by Paul Charles
“Do you have water to drink?” she asked. Her voice sounded like a shy whisper, slightly throaty.
“In the fridge,” Kennedy mumbled from somewhere in the Twilight Zone.
“That feels a lot better,” Kennedy said, gingerly rubbing his neck and half expecting his back to make him pay heavily for the cost of lifting his hand to such a position.
Miss Chada opened the door to the large Siemens silver fridge.
“Ah I see. No girlfriend?”
“No,” Kennedy conceded. “Is it that obvious?”
“Boys only shop for one day,” she replied, her eyes still doing a recon of his mostly empty shelves. “Boyfriend?”
“No,” Kennedy said, making a feeble attempt at a smile.
“No one to take care of you?” she continued in her comma-less diction, as she searched the cupboards for two glasses, which she examined closely. “Very clean for single man. Very clean house.”
“Thank you, and I live by myself.”
She squinted sternly, destroying the incredible lines of the natural beauty of her nose and eyes. “But I still see a woman’s touch in your house. Your curtains are too gentle for a man. Very tastefully done.”
“There was…” Kennedy started. Kennedy thought of ann rea. There was no short way to describe ann rea and his relationship with her, so he didn’t even try.
“Ah I see,” she said, nodding knowingly, as she poured two large glasses of water. She walked back to Kennedy and handed him his glass. She was very light on her feet. She was now close enough for him to see she was quite flushed and there were several beads of sweat on her brow and below her eyes. Strong and all as he knew her to be, her massage must, of course, be as taxing on her as it was on her client.
She took a long swig of cold water and then held her glass up and cooled her brow and cheeks with it. The manoeuvre looked very sensual, although Kennedy was sure she was totally unaware of this.
“You’re in very bad shape,” Miss Chada said, “worse than I thought. You look poorly Mr Kennedy.”
“Christy, please call me Christy.”
She smiled; it wasn’t a shared smile but a very private one.
“No, no, I didn’t mean…” Kennedy began, fearing she might be thinking he was trying to get fresh with her. She probably had to put up with advances from patients all the time. She looked absolutely amazing. He couldn’t remember ever thinking this before about her. In the last few minutes, they had spoken more than they had in the previous twelve months.
Miss Chada smiled again, this time a generous, shared smile. She always looked as if she were in her own wee world though. Kennedy had put this down to the fact that she needed to go to her own space to get her through manipulating other people’s bodies to try and heal their various ailments.
“Please drink water,” she began, avoiding addressing him by name. “I need to do some more work on your neck and back. You have music you like?”
“Ah, yes…”
“It will help distract you from my work,” she began, and thought for a second before adding, “It helps me too.”
These four words were the first words between them that could be interpreted as in any way personal in the year she’d been treating him.
“You put on the music. I’ll bring in my treatment table,” she ordered as she left Kennedy. As he stood up, he was shocked by how pain free his movement had now become. He went to his music room under the stairs and selected Astral Weeks, and soon the (perhaps) greatest forty-six minutes and five seconds of music produced in modern times was filling his house.
Even though it was a warm June day, Miss Chada still had her fresh white towels, which she layered over Kennedy and moved around him to accommodate the areas of his body she was working on.
She didn’t speak for the duration of Astral Weeks, and as the final piece of music came to its abrupt end, she said, very, very quietly, “What was that? I have never heard anything like that before in my life.”
She seemed genuinely overcome by what she’d been listening to.
When Kennedy explained the little he knew of Van Morrison’s masterpiece, she asked if he would mind playing it again.
Again no words passed between them as they listened to the music and she worked, sometimes gently and other times violently, on his body.
The aches that had been troubling him were now slowly evaporating. He actually thought he could feel the stiffness and soreness leaving his body in waves of heat.
