Peter Anghelides - Another Life

He listened to her footsteps disappearing into the distance. Then he just sat for several minutes and let the night-time sounds of the Hub echo around him. The 50 hertz hum of the machinery. The tick-splash sound of a drip. The occasional creak of a board somewhere in the older fittings.

There was no sign of Toshiko returning. He went out to the main area, and satisfied himself that Ianto had also left for the evening. The helmet-mounted display and data-gloves were at his desk where he’d left them.

Owen powered up the computer again, and began to type. His logon screen appeared, and he tapped in his user id: harpo@swalesonline.net , followed by his password.

‘This is Second Reality ,’ the screen told him. ‘Connect to the Internet? Y/N’

He slipped on the data-gloves, flexing his fingers and feeling the touch-sensitive pads against his skin. He carefully strapped on the helmet. The screen image was already displayed on the stereoscopic screens, and the text seemed to leap out at him in three dimensions.

He reached out his right hand and pushed against the Y.

‘ Second Reality ,’ said the mellow voice of the game, all around him. ‘Welcome back, Glendower Broadsword.’

The chlorine stink caught in her nose and throat. A child screamed from the far end of the swimming pool in alarm or delight; it wasn’t clear to Gwen. She swung around, lurching, swaying, unsure of her footing on the bleached blue tiling.

Swimmers thronged the pool. A flotilla of inflatables carried a procession of whooping children and indulgent parents diagonally across the main race lanes and towards the lazy river, where water jets urged the tide of people onwards, onwards.

That man on the balcony was still watching her. He peered nonchalantly over the top of his newspaper. She knew him from somewhere, didn’t she?

Gwen grabbed the stainless-steel rail at the edge of the deep end. Held on to it fiercely as the room snapped back into focus. In the dead centre of the pool, ignored by the endless stream of swimmers, one man churned the green-blue water. Floundering. Gasping. Going under for the third time.

It was Jack. Gwen recognised the black Speedos. (How did she recognise the black Speedos? She couldn’t say. It didn’t matter.)

Jack’s face broke the surface again. Another huge gasp for air. His hair was slicked close to his head by the water. His eyes made contact with hers, past the kids on floats, past their attentive fathers, past the boisterous teenage lads who ducked their girlfriends or did handstands underwater. Unseen by them, Jack’s mouth opened in a wide ‘o’ of surprise and horror before his mouth, his nose, his terrified blue eyes submerged beneath the churning water.

‘Someone help him!’ screamed Gwen. She looked wildly around. From the other side of the pool, a lifeguard sauntered slowly towards her. The lad was about twenty, absurdly good-looking, with short-cropped brown hair and startling green eyes. He peeled off his yellow T-shirt languorously, to reveal a smooth, muscular chest and a fuse of hair that circled his navel and ran down into his baggy red shorts. ‘Leave him,’ he told her, his voice warm and dark and calm. ‘He’s mine.’

The lifeguard slipped into the water, and the kids and parents and teens parted before him. He pulled himself towards the floundering Jack with slow, powerful strokes. Gwen felt the frustration build in her, a tensing of the muscles in her upper arms and shoulders. ‘Hurry hurry hurry,’ she chanted, like a mantra.

Just as the lad was about to reach Jack, a long-legged girl collided with him. Her blonde hair coiled like snakes around her in the water. Her tight red one-piece swimsuit was the same colour as the boy’s shorts, and Gwen knew suddenly that she was another lifeguard.

‘Leave him,’ said the girl in red. Her tone was deliberate and her voice was breathy, yet clearly audible above the sound of the pool. She lifted one hand out of the water and pushed down on the other lifeguard’s head. ‘Leave him. He’s mine.’

The young male lifeguard shook her off and pushed his head back to the surface, blowing air through his pursed lips and scattering water with a rapid shake of his head. He pressed up against the woman, forcing her away so that she slowly fell backwards, the swimsuit material stretched tight over her breasts.

The two guards continued to jostle together in the pool, a leisurely exchange of shoves and nudges that was more like a ballet than a fight. Beside them, Jack’s face floated just below the surface, his eyes and mouth wide.

Gwen choked. She couldn’t draw breath. It was as though she was underwater, unable or afraid to breathe in. She wanted to plunge into the pool, drag herself across to the middle and bring Jack to the surface. But her legs were leaden; she could not even slide her bare feet over the cracked blue tiles. Her hands spasmed, and her fingers locked, immovable around the barrier rail.

The thin-faced man stared down from the balcony. He had stood to watch the commotion in the pool. No, Gwen realised, his eyes were fixed on her. ‘Owen Harper,’ she said.

‘It’s Doctor Owen Harper, the thin-faced man called to her. ‘Actually.’

Gwen cursed her paralysed legs, and tried to lunge over the barrier into the water. Her arms had no strength. The crowds continued their unheeding passage around the drowning man. Gwen screamed wildly at the lifeguards. They paused to study her incuriously.

‘Save him!’ Her shrill cry echoed around the swimming pool.

She woke up abruptly, surfacing from beneath her sheets with a wail of misery and fear.

‘Bloody hell!’ Rhys fumbled around on the bedside cabinet, and scattered books and pens on the floor before he managed to locate the light switch. He propped himself up on his elbows. ‘What’s the matter, love?’

Gwen found that her arms weren’t paralysed any more, so she threw them around her boyfriend and started to sob.

She let him clasp her tightly, quietly, until she slowly calmed down. He was good like that, Rhys. He knew when to talk and when to shut up and just say nothing.

She knew she couldn’t explain it, so she lied to him that she’d already forgotten what the nightmare was.

Rhys squeezed her again. ‘It must have been the rain rattling the window. Sorry, love, I know I should’ve fixed it, and now with the storm and everything…’

‘No, no,’ she mumbled. ‘S’all right.’

Rhys held her at arm’s length to look at her. Jerked his head towards the window. ‘And it’s boiling in here, isn’t it? Maybe that rain’s not so bad, I can open the thing a bit and let some air in?’ He slipped out of bed and ambled over to the window. When he cracked open the top pane, Gwen could hear the steady susurration of rain on the pavement below.

Rhys padded through to the bathroom. He left the door ajar, and raised his voice so that she could hear him over the sound of the running tap. He spoke in short bursts as he brushed his teeth. ‘Every time my gran knew a storm was coming in. She’d cover up all the mirrors in the house with bedsheets. White bedsheets. It was like her terrace house was going into storage. Wouldn’t get unwrapped until the lightning had gone away.’

Gwen smiled to herself, not quite sure if she was amused or sad. She knew Rhys was just talking cheerful nonsense to cajole her out of the fearful mood, to help her completely forget whatever it was that had upset her. But his anecdote reminded her of that alien radiance sprite Torchwood had trapped a few weeks ago in a mirrored box. Toshiko had folded up the reflective surfaces and thrown a dark cloth over it. Would nothing be simple any more, Gwen thought to herself. Maybe she’d never again have normal points of reference for the stories that Rhys told about his family, or about what had happened to him at the office, or something that he and Banana Boat had laughed at in the pub. She could never talk about her own work, and lovely Rhys just didn’t question it because he accepted ‘Special Ops’ was something she could never discuss. He could tell her about Barry’s latest computer cock-up, or the naivety of the young secretary he’d just hired, or the latest crazy diet theory expounded by Lucy in his office. But Gwen never made up any of her own stories to exchange about Special Ops colleagues. She knew from her own police work that it was too easy to get lost in those kinds of fabrications, once you got started.