A/N: Thanks again to everyone who has reviewed or put me on their alerts and fav lists. And thanks to my beta Brighidsfire for keeping the encouragement coming.

Part I: Bristol

Chapter 3: Roast Mutton

He is woken by the ringing of his telephone. He lies there drowsily, waiting for the answer machine to take over.

"Hi, Pete. It's Janet, Janet from Reception. Management wants to see you today at noon." There's a pause. "I heard about what happened yesterday and I just wanted to say that I'm sorry ... I mean, I'm sorry we won't be working together anymore. Not that we were really working together." She gives a little giggle, and he rolls his eyes. "Oh, and that doctor whose name and room number you wanted last night: she asked about you today."

He's suddenly wide awake. He rolls over and picks up the phone. "Hello. Sorry I took so long - I was in the bathroom."

"Oh, hello, Pete." There is an awkward pause.

"You've got the room number of that American doctor?"

"Oh, yes. Yes, she's in Room 354. Her name is Dr Lisa Cuddy."

"Brilliant. Thanks, Jane."

"Janet. ... Though the information isn't of much use to you now, is it?"

"Why not?"

"Well, you got yourself sacked, didn't you?"

"So?"

"Oh, right." She sounds disappointed. Then she adds hopefully, "Will we be seeing you around?"

"Could be," he says vaguely. "Thanks anyway."

Putting the phone down, he sits up and swings over to the edge of the bed. Picking up his crutches from where they are leaning against the wall next to the bed, he heads for the bathroom. After a quick shower and a shave he's more or less ready to go. He's early for the meeting with management, but he wants to drop by Ms Cuddy first anyway - he has a sneaky suspicion that management won't want a sacked employee to hang around the hotel for longer than necessary. That leaves him with a tricky question: what to wear. He doesn't want to be too neat - no reason to give management the impression that he's kow-towing to them - but he doesn't want to repel Lisa Cuddy. A white Oxford shirt and jeans, he decides, but no tie. A tie would be over the top. He takes the clothes from the wardrobe and hops over to the bed. There he stuffs his prosthetic into the right leg of the jeans before strapping it on; it's easier than trying to thread it through the jeans once it's fastened. After casting a quick glance in the mirror he leaves his flat to catch the bus.

He marches into the hotel through the front entrance, another no-no, but unfortunately Donald is not on duty today and his replacement doesn't seem to notice or care. When he reaches the third floor, his happy anticipation fades somewhat, and by the time he knocks on the door of Room 354 he's pretty certain that this will end in a fiasco. He may be a social inept, but it's obvious even to him that reminding an abused woman of her trauma won't have earned him the epithets 'caring' or 'supportive'. He hadn't meant to hurt her or to poke around in her wounds; he'd just been curious, but it is unlikely that she'll consider this a mitigating circumstance. He leans against the wall next to the door, not sure whether he would rather that she be there and answer to his knock, or that she be out and he miss her.

Before he can decide the door is pulled open. There is a short silence, for the duration it takes her to figure out that the person who knocked isn't standing straight ahead but around the corner, and then her head pokes out of the doorway.

"Hi," she says.

He examines his shoes for a moment before daring to look at her sideways. She's dressed professionally in an executive style black skirt and jacket with a pink blouse underneath and the obligatory heels. Seeing her close up by daylight for the first time, he corrects his estimate of her age: she's in her mid-forties if not older, and judging by the puffy state of her eyes she didn't sleep too well. Courtesy of his stupidity, no doubt.

"Morning," he answers and waits for her anger to pour out over him. Nothing happens. He dares another look. She's mustering him with interest. No doubt she didn't get a good look at him before either. "I, umm, wanted to apologise for last night. I ... " How exactly do you apologise for the tactless things you said without referring to them? He's on the verge of putting his foot into it again.

"That's okay." She leans against the jamb, half smiling at him. It's encouraging, to say the least, even if it's a trifle surreal to be smiled at by a woman who not twelve hours ago seemed ready to gouge out his eyes.

