The Needles

There was a light glaze of rain across the cobbles, and the wind was brisk enough to make the masts rattle like the bells of a doll's church.  In the darkness and the sporadic light of the hostelries, the reflections bounced across the pavement, and cut romantic reflections down the main street. It was the typical autumnal scene of an English seaside town: empty, quaint, melancholic.  There was a sense of something warm and promising, but it lived in someone else's home, or someone else's heart.

The Cutter was busy for a Wednesday night, the crew of a racing yacht having moored in the day, and a great gaggle of sailors propping up the bar, warmly dressed, rosy faced and talking and laughing at that slightly higher volume of a round or two haven't passed.  The Cutter was a traditional pub with an L-shaped 

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.

There was one other person in The Sec who could be said to have medical knowledge.  Mo Zaman still knew the intricacies of every bone, the nodes of the heart, the sinews of the facial muscle, but it was confined in the small, glass safe that had for 18 months been locked without chance of decoding.  He had been carried into The Sec with a fractured skull, his eyes lolling back in his head, his pulse disappearing into inside him like a moorland stream dropping into the limestone.  Since The Sec had become marooned in no man's land, Mo was the typical patient: a hopeless case, someone who lived when they should not have lived, someone who might survive as a shadow, and haunt the people who once knew him.  In fact Dr. Joseph Tsonga had done everything to lift Mo from the shadows, had removed a shard of bone from his bone, sat for hours by his bed, lifting his limbs, coaxing sounds and meanings.  And now it was Tsonga who was the shadow, outlived by another of his hopeless cases, haunting interstitial spaces of the memory.

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.

There was one other person in The Sec who could be said to have medical knowledge.  Mo Zaman still knew the intricacies of every bone, the nodes of the heart, the sinews of the facial muscle, but it was confined in the small, glass safe that had for 18 months been locked without chance of decoding.  He had been carried into The Sec with a fractured skull, his eyes lolling back in his head, his pulse disappearing into a cavity inside him like a stream on the moor, disappearing into an ancient cave.  Since The Sec had become marooned in no man's land, Mo was the typical patient: a hopeless case, someone who lived when they should not have lived, someone who might survive as a shadow, and haunt the people who once knew him, remind them of their own mortality. 

I