| I
stare into a window and the memory of him stares back at
me from over
my shoulder. I imagine his hand heavy, anchoring
me with him for
better or worse. I conjure up the sound of his
breathing, soft
huffs of nicotine-tainted air blown from his nose.
He always
breathed through his nose, it left his mouth free to
shout at the
nearest potential criminal or hurl the latest insult at
some poor
unsuspecting victim - be it a coloured guy, a gay bloke,
or a member of
his own team. Taking a deep breath I recall the taste of burnt whiskey in the air and remember the night we spent running the Trafford Arms undercover. Or as undercover as Gene Hunt got. Actually, he was surprisingly good at it, to give him his dues. Once he got the hang of not beating the answers out of his customers the way he would have out of his suspects, he was a natural. Could say I was proud to be with him for a while that night - proud to be his DI. Could say. I recollect the soft swell of his belly against my back and stand completely still as the warmth from his ghost in the glass soaks through me. His mere presence used to command his team. He was a very physical man and each time he pushed close to me my heart would start pounding, pulse racing, driving blood south into my treacherous, lecherous cock. There was something undeniable about someone so unashamedly sexual, as brutally, honestly masculine. Men like Gene don't exist anymore, but apparently if they did I'd be shacked up with one of them�. It's like a particularly vivid dream that stays with you after you wake up; so vivid you can call to mind the sensations, the feelings, the smell and taste, the colour and sound of it. Only with this dream none of the details have faded, possibly because I won't allow them to. I hang on to them, like treasured possessions, return to them daily to touch, turn them over in my head, remind myself of how they look and feel. I keep the memories fresh so that it constantly seems as if they happened yesterday, last week, last month, no later. I won't let anyone else near them - not Mum, not Maya (who doesn't know I heard her dump me), not the psychiatrist or psychologist and especially not the hypnotist my doctor recommended. They're my memories. I can't go back, can't ever return. They're all I've got. And I miss them; Annie's smile, Chris' unwavering trust, Ray's uneasy respect, Phyllis' questionable judgement, Nelson's friendship, and Gene�. I miss Gene most of all, more than I can sometimes cope with. More than I should a man they say never existed. How can it all have just have been in my imagination? They say Maya was never abducted. They say Tony Crane was always crazy, has been in a mental hospital since the early '70s and never married. They admit a Superintendent Harry Wolfe was the first the fall in the corrupt cops house of cards but tell me I already knew that. I haven't yet dared to ask if there once was a DCI Gene Hunt working for Greater Manchester CID or if the first woman detective there was called Cartwright. They think I've already lost it, taking pity on me because I spent months and months in hospital hooked up the machines with tubes and wires and not really living at all. If I found out that the doctors are right - that I'd made them all up - I really would go insane. So I walk down the high street, stop at the old record shop that's a Starbucks now to stare at the glass in the window, and over my shoulder the ghost of Gene Hunt stares mournfully, accusingly back at me. Sometimes I wonder if a part of me didn't come back at all, if I'm still there in 1973, sleeping in that bloody damp depressing flat, yelling at Gene every time he jumps from crime to confession in a single bound, banging my head against the brick wall of Chris' education. Joking with Annie over treacle sponge and mint custard in the canteen, chinking Scotch glasses with Ray in the Railway Arms, arguing with Gene over who gets the lion's share of the pathetically narrow mattress and losing, always losing. Me and Gene. The lawmen. Beating up the wrong guy in order to lock up the right one. In the glass the ghost lays a hand on my shoulder and it feels so real; the weight of it, the pressure of it; the squeeze of the fingers and the meaning in the touch. It forces my eyes to blur as I hear his broken voice tell me, "No need to get all sentimental, Dorothy." Maybe it's my tears reflected in his eyes, or maybe it's because - in all my dreams - he's never sounded so shattered, but I reach up to cover his hand where it lies, my heart crashes once against my ribcage and I feel flesh and bone under my fingers. Blossoming tears become a torrent, riding waves of soul deep sobbing I can't hope to control, even standing there in the middle of the street surrounded by shoppers and kids with ice creams. Warm fingers part under mine and the pressure on my shoulder pulls me around so that I come face to face with him to see his smile burst through his own tears like sunshine in a storm. His arms enfold me at the same time as I almost jump him, flinging myself around him as if it really has been three long decades since I saw him. # The pub awaits us as it always did. It�s far too late for explanations from me; the newspapers have already done all that. "Thirty-three years, Sam. I lost my mind wondering what happened to you." The smile has gone; the sunshine back behind black clouds. He divorced in the end, my fault he said, for corrupting him, showing him the dark side. (He finally got the offhand Death Star comment I'd made next to the elevator one morning, he says. I don't remember it.) He never remarried; a couple of short-lived affairs with younger women, a few brief, shadowy liaisons with men who - in the dark at least - reminded him of me. In the '80s he'd given up smoking, taken up five-aside-football with Chris and Ray, dropped a couple of stone in the hope, he says, of making it to 2006 without his heart packing in like I'd often hinted it would. "Never got over you, Sam," he tells me. It's both flattering and heartbreaking at the same time. Thirty-three years - he's come the long way round. He's lived almost the whole of my lifetime since I last saw him; I'm barely out of hospital. He has the air of a man who's reached the end of his path and it scares me. There's none of the boisterous '70s Neanderthal I fell for in the man sitting opposite me. After that initial hug he's barely smiled, only once, maybe twice met my eyes. And after a single Scotch and a half-pint, he's asking me to walk him out, this man I've missed more than I missed anything from this time while I was back in his. I don't think he feels anything for me any more and why should he? It's tearing me apart though; I'm still in love with him. A stilted handshake is how we part this time, more than we had thirty years ago but not even a shade of what I want. Still, what right have I to ask him for anything? I feel like my heart's being torn out piece-by-piece and stamped into the pavement like a chain of cigarette butts. Why I imagined three decades wouldn't dull what had existed between us, I'll never know. But it was so explosive, so consuming, so desperate, I'd hoped beyond hope that it could have survived. Thirty years separate us now. Gene's old, he says, and I'm young. I feel a hundred years old watching him walk away from me along the pavement. When he stops it's not next to a bronze Ford Cortina but an old blue Vauxhall Cortina. Two steps to the right and I can see the number plate - the same number plate that's forever etched into the forefront of my mind. E599 SRJ I set off at a run. "Don't you dare, Gene! Don't you dare drive away from me again!" He stops with the key in the driver's side door, turns and finally he looks at me with something other than blank resignation. It's devastation, complete and total, but somehow it's better and when I reach him I do the only thing I can think of doing. I snatch his head in my hands and kiss him, hard and for a moment seemingly unwelcome. Then his hands slide over my shoulders and his mouth opens under mine. My trampled heart is singing - something by David Bowie - and it's Gene who has to push me away, still holding on when he meets my blurring gaze. "I didn't drive away from you that day. I stopped, called the station, called for an ambulance. Then I parked my car at the top of the slip road to block it and sat with you in a state of disbelief until the police arrived. It was an accident, Sam, I swear. It was always an accident." I can't help my smile. "Best thing that ever happened to me." # I stare into the window at the reflections of the people passing by, the lights of the caf� opposite and Gene Hunt, who shakes his head. "I don't feel like a Chinese." Fine with me. "Indian?" He nods happily. "I could murder a curry." I've never been so happy in my whole, entire life, in any time. These years at least I can share with Gene. |