Part Seventy Six
She was sat at home doing some of her work on a PC in the homely basement flat that she shared in a discreet corner of Shepherd's Bush. The large front room was overlooked by the flight of steps from the front door from the entrance lobby up to the quiet street and the fading sunlight peeked in, creating an illuminated patch on the solid foursquare oak table. Behind her, the huge ceiling height bookcase told the story of two lives as read through the books that they had bought.
She flicked her brown shoulder length bobbed hair out of her large eyes while the computer screen of her laptop stared blankly back at her, and her thoughts wavered, lost shape. She oughtn't to bring work home but her previous job had fatally instilled workaholic habits into her that she knew she really ought to resist but didn't. She had a desire for perfection that made her feel irrationally guilty if she skimped on her work so she took the obvious next step of doing that bit of extra work at home. Staying at work on a sunny evening to write up her case notes after the last patient had gone only made her feel more isolated as everyone else in the practice had gone home. She worked as a psychologist and she and her partners were kept busy. Because modern city life was so rootless, it created a syndrome almost of its own and ensured that the referrals to their practice would never dry up. Neuroses and feelings of insecurity were normal in this city, far from the stone solid certainties of her youth spent growing up in an isolated country vicarage. She was tired and overworked, that was the problem. Nothing that a good rest couldn't cure, she thought to herself.
From the outside, she looked much like the other women in the block of flats where she lived , friendly and outgoing. True, she did not indulge in the eternal complaint of the women office workers who lived in the rest of the tall block of Georgian flats. When the sun was shining , they gathered together in the communal back garden where the collective conversation ran along the lines of 'my husband's so helpless, he needs someone to organise every little thing in his life.' She smiled inwardly at them as it was totally obvious to her that they were nestmakers, one and all and wouldn't want interference from their partners at any price in their homes. What they wanted was a relatively malleable man who they could organise while he slaved away as the rising young entrepreneur in the City to bring in a handsome income. It was the woman who ran the home as they conformed to Cosmopolitan's new post feminist consumerist model who enjoyed their rights that earlier generations of women had got so strident about. Theirs was a world where, with their own earnings, they could afford the luxuries of life. They had worked hard from when they had first started work as the office junior and had fitted into their slot in life where they had it made. It was part of working in offices that introduced the outlook in life that nothing existed outside their mould and created that natural conservatism. Where no one and nothing had crossed their paths to challenge their assumptions and there was no major tumult or rupture in their lives, such a way of thinking seemed the natural order of things.
She tended to stay out of such conversations , smiling politely and listening but was ready enough to joke with the others. They found her likeable enough but not too forthcoming about patches of her life. To all intents and purposes, she didn't talk about the normal topic of conversation that the single unattached woman always talked about as they well remembered from their own days. Her flatmate wasn't often seen around outside but they kept themselves to themselves and there was nothing wrong with that. Helen's marked accent spoke of someone who had not grown up within the wide open London suburbs, only a tube ride away from the bustling metropolis. In their eyes, Hatfield was surely the passport to the north, the point where M1, that wide stretch of tarmac slashes its relentless way through the countryside and opened the way up through the central spine of Britain. Her accent spoke of a far off part of the United Kingdom with a much grittier down to earth lifestyle which living in London hadn't softened.
In many ways, she appeared much like the thousands of other single women making a living in the busy hustle and bustle of London life.
The last clubbers reeled out the door, past the "Chix" sign and shouted to each other into the darkened side street while the tall slim woman with short cropped black hair locked up the night's takings in the stout metal wall safe. The loud music had stopped and the utter silence was deafening to her buzzing ears. She ran a practised eye over the club while the two barmaids, June and Terry, scurried around tidying up the place ready for the next night. She knew that they could be trusted to do their job well from when she had first hired them. She had that instinct about people which served her well, not only in her present line of work but in other strange situations in her turbulent life.She had done her stint that night of the week and her business partner was due to take over for the rest of the week. It was an arrangement they had come to which suited them best and divided up the responsibilities nicely. Both of them knew the business inside out and trusted the other to work to the same ideas that they had struggled for so many years to get off the ground. The evening left her eyes smarting from the cigarette smoke and the crick in her back. She had no need of the workout videos that some minor soapstar lent her name to for a nice fat percentage on the sales.
