Strangers

There is a tiny, almost undetectable movement just at the right side of my vision, like a flicker of light caused by a passing car in the street outside but there is no engine sound and I know better than to look for the cause of the visual irritation. Instead I ignore it by focusing with all consuming concentration on the task at hand, the cryptic crossword.

I have always been much better at things that are still than any task where movement is the key to success. I was a disaster at sports as a child and can still embarrassingly stumble over a seemingly minute unevenness in the pavement. When I am motionless I can be at peace and I can gain some power over the meaningless vibrations my mind creates and manage to ignore them.

I sit alone in the kitchen, I always rise first and while Jane readies our daughter for school I steal a few last delectable moments in the calm, controllable sanctuary of home before facing another day. I spend a significant amount of time marshalling my fear and extensively planning my day right down to which people I might bump into at every stop. I build a web of information, cues to help me place people until I feel that my mind is overflowing with lists which sometimes feel more like a hindrance than a help.

‘Good morning, Dove,’ Jane comes into the warm kitchen, she has an adorable habit of calling me by unusual endearments reaching out with warm words to reassure me.

Jane is my rock and I often wonder if it hurts her than I cannot pick her out from a crowd until she speaks or beckons to me. If she is hurt by my failure to notice her new haircut or that she is wearing make up for a change she is compassionate enough never to let it show.

Although I have a great fondness for the static I find people easier to view when they are moving. Standing still Jane appears like any other woman of her height and build but moving she is utterly unique. My wife walks fast with long strides which speak of confidence and purpose and her hips sway with unassuming sensuality. She fiddles almost constantly with her wedding band and hums, often subconsciously, under her breath. She smiles and laughs with her whole body, her shoulders drop when she is happy and hunch when she is anxious or angry. Her hands are so expressive when she speaks that I often feel her words are not strictly necessary and they are so cold that I instantly know if I brush past a woman who is not her in a busy place. Jane has endless patience; she never reacts angrily to me even when my fussing and failures must be both maddening and pitiful at the same time.

A smaller person enters the cosy warmth of the kitchen. Her grey uniform is my nightmare at the school gates when I cannot recognise my own daughter among all the other identically clothed children. Her name, Reanna and shortened to Rea, is as unique a marker as we could give her without embarrassment, carefully designed to limit my chances to make mistakes.

‘Morning, Pop,’ Rea chirps and drops her bright pink backpack by the leg of the table. It is by her bag that I pick her out when I meet her from school, she even gets to wear a bright bathing suit at swimming galas so that I can pick her out and applaud when she wins races, she is still young enough not to mind but I worry about the future. At only seven the attention still loves feel special but parents are inevitably an embarrassment to their teenage children and I can only imagine that I will be more embarrassing than most.

Rea is easier for me than most people, I do not need so many clues. My daughter tilts her head to the left when she listens and she balances on one foot whenever she is forced to stand still, she fiddles with her hair and her laugh comes in explosive little blasts like a stream of bubbles when you squeeze the soap bottle. She has freckles on her forearms and very pale skin.

‘Can I have a lift, Pop? It’s raining,’ she asks.

‘Alright, but I am leaving in two minutes,’ I reply and she laughs a little collection of bubbles and runs off to find her shoes. She always calls me ‘Pop,’ it is her safety net and mine and I am sure Jane taught her to do it. I wish Rea didn’t have to be so aware of my shortcomings but it saves us both the embarrassment caused when I start chatting to one of her classmates instead of her.

Jane kisses me goodbye with a fierce hug. ‘She has her blue coat on,’ she whispers in my ear by way of parting advice and leaves me without guidance for the day ahead. When we are apart my wife becomes simply a collection of lovable attributes which I cling to until we next meet.

I drive silently all the way to Rea’s school but she sings loudly along to the stereo. She is joyful, so excited to be heading out into the world and I am glad. Research has only recently suggested that my condition, prosopagnosia which means I have always been unable to identify faces, could be passed genetically and I am thankful that Rea is spared. It is not a risk I would have taken lightly had I known of it. I go from day to day, straining to imprint people’s characteristics on my memory and to find the unusual thing that identifies them and I am glad Rea does not have to do any of that. She is free.

