‘Flour,’ Henry Machin said, looking at the new corpse lying on his slab like a freshly caught fish. The pathologist ran his fingers along the dead woman’s skin and studied the trace of dusty white powder on his fingers.
‘Flour?’ Jack Gannet puzzled. ‘Plain or self-raising?’
Or Else
NO, NO, NO, THIS IS RIDICULOUS. I OBVIOUSLY MADE THE wrong choice. Let’s try again, even if it means sacrificing the kiss.
~ It exists, it’s written down.
But apparently not, for I have no memory of it. If only I could be kissed by him again without having to go through everything else again.
The snow was beginning to settle thickly and most of the traffic had stopped but I could just make out the yellow headlights of a car moving slowly towards me along the Lochee Road. The car was almost obscured by the snow as it slewed to a gentle skidding halt on the other side of the road. It was the Cortina. The driver’s window rolled down and Chick’s ugly features resolved themselves out of the white kaleidoscope of snow.
‘Get in,’ he said. ‘You can die in weather like this, you know.’
I got in and we battled our way through the snow, the only car on the road. What an heroic beast the Cortina was. How familiar it seemed too, how familiar Chick seemed.
‘How come you’re always around, Chick, if you’re not following me?’
‘Maybe I am following you,’ he said, lighting a cigarette and offering me one. ‘That’s a joke,’ he added when he saw the expression on my face, ‘ha, ha.’
‘Did Maisie get home all right?’
‘Who?’
The acrid smell of Embassy Regal filled the car and drove out, momentarily, the scent of dead cat.
‘Been in the wars?’ Chick said. When I asked him what he meant, he pointed to my forehead and said, ‘That’s a rare bruise you’ve got.’ He turned the rear-view mirror for me to see and there indeed was a blue bump the size of a robin’s egg just where the Hornet’s door had slammed on me. How curious. For there was no trace of his kiss on my lips.
The Cortina had struggled as far as the junction of Dudhope Terrace with Lochee Road when I remembered something. Chick took some persuading but eventually I managed to get him to turn round and return to the DRI.
‘Back so soon?’ the receptionist said brightly, but with a rather wary look in her eye at my deranged appearance.
‘I forgot something,’ I said, searching the waiting-room until I found what I was looking for. My George Eliot was on the floor, under a chair, sandwiched between a Woman’s Journal and a Weekly News .
‘You take care as well now,’ I said to the receptionist as I left, but she didn’t look up.
Chick dropped me off at the end of Cleghorn Street. Even the plucky Cortina wasn’t going to make it back downtown on a night like this. The tail-lights of the car quickly disappeared into a wall of whiteness.
Terri had become a homemaker since I last saw her. The dingy flat in Cleghorn Street had been transformed into a cosy little love nest. Patchouli joss sticks burned on the mantelpiece, ‘Liege and Lief’ played on her Amstrad deck, a fire burned in the grate, church candles illuminated the dark and a boeuf Bourguignonne simmered in a well-behaved manner on the stove. Hank, the cause of all this domesticity, was stretched out on the mattress on the floor that served as Terri’s bed. The stale sheets on the bed had been replaced with fresh ones and Terri had purchased a piece of red dressmaker’s velvet to act as a princely counterpane for her new consort.
‘Kinda homey, huh?’ Terri said, putting wood that she’d found in a skip in the street onto the fire. She was wearing what looked like a crinoline and smelt of sandalwood soap and meat, an odd, rather unsettling mix that I felt must be for Hank’s benefit. She had even made sausage rolls (‘Jus-rol, it’s easy.’). The sausage rolls were dog bite-size and every so often she would lob one in Hank’s direction.
She perched on the edge of the mattress to consult a book called Cooking for Two , biting her lip with the effort of reading a recipe.
‘How about an Apple Betty for dessert?’ she asked, although I wasn’t sure if this question was addressed to me or to Hank. It wouldn’t be long before she was greeting him when he came home from work (‘Hi, honey’), waiting at the front door for him with a Martini and a kiss, her hair fixed and her make-up freshened and a big Mary Tyler Moore smile on her face.
I defrosted in front of the fire while we finished what was left of the Don Cortez that Terri had used to make the boeuf Bourguignonne and had started on a bottle of Piat d’Or that had been chilling outside on the windowsill. When Terri opened the window to retrieve the wine, flakes of snow flew inside and fell on us like cold confetti tossed by an unseen hand.