He decides to give Daniel the benefit of the doubt. He won’t die just yet.
When his heart is beating again, Mr. Ordinary declares it’s time he had a break.
In pale yellow scrubs and with his throat still sore from tubes and retching, Joe sits in a room with window boxes and wishes himself a thousand miles away, wishes himself someone else, wishes he had never met Billy Friend, never chosen to follow his grandfather into the dying world of clockwork. Wishes his father had forced him to be a lawyer, which at one stage was very much Mathew’s intention, until Harriet’s tears pried him away from it.
So now he’s playing Snakes & Ladders with a woman inmate and watching the clock. In twenty minutes it will be eleven a.m. He wonders whether they will come for him then because it’s a round number.
Not all of the staff here are Ruskinites. Many of them are, as far as he can tell, conventional medical personnel. He is in a Ruskinite hospital for the mentally ill. One of the nurses—a pretty, roundish sort of woman called Gemma—told him in confidential tones that he is receiving the best possible care and will be all better soon. He responded that he was sure that was true, and she dimpled.
All the same, she would not reveal to him the name of the hospital (“I’m not allowed”) or get in touch with anyone for him (“You just think about getting better, all right?”) or give him any news from outside—about golden bees, for example, or whether they have yet provoked a war.
He has christened the place Happy Acres. The other patients—not all of them, he’s fairly sure, are prisoners—are mostly silent and bewildered. One man sings the first bars of a pop song over and over in the corner. A woman whimpers.
At five minutes to the hour, seven men walk into the room and clear a space for a sort of coffin. It is like the board which Joe was strapped to during the waterboarding (“saline disclosure therapy,” Nurse Gemma said reprovingly), but it appears to be made to measure and is more absolute in its restraint. The man inside is almost entirely cased in nylon straps and rubber. He is older than Joe but younger than Mathew when he died, and he has wild hair and a full beard and tanned, working man’s skin, pale beneath the restraints. Even when this man is outside, he is in his coffin.
At last. Someone they hate more than me.
They put the coffin man by the window so that the inmate can see the flowers, and he makes a rough, gargling noise, which Joe eventually realises is the man saying a polite “good morning.”
After a moment, they take Joe to stand in front of the coffin. All he can see of the man inside is one brown eye and one blue, staring back at him unblinking. Joe realises the man probably never gets to see anyone’s face for very long. He looks past the coffin and sees Mr. Ordinary watching him intently, reads the warning: There are worse places than the one you are in, lad.
“Hello,” he says to the prisoner, “my name’s Joe. What’s yours?”
He wonders briefly why they all laugh at him, even the man in the coffin.
They do not take him back to his cell. He can feel the little room behind him, not much bigger than his body, waiting to embrace him again. He stares at the white light from the windows and commits it to memory.
He plays draughts with the coffin man. They have to use an electronic board. The coffin man has a remote control, like the ones used by paraplegics. One of his fingers is released to operate a little joystick, one click at a time. Forward. Sideways. Forward. Sideways. Apparently it doesn’t do diagonal.
Joe wins. At the last minute, though, the coffin man gives him a scare with a rampaging king. It menaces, threatens, and bullies Joe out of position, captures a few pieces by sheer force of threat before he can corner it. In the midst of his pieces, the king is not at bay. Rather, it is surrounded by targets.
The coffin man says something around his bite plate. It’s hard to decipher. He hawks and plays with the thing in his mouth, curls his lips. Spittle glistens. He says it again.
“That’s how it’s done.”
And then he laughs.
When Joe asks why they don’t just let the coffin man speak his instructions, everyone laughs again. A tall orderly rolls up his sleeve and shows a scar on his arm, a long pale strip of grafted flesh. He doesn’t seem to resent the coffin man at all. The orderly seems to feel they’re all in this together. The coffin man gargles cordially.
Later, Joe is given a meal. They feed him, because he is shaking too much to do it himself. While they do this, someone else gives the coffin man an intravenous feed. At some point they make a mistake, and the coffin man opens a long, rich cut across a man’s face with his joystick hand. He snarls something. It is muffled, but somehow quite clear.
That’s how it’s done.
The coffin man howls, an incredibly loud, appalling noise. They taser him, which is utterly pointless because he is already restrained, and he starts to choke. A moment later he turns purple and slumps, and they call a crash team. When they try to resuscitate him, he casually claws across a woman’s eyes. He glowers, bright and angry, and finds Joe.
It is a question of focus, Joe realises. Of intensity. It is the thing Mathew must have had but which he never allowed his son to see, because it was only for emergencies, and in Mathew’s world—the version he allowed his son to know about—emergencies were forbidden: everything which happened happened to the advancement of the House of Spork. But when your back was to the wall and someone else had the knife, there was, in the end, a simple decision: They are not the monster. I am.
You can’t care about consequences. Every second becomes an end in itself. That’s how it’s done.
They beat the coffin man down, and he laughs the entire time. Joe abruptly realises what has just happened.
Tuition.
He stares at the wild, angry eyes, and feels comradeship. Then the orderlies drag the coffin man away.
“State of the nation,” Mr. Ordinary says regretfully from behind him. “I see you’ve made a new friend.”
“Crazy man. I don’t know his name.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Mr. Ordinary ponders. “Huh,” he says. And then break time is over.
“I wanted to show you this myself,” Mr. Ordinary says, “because I’m very much responsible for it. I had to work hard to make this happen. No one is coming for you.”
The letter is very plain, written on an expensive vellum. It is addressed to Joe, care of Rodney Titwhistle.
Dear Mr. Spork,
We regret to inform you that in view of your involvement in activities against the interests of the United Kingdom, specifically the terrorist murders of various persons and associated crimes, we can no longer act on your behalf. The protection of Cradle Noblewhite is withdrawn from you as of this moment, and we would appreciate settlement of our outstanding bill for services rendered in the usual 28 days.
There is a PS, in Mercer’s execrable handwriting: I’m sorry, Joe. It turns out they punch harder than we do.
The letter is countersigned by all the partners.
Mr. Ordinary smiles. “There’s one from your mother, too.”
He seems to think that’s a victory for his side, which shows a pleasing lack of information about Harriet.
They leave the door to Joe’s cell open. He steps towards it, wondering. A shaft of light beckons him, and any moment he will hear Mercer’s voice. It is all a stratagem. He is free.