Voice Off. Certain human societies inculcate in their young a belief in innate human goodness. To police those same societies a belief in universal human culpability has also to be impressed upon their police officers. Such counter expectations create a fluctuating imbalance in both those individuals and those societies.
When the last of the visitors leave, with nothing else to attract his attention, the man once more looks inside himself, mulls over — in light of what he has learnt from the detective — his ignorance of himself. Northampton? Mid-thirties? Criminal?
The other patients exchange the news their visitors brought them, drink their coffee, or watch their small televisions. He listens to the television nearest him, remarks on its familiarity, its filling the airwaves with chatter and jingles. Will the radio be new?
Following the example of another patient he unhooks the headphones from the wall behind the bed. The moment he hears it — a DJ cheerily warbling — he knows that it is what he expected.
Two of the nurses push a wooden-sided drugs trolley around the ward. His buttocks have gone numb from sitting up in bed. He shifts onto his side. The blonde nurse tells him that no medication has been prescribed, but if he can't sleep to let her know and she will ask the duty doctor for something.
The drugs trolley completes its rounds. He pees in his flask. Some of the patients switch on their angled bedlamps to read, some settle to sleep. The nurses switch off the ward televisions, then the ward's ceiling lights. One low bulb remains on in the centre or the ward, above a table. Two patients are still in the television room. The blonde nurse sees him still sitting awkwardly up in bed, rearranges his pillows for him, helps him down the bed. She tells him that he'll probably awake in the morning remembering everything.
Looking up at the dim squared ceiling, the idea of becoming unconscious again frightens him. He listens to the single separate sounds of the ward, a bed creaking, a man's choked cough. Northampton? Every answer begs more questions, his ignorance of himself seeming to endlessly increase. Does he have a family? Disconcerting to think of a group of people he doesn't know intimately concerned for him. He tries to imagine, from what he has seen of the other patients' visitors, what his own family of different-sized strangers will look like. That they should know more about him than he does makes their situation unfair, unnatural, makes him afraid of meeting them.
A nurse's shoes stick and unstick from the polished floor as she passes the end of his bed. A whispered conversation: nurse soothing an anxious patient. He hears a bedside light click off further down the ward. He listens. He sleeps.
Voice Off. Identity depends on the type of human society to which one belongs. In a small structured tribal society identity depends only on whose son or daughter one happens to be, and to which sub-grouping of the tribe one's family belongs. In a loose largely unstructured society identity depends on other peculiarities such as one's given name, one’s income, one's possessions, one’s education, one's accent and one's aspirations within that society. In such a society one's status is mostly self-imagined, is influenced by the other people one has chosen to know and one’s remembered experience of that society. With so much more to remember, amnesia in such a society is far more traumatic.
The observatory is a brick tower. Surrounding the tower, beyond oblong lawns, are squat blocks of brick and glass offices. On the flat top of the tower is the telescope. The scope's protective coverings are hinged open making the tower look like a nestling stretching its stringy neck up out of a cubist nest, gaping beak open to the stars.
Within that tower, below the scope, are rooms full of arcane equipment. Barry Tappell curses that equipment.
Las Palmas being down — a recurrent fault there resulting in a 24 hour shutdown for a complete overhaul — he had a whole free night on the scope here to catch up on and fill in the gaps in his research. A perfect night for dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Even if a short summer's night. An anticyclone stationary over Northern France, no moon, the evening mist blown offshore by a light breeze... and technology has failed him.
And what primitive technology. Computer enhanced images from a 98 inch reflector. Prehistoric! Like mounting a radar on a horse and cart. So dependent on the day/night rotation of the planet Earth; and, of course, the English weather. He can't, though, blame the weather tonight.
His object of study is Sheliak, an eclipsing variable in the Lyre constellation. A constant does not excite the human curiosity. Variables are also more scientifically attractive in that they are amenable to qualification and quantification.
The eclipse is now in the sixth day of its 13 day cycle, its magnitude 5.71. All is an earthbound astronomer's dream. And technology has failed him.
Had Barry Tappell been unquestionably ordinary then Barry Tappell is convinced that he'd now be using satellite reflectors, be a 24 hour a day astronomer, be in the van of apace exploration. But oh no, mediocrity rules the day, no-one is allowed to act that differently. And all he did was to fall worshipfully in love. She fell worriedly pregnant. She didn't want the baby, nor him. He fell into despair.
