by A J Waines
I was sure of it. There was something in Jake’s drawing that didn’t make sense.
When I got back from the theatre, I could hear a tap running and found Miranda in the bathroom. She was rubbing at a woollen jumper in a basin already overflowing with billowing suds. Her bare feet were wet as the rising tide of warm water was gradually swamping the floor.
‘Careful…’ I said gratuitously.
I reached across her to turn off the tap and went for a mop. As I passed the bedroom, I noticed that in my absence, she’d opened all my cupboards and dumped every item of clothing I had in a heap on my bed.
‘What’s going on?’ I said, fighting to stay calm, knowing that my irrepressible craving to go straight to bed would have to be put on hold once again.
She dabbed a blob of froth on my nose. ‘Don’t be such a boring old fart. You need some new clothes. Your outfits are ancient.’
If I’d been under any illusion that Miranda had changed, I was wrong. Having her back in my life was going to be far from easy.
Chapter 8
My nine o’clock appointment on Wednesday had been cancelled, so I took the opportunity to head over to Liverpool Street on the Tube. I needed to see for myself. I organised my journey so I arrived via the Central line, where the fire had started. Part of the platform was still cordoned off and there were smudged sooty patches on the walls. A man in overalls with a bucket and long-armed brush was swilling sections down.
The adverts blurred past at my side as I stood on the escalator. There was a smell of emulsion and tattered ‘wet paint’ signs were still stuck with masking tape to billboards. Once I was through the barrier at the top, I walked over to one of the ticket booths. The official jerked his chin in lieu of asking what I wanted.
‘Were you here the day of the fire at the end of May?’ I asked.
‘Why, what’s the trouble?’
‘I just wondered what it was like. How crowded it was. If there was a mass panic.’
‘You press or something?’
‘No – I work at St Luke’s Hospital. With trauma victims.’ I showed him my ID card which seemed to do the trick.
He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t bad, to be honest. The fire started in one of the admin offices down on platform four on the Central line. Electrical fault. The guys down there couldn’t get the extinguishers to work. There was a lot of smoke; it billowed up through the corridors so fast and everyone was disoriented. It was 6.30pm, so right in the middle of rush hour, but we did everything we could.’ He pointed to the barriers. ‘We opened the gates. One of the escalators was out of order, so it got a bit manic.’ His blinking became fast and pronounced. ‘I mean, it was congested, but it didn’t turn into a stampede or anything and we gave out announcements on the PA system.’
‘Which escalator was out of order?’
‘The one coming up from the Central line. It was only for a couple of hours.’
‘So, anyone leaving a train on the Central line would have had to walk up the escalator?’
‘Yeah. We’ve got lifts as well, but we have to shut those down during an evacuation.’
‘How far did the fire spread? Were any passengers up here caught in the flames?’
He snorted. ‘Up here? Oh, no. The smoke damage only went as far as the bottom of the escalator.’
As I thanked him, I glanced at his lapel badge and noted the name, Perry. I had a feeling I might be needing to speak to him again.
I took out Jake’s sketch and I wandered around the ticket hall, noting the position of the escalators and lifts and comparing the layout to his map. I turned it around one way, then the other. I went back down to platform four and followed the same route Jake said he’d taken to get out. By now, it was clear that the map didn’t fit at all.
Then I headed round to the Transport Police.
The officer at the desk was busy tracing a line on a maze puzzle in front of him. It took him a moment to register I was waiting and he hurriedly squashed the booklet under the counter.
‘Hi – is it possible to see someone who was involved with the fire on May 28th?’
‘And why might that be?’ He rattled the biro between his teeth.
I used the same approach as I had with Perry, adding that I was counselling survivors and needed to check some facts. He disappeared through the back and a woman returned in his place.
‘DS Patrick. How can I help?’
I gave her the background. ‘Were you actually at the station when it happened?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. I was here with a team before the fire brigade arrived.’
‘Can you tell me about the fire itself? Did it spread far?’
‘Only from the admin office as far as the first strip light in the ceiling.’
‘So the main problem was the crush of people getting up the stalled escalator, and the thick smoke?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Do you have a record of the injuries?’
‘Hang on.’ She disappeared and came back holding a file. ‘I’ve got the initial report here.’ She flicked through several pages. ‘Yep. There were a handful of casualties who suffered smoke inhalation and some minor injuries caused by the overcrowding.’
‘Any fatalities?’
‘Oh no, nothing like that.’
‘Were there any reports of people – their clothes – being on fire?’
She drew back her chin. ‘What? No.’ She shook her head adamantly.
‘Not in the ticket hall?’
‘Oh, definitely not up on the surface. The fire got nowhere near there.’
I thanked her and left, my brow crinkled into a tight frown. I knew for certain: Jake’s account was all wrong.
I felt numb as I wandered to the outside of the station and caught the bus to the hospital. My next session with Jake wasn’t until next week, but I was agitated, eager to find out what was going on. Had he simply been confused? Was his memory playing tricks on him? Surely, that had to be it.
I went straight to the Burns and Plastic Surgery Unit when I arrived. When I’d seen Jake on Monday, his check-up had been cancelled. Luckily, he was due in that day at 11.30. I made a mental note to come back.