"Want a decent dinner tonight?" he asks. She arches an eyebrow. "Better than the swill here. I know the best cook in Bristol," he concludes pointedly.

She smiles even more at that, one finger twirling a strain of hair into locks. He feels like a teen in the schoolyard tagging behind the school belle. "I thought you cook here."

"I do. Did," he amends. "Getting the can today. But this place hampered my style. I can do better at home."

"You want me to come to your place?" she says doubtfully.

When she says it like that, he can hear how iffy it sounds; it's not what protective parents would advise their daughters to do. "Don't worry. I won't try to get into your knickers," he says, and immediately wants to kick himself. Her git of a boyfriend probably mouthed reassuring nothings like that before knocking the stuffing out of her. Looking at it from her point of view, he sees what a stupid proposition this was from the start.

"Forget it," he says, "we can meet for a drink at a pub, if you like." He rubs his thigh, but stops at once when he sees her eyeing his hand movement.

"No, it's fine," she says abruptly. "Dinner at your place. Shall I come there or will you pick me up?"

"I'll pick you up," he says, too stupefied at this turn of events to consider how he's to do that. "Will seven-ish be okay?"

"Yes, that's fine."

"Great! I'll see you at seven, then," he says, feeling buoyant. "My name is Pete. Pete Barnes."

"I know," she says. "Casual?" she asks as he turns away.

He eyes her severe get-up and says, "Very casual," with a suggestive quirk of his eyebrows.

To his surprise she laughs as she shuts the door to her room.

The interview with management is long-winded and predictable; most of what the starch-shirt says glitches off him like water off a duck's back: he knows he's a liability to the hotel and untenable; he doesn't need someone twenty-five years younger than him to tell him so. Besides, he has this evening's menu to plan. The dinner has to be easy to prepare in advance, because he has to come back to the hotel to pick her up, and he doesn't want to spend another hour in the kitchen while she's around. An arugula salad as a starter, then a main dish (not pork - lots of Americans are Jewish; beef or mutton) and a dessert. He'll make a carrot-and-parsnip julienne with lemon vinaigrette as a side dish; that can be served cold. He's undecided about the dessert. It's unlikely that she'll eat much of it - judging by her figure, she'll probably pass altogether. Perhaps a simple fruit salad? No, he's already got a salad. No sense in something rich like chocolate mousse cakes, his preferred choice. A compromise: small apple pies with vanilla ice cream. Sweet enough to pass as a dessert, but with fruit in it to give an impression of pseudo-healthiness.

Management still isn't done lecturing him, so he compiles a mental shopping list next. When he's done with that, he interrupts rather rudely (he should have done this ten minutes ago), throws his hotel ID badge on the table and walks out.

After a short detour to an Italian delicatessen on Whiteladies Road he leaves the bus on Kellaway, where there's a butcher, to get some fresh meat. After examining the display he opts for a rack of lamb. It's only a short walk to Tesco's from there, where he does the rest of his shopping. He spends most of the afternoon toasting hazelnuts, chopping herbs, preparing the pastry for the apple pies, scooping out potato balls for his Parisienne potatoes, searing the lamb, preparing the crust. Around five o'clock he casts a glance around his kitchen - the rickety table with its dented wood, the two mismatched chairs, his chipped crockery - and decides to pay his landlord a visit. He makes his way to the ground floor and knocks on the door that separates the ground floor flat from the entrance hall and staircase.

Gavin, a short, balding postal worker, musters him with some surprise. "Can I help you?" he asks politely.

"I hope so. Got a tablecloth?"

"Don't think so." He disappears, but returns within minutes, shaking his head.

"Napkins?" he asks, not yet ready to lose hope. "Candlestick and a candle?"

