Chapter Five

2012

Kim had been moved finally from A&E to a room of her own, although she wasn't planning to stay for anywhere near as long as the doctors were expecting her to. She was used to humouring medical professionals and then sneaking away as soon as physically possible. Her determination to escape the damn place was backed up by the moment a nurse delivered to her a piece of lasagne that looked like it had been sculpted from plastic and varnished twice. There was no way it was edible. She actually laughed when the nurse told her she needed to eat to keep her strength up.

"The only thing that will be coming up if I eat that is the bloody lasagne!" she told her.

Somehow the nurse still stubbornly refused to believe anyone in their right mind could turn down the wonderful cuisine before them and left the tray where it was with a large piece of chocolate cake that Kim fondly labelled 'poo pudding' beside it. As though she could have eaten anyway. As though there was any chance that her anxiety and fear about Robin as he underwent surgery wouldn't have killed her appetite stone dead. Even if she'd been served a plate of food made by Robin himself she wouldn't have been able to manage it.

Instead she sat, ignoring the strangely glue-like smell of the lasagne and focusing on the news that wouldn't quite sink in. It had been a few hours now since she'd discovered about the baby. She couldn't believe that she hadn't even had a clue, for all that time. She'd had all these wonderful, perfect ways planned out in her mind of telling Robin if or when the day came that she suspected she was expecting. None of them involved him undergoing extensive surgery while she sat on her own with gluey lasagne and poo pudding stinking out her hospital room.

With one hand over her stomach, just trying to take in the news, she begged and prayed silently for everything to be alright. She had only just found happiness, years and years after her spell of time in the nineties had taken it away from her. She wasn't going to let some damn bullet screw it up.

"Hello."

She looked up as a voice pulled her from her thought. A slightly nervous Alex came towards her. She was smiling but there were layers of worry and sadness behind it.

"Ma'am," Kim's own smile was weak and fairly unconvincing but it was the best she could do.

"How are you feeling?" Alex asked as she took a seat by the bed.

"About the same as when you asked before you went out fifteen minutes ago," Kim said quietly with a tiny smile, "put on a nurse's uniform and ask the question again and you'll get the big, smiley, song and dance 'I'm Fine' version of that though."

"Yeah, I've seen that before," Alex told her, a slightly stern note in her voice.

"Oh, come off it, you're a fine one to talk," Kim dismissed her concerns with a wave of the hand, "when did you ever follow medical advice? We all follow the same 'I'm Fine!' routine to get out these places."

Alex couldn't argue. Kim had a very valid point.

"Fair enough," she said. She placed a thin white plastic bag on the bed. "I went to the hospital gift shop," she said, "I was going to buy you a crossword magazine but, well," she sighed, "then I remembered that crosswords make you want to strangle innocent bystanders so I bought you a tattoo magazine instead."

Kim smiled distantly as Alex took the magazine from the bag and laid it on the bed.

"Thanks," she whispered, remembering someone else presenting her with one in hospital a very long time ago. She wondered what else was in the bag and glanced at it curiously. "Anything else interesting in there?" she prompted.

"Define interesting?" asked Alex.

"Any presents for me?" Kim asked, "edible ones. Not grapes," she said quickly, thinking of Keats's hospital gift of choice.

"Are you telling me the hospital cuisine is not up to scratch?" Alex asked in mock surprise. He reached back into the bag and pulled out a packet of chocolate digestives. "I swear you have a sixth sense," she said, handing them to Kim.

"Oh, that's more like it," Kim sighed with relief. She might not have had an appetite yet but knew that she'd need something that didn't resemble varnish, glue or poo to tempt her when it did.

Alex tucked the biscuits away in the bedside drawer and started to fold up the empty bag. She just needed to give her hands something to focus on as she looked at Kim with concern.

"I spoke to one of the doctors," she said quietly, "Robin's likely to be in surgery for a while longer yet."

Kim's expression fell in an instant. Her skin grew pale and her heart seemed to seize up.

"Fuck," she whispered.

