After the Fall
A stranger's absence is very seldom noticed.
Someone once told Mike this in the heart of winter, to a brazen wink. Quoting someone else.
And now, in the green heart of Regent's Park, the orphaned words (for the speaker had been Sherlock, trying to embezzle a whole corpse – one of several John Does donated to St Bart's by the generous, pitiless winter – without bothering to check if anyone had booked the poor devil for their anatomy lesson) hit again. Fast and low, with a pang that trips Mike's already halting jog into a stop and an awkward blink – his glasses are always an inconvenience in the glare – as he peers at the solitary figure ahead of him.
Not that the man sitting on the grey-green bench, his gaze lost unblinking to the sun, is unknown to Mike. Or could ever be, for all he's been trying lately. But what makes Sherlock's words so fit and painful as they resurface in Mike's mind is that here, so close to the open grass where young mothers squat laughing, holding out their arms to catch a bright-coloured ball, and lovers' mouths touch drowsily in the heat, John Watson is turning himself into a –
"You all right here, mate? Need a lungful or two?"
The elderly jogger in the Dutch blue cap behind him has caught up and is hopping from one foot to another, in sweat and sympathy, until Mike nods him clear and watches him trot away without a glance at the still, grief-ridden face on the side of the path.
– stranger.
And Mike, who has been privy to many stories in the course of his life, perhaps because his cushiony face and manners make him a natural magnet for confidences, now remembers a pub's penumbra, and John telling him about the sand haze in Helmand. A trick of the heat and light, John had said, making the air ripple down like quicksilver before a man's eyes and swallow up the white hills into nothingness. And whatever lay in there. Nature fighting both sides. Hid them from us, blinded them to us, till you couldn't tell where the one began and the other ended, the mirage and the war.
Four months later, in the green of summer, Mike can see how John's hands, resting on each side of his lap, are curled into a taut show of knuckles. Park benches usually accomodate two, but John's hands are sending out a simple message – You don't want to notice me.
The bench gives a soft ancient creak as he lowers himself, like a seal of approval. Ah, well. Volume is presence, Mike tells himself with a self-indulgent sigh, and waits for John to reappear out of the luminous, empty sky.
"Don't," John says at last, his tones too curt for a plea, too dulled for a threat.
Mike bids his time. Back in their students' days, when he was known to his peers as Friar Tuck (liked to drive his pint home, even then) and John as their honorary prankster, talk never came easy. Because it was one thing to book "The Hon. Emma Rhoid" an appointment with poor Doctor Brewster, their chief of service; quite another when John crashed back after half a week-end at Harry's, straight into their kitchen, seized their (empty, thank God) teapot it and bashed it against the wall in a savage, wordless, cathartic –
"I mean, don't make me speak of it."
Mike's chuckle surprises them both. "Can't, Little John. Not enough breath – for a start. And I bet you sent them all packing. The talking heads."
"Too right." His friend turns to face him, and Mike can sense the inner tug-of-war, between the John who wants to be left to his cloak of invisibility, and the John who has begun to think of another park, another encounter, and reaches tentatively out of the haze.
"They've been at it all the time. Telling me I mustn't bottle it up – that from Harry, of all bloody comments – the shock, the anger. Say it loud and clear, John. Write it all down, John. Make a blog entry, make a fucking PowerPoint display. As if I – Jesus. Did you see him at all?"
"No." Mike leans down to open the backpack now lying at his feet. "I was with you all the time, remember? Young Molly had sent me to patch you up and drive you home, given you weren't in a heal-thyself condition. And later, when I offered to do the post-mortem myself – well, I told you. There she was, standing by the door like the archangel Michael in a ruffled blouse, saying she'd done the job and didn't want any more people gawking at him. And it –"
– has stuck with him, because gawk did not sound like Molly's regular brand of words; gawk was, if anything, more like Sherlock's department – but Mike knows from practice that there's no telling with lovers and their loss, and Molly had apologised when he'd come back, bringing two coffees soaked with enough sugar to keep the whole dental school on their toes, and shyly asked him to co-sign the postmortem.
"Don't know that he'd have minded." John has accepted the plastic bottle filled with water and is twisting off the cap with one hand. "He told me to look, after all."
"Who, Sherlock?"
