Free The Ashes of an Oak by Chris Bradbury

pens, things like that. Why do you ask?’
    ‘Do you have a picture of your husband, Mrs Curtis? That we could see?’
    Mrs Curtis stood up and went to a sideboard. She rooted through a drawer and came back a moment later.
    ‘That’s me and George at the Grand Canyon on our Vegas trip last summer.’
    Frank took the photo. His heart fell. It showed two happy middle-aged people against a backdrop of blue sky and brown rock. George had smiling eyes and straight teeth. He was clean-shaven and had on his head a white hat against the hot Nevada sun. He looked like a salesman, but not the kind you’d shut the door on.
    He showed it to Steve, who remained impassive. There was no doubt it was the same man that had been pulled flyblown and pulpy from the furnace in that deserted factory.
    ‘Mrs Curtis, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but yesterday we found your husband’s body.’
    Mrs Curtis let out a noise that sounded like a hiccup. An uncertain smile quivered upon her face and Frank saw the colour drain from her. It was like a bottle of rosé wine emptying before his eyes. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘He’s out working. He left about a week and a half ago. He’s due back this weekend. I’m baking cookies.’
    Frank lowered his head and stared hard at the beige carpet. He took a deep breath and smelled the sweet doughiness of the baking cookies, the residue of odours that leaked from the fibres on the floor, from the sofa. He smelled the essence of these good, ordinary people embedded over time in the fabric of the house.
    ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Curtis,’ he said. He raised his head and looked her in the eyes as much as he dared. ‘George isn’t coming home.’
     
    Mrs Curtis had identified her husband. She had insisted. How would she know, she asked, if she didn’t see him, that he was truly gone? There would forever be that cruel glimmer of hope in her heart that one day he may walk through the door and say, quite casually, that he’d been for bread or cigarettes or a bottle of wine for them to sip at while they sat in a comfortable silence and watched their favourite film together.
    She had stood with trembling dignity, uttered the affirmative that she was required to give and then allowed herself to be escorted from the building and driven home, to a house that she no longer recognised, because a person that she had never met had broken in to her life and stolen from her the one thing she held most dear.
    She sat alone with her thoughts in her living room, upon their fat, comfortable, old yellow sofa and held George’s warm, brown, old woollen jumper to her nose.
    The rhombus of golden light from the window crept slowly across the room, across the plain green carpet, over the chairs and the magazines and the newspapers and the empty slippers, until it reached the skirting, folded in upon itself and disappeared. The sky faded to grey. The jagged horizon vanished as the dusk brought an equipoise to night and day. The sounds of the city, the driven, animalistic, merciless roar of the day, gradually diminished to become the random, light-hearted, spontaneous interjections of a balmy summer night - the laughs of freedom, the hiss of bus doors, the clatter of high heels, the distant horns of taxis driving headlong into another lysergic trip through the unfocused, bleeding lights of civilisation. She could smell, almost taste, the food of a hundred thousand takeaways as their pungent odours gathered in the ersatz heat of pipes and wires and scantily-clad bodies and crept like tarantulas, up, up to her window. She could imagine the myriad lives intertwined by love and friendship, the gut churning excitement of adoration born and the gut shot pain of dying love. She could see the heart-breaking twists of fate that lurked around every corner, to ambush each unsuspecting soul that walked and breathed in happy ignorance in that city of eternal hope.
    She drank nothing. She ate nothing. The longer she sat, as the