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The lawns spread away from Graystairs, neat and razor sharp, dipping down to the lake where a couple of ducks were raucously squawking at each other. On the flagstones that bordered it, an elderly lady in a wheelchair, tartan rug across her knees, was breaking up a few stale crusts to throw to them.

‘She’s your type,’ said Harry, elbowing his companion.

The two of them sat on a mossy stone bench at the top of the lawn, enjoying the spring sunshine and watching Graystairs’

other residents.

‘Who?’ asked George, thrown by this sudden lurch in the conversation. A moment ago, they’d been talking about the hoo-hah that Eddie’s disappearance had caused, and they’d been placing bets on which member of the staff would be made to carry the can for it.

‘Enid. There. Down by the lake.’

George fumbled with a handkerchief and polished his glasses.

‘Are you sure it’s not Sydney? Enid hasn’t got that much hair.’

‘She’s wearing a hat. She’s a good-looker, though,’ Harry added with a hint of wistfulness in his voice.

‘Enid? She’s alright – but she’s not all there, you know.’ He tapped the side of his head.

‘George, none of us is all there.’

‘Speak for yourself. Still, she can’t be more annoying than Doris Wesley and her knitting needles.’ He shook his head at the memory of the klakk-klakk-klakking that was, day in, day out, driving Harry more and more insane. It wasn’t even as if she had anything to show for it: she’d knit an eight-inch square in dark green, and then unravel the whole lot, rolling the wool up into an increasingly frizzy ball, before starting over again. There were times when George knew Harry would quite happily have skewered Doris’s hands together with the needles, just to give everyone a bit of peace.

In silence, they watched Enid and the ducks, and breathed in the sweet, fresh air. It made a welcome change, thought George.

Bedpan Alley, that’s what they called Graystairs. Very nice if you liked that sort of thing. Which George didn’t. He wasn’t quite sure what it was that he’d prefer, but he knew it wasn’t doilies and the smell of pot pourri hanging over everything, trying to mask the smells of age and infirmity and disinfectant.

‘Anyway, what would someone like Enid want with a raddled old git like you?’

‘I was a bit of a looker when I was young,’ George said indignantly. ‘During the war, I could have had anyone I liked.’

‘And you did,’ Harry grinned back.

They both chortled at the remembrance of those long gone days – but, if they’d been honest, they’d have admitted that their memories were as much wishful thinking as genuine recollection, although Harry remembered seeing a documentary on memory-loss in old age, and felt sure that it should have been recent events that were all fuzzy, not the distant past. Or was it the other way round after all?

They lapsed into warm, contemplative silence, listening to the quacking of the ducks. George polished his glasses again, oblivious to the fact that he’d only just cleaned them.

‘It’s a shame, really...’ George suddenly said.

‘What is?’

‘That we can’t actually remember what it is we did during the war.’ ‘ I can remember perfectly.’

‘No you can’t.’

‘I remember shooting people.’

‘Who?’

‘The enemy of course.’

‘And who were the enemy exactly?’

Harry didn’t reply.

‘See, I told you you couldn’t remember.’ George settled back smugly, reached for his handkerchief, and decided not to bother.

Harry snorted. ‘Well, with a bit of luck we soon will.’

George nodded hopefully, and watched Enid and her hat as she finished throwing her scraps of bread to the ducks.

As the cold metal terminals touched his temples they expanded, living webs of quicksilver spreading out over his skin to form a network of shiny veins. He gasped sharply as time froze around him, and he sank, a stone in an ocean of numbers and symbols.

With a numb, glacial slowness, he realized that he couldn’t remember his own name.

Things swam past him; bizarre shoals of figures, letters, mathematical equations. An icy gale screamed