Tommo

On the day that Barnaby Ricks retired, his team held a small celebration for him at his desk and drank sparkling wine from paper cups. After Barnaby had made a short speech and thanked them all for the kind words which they had written in his card, his manager took him to one side and explained the situation with the company’s pension fund.

‘The thing is Barnaby, there’s no money in it.’

Barnaby was a little puzzled by the news and a little upset. He had promised to take his wife Eileen on holiday to Iceland, and also to buy her a new hall carpet.

‘But why didn’t anyone tell me this before? What happened to all the money?’

‘Barnaby, those are questions of national security. It would be an act of treason for me to answer you,’ said his boss.

Barnaby sat quietly for a moment and then said nothing.

‘Suffice it to say that our nation’s ongoing commitment to international security requires that we all play our part.’

Barnaby did not know what to say, and he said so.

‘Look, Barnaby, it’s a difficult world we live in – a dangerous world. Under the new amendments to the Terror laws, the government is now allowed, in certain very exceptional circumstances, to appropriate the pension funds of companies that are based in this country. To tie the government’s hands would help the Terrorists, and nobody wants that do they?’

‘And that’s what happened?’

‘Barnaby, I won’t beat around the bush, they used our pension fund to pay for robot soldiers.’

‘But what were the exceptional circumstances?’

‘They didn’t have any robot soldiers.’

‘But what am I supposed to do now? I mean, there’s Eileen, and my retirement, and Iceland.’

‘Barnaby, there’s no need to panic. We’re not at war with Iceland. Listen, the government isn’t so cavalier that it would just take off with your pension and leave you nothing in return. Here, read this.’

Barnaby’s boss slid a leaflet across the table to him. The leaflet was called ‘Choices For Change’ and had a photo of a smiling grey-haired gentleman in a boiler suit, wearing goggles and holding a large spanner. He was standing in front of one of the ugly angular fighter-bombers that Barnaby often saw on the news.

He opened the leaflet and read it, and that was how Barnaby Ricks came to join the army.

Eileen Ricks had been a little disappointed that they had not been able to travel to Iceland, but Barnaby had been determined to make the best of things and he had seemed quite happy as she waved him off at the airport. She didn’t know exactly where Barnaby was stationed because to know would have been to help the Terrorists, and nobody wanted that. She couldn’t be sure which hemisphere he was in, but guessed that he was somewhere not too far from her own time zone. She came to this conclusion because every day she read the web log that Barnaby kept updated with an account of his day-to-day activities. Barnaby had also been implanted with a digital dog tag of the type that the soldiers called blogtags, which automatically posted his heart rate, circadian rhythms and core body temperature to the log. Sometimes Barnaby posted images that he had seen, and sounds that he had heard and which were also recorded by his implant. Because the blog was posted on an army server it was heavily censored and so contained no real information. Wherever Barnaby was it was very hot and dusty, and his circadian rhythms normally coincided with hers, so she supposed that he must be somewhere on the continent of Africa, which was where the army mostly seemed to be these days.

Because Barnaby was implanted with a blogtag, Eileen knew that he was dead four days twelve hours and twenty-two minutes before she received official notification. She read the last entry very carefully. It was a terribly detailed account of repairs that Barnaby had made to Dave, one of his sentry robots who had been damaged in one of the regular rock throwing incidents that the base where he was stationed was continuously subject to. The account was illustrated with images that had been recorded through Barnaby’s eyes by his blogtag. The tag was tied into his brain through his central nervous system and recorded everything that he saw and everything that he heard.

All of the soldiers had them because it made intelligence gathering so much easier. In the biggest photo, two of the robot soldiers, Dave and Wally, stood to attention like fat metal chickens whilst one of Dave’s comrades posed for the photo by squatting down and putting an arm around them. The third sentry, Brian II, stood to one side and looked on. Barnaby had been terribly upset when the first Brian had disappeared under the tracks of a tank during the hectic week last spring when the base had come under sustained assault. There was a whole section on the blog dedicated to the heroic highlights of Brian I’s life. The sentries were less than waist high and their squat square bodies were stuffed with an array of sensors and something that Barnaby referred to as ‘sub-lethal munitions’. They were designed to have rocks thrown at them so that the real soldiers didn’t have to. Eileen sensed that, from the way he wrote about them, Barnaby really loved his sentry robots. She felt a bit sad that she and Barnaby had never been able to have children. Barnaby would have made a good dad.