He had believed in singleminded women like his mother, women prepared to subjugate themselves for another life, for the new life. He had believed in women who fiercely made their children their cause, who believed in themselves. The woman he loved negated her sex and aborted his seed.
Wanting to understand, and be loved again; wanting to do the right thing, and unable to find out what it was, he first questioned the worth of his own existence, then of all existence.
"What worth a human life?" he asked of shoppers passing by. Then he withdrew into a depression so deep that he lost two years of study. Such human fallibility consigned him to this second-rate zoo.
Were Barry to go to even a second-rate American zoo he'd more than treble his wages. But, because he has had to do battle with establishments to prove his suitability to continue with his education, he is effectively barred from any brain drain.
What true scientist, though, has ever placed pecuniary reward high on their list of requirements; the facilities are ultimately what matter. And the Americans, just to rub salt in the career wound, have the facilities as well as the wages.
At times of frustration like these Barry feels as tainted by his youthful idealism as a failed revolutionary; and he is as angered that the establishment won't forgive or forget. The injustice irks him. One youthful aberration and he is marked as unstable for the rest of his tedious life...
For all his reflection and self-justification, the inescapable present is that he is stuck here in a castle in a steaming marsh, like a mad scientist in a gothic nightmare. Except that those marsh-bound and sinister scientists usually had machines that worked.
Barry's doesn't. This zoo's egotistical benefactor's pursuit of posterity is a penny-pinching affair.
The prestige projects which attract the bigger egos and the bigger money now all belong to the Mullard zoo and the Royal Observatory on Mount Ichea, Hawaii. As if Hawaii didn't already have the weather. Here in this Sussex bog Barry has to make do with obsolete leftovers, hand-me-downs, technological crumbs.
Every five minutes this night this particular technological crumb gives a facsimile printout. The first printout came at 10:30, clarified as the night deepened. At 11:25 he noticed a faint line to the right of Sheliak, down through Vega. The line went from top to bottom of the page, almost like an overlap, bringing Vega too close to Sheliak. Neither the printer's ribbon nor the paper feed was at fault.
Checking back he found that the line first appeared at 11:05, its distorting effect increasing with every five minute printout. He enters the fault in the log, loses two printouts clearing the computer, reloading the program and giving it his co-ordinates. At 11:36 the line is darker still. At 11:41 it has centred on Sheliak If it stays there the night's work is ruined.
Wednesday, 24 October 2007
Tuesday, 16 October 2007
Three
Voice Off. It hurts a human being to be born. It recovers. As toddlers human beings suffer bumps and illnesses. Most recover. So do most human beings, in their brief and painfilled lives, soon come to expect to be hurt and to expect to recover. They also, early in their lives, accept death's inevitability. Thus do most unwell human beings await cure or death with equal passivity.
Detective Constable Derek Hawkins has an aptitude for paperwork and court appearances. Nursing a swollen bladder in a cold parked car has never struck him as glamorous: he is happier by far sitting in the office or waiting on a court bench. Fortunately his superiors appreciate his inclinations and talents, and they like to have him in court — he has a stolid unflappable court persona. And, with him in court, his superiors can concentrate their other officers on what they regard as ‘real’ police work — the garnering of evidence Albeit that the presentation or that evidence in the courtroom is what leads to convictions.
For all of next week DC Hawkins has at least two court appearances per day. This week, the week of his obligatory nightshift, he has been looking forward to catching up on his outstanding paperwork. 'The suspect was seen to...' 'The suspect, when approached, admitted to...’
His superiors’ derisory attitude to the courtroom often amuses DC Hawkins, occasionally it dismays him. He was not unduly surprised, therefore, when, on coming on shift, his paperwork was dismissed as secondary; and dogsbody DC Hawkins was sent to investigate an alleged amnesiac.
Making his disgruntled way to the hospital DC Hawkins considers amnesia, loses himself in a daydream wherein he realises how pleasant it would be to escape his own past, to throw off his imprisoning identity and to start afresh. At twenty three he believes that already he's done everything, seen everything. Never again in his life will he know such intensity of experience: his lot now is dulling repetition, is paler variations of the same. Life for him, he believes, is effectively finished; mistakes been made, opportunities missed, his future decreed, nothing more for this identity to do in the next sixty years but to act out his self-formed fate.
