Another Life

by Peter Anghelides

  ‘It’s the Michelin Man!’ laughed Owen.

  Jack seemed unsurprised by the new arrival. ‘The cut of that suit does nothing for you. It doesn’t even look comfortable.’

  ‘It’s comfortably protecting my testicles,’ responded Ianto’s voice from the speaker.

  Jack considered this unexpected news. ‘I could talk to you about your testicles all day, Ianto,’ he said. ‘But I imagine you have something even more important to tell us.’

  The helmet speaker coughed apologetically. Ianto brandished a Geiger counter at them. It was already clicking alarmingly. Gwen wondered fleetingly about where she could go to escape the radiation. But what was the source?

  ‘I took the liberty of scanning the corpses in the mortuary,’ Ianto began. ‘And I regret to say that one of them is highly radioactive.’

  ‘OK,’ said Jack calmly. ‘Not too much of a coincidence after all, Tosh.’

  Ianto was quickly scanning them each in turn. The ratcheting sound of the Geiger counter didn’t increase when it ran over Jack or Toshiko. It stayed the same when Ianto motioned it against Gwen, too, and she released a rush of air from her lungs that she hadn’t consciously been holding. She stepped out of the way to let Ianto waddle further into the room alongside the table.

  The Geiger counter crackled and spat violently when Ianto placed it against Owen. From the look on his face, Owen wasn’t entirely surprised. ‘Up to me elbows in the corpse,’ he shrugged. ‘For two hours. What did you expect?’

  ‘The rest of you are within safe limits,’ Ianto confirmed.

  Gwen was faintly ashamed to discover that she’d unconsciously positioned herself at the end of the table, as far away from Owen as possible. Toshiko bumped up close to her, she noticed. Owen glared at them accusingly from the other side of the room. But where had Jack gone?

  Ianto was still explaining. ‘I’m afraid that Owen’s close proximity to the irradiated cadaver means that he will need decontaminating.’

  Jack reappeared through the door. He carried a wooden box, teak with brass hinges and an elaborate clasp. He placed it on the table, unfastened the clasp, and from the velvet-lined interior of the box withdrew what looked like a squat loofah.

  Owen eyed this novel new item. ‘If you think I’m going to scrub it all off with that…’

  Jack held out the loofah, and waggled it at Owen until he took it from him. ‘This will soak up six types of radiation.’

  ‘Six?’ Owen looked impressed. ‘I can only remember three types.’

  ‘Well, I got a deal on that thing,’ Jack explained.

  Owen was considering the radiation sponge more closely. He was starting to look less enthusiastic. ‘This is it? Shall I just stare at it until the vomiting and intestinal bleeding starts, or should I wait until all my hair’s dropped out?’

  Jack gave Owen one of his disconcerting grins. ‘That thing is so effective, I have to store it in this lead-lined box most of the time. Keep it with you, probably for the rest of the day.’ He took the Geiger counter off Ianto, and handed it to Owen. ‘You should stay in the Hub until the rem count for your absorbed dose gets down to here…’ Jack indicated a reading on the counter. It looked as though Owen was going to complain bitterly about this, but Jack quashed his unspoken protest with a look. ‘Tosh, you can keep him company while you complete the search for that thing in Wildman’s spine. Gwen, you’re coming with me to search Wildman’s apartment for the source of this radiation. I think we can guess what that is, but if it’s as radioactive as Wildman, we should make it safe. Ah, thank you, Ianto…’

  Ianto had brought two more Geiger counters, each the size of pocket calculators. Jack put one in his jacket, and handed the other to Gwen.

  Gwen held it at arm’s length across the table, towards Owen. The dial flicked up into the danger zone. ‘You should have said we were going to Wildman’s, Jack. I could have met you there in the first place, saved myself a journey in here.’

  ‘What?’ asked Jack, leaving the Boardroom and strolling out into the Hub main area. ‘And missed seeing Owen glow in the dark? Not to mention the pleasure of my company?’ He stopped beside the stainless-steel fountain that stood so incongruously in the middle of the area. Jack pressed a button and Gwen could see, far above them, a piston pushing aside a paving stone in the ceiling. It was immediately obvious that the weather had worsened since she’d arrived. A sprinkling of rain started to spatter down on them, and water began to flow over the sides of the hole.