The official notification of Barnaby’s death came in a shiny cardboard envelope of the sort that she frequently received from magazine publishers and insurance companies. In common with its more prosaic cousins, the envelope was splashed with important looking stamps that said things like ‘Urgent Communication’ and ‘Open Immediately’. It was only the magenta and puce stripe around the edge – which had replaced black after a focus group declared that black was too depressing – and the presence of the stylised portcullis drawn with slightly ragged lines, as if by a hurried watercolour artist, that told her that this was an official communication from His Majesty’s Government.

She had not cried when she saw the flatline on Barnaby’s blog and she did not cry now as she put the kettle on, placed the envelope square in the middle of the coffee table in the living room, and sat down to prepare herself to open it. She had watched the news carefully but, of course, the news was never very clear about what was happening where. That would only have helped the Terrorists, and nobody wanted that. There didn’t seem to be any real fighting happening anywhere. Perhaps Barnaby’s lumbago had finally finished him off. After Eileen had made a pot of tea, and drunk one and a half cups, she picked up the envelope and opened it using the tear across strip on the back. Inside the envelope was a letter. It said:

Dear Mrs Rick,

We regret to inform you that your child/spouse/sibling Ricks, Barbany J was killed in heroic performance of his/her duties on Date Classified For Reasons Of National Security.

I am sure that you will join with me in celebrating the life and achievements of Barbany J and will feel the same pride that I do in his/her glorious sacrifice.

Please accept the thanks of a grateful nation, I have also enclosed a voucher to enable you to apply for a substitute child/spouse/sibling through our ‘Reform, Reintegrate, Repopulate’ program.

Dealing with the death of a child/spouse/sibling can be challenging. If you wish to speak to a government advisor please call Lossline on 0845 675 2000 (local rates apply).

Underneath this was a fuzzy copy of the signature of the prime minister, and underneath the signature, two oblique slits in the paper held a long thin slip of shiny green plastic that was about the same size as a cheque. On the plastic was written:

This voucher grants the bearer the right to take into their care and custody 1 (one), reformed chemo penal inmate from any of the distribution centres listed overleaf. Full details of the scheme are available at www.reformreintegraterepopulate.gov.uk

Eileen put the letter and the voucher behind the clock on the mantelpiece and put the envelope in the bin. Then she sat down, finished her tea and cried for fourteen minutes.

She watched the news again in the evening, but there was nothing about Barnaby. After the news she watched a program where people got to ask questions of government ministers. She wondered whether she should go on the program to ask about Barnaby, but decided that it probably wouldn’t help. There had been talk of stopping the program anyway, because there was a danger that the government ministers might accidentally say something to help the Terrorists, and no one wanted that. After a question about the pension reforms, someone asked a question about what was going on in Africa. The minister got very excited very quickly.

‘Unsubstantiated reports of massacres, cover-ups and the use of weapons of intermediate level destruction have been levelled at these operations for years. And have we seen any evidence of this? No.’

‘Cover up!’ yelled someone at the back of the studio audience.

‘Where is Ashley Jones?’ screamed someone else, but the camera swung round to the panel again quickly as burly security men waded through the seated audience towards the troublemakers.

‘No one,’ began the minister, speaking above the off-screen noise of eviction, ‘no one would like to know where Ashley Jones is more than I. Everyone is praying for his safe return, of course, but he was doing a dangerous job in a dangerous part of the world and we must prepare ourselves for the worst.’

‘Why was he unembedded four days before the …’ came a shouting voice, but it was silenced very quickly.

She had never heard of Ashley Jones, but he certainly sounded like he was involved in whatever was happening in Africa. She wondered if Ashley Jones knew anything about what had happened to Barnaby.

When Eileen went back to the blog pages for the 1064th Automated Sentry (Technical) Brigade, she found that they were missing. She used the search engine to look for them, but only came up with old pages and old information. She found a lovely picture of Dave and Wally dressed in tinsel and sprayed with fake snow and printed it out.

She put the name ‘Ashley Jones’ into the search engine. Lots of results came back, but most of them were flagged with the little red symbol that meant that the government thought that they contained information that might help the Terrorists, and that if you read them, then you would be helping the Terrorists too. Eileen didn’t want that – nobody did – but at the same time she wanted to know more about the war and why Barnaby had died. She clicked on one of the links and read:

‘Embedded journalist Ashley Jones is still missing over a week after he travelled to the embargoed region of Province K. A spokesman for the military said ‘The protection offered to embedded journalists is contingent on their staying with the unit to which they have been assigned. We can’t protect them if they just wander off.’ Colleagues of the missing journalist have suggested that he was investigating reports of genocide and the use of WILDs in the embargoed Province K and have been prevented from filing reports, claims that are vigorously denied by the government.’