She clicked off the lights at the back while the two barmaids slipped their coats on and made their way to the door.
"Night Nikki," they both called out as they made their way for the door and shot out.
She was about to reply but they were gone. Teenagers, she smiled, they are always in a hurry everywhere. She was one once, she reminisced fondly.
She slipped on her favourite smart long black coat and made her way to the Underground station round the corner, past the turnstiles, along the ancient worn out while tiled corridors and into the world of mechanical clanking sounds that pulled her homewards to the garish green tiled ceiling of Shepherd's Bush underground station. She was tired and her bed was ready and waiting for her.
Helen Wade was up early while her partner lay sleepily in bed from the night before. The indeterminate mound under the quilt showed her presence. Helen was a morning person, always offensively bright and cheerful while her partner took ages to rub the sleep out of her eyes and let her thoughts collect themselves before she could face the day. The first cigarette of the day was her call to action.
Helen wandered through to the front room in her dressing gown, her hair still rumpled and fished out the copy of the Guardian which had been set apart from the rest of the papers which came and went. That front page story was vividly connected to a past life to which she felt half a stranger, even from the photo of her slightly younger self in a blue two piece suit and short slightly curly hair. That reminder of the past which she wanted to forget was kept out of sight in the photograph album in a seldom disturbed top cupboard.
Helen picked up the paper and stared at the headline story. This had niggled away at the back of her mind when the newspaper flopped its way through the letter box the same way as it did every normal morning. Her first instinct was to hide it away with everything else in her past but logical disposal of the sort of files that she handled didn't work where it personally affected her life. She had had strange dreams where images of her past came back to haunt her. It was always that same face, sometimes sly with fake innocence and downcast eyes, sometimes when the real man emerged, a mingled expression of fury, and a deep rooted personal antagonism for all that she represented which he took as a personal insult. Right then she saw him near the very end, that terrifying assurance of power over her from the one slipup that she had made, small but fatal. It was only later on that Nikki was hunting round for the morning paper that she found it and drew the correct conclusion.
"What's up, darling?" Came that muddy echo of that soft musical voice from out of her dreams while she fought a losing battle with that man to stop him going through the drawer in her office.
"Only another bad dream," Helen mumbled as the bedside light was switched on, banishing her nightmare visions and only Nikki's gentle troubled face and the tender touch of her fingers was there to soothe her fears away. She had jumped through time and space where she was now Helen Wade, psychologist and she had left her old identity, Helen Stewart Wing Governor of Larkhall far behind in her dreams.
Nikki said nothing as she knew only too well, her lover's tendency to bottle up her fears, even with her nearest and dearest and the fear in Helen's eyes betrayed herself. it was strange that Helen worked as a psychologist for a living understanding other people's disturbed psyches. It was as if this enabled her to keep her own problems at a distance.
"Helen, you have to deal with this," Nikki said gently to her one day.
"I'm not going back to Larkhall or having anything ever to do with the place. Not ever," Helen said with real passion and fear. "I've done everything to cut myself off from that part of my life. I don't even drive near that part of London but take the long way round.
"So that's what you've been dreaming about," Nikki said softly, her fingers resting against Helen's bare clammy skin at which point Helen nodded.
"I even changed my name so that none of them could trace me," Helen finally blurted out.
"So that's why you did it?" Nikki asked her softly, eyebrows raised. Only Helen could tell that this admission had hurt Nikki. She could remember with total delight the day that Helen had insisted on changing her name to Wade in the first flush of their life together and the passion with which they shared their first full night together.She had learned from Larkhall to count to ten before speaking in fraught moments. She had not only got her English degree at Larkhall but had learned patience also.
"Yes, Nikki," Helen said apologetically. "But I did it also because after all the shit I landed on you, even though I didn't know half the time what I was doing, I wanted to make it up to you and give myself totally to you, as a demonstration of my love for you. You must believe me, Nikki."
