“You’re telling me you can’t remember anything?” I can hear the tinge of disbelief in his voice.
And I don’t blame him. If I was him I’d be the same. I’m me and trust me, I’m finding it pretty hard to believe.
I rake my fingers through my tangled hair. “No, I can’t,” I say feeling somewhat breathless.
I look at him. His brow is all furrowed. I can see his thoughts furiously flicking away behind his insanely blue eyes and I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking I’m either an alcoholic, a drug addict or just plain crazy . . . or maybe actually all three combined.
But I don’t feel crazy - slightly hysterical maybe, but not crazy.
“I’m not crazy,” I hear myself saying, “I just can’t remember.” I cover my face with my hands, pressing the soggy tissue up against my cheek.
He inhales deeply. “I never said you were crazy. I just wanna help you.”
I peer out from in-between my fingers to see him looking at me sincerely.
He pushes his hand through his dark hair. “Have you got anything with you, like a purse, a phone . . .” A quick glance around me answers his question. “No, okay.” He drums his fingers on his bare knee. “Well, can you give me a number of someone I can call for you and we’ll go from there?” He reaches for his phone.
I flick a quick glance over at the jogger, then back to Fen. They’re both staring at me expectantly and I don’t know how to answer.
I feel like my heads short-circuiting or it’s possibly about to explode because the more I try to force the memories, the worse it gets, the higher my level of panic rises. I try to search my brain for a telephone number, reaching to the outer edges of my mind, but there’s nothing there except for a vacuous void where my memories should have been. No telephone numbers, just absolutely nothing.
“I don’t know any numbers.” I can feel the blood pumping furiously through my veins and my face is getting hot.
A look of frustration flickers over Fen’s face. He clips his phone back to his belt and folds his arms and stares at me. “Come on, you must know one, how about your mum’s or –”
I shake my head furiously, forcing his words to come to an abrupt end. And as I look at his bewildered and frustrated face, I suddenly feel powerless and so completely and utterly vulnerable.
“I. Don’t. Know,” I say, my voice snapping and unable to avoid it doing so. “I don’t know anything!”
“Okay, just try to keep calm,” he says in a composed voice.
“I can’t!” I cry. “How can I keep calm? I’m here and I don’t know why I’m here, or how I even got here and . . . and . . .” I tail off breathlessly as the realisation drenches me. I have to bite my lip to stop from crying. My stomach is churning about in dread and my heart is beating so fast I feel like it’s going to jump out of my chest as I comprehend just how very bad this actually is.
Because the truth is even when I try to think of the most basic things about myself, nothing comes. It’s like I know everything and absolutely nothing. I know this is sand here below me and that’s the ocean over there, and that’s a seagull hovering in the sky just there, and I know what a lifeguard is, but for some terrifying reason I know absolutely nothing about myself, not one single thing.
“I know you’re scared,” Fen says, his voice controlled, deep, “but you’re gonna have to try and stay calm because I can’t help you if you don’t.” I can see his hand clasped around a radio that’s attached to his belt.
I close my eyes, taking a few deep breaths. Blood is beating in my ears and my heart is pounding so loudly I’m sure he must be able to hear it.
I open them again to see Fen looking at me with uneasy eyes. The radio is in his hand now.
“I’m sorry,” I apologise, pulling my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around them. My eyes are swelling with tears again.
I see Fen exchange a look with the jogger who’s actually moved further away from me.
Fen moves round and sits beside me. “Look, what I’m gonna do is radio to my colleague and get her down here to cover my patch so I can take you to see a medic. I think that’s the best thing to do. Is that okay with you?”
I rest my cheek on my knee and glance sideways at him. “Yes,” I say.
“Good.” He puts the radio to his mouth, pauses and looks back at me with questioning eyes. “What’s your name?”
I tighten my arms around my legs and take a deep breath. “I don’t know. I don’t know my name.” I push the air from my lungs and a stray tear trickles from the corner of my eye.
I see the shock reverberate through his face. “Bugger,” he murmurs quietly.
Yeah, bugger. That just about covers it.
He puts his arm around my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he says in a soft voice, patting my shoulder gently, “it’s all gonna be okay. I’ll make sure your okay.” He puts the radio to his lips and starts talking quickly into it.
I sigh heavily and another tear breaks free, followed by another, then another.
And I know it’s not going to be okay. How can it be when I don’t even know my own name?
Chapter 19
Desolate
“So you’re seeing Mark Rogers at two pm for some tests, is that right?” Dr Woods asks. His grey eyes are peering out from over the top of his glasses as he looks enquiringly at me.
I repress a sigh. More tests. Great.
“Yes.” I nod.
