" We fight on so that something that remembers being human might survive."
- The Senior Auditor
...
He should be dead – not here in a hospital fallen out of time; not breathing, thinking.
Not hungry.
.
His spine breaking, softer things rupturing as Jon holds his head with PHANG strength, turns it, quickly, until he is facing backwards although his body is not. He crumples, feeling the impact of head on ground but nothing else. His face is sticky with Derek's blood. Breathing is difficult. The commanding presence has withdrawn but is watching still, from the back of his mind.
He is going to die now.
Thank God.
.
There are more than 50,382 grains of salt in the salt shaker that comes with the kitchenette. He counts them with a needle-focus that he never had for numbers: fifty-thousand-three-hundred-and-eighty-three, fifty-thousand-three-hundred-and-eighty-four, as if numbers could fill the spaces where memory moves, fifty-thousand-three-hundred-and-eighty-five, like grains of salt fill the little screw-top jar.
Before they bundled him off into an ambulance with blacked-out windows outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Mhari grabbed his upper arm, nails digging into his flesh like teeth.
"Pete." Her voice was low, urgent.
He didn't look up.
"Pete. Look at me. Please?"
He raised his head reluctantly. Her face was drawn. She didn't say that she was sorry, aware already that he knew. Not many hours earlier she had worn him like a suit.
"I want you to know. . ." She swallowed. There was a watery shine to her eyes. "If you want to. . . end it. Nobody is. . . We're not going to stop you."
She still had his arm in a death grip; became aware of it, let go, then reconsidered and took his hand, more gently.
"I am personally going to make sure that nobody stops you. That's a promise."
Bleak gratitude made him sag.
"But, Pete, listen. Don't do it on impulse. Okay? Think it through. Make sure that it really is what you. . . need to do. Please?"
His gaze was drifting away from hers.
"Can you promise me that?"
Amazed, he found that he still could cry.
.
His room is a small bedsit furnished in forlorn 1950s relics. Someone has helpfully bricked up the only window, doing a thorough job of mortaring every gap. They haven't bothered painting over it. Aesthetics are a tertiary concern at St. Hilda's.
On the second day Mhari visits. She has talked to Sandy, she says, informed her that Pete was wounded in action, details classified.
She leaves him a small tube of blood.
"Terminal bowel cancer. 87 years old. Days to live. You'll be shortening her life a teensy bit, but she's had a good run, and she definitely won't notice." she says. "Cross my heart and swear to die."
He wants to tell her to take it back to London with her.
She puts it in the fridge.
The hunger is a sucking emptiness, a black hole at his core.
.
He tips over the salt shaker and counts to sixty-thousand-three-hundred-and-seventy-four.
In the months of uneasy wonder after Pete's conscription Bob seemed to want to apologise to him a lot.
The apology didn't always make it into words. Pete wasn't sure if Bob was entirely aware of it. No matter; his body telegraphed it every time they met in the corridors of the New Annex, or in the canteen, or on those rare occasions when Pete, bearing bad coffee, would seek him out in his shoebox office with some question or other on the arcana of Laundry bureaucracy.
Pete had found it baffling; a little bit endearing. Slightly out of character, perhaps.
.
On the third day he writes to the bishop.
There are no computers at St. Hilda's; no phones, not even the analogue kind. The paper a nurse hands him is thin, fibrous, slightly yellowing, as if the last time the hospital ordered office supplies was during post-war rationing.
The nurses know that he hasn't been feeding. He smells their terror when they keep their distance; smells it still when they get close – too close, throwing him sidelong glances that linger, too long, with something like yearning.
Horrified – no: mortified - he wonders what his parasites are making them see.
He is ashamed of his shame: a moral category error, all about what people might think. His concern, his only concern, should be keeping them safe.
Underneath it all is a predatory pleasure that doesn't care about feelings or morals; that is primal, and terrifyingly pure.
He writes: "I can't share classified information but I am now confident that I am – and I realise that this is a strange word from a modern, enlightened minister – damned. Please believe me that my use of the term is thoroughly considered.
"Under the circumstances, I cannot find it in my conscience to remain part of the body of the Church. Please do not try to change my mind on this, or make any attempt to "save" me/my soul. I am, truly and utterly, beyond help."
.
He sleeps.
He is a realist in dreams: there are no welcoming summer skies, only a blanket of clouds, a distant hint of brightness behind thick grey. He looks up at it. He is very cold.
"I didn't do it!" he shouts. "It's not my fault!"
He isn't sure what exactly it is that he is denying.
The clouds pull apart. Light bursts forth, a sudden, silent violence.
It envelops him in loving flame.
.
Once or twice a therapist sits with him, for an hour or so, a perfunctory effort for any of a number of very good reasons. He remembers Mhari's promise, stares at the wall behind the woman's white-coated shoulder. She finally gets up and leaves, barely hiding her relief.
When she's gone he writes to Sandy.
He doesn't make it past the first line.
.
Dreaming:
Sandy, dishevelled from hours of labour, sweat-drenched hair plastered to her forehead; the tiny head crowning between her thighs. Him thinking vaguely upwards, in baffled awe: 'Pretty strange way You came up with to bring about more of us, really.' He presses Sandy's hand tight.
Cut: he is holding his daughter. There is an element of surprise to his joy, as if he hadn't expected the experience to hew quite so close to the textbook. The infant twitches, jerks a pudgy arm, looks at him with eyes that he knows cannot resolve his face yet. She smells warmly of newborn, and of Sandy, and something else -
He is teeth and thirst.
.
He wakes and vomits bile onto the ancient linoleum beside the bed.
.
Later, he sits at the small table. It is night, or not.
He tips over the salt shaker and counts.