Loss of Separation by Conrad Williams

underling today. I put out some food and water for him and then I tried to find the booklet about Winter Bay that I had seen the previous day, but I couldn't remember where I had positioned it. I checked my room, in case I had accidentally taken it back with me, but it wasn't there either. Someone must have bought it.
    I sat at the desk for an hour, trying to read, but my pain would not allow me to focus. No position was comfortable. Just trying to keep my balance on the rolling ship had caused me agony in muscles that my wasted legs had not used for months. The motion of the sea had stayed inside me, as if it had stolen aboard and was influencing the tides of my blood.
    I closed my eyes and thought of one of my first times flying a commercial passenger jet. I had the controls of a 737 and we were flying through heavy cloud, climbing out of Prague. The sun was shining through them, giving everything an otherworldly brightness. It was like flying through glass. We banked left, a steep one, and a couple of minutes after levelling off I suddenly felt certain that the jet was going into a subtle roll. The horizontal situation indicator was dead level though. I closed my eyes and yes, there it was, that feeling of tilt. I compensated with the steering column and the indicators showed we were tilting to the right.
    'I think we have an instrument malfunction,' I told the captain. He took over the controls - correcting my manouevre - and checked the display.
    'Not that I can see.'
    We talked about it and he told me it was spatial disorientation, a fairly common phenomenon that most pilots experienced, even seasoned ones. I'd been made aware of this during my training as a pilot, but until then I'd never experienced it. It was believed to be the cause of an Air India 747 crash in the 1970s.
    Now I felt like this all the time. Listing, spinning, a sense of always being about to fall over despite being on an even keel. Nevertheless, thinking back to my days as a pilot had a calming effect. Gone, or at least reduced, was the edge that seemed to harry me all the time. The coldness of or in my bones lessened, and I didn't feel quite so ill-fitted in my skin. It was as if the memory of altitude had nourished me in some way, reminded me of who I was, essentially, rather than what I had become superficially. The breaks and bruises would take time to heal and the scars would be ever-present, but I was coming back. It might take years, but I was still Paul Roan. I still had a part to play in things.
    Bolstered by this, and the realisation that I might well make a full recovery given time, I felt the urge once again to connect with Tamara. I was convinced that she would change her mind if she could only see how well I was progressing. And any improvement would surely be accelerated were she to return to me. I couldn't see how she might refuse, despite Ruth's insistence that she would eventually have moved back to her comfortable, certain life even if the accident had been averted.
    I dug out the numbers I'd dialled and tried them again. No answer. I tried them again, dialling carefully with the stiff pegs of my fingers, but there was no joy. I felt cheated. My mood upswing had been checked too easily.
    I thought of Tamara maybe sitting in a room, dressed for lunch with her old flame, but poring over photographs of me. She'd be chewing her lips as she often did when she was worried or unsure. I should call him. I should see how he is. How could I just walk out on him like that? At the very least he deserves an explanation, an apology.
    Yes. That's right. Call me.
    I closed my eyes and willed it.
    Footsteps outside the door.
    I opened my eyes, fully expecting to see Tamara's hand reaching out, but it was a bald, heavily-bearded man in a pale grey jumper, bottle-green corduroy trousers and Wellingtons armoured with mud. He was old. He was carrying a box and peering through the glass as if unsure that the shop was open. He seemed uncertain, worried