by Paul Charles
“I get the picture,” he said, trying hard not to sound bitter.
“Oh, Christy, you don’t do sarcasm very well,” she said fondly, but, Kennedy felt, with just the slightest hint of sarcasm. “I’ve realised that what most of us do is sit around waiting for things to go wrong with our lives when what we really should be doing is getting on with our lives and enjoying them. And I keep trying to do that. But it won’t work for me. I’m stuck in something and I need to get out of it. I want, I really need to spend part of my life, at least, living my life rather than waiting for something to go wrong.”
Kennedy wondered if that was a variation of, “This is not about you, it’s about me.” Could she really be trying to say to him, “This is not your fault?” Of course it was, at the very least, half of his fault.
“Christy, I won’t say, ‘I really do love you, but not in the way you want me to.’ But I will say: I do feel we shared something very special. We’ve been closer than most married couples ever will be in their lives, and maybe I can’t help crying now because, sadly, I feel with all that’s happening to us, we’ll probably lose our friendship as well as everything else. I don’t think I’ve ever talked so much to anyone in my whole life. You know what; we talked so much I no longer heard your accent.
“Look, I’m really sorry I behaved the way I did around the time of the Willie Henderson incident, but I needed to do something, Kennedy, and you handed me the perfect excuse on a plate. I thought it would make me feel better. But since then I wake up in the mornings and I feel good, and I feel strange about feeling good, and then I realise how bad I really feel, and it all comes flooding back to me about how messed up my life is. I imagine that must be what it’s like when someone close to you dies: when you first wake each morning, you feel okay, but then as your mind clicks into gear, you start to remember all the black clouds that hang around your shoulder and just won’t go away. Christy, I need to make them go away.
“Oh God, if you weren’t someone I cared so much about, it might be easier…”
“You really think that makes me feel better?”
“No, no, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” she pleaded, “but I was feeling so shit every day that passed when I wasn’t dealing with this.”
She took his hand.
“We had to deal with it, Christy. I don’t want to lose you as a friend, and my biggest fear is that I might have already jeopardised our friendship by my inability to deal with this...” she said breaking down into an uncontrollable fit of sobbing.
“Oh, ann rea, it’ll be okay,” Kennedy said, reaching across to take her hand.
“Kennedy, don’t be nice to me at a time like this. I couldn’t stand it. Please, just leave me, now, this moment, please.”
“ann rea, I can’t leave you like this.”
“Please, Kennedy, if you stay I’ll only get worse, and I’ll never get away from here.”
Kennedy rose and kissed her on the top of her mop-top, ruffled her hair, and barely managed to get the word “goodbye” pronounced in a decipherable state.
Kennedy could never work out why it was girls were usually so cut up when they dropped you. In his limited romantic history, this had always been the case.
First off there had been Betty Booth. She was such a good pre-teen friend she’d even put a pair of the US Cavalry gloves he’d seen James Stewart wear on to her Santa Claus list. By the time Christmas arrived, she’d dropped him for an older man - Kennedy’s then best friend, Gerald Kelly, who was all of ten years old. Next came Margaret Hutchinson. Well, he had to admit that was more him admiring her from afar, so technically she’d never really dumped him. But the realisation that nothing was ever going to happen between them was just as big a gunk to his system.
Next came his first real girlfriend. She actually came up to him at college and asked him if he’d go out with her best friend. He said, “I’d prefer to go out with you.”
“Okay, yes, that would be nice,” she said sweetly, “but can you wait for a fortnight so I can either find a new boyfriend for my best friend, or at the very least by that point she’ll have gotten over you?”
So, in the middle of the second week, Adel officially became his girlfriend. “Friend” as in they got on well with each other and “girlfriend” as in they kissed; in fact Kennedy seemed to remember they kissed a lot. They even enjoyed an arousing snogging session on a certain Saturday afternoon at the matinee. The same Saturday and the same cinema where she said, in a cinema whisper, “We’re too young to be going steady. We’ve hardly lived. We shouldn’t be exclusive. We should also see other people.” Which was code, and not a very subtle code, for “There is someone else I want to go out with.”
Kennedy dealt with it as maturely as he could; he refused to ever speak to her again, but he’d heard from her best friend - yes, the same best friend who’d indirectly started the whole affair - that Adel couldn’t come to college that week because she was at home crying all the time.
Then came his first English girlfriend, Budgie. He could still see her, a cigarette in one hand, using the other to rub cigarette ash into her denim jeans to try and age them. She broke up with him by letter, then made up with him by phone, and then, after a few more rocky blips, dumped him for the third and final time in person, in her beautiful English voice, at eight forty-five on a Wednesday night in Wimbledon; the time, the day, and the place, if not the date, etched into his memory for ever. Kennedy took a long time to get over her, which he eventually did, but he never forgot her. She’d told him, “You never ever forget the first person you make love to.” But she cried a lot on the three times she dumped him.
Then there were the lean times on the female front, several relationships but none that hurt when they broke up, so, no more tears were shed in the wilderness years. Then from, out of the blue, ann rea, and now she was starting to cry, so Kennedy accepted that the signs weren’t great.
