After The Fall

  To all those who have helped to keep me here, making each day liveable.

  To my parents, for taking me in when I needed them, and for understanding (sometimes) what it’s like to feel this way.

  To Vikkie, for picking me up more times than I can count, and for never giving up on me, even when I have.

  Chapter One

  The TV on the wall was showing a really old episode of Diagnosis Murder. The green ticker at the bottom said it was Diagnosis Murder, and the haircuts told me it was old. No one I’d seen looked like that.

  I wasn’t really watching the television. It was on mute anyway, so there wasn’t much point. I was watching the door, and waiting for a real-life doctor to come in and see me. I could hear doctors and porters and nurses walking around outside, and occasionally some of them would come onto the ward. They spoke to one of the other eight patients that were lying in their beds around me, and then they left again. Eventually it would have to be my turn.

  The patient in the bed next to mine was a man who looked to be in his fifties, and he had gallstones. The bed on my left was vacant, and on the left of that was the window. Outside was the car park, which was almost empty. Light, misty rain fell from the sky, and beyond the car park tower blocks rose up to meet the slate coloured sky.

  At long last, a doctor came to see me. He was Indian, maybe thirty, and had incredibly sad eyes.

  “Mr Ray? I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to meet you, it’s been pretty busy around here, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

  It did indeed seem incredibly busy.

  “The bridge collapse has us rather over a barrel in terms of patient care,” the doctor continued, and I wondered why he was telling me this. It seemed like none of my business.

  “Anyway, I’m happy to say that you can go home tomorrow afternoon, and that your wife is coming to collect you then.”

  I smiled because he was smiling.

  After he’d gone I started watching the television that hung over my bed. There was still no sound, but it was easier to think when I wasn’t looking at the other patients.

  In twenty-four hours I would be at home, sleeping in my own bed, with my own things around me.

  In twenty-four hours I would be going back to my life.

  Twenty seconds ago, I hadn’t even known I had a wife.

  I had to tell someone, eventually.

  Ever since I’d woken up in the hospital, a week ago, I’d been waiting for someone, maybe one of the nurses, to look at my chart, feel my forehead and exclaim, ‘wait a moment, this man has no memory!’

  But that hadn’t happened.

  So, in the end, I got out of bed and shuffled to the nurses’ station and asked them to please call back my doctor, because I’d forgotten that I had a wife, and I didn’t actually know her name, or where my home was.

  The funny thing is, it’s actually quite hard to work out that you’ve lost your memory.

  You’d think it would be easy, and it should be. But, how do you spot it? For me, it was like being in a room where all the walls were made of doors. Behind those doors was nothing but darkness, but I didn’t know that because I hadn’t tried to go through any of them yet. I hadn’t needed to.

  Put another way, it’s amazing how well I’d managed to pick things up. My name for one. Connor Ray, was printed on my wristband. I’d learnt that within the first five minutes. So when people said, ‘Mr Ray?’ or ‘Connor? We’re taking you down to x-ray’ I could nod and smile, and they thought I knew who I was.

  I knew my age (32) and read a few tatty copies of Hello! so I could parrot stuff about who was currently in rehab, and who was in line to win the World Cup. But under that I was a total blank. It had just taken me a while to realise it.

  That day was the first time someone had even mentioned the bridge collapse. When the doctor came back, looking anxious and concerned, I asked him why I was in the hospital. Of course, people had told me that I’d had a head injury, but I hadn’t felt sick, or overly tired, so I hadn’t thought anything of it. I’d been more concerned with my banged up ankle and the scratches on my arms and back. No one had thought to tell me that I had all those things wrong with me because the motorway bridge I’d been on had collapsed, that my car had fallen with the rubble, and been partially crushed by a falling piece of concrete.

  It was like hearing the plot of a film. I couldn’t remember a second of it.

  The doctor told me that I’d been in hospital for a month, and that I’d been awake for most of it. I could only remember the past week, and that worried him, I could tell. Apparently, when I’d woken up after the accident I’d been confused, but, what no one had picked up on, was the fact that my mind kept resetting itself. Every time I went back to sleep.

  The doctor had me tested, and after a series of weird number and word games, plus some brain scans, and an interview where he asked me about my family and my past jobs (none of which I could remember) he determined that my short term memory was perfectly fine now, but that I had complete retrograde amnesia.

  He explained it to me like this – It’s as if you have ceased to exist in your own eyes. Your past, your experiences, have been forgotten, but, the rest of the world, things you’ve learnt like reading and what a kettle is for, those things remain. He told me that my memory of other things, like films and recent history might be a bit spotty, and that I should tell him if I found myself without the skills to tie my laces or work a lift.

  I was truly confused by that point. How could I have remembered how to read a book, and not which books that I’d read previously? How could I know how to use a phone, and yet not recall a single phone number? Why could I remember the name of the Prime minister and not my own parents?

  My wife turned up that afternoon, the hospital had called her at work. She walked into the room, a bottle blonde with a chocolate coloured mole on her neck and thick, dark eyebrows. I didn’t even notice her until she stopped at the foot of my bed and said, “Connor? It’s me, Emma.”

  “Hello,” I said, because what else could I say?

