Slow Decay

Rhys paid the bill. They walked out of the restaurant together.

‘Thanks for lunch,’ she said. ‘This was great. We should do it again.’

‘I’d like that,’ Rhys replied, and felt the sharp edge of guilt slicing through his heart. ‘I’d like that a lot.’

There was an awkward moment as they both stared at each other, half-smiling, each waiting for the other one to do something. Eventually Lucy leaned up and kissed his cheek. ‘I hope you feel better soon,’ she said, and turned to walk away.

Rhys watched her go, admiring the way the creases in her tight — but nicely tight, not horribly tight, they way they had been once — jeans flickered diagonally bottom right to top left and then bottom left to top right every time she took a step. It was hypnotic. Mesmerising.

Which was why, when a white van that had been cruising along the street suddenly swerved towards her, the side door sliding open, and when the man with the shaven head who had been walking along beside her suddenly turned and pushed her towards the opening, Rhys saw the whole thing.

Lucy screamed. Heads turned, but nobody did anything. Everyone else seemed hypnotised, mesmerised, but for all the wrong reasons. Rhys felt like he was watching something on a stage: he was the audience, they were the actors; he shouldn’t interfere. Then she turned towards him with terrified eyes, and he found himself rushing forward, a snarl forming on his lips. ‘Oi! Leave her alone, you arsehole!’ he yelled. It took five steps to reach the tableau, by which time Rhys was running, and the force of the impact when his right arm pistoned up from somewhere below his waist and connected with the shaven-headed man’s nose caused blood to spray in all directions and pain to lance right down to his shoulder socket. The man fell backwards. Rhys grabbed Lucy from where she was teetering on the edge of the van and pulled her back onto the pavement. The van pulled off fast, slowing only slightly for the shaven-headed man, his face all scarlet and wet apart from his insanely angry eyes, to roll in. The door slid shut and the van accelerated away, vanishing around a corner within moments. He could hear the squeal of its tyres for a few seconds more.

‘My hero,’ said Lucy as she clutched at his arm.

‘My God,’ said Rhys. ‘What the hell was that all about?’

EIGHT

Gwen held the mobile in a hand that was suddenly nerveless and trembling.

New Message read the tiny LCD screen. Read now?

She looked around the Hub: at the desks and the LCD terminals; at the brick walls and the pillars; at the water sculpture and the big glass windows into other areas; at Toshiko, head down and working on a whole pile of alien devices that looked like the one they had recovered from the nightclub, and the preserved hand that floated in a specimen jar. How the hell could she get a signal this deep underground when all she had to do in some parts of Cardiff was turn around and she lost her signal?

She was prevaricating. The entire shape of her future life depended on this message.

At least, she thought it did. She and Rhys: she had assumed they would just keep on going, but it had been just that — an assumption. They hadn’t really talked about it. She hadn’t really considered it in any detail. Did she want them to get old together? Did she want Rhys to be the father of her children? Did she actually want children? Big, big questions that she’d never really made the time to consider. In the way that young professionals do, she had just shoved the Big Life Questions to one side and lived her life one day at a time. Big Life Questions, like mortgages and life insurance, were something for adults to think about. And, despite the number of times she’d told Rhys to stop acting like a child, she still didn’t think of herself as an adult. Not really.

She was still prevaricating. Convulsively, her thumb closed on the Y button before her thoughts had a chance to catch up and cancel the action.

Sorry. Really really sorry. If yr still tlkng 2 me, pls call. I stll wnt us 2 b 2gther. R.

Bloody typical. Even at a time like this he couldn’t avoid using text-speak.

But the annoyance was another form of prevarication. Gwen let it wash away from her, waiting to see what she felt when it left. And what she felt was relief. Sheer relief. They were still a couple. Thank Christ, they were still a couple.

Owen walked into the Hub, coming from the direction of the armoured glass cells where they kept living alien specimens whilst they decided what to do with them. Jesus, she was hardly one to hold the moral high ground, was she? And it was her unauthorised and unwise use of the alien device that had excavated these undercurrents within the relationship. Best to just cover them up and keep going. Big questions could wait until she and Rhys had both grown up a bit.

She selected Options and then Call back on the phone’s menu, then watched the LCD screen, almost hypnotised, as it dialled Rhys’s mobile back. She had to force her hand to raise the mobile to her face.

‘Gwen?’ He sounded scared and far away.

‘Rhys, look, I’m so sorry.’

‘Me too. Can you forgive me?’

‘Can you forgive me?’

‘Can we just exchange forgiveness?’ he asked; ‘cancel everything out and get back to where we were?’

‘Let’s do that.’

‘Well…’ Rhys was thinking: she knew the sound of that silence. ‘When I say “back where we were”, I mean before the argument but after the hot sex. Is that OK?’

Gwen smiled, and turned away from Toshiko and Owen, shielding the mobile with her hand. ‘That’s exactly where I’d want to leave it too. But leave it in a “pick it up later at that point” sense. But hey — where are you?’

A pause. ‘I’m just outside that Italian restaurant near work.’ There was another pause: not so much a thinking pause, but a working out how to say something pause. ‘Look, Gwen, you are the only girl for me. I love you totally and completely, right?’

‘There’s a “but” coming. I can feel it.’

‘But someone tried to abduct Lucy.’

Gwen suppressed the desire to say ‘You were having lunch with Lucy?’ That wouldn’t have helped. And besides, she could tell from Rhys’s voice that he was contrite. And that he still loved her. Instead, she said: ‘Has she reported it to the police?’

‘Yeah, but as we didn’t get the licence plate of the van and we couldn’t describe the guy it all got a bit inconclusive. We ended up reporting it to your old partner, Andy, by the way. I don’t think he likes me at the best of times. He wasn’t helpful.’

‘I’ll have a word. Hang on — what van? What guy?’

‘A van pulled up by the side of the road and some guy tried to shove Lucy into it. I hit the guy and pulled her back. The van just drove off.’

‘Wow. Are you OK?’

‘Bruised knuckles and swollen ego. The former will heal; the latter may take some time.’

‘Is this connected to Lucy’s boyfriend? The drug addict?’

‘Lucy says no, but I’m thinking yes. He wasn’t the guy who tried to shove her in the van, but I’m wondering if it’s some kind of thing where he owes someone some money and they try to kidnap Lucy to make him pay up.’

‘Sounds like it.’ As words started forming in her brain, Gwen felt her face twisting into a grimace. There was an obvious conclusion to this, and she just didn’t like it. ‘Rhys — has Lucy got anywhere else to stay?’

Rhys’s voice indicated that he’d already got to where Gwen was going, but he wasn’t going to say it first. ‘She can’t go home, and I don’t think a hotel is a good idea. She’s in a bit of a state.’

‘Other friends?’

‘Nobody else she knows well enough to impose on.’

‘Family?’

‘South Shields.’