Cold Fire Read online

  I don’t know. I don’t want to know so I’m not telling Helen I saw a woman with no face on fire.

  I concentrate on living. That’s what the living do. That’s what takes up our time.

  I don’t think about burning women or God or visions or fugues or weird aberrations in my brain that are fucking me up.

  I don’t.

  Living’s hard enough as it is. I’ve got some weight to lose and my own rehab to go through. I lost 13 pounds in the three weeks I was in hospital. That’s good, but one shy of a stone. Not good enough.

  Living’s a good goal. When I’m home with Helen, I don’t think about drugs and drink. I think about bending my legs and working on getting up and down stairs on my own.

  It’s my own fucking fault I’m crippled, just like it’ll be my fault if I go back down the old road and die.

  I go as an outpatient to see Seetha for rehab. There’s another girl there, sometimes, instead of Seetha, but in my head I’m doing it for Seetha, even if she’s not there.

  Most times, though, she’s there.

  I can’t get up the stairs in our townhouse without some help. The stroke’s left my right side dead. I can’t see properly out of my right eye, but I can see not quite shapes, like the idea of shapes. It’s dark in that eye, but it’s not pitch like it was in hospital. I still can’t hold my tennis ball in my right hand.

  I can get about on the flat with my standard issue crutch. I get about a lot. I can put a little weight on my right leg, although my foot flops around because I’m numb. It feels like a false leg. I can’t deny it, though – there’s definite improvement.

  Speech has pretty much been unaffected. Sometimes a word comes out weird. Hot, hotten. Cold. Colden. Things like that. It’s a pretty small thing. Words elude me, from time to time. Thoughts might slip away. Anger doesn’t help there. I’ve spent too much time on anger. Seetha says it helps, but that’s my one rebellion.

  I used it, everyday, with her. I used it, until I could walk the line. That stupid fucking yellow line that wasn’t yellow. I know she meant it metaphorically, but the line was there. Now it’s there in my head and I’ve got Seetha to thank for that little piece of extra shit in my brain.

  But this life, life after dying in an ambulance and being brought back to life, life after a stroke and a heart attack, a second chance...this isn’t about me walking the line, anymore. This is about me and Helen.

  But then, maybe it is. Maybe it’s all about walking the line.

  I take my anger, push it down, and remember the best present I ever got from my wife, a fuzzy grey tennis ball, and I move about as much as I can.

  The weight keeps coming off. I don’t eat so much anymore. I have no cravings for coke or pills or weed or beer. I don’t drink coffee. I just drink water.

  My hand bugs me. I use these little tricks. Manipulating it with my other hand. Lifting my arm. It’s useless, but I try, all the while thinking I’m going to have to teach my stupid hand to be clever. I don’t tell Helen this. This is my secret. I don’t want to let her down.

  Seetha says I can take a break now I’m home. She says I can let myself rest, but I won’t. I’m awake and I can feel a clock ticking down, counting out the day. I don’t want to waste it. I can feel something over the horizon. Something good is coming.

  A month down the line and the letter comes through the door. I know from the return address stamped on the envelope that this is it. Helen’s out. She usually opens the post but I don’t need her for this. It’s better that she’s not here. I can manage this.

  I tear the letter open with my teeth and pull out the letter with my teeth, too, then straighten the paper on my lap.

  I read it through. It takes a long time. Reading is hard. The words swim, but I have an idea what it says, because I’ve been expecting it.

  It’s the best news I could hope for. The best news because the commission on my last deal went into my account three weeks ago. The best news because they got the medical report the week after. They’d had time to digest it. It hadn’t taken them long.

  Am I sad? Not a bit. I’ve been off sick for nearly two months. Not one fucking bastard from work visited me in all that time. I thought I was golden, but I realised a while ago, even as I knew it then, you’re everyone’s friend when the coke is free, nobody’s friend when the party’s done.

  £120,000. My commission. Not bad for a glorified salesman.

