Falling Apart

by Jane Lovering

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  ‘Jess?’

  I jerked upright and tried to pretend that I’d been looking for something under my desk. ‘Urgh? Oh, morning, Liam.’

  ‘You were asleep, weren’t you?’

  ‘No, no, I was just …’

  ‘Licking the desk? You’ve got dribble round your mouth.’ He hung up his jacket and came over to collect the mugs. ‘Okay, so what occasioned today’s early-morning start? Has Zan finally thrown you out of the House of Doom for leaving molecules scattered around?’

  ‘I was googling.’

  A sceptical eyebrow raised. ‘Okay, and Zan has outlawed the use of all search engines under his roof? No, it’s fine, Jessie, if you’d rather be here than anywhere else … I understand. I mean, I don’t, because, let’s face it, this place is only one step away from being a teenager’s bedroom.’ He looked around at the half-open filing cabinets with corners poking out like extras in a stationery-based Beau Geste film, and the dark orbits of long-dead mugs of coffee on the desks. ‘Irresistible. If you’re fifteen. You can’t even see fifteen in the rear-view mirror, so what makes you want to hang around here in the depths of the night, and don’t say work because … seriously?’ He looked into the depths of my mug. ‘You didn’t even make coffee, and if you’ve learned to work without the stuff then I think you’ve moved up the ladder on the twelve-step programme. You probably get a badge.’

  ‘If I learn to work without coffee, you are out of a job.’ I rubbed the back of my hand across my eyes, trying to smear away sleep. ‘No, I woke up early and thought I’d come in. It’s better than trying to eat toast with Zan lurking behind the teapot. All that stalking around – seriously, would it kill him to slouch once in a while? He’s like Death without the personal touch. So I came here. I was going to do something useful but …’ I propped my elbows on the desk and rested my chin in my hands. ‘I couldn’t think of anything.’

  ‘Figures.’ Pointedly Liam took a letter off my desk, glanced at it, pulled open a filing drawer and slid the paper inside. ‘You put the filing fairies off their nightly chores.’

  ‘You are one small step away from mincing, Liam. I tell you this for your own good, obviously. Just go and do what you’re best at, don’t hold back on the biscuits, and then come back in here. I need someone to think at.’

  He hesitated and, just for a second, I saw an expression cross his face that I didn’t think I’d ever seen there before. It tightened his eyes like fear. ‘Jess …’ His voice was similarly unfamiliar. ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘It’s not to declare undying love, is it?’ His strange manner and odd body language made me flippant. ‘Because I’ve told you before, I couldn’t take the shame of being associated with a man who buys second-hand cybermen suits, I mean, think of the sweat!’

  Liam still hadn’t moved. ‘I had a phone call. From Head Office.’

  ‘Seriously? Head Office think you’re five! They think you came in on a Bring a Schoolchild To Work day and just never left. Why would they ring you, unless it’s to try to source illegal Pokémon cards?’ His lack of movement was making me nervous now. Liam knew his main duty was to make me coffee and keep the paperwork from sliding down the stairs and onto the street, and his reluctance to carry this out was worrying.

  The slam as Liam hit the desk made me jump. ‘No! Stop it!’ He used his fist, punching at the flimsy MDF in a way guaranteed to make the whole office rock. ‘Jessica. This is serious.’

  ‘It must be,’ I said, staring at him. ‘You haven’t been this butch since Sarah did the pregnancy test.’

  ‘Stop it!’ To my surprise, and slight horror, Liam moved away from his desk and stood in front of mine, hands bunched almost as though he wanted to hit me as hard as he’d hit the furniture. ‘You’re always doing this, treating me as though I’m some kind of idiot foil for your brains … and I’m not, Jess. Seriously, I’m not.’ His voice rose to something nearer a shout, and he scattered the paperwork off the surface of my desk with the side of his hand so that he could lean over towards me.

  ‘Liam, I …’ This was slightly scary. A bit like being attacked by a tea-cosy.

  ‘No. Shut up for once and listen to me.’ His breathing was quick, his shoulders hunching up as though the words he had to say were heavy and weighing on him. ‘Head Office want me to take over from you. They think you’ve been compromised by Sil and Zan; that Sil going rogue has affected your ability to do your job, so they’ve approached me with a view to getting you to step down.’

