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was less suspicious now. ‘And how do they?’
    After a few minutes, Irena noted, Lind began to wax enthusiastic, and Tarski was gradually transformed, as if the older man’s enthusiasm, slow to be roused, acted as a tonic, stirring the younger one’s face, his mind, even his body, which now seemed more erect, more vigorous. Irena watched, rapt. It was like watching a mental infusion of some magical elixir or the charge of an electric rod. With the new intensity in his face, Tarski had suddenly been turned into an attractive man. Was this what people meant when they talked about ‘so-and-so’s’ particular brilliance at heading a lab, at getting the best out of their post-docs, that slew of younger researchers who seemed to move round the world like an elite corps of scientific backpackers, sussing out through some impenetrable grapevine which beach or lab was the perfect one for them.
    She wished that Lind could infuse her with some of his energy. Not that it would necessarily help her penetrate the arcane matter they were now talking about. If she had come here with the veiled hope that she might learn something that would help her deal with her mother, she was fast giving up on the notion. There was a Gobi of blinding sandstorms and unquenchable thirst to cross between these brain scientists’ descriptions and her mother’s experience, let alone her own, of the slow sadistic killer that Alzheimer’s disease was. Would understanding the nature of a cytokine or the biochemical workings of a memory cascade explain why her mother too often insisted Irena was someone quite other than Irena, someone she called out to with love in her voice, only momentslater to sit frozen in terror in the armchair she was increasingly reluctant to leave? Could anything visible only through an electron microscope at a ten-thousand time magnification tell her why, when her mother occasionally blundered out of the building, she would lose herself on a street she had walked on daily for too many years, while she could describe in minute and repetitive detail the night of Irena’s birth in a small town hundreds of kilometres away, the name of the midwife, the birds and flowers she had listed so as to mute the pain of the labour – names she still chanted with parallel and rising urgency? Would anything gleaned at this conference help her deal with her mother’s sudden rages, so vicious that she felt reduced to pulp when they were over? She doubted it.
    If only there were someone to share it all with.
    Which is why, of course, she had come. To try again, after all these years. To try and find a possible kin.
    Bruno Lind’s voice penetrated her absence. ‘I’m sorry if I was rude, Ms Davies. You’ll have to forgive an old man.’
    ‘No. No.’ She had no idea what he was talking about.
    ‘I’ll leave you now. We’ll see each other later, no doubt. You, too, Professor…Professor...’
    ‘Tarski,’ the man filled in for him.
    ‘Yes. Yes, of course. Tarski.’

    The next time Irena saw Bruno Lind was in the hotel lobby that evening. He was with a striking chocolate-brown woman, who was slightly taller than him and who had her arms round his neck in what could only be called a passionate clasp. Irena tried not to, but she felt a mixture of envy and disgust.

3
    ‘I want to see. It’s important that you take me.’
    Bruno Lind ushered Amelia away from the crowded conference buffet. All eyes were on them. And he knew exactly what the mental processes behind those eyes were conjuring up.
    ‘You shouldn’t have come here.’
    ‘I knew that if I didn’t come, you’d find some excuse. A message left for me at reception. Important paper, blah…blah… More important meeting…’ She laughed her low sonorous laugh. ‘Admit it.’
    Bruno threw his head back and joined in Amelia’s teasing laughter. They were outside now, on the busy midday street. A tram rattled past. ‘Am I that transparent?’
    She didn’t answer him directly.