August, Bank Holiday

We are at home now and the wine bottle is empty. Katie is staying put, wrapped up in that cheap fluffy white dressing gown that her mother recently bought for her. She is royally pissed off with me. Yes, I let her down again by spending too much time in North Staffordshire decoupling from the scent and touch of Lydia’s body.  It was about nine when I got back to the flat and too late for the cinema and now have been sitting here together for two painful hours; Katie the stoic and John the penitent. The ’Exorcist II: The Heretic’ on the television.  I’ve had enough, ‘I am off to bed.’ Her head does not move, she is playing deaf as she stares at the plasma screen. ‘Fuck you.’

 The T.V. is louder than usual; hollers and screams pass through the ceiling and shake the light fittings. Katie can sometimes be vindictive and petulant. Childish even but I let her moment and then undress.  In hindsight, I must have fallen asleep quickly as I cannot remember any nightmares, happy dreams, sad dreams, images of people – Katie, Lydia – they were not there but there was something…something…

 At first it’s just a feint noise, building and bubbling in my ears like water coming to the boil. Shadows are roaming around our room. Absurd questions are spoken from a black mouth, ‘drugs, what drugs you have you taken?’  What am I thinking? Confused, I am unable to answer back. My jawbone feels like it has been hit repeated by someone who does not want me to ever speak again.  I am paralysed. In the dust and the dirt with the mites and dead skin. Down and out. My thoughts in tatters. Concepts of time and place are absent. The harder I try to think the less I understand. They lift me from the floor, put me in the chair and tighten the belt and things fall into place; a pile of clothes, the print on the wall, the book by the bed, jewellery neatly arranged on the dressing table. However, the focal point of this neat bedroom arrangement is the bed itself, the yellow mattress, which yesterday, I could have sworn was white.

I am regaining consciousness and a semblance of order but it is fragile, thin and brittle, poised to tilt into something so much worse.

They carry me down the steps and the panic heightens and spread all over me like a childhood rash. Down on the dimly lit street the ambulance patiently waits. Calm voices pass me over the threshold but the panic is growing and everything is beginning to unfold before me. I start to associate objects with their functions and their intentions: heart monitor, plastic tubing for aspiration, hypodermic syringes, blue gloves, neck braces and collars and lastly, the oxygen mask that they are trying to force upon my face. I am in free-fall. The plane is coming down and nothing can stop the momentum, the descent of accelerated time. I am crashing with no one to rescue me and set me down outside of the panic, the fear, the terror of the hunter on my trail. I am over. Extinguished; the smell of death and cordite is everywhere. And yet, amid all the chaos, a part of my brain is still processing and asking some very big questions –

‘I am only thirty three years old and I am too young to die.’ 

‘I believe in you God. Where are you?’ ‘

‘Where is he? The Man on the Cross? I need his comfort. I need his words.’

‘Why aren’t the scenes from my life replaying? Come on, someone promised me. Childhood. Youth?’

 ‘I will be okay someone will save me won’t they?’ ‘Mum, Dad, Katie?’

            But the dread returns, stronger and more potent and I plead and I say to anyone who is listening,

 ‘I do not want to die not now, it is too early.’

A siren wails and the blue lights pulsate and makes patterns on the windows. I am conscious but I am waiting, guarding against that sudden swoon that will make my heart stutter and stammer and suddenly stop. My eyes are like suckers, locked onto the monitors, to the peaks, the troughs and the oxygen levels. These are my lifelines and I watch over them and guard them. I am controlling them and keeping them steady. There is no one else but me and my body. I work with it and calm it down. Doors fly open and the lines move faster across the screen as the warm night air rushes into the van. Gently and carefully, they set me down on solid ground. The stars overhead are shining like silver pinheads in a sky made of black carbon paper.  I leave them behind and pass through the hospital doors and into a bright and polished light. The doors close behind, life is returning but everything has changed, and I know that nothing will ever be the same again.

