Altered Life

by Keith Dixon

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THEY KEPT ME FOR twenty-four hours, then they had to release me or apply for an extension. My lawyer came and helped them understand. She was a girl called Veronica in her late twenties, as slim and sleek as a racehorse, with long crinkly hair and a no-nonsense attitude that seemed to cut through the procedural delays. I’d signed on with her firm in Manchester a year ago but this was the first time I’d used them. I’d use them more often if they sent Veronica again.

  ‘They can’t keep going on this,’ she said, ‘without actually charging you with anything. No one in their right mind thinks you abducted this woman then boffed yourself on the back of the head hard enough to need six stitches. Give ’em credit for trying, though.’

  ‘I will.’

  She picked up her bag and slung its strap over her shoulder, then looked me up and down. ‘What do you want to do now? Are you in a fit state to do anything? Anyone I should call?’

  ‘I guess not. Could you take me home?’

  She smiled, putting her head on one side so that her hair fell downwards like a crinkly waterfall. ‘Ah, that’s sad. Walk this way, sir. I will chauffeur you to your place of residence.’

  We talked little as she drove me home, then she turned the car round in my drive and whisked back to Manchester to prepare the bill for her services.

  I slumped in a chair with a whisky and tried not to think of the events at Tara’s house. With limited success. That meant I had to have another whisky to help my concentration. Still no good.

  At the point at which I’d been hit, did I smell something? Did I hear something? Was there a shadow cast on the ground that I could recognise if I just thought hard enough? And as I’d left the house, with Tara opening the door for me, I’d glanced at her profile and caught a momentary glimpse of an expression behind her eyes. I realised now what it was that I’d seen. It was deep-seated, bone-deep fear. She was absolutely terrified of something, and I had no idea what it was. And now I would probably never know.

  The woman I’d married eighteen years ago had been called Debbie Hoyt, not Tara Brand. She was a trainee nurse, not a sales wizard in a corporate environment. She’d left me and gone to London and I hadn’t heard from her since.

  She was still the most exciting woman I’d ever known. I’d had longer partnerships with women since, none of which had lasted, but Tara was the benchmark. The one against which all the others were measured. We were twenty years old, living in Leeds. She was a student nurse and I rented a room in the same house when another nurse left the course and created a vacancy. I was avoiding higher education by claiming that I wanted to pay my way in society, and in the meantime acted as a jobbing handyman for my friend, Barry, the painter and decorator. I’d see Debbie at odd hours, flying up the stairs to get changed before she came clattering down again half an hour later looking sleek and shapely, her short dark hair cut in a bob that clung tightly to her head and giving her the appearance of a twenties flapper. She’d charge out of the door and leap into a succession of expensive cars driven, presumably, by doctors with large overdrafts.

  God knows what I looked like to her. I was still skinny, though tall, and was usually dressed in a white painter’s apron with rainbow streaks drizzled over it as though I’d been coloured in by a child with no aesthetic sense but a lot of big brushes. I gave her a weak grin when we passed on the stairs but she looked right through me, as only the glamorous can.

  Then we met a couple of times in the kitchen and talked. I had a sense of humour then, and managed to amuse her for the length of time it took a kettle to boil. She would stand with her back to the sink, tossing her hair and stretching her arms upwards as though unaware of the effect her body was having on me. I quit working for Barry and joined the Civil Service. Started to wear a shirt and tie. I bulked out a little because I took up running and weights. Now she started smiling when she saw me on the stairs, occasionally stopping to talk. The visitors in fancy cars stopped calling as she knuckled down to work, and we sometimes found ourselves in the room downstairs that was a shared lounge, sitting in opposite chairs and reading. At least I was pretending to read, though actually I spent the time thinking about what I could say to her next without sounding stupid.

  All this happened in the space of three months. Then I stopped seeing her altogether. I began to hear music from her room, which was above mine. She was spending more time at home when she wasn’t at work, slopping around in jeans and a baggy jumper she found in a charity shop. I wouldn’t see her for days at a time, then I’d bump into her on the doorstep, where she’d give me a small conspiratorial smile before trotting upstairs—if a gazelle can be said to trot.

  Then things happened very quickly. We got drunk one weekend at a party, and an emotion was released between us that we’d known was there but hadn’t found expression until then. The pent up feeling gave it an electric charge that I still remembered nearly twenty years later. The union had been fierce, and almost as a footnote to the act, just to show it was more than a passing moment, she got pregnant. Her father—some kind of bigwig in the Army—forced us to marry, though my parents would have been happy enough if we’d decided to live together.

  What I remember most is the embarrassed scene where the six of us met in my parents’ house. We could barely get in the parlour. My dad was all graciousness and bonhomie, trying to make the guests feel at home; my mother spent most of the time in the kitchen, the other downstairs room, brewing tea and making scones that were hard as slate. Debbie and I sat apart on the sofa, not looking at each other. Her father, the Major, tried to take charge, but was constantly out-charmed by my dad’s matter-of-factness: not to worry, these things happened, it would all work out OK, we shouldn’t get upset about it, the world was a different place now. Tara’s mother, a frail woman you could almost see through, seemed to agree with my dad and was all for a quiet approach to the whole situation. The Major, on the other hand, saw that the niceties had to be observed. Maybe of all of us he had the most to lose—social face, standing, the regard of the men.

  So Leeds registry office on a windy Saturday morning. The six of us in best suits. For the wedding before us in the office, the bride went the whole hog—full wedding dress and train, maids of honour, corsage, the lot. Tara and I looked at each other in our plain outfits and laughed, smothering our faces with our hands.

  Two months later, she miscarried. Two weeks after that she quit her course and went to London. She didn’t tell me she was going until the night before she caught the train. We had a nasty stand-up row in the middle of a kitchen little bigger than a shoe-box, saying things we both regretted at once. She took nothing with her, except a piece of my heart. I hadn’t heard from her since, though in quiet moments I’d thought about her. What I thought about mostly was her impulsiveness. She had sex with me impulsively, got married on a whim, left me and our marriage on the spur of the moment. It was exciting, but scary. I thought London would suit her fine.