THURSDAY NEXT
—A Life in SpecOps

I TOOK my new car for a drive in the countryside with the top down; the rushing air was a cool respite from the summer heat. The familiar landscape had not changed much; it was still as beautiful as I remembered. Swindon, on the other hand, had changed a great deal. The town had spread outward and up. Light industry went outward, financial glassy towers in the center went up. The residential area had expanded accordingly; the countryside was just that much farther from the center of town.

It was evening when I pulled up in front of a plain semidetached house in a street that contained forty or fifty just like it. I flipped up the hood and locked the car. This was where I had grown up; my bedroom was the window above the front door. The house had aged. The painted window frames had faded and the pebbledash facing seemed to be coming away from the wall in several areas. I pushed open the front gate with some difficulty as there was a good deal of resistance behind it, and then closed it again with a similar amount of heaving and sweating— a task made more difficult by the assortment of dodos who had gathered eagerly around to see who it was and then plocked excitedly when they realized it was someone vaguely familiar.

“Hello, Mordacai!” I said to the oldest, who dipped and bobbed in greeting. They all wanted to be made a fuss of after that, so I stayed awhile and tickled them under their chins as they searched my pockets inquisitively for any sign of marshmallows, something that dodos find particularly irresistible.

My mother opened the door to see what the fuss was about and ran up the path to meet me. The dodos wisely scattered, as my mother can be dangerous at anything more than a fast walk. She gave me a long hug. I returned it gratefully.

“Thursday!—” she said, her eyes glistening. “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming?”

“It was a surprise, Mum. I’ve got a posting in town.”

She had visited me in hospital several times and bored me in a delightfully distracting manner with all the minutiae of Margot Vishler’s hysterectomy and the Women’s Federation gossip.

“How’s the arm?”

“It can be a bit stiff sometimes and when I sleep on it, it goes completely numb. Garden’s looking nice. Can I come in?”

My mother apologized and ushered me through the door, taking my jacket and hanging it up in the cloakroom. She looked awkwardly at the automatic in my shoulder holster so I stuffed it in my case. The house, I soon noticed, was exactly the same: the same mess, the same furniture, the same smell. I paused to look around, to take it all in and bathe in the security of fond memories. The last time I had been truly happy was in Swindon, and this house had been the hub of my life for twenty years. A creeping doubt entered my mind about the wisdom of leaving the town in the first place.