She was forty-five minutes out of Manchester Piccadilly. She decided to get a cookie or some chocolate from the buffet, maybe a tea as well.
She got up. She felt light-headed and empty-sick. The train was too hot, the two chattering women in the twinsets too loud, and the girl on the clam-shell too obnoxious.
The small boy, travelling with his mum, looked up from his toys at Gwen as she edged by.
‘All right?’ she fake-smiled at him.
She certainly wasn’t.
Why was that man looking at him? That oh-so-familiar man?
I’m just being paranoid, James thought. He’s just got one of those faces, and I’m in one of those moods.
He started heading to the Please Pay Here.
There was the man again. No, it was a different man. This one was dark haired, not blond, and was wearing jeans and a dark T-shirt instead of a suit. But he also looked uncannily familiar.
It’s just going to be one of those days, James told himself. Just face it.
The stab behind his eyes was back. Sounds all around him seemed boxier than ever. He looked down into his basket, to check he was done. It was full of stuff. He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d put most of it in his basket. Tippex? A globe artichoke? Cat treats? Really?
He looked up in slight panic, wondering if anyone in the Saturday crowd could tell he was having a quiet breakdown in the middle of the shop. He saw the dark-haired man in the black jeans.
The man made eye contact with him.
James turned and headed for the exit. He was walking quite fast, on the very edge of actually trotting.
‘Excuse me? Sir?’ a shop assistant called out.
He realised the basket of unpaid-for goods was still swinging off his arm. He threw it aside and started to run in earnest. There was some commotion behind him at the disturbance. His basket landed on the floor, and spilled out his sea bass and his packet of geranium seeds and his block of marzipan and his hair-clips and his conference pears and all the other things he had collected.
‘So, what are we saying?’ asked Toshiko.
‘James is not James,’ said Jack. ‘James is in danger. We’re in danger. Something’s happened to the real James. This James is an impostor. This is the real James, but something seriously crazy is happening to him. This has something to do with the alarm. This has nothing to do with the alarm.’ He looked at the other three. ‘Take your pick. Any or all of the above.’
‘I checked James out,’ Owen insisted. ‘Full work-up. There was nothing-’
‘Nothing we can see,’ Jack corrected.
‘All right, all right,’ Owen replied, conceding.
‘What do we do about it?’ Toshiko asked.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
‘Whatever we can,’ said Jack. ‘Whatever we damn well can. And let’s hope part of that whatever is helping our friend out.’
‘Do we know where he is?’ asked Owen.
‘I could try his phone,’ offered Ianto.
‘Don’t,’ Jack said. ‘Try Gwen instead.’
A cookie hadn’t helped. She was feeling worse. The wretched sense of loss gnawed at her. She felt like bursting into tears.
But over what? It was hard to reconcile anything in her recent memory with these pangs that seemed to register on a scale with grief or bereavement. In fact, the more she tried, the more she realised her recent memory seemed downright patchy. What had she done yesterday? The day before? The robot thing in the allotments, in Cathays. Yeah. That had been pretty full-on. Maybe this was what post-traumatic shock felt like.
If she was actually ill, that would help to explain the way she felt. It would explain the emotional fragility, the sense of loss, the emptiness.
There was a void inside her, a big dark hole. Its presence gave her an appetite, a searing need to fill it up. She was hungry and thirsty, she was craving, but no amount of food or drink would do.
The train was just beginning its roll into Manchester Piccadilly. She knew why she’d made the trip — to visit this bloke — but it all seemed so pointless now she was arriving. She couldn’t reason out why she’d ever thought this trip worthwhile. She had no intention of doing anything except getting off this train and on the first one back to Cardiff. Screw this Brady guy. Sorry, but screw him.
She’d put her MP3 back in, but it kept playing her random tracks she didn’t know; annoying indie pop that she didn’t like at all. It sounded like Rhys’s stuff. Had he put them on there?
It made her really want to call him. She wanted to talk to Rhys more than just about anything she could think of. It was a gut feeling, as if talking to him would provide a fix that would soothe her cravings. Something, some dull feeling of restraint, stopped her from hitting his number on her phone list.
The music went on: more stuff she didn’t like or know. She pulled out her earphones, and stuffed the MP3 into her bag. Outside, grey platforms crawled past. She could see the mighty span of the station roof. The train rocked to a halt. There was a rifle salute of opening doors.
People were getting up, gathering their things.
She breathed hard, trying not to cry. She got up. She left her rubbish, her coffee cups, her food wrappers, her paper. She had some magazines too. One was folded back on a glossy article about what Jolene Blalock had been up to since Enterprise wound up. She’d saved that for Rhys, she remembered. She rolled the magazine up and put it in her bag. She dumped the rest.
She got up, and joined the queue filing down the aisle. The women in twinsets were still chattering. The young woman who thought a lot of herself was loudly telling her clam-shell she was just getting off the train.
The small boy and his mum were just in front of her. She stepped back to let them into the queue. The mum smiled a thank you. The boy toddled along, clutching his Spongebob Squarepants toy.
Gwen got off the train and walked out of the bustling disembarkation tide to the quiet side of the platform. She stood, breathing hard, hurting. The air was cold and tangy with fumes. Whistles and voices and door-bangs and the patter of footsteps barely filled the echoing vault. A Tannoy announcement rang out into space.
Unable to stop herself, she started to cry. Tears streamed down her face. She shuddered with each sob. The sense of loss was as overwhelming as it was incomprehensible.
Her phone rang. It rang for a while before she was able to answer it.
‘Gwen?’
‘Jack?’
‘Gwen, are you OK?’
‘Yeah. I… Yeah.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Manchester Piccadilly,’ she replied.
‘OK. Why?’
‘I… It’s complicated.’
‘Gwen,’ Jack’s voice said. ‘This is important. I need to talk to you about James.’
She swallowed. She sniffed. She thought about that.
She said, ‘Who?’
TWENTY-SEVEN
He left the food hall and ran along the upper landing of the shopping centre. It was busy. Hard sunlight shone down through the atrium’s glass roof onto hundreds of jostling people.
His mind was busy too. His heart was pounding. He-
He slowed down. He was being stupid.
James came to a halt, and slowly turned around, scanning the crowd. No one gave him so much as a passing look. Too many minds were focused on their Saturday shop, too many attentions were wrapped up in conversations with partners or friends or whining kids.
Sounds, too many sounds, all boxy and hollow. It was like being underwater in a busy public baths, and hearing the swell of voices in the air transmitted by the water alone.