Dispossession Page 2

  The two docs looked at each other; one of them twitched an eyebrow, the other made a note on a clipboard. It was Sue who risked their wrath once more, by treating me like a human being with the right to know what a fool I was making of myself.

  “April,” she said. “Thirteenth, which makes it the Ides of. Cute, eh? And I thought it was going to be so lucky for me. Just lucky it’s not a Friday on top, I suppose...”

  She was lying again, she had to be. I looked to the doctors to tell me so, and all they did was nod. “It’s the thirteenth of April, Mr Marks.”

  “Christ.” So much for machines that went beep. They must have wheeled them all away, when I started waking up. “So how long have I been here, then?”

  “Three days,” Sue said, perching herself on the side of the bed and taking one of my hands in both of hers. “And I don’t care what anyone says, you’re getting shaved tonight. Scabs or no scabs. You look disgusting. If you won’t do it and they won’t do it, I’ll do it myself. Can’t stand prickly men, I like ’em smooth...”

  “Please, Mrs Marks,” one of the doctors butted in, bless him. “I know this isn’t easy for you, but you’ll only confuse your husband more.”

  Damn right. I was trying to equate three days—or what she said was three days, though she’d shown herself an utterly unreliable witness, and I wished to God they’d stop supporting her—with what, ten weeks? Maybe twelve weeks since I could find a solid, dependable memory with a date attached to it. This did not compute. Nothing was hanging together, nothing made sense. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, and it felt like all that was holding me to Planet Earth right now was the hard grip of a stranger, except that she was the most muddling thing of all, and every time I thought something was coming clear she gave the whole mess another stir.

  o0o

  The doctors weren’t too much help just then, though fortunately I wasn’t really expecting any better of them. Slowly and patiently they told me what was known or obvious already: that I’d been in an accident, that I’d sustained a significant jolt to my brain—an insult they called it first, before catching themselves in jargon and correcting for the layperson mentality—which had scrambled everything up a bit. I’d experienced some memory loss—no, really? Gosh, tell me about it—and once they’d checked me out physically, what they needed to do most urgently was to establish the range and depth of that loss.

  Which actually meant that after they’d poked and prodded and shone lights into my eyes and such, they just needed to ask me a lot more questions. We dealt quite efficiently with the President of the United States and what had been the Christmas number one, but I couldn’t help them at all with who’d won the Five Nations this year or what was the score in the last Newcastle game. The last I remembered was one-all away at Stamford Bridge, but that had been a January cup-tie and I couldn’t tell them who’d won the replay.

  Sport and politics seemed to confirm the time-lag, that I was missing near enough three months of my life here. Unless the doctors also were lying to me—which would make them not doctors at all, I supposed, only actors in white coats and this not after all a hospital, just a room dressed up to look the part as they were. Some grand scam this could be, though the purpose defeated me...

  Except that I knew the view outside the window. The hospital grounds had been a regular short cut for me, when I was a student and living this side of town; I knew that building, that path, those trees. This was where they said it was; which made them necessarily what they said they were. Too much to believe that they’d hired or stolen time in this place to turn a disused room into a stage-set, an operating theatre for some bizarre conspiracy.

  The men at least, what they said they were. Not the woman, no way the woman...

  So okay, I’d had a crack on the head and lost three months’-worth of memories. I wanted them back, I was ready to riot if they told me I’d never recover them; but I didn’t even get the chance to ask just then. The doctors were homing in on personal stuff, and they weren’t giving out information, only questions.

  “What car do you drive, Jonty?”

  “Volvo. Grey, 650, three years old.” Sensible, boring, safe. Should have been safe, at least. No previously-recorded tendency to fly.

  “Uh-huh. Do you ever drive anything else?”

  “Yeah. Carol’s got a 2CV, she lets me out in that sometimes.” I saw the way they glanced at each other, one doctor to the other to Sue; and I sighed, and said, “Okay, you might as well tell me. What was I driving when I crashed?”

  “James the Second,” Sue said.