  Half of me wanted to laugh, a little hysterically perhaps, but still … the image of Liam out on the streets with a tranq gun was so incongruous that it made my lips twitch. But the other half of me felt a cold, creeping dread. ‘They’re going to fire me?’

  A brief nod.

  ‘And you’re going to take over?’

  ‘Thinking about it. I want … I need to be getting on.’ And now his voice was a little more normal, nearer to the Liam I relied on. ‘Sarah … she’s getting sick of me being dragged out of bed or away when I’ve promised I’ll be home; she …’ A quick shake of his head, as though to dismiss painful conversations. ‘I could lose them, Jess. Sarah and Charlotte. They’ll go if I don’t start getting regular hours, some actual money and fewer phone calls in the middle of the night.’ His tone was sad. ‘And I’m not prepared to throw it all away. Much as I … you and me, what we’ve got here, it’s great and I … you’re great. But Sarah is mine and I love her and my daughter, and I will do anything I can to keep us together. Do you understand?’

  Now it all made sense. Liam’s tension, the half-heard muttered conversations during the late phone calls. I’d dragged him into this, a world of uncertainty and low-paid stress, and I hadn’t even noticed what was happening to him. Zan’s words about my only needing people when I was using them came back to me, with a little twinge of guilt. Now, with what I felt for Sil … I’d do anything, was doing anything, to keep him safe, and Liam just wanted the same for himself. How could I deny him that? But if I was no longer employed at Liaison, then how could I use the system, my network, to help Sil? ‘How long have I got? Before they throw me out?’ I tried not to look at him, remorse was needling at me, just underneath my heart.

  ‘I haven’t given them an answer yet. Well, unless you count whooping down the phone, but they want that in writing.’ Liam sounded a little bit sheepish now. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I don’t want you kicked out, but I need … I have to think of the future. And a future without my daughter, without Charlotte and Sarah, well, it’s not the future I want.’

  ‘You’d do it? You’d seriously do my job?’

  A tentative grin lightened those strained eyes a bit. ‘I don’t really want … Well, it is mostly drinking coffee, eating Kit Kats and swearing, and I think I’ve got a handle on all those.’ The smile became sad. ‘I told them I needed a few days to think about it. So I guess you’ve got that long. They don’t want the office unmanned, and I’m pretty sure they’re not going to go to some temp agency to try and find someone willing to get eaten by werewolves in the line of duty, so …’

  ‘So I stay here until you decide to tell them you’ll take over.’

  Liam leaned in closer. There were small lines of tension creasing the sides of his mouth and his eyes were shadowed. I knew that this whole conversation had cost him dearly, and that he knew our relationship would never be the same again after this. Our easy ‘boss and sidekick’ roles were gone, blown out for an uncertain future and my palms were clammy at the emptiness that lay ahead. ‘I can hold off until you sort something for Sil,’ he almost whispered. ‘When we know he’s safe … then maybe you can negotiate with the council, get posted somewhere else? Maybe go work for Laurie across the river.’

  I suddenly felt tired. As though my sleepless night had rebounded and hit me in the back of the head. ‘I don�
��t have much choice, do I?’

  He reached out. Took my hand where it lay limply on my desk and gripped it. ‘I don’t want to do this to you. Seriously, I don’t. Liaison isn’t me: I’m born to be a second in command, and I’m never happier than when I’m hiding the emergency biscuits from you – gods, woman, you’ve got a nose like a bloodhound for HobNobs – and I love being your backroom guy. But I need … I need more. More money, more resources, better tech, shorter hours …’

  ‘That’s less, then.’

  ‘A proper contract. Health and Safety protocols, an R&D budget, overtime that isn’t paid in garden centre vouchers, overtime that’s paid at all, actually. All that. A real job. And this’—the hand not holding mine waved to take in the concentrated chaos of our office—‘is not a real job.’

