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 spoke about hypnotherapy but there was a waiting list to get it on the NHS. 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.
We carried on meeting, always in places nowhere near our homes but back at Della’s in time for a roll between the sheets then for me to get back to Karen. I told her and Natalie that I was trying to sort out my head through time by myself, long walks and sitting on park benches. They didn’t question me, maybe because everyone knew I was screwed up, maybe because they had stopped caring. And it was during the summer when it was more credible to be walking the streets late; it would be less convincing once the evenings become dark and cold. The years between the accidents remained a big blank, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I was aware of losing things that must have been important – having a wife, kids, a worthwhile job and people who seemed to have liked me – and felt I owed it to everyone to find those years again. But there was no emotional yearning, just an empty space.
Becky was the most concerned. She encouraged me to get all the medical help I could. I carried on with the regular therapy, then I got the OK for hypnotherapy, had a couple of sessoins but got nowhere with it. There was some talk about electro convulsive therapy, until one doctor pointed out that could easily make me forget what had happened more recently. I talked about it with Della and said it might mess up things between us. She replied that it might but if it did it was meant to happen. I hear a hint of regret in her voice. Then my therapist asked me to go in for a chat. She had consulted with another specialist who knew another practising a new technique of hypnotherapy that had helped people with severe amnesia, and did I want her to try to arrange some sessions? I said yes, because I thought that’s what everybody would expect me to say.
I went home and told Karen. She asked if I knew the odds on it working.
“Better than anything they’ve done for me so far.”
“OK. I suppose it’s worth a try.”
She didn’t sound excited. I told Natalie, who was more encouraging about it, then spent three times as long talking about two of her friends who had fallen out over wanting the same guy when she knew he was more interested in another of her friends who had just got engaged to someone else. I phoned Jake to tell him and he asked if I really wanted to know everything that had happened in those years. It sounded like he was only half joking.
“Is there something I ought to know?”
“Nah! Good luck with it!”
So I went to Becky. She had been telling me things, so I knew about relations who had got married, divorced, had kids or died; and some stuff about politics, and which bands had been big, and a handful of popular TV shows; and how to begin making sense of doing stuff on the internet. But she hadn’t told me how I’d been getting on with my family.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You never said there was anything wrong, but I always wondered if you were hold something back.”
“Why?”
“Just that, when you talked about Karen, you seemed a bit guarded.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. You didn’t tell me.”
That led me back to Karen.
“You said that lately there had been more downs than up between us. What’s the detail?”
She looked uncertain.
“Does it matter? I mean the way that you are.”
“Of course it matters. It’s part of that life everyone says I should get back.”
She didn’t answer. I guessed there was something quite painful.
“Did I cheat on you? Is that why there’s been this gap between us?”
She hesitated. There was an odd twist in her lips.
“No. I cheated on you.”
“Oh!”
“More than once. I mean, with more than one man.”
“How many?”
“Four. It would have been five, but one guy chickened out at the last minute.”
“Did I know them?”
“A couple. Not well, but you would have known faces, maybe a name. And there was once I had to ask to move tables in a restaurant because another was there with his wife.”
It took a moment to sink in.
“Why? Was it because of me or you?”
“A bit of both. You were a bit sort of, wet. Your family said it was because of your accident, the first one, that it made you scared of everything. You were nice, but not a lot of fun.”
“And you?”
“Well, that’s what I’m like. I used to cheat on boyfriends before I met you. There have been times when I’ve said I wouldn’t do it again, and at times I’ve gone for years without doing it, but then someone’s come along and I couldn’t stop myself.”
“Couldn’t stop yourself?”
“Alright, I didn’t want to.”
“Who knows about it?”
“I’ve never talked about it with anyone, and I’ve always been discreet.”
“Does anyone suspect?”
“If I do they haven’t told me.”
“Did I know?”
“I think you suspected, because I had too many late nights out, but you didn’t say anything. You just looked at me funny, which made me annoyed, which was why we weren’t getting on.”
There seemed a lot more to say but I couldn’t work out what it was. I walked out of the house, took a bus to Della’s place and told her everything.
