Inside the doorway was a large, open space where the walls were punctuated by glass sheets fronting tanks full of water. The room was heavy with darkness, and even the scant violet light that oozed from the tanks was just a minor variation of the darkness. She waited for a few moments for her eyes to become acclimatised then she walked further into the centre of the room and looked more closely at the tanks.
They were full of nightmares.
The things that were in the tanks were fish, but not the kind you’d want to see on your dinner plate. Some of them were translucent, with organs and bones clearly visible through their skin. Others were covered in what looked like black armour, or mottled grey flesh that looked unhealthy, diseased. They all had mouths that were too large for their bodies, or eyes too large for their heads, or no eyes at all. One tank contained a nest of slowly writhing, fleshy worms about the thickness of her leg, bright red in colour, with holes at their ends that were less like mouths and more like gaping rips in their flesh.
Floating, half-deflated, in their tanks, the creatures looked like God’s rough sketches for what he was going to populate the oceans with later.
‘Where the hell in this universe did these monstrosities come from?’ she breathed.
‘The Pacific Ocean,’ said Jack, behind her, making her jump. ‘The Atlantic Ocean. The Indian Ocean. Pretty much any ocean you care to name on this planet.’
‘But — but I assumed they’d come through the Rift, like everything else we deal with. You don’t see these things on ice in the supermarket.’
‘They live too deep. The pressure down in the ocean trenches is immense. It could turn a polystyrene coffee cup into a hunk of stuff the size of a small coin. If anyone could fish that deep — which they can’t — and could bring one of these fish to the surface — which, I stress, they can’t — the things would just explode. The difference between the pressure in their bodies and the atmospheric pressure around them would just be too much for their skins to take.’
‘But — why are they here in the Hub? What’s the point?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jack admitted. ‘They were here when I arrived. Somebody’s little aquarium of freakish fish. I think whoever put them here was trying to make a point that there are stranger things in the Earth’s oceans than slip through the Rift. They could’ve just written it on a Post-it note: I would have got the message. This thing is kinda like overkill, if you ask me.’
‘Who feeds them? Who looks after them?’
‘I think Ianto does it. Either that or it’s automated. The real trick is how the pressure and coldness of the ocean depths is maintained in those tanks, and I guess that technology
Rhys looked at himself in the mirror, and he didn’t like what he saw.
He was haggard and pale through lack of sleep, and there were dark circles under his eyes. His hair felt lank. Sleep had evaded him for most of the night; too many times to count he’d half got out of bed to go and talk to Gwen in the living room, but he’d just fallen back, unable to form the right words. Each time the flat had creaked he’d thought it was Gwen coming back to bed, but he was always wrong. He’d already phoned in sick, but the sickness wasn’t in his body — it was in his soul.
He had come within moments of lashing out at Gwen, backhanding her across her face. Her beautiful, wonderful face. And moments after the best sex they’d ever had, as well. He had no idea that he was capable of violence like that, but the rage had just taken control, escalating from nowhere into a hormonal storm that had hijacked any rational thought. He’d had his share of fights, of course — brawls outside pubs when some drunken yob had yelled one insult too many, fights on football pitches after questionable tackles, one memorable thrashing he’d inflicted on a drug-frazzled would-be mugger in an alleyway where he’d gone to have a piss — but he’d never thought of himself as a fighter. He’d never been consumed with the need to see blood, to split someone’s face open. Not before last night.
He knew that he needed to talk to Gwen, to try and repair some of the damage that had occurred, but he didn’t know how. He didn’t know what words to use. She was the talker, the thinker, in the relationship. He was the intuitive one, the one who went with his feelings.
And look where that had got him.
What did one do in circumstances like this? Flowers? He could have them delivered to her workplace, but he didn’t even know where she worked any more.
Perhaps he could just text her. Just one word — sorry. See if that worked.
And what if it didn’t? What if she was already phoning around to find a new flat to move into? What would he do then? He wasn’t even sure he could survive without Gwen in his life. She had intertwined herself into his very existence to the point where the thought of being single again was like the thought of losing an arm, or an eye.
Should he have proposed to her? Did she want kids? They’d never really talked about that kind of thing before. Conversations about their future usually revolved around which area of Cardiff they wanted to move to, and whether stripped pine floors and chenille throws over the furniture were too naff for words.
He felt lost. He felt as if he was drifting in uncharted and deep emotional waters in which strange fishes swam.
But on the bright side, he realised, looking at his stomach in the mirror, he was definitely looking slimmer.
He ran his hands across his stomach in disbelief. Surely that pill couldn’t have started working already? Where would the fat have gone? It didn’t just evaporate, and he couldn’t remember having taken a dump since he’d taken the pill. But there was definitely more muscular definition there, and the swags of flesh that bulged out on either side of his belt when he got dressed — the things that Gwen referred to as ‘love handles’- weren’t as pronounced as they had been.
Jesus, that pill was worth the money.
And with that thought came another — he was hungry. In fact, he was ravenously hungry. Despite all of his well-meant mental promises to cut down on the carbohydrates, eat his five-a-day ration of vegetables and fruit and drink a litre of water between sunrise and sunset, he was hungry.
Rhys’s legs carried him out of the bathroom, across the hall and into the dining room before he even knew what was happening. The remains of dinner from the night before were still there, the clearing-up delayed first by rampant sex and then by their vicious argument. The chicken was dry; the asparagus limp; the Parma ham darker and hard. Despite that, Rhys shovelled them into his mouth, savouring the taste of the orange and lime marinade. His jaws worked like crazy, masticating the food into a pulp so he could swallow it down. All thoughts of his stomach were forgotten now, blurred and overlaid by the need to satisfy his raging hunger.
He’d finished his portion now, and started on Gwen’s. Raising the plate to his lips he scraped the food into his mouth with a fork. The flavours blended in his mouth: asparagus, salty ham and the citrus tang of the chicken. It was gorgeous. It was heaven.
And it wasn’t enough.
Gwen had mentioned dessert, and Rhys stumbled into the kitchen area in search of it. He found it in the fridge: two ceramic pots containing a creamy vanilla custard, just waiting for sugar to be poured over the top and to be shoved under the grill to caramelise. Bugger the sugar: he grabbed a spoon from the draining board and scooped the sweet, creamy stuff into his mouth. Finishing the first, he started on the second. Within moments, it was gone.
Rhys stood there in the kitchen, stark naked, with the juices from the chicken and the asparagus trickling down his chest and the remains of the creme brulee plastered around his mouth, and he wasn’t thinking about his appearance, he wasn’t thinking about his diet, he wasn’t even thinking about Gwen.
He was thinking about the rest of the food in the fridge.
Gwen closed her eyes and sighed. Jack didn’t sound angry, and somehow that was worse. Somehow, it meant that he had expected her to do it all along. ‘I borrowed it so I could get some information from a police contact,’ she said. ‘He didn’t touch it, and he didn’t get anything from it. As far as he was concerned it was just a piece of decoration, but I managed to get the video footage from the nightclub in return.’