  But it’s all I’ve got, I wanted to say. But didn’t. ‘Okay then,’ I said with a careful confidence I didn’t feel. ‘We both want to get the Sil business sorted as fast as possible. You so that you can get this place arranged and colour-coded, and me so that I can … well. Whatever.’

  ‘Jess …’

  I shook my head. Business as usual, at least for now. ‘Until then, I am still your boss and I rather think that I need coffee more at this minute than I have ever done before. Unless you’re going to come over all Bond Villain on me; although I think I actually still have the power to fire you, which could cause an interesting case of recursion to ripple through Head Office. If I fire my replacement before he even becomes my replacement, well, we all might disappear up some anomaly … any chance of a coffee?’

  Liam gave me a mild raised eyebrow. ‘Of course. And then you said you wanted to think at me?’

  When he reappeared, two mugs braced out in front of him, like the world’s most domestic knuckleduster, I said. ‘I need to go up to the farm. I think I need to talk to Sil again.’

  A coaster appeared to cushion my paperwork from the mug. ‘Not such a great idea, Jess. The more often you go up there, the more likely it is that Zan will get suspicious. Actually, no, he’s already suspicious, got to be, with a walk like that. But, seriously, can’t you just phone?’

  ‘He doesn’t have his mobile and he wouldn’t answer the house phone.’ I took my first, life-saving, mouthful of coffee. ‘Besides, I might need to …’ I wasn’t even aware that I’d done it, but my finger must have touched the now-healed bite under my shirt, because Liam slammed his mug down on his desk.

  ‘No. No. Not again. I’ve still got the bruises from last time.’

  ‘Well, obviously, let’s get our priorities right here.’

  ‘You can’t keep giving him blood every time he gets a bit forgetful! What’s going to happen if he goes senile – you walk around next to him like a human Snack Bucket?’

  ‘This isn’t a bit forgetful, Liam, it’s something that’s been done to him that my blood can partially reverse, even if only temporarily. And we need to know more.’

  Liam picked up his mug and stared into it, shaking his head again. ‘Crazy. It’s all getting political here; I never signed up for political. I signed up for making the world a better place, equality and fraternity and not staking blokes just because they’re wearing eyeliner! Not some deep shit in London with non-existent birth certificates and your boyfriend getting a death sentence. This is way, way beyond my brief.’

  ‘Well, it won’t be worrying you for much longer, will it?’ I hadn’t meant to sound quite so sarcastic and tried to mitigate my words. ‘Once this place is all yours you can make the job as unpolitical as you like, can’t you?’

  Dark eyebrows flicked at me over his mug. ‘I might complain about them, but one thing I do know about politics is that they generate a phenomenal amount of paperwork. Best bit of the job, paperwork.’

  ‘And, incidentally, great for starting fires.’ My gaze went back to my computer screen and an itchy little ache set up between my heart and my lungs. ‘Something is wrong.’

  ‘With Sil?’

  ‘With this whole thing. Sil went to London to look for records relating to my mother, okay, so far, fine. Next thing he knows he’s shot; then he wakes up starving and … well, his demon took over.’

  ‘Yes,’ Liam said gently. ‘I know. I was there when he told you.’

  ‘Right.’ Then, aware that hadn’t sounded very butch. ‘Right! Get on that machine and find whatever census result it was that Sil got up. We might as well be working from the same parameters. Oh, and keep that security level up high; we don’t want Zan hacking in and finding out what we’re doing.’

  ‘Bloody hell, when did you come over all MI5?’ Liam said.

  ‘And I am going up to the farm. It’s all right, I’ll take a cover story in case Zan is watching. Can I borrow your car?’

  ‘Don’t let him bite. Not without someone else there. I saw him the other day and he wasn’t in control, not really. If I hadn’t hit him …’ Liam clenched his fist reflexively. ‘Well, anything could have happened.’

  ‘I have to trust him.’ Ignoring my body’s screams for a good night’s sleep in a proper bed, I pulled on my jacket. ‘Because otherwise there’s nothing between us.’

  ‘Well, all right.’ His keys, with the flashing TARDIS keyring, flew across the desk. ‘But take care, kemo sabe.’

  ‘I’ve always thought of you more as Robin to my Batman. Only without you in tights, obviously, because, ugh.’

