too glad I could help.”

  We sat and drank tea, just as we had done some twelve hours ago.

  “Do you know yet what caused it?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.  “The fire brigade say they will send their investigation team to have a look.”

  “It’s pretty well-burnt everything,” Kira added.  “You can just about tell the difference between the fridge and the washing machine, but the heat badly melted them both.  The oven is recognizable, but the rest have gone completely.”

  “I’m so sorry, dear,” Kira’s neighbour said.

  “Well at least it didn’t get us,” Kira said with a smile.

  “No, dear,” she said, patting Kira’s hand.  “I’m glad about that.”

  “Thank you.” 

  “Do you know what you will do?” she asked.

   “I’m staying with John,” she said.  “Then, we will see how it goes from there.”

  The old lady smiled.  “I meant with the house, dear.  Are you going to rebuild?”

  “Oh, I expect so,” she said.  “I will wait and see what the insurance company says.”

  We stayed for over an hour and, by that time, she had shown us photos of all her many children and her very many grandchildren.  Most of them lived in New Zealand, and she was obviously lonely and thankful for having someone to talk to.  We opened the chocolates, and we had a second cup of tea.

  We extricated me from her life story and went back next door for a closer look at the remnants of Kira’s palace.  We were not alone.  A man in a dark blue jersey and royal blue trousers was picking his way through the ash.

  “Can I help you?”  Kira asked.

  “I’m fire brigade.  From the investigation team.”

  “I own this scene of chaos.”

  “Sorry,” he said to her.

  “Ah well,” she shrugged.  “At least our ashes aren’t here for you to find.”

  “Are anyone’s?”  He asked.

  “No,” I said.  “There was no one else in the house.  Well, not unless they broke in after we had gone to bed, and then died in the fire.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” he said, unamused.

  He went on poking the ash with a stick.  At one point he stopped and bent down, placing some ash into a plastic bag he produced from his pocket.

  “What have you found?”  Kira asked him.

  “Nothing special.  It’s just for an accelerant test, to see if someone used petrol, paint thinners or paraffin, that sort of thing.”

  “I thought it was electrical,” Kira insisted.

  “Probably was.  Most fires are electrical, but we need to do the test anyway.  II don’t expect it to show much.  This place is so badly burned it will be near impossible to determine how it started.”

  He went back to his poking of the ash.  After a while, he lifted something up on her stick as if landing a salmon.

  “Aha,” he said.  “What have we got here?”

  It looked like a black molten lump. 

  “What is it?”  I asked.

  “Smoke detector,” he replied.

  “I don’t remember hearing the alarm go off,” Kira said.

  “It does help to have a battery in it.”

  “But it had a battery,” she insisted, annoyed. “I am a Home Office pathologist, and I have seen enough bodies burnt to a crisp as result of house fires to know to always check to on it. I replaced it when the clocks went forward for summer in March.  It had just gone off last week when I burned toast.  It had a battery!”

  I knew Kira well enough to know if she said it had a battery in it, it had one.  I was sure of it, just as sure as the investigator was that it had been battery-less.

Chapter Twenty.

It rained that night.  Water soughed and gurgled down the drainpipes that needed cleaning, one of many odd jobs that needed doing around the house.  Hinges needed oiling and taps needed washers and I had allowed the vegetable garden to overgrow.  I needed to make a list of all the jobs I had put off. 

  I was upstairs in my bedroom, my notes spread across the bed looking for inconsistencies.

  Before getting thrown off the case, I knew they had finished interviewing most of the suspects, and I’d studied the crime scene photographs.  No gaping holes or anomalies had emerged apart from the obvious one – the killer’s identity.

  After about two hours Kira appeared in the doorway.  I’d been concentrating so hard I didn’t hear her climbing the stairs.  I closed my folder quickly, like a schoolboy caught looking at a pornographic magazine.

  “You missed a telephone call,” she said, holding my phone.  I had a vague memory of it ringing and looked at the screen.  The caller hadn’t had an ID.  “They’ll call back if it’s important,” I said.

  Kira was still in the doorway, she had dark shadows beneath her eyes.

  “I thought you were watching the television,” I said.

  “I was, but I wonder when we will go out to dinner.” 

  “Sorry,” wondering how I could forget.