A nude coloured curtain shades me from whatever is going on outside. Katie is with me, her eyes are full of tears and the look on her face is disturbing. Her expression is one of pure fear. I don’t want her near me. She is making everything worse. I try to ask her what she is looking at but the words remain inside my mouth. I have the words in my head, but I cannot force them out. Language is internal and cannot be spoken. The frustration that I feel is deeply embedded like a splinter beneath my skin that cannot be eased out. I want to scream but my tongue will not make the necessary shapes to call out. Her pupils are shrinking; now it looks like its Katie who is dying. She is the one that’s passing out.

Speech returns and takes me by complete surprise. ‘Katie, what has happened to me?’ Her eyes widen and reveal two black orbs of recognition. Her pale hand with her long fingers interweaves with mine and I strengthen my grip so hard that she winces and visibly struggles to stifle a scream. I will not let her go; I am so frightened by the fear that a sudden gust of panic will disturb the newly granted calm that has settled about me. I question her again, ‘Kate, what has happened to me?’ However, she will not tell me, she is dumbstruck; it is too much for her as she reaches yet again for the comfort of her midriff.

            The curtain rustles and opens wide to reveal a small, squat, young nurse. The first thing that I notice about her is ridiculous, but a sign that I am regaining some kind of normality. As she bends over me I assess her hair and decide it needs a wash and that the hideous and gaudy scrunchy that is pulling tightly on her hair has to go for both our sakes. I hold up my arm and she cuffs me, numbers rise and fall and bottom out. Katie and I sit in suspense for something profound to fall from her lips and when it does, I know exactly where I am –

            ‘Da ya wanna a cuppa tae mate?’

            The Black Country. Not home. Not Brindley Place. Not Birmingham. I ask Katie why am here, ‘Walsall Manor Hospital WS2,’ and she gives me a garbled explanation about a bed shortage. I listen, and drink the scalding tea that the scrunchy beheaded nurse, who has now taken up residence on my bed, has given me. The ‘cuppa tae’ tastes surprisingly good, the best that I have ever drunk perhaps. The three of sit in cosy collusion before the young nurse speaks up and readies her papers. The young nurse explains that these are routine questions, universal, and it’s all just procedural stuff. I ask again, ‘what has happened to me,’ but she cannot provide an answer, ‘she’s not qualified,’ however, she feels that she has the right to ask me as to whether I piss or shit myself. Katie recognises that I am losing my patience and asks me to calm down but no one is getting this. I lean back on the pillow and for some unknown reason I have a vision of Picasso’s ‘Three Dancers,’ a print that hangs on our bedroom wall. ‘Love, sex and death.’ I don’t want to be here anymore. The intensity of my thoughts are breaking me down into pieces and all I want to do is to leave this place and get back to yesterday and its certainty but my past is slowly being effaced and binned. The little nurse asks me if I am ‘okay’ as she attaches a paper bracelet around my wrist that has my name and a number printed upon it. Little do I know that this alphanumeric tag will be with me for the remainder of my days – it will be my emblem, my coat of arms, a virtual tattoo that will be ingrained and absorbed into the National Health Service.

 I am sitting quietly when the curtain opens again. The nurse seizes her chance and exits quickly. He is tall, six feet may be, sub-continentally thin, his hirsute arms protrude from his powder blue theatre scrubs as his spidery fingers leaf quickly through my admission notes and then he starts coughing. A deep tubercular rattle. I hear him curse under his breath. Eventually he regains composure –