"They haven't managed to remove the bullet yet," Alex said quietly, "there was a lot of damage, a lot of internal bleeding; they're dealing with that first."

Kim nodded slowly. She knew she just had to trust that the doctors knew what they were doing and that Robin was strong enough to make it through.

"Do you think he's there?" Kim asked quietly.

Alex didn't need to ask where.

"I don't know," she said quietly. He bit her lip and looked at Kim. "Were you?"

"Was I what?"

"You were unconscious for quite a while," Alex reminded her, "I thought…" she closed her eyes, "I thought that perhaps you were both there."

Kim shook her head.

"Not me," she said quietly. She looked at Alex and saw how sad her expression had become. "Ma'am?" she whispered, "I'm really sorry. I know what you're thinking. I've been thinking it too." she paused. "If you'd stayed in the shop five more minutes…"

"I know, I know," Alex nodded slowly, "I've gone over this in my mind a hundred times." She shook her head. She didn't want to get into this just yet. Taking a deep breath, she decided to change the subject. "So," She began, trying to make her expression more positive, "how are you feeling, mum?"

Kim looked down, torn between smiling and crying.

"I feel like a bloody idiot," she said, "nine weeks … I know I had no idea I was pregnant the… the first time, in your world –" she noticed Alex gave a gentle smile at Kim referring to it as her world rather than just as Gene's, "but I'd never been pregnant before, I didn't know what it was supposed to feel like."

"You're not the only one, Kim," Alex tried to reassure her, "I was three months before I realised."

"Yeah, but you weren't trying."

"Never even get Gene onto that subject," said Alex, "you'll get a coded talk about sending troops in without their uniform on."

Kim shuddered a little. She hoped to avoid that lecture.

"Even so," she said, "I still feel stupid."

Alex sighed and pulled out her phone. He knew she shouldn't have been using it in hospital but she had something to show Kim. Something had been bothering her since Kim received the news. She pulled up a web page she'd been reading while waiting to be served in the shop and handed her phone to Kim.

"Here," she said, "This might explain it."

Kim took the phone and tried to read the page but in her scrambled frame of mind it was difficult to take in a word.

"What's this?" she asked, "Couvade syndrome?"

"Sympathetic pregnancy," Alex explained, "it's a fairly well-known phenomenon where the partner of a pregnant female will experience a number of pregnancy symptoms. There's debate about whether the cause is psychological or physiological."

"Rob didn't even know," Kim whispered, "I didn't even know."

"Maybe it is a physiological issue then," said Alex.

"Or maybe he's just too bloody sensitive," Kim tried to scold Robin as such, but inside the thought of it made her feel warm and touched. She sighed and closed her eyes for a moment. "I feel really mean," she whispered, "I wound him up all that time, I accused him of having…" she shook her head, "a deep rooted psychological need to be pregnant… he was taunted like crazy at work too."

"Don't feel too bad about it," Alex told her gently, "this isn't exactly a normal situation. And besides, he still subjected us to all those beans. And fishy biscuits."

Kim instantly felt her stomach turn over.

"Suddenly that lasagne is sounding so much better," she said. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the pillow. "I should have known though, ma'am. I mean, there were some things… I had some weird stomach aches, I just thought my body was screwed up from stress and my period was coming on. And I thought I'd put on a bit more holiday weight than usual, but – hell, it was my first Christmas with Robin, I thought that had to be normal, amount of food he makes." She shook her head, "but he got all my morning sickness and cravings and all-night peeathons. I just didn't know."

"The important thing," Alex told her firmly, "is that you know now. You can take care of yourself and the baby, make sure you keep your strength up –"

"You sound like that bloody nurse."

"With real food, not whatever that slice of hell is they've given you," Alex told her which made Kim laugh, "and you'll be fine. Both of you."

Kim bit her lip.

"And what about Robin?" she whispered.

Alex wished that she could look into the future and know for certain.

"Robin is strong," she reminded her, "he's a fighter. He'll come through this."

Kim looked down.