Eileen looked down the list of other links on the search page:

Weapons of Intermediate Level Destruction (WILDs)

Fuel air weapons

Massacre at the schoolyard

Kitambe province genocide

Disappearance of embedded journalist Ashley Jones

Government cover up in Province K

She clicked on the link for ‘Join the ‘Where is Ashley Jones?’ campaign NOW!’ and read:

‘We believe that Ashley has evidence of war crimes and human rights violations carried out on the orders of this government in Province K. Join us now to force the warmongers to reveal his whereabouts and the truth about what happened.’

She looked at the blurry picture of Ashley. He was standing with a group of soldiers. He was quite tall and looked very young. He had one of those beards that looked like it had just been grown for the first time. In front of the group of soldiers were two robot sentries. The picture was very grainy, and she couldn’t be absolutely sure, but one of them looked like Wally. She read a little bit more about Ashley Jones and why everyone was looking for him, and then she clicked on the button to join the campaign to find him. She felt a little bit scared and a little excited. She had never done anything political before. She didn’t want to help the Terrorists – no one wanted that – but she thought about how bad she was feeling about Barnaby, and how much worse it must be for Ashley Jones’ family to not know where he was or whether he was alive or dead.

In the morning, Eileen took Barnaby’s slippers and put them in the dustbin.

In the months that followed, Eileen was kept quite busy putting all of Barnaby’s affairs in order. Although there was no money in his pension scheme, there was still a good deal of red tape to be gone through to make over his annuity payments to her as provided for in the pension scheme and also the new War Widows act. Each month on her bank statement she saw the entry that indicated that the pension company had deposited zero pounds into her account. Although the news continued to be quite vague, she got the impression that things weren’t going very well in Africa. She got regular emails from the ‘Where is Ashley Jones?’ group.

It wasn’t until the spring came that Eileen found herself spending more and more time sitting on her linen covered sofa, looking at the little plastic voucher that was still tucked behind the clock. Barnaby had been very enthusiastic in the garden, and Eileen found that their little plot was too much for her to manage all by herself. One day after she had spent all afternoon digging compost into the flowerbeds without even getting as far as the back fence she realised that she was lonely. That was the first time that she felt that she really missed Barnaby. She took the voucher down from the mantelpiece and read it carefully. As a token of compensation for her sacrifice, the government was offering her the chance to adopt into her custody a former convicted criminal who had been reformed by aggressive chemo penal treatment. She knew that Mrs Johnson at number fifty had got one after her son Darren had been killed in the assault on Tristan da Cuhna. He wasn’t much to look at, but Mrs Johnson said that he was ever so polite and helpful with the shopping, and no trouble at all to look after. Eileen thought that Mrs Johnson might even have been secretly pleased, as before he joined the army her Darren had been a bit of a tearaway who drove a small car with a big stereo.

She looked up the address of the website on the voucher. It explained how she could redeem the voucher and how patriotic she should feel as using it would free up prison resources and help to create a more law-abiding society. In fact, she decided, not using the voucher was as good as helping the Terrorists – and no one wanted that.

One of the depots was quite close to Eileen’s house. She spent a long time deciding what to wear. The only thing she was sure about was that she didn’t want to dress like a widow. In the end she decided on the smart skirt, blouse and jacket that she had worn to her nephew’s christening. The depot was a big warehouse with corrugated sides that was situated on a light industrial estate just outside of town. She parked in the car park in front of a small area of neatly trimmed grass and pots filled with flowers. She got out of the car and walked up a very short block-paving path and through the doorway of the little office that was built on the front of the warehouse. The door chimed as she went into the office. Inside there was a single room, divided by a long counter. On her side of the counter there was a water cooler and six foam cushioned chairs lined up against the wall. A computer terminal sat on the counter and on the other side of it there was nothing, except for a door leading into the warehouse and a wall covered with posters about terrorism.

A thin man wearing half-moon glasses and a short brown overcoat with biros clipped in the top pocket came through the door from the warehouse. He was whistling.

‘Now then what can I do you for?’ he asked cheerily.

‘It’s about this,’ said Eileen, sliding her voucher across the counter to him.