"You'd better come in," Gavin tells him resignedly. They've been living in the same house for three years now, but it's the first time he's entered Gavin's flat. While Gavin roots around in his kitchen, he looks around the living room. There are shelves from floor to ceiling along every wall, but Gavin has practically no books. It's mostly nature magazines of the past fifteen years, ordered by title, year and month, and a truly formidable collection of CDs, ordered alphabetically and colour-coded with little stick-on dots according to some obscure system that he'll need a few moments to decipher. Some CDs sport up to four different dots, others have only one. The bottom-most dot is obviously genre, but he's still working on the others when Gavin reappears with white napkins, silver napkin rings and a candle.

"'Ere, be nice to my napkin rings. They were a present from my godmother at my baptism. Can't find a candlestick - I guess my ex took 'em with her when she left - but you can always stick the candles into an empty bottle or something. Who's coming over?"

"Just a friend," he replies. "Have you got some decent music? I need something soothing for dinner."

Gavin stares at him. "'Haven't you go' any music?"

"I'm not sure she shares my taste."

"She, right? Well, tell me something about 'er, something for me to go on. Age?"

"About fifty, give or take."

"No spring chicken, then." He pulls a thick folder from a shelf and leafs through it. Pete fidgets impatiently. He doubts Gavin needs to check in his catalogue to find specific CDs; someone as obsessive about cataloguing his CDs knows exactly what he possesses and where each CD stands. Gavin comes back after a moment and pulls three CDs off the shelf, giving them a caressing dusting before he hands them over to Pete.

He looks at them, and then at Gavin. "You're kidding, aren't you? Is it 'Bald Guys' Day' or something?"

"Sting isn't bald," Gavin points out. "Women like him. Elton John's Love Songs might be the better choice if you're thinking of a slow dance after dinner." This is said without any sort of innuendo or inflection; Gavin is patently the type who doesn't think in metaphors. "Personally, I prefer the Serious Hits, but Phil Collins's voice isn't romantic in the classical sense." He looks up at Pete. "You'd better hope it is 'Bald Guys' Day' for her, otherwise you don't stand much of a chance."

"Don't need a chance," he murmurs, brushing a self-conscious hand over the bald spot at the back of his head.

"Right, you're inviting a lady friend over for a candlelight dinner for the sake of conversation," Gavin says sarcastically.

His mind casts around for a good reason why he'd wine and dine a total stranger. "She's American. I'm thinking of going there some time. She could be useful to have on my Friends list."

"You don't have a Facebook account, do you?" Gavin says suspiciously. "You shouldn't, you know. They spy out all your personal data, chart your movements, invade your privacy. They're the new mafia. No, not the mafia; the Gestapo, the KGB, they ...,"

"My roast," he says quickly. "Got to rescue my roast. Cheers, Gavin. I'll return your stuff to you tomorrow." He turns to go, but then a thought strikes him. "Hey, can I borrow your car?"

"Can you drive?" Gavin asks with a doubtful glance at his leg.

"Everyone can drive!" he states, conveniently forgetting to tell Gavin that he is not in possession of a licence.

Gavin harrumphs and goes to get his car keys, his body language screaming that he's unhappy about this. "The car's at the end of the lane. The door jams a little, but don't slam it. Please."

"Don't worry," he says, pocketing the keys.

He completes his cooking preparations, takes a shower, puts on a blue shirt and leaves for the hotel. By the time he reaches Room 354, he's half an hour late and his shirt is suspiciously damp under the armpits. Gavin, the enemy of all modern technology, the eschewer of computers in general and the internet in particular, has no Satnav installed in his car. Dr Cuddy could well have given up on him by now, and even if she hasn't, she'll probably be scathing. She seems the type to expect punctuality.

"Fashionably late," Lisa Cuddy says when she opens her door, but she seems neither surprised nor put out. He murmurs something about rush-hour traffic as he watches her slip into flat slippers, his head tipped in contemplation. The shoes are a pity, but the jeans and the top, clingy in all the right places, make up for them.

Downstairs, she stops short when she sees Gavin's Vauxhall Astra. "That's your car?"