  Only an hour earlier I had been watching her getting dressed.  It is a far sexier spectator sport than watching a woman dress.  It’s akin to a dance without music, a silent ballet where every movement is so practised and easy.  Kira had laid a skirt in the bed and then looked for a matching top.  She decided and then changed her mind.  Looking on, I revelled in the familiarity of the scene.

  “Sorry it’s taking so long,” she’d said, going back and forth to the wardrobe.

  Having decided, she sat on the end and rolled her tights over her legs, leaning back to pull the opaque black fabric over her thighs and buttocks.  (Less sexy, but still watchable.)  Then she stood and shimmied into the dress, letting the fabric fall to just below her knees.  Turning left and right, she checked out her reflection in the mirror.

  “You look beautiful,” I’d said.

  She rolled her eyes, dismissing the compliment, but I knew it pleased her.  It’s not pretence or false modesty.  A woman like Kira favoured self-deprecation over self-assertion.  It made her feel more comfortable and less objectified, although sometimes I wished she would accept an accolade and say thank you.

  I’d booked a window table at her favourite restaurant along with champagne and flowers.  Too much, but I am not adept at all this.  When I’d proposed to Zoë, I’d spent most of the evening umming and ahing, stopping and starting, mumbling, and apologizing.

  I tidied up my paperwork and followed Kira downstairs.  We took my car but I let her drive.  In profile, I saw an eyelash brush against her cheek and the pink shell of her ear poke through her hair.

 Twilight had descended on the landscape as the angled sun created a soft aura of light around the trees.  I saw a family picking strawberries, stencilled like cardboard cut-outs against the light.

  We reached the restaurant.  It is one of those trendy places done out in polished concrete and chrome, where you can look through to the kitchen and see eruptions of flame burst from a wok or frying pan.  We found the menu hard to read.  Our waiter reminded me of a greyhound and his French accent was so thick we both avoided the ‘specials.’

  We ordered and ate and reminisced how we met.  I think every couple embellishes that moment, romanticizing the details, pushing them into a shiny creation myth.  But once we moved onto another subject, I still couldn’t understand why Kira had chosen me.

  We kept chatting over coffee and herbal tea and by time I had paid the bill the long twilight had given way to night.  Once back at my house, I followed Kira upstairs, and we were hardly in the bedroom before she kissed me, murmuring something I could not understand, but I didn’t ask her to repeat it.  Her mouth was soft, and she smelt of wine and garlic and peppermint tea.  We stumbled to the bed and crashed onto the mattress.

  I unzipped her skirt and pulled it down over her hips.  I kissed her bare shoulders, her arms, the swell of her stomach, her hips.  My hand slid up to her thigh, passing through zones of deepening heat to the lace-enclosed swelling that made her a woman.  And when she was naked, lying beneath me, I held back, but she let me know there was no need and my breath quickened and a small cry escaped her lips and I wished I could hold on to that moment forever.

  Afterwards, she fell asleep beside me and I soon fell asleep myself only to stir hours later when light edged the curtains and birds celebrated another morning.  I stared at Kira’s sleeping form, her lips barely apart and hair loose upon the pillow.  She awoke, stirred, and straightened her legs.  Her eyes opened and her vision seemed to cloud.  “Morning.”

  “Good morning.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Couldn’t be better.”

  She rolled away from my kiss.  “Just going to the loo.”

  “Can you run me a bath?”

  “That’s decadent.”

  “I think I deserve one.”

  “You were good, but not that good.”

  I laid in the steaming water, replaying last night’s greatest hits.  Kira came into the bathroom to brush her hair.  “I’ve got to hurry.  Duty calls at work.”

  “I’ll ring you later,” I told her, as she bent over the bath and gave me a kiss.

  And then she was gone, her departure confirmed by the slamming of the front door.

  Within the hour I walked to my office.  I had paperwork to finish and wanted to complete it by the end of the day.

  High tide had pushed into the inner harbour and the boats tied along the Oxmarket Quay towered over me as I headed south, past a forest of masts and radar grilles and satellite pods.  I could see the clock on the town hall, above the pitched roofs and dormer windows.  I skirted piles of lobster creels and great heaps of tangled green fishing nets.  Skippers and crew were off loading supplies from vans and four-by-fours on to trawlers and small fishing boats, today nowhere near over before preparations were made for tomorrow.  Overhead the gulls wheeled endlessly, scraps of white against a clear blue sky, catching the morning sun and calling to the gods.