The total sincerity with which Helen spoke convinced Nikki. Helen had changed since she had left Larkhall as Nikki had set to work, lovingly but with great determination, on Helen's curious habit of speaking indirectly and holding a card up her sleeve. As Nikki was the one with the confidence and experience of living together with another woman and Helen was the learner, Helen gratefully cast aside the burdensome shackle of that desire to be boss.
"All right, Helen," she smiled and kissed her gently on the lips. "But sometime, someday, you have to face it. But you decide when."
"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," came that hoarse gentle voice from her music system with the steel drum accompaniment that soothed her thoughts. She smiled to herself that John Lennon had it about right. That said everything about her time at Larkhall. The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. She'd read that in a book and that was also true.
"Didn't know that Yvonne Atkins had a son, Nikki," She called out rather too loudly for the fragile figure in the bedroom.
"Neither did I," came the sleepy mumble from still under the bedclothes. "Yvonne only talked about Lauren."
Then Nikki sat up bolt upright.
"Has the morning paper come, Hel?" Nikki asked casually as a way into the conversation as she whipped her jeans on.
"No, but the paper with the report of the suicide of Yvonne's son and a woman called Snowball Merriman has." Helen's voice floated up from downstairs announced in casual tones .
'I may be on the way out but I will drag you all the way down with me.' she remembered uttering her very last words to that man as she turned to leave. Well that hadn't happened but who knows, some other person would succeed where she had failed. That bastard's luck couldn't run forever. Sooner or later, he would slip and fall.
A dishevelled Nikki rushed in the front room to see a very relaxed Helen stretched out with the paper in front of her with the headline. "Two die in suicide pact."
"OK so far,Helen." Nikki asked.
"I'm fine, Nikki, so long as I keep it in mind that I'm a spectator, I'm not in charge. It was that instinct that was scaring me that somehow, I'd be pulled back to Larkhall whether I wanted it or not if I as much as started reading the paper.I'm a reader, just like anyone else only I know, sorry, knew the place. Here" and Helen patted the settee next to her, "Sit here next to me and read it with me."
It was Nikki's turn to be apprehensive as she had never read the paper either, supposedly respecting Helen's right to lock away unpleasant memories. Now Helen had made her choice, Nikki's options were left open.
It was a competently written article, rapidly sketching in the background of the two people concerned. The son of a well known Eastend gangster family and his would be American actress girlfriend who was held in this country on drug smuggling charges who had set fire to Larkhall and caused the death of a young prisoner called Shaz Wiley…….
Helen turned white. "I interviewed her once. I set up that meeting with the widow of the man she had killed with her poisoned oysters. That was the meeting which you tried to gatecrash with the tea trolley doing your 2 Julies impersonation……. "
Nikki gave a wry smile at the description but the memory of the desperation with which she sought out Helen to heal a tare in their relationship was one she would as sooner forget.
The article went on to describe the way that the home made bomb had exploded in the corridor next to the library causing flames to sweep through that part of G wing causing her death and nearly caused others to die…….
"Who the hell were the others, Helen. Anyone we might have known?" Nikki demanded of the paper in vain. It could have been any number of the women she had known and had cut herself away from so that they could move on away from Larkhall. She couldn't pretend to herself that she was doing it for Helen's sake.
The article gave the bare details of the facts of the matter, Mr Atkins's overdose of barbiturates and the razor blade that cut Snowball Merriman's wrist. It did not offer up any suggestion as to why the couple had committed suicide so soon after being sentenced to prison nor how it was arranged…..
"How do you think Yvonne is feeling, Helen? I was close to her once," and the last word expressed all Nikki's regret at the distance she had put between her and Yvonne, "……..and I know how she felt about Lauren. I never knew that she had a son. She never told me about him."
"Don't be a daft cow, Nikk," she could hear Yvonne's mocking but gentle Eastend accent and that warm smile despite the affectation of tough bitch. "You've got your life to lead. You've done your bit. I'll be here to carry on taking the piss out of Bodybag………"
Everything signed, sealed and delivered for the reader to digest and move on to the next column
Nikki flicked the TV on and a black and white film showing an angry looking young man with an aquiline nose and wearing dark glasses was talking in an impassioned American accent at the viewer.