"Yes," he lies glibly, looking the Astra over. Okay, it isn't what he'd choose to drive, nor would any car of his shine as brightly as Gavin's well-washed and polished family vehicle, but is there a sign posted on his forehead saying, 'Bad Boy - Not Good Family Material'? For all she knows, he has a charming wife and two well-behaved children in a terraced house on the outskirts of Bristol.

"Crap!" she says in a most unladylike manner.

He lets it slide, opting to end the conversation by opening the passenger door for her. Once he's seated, he leans over her to open the glove compartment. Gavin, predictably, has a Bristol A-Z in there which he takes out and thrusts at Dr Cuddy.

"Here. You'll have to guide me. Filton Grove." She looks blankly at him, and then at the A-Z on her lap. He gives an exasperated snort born of embarrassment. "There's a road index at the back."

She opens it at the back, muttering, "Filton Grove," darkly and trailing a finger down the index. When she finds it, she opens the road atlas at the right page, and then traces the route back to the hotel. After checking the route twice she looks up at him incredulously. "You need me to guide you down three miles? Okay, maybe four."

He doesn't answer - he's staring straight through the windscreen in mortification.

"How do you normally get here?" she asks.

"By bus," he mutters. That's what caused today's delay on the way down - he is so accustomed to his daily bus route with its fixed landmarks and predictability that he forgot that his sense of orientation is limited. "So if you want dinner before midnight ...," he says with a meaningful gesture at the A-Z.

"Okay," she says, "let's go. Straight ahead down this road, and then right onto, umm, Clifton Down."

It's a lot faster than the way down, where he had to keep stopping to ask the way, but it's still by no means a relaxing ride. When they stop before the house, she snaps the road atlas shut, saying, "I'll take a cab back, I think."

He can't blame her. It isn't only his sense of orientation. It seems that he didn't do much driving between the amputation and the onset of his amnesia, and he knows that he's done none since then. Working the pedals with the prosthetic is not something he is practised in, and there was one memorable turn-off on the way that he exited on the right side instead of the left, prompting a yell of dismay from his passenger and the injunction to 'get the bloody car' back onto his side of the road.

He gets out, seeing the neighbourhood with her eyes - the overfilled garbage bins lining the road, the weedy front gardens, the battered cars lined up along the curb, the cracked pavement, the blistering paint on the window frames and doors. Signalling to her to follow, he walks up to the red-painted front door and unlocks it. The house is a terraced one, originally built for one family. Gavin kept the ground floor and the garden for himself and converted the first floor into a self-sufficient flat when his wife departed with the children. He goes upstairs, steadying himself with one hand on the banister, and lets her into his flat before Gavin can pop out of the downstairs door to muster her.

She walks in, looking around curiously. This time he doesn't bother to imagine what she's thinking. It's probably much the same as what he'd thought when he first saw the place. He's renting it fully furnished, including mismatched furniture, threadbare carpet, flower-patterned curtains and Peter Scott prints of Bewick swans on the walls. Not his style, but then, he hardly knows what his style is, and buying and lugging furniture up to the first floor was hardly an option when he moved in here those three years ago.

"I need a few minutes in the kitchen," he says. "Can I get you something to drink, Dr Cuddy?"

"I'm good." She hesitates. "And call me Lisa. Can I help?" She follows him into the kitchen where they'll have to eat - the flat is too small for him to have a dining area in the living room - and leans against the counter while he sprinkles walnuts and Asiago cheese over two plates of baby arugula.

"Voilà," he says, feeling more confident now that he is in his element, and gestures at the table. He decided against the candle in the bottle at the last moment, preferring to borrow some flowers from his landlord's garden. They look fresh in the centre of the table and less suggestive of a romantic dinner than a candle would have done. Altogether, he rather likes the casual atmosphere he has created. If his guest was expecting something fancier, she is too polite to show it.

The meal goes a lot better than he expected. His social skills, as one of his female acquaintances once took the trouble to point out, can probably be traced back to some marauding Viking ancestor, but Dr Lisa Cuddy, although used to the refined manners and polished talk of academia, seems to be amused at his wry tales of kitchen mishaps and culinary crises, and in turn does a very passable imitation of the cab driver who called her 'luv' and 'dearie'. There's a slight musical crisis at the beginning, when true to Gavin's advice he puts the Elton John CD into the stereo in the living room and turns up the volume so they can hear it in the kitchen. Lisa gives him the oddest look and picks up the CD cover.