  “Eh?”

  “You bought him, you named him. An MR2? In British racing green?”

  I shook my head helplessly. What the hell would I be doing with a car like that?

  “Who was James the First?” one of the doctors asked. Trying to catch me out, I guess, me or my memory or both.

  “A Scottish king,” I said flatly.

  Sue looked at me and said, “Writer. Ghost stories. Christ, you really don’t remember, do you?”

  “That’s right. I really don’t remember.”

  “Okay. M R James wrote ghost stories; the car was an MR2; so, obviously, James the Second. It was obvious to you, anyway.”

  “I’ve never read M R James,” I said, still trying to put distance between this girl’s version of the world and my own.

  “You read them to me every night last month. Dead spooky. I wanted candlelight but you wouldn’t do that, you said you couldn’t see to read, but I reckon you were scared...”

  Layers beneath layers: teasing on the surface, she was angry underneath, or wanted me to think it. How dared I not remember what was so potent, so shared? But I thought the anger was as artificial as the tease, with something tight and frightened hiding down below.

  I could get angry now myself, I thought; but I thought it would be just as artificial, and what it hid in me would be just as craven. I knew what I was scared of—and yes, you could call it a ghost story, this mythical life she claimed for me, that I had never lived—but I was less certain about her. I wanted to think about that, to try to draw some sense out of a skein of impossibilities; but more even than that I simply wanted to be alone, to answer no more questions for a while, neither to be faced with questions that I couldn’t answer.

  So I let my head topple back and roll into the pillow, and there was nothing artificial in this, I felt completely shagged. And said so, said, “I’m shagged. Can we save the rest till later?”

  “Yes, of course, Jonty.” My God, considerate doctors? “You sleep awhile, and try not to worry. Experience shows that most memories are recovered, sooner or later. We can’t force nature in this respect, but she does a pretty good job on her own account.”

  They left, conferring in low voices before they were even out of the door. Sue hesitated a moment, made half a move to come back to the bed, half opened her mouth to speak; but I only looked at her, offering no encouragement and certainly no help, and in the end she just twisted away and walked out.

  She might be short, but she did okay in proportion. Nice legs, neat bottom. I barely registered, though, was in no mood to enjoy.

  o0o

  A nurse looked in an hour later, to check that I was sleeping. I wasn’t. I’d not felt so exhausted, so drained and confused, so very far from sleep since the first night I ever spent in someone else’s bed, nervous and daring and massively, monstrously pleased with myself and with her. The emotions this time were as different as their causes, but the effect was similar.

  “You’re supposed to be resting,” she said, fussing with my pillows and my pulse. “It’s no good battering your head against a brick wall, you know, that won’t bring things back any quicker. It’s like when something just slips your mind, you know? You have to forget about it, and then suddenly there it is. Think about something else, and I bet you’ll start remembering what you’ve lost. You’re trying too hard, that’s all. Do you want the telly on? Or the radio? As you�
�re obviously not going to go to sleep?”

  “No,” I said, relieved to find myself positive about one thing in my life. “Thanks,” added a little belatedly; and then, “Do you know where my clothes are?”

  “In the locker there, what’s left of them. But you’re not getting up, sonny Jim, so don’t you think it.”

  I smiled thinly. “Last thing I want to do, believe me. My legs ache like fuck,” which I said only to hear her cluck; I don’t much like being ordered about by strangers. But she never twitched an eyebrow, and that was points to her, so I explained more reasonably, “I only want to see what I’ve got in my pockets.”

  Just my luck, to land a maternal Tolkien fan. She hissed softly as she opened a drawer in the bedside locker, and whispered “What has it got in its pocketses?” And then she tipped the drawer upside down over my knees, and said, “That’s the lot. Anything missing must have got left in the wreck. I don’t know if Mr Coffey would approve of this or not, but it sounds like a good idea to me. Maybe something here’ll trigger your memories.”