"You'll never understand it. It'll go right past you. ……..I'm not going to read any of these magazines. I mean, they've got too much to lose for printing the truth. You know that.
They'd go off the stands in the day if they really printed the truth……the truth is a plain picture, a plain picture of a tramp vomiting into the sewer and next door to the picture Mr Rockefeller on the subway, going to work. Any sort of a picture. Just make some sort of collage of pictures which they don't do.
Just these facts. There's no ideas in Time magazine. Even the article which you're doing, it can't be a good article. Because the guy that's writing the article is sitting at a desk in New York. He's not going out of his office. He's going to get all these fifteen reporters and they're going to send him a quota……….All right, you do your job in the face of that and how seriously you take yourself, you decide for yourself."
"Do you believe in what you're saying." came the answer.
"Ageless portrait of Bob Dylan, the young folksinger looking enigmatically at the world from behind his sunglasses as he tours England with his unique brand of spiky humour and folk protest songs and his patented anti interview style with the faceless reporter from Time Magazine in 1965."ran the critical review in the colour supplement.
Nikki clicked the TV off. Interesting though the film looked , there was a more urgent consideration.
"I ought to write to Yvonne. It is the least that I can do."
"And then you'll want to meet her and you'll drag us back to Larkhall, Nikki. Everything that we've strived for, you are putting at risk." Helen's panic stricken voice and the expression also pleaded with Nikki not to do it.
"Yvonne must be out by now. You know how prisoners come and go, well most of them," Nikki reasoned though a sick feeling in her stomach reasoned that the three appeal court judges, resplendent in the finery of their wigs and robes pronounced on Nikki, the prisoner in the dock, her freedom or else she would be the one stuck forever behind prison bars.
"All right Nikki but you promise for my sake to be careful," And she clung tightly onto Nikki, the one person who might bring her back to a nightmare to be relived.
She was sat at home doing some of her work on a PC in the homely basement flat that she shared in a discreet corner of Shepherd's Bush. The large front room was overlooked by the flight of steps from the front door from the entrance lobby up to the quiet street and the fading sunlight peeked in, creating an illuminated patch on the solid foursquare oak table. Behind her, the huge ceiling height bookcase told the story of two lives as read through the books that they had bought.
She flicked her brown shoulder length bobbed hair out of her large eyes while the computer screen of her laptop stared blankly back at her, and her thoughts wavered, lost shape. She oughtn't to bring work home but her previous job had fatally instilled workaholic habits into her that she knew she really ought to resist but didn't. She had a desire for perfection that made her feel irrationally guilty if she skimped on her work so she took the obvious next step of doing that bit of extra work at home. Staying at work on a sunny evening to write up her case notes after the last patient had gone only made her feel more isolated as everyone else in the practice had gone home. She worked as a psychologist and she and her partners were kept busy. Because modern city life was so rootless, it created a syndrome almost of its own and ensured that the referrals to their practice would never dry up. Neuroses and feelings of insecurity were normal in this city, far from the stone solid certainties of her youth spent growing up in an isolated country vicarage. She was tired and overworked, that was the problem. Nothing that a good rest couldn't cure, she thought to herself.
From the outside, she looked much like the other women in the block of flats where she lived , friendly and outgoing. True, she did not indulge in the eternal complaint of the women office workers who lived in the rest of the tall block of Georgian flats. When the sun was shining , they gathered together in the communal back garden where the collective conversation ran along the lines of 'my husband's so helpless, he needs someone to organise every little thing in his life.' She smiled inwardly at them as it was totally obvious to her that they were nestmakers, one and all and wouldn't want interference from their partners at any price in their homes. What they wanted was a relatively malleable man who they could organise while he slaved away as the rising young entrepreneur in the City to bring in a handsome income. It was the woman who ran the home as they conformed to Cosmopolitan's new post feminist consumerist model who enjoyed their rights that earlier generations of women had got so strident about. Theirs was a world where, with their own earnings, they could afford the luxuries of life. They had worked hard from when they had first started work as the office junior and had fitted into their slot in life where they had it made. It was part of working in offices that introduced the outlook in life that nothing existed outside their mould and created that natural conservatism. Where no one and nothing had crossed their paths to challenge their assumptions and there was no major tumult or rupture in their lives, such a way of thinking seemed the natural order of things.
