The Third Shadow

Thirty-five

It was almost midday by the time I roused myself awake; my get-up-at-the-crack-of-dawn routine had been pretty much shot to hell by this point. A further indication of my recent spiritual decline was the fact that my first waking desire was not for coffee and eggs but for wine. A beer at least, something to blur the edges a little.

I resisted it though, forced down a little breakfast. If I was going to get through this - if my business stood any chance of surviving - then there were things I needed to do that day. It was gratifying to know that I hadn't yet given up. Wasn't quite ready to press the self destruct button.

Firstly, there was a certain telephone call I had to make...

There was no point putting it off any longer, I thought, tossing back the last of my coffee; I'd been putting off for several days by then. Taking a deep breath, I reached for my phone, dialled up International Direct Enquiries.

" Saltburn, England. The name's Foster."

*

It was he who answered, his tone quizzical, clearly unfamiliar with the international prefix which would have flashed up onto the screen of his landline handset.

"Can you put Heather on the line?" It escaped me to add a 'please'.

There was a brief silence; not one of shock exactly, more he needed a moment to work out his tactics, how he was going to play this. Like our face-to-face encounter a week and a half earlier, he plumped for feigned kind of relief, a presumed continued mateyness as if nothing in the world had happened.

"Jim! Great to hear from you! Heather was so..." The successive correction was too late to be in any way convincing. "I mean, we were all so worried. The way you took off like that. Boom! - all of a sud-"

"Just put my ex-wife on the line eh Foster."

A moment or two later, I could hear her breath rasp into the receiver; she must have been close by, at the mention of my name had grabbed the phone from him.

"Jim! How are you? Dear Christ, you had us-"

"He still standing there listening?"

"Besides ourselves. Sick with worry. All of-"

"Foster." My interruption was firmer this time. "Is he still there listening?"

"He's just... He's right here in the doorway."

"Tell him to go away."

"But-"

"Heather, just ask him to step away for a moment please."

The matter I was phoning about wasn't anything I could reasonably expect her to keep secret from him, but the asking of the question at least I wanted to be a private affair, just the two of us. It wasn't much to expect, surely, that a man could have a moment or two on the phone with his ex-wife of twenty-eight years?

"He's gone," she promised. "Back off into the kitchen. Was busy peeling potatoes for lunch."

Despite the recentness of my ill-considered visit to Saltburn, the very sound of her voice still seemed strange: an echo from a former life. No, not an echo I realised - rather an old warped videotape, my memories obscured by a floating succession of horizontal blurs. Twenty eight years - they were slowly getting buried under the snow of electro-magnetic static.

"You've got him well-trained," I commented. "Always hated that job myself."

But even as I was saying it, I knew I was digging a hole for myself. Knew exactly what she was thinking. She could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I'd ever peeled potatoes. I was never at home enough.