  Seventeen years worth of redundancy, once I’d signed the form enclosed with the letter and returned it.

  The question: Did I want to take voluntary redundancy?

  The unspoken suggestion: We want you to take voluntary redundancy.

  I left the letter on the coffee table for Helen. It’d be the first thing she’d see when she came back from the hairdressers. Once she’d read it, we’d have some serious talking to do.

  I wanted to celebrate. My first thought was coke. Coke’s kind of like champagne. It’s the drug of choice for a celebration. The thought made me ashamed. And yes, angry. The anger helps there. Instead of celebrating alone, like in my old life, I would wait for Helen. This was something for both of us. Like everything should be.

  I paid my own penance for backsliding and thinking about drugs, even though just in thought. Penance was manipulation until I was drenched in sweat.

  If my arm and leg were numb, why did it have to hurt so much?

  When I was done, I sat in the newly fitted idiot chair in the shower to slew off the sweat. That’s where Helen found me after an hour. Her hair looked good. She looked good, too, after the initial ‘Shit, he’s dead in the shower’ look had gone. I didn’t like that look. I’d been seeing it too often.

  But I did like the nod and smile I got in response to my own.

  Yes, that nod said. I’m going to take it. The smile because I’m happy about it.

  ‘We need to talk,’ she says.

  ‘Not yet,’ I say.

  We need to celebrate. Together.

  We make love, right there in the shower. I can’t remember how long it’s been. It’s not fucking easy, but all I know is it’s better than celebrating alone.

  *

  5.

  The backslide, wanting to score, worried me. It was like I’d had some kind of relapse. I could get drugs if I wanted. Easy as a phone call and a taxi ride.

  I don’t want to, though. I don’t want coke or pills or heroin I can lay out on a piece of tin foil and burn hot enough to breath in the smoke, or some shitty dirty drug like meth or crack that I wouldn’t have touched with someone else’s bargepole even if I was so fucking desperate I’d turn yellow and shit myself without a hit.

  Now, I don’t even want coke. I don’t want that shit up my nose. I don’t want to fall down after it’d taken me so long to get up off my arse and wake up.

  I don’t want it – now.

  But later?

  Can I say for sure? I’m weak. Once an addict, always an addict. Whatever I could get. Coke for preference, but really, it was never about the drug. It was about forgetting.

  Sometimes it worked, if only for a while, and that was always good enough.

  I know I’m weak. I’ve proven that over the last few years beyond any doubt. I’ve a million reasons to stay out of that life. A wife, first and foremost. A wife who loves me. A wife who cleaned the blood from my shirts sometimes; the pillow, other times. Now, a wife who places a grey tennis ball in my hand every night, before she puts her delicate hand around my dead one, and squeezes.

  I owe her more than that.

  I still didn’t think I owed myself anything. How could I? But that has to come. It has to come for me to be free. I want to be clean. When people say you get clean, it’s not just a figure of speech. I remember all too well the feeling of my blood being dirty. Somehow like I was dirty in my veins and arteries, right down to the capillaries in my eyes. The feeling of filth inside that you can’t shower away. The feel of steel on your teeth you can’t brush out.

 
You just have to flush it out like a beer shit the morning after, shaking off a heavy one.

  Maybe it’s just in my mind, but even now, thinking about coke, about drugs, fucking, sweet, beautiful oblivion from the constant pain, I can feel the taint in my blood. I hate myself a little for the blood I muddied myself.

  How can you be a better man if you don’t even like yourself?

  They’d offered me drug rehab. I turned it down. I didn’t want to be weak.

  I want to do it on my own.

  Would I slip back? I didn’t think so. But I couldn’t be sure.

  Some things were clear since the stroke. That my wife was my world. That the geography of my life had changed.

  When I’d been working I’d been a part of something large. Pleasantries and banalities and bullshitting along with everyone else in endless meetings, giving clients virtual handjobs for their money.

