Almost Perfect

by James Goss

  Brendan laughed, gently in his ear. ‘You’ve forgotten! Oh, that’s great.’

  ‘We are very distracting,’ said Jon.

  ‘And haven’t you done well?’ said Brendan, admiringly.

  ‘What?’ murmured Jack. ‘What have I done?’

  ‘Provided us with a lot of much-needed power,’ said Jon. ‘You could call it a jump start.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ sighed Brendan. He started to kiss Jack’s neck. Jack laughed, slowly. ‘Listen, babe, we’ve got to go for a few hours. And you’re pretty much spent. So we’re going to leave you here.’

  ‘You’ll like this bit,’ said Jon. ‘Spread out your hands.’

  And Jack spread out his hands, feeling the two of them wrapped round him, and he smiled, happily. None of it felt real. He looked at the wall, all neat, white plaster, and then watched, dreamily, as it changed, spreading with a blood-red stain which moved around his figure. And then rippled. And the pounding, the pounding that had been in his head for so long he couldn’t remember… oh, it got louder.

  ‘It’s the wall,’ said Brendan, pressing in on him. ‘Try and move your hands.’

  Jack couldn’t. He managed to lift his left hand, just slightly, but the wall shifted. He struggled, and the wall just wrapped itself further round his arm. He turned, almost alarmed, but still giggly. ‘What is this?’

  ‘It’s the wall,’ said Jon. ‘We built a temple, after all.’

  Brendan pulled close, kissing Jack and running a hand through his hair. ‘We built it out of our believers.’

  And then he broke away from Jack, laughing as they pushed him into the wall. As it wrapped round his head and his body, so warm and horrible and strange, he realised that something very bad had happened. And he tried to scream. But as he opened his mouth, the wall just poured in. All warm and pulsing and red.

  IANTO KNOWS THE TRUE

  VALUE OF A NUGGET

  Ianto stumbled through central Cardiff. The streets were eerily empty, bathed in the watered-down light of winter. Buses were still running, with exhausted drivers barely lifting their eyes from the road. Shops were open, but the music was muted. The streets were full of rubbish, coke cans and chip wrappers and bottles and even the odd person, slumped in a doorway.

  ‘I’m so tired,’ he thought. ‘I’m so tired I could just sleep.’

  He carried on walking, though. Down along St Mary Street, which was still crowded with clubbers, milling around in an exhausted, desultory way. He checked his watch, puzzled. It was either early or late. He couldn’t work it out. It was almost like they’d left the clubs and not bothered to go home, just stayed on the street. Standing fairly still, staggering from side to side, a little. Almost like they were still dancing.

  Every now and then a bottle would drop to the ground, and he’d hear it rolling a little.

  He made his way through the crowd, finding the fish bar.

  Bren caught his look, so old, so tired. ‘Oh, we don’t close while there’s business, luv,’ she said. ‘Patrick’s still out the back.’ Her look wasn’t approving. ‘Don’t distract him. He’s got nuggets, hasn’t he?’

  ‘But he’s OK?’ asked Ianto.

  Bren didn’t even blink. ‘Of course. Why shouldn’t he be?’

  Ianto swept through to the back of the shop, where Patrick stood, emptying an enormous sack of frozen chicken nuggets into a deep fat fryer. He turned and smiled at her.

  ‘It’s been a long night,’ he said.

  ‘A really long night,’ Ianto agreed.

  ‘And then you turn up,’ Patrick sighed. ‘Frankly, all I want is a nice bacon roll and a cup of tea and to go to bed.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Really?’ Patrick raised an eyebrow, amused. ‘Beautiful women normally play harder to get.’

  ‘Oh,’ sighed Ianto. ‘I didn’t mean anything, really.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t,’ Patrick smirked, and wiped his hands down on his apron. ‘Anyway, guardian angel, I’m still alive. Which I guess means that we get to have that date.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ianto. ‘That’s a good point.’

  ‘So. When I finish work tomorrow?’ he looked at Ianto, almost pleadingly.

  ‘Of course,’ said Ianto, a bit too quickly.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Thank you for calling me beautiful,’ Ianto said. His phone rang.

  It was Gwen. She was excited.

  ‘Right,’ said Ianto. ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes, promise.’

