The Big Blank (1/2)

I sat in a hospital bed facing a woman who insisted she was my wife. I couldn’t remember her face, name or voice, but thought maybe I should believe her because I couldn’t remember anything. Well I could remember things, but I could tell that something had gone wrong. When they had given me a mirror I looked like me, but a lot older, well into my forties instead of nineteen.

“Are you having me on?” she asked.

“No, I’m not having you on. And the doctors said this can happen. Not often, but it’s possible.”

She looked as if the only reason she might have to believe me was the bandage around my head and the broken hip.

“Do you remember the accident?”

“Yes. I was with Vinny. He had swiped a TV recorder from Dixon’s and we were running across the car park, and I ran into a bloke on a scooter.”

“Not that accident! It happened when you were nineteen! The one that put you in here! That woman’s dog slipped its lead, you chased it into the road and got hit by a van!”

“No, I don’t.”

She placed her fingers over her eyes. I wanted to say something that might help, but fumbled for words, felt embarrassed, looked at her, managed a “Sorry ….” Her name wouldn’t come.

“I told you, it’s Karen!”

 

A couple of weeks later the doctors were confident that my head wouldn’t explode and I was beginning to walk again, so they let me go home. Not that it felt like home. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t remember the place – not the street, or inside the house, or the horrible shower curtain in the bathroom – but the other people were a mystery to me. Natalie was eighteen years-old and said she was my daughter, and Jake was twenty and in the Army. He came home on a weekend leave, seemed pleased to see me when he arrived, but more pleased when the time came to leave. I remembered Mum, but she had become an old woman who spent more time complaining about immigrants than asking about me. Dad had been gone before my accident, up north with a younger woman, and had died from cancer, leaving another kid and a pile of debts, more than ten years ago. I recognised my sister Becky, despite having gone from fourteen to over forty, turned peroxide blonde and covering both arms with tattoos. She was married to a guy with a shaved head named Karl, had three loud kids who thought it was funny I couldn’t remember them, and was the one who was more concerned than confused.

“Do the doctors think you can get the memories back?”

“They don’t know. They’re sending me to a specialist.”

“What about a hypnotist?”

“Do they do them on the NHS?”

Other people came to see me. There were two mates I remembered from teenage years, Jordan and Jamie, who I was told were still regulars for a monthly curry and sometimes brought their families to the house. I couldn’t recall having met them since Jordan had acne and Jamie had blue hair. Two guys named Geoff and Leo came around and told me I had worked with them at the local council for the past fourteen years.

“What I do?”

“Procurement.”

“What’s that?”

“Buying stuff. Stuff the council uses.”

A few days later I met them at their office. A bunch of people shook my hand and asked how I was doing, and Geoff and Leo sat me at my desk and ran through some of the stuff we used to do together. I couldn’t remember how to use the computer, let alone do the job. As it went on I noticed the worried looks around the room, and shortly before leaving heard a whisper: “He can’t come back in this state.”

Other people tried to jog my memory with no luck. I looked at a lot of photos on people’s phones – which seemed really odd for a while – and didn’t recognise anyone I hadn’t known before the first accident. I watched TV programmes and movies I was told I had enjoyed, and enjoyed them again, especially as I didn’t remember watching them before. I watched highlights of football matches, but my most recent memory of the game was England losing to Germany on penalties in 1996. I went back to the hospital a dozen times for tests, and I was sent to a therapist who asked a lot of questions. I could remember plenty of things from being a kid, but nothing since the first accident. Then they started talking about hypnotherapy. I said I would give it a go.

Then came an evening that Karen and I were alone together and she came into the living room in some very skimpy underwear and said “Maybe this’ll do the trick”. It was fun, and we satisfied each other twice over, but I still didn’t remember any of our earlier sex life. We snuggled up, but after a while she turned away from me, and the following night I moved into Jake’s room.

I floated along for a few months. The doctors told me there weren't many hypnotherapists on the NHS who would treat my condition and there was a waiting list to see them. I took a redundancy deal from the job, looked for others, but found it hard to impress people when I couldn’t honestly tell them what I had been doing for twenty-five years. Karen gave me a smartphone she said was mine, and I used it to make calls and send texts but didn’t see much point in all the other stuff on it. I saw people less often. I got on with Natalie and Jake but felt there was something missing, and they both seemed disappointed but ready to get on with everything else. One evening when Natalie was out I asked Karen the question I had been putting off for months.