  She looked at me for a long moment, then her face crumpled. “You have no idea who I am, do you?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  She sat down in the chair next to the bed and took my hand.

  “I’m your wife, sweetheart. I’ve been married to you for nine years.”

  It was only then that I really realised what it meant to lose your memory. I hadn’t just lost a list of facts, I’d lost so much time. Thirty-two years of life had been wiped off of my hard drive.

  “You don’t remember anything?” Emma asked. “I’ve been coming to see you for weeks.”

  My time in hospital, before the day the doctor told me I could go home, was a bit blurred. Like someone had covered my brain in Vaseline, and made it slow and slippery.

  “No, sorry.”

  “You don’t have to keep saying sorry,” she looked annoyed, and threw a burning glare at the nurses’ station. “I should have known something was wrong, but they said you were just confused from the accident.”

  “Sorry.”

  She sighed. “Have they told you about Simon?”

  “No.”

  “He was in the car with you. You played golf together every other weekend.”

  No one had told me that I played golf.

  “Is he alright?”

  She looked down at her hands. “He died in the crash.”

  I had no idea how to respond to that. I didn’t know Simon, his death was about as real to me as something on the news. But, I couldn’t just say nothing, he’d been my friend, we’d played golf.

  “Was he married?” I asked.

  Emma gave me a strange look. “No, no he wasn’t.”

  So there was no widow t
o wish condolences to.

  We sat in awkward silence until the doctor came to see us.

  “We think it would be best for Connor to return home as planned,” he said.

  Emma looked up at him in surprise. “But he doesn’t even remember me. What am I supposed to do with him at home?”

  “We’ll refer you to a support group. Connor will be in out-patient care, and we’ll provide counselling.”

  “Support group?” I said, “like what? Amnesiacs Anonymous?”

  They both looked at me like I was crazy.

  Emma drove me home the next day. She arrived at the hospital with some clothes for me, a blue rugby shirt and some jeans. She was wearing a white t-shirt with a thin beige cardigan, her legs squashed into black leggings. During the drive she played pop music on the radio. The car was old and smelt like burning dust.

  “Here we are,” she said, pulling up next to one in a long line of brick, terraced houses with overgrown front gardens, abandoned toys and crumbling wood windowpanes.

  We got out and she opened the gate and walked up to the front door. There was a headless doll on the concrete strip.

  “Do we have a daughter?”

  “No.”

  She turned around, saw the doll. “We have a dog, Mick.”

  Inside the house we both hovered awkwardly in an entryway choked with coats and shoes. Mick, a gingerish mutt with a brown tail and white ears, chased around my feet.

  “Well...this is it. Home,” Emma said.

  “Can I see upstairs?”

  “It’s your house.”

  She showed me upstairs anyway, the bathroom with a shelf of things she said were mine, deodorant, shaving gel, supermarket brand shampoo. The little side ‘office’ which held the computer, my Xbox, a hoover and several boxes of files and scraps of paper. Our bedroom was a divan bed, an IKEA wardrobe, an exercise bike and a clothes horse.

  “So we don’t have a lot of money?” I asked, then realised that I was being rude, to her, to myself. “Sorry, I mean...”

  “No, we don’t have a lot of money.” Emma’s face was tight and expectant. “You don’t remember any of this?”

  I shook my head.

  She sighed. “I’ll make us some dinner.”

  Dinner was chicken and pasta with tomato sauce. We ate in complete silence in the living room, our plates on our knees and the TV on a random channel. Afterwards, while Emma washed up the saucepans I stood awkwardly nearby and looked at the faded, grease speckled paintwork.

  “Do I have a job?”

  “Yes. You’re a lifeguard at the swimming pool. You were a fitness instructor at the leisure centre, but you were laid up with sciatica, and there were budget cuts...so they moved you to the pool when you went back to work.”

  “Do I enjoy it?”

  “I honestly have no idea. You like it enough, I suppose.”

  I got the feeling I was asking too many questions, that Emma was getting tired of me and my relentless ignorance. We had cups of tea in front of an episode of Morse and I tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t result in more questions.

  “I like it in here,” I said, which was true. The walls were cream, with a gold framed mirror hanging over one of the brown leather sofas. There were tapestry cushions scattered around, and the lights made everything look warmer than it really was.

  “No you don’t,” Emma told me, “you hate this room.”

  I didn’t want to argue.

  We watched TV for a really long time, until I realised that we were both bone tired and yet too scared to go to bed. To our bed.

  “I can sleep down here, if you’d like me to.”

  Emma looked at me sharply. “Do you want to?”

  Honestly, yes. I couldn’t imagine sleeping very well under the blanket of strained silence that had hung over us since we left the hospital.

  “I don’t mind,” I said.

  Emma looked at me for a moment, then left her armchair and came towards me, one hand touching my face as she leaned in and kissed me. I kissed her back, clumsy and surprised. She leant back after a moment and stroked my face.

  “We’ll be OK,” she said, “won’t we?”

  “I don’t know, I hope so.”

  She looked at me a moment longer, searching my face for something, some hint of her husband under my clueless expression. Then she got up, and went to get a spare duvet and some pillows.

