Thicker Than Water

Then another thought occurred to her, and she cast her gaze around until she saw me.

‘Fix,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m sorry I hurt you. I knew - I knew by then what Mark had turned into, and I thought you’d come to send him away. I was so scared, when I first saw you - I wasn’t thinking straight. I wasn’t - myself.’ Her eyes rolled weakly as she saw the ironic sense of the words.

‘Nobody on the Salisbury was, by that time,’ I reminded her. ‘It’s okay, Anita. In a bizarre way you actually helped me. It was while I was in hospital that I saw Mark for the first time, and started fitting the pieces together.

‘Nita,’ Matt said, his voice cracking, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I left you. If you’d told me - if I’d known that you were pregnant—’

Anita stared at him, perplexed. ‘I knew you would have come,’ she murmured. ‘But - I didn’t want to make you come, Matty. Not like that. What would it have meant - if you married me because I blackmailed you? And if you gave up - everything else you wanted - to be with me? You would have - hated me.

He shook his head in denial or protest, sobbing aloud now. Anita put a hand up to touch his face.

‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to see you cry. You ought to bless me. Now that you’ve heard my confession.’

Matt didn’t bless her. I think I understood why he couldn’t do that, even though he knew the words would have comforted her. To say a blessing would have been to turn back into a priest: it was too big a jump from where he was, and in a direction that he simply couldn’t take right then.

"He kissed her instead. The lips were rotting, because this was a body two years dead, and they weren’t even hers in the first place. But then, this was a kiss that had been pending for a lot longer than two years: it probably didn’t matter as much as you’d think.

Tired of waiting for me to get the hint on my own, Juliet grabbed my lapels and hauled me away, off the walkway into the ruins of Weston Block. It’s coming to something when I have to take lessons in tact from a pit-spawned monster.

Although, it suddenly struck me, that was a phrase that needed to be scanned.

‘Juliet,’ I said tentatively.

‘Yes, Castor?’

I picked my words carefully. ‘I’ve always had - some fixed ideas about Hell. They seemed to make sense, in terms of the available evidence. It’s kind of a point on a moral compass. It’s where bad people go when they die, and the demons that live there have to be bad too, or they wouldn’t be there in the first place.