She tended to stay out of such conversations , smiling politely and listening but was ready enough to joke with the others. They found her likeable enough but not too forthcoming about patches of her life. To all intents and purposes, she didn't talk about the normal topic of conversation that the single unattached woman always talked about as they well remembered from their own days. Her flatmate wasn't often seen around outside but they kept themselves to themselves and there was nothing wrong with that. Helen's marked accent spoke of someone who had not grown up within the wide open London suburbs, only a tube ride away from the bustling metropolis. In their eyes, Hatfield was surely the passport to the north, the point where M1, that wide stretch of tarmac slashes its relentless way through the countryside and opened the way up through the central spine of Britain. Her accent spoke of a far off part of the United Kingdom with a much grittier down to earth lifestyle which living in London hadn't softened.
In many ways, she appeared much like the thousands of other single women making a living in the busy hustle and bustle of London life.
The last clubbers reeled out the door, past the "Chix" sign and shouted to each other into the darkened side street while the tall slim woman with short cropped black hair locked up the night's takings in the stout metal wall safe. The loud music had stopped and the utter silence was deafening to her buzzing ears. She ran a practised eye over the club while the two barmaids, June and Terry, scurried around tidying up the place ready for the next night. She knew that they could be trusted to do their job well from when she had first hired them. She had that instinct about people which served her well, not only in her present line of work but in other strange situations in her turbulent life.She had done her stint that night of the week and her business partner was due to take over for the rest of the week. It was an arrangement they had come to which suited them best and divided up the responsibilities nicely. Both of them knew the business inside out and trusted the other to work to the same ideas that they had struggled for so many years to get off the ground. The evening left her eyes smarting from the cigarette smoke and the crick in her back. She had no need of the workout videos that some minor soapstar lent her name to for a nice fat percentage on the sales.
She clicked off the lights at the back while the two barmaids slipped their coats on and made their way to the door.
"Night Nikki," they both called out as they made their way for the door and shot out.
She was about to reply but they were gone. Teenagers, she smiled, they are always in a hurry everywhere. She was one once, she reminisced fondly.
She slipped on her favourite smart long black coat and made her way to the Underground station round the corner, past the turnstiles, along the ancient worn out while tiled corridors and into the world of mechanical clanking sounds that pulled her homewards to the garish green tiled ceiling of Shepherd's Bush underground station. She was tired and her bed was ready and waiting for her.
Helen Wade was up early while her partner lay sleepily in bed from the night before. The indeterminate mound under the quilt showed her presence. Helen was a morning person, always offensively bright and cheerful while her partner took ages to rub the sleep out of her eyes and let her thoughts collect themselves before she could face the day. The first cigarette of the day was her call to action.
Helen wandered through to the front room in her dressing gown, her hair still rumpled and fished out the copy of the Guardian which had been set apart from the rest of the papers which came and went. That front page story was vividly connected to a past life to which she felt half a stranger, even from the photo of her slightly younger self in a blue two piece suit and short slightly curly hair. That reminder of the past which she wanted to forget was kept out of sight in the photograph album in a seldom disturbed top cupboard.
Helen picked up the paper and stared at the headline story. This had niggled away at the back of her mind when the newspaper flopped its way through the letter box the same way as it did every normal morning. Her first instinct was to hide it away with everything else in her past but logical disposal of the sort of files that she handled didn't work where it personally affected her life. She had had strange dreams where images of her past came back to haunt her. It was always that same face, sometimes sly with fake innocence and downcast eyes, sometimes when the real man emerged, a mingled expression of fury, and a deep rooted personal antagonism for all that she represented which he took as a personal insult. Right then she saw him near the very end, that terrifying assurance of power over her from the one slipup that she had made, small but fatal. It was only later on that Nikki was hunting round for the morning paper that she found it and drew the correct conclusion.
