Skypoint

‘I’m a doctor,’ he said.

‘I see. Well, Alison’s fine now.’

Owen leaned against the counter and folded his arms as best he could with his busted hand; he was trying to make this look informal. ‘It’s not Alison I’m so worried about.’

Wendy shook her head, genuinely didn’t get it. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Look, Wendy, I just moved in over the hall today. I don’t want to walk in and start telling you how to live your life, or how to run your family.’

‘Then don’t.’

Trouble was, that was exactly what he was going to do.

‘Why don’t you talk about Alison’s accident?’

Wendy closed her eyes for a couple of seconds, and he wasn’t sure if she was reliving the horror of what had happened that day or counting numbers as she tried to control her rage.

When she opened her eyes again she spoke quietly and quickly, like the faster she said it and the less noise she made with the words, the less chance there was of damaging the new life they were trying to make for themselves up here.

‘We don’t talk about it because two years ago some bastard got into his car after knocking back six pints of lager and ploughed into the side of my car as I picked my daughter up from playschool. I got scratched, but I watched my daughter, covered in blood, die in my arms.’

‘But the medics brought her back, Wendy. They saved her life. You’ve still got her.’

‘And I thanked God for that. I got down on my knees in the road, in the middle of the carnage, the twisted metal and the blood, and I cried out to God, and thanked him. I’d been a Christian all my life, Owen. That was how my parents brought me up and I Believed. With a Capital B. But I never prayed to God the way I did that day – while the paramedics worked on my little girl to bring her back; then to thank Him for sparing her.’

Owen looked at her. He didn’t speak, he didn’t need to ask anything, now he knew what had happened. He just waited for her to tell him.

‘But, do you know what, Owen? My life had been a lie. My parents’ lives were a lie. They died last year – my mum had cancer, my dad died exactly two weeks later of a broken heart – they died still believing the lie. But I don’t know where they went because there is no heaven, and there is no God. Do you know how I know that?’

Wendy tipped the opened wine bottle up into a glass and drank down a couple of gulps.

‘Because my daughter told me,’ she said.

Owen didn’t need to ask what Alison had told her mother. He knew what lay on the other side of death – real death, the kind that reduced your body to dust. And there was nothing but darkness. There were no long tunnels lit by distant lights, there were no endlessly sunlit gardens where birds sang and loved ones from the past waited, there wasn’t even a cloud.

There was just cold darkness. And fear.

Alison had told her mother and she had no option but to believe her. And the lie that kept the human race sane had been exposed.

She didn’t refuse to talk about Alison’s accident because she was traumatised by the past. She was terrified of the future.

‘So now you know,’ she said. She flashed him a harsh, humourless smile.

Hope was what kept the world going. Hope that one day you would find somebody you could love and trust, hope that you would never lose them; hope that your team won the cup this year; hope that you found that dream job; hope that you would find the money to pay the mortgage. But most of all, hope that one day – whatever you have told yourself over the years – you will find that life really does go on beyond the deathbed.

‘There is no salvation,’ she told him. ‘This is all there is. I don’t mind that so much. You know, I’ve actually learned to value life more. Every day counts, you don’t get it again.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with seeing life like that,’ Owen told her. ‘The trouble with God is people think they get a second chance. They don’t.’

Wendy drank from her glass. ‘If this is all there is, we should make the most of it? Absolutely. Where’s your glass?’

‘Oh, I’ve put it down somewhere.’

‘Have another. While you can,’ and she started to pour wine into another glass.

Owen hoped that she wouldn’t want to toast living life for today, or something.

She didn’t. As she poured the wine her eyes misted over again.

‘What pisses me off is that my daughter has seen what’s waiting for her.’

‘She seems to handle it all right. She’s happy.’

‘Yeah.’

Wendy said it as if that itself scared her a little bit.

‘But it’s not going to get her again,’ she told him with quiet defiance. ‘Not for a long, long time.’

She put the wineglass into Owen’s hand and moved off across the room. He looked at the drink in his hand and felt the urge to knock it back. Wendy Lloyd was right, her daughter had seen what was waiting for her, and was waiting for all of them in that room – even him, perhaps, one day.

Owen shivered. He hadn’t felt cold, or warm, in weeks. Temperature, like pain, meant nothing to him now. He had almost forgotten how it felt. The last time he could remember feeling cold was in the darkness of death, just before Jack had wrenched him out of it with the resurrection glove. That had been a terrible cold, and he felt it again now. Just for a moment.

And Owen remembered that there were worse things than being undead.

His eyes found Toshiko across the room. She was talking to another couple that Owen hadn’t been introduced to. They were both in their thirties, he guessed, and short and fat and dressed as if their invite had read Hawaiian Theme; they looked like beachballs on legs. Toshiko was laughing with them. And he wondered if he had ever heard her laugh like that before. He didn’t think so. It wasn’t that people didn’t laugh down in the Hub – Jack was often good for a giggle and Ianto had that dry wit of his, and Gwen knew more dirty jokes than the Blues’ locker room had ever heard – but Toshiko usually only smiled and got on with her work. Something was different about her now. Maybe her spritzers were a little heavier on the wine than she normally took them. Maybe she was just more relaxed.

Owen took in the rest of the room. More people had arrived while he’d been talking to Wendy, there were more than twenty people in the apartment now. None of them looked like good candidates for the shapeshifting wall-walker. Maybe relaxing was OK. He certainly liked what it did to Toshiko.

He stayed by the kitchen counter, nursing the wineglass and watched her as a tall black-haired man in a suit approached her. Owen could only see him from the back, but the suit’s cut looked expensive and he caught the glitter of a diamond on the man’s white shirt cuff as he extended a manicured hand and gently touched her shoulder blade.

Owen felt something stir inside. He knew instantly that it was nothing biological, unless jealousy was a chemical reaction.

Hey, how was that for a headline? Dead Man Gets Jealous!

Toshiko turned to look at the man beside her, and Owen saw three things at once: that she was surprised to see him (because she had expected it be Owen?), that she knew the man – and that the man was Besnik Lucca.

He said something to her and Owen saw Toshiko smile.

‘Hey, mate. What’s happened there?’

Owen saw Alun, the photographer with the girlfriend who had melons that she liked to squeeze, standing beside him. He was looking down at Owen’s hand.

The glass had cracked in his grip; red wine was seeping over his hand and down his trousers.

‘Shit,’ said Owen.

Jealous Dead Man Breaks Glass and Doesn’t Notice!

Owen put the glass in the sink.

‘Cheap bloody glasses,’ said Alun, and he checked the label on the bottle that Wendy had opened. ‘Goes with the wine. Still, here, have another one mate.’

Owen had grabbed some kitchen towel and was mopping at the wine stain on his trousers, but his eyes were