This Thing of Darkness Read Free Page B

who breaks the silence. ‘Good. Then when you make sergeant, you can go and arrest Peter Pan.’
    I give him one of my peachiest smiles. Him and Watkins, both. I think that’s the first sensible thing either of them has said today.
    ‘Yes, sir. Thank you. Thank you very much.’

 
    3
     
    Saturday. High winds, gusty and unstable.
    I meet Brydon in a greasy spoon café near his parents’ house in Pontypool: our first proper meeting since The Break Up. A trial day, an attempt to normalise.
    Brydon is there before me. He’s ordered a pot of tea for him, a cup of peppermint tea for me. A waitress in a black T-shirt takes our orders.
    ‘The full breakfast,’ Buzz says, closing the menu without really looking at it. Printed sheets encased in a padded leatherette wallet.
    I hold the menu in front of me, staring at it but not really reading it.
    ‘Why do they pad the menus? I mean, books aren’t padded, are they?’
    I think of other readable items which don’t come with leatherette padding and start listing them. Marketing brochures. Theatre programmes. Phone directories. Clothing catalogues.
    ‘Have you eaten?’
    ‘No.’
    This does feel weird. For me, certainly, but also I think for Buzz.
    ‘How about sausage, egg and chips?’ he suggests.
    One of his roles in our relationship: trying to get me to eat normal, regular meals like a normal, regular human being.
    ‘OK. Yes, that. I’ll have that.’
    ‘Sausage, egg and chips?’ The waitress looks for my confirmation.
    ‘Yes, but can I have it with bacon? And beans? And those things that come in triangles.’
    I show her the shape of a triangle.
    ‘Hash browns?’
    ‘Yes. For the beans, I mean. I probably don’t need the chips though,’ I concede.
    ‘You might as well have the full breakfast then.’
    She goes through the contents of the full breakfast, which sounds quite like the thing I just said I wanted, but I already can’t remember what I said and certainly can’t imagine eating it, so add, ‘Maybe you should bring chips as well, just in case,’ which is logical to me, because chips are the one thing I can pretty much always eat some of, but I can see that my food-ordering technique isn’t coming across as all that credible.
    The waitress looks at Buzz checking, I think, that he’ll underwrite this order. He commands her obedience with a nod, and she goes.
    ‘Sorry. I’m still the same.’
    ‘So I see.’
    When I broke up with Buzz, I told him, in effect, that a man as sane as him needed a woman a good bit more sane than me. But I also tried to explain that the break-up was for my sake too. Buzz helped me first touch the soil of Planet Normal. Helped me breathe its atmosphere, understand its customs. Those were precious gifts, the most precious possible, yet I also came to see that, in Buzz’s company, I could only ever be a resident alien. Travelling on faked papers. At constant risk of deportation.
    If I am to become well – stably, reliably, confidently well – I had to take the risk of leaving Buzz’s kind, protective custody. Had to take the risk of living alone on this planet. Treading its soil without support.
    One day, I hope I’ll be well enough to contemplate a relationship again. Perhaps even marriage. But I need to do that without feeling giddily convinced that the whole enterprise is a sham that could be stripped from me at any time.
    I need to become a sort-of-sane woman before I can become anyone’s now-and-for-ever wife.
    The breakfasts come, plus my side order of chips.
    Buzz tucks in with gusto. I bite the end off a chip.
    I say, ‘How is your Using Computers To Destroy Policing As We Know It project coming along?’
    Buzz had worked alongside me in Major Crime. Since he had done nothing wrong, not one thing, since the start of our relationship, and since I was the breaker not the breakee, it should by rights have been me who switched jobs to give him space. But since we both knew that I wouldn’t cope anywhere other