  That’s what I was hoping also, or a part of it. She put the drawer back into the locker and stood there, arms folded, watching with interest; I kept my face neutral and my hands still, and said, “I thought nurses were all desperately overworked?”

  “Touchy,” she said, tutting at my manners. “If there’s anything personal in there, lad, I’ve probably seen it already. I’m the one who undressed you—well, cut the rags off you, mostly—and sorted out what was savable.”

  “Was I that much of a mess, then?” My body might be an awkward and uncomfortable vehicle just now, but it didn’t seem to me so badly damaged. Not from the neck down, at least. I wasn’t in traction, or even in plaster so far as I could see.

  She shook her head. “Cuts and bruises is all. But you looked worse than that when you came in, and we couldn’t take chances. What I say is, if you’re going to throw your car off the road, you shouldn’t wear Calvin Klein to do it.”

  “I haven’t got any Calvin Klein,” I said automatically. Levis were my limit, I didn’t give a toss about designer labels on my clothes.

  “Well, you haven’t now, that’s for sure.” I guess it was becoming clear to her around about then that I’d make small talk for the rest of the day and all night too, but I wasn’t going to look through my things until she was gone. That realisation still didn’t shift her, though. She glanced at the flowers in the window, and said, “Did that little wife of yours show you the cards that came with these?”

  “No.” And don’t call her my wife—but I didn’t want to say that aloud, I just beamed it as a sullen message of denial which penetrated not a millimetre into the woman’s skull.

  “No? She’ll have been too much relieved to think of it, I expect. Three days she’s been sitting by your bed, you know, even in the ICU where she was just getting under people’s feet, and so we told her. We’ve sent her home at night, of course, but she’s straight back again in the morning, first thing. Ruining her beauty over you, she’s been, so I hope you’re properly grateful...”

  I said nothing, though Sue’s beauty didn’t seem to me to have taken noticeable damage. Meanwhile, as she talked the nurse was gathering up the florists’ cards from all the separate bouquets.

  “Hard enough time we had of it, getting her to go and clean up when you started to wake. It took Mr Coffey himself to tell her that it’d be an hour or two yet before you made any kind of sense, you weren’t coming to in a hurry; and besides she looked a mess, he told her, and she didn’t smell nice. I think that was what shifted her, in the end. Went running off for a shower and a change, and she was still back inside half an hour. Now, you’ll want to know who else has been thinking of you,” she went on, in defiance of the facts. Right now I wasn’t bothered, I didn’t give a damn; but she clearly did. Rather than giving me the cards—“you don’t want to be fussing your eyes over these, not with your bad head”—she read them to me.

  Here at last, for the first time since those early thoughts registered that I was waking into pain but that there was a woman there to cuddle and kiss me better, some things started to make sense. Or to sound sensible, at least, to conform to the world that I lived in. These were names that I knew, colleagues and friends.

  But nothing lasts, nothing is reliable. Though there was nothing from my mother, which again conformed to the world that I lived in, one card read ‘with best wishes from Father and Mother Chu’. And apparently they had been to visit, twice: a solemn, concerned and very Chinese couple, the nurse said, who had sat almost without speaking, smiling apologies if they seemed the least bit in the way, while their worried eyes shifted constantly from Sue to me and back to Sue again. Their daughter, obviously, if anything in this crazy mess was obvious. Whatever was going on here, I wasn’t facing a single nutcase but an inscrutable conspiracy.

  And no, there were no flowers from Carol; but the last and largest bunch, the brightest and the brashest bouquet was from Vernon Deverill, and what the hell, what the giddy hell was he doing sending me flowers? Vernon Deverill spent a good deal of his time—and hence his solicitors’ time—in and out of court, though so far as I knew he’d never been convicted of anything more serious than speeding; but he wasn’t one of our clients. We had something of a reputation for honesty, for straight dealing with our clients and with the courts; Vernon Deverill wouldn’t recognise a deal unless it was helical. The only time I could recall seeing him in the flesh, he’d been standing on the steps outside the court building giving sound-bites to the media, talking about police persecution and harassment after his latest acquittal. Myself and ninety per cent of his auditors simply assumed that he’d nobbled the jury again, though not even the stupidest reporter there showed any signs of suggesting it.