"What if he doesn't want to?" she whispered.

"What do you mean?"

"What if he's there?" Kim swallowed. She was determined not to start crying. "If he's gone over, he'll want to be with Simon."

"Kim -"

"No, it' OK, Ma'am, I've always known that –"

"No, Kim," Alex shook her head, "I don't think it's that simple." Alex had watched Kim and Robin's relationship through the past month and she knew full well that what they had between them wasn't something that was going to fade away that easily, no matter how long Robin and Simon had been together. She hesitated, unsure whether to tell Kim what she suspected she knew about Robin's trip into the jewellers, but eventually she felt that Kim had to know. "What you told me earlier… that you'd bought Robin a ring," she paused. "You're not the only one who bought a ring today."

"What do you mean?"

"Hayley Ford, the shop owner," Alex took a deep breath, "she came to see me while I was waiting to be discharged. She mentioned that Robin –" she looked at Kim seriously, "- he bought a ring while he was in the shop."

Kim's heart seemed to start doing lap of her chest.

"What kind of a ring?" she whispered.

"She didn't say," Alex told her quietly, "but a couple of weeks ago I had a conversation with him. About marriage. He's been thinking about this for a while."

Kim felt her eyes closing and her lead lolling backwards as a mix of emotions flooded her system. She'd joked about this with him, many months earlier, that whenever one of them proposed they'd probably both do it together. Somewhere inside, it hadn't felt like that much of a joke.

"Shit," she whispered.

Never before had good and bad news been so dramatically tangled together. It was going to take a long time for Kim to work through the mixed up emotions in her mind. For now she just had to wait and hope that Robin pulled through the surgery. She certainly had some news for him

~xXx~

1997

"Shoebury, a word."

Simon looked up incredulously from his paperwork to see Gene in the doorway. He didn't like 'Shoebury, a word'. It was one step off of 'Sit down, Shoebury'. He especially wasn't in the mood for it that morning. He'd been having nightmares about hundreds of baby Robins flooding society, three new cases of toastercide had popped up on his desk and Eddie had been banned from Latte Land for excess spillage of hot liquid consumables so Simon was going to have to collect the bloody things himself until the ban was over. On top of that, he was still finding it impossible to look Gene in the eye. That was partly from knowing that Gene's eyes were the same ones that he now saw when he looked in the mirror and partly because he couldn't look at Gene without seeing his backside rising and falling with his mother squashed somewhere underneath him.

"I'm busy with this toaster stuff," he said quietly but Gene wasn't having it.

"Need your expertise," he said.

Simon laid down his pen and looked up.

"My expertise in what exactly?" he asked, "this is going to be something to do with toast, isn't it?"

"No, no toast or toasters, cross me heart," Gene promised.

Simon gave a deep sigh but reluctantly got to his feet.

"Alright," he said quietly. He followed Gene through CID and into his office. He felt a little worried by the paranoid way that Gene closed all the blinds and locked the door. What exactly was going on? Top secret nuclear warfare plans?

Gene stepped behind his desk, glanced around nervously and pulled out a notebook. He slid it across the desk to Simon and waited.

"Well?" he said.

Simon frowned at the notebook.

"Well what?"

"Well, what do you make of it?" Gene demanded.

Simon closed his eyes momentarily, sank into a chair and reluctantly picked up the notebook. He scanned the list , shaking his head, and finally looked back at Gene.

"I don't know what you're asking me," he said.

"I need you to help me work out what this means," Gene told him.

"It's just a bunch of insults about TV presenters and television shows!" cried Simon.

"That all have Bolly in the starring role," Gene pointed out.

Simon frowned.

"Huh?" he looked down the list again. He wasn't sure why he'd skimmed over that the first time. Maybe because it made so little sense. He looked at Gene in confusion. "What is this, Gene?" he asked.

"I, uh," Gene looked uncomfortable as he spoke, "I had a taste of what it's like to be one of the coma crew last night," he said.

"The coma crew?" Simon repeated with a frown, "is this a new TV show I never heard of?"