  Jack leapt out of the way of the downpour, and immediately closed the gap again. ‘OK, that’s not gonna work for me. Let’s go out through reception.’

  TWELVE

  You’re not the kind of woman who stands out in a crowd. Not the kind who wants to. Your hair has never been too bright, your shoes have always been sensible, your lipstick was never too vivid.

  Even as you ponder this, you can hear your father’s voice commending you on your safe, uncontroversial choices. Science subjects for A level: ‘Quite right, Sandra, none of that arty nonsense for you, you’ll want a career.’ A university close to your parents: ‘So much more financially convenient to live at home, Sandra.’ Regular attendance at church, sitting between your parents, trying to look inconspicuous although you’re excruciatingly aware of your father’s fluting voice rising above the standard murmur of the congregation during the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Ein Tad, yr hwn wyt yn y nefoedd, sancteiddier dy Enw…’

  Dad’s mantra was that you should get stuck in, and not stick out. And yet his own insistence on being the most conventional, the most ordinary, the most outspokenly moderate man in Lisvane meant that he himself stuck out in the community more than anyone. ‘Don’t embarrass us,’ he’d tell his family at the restaurant or the cinema. He’d rather die than be embarrassed in public.

  Two weeks after he died, you abandoned the second year of your Physics course and signed up for the Royal South Regiment. It was only when, one night in bed with Tony Bee, you were discussing your father’s idiosyncrasies that Tony had reminded you of the irony in your regimental motto. ‘Gwell Angau na Chywilydd,’ he whispered as he moved his hands slowly over the moist curves of your body. ‘Better Death than Dishonour.’

  Your affair with Tony has been the most uncharacteristic thing you’ve ever done. You’re still content to just to be another face in the crowd. Guy Wildman wasn’t like that, of course, he always aspired to be more. But, by trying harder, he just seemed to become more insignificant, easier for people to ignore, more invisible. With you, it’s the opposite. You’re content if you appear to be saying to the world: ‘I’m just average; there’s nothing special about me.’ Maybe that’s why you persuaded Tony to bring Wildman on the sub-aqua trips, maybe it provided cover for your relationship with Tony.

  You know from living with your father all those years that the best way to avoid getting noticed is to take time to get the little details correct. The Army catches people who do things wrong, not those who do things right. Same thing in life. You never park in the disabled bays at Sainsbury’s in Thornhill, and you always take your trolley back to the shop to collect your pound coin.

  Since your return, you’ve been home and chosen sensible clothing for a wet, dark night. That also gave you the opportunity to shower, to remove all the traces of blood and bone that you inadvertently smeared down your face and clothes when you killed and devoured that vagrant. You did that discreetly, of course, in a back alley. And with compassion, too – you snapped his neck first, so that he would feel no pain.

  And now the deep hunger in you has been assuaged, here you are in Splott, confident that your walk up to Wildman’s apartment block will draw no attention from anyone. You wear a green A-line dress, mid-length, no stockings, and a pale green cardigan in thin cotton. You chose flat-heeled, patent leather shoes, round toe, sturdy enough to keep out this rain. You’re wearing a fitted boned coat, your favourite, in a soft navy-coloured material that keeps you half-hidden in the dark; you could see the
weather was deteriorating before you set out, and didn’t want to risk drawing attention by struggling with an umbrella in the wind and rain.

  Not that there are many people around to see you, as the rain sets in. The few that you see in these side streets are scurrying for cover, watching out for puddles not people. You move up the steps to Wildman’s apartment unseen, and even the sound of your footsteps is masked by the persistent hiss of rain and the hoot of a train further to the east in the direction of Tremorfa.

  Once inside, it’s different. The hallway is large and the clanking radiator is set too high, so that the windows are steaming up. The octagonal green and yellow tiles on the floor are even louder than the radiator.

