Land of the Living (7 page)

‘It’s just sore.’ He looked more closely. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘Swollen and bruised — but I can’t see anything significant.’ He sat back. ‘There. That’s all done.’ He reached over for a file. It took some rummaging to find the right one. ‘Now I’m going to ask you some questions. They might seem a bit silly, but bear with me. They’ll take a bit of time. Are you up to it? I could come back later, or tomorrow, if you need a rest. I know you’ve had a hard day.’

I shook my head. ‘I just want to do anything I can as quickly as possible.’

‘Great.’ He opened a large printed booklet. ‘You ready?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Is this part of the test?’

‘That’s sort of a philosophical question. Do you want to bear with me?’

‘Abigail Elizabeth Devereaux.’

‘When were you born?’

‘The twenty-first of August, 1976.’

‘What’s the name of the Prime Minister?’

‘Are you serious? I’m not
that
bad.’

‘I’m testing various kinds of memory. It’ll get harder.’

So I told him the name of the Prime Minister. I told him the day of the week and that we were in St Anthony’s Hospital. I counted backwards from twenty. I counted forwards in threes. I counted backwards from a hundred in sevens. I was rather proud of myself. Then it started to get hard. He showed me a page of different shapes. He chatted to me for a moment about something stupid and then showed me another page of shapes. I had to remember which were on both sheets. He got a bit embarrassed as he read me a story about a boy taking a pig to the market. I had to tell it back to him. He showed me stars and triangles paired with colours, word pairs. He showed me four increasingly complicated shapes. The fourth one looked like a vandalized electricity pylon. It made me dizzy even to look at, let alone draw from memory.

‘This is giving me a bloody headache,’ I said, as I struggled with it.

‘Are you all right?’ he said, with concern.

‘It makes my head spin.’

‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘I get stuck at the counting backwards. Don’t worry, there are just a couple more.’

He started to recite sequences of numbers. Groups of three and four were a doddle. He stopped at eight, which I could just about manage. Then I had to recite the sequences backwards — that really made my brain ache. After that he brought out a sheet of coloured squares. He tapped them in an order which I had to repeat. Again up to eight. And then backwards.

‘Fuck,’ I said, when he put the sheet away.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s all. We’re done.’

‘So, did I pass? Am I brain-damaged?’

He smiled cheerfully. ‘I don’t know. I have no tests for the pre-morbid period. Sorry, that sounds grim. I mean for the period before the onset of amnesia. But I can’t believe that it was much better than this. You’ve got a remarkably good memory. Your spatial recall in particular is excellent. I’d swap you any time.’

I couldn’t help blushing. ‘Well, thanks, um, Charlie, but…’

He looked serious for a moment and peered at me closely. ‘What do
you
think?’ he said.

‘I feel fine. I mean, I don’t feel fine. I have bad dreams and I keep going over and over things in my head. But I can think clearly. It’s just that gap in my memory. I keep trying and trying to remember but it’s like staring into pitch darkness.’

He began putting the papers back into files.

‘Try looking at the boundaries,’ he said. ‘Take your image of an area of darkness. You could say that there is an area that’s entirely dark and another that’s entirely light. You could try concentrating on where the two areas meet.’

‘I’ve done that, Charlie. Oh, God, I’ve done it. There’s no problem for the afterwards bit. I woke up and I was there in that place. I didn’t know how I’d got there, didn’t remember being grabbed. Before it’s different. I can’t remember the last thing I did or anything like that. There’s no cut-off point. I just have vague recent memories of being at work. It was like I went into the darkness slowly without noticing.’

‘I see,’ Charles said, and wrote something more. It made me nervous when he did that.

‘But isn’t there something ridiculous about it? The one thing I need to remember is gone. I don’t want to know who the bloody Prime Minister is. I want to remember how I was grabbed, what he looks like. What I’ve been thinking is, could it be something that happened that was so disturbing that I’ve suppressed it?’

He clicked his pen shut. When he replied it was almost as if he were trying to hide a faint smile. ‘And that maybe I could dangle my watch in front of your face and it would all come flooding back?’

‘That would be very useful.’

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But I’m sure your amnesia is unrelated to any form of post-traumatic stress. Or indeed any psychological symptom.’

