Omega

I descended the carpeted stairs. I was wearing black slip-ons, a grey sweater and the navy corduroys that Lyneth had bought one birthday several years ago. I’d never liked the trousers because they were too baggy. Had Tanya dressed me? No, I was perfectly capable of doing so myself. But I didn’t usually wear shoes around the house.

Tanya was in the kitchen, flipping through a recipe book. She looked very

domestic, a Bart Simpson pinafore draped around her, her hair loosely tied up.

“Have you seen my wallet and keys?”

“They’re safe,” she told me. “You’re not allowed them until you’re better. Doctor’s orders.”

She said this with a degree of jauntiness, but there was a sliver of steel there too. Were they worried I might get the urge to go driving or embark on a spending spree?

Snapshot memories began returning. Walking up the cinder driveway to her 1930s semi-detached, Geoff beaming at me from the porch, the door wide open. Sitting in the bath with the water up to my neck and making a sober assessment of how easy it would be for me to drown. Accompanying Tanya to a big supermarket, all gleaming lights and stacked produce, the incessant bleep bleeping of the checkout machines as we waited in the queue, our trolley stacked with kitchen rolls, salad vegetables, a string bag of oranges. A dream of Lyneth, eighteen years old again, pulling on my arm as she marched me through a department store filled with debris and broken mannequins. She was shouting to me that she had to find a red chiffon scarf while I kept looking around for a toilet. A sales assistant was standing at one of the counters. At first I thought she was a mannequin too because plaster dust had coated her. She smiled at us and told me she was my mother. I’d wet the bed. Tanya had had to clean me up in the bathroom.

“Hell’s bells,” I said aloud.

Tanya looked up. “What?”

“How long have I been out of hospital?”

“Three days.”

“I feel as if I’ve only just got here.”

She didn’t look bothered. “You’ve been out of it. ‘Flu or something. Spent most of the time with your head in a newspaper or dozing.”

‘Flu? I didn’t believe it. They were drugging me, keeping me docile. I had a vague recollection of spending hours reading any paper I could lay my hands on. Looking for some indication of a disturbance in Regent Street just before Christmas. There was none. I had read everything else too: business, sports, holidays—I was completely indiscriminate. It was all I could manage.

I went out to the conservatory at the back of the house, feeling a similar sense of frustration to Owain. I had to break free. Everything was becoming more intense, in Owain’s life as much as my own. I realised that a part of me didn’t want to lose my connection with him, at least not yet. There had to be a reason why we had become linked.

I’d been sitting in an armchair in front of a window overlooking the garden. A brick patio gave out onto a lawn with neglected flowerbeds. Everything had a weary winter look, not least the green garden chairs that were stacked in one corner and held little pools of blackened leaves.

A coffee-table book sat on the armchair—a pictorial history of the twentieth century. I must have been browsing through it. The text was pretty elementary, the photographs stock.

The doorbell chimed. I heard someone talking in the distance. In French. I almost swooned but recovered myself, held that other world at bay.

Tanya entered with two other people, a man and a woman. She found them chairs, seated them opposite me.

The man was familiar, though I struggled to recall his name. He was the same age as me, wheat-haired, energetic in his movements, already talking enthusiastically. His companion was an equally blonde woman, her eyes a startling green. Contact lenses, I realised, telling myself not to stare.

Adrian. Adrian Lister, my producer. We’d had a long working association, and it was he who had commissioned Battlegrounds. As he talked, I knew he was discussing the next series. He spoke with his usual gesticulations, periodically sweeping the hair back from his eyes. His partner was his girlfriend, Rachel. She sat with her legs slightly splayed to accommodate the neat but emphatic bulge at her midriff. She was six months pregnant. We’d had an impromptu party at the studio to celebrate.

Every so often, a pause or a change in Adrian’s tone would provoke me into making some response, though I had no idea what I was saying. But Adrian appeared satisfied with my replies, at least to the extent that he continued conversing with his customary vigour. Rachel, by contrast, was silent and looked rather uncomfortable. I didn’t know her well but it was obvious that for her the visit was an ordeal.