Omega

The sun shone low on my face above a line of terraced houses. I was sitting in the hospital grounds in my wheelchair, wrapped in a blanket. The flowerbeds were filled with red-stemmed dogwood, the earth around them freshly turned over. There was frost on the grasswhere it was still in shade. Tanya was coming along the path from an ice-cream van parked beyond the railings. She was carrying two cones.

“Look,” she said, pointing to a little cluster of white flowers on the grass.

“Snowdrops,” I heard myself say.

She nodded as if I’d just answered the jackpot question on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”

I had the impression she’d been working hard to lift me out of my stupor. She handed me a cone and sat down beside me on a bench. A swish of nylon as she crossed her legs, a whiff of scented leather.

The sky overhead was cloudless, that porcelain winter blue. I had to look down for fear I might swoon into it.

“What were we talking about?” I asked.

“It wasn’t exactly a conversation,” she told me through a mouthful of ice cream. “I’ve been doing all the gabbing and you’ve been giving the occasional grunt.”

It dawned on me that this must be the first time since the explosion that I had spoken and definitely been heard. I’d made some sort of breakthrough. At last I was able to communicate.

“Where’s Lyneth?” I asked immediately. “Where are the girls?”

Tanya went motionless. Something changed in her eyes. She looked as if I had just slapped her.

Immediately I felt a crushing sense of having committed a terrible faux pas; but I had no idea why.

“She’s in Australia,” I heard her say carefully.

“Australia?”

There was a pained expression on her face. Or was it pity?

“Are the girls with her?”

Now her discomfort was obvious.

“Owain,” she began, at the same time as I said, “Are they all right?”

For a very long moment nothing at all happened. Tanya kept looking steadily at me. All sorts of thoughts were swirling around behind her eyes, but I couldn’t imagine what they were. She gave a funny sort of nod, andI knew that somehow I had insulted or confused or disappointed her.

And now a blistering embarrassment swamped me, without me having any context for it. I’d forgotten something. Something crucial.

In that moment I was possessed by an overwhelming urge to protect myself and salvage the situation. And I could only do this by withdrawing, by not asking blundering questions that might reveal the extent of my memory loss and confusion. Things were out of kilter, but not in the way I’d first imagined.

“You don’t remember what happened?” Tanya was asking gently.

Lyneth was in Australia. So, presumably, were the girls. Therefore they were safe, not dead.

“Bear with me,” I managed to say. “It’s all a bit of a muddle.”

I saw that she was holding her breath. Slowly she exhaled.

“Well,” she said finally, “you’re speaking. Putting sentences together. It’s progress, O.”

She always called me that. No one else did. I had to stay with her, deal with the here and now. Be more circumspect in finding out what I needed to know.

“Look lively,” she said with reference to the cone. “Lick.”

I caught a trickle with my tongue. “I don’t even remember you arriving.”

“No? The helicopter made a hell of a racket when it landed.”

She spoke with a breezy candour that I knew was typical of her. For a moment I almost took her seriously.

“Or you wheeling me out here,” I persisted. “It’s blank. As if I’ve only just woken up.”

She took this on board without qualm. I think she was relieved that the conversation had moved on from the subject of Lyneth and the children. And I felt safer, less exposed, too.

“Hardly surprising, is it? You were knocked down.”

“I was?”

“Black cab. You just stopped in the middle of the road, he said.”

This made sense, even though I hadn’t seen anything coming. I considered and finally said: “I did hear this big bang.”

“You’re lucky you weren’t killed. Everyone’s amazed you didn’t break any bones. Bit of a crack on the head, though.”

I k another lick. “Nothing else?”

“Isn’t that enough to be getting on with?”

“I just wondered. Was anyone else hurt?”

“The cabbie’s dignity, I should imagine. Bruised ego. Or maybe you triggered a fit of apoplexy. Not hot on wayward pedestrians, are they?”

No explosion, then. But it still didn’t make sense. If Lyneth was in Australia, how could she and the girls have been with me in Regent Street?

Panic crawled through me again, though I fought hard not to let it show. What Tanya was telling me didn’t mesh with my memories. Did I have something wrong?

Before I could say anything further Tanya reached out and steered my hand towards my mouth.

Her fingers were cold but I welcomed their touch. My cone had a chocolate flake poking out of it. Tanya and I had once eaten a choc-ice together, starting at either end and finishing with a sticky melted ice-cream kiss. But that had been years ago.