‘Sharma, my name is Doctor Sharma.’ His rubber theatre clogs squeak as he navigates his way around my bed. Sharma raises a finger as though he about to scold me for a childish prank or bad behaviour. ‘Can you please concentrate on the bridge of my nose?’ The nose is long and fragile but in proportion with the rest of his facial features. He moves his finger across my field of vision and ignores the bleeping noise coming from inside his upper chest pocket. ‘Reflexes.’ The doctor calls for the scrunchy nurse. ‘I need a hammer.’ The trust that he had implanted in me upon his arrival is now slowly starting to ebb away. She returns with a hammer. ‘This is a Queens Square reflex hammer. Important.’ Grinning, he takes up his stick and taps away at my knee joints before scrapping the soles of my feet with the handle of the hammer. ‘Okay.’ A tone of disappointment creeps in to his voice. ‘Any allergies?’ I shake my head. ‘Can you describe what happened to you? Precisely please.’ He listens and his bleep goes off again. ‘Okay, I’ll come back to you but in all likelihood, you will need to be admitted. I could send you home but if what you say is true we best err on the side of caution.’ I feel a warm hand cover mine and Katie pipes up –

‘Is that it? Is that all you can say? Can we have another opinion? Someone else. Get someone else to see him?’ I’ve never seen Katie as animated and as passionate as this but the tired nocturnal fellow is taking it full on the chin as he’s heard all protestations and pleas before. He lets my Katie finish and then he leaves us behind and I understand completely why he is leaving us behind. On the other side of the curtain, the whole place has suddenly erupted into pandemonium; the night clubbers have arrived and all I can hear is moaning, retching and crying but there is one voice, that cuts clean through the noise and it seems to speak directly to me – ‘he has sown the wind and he will reap the whirlwind.’ I place my hands over my ears and smile. Lewis Hyde is calling me.

Scourge of The North

As I try to shave one of the purple spotlights above the bathroom sink has started to flicker. I can’t face Hyde with a bad shave. Everything must be right when we go face to face. I can’t afford to show him a single flaw.  I take a cold rollerball pen to the bags beneath my eyes and apply anti-ageing moisturiser over my face and neck. I stare hard into the mirror, at the grey hairs that have secretly infiltrated my black crew-cut overnight, at the deep creases that I am unable to smooth away. I am thirty-three now but look about forty. I will look even worse when the kid arrives. That’s what kid’s do isn’t it, make you feel old, make you grow up? Well, we shall see. Katie does not move whilst I am dressing. Today, I go for the most expensive business clothes that I possess: Eton sky blue shirt with black onyx cufflinks, a Brioni navy blue suit, a thin silk black tie and a pair of Berlutti shoes that I have worn only once. The clothes are ostentatious, clichéd I know, expensive cloth and leather, worn only to serve one point and that is to show Mr Hyde that I am superior to him in every way.

 With my car keys and my Blackberry in my suit pocket, I descend the stairs down towards the pavement. The street is quiet and soulless. The sky is a passive, a pale blue grey.  I call the car with my key and open the heavy silver door. The car’s interior smells of stale tobacco, which reminds me that I need to stop at some point to buy a packet of cigarettes. The nausea, which had been dormant throughout the night has freed itself again and gets worse with every movement that I make. However, I have a feeling that this time tomorrow, when Hyde and the North are finally dealt with and this psychodrama has come to its end, that my symptoms will have cleared but until then it’s just a matter of clinging on until the close of play.

The M6 had been kind to me this morning until I reach Junction 14. The traffic has frozen and a column of thick black smoke is now gently twisting up into the air. Emergency services career up the hard shoulder on the Southern carriageway. It’s 7.15 and I need the crawl to become a sprint. I come off the motorway at Stafford Services with the hope that when I re-join it I will be looking at clear road. I pull up at a pump and head for the shop where I buy a packet of fruit pastilles, a packet of Durex, Rennies, a tuna and mayonnaise sandwich and twenty cigarettes. The kid who serves me at the counter stares at the diversity of merchandise I have dumped down in front of him. I check out his name badge; ‘Mo.’ He scans the condoms first and smiles, the pastilles and so on but it’s all too much for me. ‘They’re for the kids, they’re off to a festival.’ Mo rises up on his tip-toes and looks over at the empty BMW; ‘any fuel sir?’ I remain silent; my impatience is growing, as the transaction seems to take an age to complete.  I then attempt to pay with my fuel card. Mo smiles again. I gather my purchases and he bids me goodbye. As I am walking out the shop, I raise my elbow slightly and knock a stack of neatly arranged column of high-energy drinks to the floor. As the commotion caused by the tins stops, I clear my throat and in my best supervisory voice, I say, ‘Best clear them up Mo. You’ve got customers waiting and as you’ve been undoubtedly been taught the customer  is king.’

