‘Come on, Kim! Fuckinganalogies!Meaning that husband of yours left you in trauma and now you’re avoiding anything that looks like a husband, even a brightly lit one.’
‘That’s the way the brain works, I guess.’
‘I only know this because of my screwed-up childhood, and it’s taken me a hundred years to sort through that bloody mess.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘But it had the reverse effect on me, where I tried to make a hopeless thing work. That faecal tracksuit Roddy was excited because I was a virgin when I met him, I think.’
This information was so left-field that Kim stifled a gasp. The sun was on her face, but she felt something in the depths of her like a diver’s light, a beam that showed how deep her innerself went, and how much of her could suddenly turn to anger or love.
She took a deep breath. ‘You’re such a wonderful girl, Stevie.’
‘That was a long sigh. Are you okay? You sound like someone tried to run off with your earrings.’
Kim replied, ‘When someone hurts you, I think I feel it.’
‘But I’m not hurt.’
‘That’s kind of what I mean. You get hit, I get hurt.’
‘Sisters?’
‘Maybe. In a different life.’
‘That’s no good to me. It needs to be in this one.’
‘Okay. Sisters in this one.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
When he finally got to Alfie Burton’s microphone thirty minutes after the press conference in the church had ended, Edward was dishevelled. The young reporter set eyes on the senior presenter and his face fell. He was dutifully standing by the radio station’s van, parked at the church gates, one side almost touching the wall of Sidmouth Museum. He covered the head of his microphone to speak only to Edward.
‘Grumpy Gordon,’ whispered Burton, moving his eyes upwards. It was a way of directing Edward to what was happening directly above him. On the roof of the van, the three-metre telescopic mast was retracting. So the vehicle’s broadcast systems had been shut down in preparation for its exit.
‘GG just said “I’m not waiting any longer”, and started turning things off,’ said Alfie. ‘Insisted on packing up because you weren’t here.’
At that moment, Gordon moved around the bonnet of the van, shirt untucked, a traveller’s money pouch hanging from his waist. He was Edward’s age and wore flannel trousers even on the hottest days. His bulbous nose and ears were cabbaged, as if he had just withdrawn his head from a rugby scrum after twenty years.
His angry frown melted away as he saw Edward.
‘Boss! I gave up on you! What happened?’
What had happened to Edward was that, just as Wendy had collared him in the church, the crowd folded in towards the radio host as if everyone had recognized him at once. Edward was offering yet more embarrassed excuses to the widow – sorry, he was on air, he had to get out to the broadcast van – but then got waylaid a matter of yards from her by dozens of people wanting information he did not have.
‘Got stuck in there,’ Edward told GG.
‘Mate! How do you always look so slim?’
Alfie Burton looked astonished at Gordon’s lighter tone, but Edward knew there would be no grumping when the engineer saw him. They had both lost a child in the same year. They were both, in a way, cross at everyone and everything – except each other.
‘Did you think I’d gone missing in there?’ asked Edward.
‘Boss,’ said GG, ‘I have to confess, I’m on overtime here and I promised to see the wife in an hour.’
‘You pack up if you’ve started.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it!’ said the man, transformed from cloud to sun, and clicked a control in his hand that was wired direct to the dashboard. The mast squeaked, juddered, and began to extend again. There was still a queue of people coming from the church, and some stopped to watch when they heard the radio van hum.
