It read ‘Please close the door, up the stairs to the surgery’. I went up, slowly.

The tooth stabbed sharply, distracting from the half-glassed surgery door and the still faced reflection staring back at me.

Middle aged with a face beginning to hold its creases between laughs and hair of various colours, some grey, some dark, and some natural.  I tried a smile and got one back. See, smile and the whole world…… wonders what the hell you’re up to.  I raised an eyebrow at the guy to no different effect and then gave him my grimmest look, pushed my hand out and in an instant he’d swung wordlessly to one side.

“Just go in and sit down, he’ll be with you presently” the top of the receptionist’s head said. I tried a smile on her but the guy on the door was more friendly.

Went in. Nothing special, except her.

Usual set up, walls, ceiling, floor, carpet, air. I was in pain but at least I hadn’t lost my  keen sense of observation.

What it was I didn’t know straight off but we both went for it, same time, same idea, bad move.  Laurel and Hardy in colour 80 years on, she stumbled, I fumbled, and she almost knee’d  me where it really hurts a man. But I’d turned at the last instant throwing in a deflect.

“I’m sorry” said as she retrieved her pen.

“Don’t worry, I’m still a baritone” placing her accent and wishing I hadn’t. It was Margaret’s. 15 years since she’d died and I’d begun to, just a little each day.  Not my fault I’d told myself but I’d known I was lying and so had the judge.

“Did I hurt you”.

Only with the memories but she meant the knee thing so I mouthed the words I wasn’t thinking, “No, but I don’t think it’s going to take the place of shaking hands” sticking out my hand and recovering my balance several ways.

We traded names, shakes, and something else that barely registered before the silence crept up to full volume.

“What do you do”, I asked, wasn’t really interested, on auto chat and would be until my eyes started looking out rather than in.

The receptionist interrupted, Mr Pearlywhites had an emergency and could we come back 3 hours later.

Same accent again “Actually I just live round the corner”. I wasn’t really listening.

“Well….” She wanted an answer so I told her.

Said she had to powder her nose so I went ahead pausing on the stairs as the memories overrode.  Don’t know for how long but as I glanced at the surgery door I saw her outline square in the glass.

She was talking low and fast into her sleeve, hand to her ear stud making the connection. Maybe she was just practising her ventriloquism  and, yeah, maybe  “Same again” were the last words of Socrates.

Reached the bottom just as she sway-hipped along the stairs towards me.

I looked out the door and up at the Bradford weather.  Dull, grey, and miserable is what I saw and the weather wasn’t too good either.

The door slammed.  We’d stepped out.

I kept her slightly in front looking for any tells we weren’t on our own. Difficult. Outside in the cold, last week of December, the tarmac was full of pinched-faced buyers hurrying to pray and display at the altar of commercialmas. Me, I was an unbeliever and it was cold so my money and my hands were in my pockets.

Maybe I was going to have to kill her, I knew that already.  She was about 20 something but the way she walked, made me ….something niggled.  Memories stuttered, blinked into being and December Bradford faded out…..

…Margaret’d wanted peace and quite something else besides danger, deniability, and a tiny government pension. With Margaret in tow, I’d looked at my life and it hadn’t smiled back. I wanted more than memories I thought I had but couldn’t quite recall. So we’d decided it’d be our last mission, then we’d be married. It was but we weren’t.

I’d been thrown clear, alive but paralysed from the waist down. It was the noise, the try-as-you-can-in-every-dream-to-forget-but-never-can noise, of her screaming that brought me to. She was trapped, entwined with the dashboard.  She screamed she didn’t want to die and then, as the flames reached, how she didn’t want to live. I’d emptied my Browning 9mm into the car and she stopped screaming, living, and dying. 

I’d stood trial. By then I’d got my legs back. But mercy killing was no defence. I’d left the Service, their choice not mine.

I’d been out on licence for a year or so and now this horlicks, this nonsense from the past….

Twenty Something was talking. She’d had to say it twice before I made it back to the  present.  She said it a third time, throwing the words and a smile my way as she reached into her coat. It was the smile more than her hand out of sight, I think.  Incongruous, menacing.

“Oh darling, are you alright”, I said. I threw in a knife hand and she dropped. Fighting like crazy, knowing as she must, that a knife hand meant a kill strike, she powered back at me with all her…At least, that’s how it played in my head for a moment as the blow went in but she’d gone limp with the force of it, the carotid haemorrhaging under the skin.  Just a minute or so now, is all she had. 

Casting round for support, but I saw she was on her own so I max’d the smokescreen with a re-run of “Oh darling, are you alright” hoping any passing interest kept on passing.

“Why…” the word barely making it past her bloodless lips.

I knew the answer to that but not the other questions. Like how they’d got ready for me at the dentist’s, what they wanted and why, after all this time, the Service was interested in me. I told her.

“Not the Service…..” she was taking deniability to extremes. I cuffed her looking for truth and getting blood.

“Just a secretary in the Service…”, that coppery metallic ozone of blood drifted up from her mouth.

 “....heard about ….”, she was coughing now as her lungs began to wheeze.

“…Margaret….had to find out……accessed your file….”

That was the magic word. I pulled her face to mine, anger ripping the words rough and raw from my throat.

 “What do you know about Margaret?”

What I heard was the last of it as she died and her hand slipped out from beneath the coat. In that hand were just her doorkeys. 

“Excuse me sir, is the young lady alright”.  There were two of them, of course, like buses, except alive, in uniform, in sight, and interested enough in me to already be reaching for their truncheons.

It was amateur hour, alright. I could have excised them both but then that’d be three innocent deaths.

And that was exactly what she’d been. As I recalled her words, I  understood her accent and what niggled about the walk too and why the Service had had nothing to do with any of this.

 “Margaret”, she’d said,” was my mother”.