‘Lovely!’ said the man and slipped the voucher off the counter and under it without even looking at it.

‘Why don’t you have a look at these fellers?’ he said, lifting two thick binders onto the counter top between them.

‘I’m assuming it is a feller you’re after of course, you never can tell,’ said the man looking her up and down.

Eileen frowned, but didn’t say anything. She opened the first binder and began to leaf through the laminated pages. Each page held a large digital photograph of a man dressed in a blue jumpsuit, and beneath each one was written a serial number. She studied each photograph carefully, but didn’t much like what she saw. All of the men seemed either very young, or very old, and they all seemed to have the same strange glazed expression. She supposed that that was to be expected. She didn’t really know what she was looking for, but thought that she might know it when she found it. She decided that having come this far she would be very careful to look at every photograph. The man in the brown coat gazed out of the window and picked his teeth. He seemed quite happy.

After almost ten minutes, and two passes through both binders, Eileen decided that none of them seemed right to her.

‘Are these all you have?’ she asked.

‘Nothing catch your eye love? There’s always these I suppose.’

The man in the brown coat slipped her a much thinner folder with a royal blue cover. She opened the folder and began to turn the laminated pages.

‘This lot came in from the Milton Keynes SuperMax last week. Don’t know what they was in for of course, but they must have been proper bad lads to come from there.’

The man in the brown jacket seemed to realise that his sales patter had taken a turn for the worse and hurriedly corrected himself,

‘Course, you don’t have to worry about that, the amount of re-education they’ve been through. Know what I mean?’

The man in the brown jacket used his thumb and first two forefingers to mimic the plunger on a syringe being depressed.

‘Means they put on a bit of weight mind, when the sentence is as heavy as that. Something to do with the hormones.’

But Eileen had barely heard him. She had stopped turning the pages and found herself captivated by a pair of ice blue eyes. Eyes that were buried deep inside a bald and jowled head. Eyes that had been purged by chemicals, wearied by years of exposure to the same four walls and fluorescent light, jaded by a life of horror and crime, but eyes that still shone out through the crude jagged edges of the pixellated photo. They were human eyes – a man’s eyes.

‘What about this one?’ she asked.

The man in the jacket took the folder from her and peered over his half moon glasses at the page she was indicating.

‘Let’s have a look shall we. NJ453478,’ he typed the number into his little computer terminal, ‘still available, you’ll be pleased to hear. Clean health record, chemo penal sentence completed successfully, with flying colours in fact, a star pupil our boy. Naturally his criminal record and previous identity details are held confidentially by the relevant institution, but there’s a note here says he responds to the name Tommo.’

‘I’ll take him,’ said Eileen.

It had been a strange drive home and, as Eileen poured tea for Tommo at the kitchen table, she was starting to have second thoughts. He was bigger than he had looked in the brochure, well over six feet tall, with sloping slabs of muscle and fat smoothing the transition from his bald head to his massive round shoulders. He stood next to the kitchen table wearing a neatly pressed, white short-sleeved shirt that bulged and strained at the buttons. Around his fat neck was a black tie, the collar of his shirt lay flat against the great slope of his neck and pushed rolls of skin up beneath his chin.

‘Sit down Tommo, let’s have a nice cup of tea!’ said Eileen.

Tommo looked at her distantly for a moment, and then took hold of the slim chair back with a hand as big as a baseball glove, pulled it out from the table and sat down.

‘Now then Tommo, how do you like your tea?’ Eileen asked brightly.

Tommo looked at her, then down at the teacup in front of him, then back to her again.

‘Tea,’ said Tommo.

‘White one sugar then, just like Barnaby,’ Eileen said firmly. She poured the tea and watched as Tommo reached for the little cup. It seemed tiny in his great hands. She looked at the scars on his arms and across his knuckles. The man in the brown coat told her that that was where his tattoos had been removed by lasers.

Even though he was so big, Eileen was quite surprised at how nimble he was. They spent a very pleasant afternoon winding up wool balls from the unravelled wool in her knitting bag. Tommo sat placidly with the wool looped around his massive fingers, whilst Eileen wound the balls and chatted away. At three o’clock they listened to a play on the radio. Tommo smiled at one of the funny bits, and Eileen felt very pleased. In the evening, Eileen made up a bed for Tommo in the spare room. She gave him a pair of Barnaby’s pyjamas, but they were far too small, and he ended up wearing Barnaby’s dressing gown instead. She didn’t have a toothbrush for him either, but Tommo washed his face very carefully. In her mind she made a shopping list of all the things that she would need for him, and found herself quite excited by thinking through all the details of it. It was nice to have someone to care for again. After Tommo had washed his face, he climbed onto the bed and lay down with his arms held stiffly by his sides.