  You don’t need a photographic memory to remember things. All it takes is practice. Your dad used to remind you: ‘You’ve got two ears and one mouth, Sandra. Use them in that ratio.’ And that’s been true since you joined the Army, whether it’s in weapons briefings at Caregan, open water training for sub-aqua, or just the lads’ drunken conversations down the Feathers about fast cars, slow flankers, and easy women. Wildman has told you in the past all about the area where he lives, the way he’s equipped his flat, the peculiarities of his neighbours. Of course, there’s nothing you don’t know about Wildman now.

  Wildman’s apartment is two floors up. The stairs beneath the worn carpet creak under your weight, but there’s no sign of anyone else, and the only indication of any other life is the sound behind one of the doors of Sunday Worship on Radio 4 played too loud. Wildman’s immediate neighbours on the same landing are John and Marcus who work at Club X, and Betty Jenkins who resolutely does not. You know all about Wildman’s recent meetings, conversations and disagreements with them. You’re ready for anything, if you meet them. It’s only since Wildman died that you’ve realised how lonely he really was, and understood his protective instinct for Betty Jenkins, his frustration with John’s casual indifference to commitment, and his never-articulated fantasies about Marcus.

  You can be calm, logical, reasonable, without being unemotional. That was true of your relationship with Tony, as he used to tell you. Now that he is dead, you’ve moved on – literally. And what should be your grief is no longer helpful, no longer appropriate. It’s still there, in the background. A curious feeling, buried deep, sublimated. Unnecessary. Do you really understand it any more? These people have a bewildering array of loose social constructs, half-formed affections, unspoken desires and occasional passions. It’s only since he died that you realise how much Tony Bee loved you. You can examine those feelings dispassionately too – the ache in him when he was away from you, when he surfaced again, when he returned to the Caregan Barracks. Until the newer, primal ache in him had overwhelmed that.

  Set that aside, now. You’re here for a reason. Being distracted by those memories is a very human thing to do. And in your current circumstances, you find that amusing.

  The key clicks and turns in the lock of Wildman’s apartment, and your search begins.

  THIRTEEN

  Jack let Gwen drive. She enjoyed the chance to take the Torchwood SUV out. It was very different to her own Saab. The first time you drove it, you felt like you were steering from the top deck of a bus. You got a sense that the suspension was soft enough to let you mount the pavement and run down a flight of steps without spilling a drop from whatever drink you’d jammed into the passenger-side cup holders. You could probably drive over a crowd of pedestrians and not feel a bump. That was usually worth remembering when she was racing through the city centre, trying to beat the press to some scene or other.

  Rain rattled on the SUV’s roof. No matter how fast the windscreen cleared with a contemptuous flick of the wipers, more water immediately smeared their view of the road ahead. It was the middle of Sunday morning, and yet the downpour and the clouds made it seem like dawn was only just breaking. No danger of unwittingly thumping a crowd of pedestrians today, because the streets were almost empty. They would all still be in bed, well out of this lot if they had any sense. That’s where Rhys would be.

  Jack had programmed Wildman’s address into the SUV’s direction-finder. Toshiko had designed it as an upgrade to the usual passive satellite positioning. This could use local information about roadworks, police incident reports and judgements about traffic flow from analysis of CCTV images. It offered turn-by-turn directions in an infuriatingly calm schoolmistress voice. Gwen didn’t need her help, and it amused her to take alternatives to the spoken directions, if only to hear it say ‘Recalculating route’ in a reproving tone, and Jack’s accompanying chuckle.

  Frequent mind-numbing patrols of the area when she was a police constable had made Gwen an expert in the urban geography here. She turned the vehicle into the next road along from Wildman’s apartment block. The area was a set of parallel roads between the two railway lines, so it was possible to cut across through a walkway, and thus not draw attention to themselves by parking a monster vehicle with blacked out windows slap bang outside their target’s residence.

  The SUV easily negotiated the traffic-calming measures that straddled the width of the carriageway. ‘They put these in a couple of years back, after the Wales Rally came through Cardiff.’

  ‘Was it a rally or an obstacle course?’ asked Jack.

  ‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Bunch of local kids thought it was all right to run their own version of the rally through these streets. There was this rash of teenage TWoCs.’

  ‘That’s not what I’d call them.’

  ‘Taking Without Consent,’ she tutted. ‘Worked out to be cheaper to discourage it. So they put these sleeping policemen here rather than put real policemen on the beat.’

