I realized something was askew upon visiting the facilities at the fire station, half an hour later. Now I'm not one to write loving descriptions of toilets, but even I realized that something quite illegal must be going on when the only stall was completely void of toilet paper, yet had a dog-eared copy of The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time lying in a dirty puddle on the floor. Quickly I deduced that this whole scenario had been engineered to humiliate me and therefore decided not to participate, despite feeling a somewhat pressing need to dump a trump.
Besides, I prefer to use the Daily Mail.
The firefighter was waiting outside the hallway, a ghoulish grin distorting her otherwise pinched features. She escorted me to an unused storage room where we sat on opposite sides of a plastic table.
"I am Siobhan Bakhtin. I will be interviewing you about the kennel escape." she said by way of introduction.
"Why?" I ask. "Wouldn't that be a police matter?"
Siobhan shrugged her shoulders at me, a tad aggressively. "Turns out that a country where it rains perpetually doesn't actually need a full-time fire department, so the police send firefighters like me to deal with minor matters while they accuse people of terrorism. You should see them, enforcing their harsh anti-terror laws all over Suffolk. I say to them, there's never been a terrorist incident in Suffolk, they cross their arms and reply that the laws work even better than they think." She paused, finding her way back on track. "I've read your book."
"Did you like it?"
She wrinkled her nose. "Was it popular?"
I smiled, happy to go plug myself. "Too popular. It's like you want to be Radiohead, then you think, shit, I've accidentally turned into Coldplay."
"More like Crazy Frog. Enormously popular, but quickly fading from the cultural landscape making no impact beyond proving extremely irritating to people of good taste. If you don't like being popular, this is your day…" She cleared her throat. "Now, I'm told that you worked as a script-writer and box-officer… But what interests me are the rumors that you worked with autistics. Can you elaborate?"
"No. Apparently I worked at an Adult Training Centre in North London, but I rarely go into such explicit detail."
"Fair enough. What do you know about autism?"
"I know very little about the subject. To present myself as some kind of expert in the field would make me look like a fool." I smirked.
"Yet by writing your book, that is exactly what you did. Why didn't you do any research?"
I drummed my fingers on the table. "It goes a little something like this…"