A Lovely Way to Burn

Four

The following hours had the unreal atmosphere of a movie watched while drifting in and out of consciousness on a red-eye flight. Stevie phoned the emergency services and sat in Simon’s living room until the police and paramedics arrived. She watched with dead eyes as the paramedics carried in a stretcher and what she supposed was a body bag.

‘So you don’t live here?’ The policeman had asked the same question already, but perhaps asking everything twice was part of the procedure. They were sitting opposite each other in the lounge. Someone had opened the curtains and Stevie could see the sky, blue and heat-hazed beyond the window. She wanted to drag the throw from the back of the couch, swaddle herself in it and sleep. She took a sip of the water someone had given her and tried to focus.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t live here.’

The policeman wrote something down on the form he had rested on the arm of his chair. He was in his late forties, with creased eyes and a weathered face that made him look like a countryman, but his accent was the East End of barrow boys and futures traders.

‘And Dr Sharkey gave you keys to his flat?’

‘Yes.’

She had placed the keys on the coffee table between them and now she touched them lightly with her fingertips to show that she was leaving them there. She had strung them on a key ring, a red plastic heart that Simon joked made them look like the keys to a love-hotel bedroom. ‘How would you know?’ she had asked, and Simon had winked.

A paramedic called the policeman through to the bedroom and they had a murmured conversation. Stevie closed her eyes. Simon was dead and she had found him. She thought of how it must have been: the empty flat, her voice on the answering machine, hard and impatient while he lay curled up, beyond hearing, on the bed in the next room.

The armchair creaked as the policeman settled his bulk back into it. Stevie looked up. The policeman’s skin was pale beneath his tan, his eyes dark with lost sleep, and she wondered if he too was coming to the end of a long shift.

‘It appears that Dr Sharkey died of natural causes, but as you’d expect we have to wait for the coroner’s report for official confirmation.’ He leant forward, his hands clasped together, striving for an intimacy neither of them felt, and she saw that his forehead was speckled with tiny globules of sweat. ‘Just to be clear, there was no drugs paraphernalia, no bottles of alcohol, no note, nothing you cleaned up to save his relatives extra grief?’

The answerphone messages she had wiped snagged in Stevie’s mind, but she said, ‘No. Nothing like that.’ Her bag lay at her feet, full of the toiletries she had come to collect. She didn’t want them any more, would never be able to smell that brand of perfume again without remembering the whiff of decay she had mistaken for an overripe bin. ‘I don’t understand what you mean by natural causes. Simon was only in his early forties. He went to the gym three times a week.’

‘Like I said, we can’t be sure of anything until we hear from the coroner, but sadly it’s not as unusual as you might think. Young, healthy men do occasionally have heart attacks, or slip away in their sleep for no apparent reason.’

‘No apparent reason.’ She repeated his words under her breath, remembering a footballer falling to the pitch during an international match, felled by a heart attack. And hadn’t there been a girl in her class at school whose brother had been found dead in his bed by his mother? Stevie hadn’t thought of him in years. She said, ‘You’ve come across this before?’

‘Once or twice.’ His face told her nothing. ‘The only consolation is it’s peaceful. It looks like he fell asleep and didn’t wake up.’

The policeman placed the statement he had written on her behalf on the coffee table and she signed without bothering to read it.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said as he walked her to the door.

‘We’d only been going out for four months,’ Stevie said. ‘I can’t even tell you who you should be contacting.’

‘In that case it was good of you to call us.’ The policeman took a hanky from his trouser pocket and dabbed some of the sweat from his face. He glanced back into the apartment, perhaps checking that the paramedics weren’t about to begin manoeuvring Simon’s body through the hallway before she was gone. ‘Plenty of people would have walked out the door and saved themselves the trouble of all this.’

‘Is that what you would have done?’

The policeman considered for a moment, and Stevie realised it was the real man, not the uniform, who was about to speak.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I would have done exactly what you did. But I’m in the job. I know how things go. Some people take fright at the thought of the authorities. They’d rather disappear, or phone it in anonymously.’

‘I waited in the living room,’ she said, and suddenly it seemed terrible that she had left Simon alone, after all those days and nights of being on his own. ‘I didn’t stay with him.’

‘It wouldn’t have made any difference. The fact that you phoned us might, though, to his loved ones.’ The policeman covered his mouth with his hand and coughed. ‘Sorry, allergies.’ He touched his handkerchief to his forehead again and asked, ‘What about you? You’ve had a shock. Is there someone at home to look after you?’

‘I live alone, but it’s okay, I’m used to it.’

‘Me too,’ the policeman said. ‘No one to find me either.’