In the car, I turn the cigarette carton over in my hands and for once, it’s not the picture of the man with his throat cut but a picture of a premature baby with wires protruding from its chest. I ignore the message and wonder if I now have the full pictorial set.

 I leave the motorway at Junction 18. The sky is slate grey, the early morning sun has disappeared, light rain specks the windscreen, the temperature in the car has dropped by a degree, as I drive alongside miles and miles of flat dirt fields to the now defunct factory and toward the near redundant Lewis Hyde.

Hyde is in his office affixing white labels to brown boxes and does not seem notice that I am standing in the doorway behind him.

‘I can feel your breath on my neck John. I’ll make us a coffee. Machine’s gone so it’s instant okay? Suppose you’ll be taking the kettle back to Birmingham with you as well?’ The Rennies have not done the trick, the nausea is back and my gut is churning. He hands me a cup of scalding black coffee in a floppy white plastic cup.

‘Good journey?’ I avoid the question and ask him to sit down. Sitting there, he looks like a big red bloodhound; corpulent, dewlapped, tomato red hair and bulging green eyes. He fingers his Disney necktie as I formulate the best way of breaking the bad news to him.

‘Well.’ He thinks he knows what’s coming before I have even started. ‘John, I know what’s coming. You can’t afford me can you? Look I’ll take a very, very minor cut in salary if you give me a lump sum similar to the maximum redundancy figure and if you also buy out my remaining holiday entitlement.’ He wants cash; about eight grand. Well, he’ll get that anyway as soon as he is jobless. Problem solved.

‘Lewis there is no job for you.’

‘What. Come again. Did I hear you right. ’ His brow glistens with sweat as he tries to wrestle with the reality of a new set of circumstances. Puzzled; he looks at me in absolute disbelief. ‘Come again.’ I do not repeat myself. Louder. ‘Come again?’ Like a mad mynah bird he keep repeating himself over and over again. ‘Come again? There’s no job in Birmingham. No job?’ The pennies are dropping one by one, falling ever quicker, until they drop in one almighty cascade of realisation.

‘I have two kids. Do you have kids?’ I answer in the negative. ‘Well without kids you are nothing. Without kids you are not living and mine are with my wife and not me. You know, I wanted to offer her something, a new life in a new place, put the past behind us but you have ruined all that. You have ruined me. Tricked and used me. Well played John!’ He gave me a sarcastic round of applause. The falling rain beat out a hollow tattoo on the factory roof as Hyde raised his voice, ‘shot by both sides, played like a gud’un.  Fucked over. I have given ten years to this company and its people. I’ve done the extra miles for the old man and his retarded playboy son and what do I end up with.’ There is a pause as we both listen to the falling rain. ‘You know there’s just you and me here John.’ The atmosphere in the office has suddenly changed. ‘The security guard will be on the far side of the building at the moment. That’s a good ten minutes’ walk back to here. You could have an accident John, a little mishap in the loading bay.’ He stands up and puts his blazer back on and walks around the desk, ‘don’t worry I’m not going to hurt you.’ He pushes passed me, turns around and stands in the doorway facing me. ‘John, do you know what, I hope that you have a real shit life. What you have done will all come back to you, twice as hard. God help you my friend.’ I reach for a cigarette but I have left them in the car.

‘Lydia where are you?’

‘North Midlands – I have a meeting with a client at twelve.’ The signal drops out and then she returns. ‘Junction 14. What’s up?’ Our signals get lost briefly in a roar of lost words. ‘Lydia, Lydia.’ She comes back with a postcode and I punch it into the sat-nav and wait for the map to appear. ‘Okay, I’ve got you. See you in a bit.’