  At Buckingham Avenue I looked along the length of this pedestrianized street with its ornamental flowerbeds and wrought iron benches.  On a Friday and Saturday night it would be thought with teenagers gathering in groups and cliques, drinking beer from cans, smoking dope, feasting on fish suppers and burgers from the fish and chip shop.  In the absence of entertainment, this was where the kids made their own.

  I crossed into Langton Avenue, passing the Cellar & Kitchen public house and made a mental note that the band Turntable were playing there next Saturday night and sent Kira a test to let her know. Before I even had time to put my mobile back into my pocket she replied to say that Saturday night she would love to go.

  As I headed toward my office, I deliberated and conjugated over my career as a private detective.  It had proven to be depressing and dull rather than glamourous and dangerous and in the past five years I had seen almost the full range of human failings and tribulations.

  The trouble was sometimes I turned up facts that surprised, appalled, and smashed peaceful lives forever.

  I finally reached my tiny second-floor suite of offices and forced the pile of mail across the floor as I pushed open the door onto the outer eight by ten offices and skirted the table and chair that might one day house a receptionist if the time came that Handful Investigations could run to such glamorous extras and pushed open the door marked ‘PRIVATE.’

  My office was bigger than the reception office, I knew because I’d measured it, but only a trained surveyor could have told it with the naked eye.  I’m not a person who is self-indulgent in my fondness of luxury, but I had to admit that it was a pretty bleak sort of place.  The distempered walls were that delicate tint of off grey pastel shading from off-white at floor level to off-black just below the ceiling that only coastal fog and the neglect of years can achieve.  In one wall, overlooking the street below was a tall narrow window, washed on the inside, with a monthly calendar of different Arsenal footballers close by.

    That was it.  Nothing more.  There was no room for anything more.

    That ritual saved my life.

Chapter Twenty-One

The bomb went off while I crossed the corridor.

  I didn’t understand immediately what had happened.  A great blast of heat hit my neck while a sledgehammer worked on my back.

  I crashed into the kitchen door upright and fell, half in and half out of the room.

  I still couldn’t understand anything. Silence everywhere.  I couldn’t hear.  I tried to speak, but I couldn’t hear myself either. I shouted.  Nothing. Nothing except a high-pitched hissing. It had no direction and didn’t change when I turned my head from side to side.

  I looked down and saw that my hands were fine.  I moved them. No problem.  I could clap but couldn’t hear a sound.  It frightened me.

  My left knee hurt.  My trousers, turning red from my blood, were torn from hitting the door frame.

  I felt with my hands, but my knee appeared to be in the right place and I could move my foot without any increase in pain.  The blood came from superficial damage only.

  My hearing came back with a rush and suddenly with a mass of sound.  I heard screaming from outside in the street.  An alarm bell rang incessantly somewhere in the building.

  I lay back and rested my head on the floor as though I'd been there for.  The screaming went on, otherwise I might have gone to sleep.

  I was uncomfortable and my knees and legs ached. I straightened my foot and leg which had been tangled underneath me and received a reward of pins and needles.

  That’s a good sign.

  I looked up and saw daylight between the walls and ceiling where a large crack had opened up, not a good sign.  Water poured through the crack, probably, I thought lazily, from a burst pipe above.  It ran down the wall and spread across the floorboards towards me.  I turned my head and watched it approach.

  I didn’t fancy laying in a puddle.  The floor was cold enough without being wet as well.  I rolled over and drew my knees under me in a kneeling position. My left knee complained bitterly and the calf muscle cramped.  I pulled myself to a standing position using the door frame and surveyed my office.

  As a child, my mother complained my bedroom looked as though a bomb had gone off in it.  Like every other little boy, I dumped all my stuff on the floor and lived around it.

  However, my bedroom had never looked like the inside of my office.  The glass in the windows and doors had now completely vanished, and with-it large chunks of the outer office and about a third of the end wall from the side of my office.  I trembled. I didn’t know what to do.