"I 'ad messages," Gene hissed, feeling like an idiot for even admitting it, "On the bloody idiot box."

Simon stared at him for a moment. He didn't recall ever seeing Gene look so unsure of himself. His eyes turned to his list again and he reread it more carefully, finally taking in the fact that Alex had been talking to Gene through the television shows.

"Can… can you tell me more about what happened?" Simon asked, "Your list is… fine," he said quickly, "but here's a bit too much concentration going on making fun of Carol Smilie than talking about what Alex told you."

Gene rubbed his forehead and reached for his flask. Even for him it was early but he needed something to steady his nerves. This wasn't his usual territory. He'd only ever been the other side of the situation.

"Says she's coming back," he mumbled uncomfortably, "she's fighting to get back here. Told me to check her video."

"This had better not be like the video of you with my…" Simon flinched, unable to finish that sentence.

"Think she means whatever Keats has got on her in his basement," Gene explained, "find out how she gets back."

That made some sense. Simon nodded slowly.

"What else did she say?"

Gene rubbed his forehead again.

"There was some nonsense bollocks about Layton in the Teletubbies," he mumbled, "but mostly that somehow he's got something to do with it." He let out his breath slowly. "She told me he started this, and he's got to end it."

Simon hesitated.

"How?"

Gene shook his head.

"Simon, I have no idea and I seem to have misplaced me crystal ball. All I know is, Layton's got something to do with it; here, and there."

"We need to do something here?" Simon asked, "to help Alex get home?"

"That's me best guess, Shoebury," Gene said solemnly, "and I don't know what she wants me to bloody do."

Simon's eyes moved down to the notebook again.

"We'll work it out," he said quietly.

"We better bloody had do," said Gene, "this isn't me usual territory. I need to get all this x-files bollocks over with and to get Bols back where she belongs."

Simon nodded, then slightly raised his mouth into a smile.

"You made a list," he commented, unable to hide his amusement.

Gene scowled.

"Yes," he said, "I did. And if anyone else discovers about me new list-making skills you'll be eating this list for yer lunch, along with me fist."

Simon gulped.

"Message understood loud and clear," he said.

~xXx~

"…The third body was found just after seven this morning in an abandoned shed near the riverbank."

Victoria stared at the screen as the news made her feel sick and anxious.

"The three latest deaths come after a sharp increase in tainted narcotics flooding the capital. Police are warning anyone who has purchased any such substance that there is no way of knowing whether their drugs are from the same batch that appears to have killed these three young people overnight."

Victoria breathed in deeply as the news hit too close to home. She recalled her last phone conversation with Nick Nailer. He'd been right. Deaths from impure narcotics were not only on the rise but reaching a level of epidemic proportions since he had been put away. They'd probably locked away the only drug baron with any kind of morals that the country had ever seen and the result was that people like Arthur Layton could now step in and cause devastating deaths.

She looked at the sheet of paper before her; the visiting order Nailer had sent her. It almost burned her fingers to hold it. She knew it was wrong. She knew she should rip it in two and throw it straight in the bin. But something stopped her. Whether it was the latest news or the strange pull she felt to a man on the wrong side of the law who seemed to much warmer than the dark figure at the helm of Fenchurch West, she wasn't sure, but she couldn't stop thinking about it. She had a feeling she had an important visit to make that day.

~xXx~

#...The sky isn't always blue

The sun doesn't always shine

it's alright to fall apart sometimes,

I am not always you

And you are not always mine

it's alright to fall apart sometimes

After all is said and done

One and one still is one

When we cry, when we laugh

I am half, you are half

The heart isn't always true

And I am not always fine

We all have an angry heart

sometimes

Look how far we have come

One and one still is

One moon (one moon)

One star (one star)

I love the one we are

One thread (one thread)

One line (one line)

Let's stand still in time

One moon (one moon)

One star (one star)

I love the one we are

One thread (one thread)

One line (one line)

That runs through our lives… #

- One and One – Robert Miles