"This isn't yours," she states with the same certainty that she showed regarding the Vauxhall Astra. "Where are your CDs?"

He doesn't answer, but his eyes slide involuntarily to the drawer where he keeps his collection. She sees the eye movement and goes there swiftly. Before he can stop her, she pulls it open and peers inside it. He closes his eyes in dread anticipation - the drawer also hosts his collection of porn DVDs. There's a loaded silence.

When he opens his eyes again, she's brandishing a modern jazz selection. "I think we can both live with this," she says. He takes the CD gratefully, ejects Elton John from the player and starts the one she chose. Judging by her indifferent mien, she didn't notice the recurring motif of his DVD collection.

When they're back in the kitchen and eating their salad, she says out of the blue, "You manage with ten porn DVDs? Very modest."

Flushing, he almost chokes on his food, but when he looks back up at her there's an amused gleam in her eyes. She's playing with him, he realizes, deliberately ragging him when he thought the danger had passed. "I'm thinking of expanding my collection. Any suggestions?"

She smirks, but changes the topic. "What'll you do now that you've been fired?" she asks.

He shrugs. "Look for a new job. It shouldn't be difficult. There are dozens of hotels and restaurants in Bristol. Look at the bright side: if I hadn't got fired, I'd have had to work this evening."

She smiles at that. "True. And what would you have done tonight if I hadn't accepted your invitation?" she asks slightly provocatively.

"Oh, don't pride yourself on saving my evening. I'm missing Spring Watch - the Tenth Anniversary because of you."

"Spring Watch? Is that some modern Baywatch spin-off?" she asks.

He almost cracks up at the idea. "No, although the idea of the female presenter wearing a bikini is very attractive. It would liven up the programme. The BBC takes over a farm east of nowhere and spends three weeks trying to animate comatose wildlife into showing aggressive or libidinous behaviour. Once a day, at prime viewing time, the long-suffering public is subjected to the summary of the day's non-events. All we get to see is the presenters telling us what we could be seeing if otters, beavers or nesting birds decided to perform for the cameras instead of doing their dirty deeds in the dark."

She gives him a doubtful look. "And that's what you would be watching if I wasn't here."

"Yep," he says happily. During Spring Watch season Gavin comes up with fish and chips, he provides the beer, and they watch it together. Gavin's a wildlife aficionado of the worst kind, but his antique television can't compete with Pete's high definition flat screen. The first time he'd come to watch he'd pretended his television had just kicked the bucket, but now in their third year, their sessions have become a ritual. Gavin watches Spring Watch with true dedication to the cause of wildlife and unwavering loyalty, and Pete, for his part, watches it for the absurdity of Gavin's serious comments.

She suggests a break after the main course so she'll be able to do justice to the dessert, and she gets up automatically to help clear the table. Ignoring his protests, she runs water into the kitchen sink and starts on the dishes, tossing him a tea towel as if it were her kitchen, not his.

"Not bossy at all," he mutters.

"Oh, get over yourself. You hate doing the dishes, and I don't mind," she says.

He has to admit that it's oddly comfortable, working together in the kitchen with this near stranger as if they have always been doing it. She's certainly a lot more efficient than the trainees at the hotel, and she stacks the dishes the way he prefers them: not all higgledy-piggledy, but arrayed according to kind and size. Following up on Spring Watch, they get involved in a debate on the quality of BBC television products, only coming to a truce of sorts over Dr Who. A short-lived truce.

"It broke my heart when the eleventh doctor left. Matt Smith was infinitely better than the guy who's playing the twelfth doctor," she says with typical female ignorance.

"The twelfth doctor," he proclaims, "is the best there ever was."

"Bullshit. He's a macho and a geek. It's bo-o-ring."

