Omega

The sister peered out into the corridor, obviously looking for assistance. With slow rhythmic precision Rees began to sigh heavily, as if he were mentally reciting a calming mantra.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” the sister said.

“Is he coming out of this?”

“What?”

“I was wondering. Will he get better?”

Another glance down the corridor. “He’s making progress. But he needs to rest.”

Rees produced something from a pocket of his windcheater. The sister shrank back as he came forward but she took it from him when he offered it to her.

“That’s me and Owen,” he told her. “And our mother. She’s dead now.”

It was a strip of photographs, dog-eared at its corners. I knew it would be the one that had been taken in a photo booth during a day trip to Porthcawl when Rees was nine. Four near-identical shots, all three heads crammed together, frantically grinning. He always carried it with him.

“See?” he said as though vindicated, plucking it from her uncertain fingers.

He returned to my bedside and looked down at me. I narrowed my eyes to slits, not wanting him to know I was awake. He didn’t notice anything. He was staring at me yet not seeing me, with the air of being haunted not so much by my condition as by the effect it might have on him. Rees had his own problems and frequently turned those of others into crises of his own.

“I really must insist,” the sister said.

“No problem,” Rees told her. He glanced at me one more time and said, “I’ll be back,” in his best Arnold Schwarzenegger manner, before slouching out.

The sister came briefly to my bedside. I closed my eyes again, tried to look as tranquil and undisturbed as possible. After a few moments she exited.

Presently I heard voices in the corridor—the sister speaking angrily, a male voice defensively. I couldn’t make out the words but the man didn’t sound like Rees. Soon two more nurses appeared at my bedside, checking everything around me, tucking me securely in. There was more conversation in the corridor, dwindling away. And at length silence.

I lay there, fully awake, marooned in my bed. The night-time hospital quiet invaded the room, bringing with it a perverse sense that while nothing untoward was happening on the ward its very tranquillity made some new nocturnal emergency imminent. I had the growing urge to scream, just to jolt something into action.

Had Rees been escorted off the premises? How did he get in in the first place? Lax security, or simply through the force of his singular personality? And how long had he been at my bedside before I’d awoken? It was typical of him to come at some unsociable hour, but I could easily imagine him inveigling the confidence of a sympathetic nurse by insisting on seeing me in that innocent yet adamant manner that would brook no denial.

Rees was three years younger than me, a cheerful child who had become more withdrawn in adolescence. I’d just finished my finals when my father phoned to say he had been hospitalised. He’d been found wandering the streets near Swansea jail in the middle of the night, dehydrated and malnourished. It turned out he’d scarcely eaten in over a week.

For weeks after his release from hospital he remained fragile and uncommunicative. There was talk of a thyroid imbalance, of anaemia-induced depression, of possible drug abuse. My father put the episode down to exam pressure at school, even though Rees had been found less than a mile from the spot where our mother had died. Slowly, throughout the summer, his condition improved, but his illness ultimately triggered my eventual split with Tanya. To beginit I kept in touch with her by daily telephone calls. We’d planned to go travelling in Europe later that summer. Typically I hadn’t bothered to consider how I would square this with a similar promise to Lyneth.

In those days I lived too narrowly in the present: with me it was always proximity that made the heart grow fonder. And Lyneth wasn’t merely on hand; she was also a big help with Rees. She drove a little Fiesta that proved useful in taking him out on recuperative drives around the Gower. She made herself very available to him—so much so that the two of us only spent time alone together on prim shopping trips or visits to the cinema. Sex was very much off the agenda. But one afternoon in the Tesco car park she told me that she’d missed her period in May, followed by a heavy one the next month that she suspected was a miscarriage.

This was said without any hint of reproach or even expectation; she might have been informing me about a decision to buy apples rather than pears. Her matter-of-factness had the odd effect of making me feel I couldn’t possibly abandon her for Tanya. She was selfless, self-disciplined, and considerate of others—all the things I’d decided I was not.