Omega

How was I to sever the link? Could I shut him out simply by making myself aware of his intrusions, by insisting on my own prior occupancy? For all I knew he might be controlling the transitions between our worlds, though I had found nothing in his thoughts to suggest this. In fact, I’d still found nothing to suggest he was actually aware—

“O?”

Tanya calling me. There was something important here, but I was trailing behind her and my father. She was wheeling him down the twisting path. I caught up, drawing alongside my father, saying somewhat pathetically: “It’s nice in the sun.”

“Squirrels,” my father said. “They’re vermin, you know.”

I could see none in evidence, but my father generally objected to things in principle, the intellectual equivalent of getting your retaliation in first. It was a policy he had adopted throughout his life. He saw the world as a series of antagonisms, and people as weak, foolish or venal unless there was outstanding evidence to the contrary. There was no one he admired unreservedly, and he disdained almost all organisations, including charities, as tainted by the compromises of bureaucracy. His favourite maxim was Thoreau’s “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”. He was a professional dissenter who’d often swum against the intellectual currents of his age. Admirable in his way; but a hard act to follow.

I took over from Tanya, turning the chair down towards a sunken garden.

“What are your views on gun control?” he said to me.

He was staring straight ahead, his prominent nose pointing the way, as though he were a human bloodhound on the scent of something interesting.

“Here, or in America?” I asked.

“Makes no difference.”

“Dad, I didn’t come to see you to talk about gun control.”

“Surely you have a view?”

“Does it matter?” I asked.

“Of course it matters,” he replied with an irritable growl. “You’re my brother, aren’t you?”

We looped around a damp fountain. My father’s elder brother, Arthur, had been a bomber crewman shot down over Essen in the last months of the war. Nineteen years old, by all accounts, my father himself too young to serve. Another thread of the web. It was as if I couldn’t escape it.

I noticed that Tanya was hiding a grin behind her gloved hand. I mouthed a “What?” at her, but she merely shrugged in a manner suggesting she didn’t know, or that it wasn’t important.

Perhaps it was the best way to take it. To see it as funny, although without disrespect. Tanya had often chided me that I always portrayed my father as an ogre, whereas she was plainly not daunted by him in the slightest. But she hadn’t grown up in his shadow.

My father was humming to himself, something rather jaunty. I’d never heard him sing or whistle or make any sort of joyful noise before. I recognised the melody: “Shall we Dance?” from The King and I.

Where among the mists of his memories was he? Tanya took his hands and raised him out of his seat. My father did a sterling job of keeping up with her as she gently waltzed him around. Then he started crying. Or rather silent tears were trickling down his cheeks.

“What is it?” I asked anxiously.

“Things lost,” I thought I heard him say as he fixed me with an intense stare. “Nothing unusual to report.”

He was relieving himself. Urine was running off his turn-ups, puddling around his feet.

Owain played with the TV control. The picture shifted from the Atlantic to a big military installation in the desert; a launch complex surrounded by rainforest; an army formation spread out on a treeless plain; a coastal town; a pale island covered with an untidy weave of aeroplanes. Were these all targets for Omega?

“They might be.”

Somehow Rhys had insinuated himself into the cabin. He was sitting in an armchair opposite, in a brindled charcoal suit and a white silk shirt.

“A question of keeping one’s options open. You didn’t believe me, did you?”

Sitting laxly in the chair as though this was any ordinary domestic occasion, he both looked and sounded smug.

“The hotel,” Owain said. “You saw me coming?”

Rhys nodded.

ont size="3">“Why did you run away?”

Rhys gave the impression that this was a stupid question. “Why do you think? You’re a loose cannon, Owain. Who knows what you might do?”

Owain had doused the overhead lights earlier so there was only the glow from the screen. Rhys crossed his legs. Pale, sheer socks sheathed his slender ankles. His black shoes gleamed.

“Bit of a risk coming in here on your own in that case,” Owain said in Welsh.

“What are you going to do?” Rhys replied in English. “Strangle me? Shoot me? What purpose would it serve? To vent a hate that has no rational basis?”

“I don’t hate you.”

“Well, you certainly despise me.” His brother gave the impression it no longer concerned him. “I couldn’t be the same as you, Owain. It just wasn’t in my nature. We can’t all be frontline heroes.”

“I’m no hero.”

“Father would have been proud of you.”

Coming from anyone else, Owain would have taken this as the best of compliments; but from Rhys it was devalued.