"Is not. You girls go hormonal over some imaginary vulnerability that you sense in the eleventh doctor when all there is, is immaturity and a crass lack of responsibility."

"But pulpifying aliens first and then asking if their intentions were friendly, that's responsible and mature, right?"

"It's realistic. Aliens are never friendly," he says with absolute certainty. "I wouldn't have thought you'd be the kind of person who watches Dr Who," he muses.

Her reaction is interesting - she avoids his gaze.

"You wouldn't watch it if it weren't for someone you watch it with," he surmises. "Your children. You have children." There, he's doing it again, getting her back up by prying in her life. She already looks miffed; now that he comes to think of it, she has said hardly anything about herself so far.

"A daughter," she says with visible reluctance.

Her reticence is provokingly mysterious. His experience with Americans to date is that during the brief course of a smoke on the roof terrace they'll have told him all about their divorce, their run-in with cancer and their grandchildren, complete with pictures of the latter brought out of the dark recesses of their wallets, and all this despite his obvious lack of interest as manifested by the ear-buds in his ears.

Perhaps he's just imagining it, or she's still smarting from the incident on the roof. Either way, a bit of interest in her spawn can't be wrong.

"Have you got a photo?" he enquires casually.

One eyebrow goes up, but she digs around in her purse, coming up with a passport-size photo of a girl about eight years old. Nothing special - brown hair like her, brown eyes, a wide grin. On the back of the photo it says, 'Rachel, Feb 2015'. He hunts around for an appropriate adjective.

"Nice," he says, realising as he says it that 'nice' is a lame adjective. He amends it to, "Cute kid." There, he's doing it again. He's noticed this before - when he's with Americans, he tends to mimic their accents and pick up their vocabulary after a relatively short time. His early years, his forgotten ones, must have been misspent watching American series on television.

"Cute, huh?" she says. He looks up from the picture; judging by her tone, he must have got that very wrong, that bit with the appropriate adjective. Giving him a measured gaze, she plucks the photo from his fingers. "Why don't you tell me what you want," she asks, "instead of beating around the bush? This is ludicrous."

His eyes slide to a spot on the wall a few inches left of her head. He is bust.

"Come on. You're not the type to consider kids cute. You want something, and it isn't sex. You haven't tried to hit on me, you've only given me an obligatory ogle or two, and you didn't even try to brush against me when you passed the food. So, what is it?"

"Your shampoo," he mouths hollowly. There, he's said it, and he can hear himself how batty it sounds.

Her eyes narrow. "What about it?"

"What brand do you use?"

She digs in her handbag again; for a fearful moment he thinks she's searching for her mobile to call a cab ... or the police. Instead, she pulls out a pen and a notepad on which she rapidly jots down a few words. Tearing the page off the notepad, she proffers it to him. "Satisfied?"

He looks at it. He's never heard of the brand, but he'll go shopping tomorrow. "Thanks," he says with real gratitude.

He can't blame her for looking at him rather critically. "So all this," her arm sweeps around to encompass the whole kitchen, "is about finding out what my hair smells like."

He scratches the side of his nose. "I enjoyed your company," he offers, phrasing it in the past tense, because he has a premonition that the evening is over, regardless of the mini apple pies keeping warm in the oven.

"You haven't gotten rid of me yet," she says grimly, sitting down again at the table. "What happened to the concept of dessert?"

His mouth quirks with relief. He's got what he wants, true enough, but he wasn't lying when he said he'd enjoyed having dinner with her. It's been a lot less stressful than evenings with women are as a rule, despite all the landmines he has to avoid. Perhaps he should try this more often, cooking for the women he wants to shag, instead of taking them out to the pub or the cinema. Except that he doesn't want to shag Lisa, and he can't really see himself spending a whole evening conversing casually with Sharon or Janet from reception or whoever. Maybe that's the problem - that he doesn't enjoy talking to the women he wants in his bed.

