Water's Edge

Chapter XVIII

Viv

I woke to the smell of patchouli. Everything was purple or gold. A light incense smog drifted over a few bodies. My shirt was undone and for a second I expected a wound, the shirt ripped, but it appeared an altogether different kind of affair had transpired. Damned Saxon spirits—!

"The kraken wakes!" Said a voice I barely recognised. In the doorway, a tall woman, and seemingly the only person in the house fully dressed. I began to piece together which limbs belonged to who, and it wasn't quite as debauch as I first imagined when I regained consciousness. It was Viv Handsome, the freelance pathologist; what was coming of the world? "It's under the student wearing the hideous knickers." She pointed. I must have looked panicked. Indeed, under one of the hippies was my jacket, which I pulled out unceremoniously. I stood to leave, "Oh no. No no." Viv stood in my way.

"This didn't happen."

"Ah, but it did." It had. Why had it? "Let me get you a coffee."

She drove me out of Thorngumbald to the greasiest greasy spoon she could find. A smiling pig holding forks for it's own bacon peered down at me, and she got us two fried breakfasts and a pot of the blackest tar coffee I had ever seen. Only cure for a hangover; I was just surprised I needed it in my older age. I was past university parties, and going on the pull with my fellow coppers. I had given up on that long ago. I only realised then I was wiping tears from my eyes, and Viv hadn't said a word.

"What's going on?"

I gave her a proper look. Dark hair, with purple and violet streaks, in a short bob. Dark clothes, a perpetual curl to her lips that implied not flirtation but secret knowledge, like she knew what was going to happen before it did. A prophetic pathologist.

"Your Dad is my landlord?" I asked instead.

"Yeah. And he doesn't take on renters unless he thinks they are good people. And he certainly doesn't think ex-coppers trying to fuck students after a night of karaoke are good people." She cocked a brow. She wasn't going to let me off with anything.

I explained as best as I could. I had lost my previous office to renovations, gentrification as the hippies would have called it. And I had moved into Albert Handsome's place around the same time I had put my Dad into a home. He was 80 odd. The oldest of the old coppers. Hated what I had become.

"Being a Runner?"

"I hate that term." I said and my story was cut short as we both dived into our breakfasts. It was good because it wasn't, "Why do I feel like you're good at this because of the Undertaker?"

"And she hates being called that—" Viv leant back in her seat, was getting a few looks from the truck drivers who had come for their own fuelling, "But yeah. She wanted a proper locum pathologist, but got me."

"Why are you giving me the time of day?"

She smirked, "I've been worried for you the moment you turned up that morning." She finished her coffee; her tongue must have been made of asbestos, "Same as I did with Margaret. I always buy fry-ups for my alcoholic colleagues." The smirk just would not vanish. I admired it, "So, this is your first case without your father looking over your shoulder?"

She was right. I had dived into the drink and the girls the moment I got the chance, utterly bewildered after I had left my Father at the home. I would have to visit him when this was all over; if he was still there. I suppose that also lingered. Working with the dead, you can't help but wonder who, out of your own tribe, will be next.

"Tribe." I muttered, unthinkingly.

"Tribe?"

I looked up, and called over for a take-away cup, "Drive me back into town. How'd I end up where I did? I thought I'd be with Babbitt?"

"Babbitt?" She moved swiftly, grabbed a sausage for the way to the car, "The professor... no, you kept babbling on about a Becky or something and then cried about your Dad."

I opened the passenger door, "Hold on." She paused, raised her brows in a kind of I wondered how long it would take glare, "Why were you there?"

"You're not the only one who enjoys fucking hippies, Detective."

I think I'd like this one.