‘Wouldn’t you be better under the sheets, Tommo?’ asked Eileen.

Tommo looked at her blankly.

‘The sheets. Look,’ said Eileen, and pulled the sheets away from mattress. Tommo held the edge of the sheet where it folded over the blanket and looked at it doubtfully. He stood up and Eileen pulled the sheets all the way off the mattress. Tommo lay down on the mattress, and Eileen found herself tucking him in. It made her feel strangely happy.

‘Sheets,’ said Tommo thoughtfully.

‘Yes. That’s better isn’t it?’ said Eileen and she almost kissed him on the forehead, but something stopped her. She went to the doorway.

‘Goodnight Tommo.’

‘Night.’

She switched off the light and Tommo sat bolt upright, the neatly tucked in sheets were torn from the mattress.

‘Light,’ said Tommo looking surprised, ‘always light.’

Eileen walked over to him and pushed him gently back down on to the bed and rearranged the sheets around him.

‘No, Tommo. At night, we turn the lights out.’

‘Lights out,’ Tommo said quietly, and then he smiled a smile of deep satisfaction and closed his eyes. Eileen kissed him once, very gently on the forehead, and closed the door quietly as she left the room.

In the days that followed Eileen found that Tommo was very useful around the house, and particularly successful in the garden. He was very strong and once she had set him to a particular task, he didn’t stop until she told him to. She was pleasantly surprised to find that as well as the heavy spadework, he was very gentle and very conscientious when he was weeding or planting out. Eileen took pleasure from her rapidly developing garden, but she was even happier when she was bringing Tommo his tea in the huge mug that she had bought specially for him, and a plate of ginger nuts. Tommo loved ginger nuts and would always empty the plate. She liked to watch him eating the biscuits, but had to be strict with herself not to spoil him. He was already big and she didn’t want him getting fatter.

One day when she brought his tea out to him he was weeding one of the beds that she had tried to dig over before he came and which was now covered in chickweed.

‘Ooh that awful stuff,’ said Eileen.

‘Stellaria media,’ nodded Tommo, and took a bite of his ginger nut.

Eileen looked at him, but said nothing. When she took the empty plate and mug back to the house, Eileen looked up chickweed in her Alan Titchmarsh book and found that its Latin name was Stellaria Media.

She didn’t know what to think about that.

Time seemed to pass by very quickly then, and before she knew it the summer had come. At the beginning of June, Eileen made a blackout blind for Tommo’s room, as the light evenings seemed to upset him. When it was properly dark in his room, he would always settle very quickly. He loved the darkness and fell asleep every night with a smile on his face.

One night, Eileen woke up suddenly, without knowing why. The square green numbers on Barnaby’s alarm clock told her that it had just gone three o’clock. She never woke up in the night. She got out of bed and pulled on her dressing gown. As she went out onto the landing she saw that the door to Tommo’s room was open. She went to the door and looked in. Tommo wasn’t there. She called for him, but there was no answer.

She went down the stairs, and looked into the living room. He wasn’t there either. Then she went into the kitchen and found him standing by the table. He was wearing his pyjama jacket, buttoned all the way up to his neck but his pyjama trousers were piled around his ankles, and his legs stood like two great white columns of marble in the bright moonlight that streamed through the kitchen window. Eileen saw that he was holding the big knife that she used for chopping onions. He was staring out of the window into the moon blue garden, just standing there.

She didn’t feel frightened, which surprised her. She realised that there was no part of her that believed that Tommo would hurt her.

‘Put the knife down Tommo.’

He did not move.

‘Tommo.’

There was a kind of stiffening in his face, as if some part of him had heard her, or almost heard her.

‘Put the knife down please, Tommo.’

He turned and looked at her with his ice blue eyes, like he was looking at her from very far away. Like the light from her had only just reached him, though she had been talking to him all this time.

‘Put the knife down on the table, Tommo,’ she said, using the firm but matter of fact voice that she used when she was telling him that there were no more ginger nuts.

He put the knife carefully on the table.

Eileen helped him to pull his pyjama trousers up, and then put him back to bed.

