The Sec

The Sec had moved across the maps, as inexorably as it had moved across the consciousness of those who knew it.  At one time, it had been a place for sentimentality, a faithful old monk immersed in silence, stubborn in its integrity to the faithful and the lost.  You might never have been inside its robust white walls, but you were glad to see it still standing, when you passed.  But now, its name was uttered in black humour.  "We'll end up in The Sec" had become the group motto for any dreaded mission, any irreversible path towards your fate.  If your best outcome was to be carried through the barbed wire avenue, across the bare, starched grass, to the tired mercy of The Sec, then you might as well wish for oblivion.  How sad that The Sec should have lost its nobility so ingloriously in the intervening years.  Just as the battle lines had crept up behind it, and metre by metre marooned it in the chaos of war, so a tramp might take shelter in a ruin, catching the sympathetic gazes of travellers, none of whom would ever think to go in and comfort the wretched creature.

As of February that year, The Sec’s qualified medical staff totalled just one nurse, Sister Kelly Broad, 35 years old, thin, and with skin so pale and translucent, she appeared like a brittle waxwork in a seaside museum.  This description was all the more appropriate as, although her features were delicate, and her frame petite, it was quite obvious upon speaking to her that she could and had survived catastrophes, and would face you with the same stern intensity whether you beheld her in some corner of a dusty collection, or in the midst of a violent storm.  The Sec was the natural home for such a person, half collapsed, pinned together with sheets of corrugated iron, but with a neat bed of beetroot and celeriac next to the outhouse, and the occasional wafting of music, to which you could hear the steady clumps of footsteps pounding an impromptu dance floor.