He brings out the pies, puts one each on a dessert plate, adds a generous dollop of ice cream to his, a slightly less generous dollop to hers, and places her plate in front of her with aplomb.

"So," she says, digging around in her pie with her spoon, "do you enjoy cooking? As a job, I mean."

"Yes," he answers. It isn't as though he has much of a choice in the matter, but that's beside the point. "Why not? It's not a bad job for a chap like me." Which is basically what he tells himself every day when he forces himself to go to work.

She stops eating to stare at him. "You're kidding!"

He's annoyed by the assumption that anything that's less stimulating than medicine must be below everyone's dignity. Just how, Miss High-and-Mighty, do you get a decent job when you are well over fifty and have no proof whatsoever that you have an education or formal training in any field? But that's something that he isn't likely to share with her, no matter how comfortable they were a few moments earlier, so instead he says, "I'm the best cook in Bristol. I won't have to beg for a new post - I'll be able to choose." Which is almost true. He'll be blackballed in Bristol, but there are other cities he can still try.

"Have you always been a cook?"

"About six months." He tries to keep to the truth as much as possible. It makes it easier to keep tabs on what he's telling people about himself.

"And before that?"

Perhaps he's overly sensitive, as he tends to be when people ask about his past, but he can't help feeling that she's interrogating him. "Oh, this and that; a jack-of-all-trades." It's his standard reply to questions about The Time Before. She's about to ask more, so he lists some of the things he's done over the past three years, "A stint in the electronics industry, some programming, the coroner's - I'm a bit of a shady character," he ends, flashing her his bad-boy smile that generally has women drooling all over him and shutting up about his past. She chooses to drool over the apple pie rather than him, but she gets the message and drops the subject.

"What's with the shampoo?" she asks instead.

He grimaces. His plans had included getting into her presence so that he could find out about her shampoo, but not what he'd say as an explanation if she did cooperate with him. "It reminds me of - the shampoo my mother used to use," he improvises. Her look indicates that she really, really doesn't believe him, so he adds as a distraction, "I smelled it when you got in the lift yesterday. I was in there, too, but you didn't notice me."

Brilliant! he thinks the moment he's said it. Now she'll think he's been stalking her and using the shampoo as a blind, but that's better than having to explain the truth to her: that he has no memory, but has to rely on the odd olfactory flash for glimpses of his past, glimpses that never go beyond emotions or sensations, never concretise into images or recollections.

Rather surprisingly, she believes him, believes the complicated truth instead of going for the simple explanation that she's being hit on by a loopy creep. "You got yourself fired because of the smell of a shampoo in an elevator," she says, shaking her head in a mixture of amusement and disbelief. "I hope your mother is worth it!" When she puts it like that, he can see the ludicrousness of the whole situation. Soon they're both laughing, their former rapport restored.

They remain seated, talking about more general topics for some time, and then, at her request, he calls her a cab. When it pulls up outside the house, he escorts her to the door of the flat. Before he opens it, he looks down at her for a moment, hesitating. He wants ...

"You want to smell my hair, don't you?" she asks.

"I ... yes," he admits, drawing a hand through his own sparse hair.

She smiles understandingly, taking a helpful step towards him as he leans down towards her. He puts a steadying hand behind her head and brings his face down into her hair carefully to avoid freaking her out. Yes, it's that same scent, and it's as good - no, even better - than he remembers it, because now he's getting a whole breath, not just a passing whiff. And it's that same warm, blissful feeling that he experienced in the lift, only much stronger, that feeling of cosiness, security, calm. Not the adrenaline rush that he gets from other familiar smells like leather and tarmac, or the nostalgic feeling that fresh magazine pages induce. Perhaps he wasn't that far off when he attributed the scent to his mother. He burrows in deeper, his other hand coming round to the small of her back, both hands pulling her in closer. Her hands come up to grip his shirt, whether to steady herself or whether to push him off somewhat, he can't tell. The nagging voice of common sense is telling him to let go of her and step back before Something Bad happens, but that voice, uncommonly faint from the outset, is fading away into the background ...

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