‘Here we are,’ Ianto said, stopping by a stack of metal, bolt-together shelving. ‘Shelf eight, box thirteen.’ He indicated a box at eye leveclass="underline" an ordinary plastic box — more of a crate, in fact — institutional grey in colour, half a metre along each edge.
There was nothing written on the box, apart from what looked to Toshiko like a random string of alphanumeric characters. She couldn’t work out how Ianto had got to the right box so quickly. In fact, she couldn’t work out how he had even got to the right chamber, given that there was no way of telling them apart. She gave him a sceptical look.
‘I have a system,’ he said, affronted.
Together they pulled the box off the shelf and lowered it gently to the floor. It was about the weight of a portable TV. Funny, she thought, how they kept comparing alien devices to ordinary things, like iPods and portable TVs, as if they were just different examples of the same thing. But they weren’t. They really weren’t.
The box was sealed with tape. Ianto ran his thumbnail around the edge of the lid, splitting the tape in two.
‘Do you need me for anything else?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Thanks for helping me find the stuff. I might have been down here for days looking for it, otherwise.’
‘Helpfulness is my middle name.’ He looked down the tunnel, towards where Toshiko had seen him earlier on. ‘If there’s ever anything else you need down here, let me know. I can find it for you much quicker than you can find it yourself.’ And with that he walked off, back towards the Hub, walking fast and not looking backwards.
Dismissing Ianto from her mind, Toshiko reached down and pulled the lid off the box.
Afterwards, when all passion was temporarily spent, when they were lying with Gwen diagonally across Rhys’s chest and with his hand cupping the heaviness of her breast, with the sweat and the moistness of their bodies cooling on their skin, the silence between them was the silence of lovers who didn’t have to say anything, not lovers who couldn’t think of anything to say. Gwen had climaxed twice: once quietly, biting her lip, while Rhys touched her with insistent gentleness, and once again gasping, hips raised, while Rhys moved deeply within her. Rhys had climaxed once, crying out like a man who had just run into a brick wall, the sweat trickling down his face and dripping onto Gwen’s shoulder blades. Now they lay there, on the same bed where they had made love so many times before, trying to incorporate this latest time into the story of their lives.
‘That was incredible,’ Rhys said. He was still breathing heavily. ‘You were incredible.’
‘You weren’t too shabby yourself.’
‘Don’t expect me to recover any time this week. You’ve used me up.’
‘I could go again. Just give me a few minutes.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s no good. I’m finished. You go on without me.’
Gwen laughed quietly beside him, her breast moving gently in his hand in time with her laughter. He felt himself stir. Perhaps he could manage one more time. Once he’d caught his breath. And had a piss.
‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ he said. ‘I’m exhausted. Drained. I need vitamin pills. Lots of vitamin pills. In fact, I may just try to dissolve as many of them as I can in a glass of water and drink it.’
Gwen giggled, and rolled off him. He rolled in turn to the edge of the bed and stood up. His clothes were strewn across the floor. Responding to a half-formed thought provoked by the mention of pills, Rhys reached down and burrowed in his pocket for a moment. There, wrapped in a piece of tissue paper, was the blister pack that he had been given by Doctor Scotus that afternoon. Closing his fingers around the pills, he looked down at himself, at the curve of his stomach, at the way his thighs flattened out against the mattress. Gwen still loved him, but if he wanted to show her that he loved her then he needed to do something dramatic. He needed to lose that weight.
Padding to the bathroom, he was already pushing the ‘Start’ pill from its blister as the door was closing behind him. The pill was larger than he had realised, spherical and a mottled yellow. He popped it into his mouth and swallowed. The pill stuck in his throat for a moment, as if fighting to get out, then a wash of saliva carried it down.
As he returned to the bedroom, the night air cold against his naked skin, thoughts of the pill led Rhys to think about the Scotus Clinic, and that in turn led him to think about Lucy, who had given him the Clinic’s address. His brain wasn’t editing his thoughts properly: he was feeling tired, in a good way, and still turned on. That’s why he suddenly said: ‘So have you thought any more about Lucy coming to live here?’ He listened to the words coming out of his mouth with horrified fascination, knowing exactly what kind of reaction they would provoke but unable to call the words back. ‘Just for a while,’ he added, weakly.
Gwen’s head popped up from the tangle of sheets on the bed. ‘If that’s a joke,’ she said, ‘it’s in really poor taste. What’s the matter — one woman in bed not enough for you?’
The candle back in the dining room was flickering a deep crimson, casting dancing shadows across the hall and around the bedroom, illuminating Gwen’s incredible breasts with a bloody wash of colour. Although part of Rhys’s mind knew that he’d stepped into a minefield and he ought to back out rapidly, by far the greater part felt a sudden and brutal surge of anger, a dark wave that washed over him, knocking rationality off its feet and leaving something older and nastier behind. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he snapped. ‘She’s just a friend. Do you want me to write it down for you to make it easier to understand? Or shall I just text you the details, since you seem to pay more attention to whatever appears on your mobile than anything I say?’
The light from across the hall was flickering faster and faster, casting Gwen’s ribcage into stark and ugly relief. ‘Fuck you if you can’t understand that I don’t want another woman in my flat. And fuck you if you can’t handle the fact that I have an important job. I guess simpering Lucy the simple secretary is more your type!’
Gwen sprang to her feet and jumped off the bed, clutching the bed-sheet to her chest. For a moment, Rhys thought she was going to push him out of the bedroom, but instead she sprinted past him and into the hall. The door slammed shut behind her, but not before he had seen, in the insane pulsating light, the expression on Gwen’s face.
And beneath the rage, which he had been expecting, which he was feeling, there was something else.
There was horror.
Nestled together inside the storage crate were a collection of rounded objects, each about the size of a small piece of fruit. No two were identical, but they were all alike, and they were all similar to the object that was currently sitting on her workbench. It wasn’t easy to tell, in the orange light that drizzled down from the overhead lamps, but their colours seemed to run the gamut from aquamarine to rose: nothing too bright or too dark, all pastels, all colours that would look good in a nice restaurant or bar. Relaxing colours. Their surfaces were blistered, but the blistering looked as if it was part of the design, not the result of extreme heat or extreme cold. The blisters were all the same size and the same distance apart, and they formed bands, or ribbons, around the objects, with areas of plain material — some kind of ceramic, she thought — between them. They looked to Toshiko like controls of some kind.
Each object was different in shape from its brethren. Some were long and thin, some were short and squat, and some consisted of globules all massed together.
There was a sheet of paper in the box. It had slipped down between the objects and the box wall. She fished it out. For a moment she thought it had been printed in an old-fashioned typeface, then she noticed that the paper was yellow and stiff, rumpled slightly by dry conditions in the way that old newspaper often got. The typeface was literally that — the note had been typed. By hand. On a typewriter.