He wondered if any of the girls had been aware there was a simple way for them to make themselves feel better. Easy, don’t dump him! Really, it was that simple!
***
Kennedy did what he always did when he wanted to clear his head; he went for a long walk. When he was young, it would be along the beach in Portrush, but since he moved to NW1, he’d taken a shine to Regent’s Park. He tried to figure out exactly what was happening to him. He didn’t feel as bad as he thought he would. Maybe it was just that he’d been living with this for so long, and now that it was definitely really over, it wasn’t really such a big shock to the system as he felt it might have been. Perhaps he’d been in training for the last couple of months for this exact moment. However, what ann rea had said was spot on; like her, he’d wake up the following morning feeling okay, but then as the realisation of what had happened the day before came to light, he’d hurt again.
How do you avoid the hurt? he wondered, as he passed the boating pond over on the Mosque side of the park. The bottom line was that to him ann rea was the perfect woman, but the fact of the matter was that things between them definitely were not going to work out. It was another major gunk to him, perhaps the biggest of his life, and he accepted this was simply because he was realising how special a person he’d just let slip through his fingers.
About thirty minutes later, towards the end of his walk, Kennedy reached the two telephone boxes standing proudly like faithful and trusted guards at the foot of St George’s Terrace, just opposite Primrose Hill. They were two of the few vintage telephone kiosks in London to have survived Red Ken’s 1990s modernisation. It was eight-forty. Even though he was, at the most, a hundred feet from his house, he entered the telephone box on the left, took out the piece of paper Miss Chada had palmed to him earlier and made the call he always knew he would. Twenty minutes later he answered the ring on his doorbell and he admired the perfect-bodied woman as she whished past him into his house.
Kennedy thought Miss Chada was so beautiful that when she walked into a room people would stop whatever
they were doing and be helplessly drawn to her earthy, undisputable beauty. Just like the way bees are drawn to flowers, Kennedy figured, but unlike the bees who have no inhibitions whatsoever in their overtures to the roses, Miss Chada, nine times out of ten, would remain unattended, and that’s because the boys would be scared of her and the girls jealous of her.
For some reason though, Sharenna Chada had picked Kennedy. She wasn’t offering to give, or take, love, but what she was offering, and what he greedily accepted, sent him to an exhausted and contented sleep ninety minutes later.
Chapter Eighteen
Tuesday came slowly and sluggishly for Kennedy. He remembered getting up at three-thirty in the morning to make Miss Chada - he wondered why did he keep thinking of her as Miss Chada and not Sharenna - a cup of tea and some toast. Although she said she didn’t need it, she smiled as he made it, watching his every move intently. She said she had never seen anyone make such a fuss about preparing tea and toast; she also said it was very nice of him to do this for her. She seemed to enjoy her tea and toast immensely. Kennedy had the feeling that she was not used to having people do things for her. Without commenting on it, she immediately washed the dishes in the sink and cleared away the crumbs by the toaster. He’d walked her to her car, again something she seemed to take a certain pride from. She seemed in no hurry to rush the journey. They said goodnight. There was one awkward moment when Kennedy considered if he perhaps should kiss her.
She seemed to read his mind, because she rubbed his arm gently and then said in a whisper, “It is enough for me to tell you that I would like to return to your bed. I know that you would like me to return there too.” She moved her hand from his arm to the side of his face. “For as long as we can retain this need and this honesty, I promise you I will return to your bed.” She smiled her sad smile. Her smile suggested that she knew more about them and what they would do than he did.
As she drove away, leaving Kennedy standing in the middle of his road with his hands deep in his pockets, the thought running around his head was that the first time he’d been with Miss Chada, it had been like a master class in the art of lovemaking; she knew exactly what to do, and when, to pleasure them both. But a few hours ago, during their third session, their mating had been more natural, relaxed, and consequently all the more enjoyable.
***
“You’ve changed,” Nealey Dean said to Kennedy the minute she opened the door to her apartment some six hours later. “Something has happened to you.”
Kennedy blushed as he recalled standing outside his house in the middle of the night watching Miss Chada drive away. He’d slept well, as well as any night during recent months, but the morning had arrived too soon.
“Good morning, Miss Dean,” Kennedy said as she took the hand he’d offered and used it to pull him towards her for a peck on each cheek. He hoped she didn’t notice his blush.
“I don’t know what it is; you look taller, more confident,” she continued, seeming genuinely intrigued by Kennedy’s aura. She completely ignored Dot King.
Kennedy shrugged his shoulders. Happily, Nealey let it go.
“Oh my goodness, Christy,” she said, taking him by the arm and walking him through to her sitting room, “I’m so glad you didn’t bring James with you. That was very awkward last time.”
“Yes, I’m sorry to have put you through that,” Kennedy replied.
“Not for me,” she laughed. “I meant for James. I was perfectly fine, but the poor man was as nervous as an agent at a showcase performance.”
“Oh,” Kennedy said, breaking into an involuntary smile.
“Okay, here’s what I’d like to do,” Nealey said, still clinging to Kennedy’s arm like a bride to her reluctant father, “Christy and I will make coffee, and of course tea for the inspector here, if you,” here she looked directly at Dot King, “will nip out and get some croissants, please?”
