Land of the Living (29 page)

‘That’s good, because I’m leaving here this afternoon.’

‘How are you?’

‘Fine.’

‘Well done,’ he said.

I remembered from before the sense of approval he brought with him. It made me feel warm. ‘Jack Cross told me you stood up for me.’

‘Well…’ He waved his hands vaguely in the air.

‘You walked out of the meeting.’

‘It didn’t do any good. Tell me, did your memory come back at all?’

‘No. Not really,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I think there’s something there, just on the fringes of my consciousness, but I can’t catch it and if I turn my head it’s gone. And sometimes I think that the lost time is like a tide that flooded me and that’s now ebbing away. It’s so infinitesimally slow that I can’t possibly detect it and perhaps I’m imagining it. Or maybe, bit by bit, memory will return. Do you think that’s possible?’

He leant forward and looked at me. ‘Don’t count on it,’ he said. ‘Anything’s possible but everything’s a mystery.’

‘For a long time I thought that there would be an answer in the end,’ I said. ‘I thought if I saw him I would remember. I thought that the things that were lost could be found again. But it’s not going to happen like that, is it?’

‘What did you want to find?’

‘I wanted to find me.’

‘Ah. Well, then.’

‘I’ll never get that lost me back, will I?’

Professor Mulligan took one of the flowers and sniffed it. He tore off the end of the stalk and inserted it into his lapel.

‘Do you mind?’ he said. I smiled and shook my head. ‘Try not to dwell on what you don’t remember. Think of the things that you do.’

Things I don’t remember. I count them up on my fingers: leaving Terry, meeting Jo, meeting Ben, meeting him. I still think of him as nameless, just ‘him’, the man, a dark shape, a voice in the darkness. I don’t remember falling in love. I don’t remember that week of being simply and gloriously happy. I don’t remember being snatched out of my life. I don’t remember losing myself.

Things I do remember: a hood on my head, a wire on my neck, a gag in my mouth, a sob in my throat, a voice in the night, a laugh in the darkness, invisible hands touching me, eyes watching me, terror, loneliness, madness, shame. I remember dying and I remember being dead. And I remember the sound of my beating heart, the sound of my continuing breath, a yellow butterfly on a green leaf, a silver tree on a small hill, a calm river, a clear lake; things I haven’t seen and will never forget. Being alive. I remember.