Slow Decay

SEVEN

Friday morning arrived unwillingly in the city; dragging itself into existence with reluctance, grey and dull, sluggish and tired. The traffic moved as if drugged; the drivers slow to use their accelerators and brakes, slow to react to traffic lights or pedestrians on crossings. A haze seemed to hang damply in the air, coating the sides of the buildings and making people’s faces look as if they were covered in sweat, even though they were wearing thick coats. The pigeons huddled together for comfort, unwilling to fly for longer than it took to find a new space to land in. Even the water on the sculpture in the centre of the Basin trickled more slowly than usual. The heat and frantic activity of the past few days had ebbed away, leaving a muddy estuary of apathy behind it.

The mood in the Hub was equally funereal, as far as Gwen could tell. Toshiko looked as if she had worked all through the night again: she didn’t speak unless spoken to, and hardly even then. Owen’s hair was pointing in all the wrong directions and, although he’d left and come back, he was still wearing the same clothes, and he hadn’t shaved. Only Jack was cool and crisp, moving through the still air like a predator; a faint crease of worry between his eyebrows.

Gwen waited until Jack was talking to Owen before slipping the alien device back onto Toshiko’s desk. Toshiko looked at it blankly for a few moments, then glanced up at Gwen with an unreadable expression on her face.

‘Did you get what you needed from it?’ she asked.

‘I got what I deserved,’ Gwen replied, and turned away.

She couldn’t stand to be in the Hub with the others; the silence was too intense. Instead she wandered off, down one of the tunnels she rarely used. Her footsteps echoed off the red brick as she walked, the tock tock tock of her heels matching the drip drip drip of water somewhere off in the darkness.

Jesus, how had it all gone so wrong so quickly?

She had meant for the alien device to have boosted the affection between her and Rhys, cementing the relationship between them, repairing the cracks that had developed over the past couple of months. Instead, it had driven a wedge into those cracks and levered the two of them apart. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She should have guessed that the device would amplify any emotion. After all, nothing is ever completely perfect. Even the most loving conversation contains the seeds of argument; the skill is in just nurturing the seeds you want and letting the rest stay fallow. The device just amplified whatever it was fed, with no selection, no discrimination. A momentary flash of irritation on her part had translated itself into anger for Rhys, which had then echoed back into a ferocious rage sweeping through Gwen’s body. She had run out of the bedroom as quickly as she could, knowing she had to turn the device off before she slapped Rhys, or he hit her. She could feel it coming, like the prickling you got before lightning struck. They had been seconds away from violence, perhaps seconds away from one of them killing the other. And what terrified her the most wasn’t that proximity to violence; it was how it had always been there. The alien device hadn’t created it: only accentuated it. You couldn’t amplify something that didn’t already exist.

Alongside love, lay hate. That was what Gwen had to come to terms with.

She had slept on the sofa that night, wrapped in a sheet, the rage that had burned within her keeping her warm until it drained away and left her shivering and silently crying. She had showered early and left the flat before Rhys had woken up — assuming he had slept at all, and not just lain awake in their bed staring at the ceiling.

She needed to text him. She needed to call him and talk, but she needed to text him first to prepare the ground, because if she called him now she didn’t know what he was going to say.

Perhaps it was all over. Perhaps they had already broken up, in his mind, and she didn’t know it yet. Perhaps she was suddenly single.

Her blind footsteps had carried her far away from the Hub. She walked past Owen’s medical area, and the firing range. She walked past the entrance to the long platform that extended parallel to a set of metal rails which vanished into a black tunnel; the terminus, Ianto had once told her, of an underground railway system that linked the Torchwoods together, although she had suspected then that he was joking in that straight-faced way Ianto had. She walked past the archives into which Ianto placed the various alien devices Torchwood had confiscated over the years. She kept walking until she was deep into territory that she had never seen before.

A sudden wave of coldness passed over Gwen, raising goose flesh on her arms. She looked up to see an opening in the tunnel wall on her left. Light began to ripple on the ground, just within the arch of the opening; a deep, violet light. Entranced, she entered.