At every break, Kennedy half expected her to say, “Right. That is it. I need to be going now.” But on and on she kept working at his body. She spent an extremely painful (for Kennedy) twenty minutes, bringing tears back to his eyes as she tried, and eventually succeed, in releasing the knots in his fingers and toes. Occasionally she would pause to catch her breath, cool her brow and have a sip of water. But all the while Mr Morrison cast his mesmerising spell around them both. By the time Astral Weeks concluded its second cycle, it was just before five o’clock.
“When did you last eat?” Miss Chada asked.
Kennedy struggled to remember.
“I thought so,” she chastised. “Your body also needs food to help it recover. Your aura is still unbalanced.”
Okay, Kennedy thought, right there you just lost me. She made him sit upright on one of the kitchen chairs and started reiki treatment. He could feel the heat from her palms even though she never actually placed her hands directly on his head. He could physically feel a great weight lift off his shoulders.
“There,” she said, “that is better much better. Now let’s eat. I’m hungry.”
She looked in the fridge.
Kennedy looked embarrassed. Did she not trust him to eat? Was he really in such a bad state that she felt she had to baby-sit him?
“Don’t worry. I have an idea.” She fetched her mobile from her black rucksack, punched in a few numbers very quickly and said something in a foreign language. The only part Kennedy recognised was his own address.
“Just give them twenty minutes. Then I guarantee you’ll enjoy the best Indian food you’ve ever tasted.”
“Good,” was all Kennedy could find to say.
“You have shower I can use? I like to enjoy my food. I can’t enjoy my food when I’m…”
“Of course; it’s at the top of the house. I’ll show you,” Kennedy replied, kicking himself for reading too much into a simple hygiene request.
Kennedy escorted her and her rucksack to the top landing and pointed her in the direction of the shower, a half a flight up from his own bedroom. He disappeared into his bedroom to replace his dressing gown with a T-shirt and light black linen trousers. As he stopped to put his feet into his trousers, he found himself more impressed by the fact that his back appeared totally pain free than he was by the fact that a beautiful woman was naked and entering a shower about ten feet from where he stood.
Kennedy was down in the kitchen serving the Indian takeaway on to two large plates in the centre of the table when he heard her footsteps on the stairs. He thought she’d ordered enough food for a feast as he uncorked one of the two chilled bottles of wine in his fridge.
She was barefoot and wearing very expensive-looking Prada tracksuit bottoms with a vibrant blue sweatshirt. Once again, her face appeared flushed. Her long black hair still looked a little damp. Kennedy enjoyed a moment of feminine perfection and then scolded himself for ruining it with an, albeit brief, sexist image of her feeding him his food.
“You are very clean Mr Kennedy. Your bathroom is very clean. Your bedroom is very clean. Your house is very clean. Clean is good. I like clean,” she smiled. “I am Sharenna, Mr Kennedy.”
“And I am Christy,” he said as he poured her a glass of wine, thinking if he had to pick one word, other than stunning, to describe Sharenna Chada, it would be “clean.”
She was very polite; she always spoke in short comma-free sentences; she didn’t talk much about herself save that her mother was a Fijian Indian, her father was from Malaysi
a, and she was born in Woodstock, just outside of Oxford. She was very passionate about her food and kept saying that she would need strenuous exercise to work it off. Kennedy pulled himself up short just as he was about to tell her he thought she had the perfect figure. He felt there was no statement surer to send her running for the front door. He was at least ten years older than her, for heaven’s sake, and was this any way to treat a lady who’d given up her Saturday afternoon to massage away all his aches and pains?
Kennedy told her about ann rea - the whole story about ann rea.
“Men and women want too much from love,” she said. “Our lives are bigger than love. What is love? Love is for when you’re old and you’ve lost your passion. Love is companionship. Love is for when you witness your partner’s body slowly age and unconditionally forgive them for it.”
“Wow,” Kennedy said.
“No, no. I see in your eyes Mr Ken... sorry… Christy. I see in your eyes that you don’t believe this. Tell me did you ever feel a love which was stronger than what I was able to do for your pain this afternoon?”
“But we’re talking about two different things.”