"What's up, darling?" Came that muddy echo of that soft musical voice from out of her dreams while she fought a losing battle with that man to stop him going through the drawer in her office.
"Only another bad dream," Helen mumbled as the bedside light was switched on, banishing her nightmare visions and only Nikki's gentle troubled face and the tender touch of her fingers was there to soothe her fears away. She had jumped through time and space where she was now Helen Wade, psychologist and she had left her old identity, Helen Stewart Wing Governor of Larkhall far behind in her dreams.
Nikki said nothing as she knew only too well, her lover's tendency to bottle up her fears, even with her nearest and dearest and the fear in Helen's eyes betrayed herself. it was strange that Helen worked as a psychologist for a living understanding other people's disturbed psyches. It was as if this enabled her to keep her own problems at a distance.
"Helen, you have to deal with this," Nikki said gently to her one day.
"I'm not going back to Larkhall or having anything ever to do with the place. Not ever," Helen said with real passion and fear. "I've done everything to cut myself off from that part of my life. I don't even drive near that part of London but take the long way round.
"So that's what you've been dreaming about," Nikki said softly, her fingers resting against Helen's bare clammy skin at which point Helen nodded.
"I even changed my name so that none of them could trace me," Helen finally blurted out.
"So that's why you did it?" Nikki asked her softly, eyebrows raised. Only Helen could tell that this admission had hurt Nikki. She could remember with total delight the day that Helen had insisted on changing her name to Wade in the first flush of their life together and the passion with which they shared their first full night together.She had learned from Larkhall to count to ten before speaking in fraught moments. She had not only got her English degree at Larkhall but had learned patience also.
"Yes, Nikki," Helen said apologetically. "But I did it also because after all the shit I landed on you, even though I didn't know half the time what I was doing, I wanted to make it up to you and give myself totally to you, as a demonstration of my love for you. You must believe me, Nikki."
The total sincerity with which Helen spoke convinced Nikki. Helen had changed since she had left Larkhall as Nikki had set to work, lovingly but with great determination, on Helen's curious habit of speaking indirectly and holding a card up her sleeve. As Nikki was the one with the confidence and experience of living together with another woman and Helen was the learner, Helen gratefully cast aside the burdensome shackle of that desire to be boss.
"All right, Helen," she smiled and kissed her gently on the lips. "But sometime, someday, you have to face it. But you decide when."
"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," came that hoarse gentle voice from her music system with the steel drum accompaniment that soothed her thoughts. She smiled to herself that John Lennon had it about right. That said everything about her time at Larkhall. The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. She'd read that in a book and that was also true.
"Didn't know that Yvonne Atkins had a son, Nikki," She called out rather too loudly for the fragile figure in the bedroom.
"Neither did I," came the sleepy mumble from still under the bedclothes. "Yvonne only talked about Lauren."
Then Nikki sat up bolt upright.
"Has the morning paper come, Hel?" Nikki asked casually as a way into the conversation as she whipped her jeans on.
"No, but the paper with the report of the suicide of Yvonne's son and a woman called Snowball Merriman has." Helen's voice floated up from downstairs announced in casual tones .
'I may be on the way out but I will drag you all the way down with me.' she remembered uttering her very last words to that man as she turned to leave. Well that hadn't happened but who knows, some other person would succeed where she had failed. That bastard's luck couldn't run forever. Sooner or later, he would slip and fall.
A dishevelled Nikki rushed in the front room to see a very relaxed Helen stretched out with the paper in front of her with the headline. "Two die in suicide pact."
"OK so far,Helen." Nikki asked.
"I'm fine, Nikki, so long as I keep it in mind that I'm a spectator, I'm not in charge. It was that instinct that was scaring me that somehow, I'd be pulled back to Larkhall whether I wanted it or not if I as much as started reading the paper.I'm a reader, just like anyone else only I know, sorry, knew the place. Here" and Helen patted the settee next to her, "Sit here next to me and read it with me."