  Jack was unbuckling his seat belt as the car came to a halt. ‘Sleeping policemen?’ He followed her pointing finger that indicated the humps in the roadway. ‘Oh, right. Y’know, I kinda like the idea that they actually buried some lazy cop in the tarmac.’

  ‘Buried in paperwork, more like.’ Gwen reached into the storage compartment, and took out two portable Geiger counters. She handed one to Jack. Then she buttoned her jacket, pulled her collar up tight, and stepped down from the car.

  They ran through the hissing rain, managing to avoid the worst of the puddles. Scrawny hedges drooped over the pavement. The overcast sky was dark enough that the automated streetlamps had not been extinguished. A Tesco mini-supermarket smeared a patch of orange light across the cracked paving stones.

  Wildman’s apartment was in a three-storey building. Gwen huddled next to Jack under the concrete awning that was failing to provide much shelter from the rain. The unblinking eye of a video camera watched them from above. The main doors were stout, green-painted metal, Chubb-locked, and with artless graffiti scrawled in marker pen. Residents’ names were written, more tidily than the graffiti, on plastic-covered scraps of paper next to illuminated push buttons. One or two had faded to illegibility, but one of them had neatly stencilled capitals in green ink that showed ‘WILDMAN, G’ on the second floor. A video lens peered at them from behind a glass plate.

  ‘He’s obviously not home.’ Jack stepped back into the rain. He seemed to be squaring himself to barge the door.

  ‘No!’ snapped Gwen. ‘You’ll wake up the whole neighbourhood.’

  ‘And your point would be…?’

  ‘Where are his keys? They must have been on the body.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Jack told her. ‘I’m really gonna slip a handful of irradiated metal into the pocket of my pants.’

  ‘Well, you can’t go barging in, not round here. You don’t want any fuss, or to draw a crowd. Especially if he’s left a tidy pile of nuclear materials in his kitchenette.’

  He gave her a tight smile, and reached into the pocket of his jacket. ‘OK, you’re my local expert. We’ll use ID.’

  She shook her head. ‘Not even if we were in uniform. They’re suspicious. There’s curtains twitching across the road already. No! Don’t turn round! Think of it. You wouldn’t want wet bobbies tra
ipsing their flat feet through your hallway. We have to make them want us to come in. So…’

  Gwen rummaged in her pockets, but couldn’t remember where she’d left her purse. She held out one wet hand towards him. ‘Lend me a fiver, will you? I’ve got no cash.’

  He handed over a crumpled ten pound note. ‘What are you, a member of the Royal Family?’

  ‘Back in two minutes,’ she promised him. She stared directly into his eyes. ‘Promise you won’t make a scene?’

  She ran back down the street, and could hear him shout after her: ‘I expect change!’

  The weather was killing business at the Tesco mini-supermarket. The shopkeeper’s badge told Gwen that she was Rasika. And Rasika looked grateful for her first and possibly only visitor of the morning, if surprised at what her customer bought.

  Gwen showed Jack the four bags of groceries, holding them up like trophies. ‘OK, press the button for the flat below Wildman’s.’

  He considered her shopping. ‘You got hungry?’

  ‘Six loaves of cheap bread and four jumbo boxes of cornflakes,’ she scowled. ‘Cheap and bulky. Looks like a lot, not too heavy, and cost nearly nothing.’

  ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten about the change.’

  ‘Press the button, Jack.’

  A querulous woman’s voice answered the call. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Tesco Direct,’ Gwen shouted at the speaker, and held up the shopping bags in front of herself so that the video camera could see them. ‘Bell’s bust for number nine. I could leave this lot on the step, but I’d rather bring it up out of this rain.’

  The speaker made the sound of someone clattering a handset back into its cradle. Almost immediately, the door buzzer sounded.

  Jack leaned against the green metal. The doors opened into a dingy hallway of grimy linoleum. There were two doors to the left, with two more opposite. A flight of steep steps rose into the darkness further down on the right. The hall was flanked by two scratched side tables, one covered in free newspapers and uncollected mail. Jack scanned the letters but found nothing for Wildman. He took a reading from the Geiger counter, but it ticked softly in the safe zone.