the hall table. But he always pretended he was talking to the cat, because if you talked to pictures, you had to be bonkers, didn’t you?
He put on his cap and patted the pockets of his digging jacket. Glynis had died in 1978. Complications, the doctor had said, which had seemed a reasonable diagnosis. As complications went, dying was a considerable one.
Every Friday night, she’d slipped a packet of mints into the pocket of the digging jacket for him to find every Saturday morning out on the allotment. He still checked, even though there hadn’t been a packet of mints to discover in twenty-nine years. There was a wrapper, though. A twenty-nine-year-old scrap of foil and paper. He’d never had the heart to throw it away.
He went out into the yard, and locked his backdoor. Leaning against the wall, he put on his wellies, then walked off down the backyard to the lane behind the houses that joined with the allotment path.
A pneumatic drill stammered like a frantic blacksmith. They were building new homes on Connault Way. The land buy-out had included a large swathe of the allotment space that had once surrounded the streets of Cathays. Madness. Jim French, who grew winter veg on the plot three over from Davey’s, had told him on the nod that the council were considering selling off their patches to the developers too. How could that be right, in any man’s world? What would he do for lettuce and spuds and marrows then?
He could smell brick dust and rain on the air. The new houses looked like box skeletons over the hedge. Prefab rubbish, like Airfix kits, thrown up in a month, the speed of weeds. Not like the front-and-backs on his street. Decent brick, wooden doors. Course, his could use a lick of paint, but still.
There was no one on the allotments, not on a Monday morning. The iron gate squealed as he let himself through. More than half the plots had gone back to the wild. Nobody wanted the toil of an allotment any more, not when there were Kwik-Saves full of guavas and broccoli and pre-washed beans.
That was why he’d been digging in the plot next to his. He hadn’t paid the annual fee for it, but it had been abandoned more than ten years ago, and he hadn’t seen the harm of it. And that’s when he’d found it. Just that last Saturday, forking the cleared earth while the stripped weeds crackled lazily in his brazier. He’d just had the clearest taste of a mint in his mouth, just for a second, the memory of a mint, when the tines of his fork struck it.
The boys had been there again, Sunday night. Empty beer cans on the path, a cloche kicked over. Davey still had the tub of black paint ready, in case they ever took it upon themselves to decorate his shed again, the way they had in the spring. Foulmouth buggers couldn’t even spell.
Davey went up to the shed and undid the padlock. It was still there, where he had left it, propped up in his wheelbarrow, angled slightly as if it was looking out of the grimy window.
‘All right, then?’ he asked.
It made no more response than his cat had done.
‘I was wondering if you had a name,’ Davey said. ‘Just to put us on civil terms. I’m Davey, but they all call me Taff. The wife even called me Taff.’
A little hum: no more response than that.
‘Daft name, I agree. What do you call it now? A stereotype, is that it? Had it since ’42. Royal Fusiliers, boys from all over, no older than me. Boys from Liverpool and Birmingham and Luton. Jock, see, he came from Aberdeen, so naturally, he was Jock. And I was Taff. Taff Morgan. The Welsh lad. Oh, it was a simple thing. You didn’t argue. You were glad to be noticed.’
Another hum. A slight change in pitch.
Davey took out his flask. ‘How about a cup of tea?’ he asked.
Monday morning, rain-clouds like bruises over the Bay.
Gwen let herself into the Hub via the little information centre on the Quay. She could smell Ianto’s coffee even before the cog-door rolled open.
‘All right?’ Owen asked her. His face had bruised up well since she’d last seen him on Saturday. He had even more of a pouty expression than usual.
‘It looks like you’ve had collagen implants,’ she observed.
‘Thanks for that.’ He paused. ‘How’s the head?’
Gwen shrugged. The weekend had been a serious unwind, though she knew there would be consequences. It was only come Sunday night, when she’d simply crashed, that she’d realised how deeply the effects of primary and secondary contact with the Amok had worked her over. They’d been so bothered at the time by their bruises and cuts and contusions, the physical cost of the operation.
Bruises would fade. Skinned fingers would heal. The mind was where the real harm had been done. It had eased, the tram-tracks of pain snowing over, but she still felt sick from time to time, and she kept getting a stabbing pain behind her left eye. She shuddered to think what they had all been exposed to, shuddered to imagine what it had all been about.
‘My head’s screwed,’ she replied, ‘to be perfectly frank. But it’s getting better. Like an ache that’s going away.’
‘Like the day after the day after a bad hangover,’ Owen agreed, nodding.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Though in your case, it
‘It was a laugh, though,’ said Owen.
She smiled and nodded. ‘It was a laugh,’ she agreed.
It had been a laugh, the four of them at James’s place. A necessary venting, like safety measures at an overcooking reactor. Without downtime like that, the ‘job’ would do them in.
Gwen wondered how long she’d been putting inverted commas around the word job, and how much longer she’d keep doing it.
‘Coffee?’ asked Ianto, appearing like a genie from an expertly rubbed lamp.
‘I love you,’ said Gwen, taking hers.
‘I love you more,’ Owen told Ianto, ‘and I’m prepared to have your babies.’
Ianto smiled patiently.
Owen went back to his work station and sat down. ‘Hey, Ianto?’
Ianto came over.
Owen picked up the side-arm from the clutter on his station. ‘This had better go back into the Armoury. Could you?’
‘Of course.’
Ianto took the weapon and looked at it. ‘It’s mangled,’ he said.
‘I guess I dropped it,’ Owen replied, punching up newsgroups on his screen.
‘From what? Orbit?’
‘No, I just dropped it. Why?’
Ianto shrugged and went off about his business.
‘Jack in his office?’ Gwen asked Toshiko as she came over to the lab space.
‘I guess. I haven’t seen him.’
‘What are you doing?’ Gwen asked. ‘Isn’t that…?’
Toshiko sat back, removed her eye-guards, and took a sip of her coffee.
‘Yes, it is,’ she said. ‘Mmm, I love that man.’
‘It’s me he’s marrying,’ Gwen said. She peered at the pulsing suspension field the containment console was generating.
‘The Amok.’
‘Jack said I could run the numbers on it. Basic probes and diagnostic tests.’
‘I thought you said you hadn’t seen him?’
‘He left me a Post-it. “Tosh — take the Amok and run the numbers on it, please, basic probes and diagnostic tests.”’ She showed Gwen the Post-it, the beautiful copperplate handwriting that nobody did any more.
‘Can you tell what it is yet?’ asked a bad Rolf Harris impression.
James was standing behind them. Gwen tried to act casual, but it was hard not to make the sort of eye contact that would set off sirens.
‘No,’ said Toshiko.
‘OK. Is it safe?’ James asked, peering at the thing suspended in the glowing field.
