The area was supposed to have been cleared years ago, but it looked as if it had suffered saturation bombing, everything churned up and mangled beyond recognition. He cursed the fact that he didn’t have binoculars and could only rely on murky impressions. But what was certain was that this was no decontamination team: on the contrary, as much of the ground was being turned over as possible.
A wave of giddiness swept over him. We almost went plummeting down. Another sound reached us: that of an approaching helicopter.
Again Owain cursed himself for leaving the Land Rover’s engine running: if it was a patrol craft it would be carrying heat sensors that could locate the vehicle.
He scrambled down the wall, sliding off the ice but landing safely. Edging past the razor wire, he stopped for a moment and listened. The helicopter sound was receding. He glimpsed it in the near distance, banking. It was going to come back his way.
He jumped into the Land Rover and reversed down the street, back into Saville Row. He headed south, only switching his lights on again as he made a westwards turn along Piccadilly.
I was amazed at his calmness, but his hands began to tremble. He peeled off his gloves and gripped the steering wheel tightly, his entire body swimming with a nervous exhaustion.
A vehicle was approaching from the opposite direction, its headlights blazing. It went past him without slowing, an old Army Saxon APC, reconditioned for Security Police use with a rear-mounted machine gun.
At Hyde Park Corner a street market was shutting up for the night. The area around it had been levelled. Owain turned south, winding down the window. We passed what had once been Buckingham Palace Gardens but was now snow-choked allotments that extended into Belgravia. The palace itself had been bulldozed half a century before following a direct enemy hit, the royal family reduced to a handful of survivors who were shipped overseas for safekeeping and were now dispersed around southern Africa and the American-occupied Caribbean. Their departure had only added more legitimacy to the new military government, wch already had its counterparts on the Continent. Fifty years later it was still in charge.
Owain went through a dense pocket of fog. He was driving too quickly. A T-junction materialised without warning. Mentally I lunged, attempting to wrench the wheel around. Brakes screeched, and a wall loomed in front of us.
FIVE
Two male nurses were lifting me into a wheelchair. One of them folded a blanket over my lap. I was pushed to a window and left alone.
Darkness had fallen, but I had a good view out over a rectangle of lawn with two wings of the building on either side. A modern redbrick hospital with row upon row of windows, cars going by on the road beyond.
I tried to lift myself out of the wheelchair, grasping the window ledge and levering myself up. I almost managed to straighten but the giddiness returned. I let go, for fear it might sweep me up and send me spiralling back into that shadow-world.
I lay half-twisted in the chair, my head filled with the pulse of my blood. Someone helped me sit up properly. Tanya.
Her renewed presence, and the sombre look on her face, made me think again that Lyneth and the girls must be dead.
I began raving at her, demanding to know what had happened. But again nothing emerged: I remained as limp and mute as a stuffed toy.
It had to be the medication. Or was I semi-paralysed? Brain-damaged? No, it was neither of these, I was certain. At least not in the conventional sense.
Tanya drew up a chair facing me and sat down. She wore the same brown suede coat as before, looked quite artlessly alluring. But although she sat only a few feet away from me, she might as well have been on the Moon because the rolling, sloshing sounds I could hear were coming from her. She was talking to me but I couldn’t make out a single word.
This went on for some time. What did I look like to her? A zombie? A drooling idiot? What was she trying to tell me? Something about Lyneth and the girls? She didn’t exactly look devastated, more concerned. This encouraged me. I was certain I’d seen only the front of the building collapsing in the explosion. Lyneth and the girls might have been at the back of the store. Possibly they had been injured by flying debris.
Suddenly I had an image of myself standing on sodden grass, watching as a coffin was lowered into a hole in the ground that had been cut square to accommodate more than one. I had no idea whether or not this was a true memory since I couldn’t actually remember anything else apart from Tanya’s previous visit to my bedside. But if Lyneth and the girls were dead they would probably have been buried by now.
No. It didn’t make sense. How could I have attended a funeral when I was still hospitalised and couldn’t even get out of bed without help? Tanya didn’t look pained enough. I had the impression she was more worried about me.
What had caused the explosion? Possibly she was telling me, but I was quite unable to comprehend anything. The idea that anyone would deliberately target a toy store was so repulsive it beggared belief.
I felt such a confusion of emotions. In embarrassment I managed to turn my head and look out the window again. The lawn below became a road, the redbrick hospital the metal-ribbed flanks of a bridge across which I was driving, my knuckles oozing lymph. Then I was back in the wheelchair again.
Tanya leaned forward to wipe my cheeks with a handkerchief that smelt of her perfume. She’d worn it as long as I’d known her, though I couldn’t recall its name. She scrutinised me in silence. This was unreal. Somehow I had to get a grip on things.
Tanya dragged her chair closer and took hold of my hands. She was talking again, and I could tell from her expression that she was insisting that I concentrate. Nothing she said made any sense. The sound of her voice grew higher pitched, became a buzzing that I thought was going to make my head explode.
At this point she did something astonishing. She leaned forward and planted a kiss on my lips.
It was a gentle but unreserved kiss. She hadn’t kissed me like that in years, since our salad days at university when everything had been new and we couldn’t keep our hands off one another.
She drew back and looked closely at me. I couldn’t imagine what she was thinking.
SIX
Owain had produced a torch and was climbing a stairway that zigzagged up the outside of the building.
He emerged on to a broad balcony with a view to the west. The building lay on the south bank near Westminster Bridge, itself an unfamiliar utilitarian structure of girders and thick wooden beams. In the darkness across the frozen river I could see the huddled fortresses of the state. They looked like a latter-day version of an ancient temple complex, but dedicated to their own hermetic ceremonies rather than the lofty aspirations of worship. A deserted park of sinuous walkways and barren trees occupied the site of the Houses of Parliament.
I tried to wrench myself free of him, to hurl myself back to my own world. It was another unwilled and unanticipated transition, a seamless shift from the warm aftermath of Tanya’s kiss to the bitter-cold outside air. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted my own life, as fraught with confusion and uncertainty as it was. How else was I going to find out what had actually happened?
But in this other world I was little more than a phantom in Owain’s mind. I had no physical leverage and couldn’t budge myself. Owain wasn’t aware of my strivings—indeed he still gave no sign of being aware of my presence at all. And I found that I couldn’t in this instance influence his actions in the slightest: he was firmly in command of himself.