Tony Hill u Carol Jordan 08 - Cross and Burn

you weren’t that interested?’
    He turned up his collar against the chill wind that hit him as he emerged from the shelter of the buildings around the basin. ‘I’m trying to take my mind for a walk.’
    ‘OK. Have you got it on a leash?’
    ‘Very funny. I don’t suppose you know which Freshco she used?’
    ‘Not for sure, but the logical route from the hospital to home would take her past the big Freshco on Kenton Vale Road. You know the one I mean?’
    ‘On the right as you’re coming from town? Before the roundabout?’
    ‘That’s the one. Why?’
    ‘I need some groceries.’ And, having nothing further to say, he ended the call. As he replaced his phone in his pocket, he wondered whether his tendency only to use the phone for what was absolutely necessary was a hangover from his youth, when landline phone calls were comparatively expensive. His grandmother, who had done most of the hands-on work of raising him, had regarded the phone as a means of parting fools and their money and only permitted its use in what she considered emergencies. He remembered she’d lived in terror of losing her low-user rebate. And then when mobile phones had first been introduced, they’d been prohibitively expensive to call and to make calls from, reinforcing his grandmother’s message of frugality. It couldn’t just be a generational thing, though; he knew plenty of his contemporaries who chatted away on the phone with casual disregard for what it might cost. No, it had to be one of his own personal quirks. A notion that was borne out by the reaction of most of his friends and colleagues to his own reticence during their phone conversations. Carol had always – No. He wasn’t going to allow his memories of Carol to take up space in his mind.
    Kenton Vale Road was about two miles away. There wasn’t a direct route; he’d have to zigzag across the outskirts of the city centre, but the map he carried in his head was up to the task. He could manage this more or less on automatic pilot while he did some real thinking.
    What exactly would it mean, to cut Carol Jordan out of his life for good? Take it step by step. In practical terms, compared to how things used to be between them, she was already out of his life. For the past few years, they’d lived in the same building. His house had occupied the top two floors, her basement flat a staircase and a locked door away from him. They hadn’t lived in each other’s pockets, but he’d always had a general awareness of her presence and absence. He was like the Lord in the Psalms, preserving her going out and coming in.
    Then he’d inherited the house in Worcester. For the first time in his life, he had somewhere to live that felt like home. The moment he’d stepped inside the big Edwardian house by the park, he’d finally understood what people meant when they said they belonged. Edmund Arthur Blythe’s house could have been built around Tony, so perfectly did it match. And it was a homecoming that seemed to have room in it for Carol. Living together under the same roof; a tentative step closer that might lead further still.
    Everything had always been tentative between them. Two wary people whose life choices had inflicted emotional scars and psychological damage. Neither of them the sort of person you’d choose to love. But they had grown to understand that what bound them together was a kind of love. Not the conventional sort that quickly morphed into sweaty bodies in tangled sheets. It was never going to end up there, not with Tony’s inability to perform.
    Instead, they’d fashioned a different sort of relationship that accommodated their professional and personal lives. They trusted each other in a way that neither trusted anyone else. Although they had never lived together, there was a connection in the dailyness of their lives that had made her absence very hard to bear.
    But absent was what she had become. In her grief, instead of turning to him, she’d lashed out with all the pent-up violence in her heart. She’d made no bones about blaming him and the night she’d walked away from him had been the hardest he’d ever known. He’d tried to convince himself she would be back, but he’d been right to fail. She’d walked away from all of them without a backward glance. It was as if she had died, but in some shameful way that prevented people coming together to celebrate what she’d meant to them. The mourning was real, though.
    Yet he had managed