  “Goodnight,” she said, from the doorway, watching me shake out the duvet.

  “Night.”

  I set up my bed on the sofa, and listened as Emma walked around upstairs, and finally seemed to settle down to sleep.

  I couldn’t sleep. It didn’t surprise me, even though I was tired. I was in a strange house, under a strange duvet that smelled like dog and musty airing cupboard. I could hear Mick pattering around in the kitchen, and the various other unfamiliar sounds of the house settling for the evening. Boards cracking, walls sighing, the boiler whooshing as it replaced the hot water that Emma had used to wash up.

  When had I last been in this house? The morning of the accident? Had I slept upstairs next to my wife, woken to the sounds of Mick barking for his breakfast? Did I make her breakfast? Taking things from cupboards without having to look for them, assured of my ownership of the sliced bread, knives and butter? Was I the kind of man who made his wife breakfast?

  I didn’t know the answers to any of these questions. The idea that I had apparently hated the living room still bothered me. Had my opinion changed? Or had I lied before? Why would I lie about something as stupid as the decor of a room?

  Lying on the sofa I started to realise the impossible nature of the task before me. I would have to re-learn my entire life, as I was living it. Rather like building a house in the pouring rain, battered by impending winter. I needed to know exactly who I was, as soon as possible, and even if Emma could tell me what I talked about, the things I ate and wore and watched on TV, she couldn’t tell me what I thought about. The shape my mind had been in before it had been scrambled.

  I fell asleep eventually, wondering if lifeguards kept journals.

  I had two days to kill until my first Amnesiacs Anonymous meeting, which was when I’d get together with some of the other memory-less unfortunates that the NHS were in charge of looking after, and see what my future was going to look like.

  Emma woke me up with a cup of tea, and turned the TV on to watch GMTV. She looked different out of her leggings and shirt, softer, in a pale pink fluffy dressing gown with hearts on it.

  I spent that morning, and the rest of my two day ‘break’ doing absolutely nothing. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, what I should be doing. I had no job to do, no hobbies I knew of, and no idea what the ‘old me’ would be doing with this time. Out of fear of doing something wrong, something that would make Emma even more aware that her husband was gone for good and she had some...imposter, in his place, I did nothing. My activities were limited to watching TV, reading the daily paper, and flicking through the magazines under the coffee table.

  Up in the bedroom, where I picked out clean clothes when I needed them, there was a photograph of two people at a wedding. Emma told me they were my parents, a balding man in a blue suit, wearing a smile full of wonky teeth. Next to him was a woman with wispy blonde hair, topped with a hat like an egg yolk. I tried hard to see myself in them, or to feel something for them. But nothing came. I knew from Emma that they were both dead, and my lack of feeling made me very aware of just how much I’d lost.

  By the time the day of the meeting rolled around, I was going stir-crazy. There were no more magazines in the house, daytime television was like breathing in sleeping-gas, and I was sore all over from sleeping on the sofa. I had had enough of being a blank. I wanted my life back.

  The AA meeting was being held at a nearby school, one of those concrete and tarpaper roof jobs. Emma asked me if she should go, but I told her I’d rather go alone. In all honesty, I wanted a break from the feeling of being obser
ved, of being measured against some unknown standard of normality. Even if it was only for the length of the walk to the school.

  At seven that evening I turned up at the school, and all the lights were out. The gate was padlocked, and instantly I decided that I’d made a mistake. Then a shadow at the door moved, and shifted until it became a man in a grey hoody and jeans. He had hair like Richard Hammond, and a face like Matt Baker (daytime television being inexplicably full of both of them).

  “Here for the head-case jamboree?” He called, tossing a spent cigarette into a lopsided planter presumably made by colour-blind infants.

  “Amnesiacs Anonymous?”

  He snickered. “Good one. Nathan. Nate.”

  “Connor.”

  “C’mon then Con, over the fence with you.”

  I looked at the chest high iron gate dubiously, but it was actually quite easy to climb. I touched down on the other side, and Nate clapped me on the shoulder.

  “Everyone else is already inside, had to come out for a fag. Have’ta say, all this stuff about smoking being illegal in pubs, no one ever said anything about schools, did they?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  Nate looked at me, then chuckled. “Oh you’re a laugh, thank fuck, thought it was just going to be me and Fat Marg like last week.”

  He started singing, “Looks like it’s just you and me again tonight, Maaarrrrrgery – or something like that. Margarine’d be closer to the mark.”

  He steered me down a corridor decorated with finger paintings and flags, its floor made of creaky parquet. A paper notice was blu-tacked to a door, “NHS Support Services”, someone, presumably Nate himself, had written ‘Mad As Balls Assembly’ underneath it.

  “Look lively, you’ll be the only one,” he told me conspiratorially, then patted the baggy fabric at the back of my jeans.

  Inside, a slab faced woman in a voluminous nylon dress was scowling into a plastic cup. The Marge of Nate’s song, apparently. Aside from her there were only two other people in the room, a stick insect of a man dressed entirely in brown, and a girl who couldn’t have been more than seventeen and had tiny ponytails all over her head, wrapped with multi-coloured bands.