Burn Patterns (12 page)

Iris opened the fridge to discover the same lack of food as the previous night. She took out some mineral water, sliced a lime.

Mathew came from the laundry, smelling of the lavender soap they kept by the back door.

‘This is big, even for us. I'll have to fly up in the morning. Wave the flag, make sure no one trips over their shoelaces.' He put on the kettle, took out cups. ‘Tea?'

‘How early?'

‘First thing.'

‘Would you like mindless television and biscuits?'

‘I can't. I have papers. A stack.'

‘How about an early night and mindless sex?'

He stopped making the tea, blinked at her.

She smiled, to push up the joke, remove any trace of pleading.

He sounded regretful. ‘Oh, I can't, darling. I've simply got too much to get done.' He came to rest his hand on her shoulder. ‘When I get back, let's make time for ourselves, stay in, give each other a good seeing to?'

She smiled again.

He kissed her, rather chastely, on the lips, patted her shoulder, once, then two more times, before turning back to the tea. ‘Rosemarie called,' he said. ‘In the afternoon.'

‘Oh.'

‘She's doing very well. She's eager for her exam results. She's
not back until Christmas, she said. She's moving into a house, out of the college. I was a bit concerned but it sounds like two other students – girls from the residential college. There's this fellow, Brodey. Not a promising name, Brodey. His name came up a few times. I managed to establish Brodey isn't moving in with them. Just the girls for now. A place within walking distance from the university. Has she mentioned Brodey to you?'

He jiggled his tea bag, squeezing out the excess moisture with a teaspoon before depositing it in the kitchen bin.

Iris said, ‘I haven't managed to catch her.'

‘She sounds on top of the world, full of plans for the break. I'll report back on her new digs when I'm over next on business.' Mathew took his cup of tea to his study, all but whistling.

The tea he had made her steamed on the bench. Iris surveyed the spotless kitchen. The cleaner must have come today too.

*

Iris took her cup of tea and a packet of chocolate biscuits into her home office. She gazed at her butterfly displays for a moment, recalling her peaceful morning in the enclosure at the zoo. She opened her laptop to check her emails. There was an invitation to the funeral for the firefighters who'd perished at the school. On Monday, a state funeral with full honours. They must have hastened through the forensics, Iris supposed.

Patricia had scheduled an appointment with her. Iris pressed accept. She next went through the office emails from Mary. Iris had two clients the next day. Howard Philips was having trouble in his relationship with his wife, Anna. Iris, Howard and Anna were exploring Howard's pornography consumption as the prime suspect. The other client, Jacqui, was seeking to rebuild her relationship with her philandering partner. He seemed to want to save the relationship, and the philandering. It appeared sex and infidelity would be the theme tomorrow.

Iris had sampled pornography sites as part of her preparation for Howard. It was very easy to google examples once key words and phrases were learned. After the embarrassing problems with virus infections on her computer, Iris found a few relatively safe sites.

What Iris discovered was quite surprising. She did find
nasty sites of hurt and humiliation, of drunk girls being abused, of wives being shared, of cheating men and women secretly recorded, yet she also found many dramatised fantasies played by attractive, endowed models. The scenarios appeared consensual, equal in terms of gender, issues of the financial exploitation aside.

Iris found sad videos from Russia, and exquisite, haunting dramas from Japan. Sexual organs were pixilated in the Japanese genre, the dramas unfolding over a longer time with large sections devoted to allure and relationship building, turning them into erotic tales of sex, sometimes even lyrical rather than anatomical or gymnastic or gynaecological.

Iris found lesbian sex, married-couple sex, and porn with humour. She uncovered sites devoted to the woman's perspective in which young, firm men complied with a woman's wishes with tenderness arriving in a variety of uniforms, including firefighters. Iris had to admit, amongst the wide range of choices, flavours, and preferences, she had found porn she liked. Yet she could never quite shake the dark presence of child pornography. Many windows hinted towards that evil. It was a shadow presence normalised too easily, if not constantly attacked.

