Omega

The cone tasted of nothing except a cold sweetness. Tanya showed great patience as I slurped and munched like a toddler. It wasn’t that I was being deliberately difficult but simply that my co-ordination was poor, my thought processes tortuously slow.

“He’s an opportunist.” Tanya was saying with reference to the ice-cream seller. “Doing a roaring trade.”

There was a queue of half a dozen people beside the van, most of them adults. The sunshine was bringing people out of their houses, like subterranean creatures stirred from their burrows.

A young man in running shoes and jog pants strode down the path, the sleeve of his fleece rolled back, his arm in plaster. Two nurses were smoking cigarettes next to a big galvanised trashcan. Steam plumed from an aluminium chimney on one of the hospital annexes. For the first time since the accident I felt that I was connected, however loosely, to the real world.

“Don’t tell the doctors,” I remarked.

“About what?”

“My—fogginess. Otherwise I might never get out of here.”

“It’s just a hospital, O. They need to make sure there’s nothing they’ve missed.”

Her level of concern didn’t marry with any deaths. It was as if everything that had happened was no more than a serious inconvenience rather than something truly awful. Either that, or she was incredibly skilled at keeping things from me.

I couldn’t fathom it. Why were Lyneth and the girls in Australia? When had they gone? It must have been before my accident, surely?

Tanya took the soggy remains of the cone from me and swabbed my face with a lemon-scented moist tissue. She gave me another for my hands.

Then Geoff appeared, navy-suited, jangling car keys.

“Ready to roll?” he asked.

“I think we are,” Tanya replied.

Geoff walked to the back of the wheelchair. “OK, Owen,” he said to me, “let’s be having you.” And he pushed me forward.

A dark green Renault Scenic was parked in one of the bays. Between the two of them they managed to haul me into the back and fold up the chair. It was Geoff who belted me in. His crisp white shirt and spotted burgundy tie told me he must have come straight from work, was perhaps taking a few hours to help his wife with their mutual friend who was obviously in a bad way. I felt like a charity case.

The Scenic was quite new, a dusting of crisp crumbs in the folds of one seat. Did they use it, I wondered, for weekend trips to the country or just the local supermarket? They must have had plenty of disposable income. Tanya was a successful science journalist, while Geoff was a consultant at the Maudsley Hospital, with a lucrative private practice as well. He cheerfully worked long and unsociable hours. They had no children. Tanya couldn’t have any.

I heard Geoff asking Tanya if she wanted to drive, and her replying that she was happy for him to do so. Tanya climbed in beside him but made a point of reaching back to squeeze my hand. I felt absurdly grateful.

Vaguely I heard them talking as we drove along. Something about Christmas. They spoke as if it was weeks ago. Which of course it was. Just as in Owain Maredudd’s world.

So Lyneth and the girls hadn’t come to visit me because they were in Australia. As far as I knew, there had been no cards either, nothing to say they were on their way home. I had a vague notion that Lyneth might have a sister or cousin who lived outside Sydney. A suspicion that she and the girls had left just before Christmas, that perhaps I was supposed to join them later. What if I had muddled two separate visits to Regent Street, one in which all four of us had gone together, and a later one in which I was alone and had had the accident? Perhaps no one had been able to contact them since; perhaps they were on an extended trip to the outback or somewhere, still blissfully unaware that I’d nearly been killed.

That didn’t make sense, either. Tanya would have referred to it. Which left the unpleasant possibility that there had been some sort of serious rift between us. I just couldn’t remember. My urge to know was tempered by an equally fierce determination to find out for myself rather than risk asking Tanya. Because I did know this: Tanya had once been Lyneth’s deadliest rival.

“All right?”

She’s looking around at me.

I nodded reassuringly. It occurred to me that I hadn’t even asked where we were going. Or had I? Tanya had told me before we set out but I hadn’t absorbed it. It was an excursion, I was sure of that, a little respite from my hospital bed.

I had put her on the spot by asking her about Lyneth and the girls. The topic of children, in particular, was a sensitive one for her. Then again perhaps she and Geoff were deliberately hiding something. But what?