Free The Thing Itself by Peter Guttridge

problems.’
    â€˜I can’t speak for Tingley,’ Watts said shortly. ‘What can you do for her?’
    â€˜Sorry I said that,’ Gilchrist said. ‘We should meet.’
    â€˜Of course,’ Watts said. ‘I’m on my way to Brighton.’
    â€˜Not just about this. We’ve found Bernie Grimes.’
    The mist swallowed the old man.

SIXTEEN
    B ob Watts walked along the towpath from his father’s house to Hammersmith Bridge. He’d run the distance there and back at six that morning. Now he passed the odd dog-walker as joggers passed him, but for the most part he was alone with his thoughts.
    Not long before his father had fallen ill, Watts had confronted him about his womanizing past. Watts had realized that William Simpson, his erstwhile friend, was his half-brother. Kate Simpson was his niece. He had been puzzling over when – or whether – to tell her. Now was certainly not the time.
    He was aware of the screeching of the parakeets high up in the canopy of trees that arched over the path. Escapees, it was said, from some 1940s film made at Twickenham studios. He saw a grey heron, neck elongated, standing still as a statue in the shallows.
    He took the tube to Victoria just in time for the fast train to Brighton. He’d left his car at the station a couple of days earlier. He’d forgotten where, of course, but after five minutes’ wandering he located it.
    There was an old Archie Shepp CD on the stereo.
Goin’ Home
, with Horace Parlan on piano. Watts liked dissonance in music. Anarchy, really. That’s how he’d first got into Shepp and his crazy tenor sax. But this was sweet, old-time blues, more Ben Webster than Ornette Coleman. He turned it up loud as he drove to the hospital.
    Gilchrist was waiting for him in the foyer. They hugged briefly, awkwardly. Since their brief fling, he knew she felt as unsure as he did about how to be with each other.
    She took him in to see Kate Simpson. Her face was broken and bruised.
    He thought she wouldn’t want any man near her, but Gilchrist nudged him forward and Kate raised a shaky hand for him to take. Tears welled from her eyes as she held his hand fiercely for a moment before her grip relaxed and her eyes closed.
    â€˜The drugs,’ Gilchrist murmured.
    Watts clenched his jaw.
    They hugged again when they parted half an hour later. Gilchrist had filled him in on Bernie Grimes and the south of France. Watts was fired up about that but mostly he was thinking of Kate Simpson. Her broken voice. The cuts and the swellings. The tears welling from her eyes as he held her hand.
    Watts had been living in an odd little house in the centre of Brighton for a couple of months now. It was one of a handful of cottages around Brighton that had been built by French prisoners during the Napoleonic wars. It was local flint and brick that had then been tarred black. It was on a terrace of four houses, the other three built to match a couple of hundred years later. It was three storeys high but very narrow. It had a small front garden and a private courtyard at the back. The view from the front was of a narrow walkway and the side wall of the Royal Mail sorting office.
    It was a ludicrous choice for a big man as it was cramped with low ceilings, but Watts realized he was punishing himself. When his marriage had broken up, he’d first chosen to live in a horrible bungalow. Now this.
    When he let himself in, the landline was ringing. It was his wife, Molly, phoning from Canada, where she’d gone to get a perspective on the things that had happened between them.
    Molly was his home. He recognized that now. Recognized too that he had totally fucked it up. Not because of his one-night stand with Sarah Gilchrist. Long before then. When he was busy turning his wife to drink and away from him.
    He shook his head. He was trying to process what Molly had told him.
    â€˜I’m not coming back.’
    She had been