My head is a mess as I keep replaying the scenes from of an hour ago. I try to rationalize the fear that I felt in Hyde’s office but I can’t shake off the feeling that something bad is going to happen now. I turn on Radio 3 and try to relax but everything that he has said comes biting back. The pre-Bank holiday traffic is thickening, caravans and mobile homes clog up the inner lanes. I call the office and give Forsyth an edited version of my meeting with Hyde. There are no thanks, no well done or ‘we owe you one John’ all I get is some long winded speech about how he’s already identified the next target, the next strip before he starts to reel off all the details of where he is holidaying over the next week. The sky blackens up, a sharp shower pounds the roof of the car and Forsyth’s voice crackles and disappears.

The sat-nat delivers me to another grey industrial estate in Cannock. Amongst the parked cars, I spot the Amazon green Nissan 370z Roadster. Eventually I see Lydia walking across the tarmac towards my car, dressed as usual in black trouser suit, a laptop case in one hand, a lever-arch file in a head lock under her other arm, she raps on the window and sits down in the rear of the car. She brushes her blue-black hair from her eyes and puts it into a ponytail. We swap plastic ‘hellos’ and précis’s of what we have been doing. We both know what will happen next; I slip my hand between her thighs and she raises her eyebrows as if to say ‘what do you think you are doing.’ I will kiss her hard on the mouth and she will resist. I will touch her breast, she will scold me, and on it goes.

We arrive in our separate cars at a Travelodge in Rugely and book a double room. After an hour of textbook book sex we are finished. Our meetings are getting shorter and the sex is becoming studied and staid. Lydia rises from the thick white linen sheets and goes to the bathroom. After about ten minutes she returns with her make-up re-established –

‘You okay John; you look a little green around the gills.’ I study her as she takes up her jewellery from the bedside cabinet – a ring for the right thumb, a cherry red garnet on right hand index finger, a gold band and a big coral coloured stone pendant, which she hangs deftly around her neck.

‘Things haven’t been too good workwise. You know how it is?’

‘But you weren’t like this yesterday. You were, you know, really into it. Today you seem distant. Disinterested. Inconsiderate.’

‘What are trying to say? That I was rubbish today is that what you mean.’ She quickly buttons up her white chintz blouse, pulls up her trousers and put her heels on.

‘John there’s something that I have to tell you.’ The day was getting worse by degrees; first Hyde and now Lydia. ‘I can’t see you anymore. I’m seeing someone one else. It’s a proper relationship, you know one that I think could last. I’m not getting any younger and whilst I enjoy what we have, I need some stability in my life.  Christ, I am tired of living on my own and I know John that you have someone as well don’t you? I can smell her on your skin when we sleep together.’

Naked I walk over to her and rest my hands on her shoulders.

‘What, that’s it?  Just like that. You can’t do that. We can’t stop. We have an agreement?’

‘Not anymore we don’t.’

I squeeze her shoulders with my thumbs. Two red marks are left behind. She struggles and tells me to stop. The sick games are over. But I can’t stop I clamp my hand around my windpipe and throttle her. She slaps me across my face and I feel one of her rings brush my cheek. I push her back toward the bathroom door. She stumbles and falls, and bangs her head against the plywood door and the noise resonates all around the small space and finally peters out.

There were no tears on either side; it was a cold and emotionless parting of the ways. I watched from behind the thick net curtain as she confidently strode across the car park with her phone to her ear. I sat on the unmade and waited for ten minutes to call her again. I rang three times and got her voice mail. I listened to her voice, to her clean and clipped words, a neutral colourless language so different from the filth that she used to whisper in my ear.

 I hold the phone tightly in my hand and I delete her existence.