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 is something that came through the Rift. We couldn’t build tanks like this on Earth now.’ She heard, rather than saw, him shrug. ‘Hey, maybe the whole aquarium is some kind of alien tech that was confiscated by Torchwood, and the fish just came along with it.’ He paused for a moment, then went on, quietly. ‘You took that alien device that we recovered from the nightclub, didn’t you? You took it out of Torchwood.’

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 crème brûlée 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.’

‘Enterprising. Risky, but enterprising. What else.’

‘And then… then I took it back to my flat. I thought if Tosh was right, and it was an emotional amplifier, then I might be able to test it out. I could see whether it made Rhys and I… more connected. Happier.’ It felt like a betrayal, just telling Jack this. Not a betrayal of him and Torchwood; a betrayal of her and Rhys.

‘I’m guessing that it didn’t work.’

She paused, listening to the distant bubbling of the pumps that kept the aquarium going, watching the blind, incurious eyes of the deep sea fish. ‘It didn’t work. It just made things worse. I understand why the fight took place in the nightclub now. I understand why those kids died. It was just trivial stuff that escalated out of nowhere.’

‘But we already knew that,’ Jack said softly. ‘Tosh worked it out.’

‘Yeah,’ Gwen said, ‘but there’s a difference between knowing and understanding.’

‘Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?’ Jack quoted softly. ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’

‘T. S. Eliot?’

‘Damn. I thought it was A. A. Milne.’

Gwen laughed. It was such a typical Jack comment.

‘Which one: When We Were Very Obscure, or Now We Are Philosophical?’ she asked.

‘Ever read about those tribes in South America or on the Pacific Islands, back in the 1950s, just when long-distance air travel got started? After generations of nothing much happening, they suddenly started seeing things in the sky — big white birds that flew higher than anything else, and flew in lines straighter than anything found in nature. Sometimes the tribes just couldn’t cope with this visible demonstration of something unnatural, and they just disintegrated. Sometimes they worked the aircraft into their own religions, worshipping them. But they never stayed the same. Never ever stayed the same. Even if their witch doctors, or shamans or local wise men told them to ignore the big white birds, and called them into their huts whenever the birds passed overhead, the wise men knew. And that knowledge changed them. We all get tempted, from time to time,’ he continued. ‘That’s what the Rift does: it presents us with an infinite conveyor belt of consumer goods and cuddly toys that we’re just not ready for. We have to be strong, and put them to one side.’

‘I already knew that,’ Gwen said, almost talking to herself.

‘But now you understand it,’ said Jack. He walked forward, into the aquarium, and stood beside her. She could feel his closeness in the darkness, his warmth, his solidity. ‘These fish live so far down in the depths of the ocean trenches that only the faintest trickle of light can ever get to them. They live in almost perpetual night-time. They either have no eyes at all, or they have eyes that can amplify a handful of photons to a point where they make a coherent picture. But here, in this aquarium, we shine a light on them so we can see them. It’s a faint light, sure, but it’s more radiation than they probably get in an entire lifetime. And it burns them. It blinds them. Just so we can see them. It’s as if something alien landed here on Earth but couldn’t see us, or our buildings, or our landscape, without flooding everything with gamma rays. Forget the fact that it would kill us: they couldn’t see without it.’

‘I understand the analogy,’ Gwen said, ‘but I’m missing the point.’

‘The point is that we can’t observe without interfering. We shine a light into the darkness, and it alters things. Small things, big things, things we may not even notice. But we can’t stand apart from it. Everything we see, we change. Even here in Torchwood. We think we can stand away from the alien technology and what it does to people, but we’re people too. We can’t investigate without becoming involved. And we shouldn’t be able to. All we can do is be strong.’

She could see what he was getting at, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of acquiescing to his point, despite the guilt she still carried within her. ‘Very profound,’ she said.

‘Oh, hey, it’s not mine. Some guy named Heisenberg said it first.’

‘Heisenberg? Didn’t he brew beer?’