  And this man, this leading light of our business and criminal fraternity who didn’t or shouldn’t know me from Adam, was suddenly sending me flowers to wish me a speedy recovery? Well, it was just one more on the growing list of impossible things that I was apparently expected to believe; but it was a big one, that. Bigger than cars and clothes, at any rate.

  As big as being married, maybe. All these things were impossible, but some were more impossible than others, and I wasn’t even close to giving those credence. One thing I’d known all my life, that people would lie and lie again for their advantage—you had only to look at my mother—and florists at least were easy people to lie to. Not their job to check up, to be sure that the name on the message was the name of the sender.

  γνϖθι σεαυντ, know thyself was the motto of the Seven Wise Men, at least according to Plato. It used to stand inscribed on Apollo’s temple at Delphi. I might have seen it with Carol, if it had still been there: we’d both done a Classics option at university, that was where we met, and we’d spent a long summer in Greece after, getting to know each other. I hadn’t needed to take it on board as a personal motto also, because it was already there in my head, had been a part of my private philosophy long before I ever thought I had one.

  I knew myself fairly well, I fancied; and even if I’d lost a large chunk of memory, my personality hadn’t gone with it. I was still the same man I used to be. I could feel that; every thought fitted to the old familiar grammar, my abiding image of myself. Which meant that things done during the time that was missing would have been done according to the same rules I’d always set myself, an imperfect man trying to deal honestly with the world; and that meant that there was fraud and deception here somehow, though I couldn’t understand it. I was who I was, who I always had been: and the Jonty Marks whose life I had lived would no more have got involved with Vernon Deverill than he would have left Carol in order to marry a stranger...

  o0o

  I was drifting, daydreaming almost, trying to construct this impossible world to see how it would look, and denying it even as I built. Perhaps the nurse thought that I was sleeping at last. At any rate she left me, as quietly as her heavy body would allow; and the click of
the door’s closing brought me back, and with no audience, no distractions, I could turn my fingers and my thoughts, my spindizzy mind in my aching head to the scatter of stuff on the bedspread.

  Not the car keys, they presumably got mangled along with the car and me; but my house keys were there, or I thought they were. Briefly. My key wallet was: worn black leather, anciently familiar to eyes and touch. I’d won it on a tombola stall at a church bazaar when I was thirteen, and always used it since. But when I popped it open, most of the keys inside were wrong. Wrong colours, wrong lengths and the wards made unfamiliar patterns against my palm.

  For a minute, two minutes, five I played those keys between my fingers, and recognised only a couple of them, the ones that would let me into my mother’s house. Otherwise it seemed I could only open doors that were strange to me, I knew not where. If this was a con—and surely, surely it had somehow to be a con—then it was a mind-bendingly efficient one.

  We might have changed the locks, I supposed, Carol and I, in these two or three missing months. New keys for our old home, I might have; but I didn’t think so. Especially when the next thing I picked up was my old purse, just as certainly my own, and the first thing I saw when I opened it was a photo of Sue smiling out at me from behind plastic. I felt like Patrick McGoohan, waking to wicked if invisible chains. As an exercise in brainwashing this was superb, except that everything they wanted me to accept was impossibly out of tune with who and what I was. I’d never carried a photo of any girl in my purse; didn’t see the point. I always had better and more intimate pictures in my head, ever ready for private viewing.

  The picture was a head-and-shoulders shot cropped from a larger photograph. I slipped it out of the pocket designed to hold it, and wasn’t at all surprised to find it inscribed on the back. ‘Jonty—all my love, Sue.’ Plain, simple, affecting, and I didn’t credit a word of it. Efficiency, that was all. And Christ knew, if she’d sat at my bedside for three days she’d had time enough to fiddle unobserved with everything that was mine. Except my mind, except my mind, except my mind...