Rob was quick to recover. He kicked out at Gwen, reaching for the mallet which had gone flying in the scuffle. His foot caught her on the hip, which was sore already from her attempts to break down the door, but she clenched her teeth against the pain and fought to stay close. The last thing she wanted was to give him the space to use his weapon.
Rob grabbed the taped shaft of the mallet, but reaching out had left him open to attack. Gwen utilised every ounce of combat training, following the cardinal rule of punch-ups: there's no such thing as a fair fight. She thumped him hard in the groin and, while he was curling into a ball, got one hand on the mallet. Her other hand found the back of his head, grinding his face into the carpet.
She pushed herself to her feet, yanking the mallet out of his hands and was about to hit him with it when a hand dropped onto her shoulder.
'Don't,' said Jack. 'It's not his fault.'
'OK,' said Alexander. They were now standing on the gravel forecourt of Jackson Leaves. 'That didn't kill us, then. How wonderful.'
'Time to build sandcastles?' asked Joe.
'Maybe later, my boy,' Alexander replied. 'Let's see if any of Jack's lot want to come out to play first, eh?'
Jack unlocked the dining room door to find Ianto standing there with his arms folded.
'When you've all finished being heroic in my absence,' he said, 'I'd quite like to have a go myself.'
'You can start by figuring a way out of the house, then,' said Jack.
'Oh,' Ianto wandered into the hall. 'That hardly seems fair… All Gwen had to do was beat up a workman.'
There was a knock on the door. Ianto turned to look at Gwen and Jack.
'Don't ask me,' said Jack.
Ianto opened the door, and a young man barged past him with Alexander on his back.
'Hello there,' the old man smiled. 'Did someone order a genius?'
TWENTY-ONE
'It's not his fault,' someone said, and Rob Wallace had to agree.
Opening his eyes, he was surprised to find himself back in his and Julia's old flat, cluttered but familiar, the place they had always lived together. Perhaps he had dreamed Jackson Leaves? It certainly felt like it. Pounding walls and ghostly visions… not the sort of thing that happened in a real house. Houses were normally pretty reliable places: bricks and mortar, mortgages and electricity bills.
He was thirsty. Stepping into the little open-plan kitchen, he ran his fingers over the jumble of magnets and notes on the fridge door. These were the things of proper houses, he thought, reassuring and colourful, postcards from Spanish beaches, shopping lists filled with loaves of bread and bottles of milk. Julia had bought one of those random 'build-a-poem' magnet sets, a jumble of words that you shuffled around to make new verse. He read her last effort: 'Wander out into the sky/ Ask your self the reason why/ Clouds that love are full to burst/ Open mouth and feel their thirst.' Rob smiled. It wasn't exactly Pam Ayres, but at least it rhymed. He pushed the words 'your' and 'self' closer together, trying to fix her grammar, but the gap remained obvious. He supposed it should be allowed.
He closed his eyes and shuffled the words around with his fingers, lining some up to form a random sentence.
He opened his eyes and read what he had made: 'Burst your love feel the sky and thirst.' Very poetic. He closed his eyes again and started dragging other words in from the cool white page of the fridge door: 'Show her no tears From a man who know His fears are real His death will show.' A lucky rhyme, but it was getting rather morbid…
He closed his eyes and shuffled them again. 'Show her a man who love death and tears / Burst the sky and know real fears.' No… he didn't like that game any more. The words kept making him feel as if there was a message in them, something he didn't want to know.
He opened the fridge, and looked for something cool to drink. There was a bottle of fizzy water, Julia's favourite. To him it tasted like pop with the fun taken out, but he was thirsty enough to drink anything, unscrewing the cap and drinking straight from the bottle. There was a bad smell in the fridge, something rotting. He had a poke around but couldn't find anything obviously mouldy, just a lot of different meats, damp and pink, perfectly fresh.
He closed the door and found himself feeling terribly lost in the middle of the kitchen. A ridiculous feeling in such a small space, but at that point he felt smaller. Felt, in fact, as small as one could be, stranded on the cheap black-and-white floor tiles as appliances towered over him — the jagged kettle, the sheer, silver austerity of the toaster, the towering black glass of the oven. He found his breath catch in his chest and reached for the radio, desperate to break the atmosphere with noise. He was momentarily certain that the cooking knives would eviscerate him for such a move, chop away his naughty fingers into little pink rings, but they stayed happily embedded in their wooden block, and the radio hissed into life as he turned the dial.
'Tie him up with that,' said an American voice.
'Tightly,' a woman added.
There was the screeching sound of heavy-duty tape being yanked from the roll.
Some sort of drama, perhaps? Or an advert? He wasn't sure what the sounds of a man being bound would entice him to buy. He tried changing the channel, but there was nothing else but static so he turned it back. He would have preferred music, but this was better than nothing.'
Julia's out of it,' the woman was saying. 'Someone will have to carry her.'
Where is Julia? Rob wondered, reminded of his wife by the characters in this strange programme — she always complained that Julia was such a common name, you heard it everywhere. He'd gone online to look up the name's origin; it was the feminine form of 'Julius' which meant 'man with downy beard'. He'd pulled her leg about that for weeks.
'OK!' the American on the radio shouted. 'Thanks to Alexander, we have a way out and all of you need to take it, now.
''Oh, shut up, you big bully.' Rob muttered, turning off the radio.
The silence was still uncomfortable, so he made his way out of the kitchen and across their little lounge to the television. There had to be something cheerful and breezy on, something to take the edge off his stupid nerves. At first he could find nothing but static, ghost images, half-shapes and jagged lines. Then, flipping through the channels, he found a picture: people all sat in a roadside café, an old woman talking to a soldier — at least Rob assumed he was a soldier, he was wearing an old uniform, certainly, though clearly he wasn't on duty as his collar was open. At the table next to them, a woman was dripping water all over the table and floor. Ridiculous. Perhaps it was supposed to be a comedy?
The camera moved to a close-up of the old woman, and Rob banged the side of the television, trying to improve the reception. The poor signal made it look like there were things crawling under her skin.
'That's it, Rob,' the old woman said, making him dart back from the screen. 'Hit me.'
Rob stabbed at the remote control with his index finger, desperate to flush the woman from the screen.
'No,' she whispered. 'Not like that… like this!'
She swung her arm, and Rob felt the sting on his cheek as if he had been struck.'
How did you-?'
She hit him again, his cheek glowing hot with it.
The radio suddenly crackled back to life.'
He's completely out of it,' said the voice of the woman he had heard before in the advert about tape.'
I'm not…' he said. 'At least, I don't think I am…''
You could have fooled us,' said the old woman on his television. 'Dead from the neck up… Isn't that what you are?'
He felt his cheeks turn cold and a pressure building in his sinuses.'