Michael Robotham - Bleed For Me

‘It looks a lot easier in the movies.’

‘Maybe we should start again.’

‘I’ll just use your bathroom.’

Rolling off the bed, I escape for a moment, feeling the cold tiles through my socks. The bathroom is nicely renovated, with a wall-to-ceiling mirror. There are shelves of shampoos, pastes, powders and moisturisers, which she appears to be stockpiling.

I study myself in the mirror. My mouth is smudged with her lipstick. How long has it been? Two years without sex: more of a drought than a dry spell. I’ve crossed the Sahara. I’ve forgotten how to drink.

She’ll be under the covers now, waiting for me, which is depressing rather than exciting. I look at my penis and wish it were bigger. I wish it would boss me around more often and stop me rationalising things.

I’m not a perfect human being. I know more about feelings than I do about the physical world. It’s easier for me to understand passion than to experience it.

Annie has brought another bottle of wine and glasses to the bedroom. She’s also wearing lingerie, lying self-consciously, trying to show herself to best effect. I take off my clothes and lie down next to her. She doesn’t let my doubts linger, taking my hand and pulling me next to her. Her tongue moves against my teeth.

Then she straddles me, squeezing me between her thighs, her breasts against my chest. I run my hand down her back and trace a finger over her curves. She lifts her hips, wanting me to touch her, but I glide my finger away moving higher and then drifting lower again.

‘Don’t tease me,’ she whispers, her voice vibrating.

I let my fingers sweep across her mound and she traps my hand beneath her, grinding her pelvis against my knuckles. Her lips are pressed to my ear, whispering what she wants.

I feel a familiar stirring. You don’t forget. It’s like falling off a bike or falling off a cliff or falling for someone. Even so, my lack of practice is quickly apparent. And I mean quickly .

Annie doesn’t mind. We have all night, she says. The next time is slower, more deliberate, less urgent, better, and for just a moment all the loneliness and thoughts of Julianne leave my memory and the only sound in the room is the squeak of bedsprings under our weight and the gentle slap of Annie’s stomach against mine. I cry out involuntarily, more like a woman than a man, lost in the smell of her hair and the beating of her heart.

I leave Annie sleeping, breathing softly. All men hope to do that. She looks like a child curled up in the disordered bed, one arm covering her eyes. There is a tiny mole on her shoulder blade; her upper lip more prominent than the lower; her eyebrows are shaped; she makes a soft humming noise as she sleeps and the soft swell of her stomach is strikingly feminine.

Creeping through the house, dressing quietly, I let myself out. It’s an odd feeling, having slept with someone other than Julianne, to have touched and tasted another human being. I don’t know what I feel. Relief. Guilt. Happiness. Loss.

I still have Julianne’s car. Her travelling make-up bag is in the pocket of the door and I imagine I can almost smell her shampoo on the headrest.

In between the sex, Annie had told me about her divorce and how her husband and his lawyer had stitched her up, crying poor and hiding assets.

‘I was married for six years and four months and couldn’t get pregnant,’ she told me. ‘We tried. My husband had an affair with his secretary, which sounds so boring when I say it - like a cliché. That’s my life - a cliché.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ I said.

I wanted to ask her about Gordon Ellis. Annie knew about Ray Hegarty’s allegations. She conducted the internal investigation, yet she didn’t react when I mentioned Gordon and Sienna. Was it natural caution, or confidentiality, or was she protecting a colleague?

Another bottle of wine was opened. Annie drank most of it. She apologised for being so maudlin. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, spilling my secrets.’

‘You don’t have to explain.’

‘Really? Are you sure?’

I wasn’t sure but I said yes and Annie continued, wanting to tell me everything; to share her secrets, funny stories and her bad decisions. It should have been intimate. It felt more like a therapy session.

I once had a patient who believed that the clock ran faster for her than anyone else. She was a university student and she was convinced that her exam time was concertinaed and that ‘her clock’ would speed up, giving her less time, which is why she could never finish.

The same clock ran slower for other people, she said. Annie acted like that. The world had conspired against her and she wanted me to know that it wasn’t her fault.

The flight from Bristol Airport to Edinburgh takes just over an hour and I’m on the ground before 8 a.m. Ruiz is waiting for me in the lounge, leafing through the pages of the Scotsman .

‘Do you think if I got enough people to vote we could get London declared part of Scotland?’

‘Why?’

‘Well, the Scots get more of our taxes than anyone else. They’ve got better health care, free prescriptions and no student fees. I could be a Jock, as long as I didn’t have to eat sheep’s guts and support the Scottish rugby team.’

‘They are pretty terrible.’

‘Total rubbish.’

He tosses the paper on a seat. ‘Come on.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Breakfast. I’m famished. I ate Chinese last night - gave me thunderous wind. Not even the Scots can fuck up breakfast.’

Ruiz leads me to his hire car. Something small and compact. He continues to spout his theories on Scottish devolution as we pull into the morning traffic and head towards Edinburgh. The sunrise is pink and misty, leaving tentacles of fog clinging to the valleys where church spires seem to float like islands in rivers of white.

Parking near the old city walls, Ruiz leads me through a maze of alleys until we reach the Royal Mile. The buildings are made of slate-grey stone and look as though they’ve risen directly from the earth.

It’s twenty years since I’ve been to Edinburgh. Julianne and I came up for the ‘Fringe’ with a crowd of university friends. We camped in tents and it rained for a week, but we filled our boots with satire and comedy.

Ruiz chooses a café, which looks positively medieval. Most of the patrons are tourists carrying video cameras and city guides. Taking a table near the window, he orders a full breakfast with extra sausages, toast and a pot of tea.

‘Do you know what that stuff does to your arteries?’ I ask him.

‘Do you have a chart? I love charts.’

The waitress is a big-boned Polish girl with bleached hair and a nose-stud. I order the poached eggs on sourdough toast on her recommendation. Ruiz looks at me as though I’ve asked to be castrated.

Once she’s gone, he takes out his battered notebook and rests it on the table.

‘Hey, you want to hear a Scottish joke?’

‘Maybe you should avoid Scottish jokes.’

‘Nonsense. The Jocks have a great sense of humour. Look at Gordon Brown.’

The tea arrives and he opens the silver pot and jiggles the bag impatiently. Then he unhooks the rubber band holding his notebook together.

‘You want to ask the questions?’

‘No, you talk.’

He starts with Ray Hegarty. His security business was solvent, the tax returns up to date, with no major debts or lawsuits. Ray was the public face of the company, a bona fide hero, decorated for bravery after he rescued two children from a flooded stormwater drain.

His son, Lance, left school at sixteen, signed to play football for Burnleigh. A knee injury ended his career before he turned eighteen. Initially, Lance tried to find work as an assistant coach, but then he trained as a motorcycle mechanic.