The Quiet Man

Existing

“John.”

I know what she means. It’s all in the tone of her voice; she’s concerned, she feels sorry for me, she’s apologetic. She lied to me, at least once. Probably more than once, but I can’t remember now. There were other conversations between us, weren’t there? That was another time. Another universe, the one where Sherlock died. We don’t live there now.

Her hand seems frail against my arm, but she’s anything but frail. Mrs Hudson is part of the plan, she’s a co-conspirator. I should remember not to underestimate her.

“Are you all right?” Her big eyes are fixed on me. That’s genuine concern. She knew what she was sending me into. She knew what would happen, what I would see. Has she been sitting downstairs wringing her hands and imagining how this was going? Did she want to come in, watch, make sure we were getting on? Odd voyeurism: did she want to see me collapse? To see us embrace, to see us finally kiss? Not that we would do that, of course. Not that he would want to. She always thought we were together, contrary to all evidence. She always thought so. What did she think I would do? Kiss him, or kill him? “You’ve had such a shock, haven’t you.”

I’m tempted not to answer. I’m tempted to be honest. But no: what good would that do? There’s nothing she can do to make this any easier. Not now.

“I’m fine.”

She could have told me, that might have helped. Whenever she found out: she could have told me secretly, quietly. As if that would have worked; Mycroft would have known she’d done it, somehow. He’d have read it on my face on CCTV, or felt it somehow through the walls of Mary’s flat. He’d have known. But she could have tried to warn me, she could have helped me to guess, she could have done that much. She could have let me cope with this revelation in some privacy, with some degree of dignity. She could have given me a chance to get my head in order before I came face to face with him. I could have pretended to be surprised. So when he said to me, You didn’t guess? I could have said, Yes. Yes, of course I did, codes in the classifieds, a rash of arrests, of course it was you. I knew it was you. I’ve been waiting for you to turn up.

“Fine,” I tell her. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You certainly aren’t,” she looks behind her; don’t doubt that he can hear you, Mrs Hudson. He looks preoccupied, he’s setting up screens and some kind of radio on the desk, but don’t doubt him for a second. He hears everything. Yes, of course he’s listening to us. He can’t not listen, it’s his way. It’s not even deliberate, it’s just the way he is. There won’t be any secrets told in the kitchen that he doesn’t catalogue in the sitting room, you know that. Look at him: he’s beautiful. He hasn’t changed, except that he has: so thin, his hair is too long. He’s hunched over his phone in a posture that can only be his. I’ve seen that posture since: I’ve seen it in other people. Students in coffee shops, a man on the corner, looking at me from a distance. It was you, wasn’t it. All that time. Jesus, Sherlock. It was you. “You’ve had such a shock. You must be reeling, you poor dear.”

I don’t know how to answer that. My hands are still a bit shaky, but I can manage. I can manage the milk and the bread, the beans and eggs and tomato sauce, a bag of crisps, some beer (thanks, Mrs Hudson). I can manage. Food: I know what to do with food. I know where it belongs, I know how to avoid the worst of the experiments sitting in the fridge. There are none there now, though. None at all, it’s empty. This is the real fridge, not the one in my memory. I can still see the thumbs sitting in there in a bag, like a phantom. I can see the head too, faintly. That was so long ago. There was a portion of someone’s thigh in the crisper once, like a section of a tree, lying flat on a plate. I remember all the places where your bizarre collections of flesh sat, and the smell of the bleach I used on the inside of the fridge. I remember.