On the short walk from the car to the school gates I concentrate hard on the pavement to avoid tripping, clumsiness goes along with prosopagnosia for me and I am constantly aware of it. I can already feel the buzz of increased heart rate in my chest and my daughter holds my hand protectively and chats away, she squeezes my fingers rhythmically and I find it reassuring.

‘Look, there are Lucy and Bev,’ she exclaims. She is so practiced at preparing me that she uses first names comfortably, she no longer giggles with embarrassment as she did when she was younger.

‘That’s nice,’ I reply heartily though I have no idea which of the many pairs of women and uniformed daughters in the throng at the gates she is referring to. Bev is short, not much taller than her daughter I can remember and, by concentrating on each person in the small crowd I have narrowed it to two possibilities before Rea tows me by the hand in the right direction.

It is be wrong to suspect that I cannot see faces, a mistake which many people make when I try to explain Prosopagnosia to them. I can see a smile, tell blue eyes from brown and sometimes even read emotions from a frown or a worried look but I simply lack the ability to remember that set of features as being special. It is like I take a photo with a camera without taking the lens cap off and when I try to remember all I get is a black gap as if the film has not been exposed.

‘Hello,’ Bev is always friendly to me though she knows Jane better.

‘Hello,’ I have perfected the noncommittal greeting so that I gain myself time to add up all the clues and compare them to my mental list. I am friendly enough that anyone I genuinely know might say something that gives them away. My friends probably think I am a little chilly for a moment and strangers must think I am a slightly overfriendly chap with very good manners. Over the years I have reduced my mistakes and cultivated massive lists of characteristics by which I can reason peoples names but still my heart thuds when ever my wife or daughter are not there to guide me.

The kids are keen to get into the playground and Bev and I say goodbye. The instant she steps away she is lost in a sea of unidentifiable faces and I am completely alone. I can still feel the beating of my heart in my chest, my only constant companion through the day and I hurry to be safe again.

I drive to work, cocooned in my car, and then take the steps to the relative sanctuary of the office two at a time, risking a violent trip but too keen to be inside to slow down. Sealy, Mack and Dobbs Architects, that’s us. I fit in well in a small company, especially since I have known Tony Mack since university and architecture makes sense to me in a way that the rest of the world cannot. Buildings are unique and beautiful to me and give me satisfaction. I see buildings in a similar way to the way I view people, the shape is far more important to me than anything else but as an architect that is a strength rather than a failure.

In adolescence and into my twenties no name had been given to the complete social failure I was as a child, no research had been carried out and the very few of us who suffer this way suffered alone. Even now Prosopagnosia is rare and relatively poorly understood though through scanning internet chat rooms you can find sufferers sharing their struggles and triumphs.

I had never made friends at school because I could never remember or separate any of my classmates from one another, they fell into broad categories; girls with pigtails, boys who played football, boys who played marbles, girls who played with dolls. No one stood out enough for me to reliably identify them so I gave up and studied hard. I did well academically but was so quiet and withdrawn that my mother took me to development specialists but none of them could identify the problem and I could not express it since to me it was normal not to be able to recognise anyone. I could only recognise my mother because we were poor so she only had one pair of shoes.

At university in Oxford I was prepared to go on that same way, study hard and be resigned to not fitting in until Tony Mack picked me as a lab partner in the second term. He told me later that he thought I must be smart since I was always reading and never in the pub. Tony was the perfect friend for me, a broad Scott studying at Oxford and a large shouldered man with it, expansive and socially confident and always identifiable. I clung to Tony like a life raft in a flood and he welcomed me since I never let him miss a deadline and always made sure he got home when he drank too much. I had quickly discovered that drunkenness did me no favours and declared myself teetotal. I even managed to make friends with women for the first time ever since Tony, after a pint or two, always introduced everyone to everyone else regardless of whether they had met before.

‘Morning, Nick.’ Our secretary sits at her desk by the door from the stairs and oversees our little domain. Daphne is of middle years and the skin on her hands is tanned and wrinkled from sunshine and a love of gardening. She wears a bright ruby ring on her wedding finger, I always check. ‘Just you and Nathan in,’ she informs me over the top of her computer screen,’ Tony should be here at ten and we are not expecting any guests. Lydia is filling upstairs.’

