The Anarchist

9. Integrity Blues

"I want to take you on a real date."

"Is this not a real date?"

Watkins looked around. Faded cream-tiled walls and plastic tables surrounded them as they ate from packets and cardboard packages. Orange letters like the ones in neon outside the "restaurant" hung over the counter reading, "Ol' Bubba's Fish and Chips". The young cashier had disappeared into the back room a few minutes ago, partly because there was no one to serve and partly - as Watkins surmised from the dark rings under her eyes - because she hadn't slept in quite a while.

"Well, it's not what I'd call a show-stopper," he said wryly.

"I like it," Emily told him. "My parents used to bring me here all the time when I was little. On Fridays, it was the worst. I wasn't even tolerable 'til I'd had a combo three. My mom and dad would fight about whose turn it was to fetch me from school because they didn't wanna deal with my tantrums."

"Was it cleaner back then?" Watkins asked half-seriously.

She pushed his shoulder reproachfully, a playful grin on her face.

"Excuse me! How rude!" she scolded him, trying and failing to sound stern. "This place hasn't changed one bit. Every water stain in the wallpaper is exactly where I remember it."

She paused for a moment, toying with one of her chips.

"... although I'll admit the combo three tasted a bit better when I was eight."

She offered a weak chuckle to diffuse the situation, but Watkins creased his face and pushed a little bit.

"I'm being serious, though, Em. I really haven't thanked you enough for what you did for me that first week."

The "first week" he was talking about was the week following the incident at Eden Glade Hospital. Much like he did in the days following the visit to Smylie's morgue, Watkins shut down when the reality of what had happened struck him later. He had tried everything he could to drive the images of Nell on the bed out of his thoughts, but he could not. The shades of red on the sheets had already branded themselves into his eyes, and everywhere he looked he saw shadows of the limp body staring back at him. Everywhere he went, he felt Edgbaston's fingers clawing at his face, and it all felt as real as it had the night it happened. He couldn't sleep most nights, and he struggled to function in his daily tasks. It felt like all his energy was already used up in the effort to wrest control of his thoughts.

His parents visited him at the hostel often, but they struggled to understand what was happening to their son. They were people of a conservative life experience, and Watkins's sudden behavioural changes were so anomalous to what they knew of things that he may as well have become another species to them. They tried to help, but it did not achieve much.

The only other person who visited regularly was Emily. She had found out through Wilson what Watkins's situation was, and made it a duty to arrive at his dorm every day and talk with him. That was all she did. It was nothing special. She listened to him talk about what was happening, and she didn't reply with condescension or hollow solutions. She just listened. She let him talk it out. She let him cry when it needed to happen. She gave him a hand to hold onto when he became so tired that he couldn't stay awake anymore. All these simple little things put him onto a gentle uphill curve, and while it was far from instant, he eventually improved. They continued seeing each other after that.

It was only within the previous few days that he had become lucid enough to realise that she had done all of this while likely going through similar problems of her own. He suddenly felt extremely selfish, and wanted to make it up to her in some way, but she had seemed to refuse any suggestions that he made. In fact, that day at the fish and chip place was the first time she'd openly talked about herself in any way outside of her nurse training since he'd met her.