I headed over to the canteen, desperate for a real coffee, not one from the vending machine where you had to chew the powdered milk. I was hoping the caffeine might jolt my mind into making sense of what was happening.
The rush before appointments was worse than usual and the place was packed. I collected a drink and was trying to work out in which direction the queue was heading, when someone with a stacked tray barged straight into me.
My cup and saucer hit the floor. There was a sudden hush before the inevitable cheer.
‘A little less haste and a bit more focus on the task in hand,’ said the owner of the tray. Without waiting for a response, he glided past me like a Ferrari might pass a pedestrian who had foolishly stepped off the curb.
I swallowed my impulse to swear. ‘You took a step back,’ I snapped. ‘You walked into me.’
‘Never argue with a man holding a knife,’ he called out over his shoulder, without humour. ‘Especially when he’s a surgeon.’
He continued to walk away.
Damn nerve!
A woman with a sly smile on her face passed by, right behind him. It was Lian Moore, a PA in the Burns and Plastic Surgery Unit. I’d seen her several times in the ladies’ toilet applying lipstick in a garish shade of fuchsia. She had a wild tornado of naturally orange hair and someone should have told her that this particular lip colour didn’t suit her.
An older woman who had appeared with a mop and tin bucket nudged me out of the way.
‘That’s Dr Hansson,’ she said. ‘Isn’t he something?’ She shifted her gaze to look wistfully at Lian. ‘She’s so lucky working for him.’ She leant her cheek against the wooden pole and I watched her moony eyes follow him as he found a seat. ‘And he’s Swedish,’ she added, as if that gave him special rights.
To me, he l
ooked the sort who flounced his self-appointed superiority around at every opportunity. Wearing his hair long over his collar and, no doubt, regularly touching it up with blonde highlights, he struck me as a man in his fifties trying his best to look thirty-something. He might have women drooling over his designer suit and Palm Beach tan, but he didn’t fool me. There was nothing the least bit attractive about him. The skin around his jaw sagged and he looked like he was carrying cushions in the plump bags under his eyes. I was deeply unimpressed and joined the back of the queue, empty-handed, for another go.
I’m ashamed to admit I was running on autopilot for my first patients. I was keen not to miss Jake. At 11.40, I phoned the unit and found out he’d arrived and was still in the consultation room. Shortly afterwards, I sauntered past the waiting area and spotted him nodding to the receptionist, accepting a small card for his next check-up. He saw me and gave a weak smile. I asked if we could have a private word in my office.
I offered him a seat in front of my desk and he sat on his hands looking like a schoolboy hauled up for smoking behind the bike sheds.
‘I know we have another session soon, but I just wanted to check a few details about the fire. I don’t want to ask you anything that might be upsetting, but are you okay to run through a few simple points?’
He looked surprised. ‘Okay…’
‘I’ve been looking at your map,’ I smoothed it out in front of him. ‘And I notice here you’ve marked stairs and here you’ve got the escalators.’
‘Yeah, that’s right – and there are two lifts around here.’
‘When you came off the train and left the platform, were you on a stationary escalator or steps? Can you remember?’
‘Definitely steps,’ he said. ‘I don’t like walking up escalators when they’ve stopped, I always think they’re going to suddenly start up again or go too fast…’
‘But, in the rush to get out, could it be that you didn’t notice you were climbing a static escalator?’
He thought for a second. ‘No – because I went past the escalators, see here?’ he pointed to the map. ‘I saw everyone was crammed onto them and got to the staircase.’
‘Okay…’ My mouth was dry.
‘You said there were flames in the ticket hall – are you absolutely sure about that?’
He responded immediately. ‘God, yeah. I told you, people’s coats were on fire. It was definitely in the hall, because I remember the barriers themselves were burning.’ He started to shake.
‘It’s okay – we’ll stop there. Are you all right?’
He muttered something I couldn’t hear.
‘Let’s take a few minutes.’ I talked him through a simple grounding process to help him re-orientate himself: What day is it? What are you going to do next? Simple questions. He looked confused, but fully recovered by the time he left.
As he shut the door, I plopped down into my chair.
I knew now for certain. Jake sounded so genuine and yet his story didn’t make sense. He’d told me he’d climbed up from the Central Line to the ticket hall using the steps. But, there were no steps from the platforms to the ticket hall, coming in from either east or west. I’d checked the area twice and there was access by escalators and lifts, but no steps until you want to leave the ticket hall to reach the mainline concourse.
Another part of his story didn’t add up either. He said people were on fire around him in the ticket hall, whereas the police were emphatic that the flames never got anywhere near there.
I thought about two other patients, Jane and Terry. They, too, had talked about the Tube fire and described fatalities; I had it written down in my notes. I’d need to ask them some direct questions about it if they came back, but in the meantime, one thing was clear. For some reason, Jake was lying.
Chapter 9
As soon as I got home after work, I knew all was not well. Glancing up, I could see from the street that my kitchen window was wide open.
Miranda was still here. I left my bike in the hall downstairs and followed the aroma of spicy chicken all the way to my flat.