“No we’re not,” she said forcefully. “The mistake men and women make is that they think once they fall in love they’ll be in paradise. Then they realise that paradise is just a word. But look at you and ann rea. Once you fell in love you were lost. Love did nothing for you. Most people go through exactly what you went through. Unlike you, most people feel that to protect this big love or capture this mystical love they must get married or move in together. In order to develop as people we need to learn that ‘loving’ really is just a higher degree of ‘liking.’ Maybe if we can accept this fact we have a better chance of nurturing our relationships. If we accept this fact as a benchmark then we reach a good starting point.”
“But that’s so cyn…”
“If you don’t dismiss me as being cynical about love I will show you Christy. I will really show you.”
They were finished their food, and as Kennedy cleared it away, she opened the remaining bottle of wine from the fridge. She seemed to be noting and approving of the way Kennedy dealt with the dirty dishes and the remains of the food.
She refilled both their wine glasses from the new bottle, and Kennedy could see she was really enjoying their exchange. He suggested they move to the more comfortable sitting room, one floor up, and put on some music. She said she’d prefer he didn’t put on a CD; she said music was for listening to, but right now she wanted to talk. She also added that it might be nice to listen to Astral Weeks again later.
The conversation was initially lighter than it had been downstairs, a bit of joking about Christy always calling her Miss Chada and she always calling him Mr Kennedy, a way, she said, to ensure she kept a distance from her clients.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No,” she whispered, “nor a girlfriend.”
“Ever?”
“Oh Christy please. You mustn’t patronise me either if I’m to show you. Just because I understand the shortcomings of love doesn’t mean that I don’t seek fulfilment.”
“What is it that you’re going to show me?” Christy felt compelled to ask.
“I will show you something bigger than love. I will prove to you that the love you so desperately sought with ann rea was quite possibly the reason your relationship with her failed.”
Okay, Kennedy thought, right there you’ve got me again. He then refilled their empty wine glasses, finishing off the bottle. “No more wine. We’ve had enough. You really need to be able to see. To be able to feel…” she said as she, very quietly and sensuously, stood up in front of Kennedy.
There were no embarrassing movements, no feeble attempts at lap dancing or pulling shapes, exotic or otherwise. Even the self-conscious semi-smiles were noticeable only by their absence. Miss Sharenna Chada very gracefully removed her track suit bottom and blue top and stood before Kennedy, a proud, stunningly beautiful, firm-bodied woman wearing nothing but her white briefs.
Kennedy had never seen a vision like her in his life - no, not in person, nor on the small screen, large screen, nor even a photograph. He sank back into the sofa, his jaw dropping.
“No. No this is not it,” Sharenna whispered, sounding a little disappointed. “My body is not it. Not what I wanted to show you. This is only an instrument.”
In the fifties movies, this is where the screen would fade to black, and the last thing you would see in focus would be the romantic hero leaning over a bed, but with his foot still touching the bedroom floor. In modern terms, Miss Chada quite simply bonked Kennedy’s brains out.
There was one moment when he realised the reason why Miss Chada had spent so much time, attention and energy working on his back; she had wanted him to be fit for their prolonged horizontal activity. She showed him in no uncertain terms (and repeatedly) the power and attraction of pure, unadulterated lust. To make sure Kennedy wasn’t confused in what he was experiencing, she permitted no kissing nor offered cooing endearments.
They fell asleep in each other’s arms and bodies, complicatedly intertwined, at one-twenty the following morning, both totally and exquisitely exhausted.
When they woke on Sunday morning at ten-thirty, she advised Kennedy that she couldn’t possibly be seen leaving his house in daylight. So they stayed in bed all day long, where she continued to give practical and effective demonstrations on her theory, breaking only occasionally for food and for her to do some much needed maintenance work on Kennedy’s back. She left at eight-ten on Sunday evening after he’d used the last of his energy and the last of his eggs to make her an omelette. This time though she was the one who immediately washed the dishes and tidied everything away.