The Fag Packet

The guy on the box with the Zapata moustache doesn’t look too good. He looks as though he has had his throat cut. Well that’s how he appears to me. I have collected six cartons so far, some of which have just photos on them whilst others, have messages and phone numbers on them. But no matter how graphic the picture, or how bold the message, they don’t frighten me enough to quit. I have tried to give up so many times but I can’t. It’s impossible. I have tried everything; patches, inhalers, lozenges, gum, spray, and always failed but now that Katie has quit  I suppose I should at least make an attempt to stop. I should do it for the kid shouldn’t I. Yes the kid. Who would have believed that John H. Dempsey would one day become a father? A Dad.  How ridiculous that word sounds to my ears. Do I really want the family thing, the tethers, the duty and the sacrifice? I like Katie but I am not sure whether I love her. I don’t love Lydia but that’s different. Christ, I don’t know what love is anyway. Cue a song. Recite a poem, it’s all bollocks anyway.

Hilton Services. Stop then start sit and think.  Push a pedal and turn a wheel. Press a button and watch the little glyphs light up, and tell the ever-compliant BMW 520i what to do next. I loathe this show pony of a car that the company foisted on me as a symbol to show the Northerners that we meant business. Oh yes, we meant business alright, in the shape of one hundred redundancies. I have overseen all of them bar one – men and women reduced to tears, begging for crumbs of work, watching them pass through the stages of DABDA. I know, the bad news man but every company has one. I don’t enjoy what I do but I don’t hate it either. Someone has to do it. Don’t they? However, this one has been tough and sits bad. I don’t know, there’s something I don’t like about this strip. It does not feel right; it’s  like I have overstepped a line, gone too far for the first time but I have to stick by my maxim ‘that the ends always justify the means.’ Machiavelli. ‘The Prince.’ One of my favourites reads.

Walsall. Bescot stadium quiet as usual just like on match days. Thoughts of Lyd ia begin to flood my mind. This happens daily as she reaches up from nowhere and overwhelms me with memories of our secret assignations and petty perversions. Lydia and I met on the road. We were motorway lovers, shacking up for a couple of hours in cheap hotel rooms. We don’t know each other outside of the corporate life, outside of the speak, the sharp suits, the heels and ties. You know, I don’t even think that we are having an affair sometimes it’s just a release for the both of us, a loosening of the tourniquet of corporate pressures and frustrations. I know at some point, that I will have to leave her, but I cant’t, not now.

I exit the M6 at it confluence with the M5 at Great Barr. I point the car in the direction of the BT Office tower that shoots up on this clear Birmingham day like a giant minaret. I am doing a steady 30 miles an hour on the A34 when the call comes in. Deep in the driver’s side door pocket, amid the empty fag packets and sandwich cartons, I search blindly for my Bluetooth dongle.

‘Johnny boy. How you doing?’ His overfamiliarity puts my hackles up straight away. It’s half past eight in the evening and I really don’t need this. I stop at the traffic lights and I turn Miles Davis down.

Deadbeat, tired and insincere I make a laboured effort to converse with him, ‘Hi Lewis,’ my monotone drone echoes back into my earpiece.

He starts, ‘Big day tomorrow and since I am the last man standing, I think we could have a champagne breakfast to celebrate our new working relationship. What do you say? I’ve finalised everything thing and the factory will be formally closed at twelve. Sad I know but that’s business.’ I don’t know whether it’s the Irish brogue or his unerring self-confidence which is annoying me. Silent, I wait for him to start again.

‘She’s talking to me again. She called me last night.’ I open the top button of my shirt and remove the tie that had been around Lydia’s neck at dinnertime and cast it on to the backseat. ‘I think that Sue and the kids will come back. I’m sure they will. Sue will see it as a fresh start.’ You see, Lewis Hyde has a problem that will become very apparent to him tomorrow morning when I inform him that there is no fresh start for him back in Birmingham.  I was under orders anyway, Forsyth and the Chairman, after only one meeting, had taken an instant dislike to Hyde and his fawning attitude, ‘he’s weak John but his poor management is his folly and our boon.’ I seconded their observations and carried on with my work.

He was still there burbling away in the background but I had lost his track. ‘See you nice and early John.’ I hung up and took a circuitous route around the city that took me through Hamstead, Handsworth Wood, Ladywood and the backstreets leading to our duplex flat that overlooks the canal basin at Brindley Place.

