ii.
He rants at the headstone.
It's somewhat therapeutic.
He rants about electrotherapy and nuclear power and space ships that hurtle towards the outer reaches of space. Not to mention the blatant rip off that is worldwide education systems ignoring his greater achievements and that Helen Magnus has somehow found herself pregnant, when he's sure the woman knows the fine art of safe sex; and really, how could she be so stupid as to have a child on the centenary of their use of the source blood!
He runs his hands through dark spikes of hair and feels a current throb through his body. It pulses down his spine and into the earth below, electrifying the air he paces through ahead of the small stone cross.
He's not sure who continues to leave flowers there, surely his old friends family are long gone – and wasn't that a shock! - arriving on the shores of England 20 years after the war to find Nigel had married that girl he'd met in Normandy.
Someone continues to leave flowers month after month, a tidily cut bunch each time Nikola appears in the wind swept cemetery, and it brings a strange sense of satisfaction, that someone else continues to return to the Invisible Man.
He's almost sorry he missed the funeral. Though Helen would have killed him if he'd been seen. She and James had a hard enough time ignoring John hovering some hundred metres in the distance.
Instead he pays his respects by ranting some twenty years later.
Surely, he thinks, the invisible man would have found it amusing. Nigel and John were always having a chuckle over his finer mental emergencies, flicking a cricket ball between them whilst he and James balanced chemicals over flames, or plonking at the piano Helen foolishly brought into the laboratory whilst the three scientists worked at extracting a pure serum of blood.
Yes. Nigel would find his weekly rants fine entertainment.
(And on the few occasions when he's perfectly honest with himself, when the wind dies down and Nigel's final resting place is quiet, he takes a moment to lay his fingers to the grating stone and smile at memories long gone. He'd almost thought they were immortal, The Five.
But then Nigel had always wanted to disprove his theories)