His past, he knows, indelibly shapes his future. At school his friends used his solemn round face as a front for them, to persuade parents and teachers how safe and sensible was their every madcap escapade. Authority seemed reassured by his guileless features, always found, despite his protestations of culpability, extenuating circumstances for his part in any prank. And so it was that authority, in the embodiment of the police, chose him rather than he the police as a career.
How tempting, he thinks, to slip now out of this constraining identity, to greet life with debonair laughter. And, even before meeting him, he resents this man who claims to have done so, and in so doing has interrupted his paperwork.
He has trouble parking, is misdirected to the wrong wing, and when, finally, he introduces himself to a blonde ward sister, she is at her paperwork.
"Somebody here says they've lost their memory." Hers is a small afterthought of an office.
"Yes," she bridles at his overt scepticism.
"Where is he?"
"Go easy on him," she admonishes him as she squeezes around the desk, "He's very unstable at the moment."
"What... mentally?"
"No. Physically worried. As you'd be if you'd lost your memory. This way."
The bed is second along on the right. The man sitting up in that bed is in his mid-thirties.
"A visitor for you," the ward sister tells the man.
The man looks up startled. DC Hawkins watches the man seeking to recognise him, seeking to place him in his own life.
"Detective Constable Hawkins," he introduces himself, letting the man off the hook, says, "Thank you," to the sister who has fetched him a chair.
He pulls the chair closer to the man, putting as much distance as he can between himself and the family of Indians around the next bed. He lays his black briefcase on the bed, flicks the silver catches,
"I'm told you've lost your memory."
"Well..." the man visibly sweats, "Yes and no. I can remember lots of things. But not who I am. He smiles apologetically — ingratiatingly? — at DC Hawkins.
As he extracts a notebook from his briefcase DC Hawkins studies the man. A life's doubts and surprises are registered in the creases of the brow, a lifetime’s wrinkles around the grey eyes. No-one can simply forget what has formed him. His own 23 year old face is smooth, bland; even so he is his past. His mother and father, brothers... there is so much of it, even at twenty three, to forget, to casually mislay.
"Before we go any further," he opens his notebook, "I warn you that should you, for whatever reason, not be telling the truth, and, as a consequence I have to go looking up all sorts of records, you will be charged with wasting police time. And if it turns out that you’ve known all along who you are, then you most certainly will be charged. Is that understood?"
"I'm sorry..." the man has a tremor in his voice, "I honestly don’t know who I am."
The man’s obvious agitation does not persuade DC Hawkins to the truth of what he is saying. The man may be trembling because he is simply frightened, and he may be frightened simply because he is not telling the truth.
"Now," DC Hawkins presses the button on his pen, "I’ve never actually had to deal with a case like this before. So let's begin by seeing what we do know. First a physical description. Starting at the top. Colour of hair," he stretches up to look at the man’s head, "Dark brown going grey. Eyes — grey/green. Face — squarish. Any scars?"
"I haven't seen any."
"Height?" The man shrugs. DC Hawkins runs his eye up the man’s bed length, "Five ten, eleven," he writes. "Weight?" He purses his lips, "Say eleven, eleven and a half stone." The man does not react: has he forgotten vanity too?
"Now your personal statistics. Date of birth?"
The man doesn't know. Nor his place of birth, nor the names of his parents, of his wife, nor of his children. Surely no man can forget his children, DC Hawkins thinks. Or do I think that simply because I don't want my parents to forget me? Maybe children, though, are the easiest of all to forget. He often has to remind himself that he too is now a father. That little pink bundle of smells, however, seems to have little to do with him. He makes fatherly noises; but it is a going through the motions. And easy enough to forget his wife, because he can't now grasp her existence. Why, he often asks himself, did he marry a woman who, as soon as she was married, thought of herself as a wife, whose sole raison d'être became the catering to his creature comforts? And she now thinks of herself as a wife and a mother, and she tries to reconcile the two. Yet, for all her busyness, there is a vacancy behind her self-imposed labels.
Before his marriage DC Hawkins had thought there was something elusive about his wife. He had married her to capture that elusiveness. Only, in domesticity, to realise that there was nothing there, that his imagination had endowed her with a mystery that she did not, does not, possess, nor aspire to. A vacancy is all there has ever been. And, here before him, is a man with a contracting density and no labels.
Who can he be?
You're the detective, he tells himself, detect.
"You carne in here what time today?"