‘When I’m talking to Cross — I mean the police — it just feels so ridiculous.’

‘It’s unfortunate and frustrating,’ he said. ‘But it’s not ridiculous. Post-traumatic amnesia after a closed head injury such as yours isn’t uncommon. It usually happens in car crashes. They bang their head during the smash. When they wake up after the injury they don’t remember the crash, but often they don’t remember the hours or even days leading up to it either.’

I touched my head gently. Suddenly it felt so fragile.

‘Post-traumatic,’ I said. ‘I thought you said it wasn’t something psychological.’

‘It isn’t,’ he said. ‘Psychogenic amnesia — I mean amnesia caused by psychological influences, rather than an injury to the brain — is rarer in cases like yours. And also — how shall I say? —more dubious.’

‘What do you mean?’

He gave a wary cough. ‘I’m not a psychologist, so maybe I’m biased. But, for example, a substantial percentage of murderers claim to have no memory of committing their murders. These are not people who have received physical injuries. There could be various explanations. They are often very drunk, which can result in memory black-outs. Committing a murder is, presumably, an extremely stressful thing to do, more than almost anything else that can be imagined. That could affect memory. Some of us sceptics might also say that there is often an incentive for a murderer to claim he has no memory of what happened.’

‘But being kidnapped and threatened with death must be pretty bloody stressful. Couldn’t that have made me forget for psychological reasons?’

‘Not in my opinion, but if I were standing in court and you were a lawyer, you could get me to admit that it was possible. I’m afraid you’re going to have a few other people prodding you like a lab rat to answer questions like that.’

He stood up and mustered his files under his arm with some difficulty. ‘Abigail,’ he said.

‘Abbie.’

‘Abbie. You’re a fascinating case. I don’t think I’m going to be able to resist coming back.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I seem to have lots of time on my hands. But I’ve got one question: is there any chance of my memory coming back?’

He paused for a moment and pulled an odd face, which must have been some sort of indication that he was thinking. ‘Yes, it’s possible.’

‘Could I be hypnotized?’

Suddenly he looked shocked and rummaged in his pocket, which was a particularly awkward operation with his armful of files. He extracted a card and gave it to me. ‘That’s got various numbers on it. If anybody comes in here and starts dangling things in front of your eyes or talking to you in a soothing voice, call me straight away.’

With that he was gone, and I lay on the bed with my sore, vulnerable head. My head with a black hole in it.

‘Have you talked to your boyfriend?’

I only managed to murmur something. I wasn’t entirely awake and DI Cross leant closer over me in concern.

‘Shall I call someone?’ he asked.

‘No. And, no, I haven’t.’

‘We’re having a bit of difficulty tracking him down at the moment.’

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘I’ve left three messages on the answering-machine. It’ll be because of his work.’

‘Does he go away often?’

‘He’s an IT consultant, whatever that means. He’s always flying off to Belgium or Australia or wherever on special projects.’

‘But you can’t remember when you last saw him?’

‘No.’

‘Do you want to talk to your parents?’

‘No! No, please.’

There was a pause. I was doing so badly. I tried to think of something I could give Cross. ‘Would it help if you could have a look at our flat? I’ll be back there in a day or two, I guess, but there might be something there. Maybe that’s where I was grabbed. I might have left a note.’

Cross’s blank expression barely altered. ‘Do you have a key you can give me?’

‘As you know I’ve got nothing except the clothes I escaped in. But in the front garden, to the left of the front door, there are two things that look like ordinary stones. But they’re these crazy mail-order gimmicks and one of them is hollowed out. Inside there’s a spare key. You can use that.’

‘Do you have any allergies, Miss Devereaux?’

‘I don’t think so. I came up in hives once with some shellfish.’

‘Do you suffer from epilepsy?’

‘No.’

‘Are you pregnant?’

I shook my head so hard it hurt.

‘It doesn’t mean anything but we’re legally obliged to tell you that a CAT scan can have side effects, but the likelihood is extremely small, negligible. Would you sign this consent form? Here and here.’

Suddenly the nurse was sounding like an air stewardess. I thought of those demonstrations with the lifejacket. In the unlikely event of a landing on water.

‘I don’t even know what a CAT scan is,’ I said, as I signed.

