Omega

Abruptly it began to rain. We said our goodbyes. I shepherded the girls inside while Tanya exchanged final words with Candida.

“Dad,” Beth said to me the instant we crossed the threshold, “Sarah said I’m fat.”

“No, I didn’t,” replied her sister. “I said that if you eat Monster Munch and chocolate sandwiches all day you’d be like Humpty Dumpty.”

Beth thought about this. Pointedly she said: “Anyway, I’d rather be fat than skinny.”

Sarah gave her a look of lofty disdain that implied she wasn’t going to descend to swapping insults.

“I’d hate to have stick legs,” Beth persisted.

“Better than having a pot belly.”

“See?” Beth said to me as though vindicated.

“Enough,” I told them firmly. “Truce, otherwise there’ll be no stories tonight. Neither of you are fat or skinny, so stop being silly.”

“That’s a rhyme,” Beth said.

“I hope you two weren’t behaving like this in the car on the way back.”

I led them straight up the stairs, ignoring their pleas for a half an hour’s television, and started running a bath.

While it was filling, they sneaked off. I wandered into Tanya’s study, where framed photographs of all of us were in clear evidence. It was Geoff who had suggested that I must have blanked them out because they didn’t fit in with my fantasy world. We hadn’t told him anywhere near the full details of it, but he saw it as a clear case of displacement and what he called “compensatory abstraction”. It was an expression worthy of my father.

Tanya’s desk held neat stacks of books, magazines and papers. She was gathering material for a new book, as yet untitled, though she described it as “a sceptic’s guide to para-science”. Apparently I had inspired her to it after my flirtation with another realm of experience.

It was Tanya who had stimulated my father’s interest in science and pointed him towards the books and periodicals he needed for his research. She had never been daunted by him, holding her own at the many dinner-table conversations we had over the years when we visited him.

The girls were now playing peaceably in their bedroom. The one with the heart-shaped mirror on the back of the door, though the walls were coral pink rather than amethyst. Tanya had kept it locked because of my obvious agitation whenever she mentioned the girls. I simply refused to acknowledge any evidence of their presence.

From the window I saw the Scenic finally drive away, Tanya waving after it. A sense of vast tranquil relief suffused me. It had been doing so at regular intervals since my recovery. As I stepped back from the window something went snap under my foot.

“Dad,” Sarah said with weary fatalism. “You just killed Mr Saucepan Man.”

I picked up a broken Lego figure. As usual, pieces were scattered all over the floor around a bizarre tree-like assemblage that they were building.

“Bath-time,” I told them. “Last one in gets a raspberry on the belly.”

They squeaked and scampered off across the landing.

I tidied the pieces into one of their boxes and shouted to them to put their cast-off clothes in the laundry basket and go easy on the bubble bath.

“Everything all right up there?” Tanya called from the hallway.

“I’m a toy killer,” I called back.

At least the girls were as I remembered them,, even though it was Sarah with an h and Beth, as in Elizabeth. Why all the false memories? Particularly of Lyneth. She had indeed come to London to live with me but we had parted after a year when I finally admitted I wanted to be with Tanya. Prior to that I had got Lyneth pregnant, but she lost the baby and was left infertile as a result. She had gone to Australia to live and I’d had no contact with her since. I went to visit Tanya in California and persuaded her to come home with me. As soon as she became pregnant with Sarah, we’d married. Somehow I had muddled their stories, perhaps because I felt I had ruined Lyneth’s life.

That would be the conventional psychological explanation, at least; but it begged many questions. Why would I create such a bleak world as Owain’s as an expression of guilt? Easier to believe that Owain was real, that his invasive presence had skewed my memories. That was how I’d rationalised it at first. But I didn’t think so now.

There was another possibility. Perhaps the Omega device had opened links between a sequence of alternative worlds. As I had occupied Owain, so another counterpart from yet another time line could have manifested himself in me, bringing his own history, which had become confused and conflated with my own. Just as Owain had never directly sensed me, so I would have remained unaware of this other version of myself: but I would have experienced his influence.