Iris also wondered about some of the sexual positions she witnessed. Was a particular position pleasurable or merely photogenic, for want of a better word? Did this account for the predominance of completely hairless genitalia? Large cocks were popular, of course. Long cocks seemed to have advantages for filming angles of penetration. It seemed more important for a male porn actor to be able to perform sex vigorously for a long time without climaxing. For female stars, breasts were the big thing, enhancement was obvious. Like any academic, Iris had surveyed the literature, finding a small portion arousing, although she soon tired of the repetition.

Iris's sexual history, before she met Mathew, was fairly average, she supposed. Early fumblings and experiments giving way to longer relationships and serial monogamy. However, it was not until Mathew that Iris had felt the strong physical as well as emotional desire for loving. He was gallant, dashing,
handsome, quick-witted and self-contained. He craved admiration and deserved it. Ten years older than Iris, she could look up to him and did. The sex was great. Desire charged them. They raced each other off, in cars, in the country, in rooms. They spent whole days naked, lounging, recoupling.

They'd met in court, Iris a police witness of dubious legal standing, Mathew the Department of Public Prosecutions tyro still. There were further consultancies on witness transcripts, profiling techniques, assessments of witness statements, trips in the country where Mathew's relatives had dairy farms, lunches at the big city house where politics was discussed while tennis was played on the grass court in the grounds. Then Rosemarie and marriage and another chapter to life, concurrent chapters. Parallel? Divergent?

How does a relationship become stale? Reach stalemate? Stale mate? There had been no massive, clear breach, no incident or signal of collapse. Instead it was death by a thousand kindnesses, the tiny compromises and adjustments making a relationship pleasant and smooth. Pin pricks. Or callouses perhaps. Iris was as complicit in the long, slow silencing of desire and sharing. Things moved to Saturday nights only and then to Sunday mornings, and … Mathew and Iris accommodated each other in all things. They parallel played. What Iris missed most was the affection.

She roused herself. She was still sitting in her home office. Her laptop was running screensaver shapes. The biscuit packet was empty. Iris decided to have a bath. She might paint her toes. She would not think. When she went to say goodnight to Mathew she found his office door closed.

*

Iris added bergamot oil to the filling bath. She went to Mathew's built-in robes, pulled out his suitcase and put it on the bed. It was always pre-packed to cover four days away, his usual business trip. She opened it, pulling out his socks and his underwear. She replaced them in their drawers, zipped up the suitcase and put it back where she'd found it.

Frank felt Iris compartmentalised. He felt this was a valuable defence mechanism in which she locked down certain
unpleasant things while getting on with other things. He felt her compartmentalisation was not fulfilling its function. She had too many bombs ticking away in locked rooms. Or to use a ship image, too many watertight compartments were filling with water for the safety of the ship. Frank left no metaphor unlaunched. She was personally strong and professionally successful, but she might want to integrate it all one day. Compartmentalisation was not good if you didn't know where you'd hidden the life rafts.

Iris went to the medicine cabinet. The small plastic bottle was near the back. She shook it, hearing a rattle. She had not finished the course of Triazolam she'd taken as she recovered from the fire at her private practice.

She took the pills with water, then lowered herself into the stinging, orange-scented heat of the bathwater. She looked down the length of her still-firm body, to her feet. She had beautiful feet. They were small and perfectly formed. Although her feet were usually hidden in closed shoes, she painted them lurid colours. They were a deep red at the moment. She thought she might redo them purple. Her toes were pretty. They'd all said that. All her lovers, even, especially, Mathew. Iris's toes wriggled in the warm water at the other end of the bath like little dancing flames. Maybe she should have said yes to a couple of the fireys. She giggled. Were the sedatives kicking in too soon? Iris recalled having wine. Whoops.

Iris, the jack of all psychological trades, had started in post-traumatic stress, counselling civilian victims of crime. She did some work for the police. She'd done some months as a narrative therapist, then more counselling with victims of domestic abuse. Her first contact with the fire service had been as part of the human relations department, attempting to explore PTSD within the fire service. Iris saw herself with big tizzed hair, shoulder pads, pumps, possibly a lime green top in the 1980s. Young, naïve Iris, empowered with American armed forces data and a military PTSD checklist questionnaire, marching into a fire station with the temporary acquiescence of the platoon station officer.