  He hung up and turned back to Patrick. ‘Got to go. Sorry. You going to put your nuggets on, or what?’

  ERIC DOESN’T FEEL LIKE

  DANCING, NO SIR, NO

  DANCING TODAY

  The mewling woke him briefly

  ‘Hey,’ Jack said

  ‘You’re alive?’ asked the mewling, amazed

  ‘Always’ he said, and he found that funny briefly

  ‘Stop laughing! Stop! Please!’ cried the mewling. ‘You’ve been laughing for ten minutes. Please stop.’

  OK, maybe he’d found it funny for a bit too long there

  He wasn’t really sure

  But he was Captain Jack, he was a fun guy to be with Fungi to be with. Was that ever funny? I guess it is now Laugh again

  He contemplated opening an eye, then decided it was too much like hard

  Actually, really needed to pee

  Should do something about that at some point soon

  So, back to opening an eye

  Coming back to life was always a struggle – maybe one day he just wouldn’t be bothered and that would finally be it

  Good thing/Bad thing?

  Really need to pee, can’t ignore it any more

  The mewling started again

  Eye open, finally, wince, that’s really, really bright… Ride it out, Harkness, let’s see where we

  Oh

  Not good

  ‘Hey!’ he said to the mewling. ‘It’s Eric isn’t it?’

  The DJ from the night before looked up (down?) at him. He was making an effort to stop crying, sniffing bravely like a child.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Hi! Captain Jack Harkness!’ Jack loved his back-up personality. Always there, glowing away faintly, lighting the way to the fire escape. ‘I would shake you by the hand, but if I’ve still got one, I certainly can’t move it.’

  ‘Can you help us?’

  ‘Again, I’d shrug if I could. I’ve got a good track record. How long have we been here?’

  ‘Eight hours, I think. You’ve not moved for four.’

  ‘Good watch, kid.’

  ‘I’ve nothing else to do but count.’

  ‘Hey, there’s a copy of Metro in my coat pocket. I’d hand it over to you if I could move and if I had any clothes.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Eric. ‘I could leave you a message in the I Saw You column. “I saw you embedded in a wall, Tuesday. You looked back. Drink?”’

  Jack laughed.

  Eric looked at him sharply. Jack stopped laughing.

  ‘How long was I laughing this time?’

  ‘Eighty-seven seconds.’

  ‘Close to mania. Curious.’

  ‘And irritating.’

  ‘Says crying man.’

  ‘Hey, I’m in a lot of pain.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘Can you? It’s just that I can’t move.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘I can’t feel my legs.’

  ‘That’s cos you’ve not got any.’

  Pause. That was tactless.

  More mewling. Some screaming.

  ‘I mean, not that I can see. Stop crying. It’s the wall – they’re embedded in the wall behind you. Who knows. Probably all there. All fine. Looks worse than it is – seems to be concrete, but it’s alive and breathing and… smells quite meaty. God knows, I mean, I’m sure it’s all fine. I’m probably in a worse state.’

  Now Eric laughed. ‘Can’t you see?’

  ‘Not real
ly, no. Can’t move my neck.’

  ‘Captain Jack Harkness, you’re just a head. Well, a bit of torso.’

  Back-up personality. Say something.

  ‘Breasts? I never was much of a breast man, but if it’s all I’ve got left… Even a nipple?’

  Sudden thought. Is the need to pee real or illusory? Perhaps I should just let it go and see what happens. But then, what if the resulting sensation is both imaginary and gross?

  I am in a wall.

  GWEN WELCOMES CAREFUL

  DRIVERS

  Gwen was starting to freeze. The rain was soaking through her coat, her trousers were sopping wet, and her hair was plastered to her head. ‘What kept you?’ she barked at Ianto as the SUV drove up. ‘You said you’d be ten minutes.’

  Ianto apologised hastily, but also shot her a look as she climbed in. ‘Careful with that car seat, please, Gwen. I’ve just had the upholstery steam-cleaned.’

  ‘Fine, Ianto, thank you, Ianto, I shall try and drip elsewhere. Where the bloody hell were you?’

