I stopped at the corner of High Street and The Green, two bags of shopping cutting the fleshy part of each hand and three hundred yards to the carpark left to trudge in the biting wind.
There were four people standing near the crossing: an elderly woman – thick windblown hair belying her age, two schoolkids – all noisy swearing and banter, and a tall, professional looking man with a battered briefcase and lead eyes.
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In the summer of sixty-six, a year before the Newark riots, my life took a sudden change. I’d been living in Jersey for about eight months and, for me anyway, things were different in those days. The weather was warm, the ice vendors were making money, the streets were full of laughing kids, and everyone was getting along fine.
Me? I was doing okay. My mood was good, and I had a bit of dough. So, I went up onto the pitch covered roof of my apartment block to drink a few beers and smoke some pot. I call it my asphalt beach.
The apartment manager, Joey, didn’t like us going onto the roof. He wanted to keep it for himself and jerk off or something. He’s an asshole.
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“Hello,” said the tall man as he peered around the door to the classroom. “Are you Cecelia Luth?”
“Why, yes I am,” said Luth. “May I ask who wants to know?”
“My name is Bejerot,” he replied and stepped into the room, “but not the famous one. Are you familiar with the name?”
“I really don’t know who you might mean,” Luth responded warily.
“You don’t know Nils Bejerot?”
“Should I?” Luth said, “The name seems familiar, but I can’t place it.”
“He coined the phrase ‘Stockholm Syndrome’,” he said. He pulled a photograph from his jacket, “after the attempted robbery of the Kreditbanken in Sweden. Jan-Erik Olsson held four people hostage, demanding the release of his jailed friend, Clark Olofsson. They refused to testify against their captor.”
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The trouble with British Summer Time, apart from it being a misnomer that is, is it takes Joel Bloom nearly a week to catch up with the lost hour. Mornings are difficult: a constant struggle with his body clock, which point-blank refused to accept the evidence of his eyes when looking at his bedside clock.
“Can’t be eight already,” he would murmur in his fractured oddity of a voice. Since Becca said she was leaving, he formed the habit of talking to himself. Good company and intelligent conversation, he joked, but the reality is, he is lonely and affronted by her betrayal. The bloody postman, he thought, how much of a cliché is THAT?
“Maybe it’s time to look again,” said his head.
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Charlie De’Ath looked down at his dark brown Oxford shoes as he stood on the spray-soaked boardwalk separating the waterfront properties from Old Orchard Beach, Maine. They were scuffed with curves of roughened leather where the door panel he kicked in earlier that morning scraped across the shiny toecap. Tutting, he reached into the glove compartment of his customised classic car, a silver-blue and white Cadillac ’52 El Dorado for his shoe-shine kit. He always kept one in the car, along with a tub of hair gel, a clothes brush and for exceptional occasions, a spare suit, shirt and tie. For business purposes, he kept a box of rubber surgical gloves, an industrial-sized bottle of hand sanitizer and several tubs of moisturising cream in the trunk. Tony Torandi, his mentor in the early days, persuaded him they were necessary.
“A combination of hand sanitiser and moisturising cream will remove traces of gunpowder residue from your hands and the rubber gloves will prevent you shedding any skin cells at the appointment,” Tony said. Charlie later found out from a CSI agent on the payroll this was probably not true, besides using hand cream made him feel like a cissy. Still, he kept them in the car for old times’ sake
For Charlie, sartorial classiness was like a badge of office. He liked to look smart because he thought it gave him an air of authority, a kind of lawyerly feel, judicial even. He chuckled at that: Charlie was no judge. In fact, he never made judgements. Things were simple in Charlie-World, there were just three states of being: a problem, not a problem, and no longer a problem. Simplicity was his byword, which was just as well because having too much reflection about his line of work could lead to complications.
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