  The building filled with voices and bustling people in black and yellow coats and big yellow helmets.  The fire brigade had arrived.  I cried.  It was unlike me to cry.  My father had been one of the old school who believed that men shouldn’t.  “Stop blubbing,” he would say to me.  “Grow up, boy.  Be a man.  Men don’t cry.”  And I had been taught.  I didn't cry when my father died of a heart attack, or at his funeral.  I knew he wouldn’t want me to.

  But now the shock, the tiredness, the feeling of inadequacy and the relief that cavalry had arrived were just too much, and so the tears streamed down my face.

  “Come on, sir,” one of the firemen said into my ear as he held my shoulders, “let’s get out of here.  Are you in any pain?”

  My tongue felt enormous in my mouth, stifling me.  “No,” I croaked.  Well, my knee hurts a bit.”

  He helped me to my feet and turned my shoulders away.  My gaze remained on where my office had once been until the fireman turned me so far my head just had to follow.  He held me firmly and pushed me towards the door, where a second fireman put a bright red blanket over my shoulders and led me out.  I wondered if they used red blankets, so the blood didn’t show.

  The fireman guided me down the corridor towards the staircase, and we were met in a man in a green jacket with DOCTOR written large across the back pushed past me.  “Is he all right?” he asked my escort.

  “Seems so,” was the reply.

  I wanted to say no, I wasn’t all right.  I wanted to tell him I had stared death in the face once again and that it would live with me for ever.  I wanted to shout out that I was far from all right, and that I might never be all right again.

  Instead, I allowed myself to be led to the staircase where I obeyed the instruction to go down.  He assured me that others would be waiting at the bottom to help.  I obediently descended and as promised, helping hands and soothing voices were there to greet me.  A brief assessment of my physical injuries, left me, still wrapped in my red blanket, sitting on the step of an ambulance for what seemed a very long time.  Several times a young man in a bright green with PARAMEDIC emblazoned in white letters across his shoulders over to ask if I was OK.

  I was finally taken to hospital about lunchtime.  After so long sitting on the step of the ambulance, I was unable to stand properly on my left leg as my knee had swollen up and stiffened badly.  My young paramedic helped me into the back of the ambulance that then sedately drove off with no siren or flashing lights.  It was if the urgency of the crisis were past.  I was only a walking wounded, and I would now be cared for with composure and calm.

  The ambulance took me to the small Oxmarket hospital.  An X-ray revealed no fractures in my swollen left knee.  A doctor speculated that the collision with the door might have caused a temporary dislocation of my knee cap, which had resulted in internal bleeding.  A haematoma had formed in the joint causing both the swelling and the pain.  The blood loss that had ruined my trousers was found to be due to a tear of the soft tissue of my lower thigh, also probably a consequence of the collision with the door.  Although the flow had all but stopped, the doctor insisted on applying some adhesive strips to close the edges of the wound, which he then covered with a large rectangular white bandage.  No such care was afforded to my trousers, which were unceremoniously cut short on the left side.  The hospital provided me with a tight blue rubberized sleeve for my knee both to apply pressure to the haematoma to reduce the bruising.  They also thoughtfully equipped me with a long white closely woven cotton sock to wear on my left foot to reduce swelling in the lower leg, and a supply of large round white painkillers.  I would be fine, they said, after a few days’ rest.  Fine in body, although it would take longer to heal the emotional injury.

  A taxi took me home.  So, I sat waiting in the hospital reception, somewhat embarrassed at having caused such a fuss.  I was utterly drained.

  “Taxi for Mr Handful,” a voice said.

  “That’s me.”

  I realized I had no money in my pockets.

  “That’s all right, the National Health Service is paying,” the driver said.  “But they don’t tip,” he added.  He’s going to be unlucky, I thought, if he thinks he’s going to get a tip from me.

  He looked me up and down.  I must have been quite a sight.  My trousers had one leg long and one short with a blue knee brace and white stocking below. 

  “You are okay,” he asked.

  “I’ve been better.” 

“Where to?”

  I gave him the address and the taxi arrived at my house on the southern edge of Oxmarket at about eleven o’clock.  I had slept the whole way from the hospital and the driver had real difficulty waking me up to get me out of the vehicle.  Eventually, I was roused sufficiently for him to help me across the small stretch between the road and the front door.