"This afternoon. I don't know what time. The nurses wear their watches upside down. But I was taken to Emergency first." After all his negative answers the man is excessively pleased to be able to give information.
"What happened?"
"I... don't know," the man sinks back against the pillows, "The nurse, she's gone off now, said I collapsed in Harborough Road."
"Why did you collapse?"
"I don't know. I've got a bruise on my head."
"Do they know what's wrong with you?"
"They haven’t said."
DC Hawkins pauses,
"I'll see the doctor later. Now... I take it you weren’t wearing pyjamas when you collapsed?'
"My clothes are in there," the man eagerly points to the bedside locker.
Moving his briefcase to the end of the bed, DC Hawkins spreads the clothes out upon it. His search is more thorough than the nurse's. Not only does he turn out every pocket he also feels along the seams, knocks on the rubber heels of the shoes, examines the insteps for dirt. There is none.
Taking up his notepad, aware that he is being watched by the family of Indians, DC Hawkins lists each item of clothing, make, material and colour. He notes the shoe size.
"All very ordinary this. Nothing to help us here. Except what isn’t here. No money, no wallet, no keys. Not even a bus ticket. Think you could’ve been mugged?"
The man wonderingly touches the bruise on the back of his head.
"The doctor said I probably banged my head on the ground when I collapsed. Do you think I could’ve been mugged?"
"In Harborough Road? Unlikely. And we’ve got another puzzle here," he reaches over and picks up the blue quilted anorak, "Why this? It was a hot day today. What I saw of it. You’d have been boiling in this."
The man frowns. Eventually he limply lifts his hand, lets it fall. DC Hawkins folds and returns the clothes to the bedside locker. Profession? he fingers the shirt and trousers. Semiskilled. The clothes aren’t up to much, could do with a decent clean. Nor are they anywhere near sharp enough for a salesman. Hands aren’t callused.
"Can you drive?" he asks as he rises from the locker.
"I don’t know." Too neat and clean for a derelict. Probably a diffident office-wallah. Or self-effacing long term unemployed.
DC Hawkins sits back on the chair. The man takes sips of water. He’s right-handed. Pity. The water shakes in the scratched beaker. I know who I am, DC Hawkins thinks, I cannot escape who I am. Which must mean, my thinking it, that I must want to. And I envy him because he’s magicked away his past. Watching the water dance in the shivering beaker he thinks — and yes, freedom is frightening.
"You said you can remember some things. What?"
"Well... I can remember how to speak. I know what things are. The names for them. And some things I almost take for granted. Like being able to read... Other things I have to think about. Like using a knife and fork. You see, although I can remember how to use a knife and fork, I don’t remember ever having used them before."
DC Hawkins has been listening to his accent. No habitual affectations. Straightforward Southern Standard English.
"What were you doing in Harborough Road?"
"I don't know," the man shakes his head, "I don’t even know what it looks like. Sometimes I think it has trees in it. Sometimes I just see houses. One of the nurses said it has garages in it. But all I see is a road. It's a name, a word. Like if I think of dog, I just see all different breeds of dog. Not any one dog in particular."
"Why should you think or dog? Did you have a dog?"
"I don't know," he looks directly at DC Hawkins, "Why does no-one believe me?"
Because it's too bloody easy, DC Hawkins thinks, to cancel the past. He should be so lucky. Wipe out all the shames, run away from all the mistakes. His wife had thought his main virtue safety, and he’d been flattered, so he had married her; when the inside him had felt insulted, but being used to it he had bowed his head and donkeylike had done his duty. To negate all the chances missed. The old schoolfriend who had invited him into his electronics firm and he had been truly tempted, but the family voices of common sense had prevailed, a high risk venture, shit or bust; and here he is a detective constable in Northampton and his friend is a dollar billionaire in California. I hate myself. Envy and resent him. No wonder no-one wants to believe you.
"What do the doctors say?"
"I’ve only seen one. He said my memory'll come back of its own accord."
"When?"
"He didn't say. Just told me to relax."
DC Hawkins grimacing sighs,
"I've got to assume it won't. Dc you have any objections to giving me your fingerprints?"
"No," the man frowns, "Why should I?"
"I don't know. Don't know why anyone has come to that. But if you do have a criminal record, then with your prints I’ll be able to find out in a couple of hours who you are."
"That soon?"
The man gratefully accepts the least information. Maybe he is telling the truth.
"What if I haven’t?"
