It's been a while since I've written any Spooks stories, but I still yearn for Harry and Ruth from time to time. The interspersed lines in italics are taken from Puncture Repair by Elbow (I'm not even an Elbow fan but this song was used in Silk and I liked it).
Puncture Repair
It should have been a routine operation – one of the youngsters like Ben or Jo could have carried it off without pausing to take breath – but, as she'd learnt long ago, working in Section D was not always routine. Of course some days followed the same old path, paperwork and coffee and helping Malcolm with his crossword and more coffee. There were others as unpredictable as Ros's temper, days when the vastness of her work both chilled and thrilled her.
This time, it wasn't routine. Something stupid, a little slip of the tongue, and her cover was blown. She was no longer Frances (she'd always rather liked the name Frances), who wore elaborate shawls and was as charming as she was dim-witted; she was Ruth, cat-lover, book-lover and spy. The man she was with didn't want to sleep with her any more, he wanted to kill her.
Valery Volkov was one of those men who had everything but happiness. He'd wanted affection, he'd wanted to take a woman out to dinner and pay for her meal rather for her body, and to kiss her because she wanted it rather than because it paid for her family. Unfortunately he was a Russian banker whom Harry suspected of being a KGB spy, and so Ruth was actually kissing him because Harry had told her, grimacing, to "do what it takes".
Ruth had never met a man with so many 'V's in his name, nor had she met a man so strong. In a single punch he had her on the floor, cowering, whimpering like an animal, tasting hot and salty blood on her lips.
"Valery."
He'd lashed out again, hating the way his name sounded on her lips, hating how her face was flushed with fear. He hadn't wanted fear from her, he'd wanted intimacy, Ruth thought, just for once he'd wanted intimacy and she'd withheld it.
Another punch, a twist of her arm and she felt it give way to his strength. She wrapped her other arm over her head and felt the blows against her fingers. She marvelled at how easily the bones broke, at how much anger there was inside of this man.
And then Ros had been behind Volkov and she'd brought her leg up and kicked him so hard in his spine that he'd flopped over, like he was a puppet and the hand inside of him had suddenly been withdrawn. She'd drawn her leg up again and thumped her heel into his flesh, and Volkov had screamed like an animal as well. They were all animals.
Ros had scooped her up, helped her out of the hotel room into waiting arms. The strangers had said empty, comforting things, "Take some deep breaths, love". And then she'd woken up in the hospital room, pressed broken fingers against a broken arm and felt neither. She had heard feral wails and realised they were coming from inside of her.
"Ruth." The voice she'd needed to hear most in the world.
It had been difficult for him to hold her because of the plaster casts, but he had done. Her hair had been damp with her tears and he'd pressed her face into his chest and rocked her, and it had been everything she had wanted for so, so many years, only not like this.
I leaned on you today
They couldn't really talk about work when Harry came to visit her, because of what they did. She thought about saying brightly "Did you have any difficult clients today, Tim?" or something similarly bland, something a wife might ask when her husband came in from work. They could lie, pretend they had a normal life. In truth, though, she didn't want to talk about work, she didn't really want to talk about anything at all, she just wanted him to be there because when he was in her thoughts there was less room for Volkov.
When they let her go home she couldn't face the stairs so she lay on her sofa, and he spooned soup in through her swollen lips, read to her from books that had taken his fancy on her bookshelf. He would press his fingers over the cover of the novel, fingers reassuring in their warmth and in their sturdiness, and he'd make her guess the title, the author.
"If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be." "How easy it is to judge rightly after one sees what evil comes from judging wrongly." "Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might oft win, by fearing to attempt."
She liked that last one, she vaguely remembered hearing Malcolm recite it once. From time to time, Harry would stop reading and ask if she wanted to talk about it; that was what Valery Volkov had become, he was it, an unnamed terror. Every time she shook her head and pretended that everything was okay, because that was what she was in the habit of – pretending was her job, after all, and Harry's too – but she knew she cried in her sleep.
I regularly hurt but never say
When Harry wasn't there she listened to music. Someone (maybe Jo, she didn't remember; she'd always thought the term 'it's a blur' was metaphorical, but she literally didn't know, couldn't bring herself to know, what had happened in those first couple of days afterwards) had brought a recording of some Shakespeare sonnets for her to listen to, and she watched some old repeats of Agatha Christie's Marple on television. The familiarity of the cases and the slow pace of the dialogue comforted her. Maybe she should have been a police officer.