  Ianto looked slightly sheepish as he drove the SUV up from the Bay into town. ‘Well, when you called, I suddenly realised it might be a long night, and I didn’t want that on an empty stomach, what with my blood sugar being all over the place these days, so I zapped a Lean Cuisine and counted my points while I waited. Honestly, I got here as quickly as I could. Oh, plus I had to find the keys to the SUV.’

  Gwen sat there quietly. In less than a week, not only had Ianto become a woman, but he’d become the kind of woman Gwen always dreaded being behind at a cashpoint.

  ‘You count your points? Don’t tell me you’re doing Weight Watchers?’ Gwen was slightly aghast. Ianto’s figure was perfect. Unquestionably so.

  They pulled up at the lights, and Ianto turned to Gwen, smiling gently. ‘Not religiously, no, but it’s a good idea to eat sensibly, Gwen. I mean, I know you’re married and it’s easy to get…’

  The smallest pause.

  ‘… comfortable. But if it turns out I’m stuck in this body, I’ve got to look my best. I’m a single woman, remember.’

  Gwen blinked. She could have sworn the car smelt of chips. Meanwhile, Ianto checked his hair in the rear-view mirror and completely missed the lights changing until the bus behind them sounded its horn.

  Ianto then stalled the SUV, swore mildly, and roared off in the wrong gear. ‘Honestly! The clutch keeps getting away from me. These shoes are bloody murder to drive in,’ he cursed. ‘I just can’t get shoes right. Either that or someone keeps moving the seat. Now, are you sure this device will work?’

  Gwen pulled it from her coat pocket. It was sleek, blue and bleepy. ‘Tosh designed it for hunting Weevils, based on the scents they emit during the mating cycle. According to her notes, she had a few false starts with tom cats, but it’s now pretty good at hunting them down when they’re randy.’

  ‘Aw, Tosh had the sweetest hobbies.’ Ianto smiled fondly. ‘Did it make sense of the stuff I gave you?’

  Gwen checked the readings. ‘Pretty much. You were right – Jack’s fifty-first-century pheromone pattern is fairly distinctive. It’s just not very strong. Even around the Hub. So our best hope of finding him is to stick this out the window and drive round Cardiff city centre very slowly.’

  Ianto fumbled a crunching gear change and brought them to a juddering halt.

  ‘Shouldn’t be too much of a problem,’ Gwen muttered, winding down the window.

  CARDIFF IS A ONE-WAY CITY

  Town was even worse than earlier. Someone was slumped across every bench, or, in some cases, just stretched out across the pavement. Exhausted pensioners sat slumbering at bus stops. Rain beat down mercilessly on cars, buildings and people. Traffic crawled sluggishly, causing Gwen to scream with frustration.

  ‘It’s this new one-way system,’ she howled.

  ‘Or the end of the world,’ said Ianto.

  ‘Whatever.’ Angrily, she shook the tracking device which refused even to bleep.

  The lights changed and the SUV slid glacially forward in the traffic.

  ‘Look at the sky, Gwen,’ said Ianto, sadly.

  Gwen looked, and didn’t like it. Cardiff had its fair share of menacing clouds, but these were biblical in their darkness. Pushing down on the buildings, boiling angrily away, pouring rain down on the city.

  ‘That doesn’t look good,’ Gwen sighed.

  The car crawled along a few hundred metres, and suddenly the tracking device screamed like a toddler.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Gwen yelped, waving it around. She frantically adjusted the settings and the screaming subsided. ‘It’s over there,’ she pointed. ‘Jack’s over there.’

  Ianto took the tracker and stared at the screen. ‘What can have produced that many pheromones? That’s off the scale, even by Jack’s standards.’

  ‘I know,’ said Gwen, grimly. ‘We’ve got to get to him.’

  ‘Charles Street,’ said Ianto. ‘It’ll be a few minutes before we can get back round the one-way system.’

  ‘Sod that,’ snapped Gwen. ‘Just park on the pavement.’

  BOUNCER BEN IS WONDERING

  WHY HIS NOSE GOT BROKEN

  It had been a long night. Actually, it seemed to have gone on for… well, Ben wasn’t quite sure, but he was quite snug, really. Even in the pouring rain, he was wrapped up warm, and the heat fairly blasted out of the club’s doors along with the music, which, although it wasn’t normally his kind of thing, he had to admit, was pretty spectacular. He’d work at the Temple for free, if it meant listening to the music. Of course, he was too wise to say that kind of thing. Professional pride. But he liked to think they knew.