"Oh, yeah. Very plainly. And that's what I'm supposed to be angry about, his making me watch. Except, no, I can't be mad at him, because it just feels like trying to scream underwater. How can you be mad at something that's so fucking senseless? Mike, Sherlock hated defeat. Nothing riled him more than the idea of making a poor show of himself. The one time I tried to blog about a hitch in a case, he – atomized a muffin in my face. God, he could be so ridiculous. Bloody walking vanity case, Lestrade called him once. And that man, that very man, my ridiculous brilliant Sherlock, tells me to watch while he admits there's no way out?"
John's voice rises in an air gone almost sluggish with the scent of verbena and elderflower, and the long grass pressed under all the summering bodies. Mike doesn't answer.
"And that's the worst of it. What – really – takes me apart. Of course there was a way out. His brother – and the most damning evidence yet came from a child scared out of her wits and an article in The Sun, not your bona fide witness. And that was enough to make him die? To make him kill himself? Him, the genius? Mr One Jump Ahead – ah!" John is laughing, but to Mike it sounds as if John's last breath had curdled in his throat long ago, and his eyes are fogged and far away.
"You see? I can't get it right, and it's killing me. Sometimes, it's enough to make me hope – but I know what I saw. And it's not like he could have turned up with a corpse, just like that?"
For a brief moment, something clouds in Mike Stamford's head, as if every word fallen between the two of them had left a series of widening rings in its trail. Sooner or later the rings will connect together, and there is no telling what the consequences will be if he follows the trail to its end.
There is a choice to be made. If he says what is on his mind, there is no telling what will shatter this time, or how deeply the cracks will spread. And Mike's happy, ordinary life – a life tucked on its every side by the warmth and peace of routine – may not be spared.
If he keeps silent, he can rise at some point and resume his path, letting John Watson fade out and back to his quiet, unquiet Limbo.
"I wouln't put it past him," Mike says, then realises that he believes what he says. "He almost did it once, you know. Stole a corpse of mine. I caught him red-handed." He chuckles quietly. "Well, gloved-handed. Told him that cutting my classes was his own choice, but nicking Barts' property might get him in a much tighter place."
John's face, always so malleable, is changing as he speaks. There is anger now, dilating the little black dot in the clear eyes as if all of John's blood were rising to his head, summoning his strength, and uncurling one fist so it can grasp Mike's shoulder as John speaks the next urgent words.
"The Baskerville case. I never wrote about this, but he – he made me see something monstrous, back then. And it wasn't there. Never had been, as I found. Just his call, his sleight of hand."
Mike is looking at the tears. "He's like that, isn't he? "
"Alive," John says slowly, and it's as if the whole of their talk was a maze, and the word had found its way out of it at long last, into the sun. "And where does that leave me?"
Well, there's plenty answers to that. With a breach of trust, for one thing. And a blank cheque on waiting, until an absent friend comes home to roost. But all that can wait, as Mike covers the hand with his own, smiling, and fumbles into the backpack for a clean towel.
"Same as last time, I suppose."
"Last time?"
"Last time you watched them fall."
The rings widen, connect across the years. They are thinking of a students' kitchen, and a note written in John's small, jagged hand, pinned to a cheque.
She was sitting when I came, drinking her tea, same as last night. I took a mug and sat, and she poured, looking at me, and I could see no smoke rising. So I thought she'd let the tea go cold, and then I knew. I could smell it, straight out of the cup. She looked up at me and said "Johnny Walker", and she laughed and laughed, and she was still laughing when I left. I'm sorry, Tuck. You deserve a safer man to have around.
"I went on a war," John says quietly, and, for the first time his gaze sweeps over the stretch of green fields, taking them in, letting them become territory.
"And she – "
"Back on her feet, yeah. I think."
They linger on for a bit, under the passers-by's absent eyes, skimming past the small man in the soft-worn shirt and the chubby, middle-of-the-road bourgeois. The fighter and the healer.
"D'you know what he told me," Mike says suddenly, because he can see the final ring grow and glower, until it merges seamlessly into the pattern. "When we first met?"
"Piss off?"
Mike answers the smirk with a twinkle. "You'll never guess. He said – I think he was quoting someone, but I can't remember whom. He said that a stranger's absence always goes unnoticed."
And Sherlock himself is already fading off into an Internet has-been, a mere wrinkle on the media's troubled waters, already smoothed out by the next wave of news.
"Well," John says, standing up, and Mike, looking at the crease on his brow, thinks lion's wrinkle with a swell of affection. "Time to prove him wrong, yeah?"
"Lead on, Little John. But this time, we're having a decent meal first – with ale and venison. There's a pub just outside the next gate."
John laughs, really laughs under the sun, and takes the first step across the field.
FINIS
(A/N: the initial quotation is from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.)