  “Will you be all right?” he asked as I put the key in the lock.

  “Fine,” I said, and he drove away.

  I hopped into the kitchen and took a couple of the painkillers with some water from the sink tap.  The stairs were too much, I decided, so I lay down on the sofa in my tiny sitting room and went eagerly back to my slumbers.

  I lay on a hospital trolley that was moving slowly along grey-coloured, windowless corridor.  I saw the ceiling lights passing by.  They were bright rectangular panels set into the grey ceiling.  The corridor went on forever and the lights were all the same, one after another, after another.  I looked up and back and saw Zoë pushing me.  She smiled. She wore a white lace nightdress that drifted behind her like wisps of clouds, and she floated across the grey floor.  I sat up with a jerk, screaming.  I rolled off the trolley and was falling, falling, falling . . .

  I woke up with a start, my heart pounding, my face cold, clammy, sweaty.  So vivid had been the dream that I had to feel with my hands to be sure that my legs actually there.  I lay in the dark breathing hard until my pulse returned to something near normal.

  It was the first nightmare of a repeating pattern and I spent most of the next morning lying down, first on the sofa and then on the floor, which was more comfortable.  I watched the twenty-four-hour news channels to find out more about what was being dubbed as ‘Terrorist Attack in Rural Suffolk.’  Somebody had stopped and filmed the aftermath on their mobile phone, and it showed me sitting obediently on the step of the ambulance, wrapped in my red blanket.

  When it got to midday, I realized that I was angry.  A nagging pain in my abdomen.  It was one pain I could do something about.

  I limped gingerly into the kitchen and made myself a Spanish omelette.  Food is often said to be a great comforter, indeed most people under stress eat surgery foods like chocolate, not because it gives them energy, but because it makes them feel better.  However, for me, food gave me comfort when I cooked it.

  I took some spring onions from my vegetable rack, diced them into small roundels and then fried them in a pan with a little extra-virgin olive oil.  I found some cooked new potatoes hiding in the rear recesses of my fridge, so I sliced and added them to the onions with a splash of soy sauce to season and flavour.  Three eggs, I thought, and broke them one-handed into a glass bowl.  I really loved to cook, and I felt much better, in both mind and body, long before I sat down on my sofa to complete the experience by actually eating my creation.

  At some point after I had eaten I drifted off to sleep for a while and was unaware of the doorbell going until my phone started buzzing on the coffee table.  I stirred, at first incapable of pulling myself out of the fugue, before finding enough energy to answer it, eyes still shut.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me.”  Kira.  “I haven’t got a key.”

  “Hold on.”

  Slowly, I lifted myself gingerly off the sofa and made my way to the front door.  She was standing there, under the protection of the porch, rain jagging out of the sky behind her, dressed in a long black raincoat, grey trousers, and black heels.  I saw her look me up and down, my clothes crumpled, my hair standing on end, a mix of amusement and pity in her face, and then – without me saying anything – she stepped up, into the house, brushed past me and headed for the kitchen.

  “You look like you need a coffee,” she said.

  I pushed the door shut.  “I need a bath first.”

  After I was done, I returned to the kitchen, and she was standing at one of the windows, looking out at the front garden and beyond to the harbour wall.

  She’d clipped her fringe back from her face on the left-hand side, and it had now become long enough at the back to tie a small ponytail.  It gave her slender features a different slant, revealing more of her eyes and cheekbones.  I’d spoken to her from a payphone at the hospital, a conversation that had lasted thirty minutes, and in which I’d told her everything that had happened.  For half an hour she’d just listened, silently, on the other end of the line.  Afterwards, I wasn’t sure why I’d been so candid.  She couldn’t help me then, and she wouldn’t have been able to help me mend, and much of our relationship had been built on an unspoken understanding that we might never feel comfortable giving so much of ourselves away.  Yet, I’d told her all the same.  Perhaps a part of me was just sick of holding on to everything.

  “How are you feeling?” she said.

  “Not great.”  I shrugged and picked up the coffee that she’d left for me. 

  “Are you functioning?” she asked.

  “Barely.”

  “Well, you’d better clear your head.”

  I frowned.  “Why?  What’s the matter?”

  “You’re going to want to hear this.”