On the following Saturday, Eileen sat down with Tommo after supper to watch a documentary. It felt very cosy in the living room, just like when Barnaby was there, the two of them sitting quietly together. Eileen felt a great swell of contentment as she looked over at Tommo who was filling the armchair like it was a toy in a wendy house and he was an adult invited to a tea party. She liked the way his huge hands draped heavily over the plump curve of the arms of the chair, the way his fat fingers pushed with a gentle pressure into the flowery linen upholstery, locking him into place on the seat, as if he were preparing for it to suddenly accelerate, or catapult him through the ceiling. His quiet eyes flickered with the light of the screen as the documentary took them diving into sunny waters and across a coral reef, and made her think that perhaps there was thought there within him.

‘Fish,’ said Tommo, with a strange sort of smile that she had never seen before.

‘Do you like fish?’ she asked.

Tommo nodded slowly.

‘Fish swim,’ he said.

Eileen felt a tremendous pride swelling up within her. It was the longest conversation they had ever had. After the documentary, Eileen switched over to Match of the Day and made them both a cup of tea. Tommo had never shown any interest in football, but she thought that that was the right thing for the man of the house to be watching on Saturday night. Barnaby had always watched it, even though he didn’t support anyone in particular. At some point during the program Tommo must have nodded off, because when the closing credits ran, Eileen looked over to him and saw that he was fast asleep. Eileen shook her head and smiled at him. He was far too heavy to move and he looked so peaceful that she decided to leave him where he was. Let him sleep, she thought, let him rest. She tried to take the teacup from his hand, but his fingers were coiled so tightly around it that she could not move the cup at all.

He was sitting. Awake. He had been woken by the noise of breaking. He looked at his hand and saw the blood there where he had crushed the teacup in his sleep. Saw the blood. Remembered.

The fish. Swimming. He was swimming when he was.

On the way.

Where?

They were.

They were.

They were his friends.

Sergeant Vince laughing.

In the jeep.

In the hot dust, driving away from the plane.

Sergeant Vince.

Sergeant Vince said ‘Ashley is a girl’s name’.

‘People call me AJ.’

AJ.

AJ.

‘Sounds like a fucking grid reference.’

Sergeant Vince laughing.

Sergeant Vince.

Sergeant Vince looking at his name tag.

Sergeant Vince said, ‘What does the T stand for?’

What T?

It was not a cup of tea. The cup of tea is broken. One sharp piece in his hand.

‘Thomas.’

‘Tommo. That’ll do. The lads should be able to remember that.’

Sergeant Vince laughing.

Sergeant Vince.

Tommo liked Sergeant Vince.

It was not Sergeant Vince’s fault, the thing. The memory thing. The thing he had in him. Sergeant Vince died before that. Because of that.

The fire in the school.

The fire from the sky.

The soldiers – the noises and the silence. And the big diggers, digging big holes. Such a big thing to remember – Tommo does not know if he can, but he knows that he must try. He saw it all once. Sees that it is not there anymore now. Not inside his head. But it is inside him.

Inside him.

Sergeant Vince laughing.

‘First thing is the pre-treatment injections for exposure to nerve agents and then we’ll fit you with a blogtag. Save you some money on notebooks anyway.’

Sergeant Vince laughing.

Inside him.

Where?

His friends are waiting for him. They will be pleased to see him. Tommo did not like the place where it was light all the time. It is inside him, the memory. When he had the knife he knew where. It was lower than his head – higher than his feet.

His legs.

His leg.

Tommo remembers now – the pain when it went in, takes the broken edge of the teacup and cuts, cuts right through the neatly pressed polycotton slacks, through the prison pale skin and into the glistening bubbles of subcutaneous fat. Cuts down, straight down, halfway to the bone. He can feel his mind working now, working right, all that is left of it. He draws the teacup shard backwards in a single strong stroke, making the cut longer, he needs room to work with his fat fingers, sees the dark patch on his trousers growing wider. He wants to stop to watch it grow, but knows that now he must.

Now he must.

Reaches deep into the wound and pulls it out, holds it safe in his massive hand. That is all he had to do. All. There is nothing more to think about. He looks at his trousers. There is one dark leg, one beige leg. The dark is in the yellow of the flowers of the armchair as well. On the cream of the carpet it looks red and he realises that he has been tired for a very long time. Holds the memory safe in his hand for Eileen.

He knows that Eileen is nice. He likes Eileen. Eileen is his friend. His friends are waiting for him.

Waiting for him to tell them all he knows.