  Nights, the geography had been different again. Days, I was part of a continent. Nights, a country. Somewhere small and exclusive. Colleagues, dealers, bartenders. I won’t say friends, because none of these people had been my friends. Not ever.

  Maybe I thought so then. I probably did.

  My phone is full of contacts for these strangers that I spent more time with than my own wife.

  Not one of them called. My phone hadn’t rung since the night I died. If I was paranoid, perhaps I’d still think I was dead. A ghost, cut off from life by the dead silence of a phone that can’t contact the living. But I wasn’t that imaginative, then.

  Things change, though.

  The more I think, the more I realise I want the damn phone to ring. Right then, I see my past played out as my future, how things would be without the heart attack, without the stroke.

  Me, alone. My skin’s grey, but it could be yellow. I don’t know. My wife, long gone.

  I didn’t die when I was forty-two even though I should have. There’s a chain of events. It’s all pretty simple. Because I didn’t die, my wife never gave me a tennis ball. Now all I’ve got is powder under my nose, bad guts, bad heart, a wheeze, a cough. A man waiting to die, but without the good sense to do it quick instead of slow.

  I see it all, in my head, played out like a movie.

  I see it through my dead eye.

  So do I want the phone to ring?

  Fucking right I do.

  *

  6.

  I do the only thing that makes any kind of sense. I’m not one for drama, but the neighbours must love it. I walk out the door as best I can, and believe it when I say it’s not easy.

  Most people, if they’ve got a bum leg, they use two crutches. The tripod approach. Others, they use the opposite arm for a single crutch, or a stick, if they’re a show off.

  Me, I’m doing the single crutch, but on the same side as my good leg. There’s a lot of hopping involved.

  I look like a fucking spastic.

  I don’t care. Curtains twitch. I want to shout ‘Fuck off!’ at the top of my voice. I push it down. I half hop between two cars.

  Cars are parked either side of the road. Bumper to bumper. It used to piss me off, trying to get the car in close enough to the house that I didn’t have to break a sweat carrying a shopping bag or two. Fat men sweat easily.

  Now, the parking situation doesn’t phase me. It suits me, in fact. I get to walk further, which I need, and I don’t have to drive, so parking’s not my problem anymore.

  There’s a car coming. I lean, my good foot on the ground, firm, phone in my left hand, the elbow support of the crutch doing its best to hold me up.

  I stare at the phone. I will it to ring. The car’s closer, now. It’s going pretty slow. They might see the phone and brake in time.

  If anyone asks, I can just say I’m a cripple. Thanks for stopping. Just came out in the street to get a signal. We’d share a look. People know how it is, even in London.

  The phone rings.

  I will myself not to look, but my will is pretty fucking weak.

  It’s my dealer. What are the fucking chances? One of three, but my best man.

  All I have to do is press the little green phone button. Press it. Say hello. Got anything in? Got any ice? Got any snow? Get the bong on, get cooking. Got any fucking dirty crack, because right now I’d sniff up some dead fucking badger juice, help me out man? Help me out?

  It’s not Helen’s face that stops me. It’s not Seetha’s.

  It’s a woman in a chapel, burning.

  It’s insanity, lurking somewhere within me. Something faceless, something that burns. I don’t want to be me. Right then, I want to be someone else. Someone who can walk and talk and see straight and fuck without breaking a sweat and thinking he’s going to die.

  The anger’s there, right there, not under the surface where I keep it hidden, but there in my face. I can feel my face tightening, my lips curling.

  Where was my number one guy when I was crying my heart out? When my heart stopped? Where the fuck was he when I was hurting and needed something to get me through three hours of straight physio?

  Nowhere. Nowhere, that’s where.

  I press the green button, and as the car nears, I drop the phone right under the wheels.

  I don’t know why I picked it up before I dropped it. Maybe I wanted him to know what it feels like to get run over.

  Fucked if I know.