She left him on his doorstep acting, Kennedy thought, for the benefit of the neighbours, more as a masseuse than a lover.
Did they grow closer? No, of course not.
Did they care for each other? Perhaps, but maybe only in the way a racing driver cares for his car.
Did they get to know each other better? Only physically.
Was the sex the best Kennedy ever had? Quite possibly.
Did he miss the “love” element? No, not so far.
Why him? That’s what Kennedy would like to have known, but he felt it might be counter-productive to enquire at this stage in the proceedings. On top of which, just before nine o’clock, he fell, happily exhausted, into the best sleep of recent months.
Chapter Three
The next time Kennedy visited his study, the green new-message light was flashing on his answering machine. He was enjoying his new mood so much that he ignored it and was on his way to the ground floor when the phone rang again.
Kennedy immediately had a flash of his parents up at their home in windswept Portrush. They could be reaching out to him. Although they were always extremely happy when he rang them, they never ever rang him unless it was about something important. He picked up the phone.
“Ah, Kennedy,” the familiar voice announced confidently and loudly, “you’re there. Right, my good man, I’ve decided it’s definitely time for you to get back in the saddle again.”
“Hi, sir,” Kennedy replied, feeling his new mood of contentment evaporate as his superior, Superintendent Thomas Castle, continued, totally ignoring Kennedy’s greeting.
“There’s a body, Kennedy, quite close to you in fact.”
Kennedy instantly had a flash of ann rea comatose on the canal bank by her barge.
“It’s very bizarre, in fact,” Castle continued. “This chap, it seems was… ah… indulging in some self-pleasuring activity, and either he used it intentionally to top himself or it all went horribly wrong and he accidentally killed himself. It’s just the other side of the canal from St Mark’s Church in Prince Albert Road, just by the bridge.”
“Do you mean the house with the detached swimming pool?” Kennedy asked, as he thought once again of ann rea’s barge on the other side of the bank and forty yards
at most away from the house under discussion.
“Yes, that’s the one. That’s exactly where he was found in fact, in the building housing the swimming pool. Kennedy, your team are all there waiting for you: Dr Taylor, DS Irvine, and DC Dot King. I ordered them to do absolutely nothing until you arrive. We need to be careful on this one, Kennedy; we need to do it all by the book.”
Kennedy never did it any other way.
“I don’t recall who lives in that house,” Kennedy said.
“No one famous, my man. I don’t mean anything like that. It’s just when the papers find out how he died, they’re going to be all over this and…” Castle uncharacteristically hesitated.
“A politician?” Kennedy offered, trying to help Castle find his words.
“No, no, much more unpopular than that. He was a banker, an investment banker.”
***
Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy could feel his confidence growing now; he felt physically taller. He knew Miss Chada was probably responsible for this, but Castle putting him back on a case - even though Castle had admitted he had no one else available - was exactly what he needed.
Kennedy quickly changed into black chinos, his favourite blue shirt, his black comfortable plimsolls and, just in case the temperature dropped, his insulated, black, unbranded windbreaker. His back felt good, but at the same time he was still slightly wary.
Five minutes later, he was standing on the Water Meeting Bridge, looking at the white Regency house with detached indoor swimming pool. The swimming pool building was located quite literally on the bank of the Regent’s Canal. ann rea’s houseboat was, at the most, a two minute walk, in the direction of Camden Market, on the opposite bank.
Already there was a considerable crowd gathered on the bridge and on the towpath on ann rea’s side of the canal. If the amount of texting going on were anything to go by, the gawkers’ ranks would swell considerably any time soon. Kennedy wondered if the unwanted attention might catch ann rea’s eye or ear.
With the front gates shut the gawkers weren’t going to enjoy much of a view though. The brick wall, on the street side of the house, was at least seven feet tall, and the canal bank was heavily overgrown with foliage and trees, including a grand chestnut which separated the corner of the bridge from the grounds of the house.