 In the inky blue glare of the Hyatt Hotel, I make my way across the residents’ car park, always mindful of the shadows, and enter the vestibule leading up to our apartment. I forego the lift under the misapprehension that the climb will somehow remedy a wheezy chest and a curved spine. But that’s not to be, as I stagger onto the landing and clumsily unlock the front door. Steam rolls from the crack beneath the bathroom door and I hear her shout a muffled ‘welcome.’ The smell of Bolognese sauce eats into the air and triggers the nausea that I have been suffering from throughout the day. I open the balcony door and the noise of the city floods into the room but the air is cold and refreshing. On the glass coffee table, there is one book, ‘The Pregnancy Bible,’ that is lying open with at chapter six, ‘Week Twelve End of the First Trimester.’ Katie emerges from the bathroom wrapped in a white bath sheet and looks down at the thick tome and then back to me.

‘Have you read any of that yet? Darcy recommended it to me.’ Darcy is Katie’s secretary, a mother three times over and always ready to offer Katie a bilge of maidenly advice about how to conduct her private life and how Katie should be more assertive and ambitious in her work. Given half the chance, it wouldn’t surprise me if Darcy were there at the birth of our child. I can see her now, eagerly waiting to catch the head of my newborn child. By the way, I have never met Darcy but the way in which my solicitor girlfriend reveres her so much makes me thoroughly hate and despise her.

My image of Darcy disappears. ‘Is that a no or a yes John?’ I fail to answer and she storms off to dry her hair. It’s not that I am being wilfully ignorant toward my girlfriend but the pain is my skull has grown so acute that it feels as though my head has been immersed in a bucket of polar ice. In the medicine cabinet amid all her unguents and the out of date drugs, I find a partial sheet of paracetamol tablets. I quaff four and return to the living area with my yet unformulated apologies.

We sit down to the dinner that I have served up. She pinches a piece of garlic bread from the baton I have somehow managed to burn.

‘Bad day?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

It doesn’t take much to start me off. The headache has disappeared but Lewis Hyde hasn’t. He is by my side all the time, interrogating my conscience, crying on my shoulder asking me why I have done this to him, to his family and to their future. Katie gets the barrage full on and then we fall silent over the food.

‘John it’s your job. You buy up ailing companies keep the best bits and make us some money. It’s simple. It’s just business. You could always look for something else?’ She’s right I know but looking is not having. The moneybox needs to be filled and the souls have to be collected and dispatched. I clean the plates and ask her if she wants a drink, ‘decaffeinated coffee with skimmed milk.’ The pregnant lifestyle is kicking in now and the ‘Bible’ is open. Oh fuck.

‘Just twelve weeks after conception the foetus is fully formed. By now almost all the baby’s organs and structures have formed and will continue to grow until delivery. The baby is already moving about but, the movements cannot be felt.’

‘Can you feel anything Kate?’

‘I thought I felt a slight flutter in my stomach this afternoon.’

Katie has a delicate frame unsuited to pregnancy, long legs, light olive coloured skin and big black eyes, which expand when she gets angry or frightened and shrink to almost nothing when she cries. Men crave her I know but I find it hard these days to touch or make love with her. The mystery has gone; the excitement never arrives but it’s okay, together we are steady.  She carries on reading with the tenderness of a young mother to a small child. We are in the story together, I have my part in the narrative, and then Lydia’s face emerges from nowhere and rips our little fairy-tale into pieces.

‘I’m off to bed John I’ve got a heap of work to do tomorrow. E-mails, who needs them? Are you back up North tomorrow? We could go to see a film if your back before six. What do you say?’ I nodded and watched as she climbed the spiral staircase and disappeared. 

The Twenty Seconds Window

‘I wake. I pull back the bedclothes. I sit. I walk. I stand and everything is cool. I think work. I think food.

 I am granted twenty seconds of forgetfulness before my brain chooses the right channel and begins to think the unthinkable.’

John H. Dempsey 2012