  The car’s more reliable than the dealer. It rolls right on. Bits of phone litter the road. Electronics. Components. Plastic.

  For some reason, this little victory makes me insanely happy.

  Not as happy as Helen makes me later that day when she comes home with a bag of books from the library like she does once a week and says, ‘I’ve been thinking.’

  She bites her lip as she says it. She’s not sure what kind of reception she’ll get.

  But I’ve been thinking, too, and I know what she’s going to say, because the geography of my life is the same as hers, now.

  *

  7.

  As it turns out, we’re thinking the same thing.

  We’re going to move. We’ve got to move. It doesn’t matter where, just so long as it’s not London. We don’t belong anymore. London’s poison for me and what’s poison for me is also poison for Helen. If I didn’t know that after dying and being crippled and maybe having some weird seizure in a hospital chapel I’d deserve to spend the rest of my life alone.

  We need to be gone for the good of both of us.

  Helen’s never worked. She’s always revolved around me. I think that’s a bad thing, for her. But then if things had been different, she’d be long gone, and that’d be bad for me.

  I’m redundant now, part of the landed aristocracy, practically. I’ve got spare cash. Jobs aren’t an issue, for either of us.

  We don’t waste any time. We have the house valued and I’m surprised because I haven’t paid attention to that kind of thing for a long time. We never needed to move. The townhouse, if anything, was too big for us, but we just kind of sank into it.

  We’d lived there for four years, after Samantha. The old house had too many memories. This one, too, I suppose. A house can be just as tied up in your thoughts as the things that happen in your life. I guess the townhouse holds memories for Helen, and probably none of them are good.

  Four years, a good area of London, a housing boom, a bit of a bust, but not enough to hurt us. We’re good. In fact, looking at what our money buys us out of London, we’re better than good.

  That night, we sit down and take stock.

  ‘You know what we could get?’ she says.

  ‘Depends. Location’s important.’

  She’s drinking wine. I’m pushing out the boat. I’m on a rare cup of tea. No sugar.

  ‘We’re looking at four, five bedrooms, a couple of acres…’

  She sounds breathless at the thought. I never thought she was bothered about any of that stuff.

  ‘We’d need money left, in the pot,’ I say. ‘I’m not working. I might never�
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  She looks a little sad, but it’s not because she wants me to work. She wants the country manor. I’m amused, to say the least.

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘We probably don’t need five bedrooms.’

  I just look at her.

  ‘Or four,’ she says.

  ‘Go on,’ I say. I soften it with a smile.

  ‘Come on!’

  I want this to be all good. A new start. A good start. She’s making me smile. I don’t want to laugh at her, so I stick to smiling.

  ‘I guess we only need two…It’d be nice to have a spare bedroom, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘We could push to three,’ I say, letting her off the hook.

  ‘In the country?’

  ‘Country’s no good to me. I need access. I can’t drive. I can’t rely on you all the time. I’ll be walking. I need to be able to actually get somewhere.’

  I’m not sure about this, but I want to hedge my bets. If I’m walking, I don’t want a ten mile hike to get a pint of milk. If I’m not walking, I want to be able to get places, too. On the crip bus. The ones with the steps that fold down.

  ‘By the sea?’

  I shrug. ‘Why not?’

  Simple as that, really. There’s more, but that’s what it boils down to. After that, it’s just a matter of where.

  People say the sea air’s good for you. I’m not so sure.

  The fucked up thing is, I’ve never seen the sea. I’ve seen the Thames. It’s pretty much the same thing, I think, then. Just a matter of geography and salt.

  There’s the south coast, Kent, Hampshire, but it’s all too close. Too easy. Plus, it’s too expensive. I want change in my pocket.

  There’s a hell of a lot of south, but it’s all too close.

  We decide on Norfolk. North, but not so far we’d be complete outcasts. We want North, but not Northerners. We’re Londoners. We don’t get Northerners.