"It'll take longer. We’ll see. If your memory does come back it’ll all be academic anyway. If it doesn’t, and you don’t have a record, we’ve still got a few more strings to our bow. Then there’s your family. Though it will be 24 hours before they can officially register you as missing. If they’ve missed you already, and if you’re from Northampton, then we should know who you are almost straightaway. If you’re from somewhere else it will take longer of course. But all of that depends on your having a family who’ll register you as a missing person. No memories at all of a family?"
He looks a family man, as if he belongs to someone. A taken for granted household fixture. A drab wife buying drab clothes for him. Husband of... Father of... a man who no longer exists in his own right, who probably spends his weekends digging the garden and getting shouted at. He definitely has the anxious look of the family man about him. Or is he simply an anxious man? If his memory has gone he certainly has good cause to be anxious.
"No..." the man is shaking his head, "I see snapshots. Family groups. But none of the same family. Is this Northampton?"
"You didn't know that?"
"No."
"Where would you have expected to be?"
"I don’t know."
"Do you know where Northampton is?"
"I think so... Pictures of maps. About sixty miles north of London. Between Coventry and Oxford?"
"More or less. And exactly sixty miles from London. Think you come from London?"
"No idea."
"Then again you could know the distance from a signpost here. Remember any signposts?"
"Not specifically. Blue and white. No, all I can see is a vague map."
"So you were travelling, and probably on the motorway. They have white on blue signs. You do know this is Britain?"
"I suppose so. I hadn't thought about it. Northampton is in Britain. It follows."
"Not necessarily. There's a Northampton in Australia. Several in America."
"But this is Britain?"
"Yes."
DC Hawkins decides to believe that the man is telling the truth.
"Let's take these prints." He smiles as he pulls the card and ink pad from the briefcase, "Never know I might be arresting you tomorrow."
The man watches his prints being transferred from the ink pad to the card.
"Ever had this done before?" DC Hawkins asks.
'This is new," the man fervently declares.
Two more prints are taken.
"You’re a man or absences," DC Hawkins tells him, "Absence of indentations on your fingers — where a ring may have been. Absence of a sun tan line — where you might have worn a watch. Let's see if having your photograph taken stirs any memories."
Returning the ink pad and card to the briefcase DC Hawkins takes out a polaroid. He stands self-consciously at the foot of the bed, camera before his red face.
"Look straight at me." The man blinks in the flash. Other patients and visitors look to them, turn away.
DC Hawkins sits again beside the bed,
"I can't promise any quick results. In fact I can't promise any results at all. Over 7,000 people go missing every year. Within that same year 2,000 of them will turn up again. But the other 5,000..? Who knows? Maybe you're one of those who've never been heard of again... If you haven't heard from me by first thing tomorrow morning it'll mean you haven't got a record. So you can breathe a sigh of relief on that score. To be quite honest it'd probably be much easier for us to trace you if you were dead. Forensic could then take you to bits, find out where the pieces used to fit. But alive... what you tell us, what we think you tell us, what you appear to know... all of it can mislead us. For me, now, it'll mean my having to go through all the missing persons files, see if I can find a near enough fit. I'll also try to get the local paper interested. If, in the meantime, your memory does come back, can you get one of the nurses to let me know? Here's my number. Save me a lot of work."
"Yes. Certainly," the man takes the piece of paper, studies the numbers.
"Now let's have a look at this," DC Hawkins presses a button on the camera, removes the photograph, waves it dry, "That a good likeness?"
The man pales as he looks at the photograph of the man with red-centred eyes in the hospital bed. He bites on his lip,
"I don't know."
Detective Constable Derek Hawkins has an aptitude for paperwork and court appearances. Nursing a swollen bladder in a cold parked car has never struck him as glamorous: he is happier by far sitting in the office or waiting on a court bench. Fortunately his superiors appreciate his inclinations and talents, and they like to have him in court — he has a stolid unflappable court persona. And, with him in court, his superiors can concentrate their other officers on what they regard as ‘real’ police work — the garnering of evidence Albeit that the presentation or that evidence in the courtroom is what leads to convictions.
For all of next week DC Hawkins has at least two court appearances per day. This week, the week of his obligatory nightshift, he has been looking forward to catching up on his outstanding paperwork. 'The suspect was seen to...' 'The suspect, when approached, admitted to...’
