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Alex. Are you coming back, Owen?'
    'Not tonight, no. I need to find something out.'
    'You need to find a lot of things out, Owen, I don't doubt that, but I'm not sure you'll do any of it in a hotel in Llandudno. Not during one night. Are you alone, out of interest?'
    'Not sure.'
    'Have a look behind you then . Close your eyes and hold out your hands. See if there's any flesh within groping distance that doesn't feel like yours.'
    'There's no one here, physically. That doesn't mean I'm alone though, does it, Sylvie?'
    'Sounds like a line from one of your scripts. I daresay it will be before long.' Ten seconds of silence. 'You're not coming back tonight then?'
    'Not tonight, no.'
    'Have a nice time.' And she hung up.
     

The Riverside Gallery
     
     
    Sylvie stared for a moment at the phone. She walked into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of dry white wine from the fridge. Chardonnay, its flavour always a little too insistent without food to counter it, but she didn't feel like eating. After one sip, she went over to the cellar door, opened it and walked down the steps. Something cold and unwelcoming about that cellar; she'd rather not go down there at all. Always a damp feeling to the stone. The light had gone years before, and no one had ever bothered to fix it. She stopped at the bottom and stared at Owen's greatcoat. The tip of the tabloid newspaper stuck out of the pocket. No, she'd had enough of this. None of it was her doing, was it, so how come Owen had abandoned the memory and left it to her, like some dark inheritance she was meant to sort out? Down here in the cellar of their lives. Was she the archivist of his memory, then? Bloody Owen. Came back here to her bed for one night, as though she were some sort of service station, then off down the road on his memory-recovery programme.
    She walked quickly back up the stairs, slammed the cellar door, walked into the kitchen, downed the glass of wine in one gulp and then poured herself another. She went over to the phone, picked it up and dialled a number. She didn't need to look it up. After a few rings, the voice came on, cultured, slow and warm. Henry.
    'The Riverside Gallery. How may I help you?'
    'It's me.'
    'So how is he?'
    'In fucking Llandudno, recovering his memories, almost certainly the wrong ones, I should think, knowing Owen. I'm mighty sick of most of mine at the moment, I can tell you. Particularly the ones containing the word Owen. Be more than happy to dump the lot.'
    'Want to come over?' She hesitated. 'Is it all right?'
    'I'll get rid of all the belly dancers and temple prosti tutes, change the silk sheets and ... bingo.'
    'You're on.'
    'Take-away?'
    'As long as we can have it in the Picasso Room.'
    'Have to be pizza then. Pablo might rise from his Iberian grave if there were to be a smell of curry in there.'
    'Pizza is fine. Pink period for me. You can have the blue.
    Make mine vegetarian, remember. Don't want to be having bad dreams. Not with so many minotaurs about.'
    'What time?'
    'I'll have a shower, then set off. About an hour and a half.' She cleaned herself up, chose some nice clothes, black silk, white cotton. Old-fashioned erotica. Henry was very predictable in some ways, and at this moment she was grateful for the fact.
    She stripped slowly in front of the mirror. Item after item of clothing came off, and she tried to see herself as a man might see her. Until the delta itself was revealed and he had no choice now but to enter. The mirror was a man looking. Owen, for example.
    And was that how Alex Gregory had done it? No, her attraction was to be taken surely, not to offer herself at all.
    To be taken. Owen had seen that, and that was precisely how he had used her, in both Time's Widow and Deva. She'd had the clothes taken from her both times.
    Naked now, Sylvie stared at the mirror, which stared back.
    'I hate you, Owen Treadle. And the way you use people to turn them into images. I don't care how good the images are. That's not what