It was Nikki's turn to be apprehensive as she had never read the paper either, supposedly respecting Helen's right to lock away unpleasant memories. Now Helen had made her choice, Nikki's options were left open.
It was a competently written article, rapidly sketching in the background of the two people concerned. The son of a well known Eastend gangster family and his would be American actress girlfriend who was held in this country on drug smuggling charges who had set fire to Larkhall and caused the death of a young prisoner called Shaz Wiley…….
Helen turned white. "I interviewed her once. I set up that meeting with the widow of the man she had killed with her poisoned oysters. That was the meeting which you tried to gatecrash with the tea trolley doing your 2 Julies impersonation……. "
Nikki gave a wry smile at the description but the memory of the desperation with which she sought out Helen to heal a tare in their relationship was one she would as sooner forget.
The article went on to describe the way that the home made bomb had exploded in the corridor next to the library causing flames to sweep through that part of G wing causing her death and nearly caused others to die…….
"Who the hell were the others, Helen. Anyone we might have known?" Nikki demanded of the paper in vain. It could have been any number of the women she had known and had cut herself away from so that they could move on away from Larkhall. She couldn't pretend to herself that she was doing it for Helen's sake.
The article gave the bare details of the facts of the matter, Mr Atkins's overdose of barbiturates and the razor blade that cut Snowball Merriman's wrist. It did not offer up any suggestion as to why the couple had committed suicide so soon after being sentenced to prison nor how it was arranged…..
"How do you think Yvonne is feeling, Helen? I was close to her once," and the last word expressed all Nikki's regret at the distance she had put between her and Yvonne, "……..and I know how she felt about Lauren. I never knew that she had a son. She never told me about him."
"Don't be a daft cow, Nikk," she could hear Yvonne's mocking but gentle Eastend accent and that warm smile despite the affectation of tough bitch. "You've got your life to lead. You've done your bit. I'll be here to carry on taking the piss out of Bodybag………"
Everything signed, sealed and delivered for the reader to digest and move on to the next column
Nikki flicked the TV on and a black and white film showing an angry looking young man with an aquiline nose and wearing dark glasses was talking in an impassioned American accent at the viewer.
"You'll never understand it. It'll go right past you. ……..I'm not going to read any of these magazines. I mean, they've got too much to lose for printing the truth. You know that.
They'd go off the stands in the day if they really printed the truth……the truth is a plain picture, a plain picture of a tramp vomiting into the sewer and next door to the picture Mr Rockefeller on the subway, going to work. Any sort of a picture. Just make some sort of collage of pictures which they don't do.
Just these facts. There's no ideas in Time magazine. Even the article which you're doing, it can't be a good article. Because the guy that's writing the article is sitting at a desk in New York. He's not going out of his office. He's going to get all these fifteen reporters and they're going to send him a quota……….All right, you do your job in the face of that and how seriously you take yourself, you decide for yourself."
"Do you believe in what you're saying." came the answer.
"Ageless portrait of Bob Dylan, the young folksinger looking enigmatically at the world from behind his sunglasses as he tours England with his unique brand of spiky humour and folk protest songs and his patented anti interview style with the faceless reporter from Time Magazine in 1965."ran the critical review in the colour supplement.
Nikki clicked the TV off. Interesting though the film looked , there was a more urgent consideration.
"I ought to write to Yvonne. It is the least that I can do."
"And then you'll want to meet her and you'll drag us back to Larkhall, Nikki. Everything that we've strived for, you are putting at risk." Helen's panic stricken voice and the expression also pleaded with Nikki not to do it.
"Yvonne must be out by now. You know how prisoners come and go, well most of them," Nikki reasoned though a sick feeling in her stomach reasoned that the three appeal court judges, resplendent in the finery of their wigs and robes pronounced on Nikki, the prisoner in the dock, her freedom or else she would be the one stuck forever behind prison bars.
"All right Nikki but you promise for my sake to be careful," And she clung tightly onto Nikki, the one person who might bring her back to a nightmare to be relived.