“We’re not supposed to leave a male officer alone with a female…”
“Oh my goodness,” Nealey guffawed, “I promise you I won’t attack him. He’ll be safe with me.”
“Actually, I think the rule is more to protect you,” King persisted.
“Well, here’s the thing,” Nealey continued, impishly hugging Kennedy’s arm even tighter, “I can go down and fetch them, but then you’re going to have to wait until I come back before we start our interview. Or Christy here can go down, and again we’re going to have to wait until he comes back. Or you can go down, and Christy and I can start right away.”
“Or we could just forget the croissants,” King suggested, looking beseechingly at Kennedy.
“You’re not suggesting that you want to deprive me of my early morning ritual,” Nealey stated firmly.
“It’s fine…” Kennedy started.
“Yes, it’s fine, Constable King,” Nealey continued, jumping in very quickly, dropping Kennedy’s arm, nipping over to the sofa and searching behind the cushions until she found a ten pound note, “and I’ll tell you what, we’ll leave the door of the apartment open.”
King looked to Kennedy. Kennedy nodded agreement to King.
Nealey made a fuss of closing the door after King. She returned to Kennedy on route to her small kitchen area. “Sorry about that,” she apologised, “but there is nothing that brings out the bossy boots in me more than another bossy woman!”
Kennedy accompanied Nealey Dean into the kitchen area and pulled out one of her two high stools.
“I know what’s happened,” she declared as she went through her cupboards. “You’re back with ann rea.”
“Ah, sadly not; that’s not going to happen,” Kennedy admitted honestly, thinking it was a little strange that Nealey Dean was the first person he should make such a declaration to.
“Really?”
“Yes,” Kennedy replied quietly.
“How do you feel about that?”
“Well, not as bad as I thought I would. I mean I’ve… we’ve been trying to deal with this from shortly after we met.”
“You mean your work?”
“No, not at all. ann rea was totally fine about that,” Kennedy replied, wondering if he really wanted to talk about this. “When we met she had just broken up with a guy she was in love with. He left her and got married shortly thereafter, so her point was, ‘I don’t really know what my feelings are, and if I don’t, well then, surely I can’t trust them with you either.’”
“And the fact that you were so convinced about your feelings freaked her even more.” she offered sympathetically. “Yep, been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. How long were you dating?”
“A bit over four years.”
“And you’ve been going through this for that long?”
“For a lot of the time we were enjoying ourselves,” Kennedy said, genuinely smiling.
“I must say you seem okay about the break up… there is something about you… something is going on. OH-MI-GOD, I’ve got it,” she said, stopping her preparation and dropping her arms to her side and bending over towards Kennedy slightly. “You’ve met someone else.”
Nealey Dean’s words were not a question; they were a statement of fact. Kennedy was impressed and embarrassed.
“Well, it’s early days…”
“Obviously,” she added, raising her dark eyebrows so Kennedy could see them through her blonde fringe.
“And… it’s different,” was all Kennedy could think to say.
“Let’s see,” she continued expansively as she started back into her coffee and tea preparation routine, “what’s the quickest I’ve ever started up a new relationship? I’ve never cheated, so there’s never been an overlap. I don’t think you’ve ever cheated either, Christy.”
Christy nodded agreement.
“You see. You’ve just proved my point. Some men would feel that it was a flaw not to be considered a rake, you know, and even if they hadn’t admitted it or denied it there, their body language would have been, at the least, just a tad indignant.”
“You were going to tell me about your quickest new boyfriend.”
“Ah, that would have been Usain Bolt.”
Now it was the turn of Kennedy’s eyebrows to rise involuntary.
“Not the quickest runner but the…”
“Got you,” she laughed. Nealey Dean had a brilliant laugh. Not all beautiful women look beautiful when they laugh, but Nealey Dean’s laugh lit up not just her entire body, but the whole room as well. “Oh yes, I remember. If you dare tell James, I’ll kill you myself, and then I’ll get my vengeance on both of you by turning myself in to Constable King so she can get the credit for solving the case.”
“I wouldn’t be around to worry,” Kennedy commented, deadpan.
“Oh yes… you’re right, of course,” she said through a patient smile, “so I was with this boy, we’re talking late teens, and I was so into him, even to the point that I was considering turning down acting jobs just so we could be together, and then he cheated on me. He didn’t even think it mattered; he said it didn’t mean anything. ‘It was just sex,’ he claimed. So I dumped him on a Saturday over lunch and went out with his best friend that same night. I quite liked the replacement anyway; we’d all been friends before I started dating God’s gift to women.
“I’ll tell you, Christy, there’s no lust like vengeful lust,” Nealey Dean said impishly, and added, “Now, help me take this through to the living room and tell me how you’re getting on with finding out what happened to Patrick.”
“We need to find out more about him.” Kennedy was extremely happy to be switching gears. “The last time we met, you were telling me a little about Mr Mylan’s love life with Chloe Simmons.”
“Yes?”
“Have you met her since?” Kennedy asked.
“Sadly not,” she replied. “I mean, I really would have loved to. For research purposes only, of course,” she added quickly.