So I took the lid off the stew when she arrived – wearing the purple-and-blue dress with the earrings I got for her birthday – and oh god I wanted her, and everything was just perfect, and the first thing she said was:
Looks just like the inside of a gangrenous leg.
And then she laughed too loud, like a drain, and I laughed too. I couldn't help it.
The aide took the end of the rubber tube John-Paul had fitted to his arm. He slotted it neatly onto a spigot on the side of the steel machine, and turned towards me. He avoided my gaze.
My arse hurt. I kept talking.
He pulled a needle out of a plastic wrapper, and came forwards.
The first time I met Jasmine Tomas, for the record, she was teaching a group of wankers with too much testosterone about biohazards. All part of the training. She'd been seconded to the MOD from some governmental research-team or other – had more letters after her name than an episode of Sesame Street – and there she was, stuck in front of a room of leering arseholes who spent far longer staring at her tits than at the projector presentations she brought along. So… a few of those same arseholes dared another arsehole to ask her an embarrassing question about the dangers of sexual infection during fieldwork, and she didn't skip a beat. Told him she'd examine his infected areas after the lecture as long as he promised not to leak pus on her, then kept on talking over the top of the laughter.
I was the arsehole. I went and apologised after she'd finished. She took it well.
A week later we got dinner, then coffee, then the best fuck I ever had.
Three years later I was still killing people for 'Her Divine Majesty's Government', only now I was looking forward to the weekend just like every other guy, bored of his job.
Jasmine Tomas was my weekend.
The canula was in my arm, somewhere. Fitted to the tube that was fitted to the machine. I couldn't see behind my back.
My arse continued to hurt.
The aide flicked a switch with a devotional smile towards his master, then stood with his back to me, fussing over the machine.
And the tube – oh fucking hell I understood – the tube that led from me to the machine to John-Paul, it filled with blood like a long thermometer; red mercury bulging upwards.
My arm felt warm and cold at the same time. A prickling sensation. Pins and needles, killing my cells, spreading across me. And oh Jesus fuck shit I got it, I got it you withered old bastard, and I felt sick and weak and faint, but I kept talking because it's all I could do.
I said:
Listen.
I was never really designed, you know, for the romantic thing. Wasn't sure how to do it, I guess. But then nor was she, so we got on fine. Squabbled and sniped and smarmed our way through it all, awkward as you like. Never happy for long, but never sad for long either. Fuck fairytales. Fuck 'perfect'. We loved each other like nobody else, and that's enough.
So she decides to move in. I asked her, she said yes. The thing is, she works all day every day and I'm… out of the country. Business trips. Frequent flyer, blah-blah. So we figure we'll see more of each other if it's all cosy. All domestic. No need to schedule it every time.
Then the disease started. You remember? Right at the very beginning, it was just… some new thing. Nothing to worry about. They sent me to the East, to… Well. It doesn't matter where or why. I got back and Jasmine Tomas was supposed to move in that week, and all I got was a bloody text message telling me we'd have to postpone.
She'd been reassigned. Couldn't say where. Couldn't say why.
So I waited.
And the world died around me.
John-Paul just stared.
With my blood pouring out of me, filling him up like a greedy mosquito, bringing colour and warmth to his shrivelled face, he just stared and listened. He groaned once in a while, like a man in the throes of passion, and it made me feel sick to imagine him balls-deep in someone, grunting like a pig.
I felt sick in a lot of ways.
The world wobbled around me. Nothing was the right shade. Greyness was creeping out of every corner, and stinging the insides of my arms. My eyes rolled. My arse hurt.
I twitched my fingers behind my back, certain now that the aide was too busy watching the machine to turn around. I worked with all the speed and focus I could muster as everything slid away into bloodless limbo.
I kept talking. I kept fucking talking.
It was all I could do to cling-on. To stay awake. To stay alive.
I said:
I did some digging. Pulled some strings at the SIS; found out what she'd been sent to do. Where she'd gone, even.
UN mandate. That's all I got. Reassigned to a secret location as part of an international research team. Supposed to find a cure for the AB-virus.
'Project Pandora,' it was called.
John-Paul looked up.
And moaned, softly.
My fingers moved behind my back.
My arse stopped hurting.
Blood moved on my hands.
I said:
Listen.
Everybody died.
Jasmine Tomas, who I loved in that old movie way… I never heard from her again. Not for five years.
People died and lay on the streets, ambulances rushed back and forth, the world shat out its own guts and sat there like Elvis, poised on a toilet, dying by degrees.
I went back to Vauxhall Cross. I checked her records. Blood-type AB+.
As good as dead.
John Paul wasn't listening any more. Not so you'd know it, anyway.
His eyelids fluttered and his lips twisted in a smile, and I could see the strength filling him up, my own blood giving him life, turning him back into that man in the photo, the man on the TV, the calm and peaceful saint.
He communed with God through the medium of my fucking blood.
Blood-type O, rhesus negative. Safe to transfuse into anyone, more-or-less. Not quite good for him, not quite recommended. Risk of anaphylactic shock if conducted too fast, but still, but still…
My fingers twisted.
My body slumped. My brain started to slip away.
Something clicked quietly behind me.
I said:
For five years, I didn't exist.
I was just… alive.
And then one day the machines in the SIS comms-room chattered to life, and the correct passwords slotted into place, and the power fluttered through the consoles, and in a string of exchanged information a single word rushed-by.
'PANDORA.'
And a voice said:
'Are… Are you there?'
And it's a long shot. And maybe it's coincidence. Maybe it's fluke.
She should be dead. I know that.
But…
But you listen to me, you fucking leech. You listen to me, because you're still alive and you should be dead,