Jack shrugged. ‘In principle, yes,’ he said. ‘But it’s uncertain.’ He gazed around. ‘Every now and then I feel like I ought to close this thing down, but where would I put the fish and the tube worms and stuff? It’s not like Cardiff Aquarium has the resources to look after them. This isn’t an aquarium any more; it’s a retirement home for deep sea creatures.’ He sighed. ‘Come on — every time I come down here I leave feeling that a massive order to the local sushi bar is in order. Let’s tell Owen that the wasabi paste is just a mild kind of green tomato sauce.’

‘He’ll never fall for that again.’

‘Oh, he will. You don’t know Owen as well as I do.’

Jack gestured for Gwen to precede him. She looked around the aquarium again. The various creatures that floated in the tanks — incurious, in pain — ignored her leaving just as they had ignored her arrival.

‘I think there’s one more thing these creatures can teach us,’ she said.

‘What’s that?’ Jack asked.

‘They survive under extreme pressure. They’ve found a way to adapt and survive. I’m not sure we’ve learned that lesson yet.’

They walked away, back towards the Hub, towards life and light.

Behind them, the violet light faded away, leaving darkness behind.

‘I thought you were ill,’ Lucy said. ‘They said you phoned in sick this morning.’

Rhys tried to put a pained expression on his face. It wasn’t hard: he’d only had a couple of hours sleep, and every time he turned his head it felt like his brain was lagging behind by a few seconds. ‘I felt a bit off, this morning,’ he said weakly.

‘Hangover?’ She smiled, taking the sting out of the words. If Gwen had said that to him, he’d have automatically been bristling at the suggestion, whether it had been true or not. Which should, he reflected, tell him something about the state of their relationship.

‘Sadly, no,’ he replied. ‘I think it was something I ate.’

He’d asked Lucy to meet him in a juice bar near where they worked, guessing that with her new figure she wouldn’t want much more than a rhubarb and beetroot smoothie, or whatever they served in those places. She surprised him by suggesting they met up over a pizza at a local Italian-run restaurant. She surprised him even more by ordering a large Venetian with extra toppings.

‘Look,’ he continued, ‘I need to ask you something, but first you have to promise not to tell anyone.’

She put on a serious face. ‘I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.’

‘That weight-loss clinic you went to — the Scotus Clinic? I went there too.’

Her eyes widened in surprise, and her gaze quickly flicked down to his abdomen. ‘But you don’t need to lose weight.’ She looked down at the tablecloth. ‘You’ve got a great body.’

‘You haven’t seen me naked,’ he said, then blushed furiously when he realised what he had said. ‘But seriously,’ he went on before she could say something like, ‘I’d like to’, which might lead to all kinds of problems, ‘I wanted to ask you about that pill they get you to take. Have you had any side effects?’

‘Actually, now you come to mention it, there have been a few.’ She waved vaguely at the half-eaten pizza in front of her. ‘I’m eating more than I ever did, but the weight is still falling off me.’

She was right. When she had walked into the restaurant heads had turned. Her figure was stunning, and her slimness meant that her breasts were truly amazing. And she was dressing to show them off, which she had never done before. Rhys’s reaction had been immediate and physical when he saw her.

‘I guess it’s something to do with the effect of the tablets,’ she went on. ‘They must alter the way your metabolism works. Your body must be able to process the foods and just take the stuff that you need, letting the rest just flow away.’

‘You make it sound so lovely’

She laughed, and it was a musical sound. A sound he wanted to hear more of.

‘There is something else,’ she said. ‘My stomach — it felt really tender for a few days after I’d taken the pill, but it settled down. I’m feeling great now.’

‘And you’re looking fantastic.’ There, he’d said it out loud now. ‘Have you taken the second tablet yet?’ he asked quickly, before she could react.

‘Not yet. I keep meaning to, but… but I’m scared that I might start putting on weight again, so I keep putting it off.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Oops. I should be getting back. It’s all right for you — you’re off sick. Some of us have to work for a living.’

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?’