No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) Read Online Free Page A

world, via the magic tailor’s shop, before returning to number 52 Festive Road, always with a new souvenir in his pocket, while Bradshaw lay on the couch watching him, wondering how he could similarly escape from reality and just how he had managed to ruin his entire existence so spectacularly by the age of thirty.
    It had been a long, slow road to recovery, taken in baby steps and punctuated by small victories; the ability to make a proper breakfast in the morning, two slices of toast with a couple of fried eggs on top, was considered an important milestone. When Bradshaw finally returned to work, months after the ‘incident’, as his counsellor had taken to calling it, he noticed a change in the way his colleagues regarded him. It wasn’t so much what they said,for they rarely said anything to him at all these days. It was more subtle than that; the look in their eyes or the way they pretty much shunned him when he was in the room, as if his ill luck or incompetence might rub off on them if they came too close. He was a wash-up. That’s how they saw him and, he had to admit, as he pondered his lot during the many more hours of ceiling-staring which followed while he tried and failed to conquer his insomnia, that they were, on the whole, correct and fair to view him that way. He had fucked up, therefore he was a fuck-up. There was no denying the cold, hard logic of it. He had messed up and somebody else had paid very dearly for his mistake. As he played the events over and over again in his mind, wondering how he could have been so stupid, it seemed to somehow compound his misery to know that he’d had the best education of any of them. At school, Bradshaw had always found success so effortless. Tall, good-looking and clever, he was never short of a girlfriend, captained the football team and was the hero of the swimming galas. Bradshaw attained good grades and a university degree, literally becoming a poster-boy for Durham Constabulary when during his early days he appeared in an advertising campaign for graduate recruits, under the strapline ‘Join the Fast Track’.
    And look at him now, still languishing as a Detective Constable. Ian Bradshaw’s early run of achievement had left him singularly unprepared to deal with the spectacular failure of his police career. None of the academic or sporting stuff mattered if it turned out that you were basically clueless. Everyone had always told him when he was growing up that he could be anything he chose to bebut when it came down to it, he couldn’t even become the one thing he really wanted to be; a police officer; or at least a competent one.
    Now he was staring at the ceiling once more as he lay on the soft leather couch, while his counsellor, Doctor Mellor – recommended and paid for by Durham Constabulary in an effort to prove they had not entirely washed their hands of him – tried once again to forge some form of empathetic bond between them.
    ‘This is our fifth session,’ Doctor Mellor’s soft and faintly hypnotic voice drifted over to Bradshaw from his seat in the middle of the airless room, ‘and I think we have established enough trust between us to begin to explore the matter of your self-esteem, right?’ The doctor had a habit of ending his pronouncements with the word right , an annoying little verbal tick that made his voice rise in pitch at the end of every sentence. The good doctor clearly didn’t know he was doing it but Bradshaw had taken to answering his questions literally, because he suspected it might irritate the older man.
    ‘Not right.’
    ‘Excuse me?’
    ‘Sixth,’ answered Bradshaw. He couldn’t see the doctor, he was still looking at the wooden blades of the ceiling fan, but he knew the man would be frowning while he attempted to understand his patient’s meaning. ‘This is our sixth session.’
    ‘Is it?’ the voice was disbelieving.
    ‘Yes it is.’ Bradshaw wanted to add, ‘Believe me, I know!’
    ‘I’m sure