‘Don’tyouhave work to do?’ I replied. ‘I’ve heard it’s busy on your floor.’
‘I do,’ Ruth admitted, not missing a beat. ‘But it’s probably just me editing old golden boy’s articles again or Sam pestering me to go drinking with him this evening no matter how many times I tell him we’ve got my pre-birthday meal, hence why I have come to disturb the sanctity of IT.’
I laughed as Ruth started fiddling with the things on my desk, deliberately, because she knew it annoyed me.
‘What’s the word of the day?’ she asked.
‘Wabi-sabi,’ I replied, just about being able to recall reading it this morning when I flicked it over on the ‘word of the day’ calendar I kept in my bathroom while brushing my teeth with a toothbrush that was as flat as a dab. What an absolutely horrendous Secret Santa gift. As a journalist, however, Ruth always had an interest in expanding her vocabulary.
‘Wasabi?’ Ruth frowned, half convinced I’d mispronounced it.
‘No, no,wabi-sabi. It’s Japanese.’
‘Meaning?’ she asked, now pulling open my drawer and stealing one of the biscuits I kept for when my blood sugar crashed.
‘I can’t remember exactly,’ I admitted, twisting my hands around my head as if that might somehow coax the word’s meaning out of my skull. ‘But it’s the idea of accepting imperfections, accepting that nothing lasts forever, that things are impermanent and incomplete and finding some kind of beauty in that.’
‘Weird,’ Ruth said, crunching noisily on my biscuit. ‘I don’t get it.’
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my superior eyeing Ruth with that look I knew all too well. So, with a widening of my eyes that clearly meant ‘take me seriously’, I began to shoo Ruth away.
‘I’ll see you downstairs later, okay?’ I said with a laugh. ‘Now get out of here.’
I couldn’t afford to get in trouble again for chatting with Ruth. People already knew we were glued at the hip and not always, strictly speaking, professional with our interactions. I loved Ruth, she was the kindest person I knew, but she could sometimes get too wrapped up in herself. There was so much I tried to tell her, but it always felt as though she had a habit of drifting into her own daydreams, lost in her own head every time I tried to speak to her about something of significance. Part of me wondered how Ben was with her; I’d noticed him acting strangely of late when I was round, cagier and more introverted, but I hadn’t dared bring it up just in case I was imagining things.
I think when it comes down to it, more than anything, I just wanted Ruth to be brave. She lived her life so cautiously, so carefully, she very rarely ever took a risk or stood up for herself. It was hard to be friends with someone who lived life so extraordinarily safely.
As I sorted through the various IT tickets being raised, I glanced over the TellTale Killer’s note that the paper had published on the website one more time. That was when it struck me, how I recognised it. As I read, I could almost feel the connections forming in my mind, like pieces of a jigsaw slotting into place. Was it really what I thought it was?
I quietly made a note, pulled Obama out of my draw and slipped it within his thick, well-articulated pages, and trying to avoid the watchful eyes of my superior, began a small little piece of investigative journalism of my own.
THIRTEEN
PRESENT DAY
Ruth
I was coming to the abrupt realisation that I would quite like to visit Australia if I ever got the chance. I had first considered it when I was a postgrad for a little while, blissfully wondering if I could swap the UK’s consistently wet, rainy climate for something that felt at least a little bit more exotic. But then I remembered: the trade-off would likely include spiders the size of dinner plates and snakes that would lurk in the pipes of your toilet, and that was a bit of a dealbreaker for me. I didn’t want to be subjected to a surprise nibble in the middle of the night while trying to have a wee.
It was probably in poor taste that staring at Justin’s collapsing cadaver is what brought the idea of a visit to Oz back to the forefront of mind. But it wasn’t my fault that if you squinted hard enough; his sagging, misshapen chest now almost resembled the Sydney Opera House. The jagged contours of his defined ribcage reassembling the iconic white sails of the landmark, their sharp points jutting upwards into the thin flesh. I know that’s an utterly revolting thing to think – I’m sure you’re scrunching your nose up right now or your facial muscles have shifted into something reassembling disgust – but I was just trying to findsome semblance of a silver lining in a situation where I was, quite clearly, well and truly fucked.
Operation: Hearts and Crafts had now hit a small speed bump, an unfolding crisis I would now refer to as ‘Chestgate’.
I must have made an absolute hash of extracting the heart. Rigor mortis hadn’t exactly made things more stable internally nor had his little joy ride in the back of the hearse, but still, how incompetent could I have been for the man’s chest to literally collapse in on itself during his own funeral? Perhaps the fact I was rushing during the extraction and then distracted by Uncle Phil’s phone call had meant that I had made some critical mistake while I was rummaging around in there. Maybe I had damaged his ribcage or accidentally shuffled around some organs that led to the implosion of his chest cavity. Whatever had happened, I was really hoping that they wouldn’t be able to trace it back to me. It’s not like the mass of kitchen towel in him was printed with tiny idents of my name on it or anything.
Uncle Phil was outside the hall, pacing up and down the street with his head in his hands, guzzling every Capri-Sun he could get his hands on. Every so often, he would solemnly mutter, ‘I’m finished,’ to himself under his breath. Meanwhile, Clive couldn’t stop throwing up on the foot of an old oak tree, and Eddie was rubbing his pal’s back affectionately. Meanwhile, I sat on one of those dreadful, cheap plastic chairs you’d find in a primary school classroom, which made sense as I heard the hall functioned as a hub for the guides and brownies on a Thursday. I watched the chaos unfolding before my eyes; a small squadron of police officers and forensic scientists were darting in and out of the hall while trying to keep the increasing number of bystanders at bay. I’d been trying to eavesdrop on their whispered theories about what had happened, but I hadn’t had much luck picking up on what they were saying. I was feeling strangely calm about everything, which shouldn’t have surprised me, from what I’d read there was an odd sense of relief from criminals when they finally realised they were about to be caught, knowing they wouldn’t have to deal with theunrelenting anxiety anymore somehow outweighed the idea of life imprisonment.
I saw Uncle Phil stumble wearily into the venue, his face as pale as Justin’s flesh.
He clutched yet another Capri-Sun in his hand, the plastic packaging crinkling in his grip as he squeezed the last remnants of orange-flavoured liquid straight down his gullet. He always kept a stash of them in the boot of his car for dire emergencies, bought in bulk as the only real hedonistic pleasure he had for himself. All men have their vices in times of struggle; for some it came with a straw. As he made his way over to me gradually, part of me was worried he might go into cardiac arrest right there and then, but then I remembered the copious amounts of artificial sugars and preservatives he had just consumed would keep his heart beating for the next two hundred years.
‘How are you doing, Uncle Phil?’ I asked, struggling to hide a smirk at the image of him tossing the empty pouch aside as if it were a four-shot glass of whisky he had just downed.
‘I’ve been better, Ruth. I’ve been better,’ he replied, his frail voice trembling. ‘How did this happen? How did we miss this?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, feigning ignorance for the umpteenth time and silently hoping I was getting better at it.
‘We should have checked. I don’t know how we could have, but we should have checked,’ Uncle Phil intoned as if he was giving himself a firm telling-off, wondering how much his TrustPilot rating would suffer for this.