It was the first time I stayed overnight with her, and the first time that we didn’t have sex, just slept in a loose embrace. We woke early – Della had to get to work – and over breakfast she asked how I felt about going back to Karen. I realised that I didn’t feel particularly hurt or angry – whatever Karen had done was part of the big blank – but there was something pointless in acting as if we were married. I wasn’t sure of what to do next. Della suggested I could start by bringing some of my clothes back to her place that evening.
“Are you sure?”
“I know we haven’t been together long, and this is all a bit screwed up, but we’ve started off well. Maybe it will work out, maybe not, but this seems the time to get on with things.”
She gave me a big warm smile and I was back to being the teenager with a crush on his mate’s cousin. We squeezed each other’s hands and fell into a big hug over the muesli dishes.
When I got home Karen was waiting; she had called work saying she was sick but looked embarrassed rather than ill.
“Where have you been?”
“With someone.”
“Who?”
“I’m going to be honest. I’ve been seeing another woman over the past few weeks.”
She looked surprised, but as we continued talking there was relief in her voice. Now she could feel less guilty about all the times she had cheated on me. I told her I was moving out, and after a few questions she agreed it was probably for the best.
After a few days it was going OK with Della; we were learning each other’s quirks, how to give each other space, and talking in an easy, affectionate way that I hadn’t experienced with Karen – at least not since my memory had been wiped. To my surprise, Natalie had been a little upset when I told her I was moving out, but gave me a hug as I left; and Jake told me had always wondered how long Karen and I would stick together. Mum was more blunt: “I always thought she was a devious cow!”
I shifted my mind to the future, which had to begin with finding a new job. I didn’t have a strong sense of what I could do competently, let alone enjoy, but Becky said I should start by learning how to use a computer and Jordan and Jamie told me I had always had a decent head for figures, so I looked at courses on the basics of finance, and one of them said I could start in a couple of weeks. Still nothing was coming back from the years between the accidents, but I felt that my head was coming together. Then one of my doctors called and said that the hypnotherapist in Birmingham had looked at my case notes and thought she could help. I could have a first appointment the following week.
I spent the next few days knowing that I should be hopeful but feeling a kind of emotional suspension. It wasn’t a promise, but it was a possibility of clawing back that chunk of my life that been knocked out of my head by a white van. Maybe I could recover a lot of those lost memories, get a better understanding of who I was, what I liked, what I could do. And I couldn’t get excited at the idea. One evening Della fell asleep on the sofa as we were watching TV and I sat looking at her, feeling I had a chance of long term contentment. The next day I called Natalie and asked to meet for a coffee. She came along, seemed pleased to see me, and I felt that maybe I had an obligation to her and Jake to get back to being the dad they had known. I asked her what I had been like.
“Honestly, you were nice in some ways, but a bit distant, and a little dull.”
“I was dull?”
“Not boring, but not great fun either.”
“Would you want me back?”
“I suppose so, but I like you the way you are as well, even if it is a bit weird.”
That brought it home; nobody missed the old me that much. I had been a decent bloke who was also a bit boring and didn’t make any big emotional connections, not even with his kids, and especially not with his wife. I didn’t tell Natalie about the new hypnotherapist appointment.
That evening I talked about it with Della. She couldn’t comment on whether I had been dull because she hadn’t known me in those years, and she had never heard anyone talk about me, even those who had seen me at times. I hadn’t made much of an impression on people. So I floated an idea.
“Maybe it’s better to stay the way I am.”
“Well I like the way you are.”
She gave me a big hug, and five minutes later we were in bed again.
The next morning I called the clinic in Birmingham and told them I didn’t feel prepared and wouldn’t be along. The woman on the phone was understanding and said I could always get back in touch if I wanted to do the sessions. I was glad that I might have a second chance but hoped that I wouldn’t feel a need to take it. Then I faced up to the prospect of calling my wife and kids, and my mum, and letting them know that I was letting go.
I had lost a lot of years, and decided I could live without them.
Image by ManojITT, public domain through Wikimedia Commons