“Good, good,” he mutters. “Well I’ll pop back afterwards to see how you got on.” He pushes his glasses up his nose, gathers his papers up and shoves his pen into his jacket pocket. He gets up from the chair beside my bed and heads for the door.
He stops just shy of it and turns back to me. “You’re gonna be okay, you know,” he says in a well-meaning voice.
“I know.”
“We’re all here to help you. I’m here –” He pats his chest. “– anything you need, you just have one of the nurses beep me – anytime,” he adds with a warm smile.
“Thanks,” I say forcing a smile in return.
“See you later, then.” He sweeps through the door which closes behind him with a thud.
I flop back onto my pillows and sigh loudly into the encumbering silence.
I’m sat on my bed in my room in St Vincent’s Hospital. I’ve been here for six days. Mark Rogers is the neurologist who’s coming to see me this afternoon, just in case you were wondering. I’ve seen him once before, on the day I arrived here. Dr Woods, he’s the specialist who’s been taking care of me since I arrived.
And well, Dr Woods and Mark Rogers, and several other brain doctors have all concluded, after a lot of tests and CT scans, that I’m suffering from some severe form of focal retrograde amnesia.
Amnesia, I know – great huh? The worst case they’ve ever heard of, apparently, which is comforting to know.
You see, after all the extensive tests they’ve done, they have only managed to discover what I already know, which is that I don’t remember anything about anything.
Well what I mean is I know the sky is blue and the earth revolves around the sun, and that the wall over there, well it’s really bland shade of yellow. But when it came to them asking me what year it is or who the current prime minister of the country is, or well basically anything about myself – I couldn’t answer because I don’t know.
I know absolutely nothing about me, not my name or where I live, or how old I am.
Zilch. Zero. Nada.
I’ve come to terms with it, sort of. Well as much as you can after six days.
After that day on the beach, when Fen had radioed through to his colleague, he took me to see their medic who advised that he bring me straight to the hospital, and here I’ve been ever since.
Fen has been really wonderful to me. He was amazing on that first day. He stayed with me the whole time, keeping me company, waiting patiently whilst I had test after test done. And he’s been visiting me every day since, bringing me things like magazines and chocolate, which is really kind of him because he doesn’t have to. All I am to him is just some weird girl who rocked up on his beach, putting a dent in his otherwise normal working day, declaring to him that I have no memory of who I am.
And that’s the really weird thing about my amnesia, you see, the doctors can’t seem to figure out how I’ve come to acquire it. Generally it’s caused by a trauma to the head of which I have shown no visible signs. And normally people who have amnesia lose a few months, a few years maybe, at the most, but it seems I’ve lost everything which rarely happens, if ever.
The only other possibility Dr Woods could offer was that an emotional trauma had triggered it. That can happen, as I’ve been told. Post-traumatic stress disorder, Dr Woods called it, when something so horrific happens to a person they block it out and their memory just kind of switches off. Dr Woods said he thought it unlikely in my case due to the extent of memory loss, but he didn’t want to rule it out.
So he said, in quiet undertones, he thought it best that I had a ‘physical’ examination done.
I lay there whilst Dr Woods and the attending nurse did the examination, feeling sick to the pit of my stomach every time I thought of the many different possibilities of what could have happened.
And after what I can only describe as the most humiliating experience I’ve had to endure so far, Dr Woods assured me everything seemed fine. He said if something emotional had happened to trigger my memory loss, then it most certainly wasn’t anything sexual because my hymen was intact, meaning I’m a virgin. And, if I’m as old as I look, that makes me a mid-twenty-something year old virgin.
Wonderful.
Another piece to add to the ever growing puzzle that is me.
Mark Rogers, the hippy neurologist in his brown cords, flowery shirt and long brown straggly hair, comes to see me at two, as arranged. We go into the family room which is a welcome change of scenery from the drab four yellow walls of my room. We sit at a table and do some tests where he has me drawing pictures from memory, recounting a short story that he reads to me, remembering fifteen words in a list, that sort of thing. The tests are pretty much the same ones as he did the last time I saw him, barring the physical examinations he did to my head and eyes. I don’t see the point to it in all honesty. It’s not like recounting words are gonna bring my memories back but I dutifully play along.
I remember exactly how his face lit up like a Christmas tree when he first discovered the extent of my memory loss. He was looking at me like I was the cure for cancer, and he could see the Nobel Peace Prize in sight (and yes I do know what that is; Fen told me about it the other day).
Mark said, in an excitable voice, that my case was extraordinary and that someone (I’m guessing him) would want to write a paper on me at some point.
I felt like slapping him.
He’s a nice guy, don’t get me wrong, but that was the last thing I needed to hear.
I know to him I’m just an interesting case that might boost his career, but to me this is everything, this is every memory I’ve ever made that’s gone missing. All of them vamoosed, just like that.