Before I found my key, she opened the door and waited for my response. ‘Don’t you like it?’ she asked.
Miranda’s hair was now a striking, but not brassy, blonde in a short pixie style. It was a complete transformation.
‘It’s just…so different.’ It had taken years off her face and made her look cute and sexy. ‘I like it,’ I exclaimed. ‘It really suits you.’
In a strange twist of time-travel, I instantly felt like the older sister – drab, and on the shelf at thirty. For the first time in my life, I looked at Miranda and felt a twinge of jealousy.
‘Cold drink – or tea?’ she asked. She took my briefcase from me, leaving it in the hall as if I was the guest.
‘Just water, thanks.’
‘Ice?’
I nodded.
‘What brought this on?’ I said, still taking in her new look.
‘Fresh start,’ she said, passing me to get to the kitchen where she sprinkled a handful of herbs into a pan.
‘I thought you didn’t have any money.’
‘Someone at the project did it – she’s an apprentice.’ She handed me a glass of water, tinkling with ice-cubes, a big smile igniting her face. She’d been out and back in again during my absence, so must have found her ‘lost’ key.
I sat down at the table, pushing aside a batch of pencils and a sketch. The new French cookbook Con had lent me was open on the table. I couldn’t deny that whatever chicken dish she was cooking smelt extremely tasty. She was wearing my old fashioned frilly apron, like she was on the film set of Downton Abbey.
‘Problems?’ I said, referring to the fact that she was supposed to be settling into new accommodation by now.
‘No – it’s coming along nicely.’ She lifted off one of the pan lids and sniffed. Then she went to the window and leant out, drawing in loud lungsful of air. ‘So bloody hot…’ she said.
Miranda had set napkins folded into origami swans on the table. There were fresh flowers in the centre. Roses this time. They wouldn’t last long in this heat, but she was certainly trying her best.
‘No, I meant…I didn’t expect you…to be here,’ I said, wondering for a moment if Miranda had forgotten all about the fact she was supposed to be somewhere else.
‘Oh. Yeah. Sorry about that. The room wasn’t ready after all.’ She shot me a worried look. ‘Is that going to make things difficult?’
‘How long?’
‘Just a day or so.’ She bit her lip. ‘Is it okay? Can I stay?’
It would have been churlish to suggest otherwise after she’d gone to so much trouble. Nevertheless, Miranda was a landscape of liability I could have done without.
‘Just a day or so,’ I stressed. ‘Seriously. This flat really isn’t big enough.’
She smiled. ‘Okay.’
She put two empty wine glasses beside the plates on the table.
‘Before you protest, I know it’s a week night and you won’t be drinking, but I thought the fizzy water would look nicer in these.’ She picked up a glass and twirled it round by the stem.
‘You’ve done the ironing,’ I said, noticing the empty clothes horse folded up in the corner.
‘I had a few minutes when I got back from the studio. You must come and see my pictures some time. I sold one today.’ She clapped her hands together. ‘I sold one last week, but I found out it was Daddy. But this one’s a proper buyer.’
‘That’s great. Yeah, I’ll bring Con – he’ll be interested.’
‘Things okay between you two?’
I turned away. ‘Who said otherwise?’
‘Just picked things up, that’s all. You’ve been checking your phone a lot, for a start.’
‘Everything’s fine.’
I didn’t tell her that during the evening at the theatre, Con and I had had a bit of a disagreement. The problem wasn’t exactly new – it had emerged around five weeks after we’d fi
rst met. The fun-loving, smart, sexually responsive Con wasn’t quite the entire picture. There was one little blip. As we started to get to know each other and peeled away the layers, I came across Con’s possessive side.
‘Careful!’ Miranda yelped, diving forward to prevent me from creasing a drawing. I pulled it out of Miranda’s reach to take a look at it, just as she caught hold of the corner. There was a splitting sound and the sheet ripped right down the middle.
‘Now look what you’ve done!’ she yelled. She was almost in tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, holding up the two halves. ‘Was it important?’
‘Of course it was important. It was mine, for a start.’
‘We can mend it with sticky tape.’
She snatched it away and instantly ripped it into tiny pieces. ‘Of course, we can’t mend it with sticky tape,’ she hissed. ‘It’s ruined.’ She tossed the pieces in the air and the kitchen became the inside of a Christmas snow globe. Only without the magic and good cheer.
‘Even when I was well, you hated me,’ she snapped.
I stared at the white scraps scattered on the lino. ‘That’s not true.’
She buried her fists in the pockets of the apron. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ she whispered.
‘It was never-ending, Miranda. The havoc you left behind. We all had to pick up the pieces.’ I kicked a layer of torn scraps under my foot as if to demonstrate my point.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘You stole my things. You cut the hair off my dolls. Ripped pages out of my books. Smashed my CDs…’
‘I was ill.’
‘That’s true – but you’ve never acknowledged all the upset you caused me.’
‘It was an illness,’ she insisted – the perennial windbreak she’d always hidden behind.
‘I know,’ I relented, ‘but you weren’t diagnosed until you were twenty. We had years before that dealing with a wayward, unmanageable child. No one knew why. It wasn’t easy.’
