James Goss - Almost Perfect

Now Eric laughed. ‘Can’t you see?’

‘Not really, no. Can’t move my neck.’

‘Captain Jack Harkness, you’re just a head. Well, a bit of torso.’

Back-up personality. Say something.

‘Breasts? I never was much of a breast man, but if it’s all I’ve got left… Even a nipple?’

Sudden thought. Is the need to pee real or illusory? Perhaps I should just let it go and see what happens. But then, what if the resulting sensation is both imaginary and gross?

I am in a wall.

Gwen was starting to freeze. The rain was soaking through her coat, her trousers were sopping wet, and her hair was plastered to her head. ‘What kept you?’ she barked at Ianto as the SUV drove up. ‘You said you’d be ten minutes.’

Ianto apologised hastily, but also shot her a look as she climbed in. ‘Careful with that car seat, please, Gwen. I’ve just had the upholstery steam-cleaned.’

‘Fine, Ianto, thank you, Ianto, I shall try and drip elsewhere. Where the bloody hell were you?’

Ianto looked slightly sheepish as he drove the SUV up from the Bay into town. ‘Well, when you called, I suddenly realised it might be a long night, and I didn’t want that on an empty stomach, what with my blood sugar being all over the place these days, so I zapped a Lean Cuisine and counted my points while I waited. Honestly, I got here as quickly as I could. Oh, plus I had to find the keys to the SUV.’

Gwen sat there quietly. In less than a week, not only had Ianto become a woman, but he’d become the kind of woman Gwen always dreaded being behind at a cashpoint.

‘You count your points? Don’t tell me you’re doing Weight Watchers?’ Gwen was slightly aghast. Ianto’s figure was perfect. Unquestionably so.

They pulled up at the lights, and Ianto turned to Gwen, smiling gently. ‘Not religiously, no, but it’s a good idea to eat sensibly, Gwen. I mean, I know you’re married and it’s easy to get…’

The smallest pause.

‘… comfortable. But if it turns out I’m stuck in this body, I’ve got to look my best. I’m a single woman, remember.’

Gwen blinked. She could have sworn the car smelt of chips. Meanwhile, Ianto checked his hair in the rear-view mirror and completely missed the lights changing until the bus behind them sounded its horn.

Ianto then stalled the SUV, swore mildly, and roared off in the wrong gear. ‘Honestly! The clutch keeps getting away from me. These shoes are bloody murder to drive in,’ he cursed. ‘I just can’t get shoes right. Either that or someone keeps moving the seat. Now, are you sure this device will work?’

Gwen pulled it from her coat pocket. It was sleek, blue and bleepy. ‘Tosh designed it for hunting Weevils, based on the scents they emit during the mating cycle. According to her notes, she had a few false starts with tom cats, but it’s now pretty good at hunting them down when they’re randy.’

‘Aw, Tosh had the sweetest hobbies.’ Ianto smiled fondly. ‘Did it make sense of the stuff I gave you?’

Gwen checked the readings. ‘Pretty much. You were right – Jack’s fifty-first-century pheromone pattern is fairly distinctive. It’s just not very strong. Even around the Hub. So our best hope of finding him is to stick this out the window and drive round Cardiff city centre very slowly.’

Ianto fumbled a crunching gear change and brought them to a juddering halt.

‘Shouldn’t be too much of a problem,’ Gwen muttered, winding down the window.

Town was even worse than earlier. Someone was slumped across every bench, or, in some cases, just stretched out across the pavement. Exhausted pensioners sat slumbering at bus stops. Rain beat down mercilessly on cars, buildings and people. Traffic crawled sluggishly, causing Gwen to scream with frustration.

‘It’s this new one-way system,’ she howled.

‘Or the end of the world,’ said Ianto.

‘Whatever.’ Angrily, she shook the tracking device which refused even to bleep.

The lights changed and the SUV slid glacially forward in the traffic.

‘Look at the sky, Gwen,’ said Ianto, sadly.

Gwen looked, and didn’t like it. Cardiff had its fair share of menacing clouds, but these were biblical in their darkness. Pushing down on the buildings, boiling angrily away, pouring rain down on the city.

‘That doesn’t look good,’ Gwen sighed.

The car crawled along a few hundred metres, and suddenly the tracking device screamed like a toddler.

‘Bloody hell!’ Gwen yelped, waving it around. She frantically adjusted the settings and the screaming subsided. ‘It’s over there,’ she pointed. ‘Jack’s over there.’

Ianto took the tracker and stared at the screen. ‘What can have produced that many pheromones? That’s off the scale, even by Jack’s standards.’

‘I know,’ said Gwen, grimly. ‘We’ve got to get to him.’

‘Charles Street,’ said Ianto. ‘It’ll be a few minutes before we can get back round the one-way system.’

‘Sod that,’ snapped Gwen. ‘Just park on the pavement.’

It had been a long night. Actually, it seemed to have gone on for… well, Ben wasn’t quite sure, but he was quite snug, really. Even in the pouring rain, he was wrapped up warm, and the heat fairly blasted out of the club’s doors along with the music, which, although it wasn’t normally his kind of thing, he had to admit, was pretty spectacular. He’d work at the Temple for free, if it meant listening to the music. Of course, he was too wise to say that kind of thing. Professional pride. But he liked to think they knew.

And since he’d turned his phone off, his wife had stopped ringing him to demand he come home.

Something was wrong with that sentence. Hmm.

He snapped awake as he heard steps on the metal stairs above him. He watched as two women walked down them. One was startlingly beautiful and having trouble with her shoes. The other was holding out a small blue phone thing. He decided it was best to look business.

The beautiful one stepped up. ‘Hello, mate,’ she said, surprisingly. ‘Two, please. We’d like to disco very much.’

Her companion glanced at her in something like shock and then turned to Ben. ‘How much, please?’

Ben looked at them both. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a private party.’

The stunning one leaned closer and smiled. Ben noticed her friend was rolling her eyes. ‘Oh come on now, surely you can make an exception for us? We’re always where the party’s at.’

The other one stepped forward. ‘Thing is, see, we’ve got a friend in there, we said we’d join him and…’ She made to step through, but Ben moved easily out to block her.

He looked at them both, patiently. Lasses like this, it was worth telling it to them frankly. He put on his firmest voice. He knew what it was like – a night out on the lash, few too many bottles of blue alco-piddle, kebab, loud vows to party on past dawn. He’d had nearly eight years of it, and was an expert in turning people gently but firmly away.

‘Now listen, ladies, why don’t you go home and have a cup of tea?’ he began, talking first to the tall, stunning one. ‘Now, you – pretty girl like you, this isn’t really your place to find a fella. Waste of effort, if you know what I mean. And you,’ he said, turning to the second woman, not unkindly. ‘Well, I’m afraid we’ve got our quota of fag hags.’

Gwen broke his nose.

They stood on the threshold of the club for a few moments, unable to believe what they were seeing.