“Were we happily married?”

She narrowed her eyes for a moment.

“We had ups and downs.”

“More ups, or downs?”

“About even, over the past few years at least, but that’s more downs than I’ve wanted.”

“Had I done anything wrong to cause that?”

“Nothing bad. But at times I had the impression you wanted something else.”

That made me pause for a moment.

“And you’re putting up with me being like this?”

She didn’t answer.

 

Two weeks later Becky told me she had tracked down Vinny. He had put himself at a distance from our old circle, reckoning he had to break the habit of bad behaviour, and been living on the coast for the past twenty years. I was excited, remembering he had been a good laugh and thinking that meeting him might lead to a cascade of memories. He was ready to come to me, but Karen had never liked him so I suggested a meet at a spot near Waterloo Station. I barely recognised him; he was bald and fat and had lost the flash edge that had impressed me when we were young; but he was friendly.

“So do you remember me?” he asked.

“Up to the accident.”

“What about afterwards? We saw plenty of each other for about eighteen months, two years, before I drifted off.”

“No. Last thing is you running across that car park with a box in your hands.”

“Yeah, I had to fess up to that. Got six months suspended for two years.”

“You didn’t get away?”

“No. You were splayed out on the tarmac. I wasn’t leaving you.”

I was touched, but I still couldn’t remember. Then he recalled things from the couple of years after the accident, things we did and conversations we had – he must have talked it over with Becky as something that might help – but still nothing came back to me. After a while his expression changed, still smiling but with a trace of despair.

“This other accident did leave you buggered,” he said.

“That’s what everyone else reckons.”

We got into how I was feeling about everything, and I was honest, that it was all confusing, inflicted a sort of emotional numbness, but wasn’t actually causing me any pain. There was a lingering anxiety that I should feel more about family, especially my two kids, but it wasn’t guilt and I was sleeping at night. Then we talked about him, how he had been dead straight, knew he wasn’t as much fun as when he was younger and didn’t particularly mind. He had a wife, three kids, a cat, a nice house and played golf at the weekends. He was contented – a word he would never have used when he younger. I liked him, but at the same felt a little disappointed.

After a couple of hours he apologised and said he was due to meet one of his family for a coffee before he went home. I walked towards the station, intending to get on the Underground for home, when we ran into his cousin. I definitely remembered Della. She was a couple of years older than us, tall, blond with a tongue for snappy remarks that were always more funny than rude. I had fancied her rotten, but she always seemed out of my league, with a string of older boyfriends with plenty of money to spend on her. She looked older but still striking, with deep blue eyes and the hint of a sly smile. At first she didn’t recognise me, then Vinny spoke my name.

“I remember now! Sorry!”

“No need. I don’t think we’ve seen each other for over twenty-five years.”

“How have you been doing?”

“I don’t have a clue.”

She looked at Vinny.

“Amnesia,” he said. “He had an accident.”

“Not another one! I remember this one went thieving and you wound up in hospital.”

“Yeah I remember that one, but nothing in between.”

“So come with us. You can tell me more.”

Vinny looked surprised but didn’t object, and I spent the next hour with them. She reacted with a mixture of amusement and sympathy to what had happened to me, and asked if the kids had to tell people I was their new daddy. Then she told me she had married one of those boyfriends with money, had a couple of kids, then he had left her for a younger woman, who dumped him two years later, after which he tried to win Della back.

“I told him I liked him fresh off the plate but not as sloppy seconds.”

It rolled off her tongue with an elegant disdain that made me feel I had been missing something. Then she mentioned she was unattached, and I fancied her again.

We all left the coffee bar together, Vinny heading back towards the station, me and Della discovering that half of our journeys were in the same direction. We chatted more on the Underground, she asked if I was working, I told her no and I needed to wrap my head around something to get back into the habit.

“Have you thought of volunteering?”

“For what?”

“I work four days a week, do the fifth at a food bank. We’ve just lost a couple of people could do with an extra hand.”

So I went along on the following Monday to help. We had a coffee afterwards and found it easy to talk with each other, and did the same the following week. The week after that we went straight back to her place and fell into bed together.

Continued in part 2

Image by ManojITT, public domain through Wikimedia Commons