‘Don’t worry. The technologist will explain it all to you in a minute.’

I was led into a large, fiercely bright room. I saw the high-tech trolley where I was going to lie, padded and concave in the middle, and, behind it, a white tunnel into the heart of the machine. It looked like a toilet bowl turned on its side.

‘Ms Devereaux, my name is Jan Carlton. Won’t you sit down for a minute?’ A tall spindly woman in an overall gestured to a chair. ‘Do you know what a CAT scan is?’

‘It’s one of those names you hear,’ I said cautiously.

‘We like you to be prepared. Is there anything you’re unsure about?’

‘Everything, really.’

‘It’s really just an X-ray enhanced by a computer, which is in another room. Think of your body as a giant loaf of bread.’

‘A loaf ?’

‘Yes. The CAT scan looks at a particular area of your body in slices, you see, then it puts together the slices into a three-dimensional view.’

‘Oh, you meant a
sliced
loaf?’

‘It’s just a comparison.’

‘I thought scans were for cancer.’

‘They are. It’s just a way of looking inside the body. It’s a standard procedure for anyone who has had an injury, severe headaches, trauma.’

‘What do I have to do?’

‘We’ll just pop you on the table and slide you into that thing that looks like a white doughnut. You’ll hear humming, and you’ll probably see the track spinning around. It won’t last long at all. All you have to do is lie completely still.’

I had to put on a hospital robe again. I lay down on the table and stared at the ceiling.

‘This will feel a little cold.’

She rubbed gel into my temples, smearing it over my newly washed hair. She slid a hard metal helmet under my skull.

‘I’m tightening these screws. It might feel a bit uncomfortable.’ She fastened some straps over my shoulders, arms and stomach, pulling them taut. ‘The table is about to start moving.’

‘Table?’ I said feebly, as I slid slowly away from her and through the tunnel. I was lying inside a metal chamber and, yes, there was that humming. I swallowed hard. It wasn’t quite dark in here. I could see lines moving round above me. Out there, a few feet away, was a bright room with a competent woman in it, making sure everything was as it should be. Beyond that was another room with a computer showing pictures of my brain. Upstairs there were wards, patients, nurses, doctors, cleaners, porters, visitors, people carrying clipboards and pushing trolleys. Outside, there was a wind coming in from the east and it might well snow. And here I was, lying in a humming metal tube.

I thought that some people, having gone through what I had gone through, might find it difficult to be confined like this. I closed my eyes. I could make up my own pictures. I could remember the blue sky that I’d seen this morning; the electric-blue that stretched from horizon to horizon and sparkled so. I could imagine the snow falling gently out of the dull, low sky and settling on houses, cars, bare trees. But in the darkness the sound of humming seemed to change. It sounded more like a kind of wheezing. And I could hear footsteps. There were footsteps coming towards me. Footsteps in the darkness. I opened my mouth to call out, but I couldn’t speak or make a sound, except for a strangled whimper.

What was happening? I tried again but it was as if something was blocking my mouth. I couldn’t breathe properly. I couldn’t draw air through my mouth; I was gasping but nothing was happening. I was going to suffocate in here. My chest was hurting. I couldn’t draw breath, not properly. It came in ragged bursts that gave me no relief. The footsteps came closer. I was trapped and I was drowning. Drowning in the air. A roaring built up in my head and I opened my eyes and it was still dark and I closed them and there was red behind my eyes. My eyes were burning in my sockets. Then the roaring split apart, as if my head had burst open to let out all the horror.

I was screaming at last. The tube was filled with the sound of my howling. My ears throbbed and my throat tore with it and I couldn’t stop. I tried to make the screams into words. I tried to say, ‘Help!’ or ‘Please,’ anything, but all the sounds crashed and bubbled and streamed together. Everything was shaking and then there were bright lights in my eyes and hands on me. Hands that held me down, that wouldn’t let me go. I screamed again. Wailed. Screams were pouring out of me. I couldn’t see in the light. Everything stung. Everything around me bore down on me. There were new sounds, voices somewhere, someone calling my name. Eyes looking at me out of the dazzling light; watching me and there was nowhere to hide because I couldn’t move. Fingers touching me. Cold metal on my skin. On my arm. Something wet. Something sharp. Something piercing my skin.