‘Thanks, Daphne,’ I steal a toffee from the bowl on her desk and slip towards my alcove.
Daphne is a real saint. She has a gloriously old fashioned and personal style which she quickly adapted when I told her what I needed and which makes her a credit to us. She lets me know in a single statement who I can expect to be in the building which drastically reduces the list of clues I have to check when I encounter someone. She seamlessly introduces me, even to people I know, through a friendly greeting by name and she always brings my visitors to me and announces them so I am never left on the wrong foot.

Women are generally much better at giving me context than men are, they pick up quickly when I have lost my thread and feed me information subtly, our assistant Lydia comes with me to big meetings and whispers the name of everyone who speaks so that I can pay attention to what they are saying instead of trying to figure out who they are. I find remembering discussions next to impossible with no idea of who said what and things generally move much too fast for me to use any kind of strategy. It is worse still when everyone is sat around a table since I am denied half their bodies and any of the movement cues which might give them away. It is like a game where everyone tries to hide their identity from me and I have to try to find them out. I still divide people into sets; men and women, suits, long hair or short hair, glasses or not. People who mix glasses and contacts are a nightmare to me and name badges at conferences are a joy provided the text is big enough to read without squinting.

I sometimes feel like nothing more than an endless compendium of lists; Jane, Rea, my mum, Daphne, Tony, Nathan, Lydia are all people I have regular contact with and in my mind they are only a well rehearsed list of attributes. The men are easier. Men wear the same shoes, keep their haircut, have the same jacket for years, always wear that same watch and they are much more likely to stick to their context. Women are tricky, they change clothes and jewelry, perfume and hairstyle, even a woman pinning her hair up can be enough to destroy the usefulness of any mental list I have. On top of that they change their mannerisms from work to home and they flit constantly between contexts. Bev, who I can often deduce at the school gate, is infinitely more difficult when she is at the swimming club or worse still when she is not paired with her daughter.

I ignore my email inbox with its flashing messages and turn to new drawings and work quickly takes me away from the problems I have with the real world. I am absorbed in the lines and curves of the building I am drafting, even a functional building can be so much more than a box and so much more beautiful than four simple walls and a roof and that is how I see people, I suppose, as so much more than their physical features. I am caught puzzling with pitch and aspect, constrained by limited imagination and the possibilities of technology when the telephone rings. The harsh sound causes a flash in the corner of my vision, a peculiarity of my brain, but I ignore both the interruptions.

I am safe knowing that Daphne will answer if I do not and hoping that she will instinctively know I am busy. Today I want to be closeted away, tired of being a social failure I want to focus on something I excel at. Last night’s adventure at a work event of Jane’s has worn me out even though she mostly stayed at my elbow commentating on who was approaching and who wore what among the few people that I knew so that when she was forced away I could at least approach someone who knew me rather than standing like an island in a sea of social confidence in which I have no place. I always think I must be such a burden to Jane in those situations, like a child who cannot be trusted not to tell a nosey neighbour that you call her the wicked witch behind her back.
The phone starts ringing again, a softer internal ring, and I know Daphne cannot hold off whoever seeks to interrupt my flow. I answer the phone almost gruffly and Daphne obviously hears it in my voice.

‘Sorry, Nick,’ she apologises quickly and I am sorry for my attitude. ‘It is a lady called Sarah Picking, she says she works with your wife and she says it is urgent.’

Sarah Picking, I chatted to her last night, she is Jane’s boss and she’s a redhead which always makes her easier to pick out in a throng than most. She was wearing a light grey suit last night which, with her small frame, made her bright hair seem even more shocking.