  ‘Just go.’

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  My cover story involved going via my parents’ neighbours and picking up the old Labrador they’d been minding. All right, as cover stories went it was fairly flimsy. I mean, what was I going to say, that the dog had to pop home to pick up the post? But it was all I had, and Gem was pleased to see me, at least. He leaned against me from the passenger seat all the way up the lane in a lovely familiar way.

  ‘Sil?’ I pushed open the front door and the dog waddled past me towards the kitchen, in an ever-hopeful search for dropped food. ‘Where are you?’

  Silence. But he knew I was here. I could feel it, somehow, like an expectant pulling near my navel, as though we were being zipped together slowly. And then I saw him, standing on the staircase. Dark. Shadowed.

  ‘Jess.’

  Even his tone was dark and, for a second, I wondered if Liam had talked to him, told him that the job I’d done since I was eighteen, the only job I’d ever had (if you didn’t count being a very bad waitress or helping at a Pony Club rally) and the only one I was qualified to do, was being taken away from me because of him. But the deepness of his eyes held words his mouth didn’t seem to want to say, and being fired by York Council was more of an ‘Oh well, there’s always McDonald’s’ occasion. ‘What is it? Sil?’

  He came down two more stairs but still stood above me. ‘I’ve … there are things.’ Still dark. Still shadowed. His slashed hair left his bone structure bare, made his eyes look bigger and his mouth less friendly. ‘I know it was wrong but I thought … I am sorry.’ He was holding something out to me, a blue folder of the kind that Liam insisted we should use to keep call-out records in. I thought Post-its and the odd paperclip were perfectly sufficient. ‘But it is important.’

  The tiredness was back, now accompanied by a black Labrador licking my ankle. ‘Can we just pretend it isn’t?’ I said. ‘Please, just for a few minutes can we imagine that none of this is happening?’ My hands came up and covered my face; I could feel the welling heat of tears trying to break out from my chest. ‘I’ve already had as much as I can handle for one day.’

  The folder was withdrawn and Sil descended the final stairs. ‘This is not going away,’ he said softly. ‘And this may be no time to weaken.’

  ‘This isn’t weakening.’ I squeezed the words out between my teeth, trying not to let any tears go with them. ‘It’s lack of sleep; it’s losing my job; worry about stopping zombies
getting torched; having to contend with your, quite frankly, weird boss stalking around outside my bedroom at all hours; and it’s …’ I lost my battle and a few uncorralled drops fell from my eyes. ‘It’s just everything.’

  Sil took my hand and pulled it away from its attempts to prevent emotion leaking out. ‘Come,’ he said softly. ‘Sit with me. Time is not important at this moment.’ One hand guided my shoulders into the living room and over to the couch.

  I sat down next to him, feeling my skin prickle at having him close, the firm press of his body against mine and his scent in my nostrils. There was a comfort to it, like coming home after a long journey to a cup of tea and warm slippers, and I snaked my fingers through his as we rested our heads against the sofa, eyes closed.

  ‘How’s the zombie thing coming along?’ he asked, eyes still closed, fingers still cupped against mine.

  ‘It’s … well, they’ve made a start. Actually, I pity anyone who takes on a unionised zombie. They’ve got the chanting down now, even if it is something like “What do we want? Equality! When do we want it? Whenever is convenient for you!”’

  ‘That’s good.’ A pause. ‘Liam sent me a message about Liaison.’

  ‘Ah.’ I didn’t have the energy to open my eyes, but I knew he was looking at my face. ‘Okay.’

  ‘This is my fault. All of it. If I hadn’t …’ A sigh. ‘If only I had known …’

  A chilly, damp pressure on my cheek made me open my eyes, to see the dog had put two front paws onto the sofa arm and was staring into my face with a slightly accusatory look on his saggy old jowls. I hauled myself to my feet, disengaging my hand from Sil’s. ‘We need help, Sil. This is beyond me; hell, it’s even beyond Liam, and he’s practically beyond in his own right. I think we should tell Zan.’

  Sil’s eyes snapped open. ‘He’ll turn me over to Enforcement.’