She remembered the reactions of the young, lean, mostly men; their lazy grins growing, their confident eyes turning wary.

‘A pilot study.'

Arms folded. Ranks closed. Nobody suffering from post-traumatic stress here. No one's shooting at us. They refused to fill out the symptom-related forms that the girl with the clipboard brought round.

But they were suffering. Now we have statistics, of course. Around fifteen to eighteen per cent of firefighters suffer symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Which was more than soldiers. More than police. The only ones higher were the paramedics driving ambulances. It's a stressful job. It is often life-threatening. Injury from toxic or superheated gasses, risk of over-exertion, and heat stress form higher percentages in firefighter hazard lists. Buildings can collapse. Fire traps and kills. Yet their job description also involves dealing with the dead and injured. Burnt flesh has a certain smell, as do bodily fluids voiding from a car crash victim. They cut screaming people from car wrecks. They retrieve burnt pets. They enter burning rooms stepping on children's toys, see the cracked baby bottle on the road as they approach the roll-over on the country bend. Firefighters are well trained, incredibly brave people. They are fit and strong and they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder the same as everyone else. People don't get used to it. Repeated exposure to trauma increases the likelihood of developing PTSD. No one gets used to it.

They can receive help, they can recover. It's now called critical stress debriefing, but back then it was called harassing the men or picking at the scab. Youngish Iris, hair cut shorter, wearing more sensible shoes, managed to get out to fires. The truth be told, she fell in love.

She was immediately excited by the urgency of the work. The calm way the fireys deployed hoses, advanced through walls of flames through toxic smoke. She was caught with the calm, concentrated way they stepped into their over trousers, boots ready, the zipping of the yellow fire tunics, the checking of breathing apparatus; the casual way they chose the various breaking and hooking tools from their kits. The firefighters worked together with easy trust. They seemed unfussed, almost amused as they dodged falling material or brought people out of houses and buildings.

Iris was bewitched. Inveigled. The flames mesmerised and transported her. The heat was immense, an almost solid thing that took her shoulders, shook the breath from her. The crackle, pop and shatter of consumed material. The shimmer of yellows, blues, greens, fluttering reds. The roar and scream as the fire found whatever it liked, raced, grabbed and danced around the burning fuel with a glee. It fell back from the water applied to it but found ways to pounce again with renewed potency. Fire had a personality as well as a terrifying, attractive power. It was feline, wild, a phantom panther. It transfixed her. It made her feet tingle, her knees feel weak.

The firefighters who skittered, advanced, retreated, became attendant rather than conquering even as they subdued the beast, hosed down the black, steaming house bones, pulled down the smoking walls as the fire investigators arrived to slither in like parasites feeding on the dead buildings. Iris didn't stay for them. She went with the firefighters.

Individuals, sensing her excitement, occasionally tried it on. ‘So you like a bit of fire, do you, Iris?' ‘The rush doesn't have to end at work, you know.' ‘I could use some help with my hose.' They used tired lines, those boys, but they were magnificent, very sexy young men with the aroma of earned sweat and adrenalin. Iris sensed from the beginning, to sleep with one of them would be to lose all of them. It was a male world and to become a girlfriend, or worse, a screw, was to be consigned to a utility. She worked hard to give as good as she got, fighting to become, if not one of the boys, at least not one of the girls.

Fast-forward to the boss's office. Assistant Commissioner Deb Bennett was the head of Human Resources and Training.

‘We are not going to pursue PTSD at this stage.'

‘Ma'am, you can't be serious.'

‘We have new work for you, Iris.'

‘We have sick men, Assistant Commissioner. We've got men who aren't sleeping, nightmares, flashbacks. We've got men who have big weight gain, drinking to excess. Anger, through the roof, affecting their work. Poor concentration. Look at their home lives. Divorce rates.'