Listen, there is a very good reason why Mo and I agreed never to have children. Leaving aside the fact that she’s forty-three—dangerously late to even try—there is the small fact that we are both Laundry operatives and we know the fate that lies in store for any child of ours. Maybe if we’d met when we were twenty and ignorant things could have been different, but if there’s anything that could make facing the probable end of humanity together even worse, it would be the sheer reckless stupidity of bringing new life into being at a time like this. So we clean up with gritted teeth, holding our tongues—recriminations would be pointless, we both know the score—and I fetch out a clean towel for her and we get dressed before traipsing downstairs again in guilty complicit silence, as if nothing had happened.
“Morning-after pill?” I ask.
She grimaces. “There’s probably no point; at this age I’m well past it, I’m about as likely to conceive as that”—she gestures at the kitchen table—“thing.” She takes a deep breath. “But I’ll try Boots tomorrow. Or today, if they’re still open later.”
Well fuck. This isn’t what I wanted, but we don’t always get what we want, do we? “Mo—” I move towards her tentatively, then pause.
“I know.” She blows out her cheeks, momentarily resembling a frowsy hamster. “Not your fault, not my fault, nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I’ll go eat worms.” She manages a wan chuckle.
“Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”
She drags out a kitchen chair and sits down. I sit down opposite her. “Loved the climax, could have done without the ending. Oh Bob.” She shakes her head at my answering grin.
“Was this”—I steel myself—“just a conjugal visit while I’m under house arrest, or was there anything else?”
“Anything else? Oh, yeah, that.”
“That?”
“We’re homeless, dear.”
“What?”
She drums her fingers on the tabletop, gazing pensively past my shoulder. “We’re losing the house. Technically we’ve got until the end of the month, but we’re supposed to get out as soon as possible, seeing we’re no longer entitled to a key workers property owned by the Crown Estate via our doesn’t-exist-anymore employing agency. But”—she nibbles delicately on one fingernail, and that’s how I know the news is really bad—“the police want a word with me about bookkeeping irregularities, so I’m couch-surfing with the aid of the SA’s little helpers right now.”
“But, but—”
She misinterprets: “Spooky is going to be all right; I’ve parked him at your parents’ place.”
“But Dad doesn’t like cats—”
“Tough.” In the face of Mo’s implacable lack of sympathy I can see even my father sucking it up and hitting the antihistamines.
It all hits me at once. I take a deep breath. I’m homeless, jobless—at least, officially—on the run from the police, who have good and sufficient reasons to drop me in a hole and throw away the key, separated from my wife who may be—but almost certainly isn’t—pregnant (which is just pregnant enough to be really disturbing), one of my worst nightmares seems to be taking over the country from the top down, and I can’t sleep properly at night because of the things I’ve done. I take another deep breath, and another.
“Bob—”
“Can’t—”
“I know how this script plays out and you’re not going there, love, too many of us are depending on you,” she says fiercely. “Bob! Come here!” She stands up and leans over me and I grab her and bury my face between her breasts, feeling about four years old, and I begin to grizzle like a toddler with a grazed knee, letting it all hang out. “Not letting you go,” she mumbles into my hair, and suddenly I’m sobbing, grief for all the souls I’ve eaten and the untimely ends I’ve brought to those who didn’t deserve it, all of that swamping my own fucked-up life. “Don’t need to, not anymore, that’s why the visit. Being an Auditor gets me into—got me into—lots of closed files. And I went digging and I found what they used to bind TEAPOT back in the 1920s. So I pestered Persephone until she made me a better ward, just for you.” She fumbles in the pocket of that ridiculous cardigan and pulls out a pouch on a leather thong that hums with some kind of unearthly energy. “Had a long heart-to-heart with her. Should have done it ages ago. I owe her for this.” She pushes me gently back for just long enough to drop it over my head and the world around us goes numb and quiet, peaceful even.
“What?” I look up at her face and blink, puzzled.
“It’s a new ward,” she explains. “Necromantic immobilization. Wear it when we go to bed.” She’s speaking clearly and slowly as if I’m a very small child. “We can stay together.”
“But if it doesn’t work—”
“It’s going to work. It’s the same schematic they used when they first summoned the Eater of Souls, before they bound it via the oath of office. See? It’s been tested.”
“But I might take it off—”
“You won’t.”
“But I’m too dangerous, I’m not sure I’m even human anymore!”
“Bob!” She steps back and glares at me with her fists on her hips. “Are you trying to drive me away?”
(Reader, this is why I married her.)
*
As Terry Pratchett observed, inside every eighty-year-old man is an eight-year-old wondering what the hell just happened to him; in my experience this remains true even if you divide his age by two. While my inner four-year-old is having a meltdown and Mo explains that love can find a way (with a bit of technical help from one of the most powerful occult practitioners in London), events are marching on.
This week, the cabinet reshuffle continues. A minister, Norman Grove, has been appointed to head a shiny new Department for Paratechnological Affairs, which exists entirely as an org chart with lots of empty directorship-sized bubbles, a bunch of PowerPoint presentations, and a press conference. Most of DPA’s immediate needs are to be outsourced to private-sector contractors and indeed two of the usual large outsourcing conglomerates are supposed to be prepping shiny new offices to hold the three-thousand-odd civil servants that DPA will eventually employ. Grove optimistically declares that this will be a clean sheet exercise in developing a leaner, more agile, twenty-first-century organization. In the fine print below the announcement it is mentioned that anyone who held anything above a surprisingly low grade in the predecessor agency will be barred from hiring until their background, culpability, and share of guilt for the fiasco in Leeds can be established, sometime after the Commons Select Committee Enquiry delivers its findings. (Early in the twenty-second century, then.)