The rest of the time, she sat in the rocking chair in the bay windows at the front of her house. She knew the world had a habit of changing, had never noticed how much things changed every day; the trees budding and blossoming, new bricks being laid on housing estates in the distance. Over the weeks, some children who passed the house grew to wave to her, and a little girl left a daffodil on the garden wall one day. By the time Harry came, on his way home from work, another child had taken it and ripped the petals off one by one, each careless throw stinging Ruth.
I nearly wore the window through
She went back to work after three weeks, when she could move her fingers again, when the jolt of the bus no longer caused her agonising pain but merely rocked her, like the rocking chair. "I like the bus," she'd told Harry once.
She went back to what she'd been doing for years, to her paperwork and to Malcolm's crosswords. She saw that Ros was gentler with her (gentleness by Ros's standards was a curt 'please' after a demand for something or other), and when she looked up sometimes Harry was standing at the window of his office, those sturdy fingers parting the blinds, his eyes on her. Sometimes she felt as though she was sinking.
Where was air sea rescue?
A box fell on her shoulder when she was reaching for something in the cupboard. They would have laughed if it'd been anyone else, but Ben and Malcolm ran to her side, even Ros's expression was momentarily strained. She hated that she was treated differently; ever since her childhood she'd hated discrimination for gender, race, strength. It hurt, it really hurt, but pain was nothing when compared with fear.
"Just get off," she snapped at Malcolm.
The cavalry with tea and sympathy
His hand had slipped down from where he'd been patting hers; it took a lot for Malcolm to show affection and his eyes were chasms of hurt at the rejection. This wasn't who she wanted to be.
"Sorry, I'm sorry."
"Do we not have a country to protect?" Harry asked crisply from the doorway to his office, "Ruth, we've got somewhere to be. Meet me in the lobby in five minutes."
She hadn't been outside of Section D in work hours since it. Her father had called her a hermit as a child, so keen was she to stay curled up in her bedroom reading when she should have been facing the world. Her life had always been quite small, but it had become smaller. He'd taken the use of her fingers, the easy movement of her shoulder, and then he'd taken her independence and her happiness.
"Don't worry. Malcolm will get over it."
"He was trying to help." She fumbled with her belt, not wanting to have to be strapped into the car by someone else, like a child.
"Sometimes it is better in the long run if we don't help."
Is that why you're making me do this alone? She gave up with the belt buckle, not wanting to be reduced to asking him for assistance. "Where are we going?"
He pulled down the sun screen in front of her, and then he pressed his fingers against the side of her face, so she was forced to meet her own gaze in the mirror. She was pale with lack of sunlight, her lips slightly misaligned where the swelling still hadn't entirely gone down. She hadn't known she was going to cry, but now she saw the tears well up and fall. There was something uniquely humiliating about watching yourself grow red with the effort it took to press out tears.
He held her whilst she cried, as he had in the hospital.
You were there
Then he stretched across and brushed her chin with his fingers as he pulled her belt around, making her safe.
"We're going to the river," he said.
They stood on the Victoria Embankment and felt the spray of The Thames on their faces and it felt cleaner to Ruth, somehow, than it ever had before. Harry took her hand very gently in his and the twinge in her shoulder was nice, it was a reassurance that he was there.
I leaned on you today
They went down onto the pebbly outcrop and he tried to skim a stone but it only sank, causing the water to ripple and lap at their feet. Her laughter sounded new. He crouched down; she copied him, and he took her other hand. The hand with the broken fingers which prevented her from using a knife, carrying a shopping bag, fastening a car belt.
He took that hand and he stretched out its fingers and pressed them into the water. The shock of the cold, the pleasure of it, made her squeal, and Harry smiled.
"Sometimes the only person who can help is you."
"But you've helped."
"I should hope so," he said, "I wouldn't have put myself through Wuthering Heights if I hadn't thought it would help."
"Of course. More of a North and South man."
He took another stone in reply, and this time it skimmed the water beautifully, a perfect arc around the outcrop, leaving a swirling pattern in its wake. With each leap the stone made, she felt herself leaning just a little bit closer to him, and when the stone finally settled into the water he wrapped his arm around the small of her back and kissed her.
He kissed the left-hand side of her mouth, when the dimple had once been before Volkov had replaced it with a scar, experimentally, and then he kissed her properly.
That was another cliché Ruth had been disinclined to take seriously, the one about feeling whole again, but when his lips touched hers she understood it, because Harry Pearce had repaired the puncture Volkov had made in her heart.