  And since he’d turned his phone off, his wife had stopped ringing him to demand he come home.

  Something was wrong with that sentence. Hmm.

  He snapped awake as he heard steps on the metal stairs above him. He watched as two women walked down them. One was startlingly beautiful and having trouble with her shoes. The other was holding out a small blue phone thing. He decided it was best to look business.

  The beautiful one stepped up. ‘Hello, mate,’ she said, surprisingly. ‘Two, please. We’d like to disco very much.’

  Her companion glanced at her in something like shock and then turned to Ben. ‘How much, please?’

  Ben looked at them both. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a private party.’

  The stunning one leaned closer and smiled. Ben noticed her friend was rolling her eyes. ‘Oh come on now, surely you can make an exception for us? We’re always where the party’s at.’

  The other one stepped forward. ‘Thing is, see, we’ve got a friend in there, we said we’d join him and…’ She made to step through, but Ben moved easily out to block her.

  He looked at them both, patiently. Lasses like this, it was worth telling it to them frankly. He put on his firmest voice. He knew what it was like – a night out on the lash, few too many bottles of blue alco-piddle, kebab, loud vows to party on past dawn. He’d had nearly eight years of it, and was an expert in turning people gently but firmly away.

  ‘Now listen, ladies, why don’t you go home and have a cup of tea?’ he began, talking first to the tall, stunning one. ‘Now, you – pretty girl like you, this isn’t really your place to find a fella. Waste of effort, if you know what I mean. And you,’ he said, turning to the second woman, not unkindly. ‘Well, I’m afraid we’ve got our quota of fag hags.’

  Gwen broke his nose.

  IANTO IS JUST MURDER ON

  THE DANCE FLOOR

  They stood on the threshold of the club for a few moments, unable to believe what they were seeing.

  Torchwood had shown Gwen a lot of things. She’d seen a fair bit of carnage inside, outside and underneath nightclubs. This was unlike anything she’d ever seen. Even when she was young and going to festivals in Fungus’s camper van. This was…

  She remembered being a bit stoned and leaving the folk tent, getting a falafel and then accidentally wandering into the t
echno tent. This was the nearest thing – suddenly plunged into a dark place filled with endless noise and bodies and lights and screaming and a vague feeling of panic and revulsion mixed with a wonder about how she could ever fit in and be cool here.

  The club, with its blood-red walls and mirrors and lights seemed to stretch into infinity. The dance floor was packed, packed with topless men all dancing, dancing the same little dance moves, all at the same time, all of them staring ahead, their muscles twitching, their eyes white, looking like racks and racks of meat in a disco abattoir. Just moving to the beat, swinging like they were on rows of meat hooks. Just empty meat dancing and dancing and dancing.

  Sweat dribbled down the mirrors and columns and pooled on the ceiling and the floor. She could see the odd figure, passed out but propped up by those dancing around it. Slack jaw staring at the ceiling, collecting drops of sweat.

  She thought briefly of that YouTube clip of hundreds of prisoners all doing synchronised dancing to Michael Jackson. It was kind of like that. Only crammed in all together, and the guys were semi-naked and really, really hot.

  The smell was incredible. It was an actual proper stench – of hundreds of different types of sweat, of stale dry ice, of spilt beer, of decay and death and blood.

  And then she noticed the pulsing music, the way the walls, the lights, the twitching bodies were all pulsing like a heartbeat. Regular, somehow sickening.

  Ianto turned to her. ‘This could be heaven, this could be hell,’ he breathed. All he could see was row after row of beautiful people, somewhere near a state of rapture. And the music and the music and the beat and the lights and the music and—

  Gwen slapped him. Pretty hard, he thought.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Gwen flatly.

  ‘Thank you,’ he replied rather crisply. ‘It’s strangely… compelling.’

  Gwen shrugged. ‘Oh, I dunno. Dancing, I can take it or leave it, me. But look at all this. What the hell do we do?’

  Ianto paused. ‘They’re behaving like a mass. They’re just standing there – not even lifting a foot off the floor. We should find what’s causing that. Perhaps we could stop that.’