‘Put her through, Daphne,’ I wonder what she wants and how she got my number, there is a click on the line as Daphne hangs up which makes me flinch.
‘Nick?’ the voice at the other end asks.
‘Yes?’ I am cautious.
‘It’s Sarah Picking, Nick, from Jane’s work.’
‘What can I do for you, Sarah?’ I ask, she seems nervous and that makes me nervous.
‘Nick, Jane has had a little collapse at work,’ she says, her tone is very serious. ‘She fell unconscious in the ladies but we heard the noise and she wasn’t out five seconds before someone was with her. We measured her blood sugar and it was off the scale so I injected her with the pen like she showed me. When she didn’t come around like she is supposed to we called 999 and she’s gone to hospital in an ambulance, she had not come around when they took her.’
‘Alright,’ I say though my head is spinning. Jane has diabetes and has collapsed once or twice before but not for a long time and she always comes round straight away. ‘When did this happen?’
‘They left just five minutes ago, Nick, I rang you straight away,’ Sarah said calmly.
‘Give me a minute,’ I hear myself say because my head is spinning and I have lost track of what she is saying. Tinnitus rings in my ears, destroying my balance and rushing like water in a cave. I breath deeply and slowly a couple of times and the noises fade as I give my body the oxygen it requires. ‘I’m still here,’ I say when I have everything back under control.
‘It is St. Mary’s hospital,’ Sarah says.
‘St. Mary’s,’ I repeat.
‘I will meet you at the main gate by the public car park on Market Street, Nick,’ she says.
‘No need,’ I refuse, ‘I am fine, really.’
‘I won’t stay long,’ she promises, ‘it’ll be hard for you though won’t it?’
‘It will be if she’s still unconscious,’ I agree. If she is asleep most of the clues by which I know my wife are gone and she is like anyone else. Sarah and Jane have worked together for ten years and Sarah went to a lot of effort to understand my condition when they first discussed it.
‘Market Street gate in twenty minutes then,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a black Range Rover and I’m wearing a bright green jacket.’
‘Thanks,’ I am honestly grateful that she is taking charge.
‘My hair is usually enough though isn’t it? See you in twenty minutes, bye.’

I walk out of the office telling the woman at the reception desk to cancel my meeting and without being sure whether it is Daphne or Lydia I have spoken to.

The drive to the hospital passes in a blink of an eye since I am a mass of anxiety and all I can really feel is my heart bounding in my chest and blood rushing in my ears. I find a space. No black Range Rovers, I wait.

Jane, dearest Jane, she is my key to a world which otherwise makes no sense. I had spent my whole life wondering why I was so abnormal and she changed everything in a single statement, she asked, ‘How do we manage to live with this?’It was she who realised that everyday is a series of anxious and sometimes fearful encounters for me and it was she who made a game of listing people’s non conforming characteristics so that I can use them as clues, she picks out a limp, an odd birthmark or an outlandish accent in an instant where I am so busy worrying it might take me weeks of knowing someone before I find a reliable clue. It was Jane who bought a bright orange coat eight years ago and proudly announced that I needed no longer panic when she stepped away from me in the supermarket and when, like an anguished child, I lost her completely in a second. Jane is my map to the world, she is the method by which I live my life and my every success has been driven by her certainty, her intuitive understanding of me and the way she simply refuses to be beaten.

A black Range Rover pulls up as promised and out gets a short, slender lady with a green jacket on and a shock of bright ginger hair. She waves as I look at her and smiles widely, it is obvious she is not happy but I know she wants me to know she has recognised me. I get out of the car and walk to meet her.

‘Hello, Nick,’ she says not leaving me time to wonder if I got it wrong. ‘Let’s go in and see how she is doing.’

Sarah begins to lead the way, looking back at me to make sure I am following and I walk on feet which barely feel like they are in contact with the ground. At the gate we stop and Sarah studies the map, looking for Accident and Emergency, and I wait for her to set off again.

I feel like a child being dragged to a funeral knowing that the world is somehow irrevocably changing. I know I will not recognise my wife in the hospital bed where she will lie, too many clues are lost when a body goes still and silent and even the person I have slept beside for fifteen years can be like a stranger.

At my father’s funeral I could not cry, I could not manage to match the frail body to my father whose voice and emotions had always been so large and robust. There was no way to mourn over an empty shell dressed in my dad’s suit and I fear that for Jane in the end. I worry that when she dies it will be as if she is snuffed out, she will become a collection of memories that have only the things on my list to tie them together and over time my recollection of her aura and her presence will fade and the memories will go with it.