His superiors’ derisory attitude to the courtroom often amuses DC Hawkins, occasionally it dismays him. He was not unduly surprised, therefore, when, on coming on shift, his paperwork was dismissed as secondary; and dogsbody DC Hawkins was sent to investigate an alleged amnesiac.
Making his disgruntled way to the hospital DC Hawkins considers amnesia, loses himself in a daydream wherein he realises how pleasant it would be to escape his own past, to throw off his imprisoning identity and to start afresh. At twenty three he believes that already he's done everything, seen everything. Never again in his life will he know such intensity of experience: his lot now is dulling repetition, is paler variations of the same. Life for him, he believes, is effectively finished; mistakes been made, opportunities missed, his future decreed, nothing more for this identity to do in the next sixty years but to act out his self-formed fate.
His past, he knows, indelibly shapes his future. At school his friends used his solemn round face as a front for them, to persuade parents and teachers how safe and sensible was their every madcap escapade. Authority seemed reassured by his guileless features, always found, despite his protestations of culpability, extenuating circumstances for his part in any prank. And so it was that authority, in the embodiment of the police, chose him rather than he the police as a career.
How tempting, he thinks, to slip now out of this constraining identity, to greet life with debonair laughter. And, even before meeting him, he resents this man who claims to have done so, and in so doing has interrupted his paperwork.
He has trouble parking, is misdirected to the wrong wing, and when, finally, he introduces himself to a blonde ward sister, she is at her paperwork.
"Somebody here says they've lost their memory." Hers is a small afterthought of an office.
"Yes," she bridles at his overt scepticism.
"Where is he?"
"Go easy on him," she admonishes him as she squeezes around the desk, "He's very unstable at the moment."
"What... mentally?"
"No. Physically worried. As you'd be if you'd lost your memory. This way."
The bed is second along on the right. The man sitting up in that bed is in his mid-thirties.
"A visitor for you," the ward sister tells the man.
The man looks up startled. DC Hawkins watches the man seeking to recognise him, seeking to place him in his own life.
"Detective Constable Hawkins," he introduces himself, letting the man off the hook, says, "Thank you," to the sister who has fetched him a chair.
He pulls the chair closer to the man, putting as much distance as he can between himself and the family of Indians around the next bed. He lays his black briefcase on the bed, flicks the silver catches,
"I'm told you've lost your memory."
"Well..." the man visibly sweats, "Yes and no. I can remember lots of things. But not who I am. He smiles apologetically — ingratiatingly? — at DC Hawkins.
As he extracts a notebook from his briefcase DC Hawkins studies the man. A life's doubts and surprises are registered in the creases of the brow, a lifetime’s wrinkles around the grey eyes. No-one can simply forget what has formed him. His own 23 year old face is smooth, bland; even so he is his past. His mother and father, brothers... there is so much of it, even at twenty three, to forget, to casually mislay.
"Before we go any further," he opens his notebook, "I warn you that should you, for whatever reason, not be telling the truth, and, as a consequence I have to go looking up all sorts of records, you will be charged with wasting police time. And if it turns out that you’ve known all along who you are, then you most certainly will be charged. Is that understood?"
"I'm sorry..." the man has a tremor in his voice, "I honestly don’t know who I am."
The man’s obvious agitation does not persuade DC Hawkins to the truth of what he is saying. The man may be trembling because he is simply frightened, and he may be frightened simply because he is not telling the truth.
"Now," DC Hawkins presses the button on his pen, "I’ve never actually had to deal with a case like this before. So let's begin by seeing what we do know. First a physical description. Starting at the top. Colour of hair," he stretches up to look at the man’s head, "Dark brown going grey. Eyes — grey/green. Face — squarish. Any scars?"
"I haven't seen any."
"Height?" The man shrugs. DC Hawkins runs his eye up the man’s bed length, "Five ten, eleven," he writes. "Weight?" He purses his lips, "Say eleven, eleven and a half stone." The man does not react: has he forgotten vanity too?
"Now your personal statistics. Date of birth?"
The man doesn't know. Nor his place of birth, nor the names of his parents, of his wife, nor of his children. Surely no man can forget his children, DC Hawkins thinks. Or do I think that simply because I don't want my parents to forget me? Maybe children, though, are the easiest of all to forget. He often has to remind himself that he too is now a father. That little pink bundle of smells, however, seems to have little to do with him. He makes fatherly noises; but it is a going through the motions. And easy enough to forget his wife, because he can't now grasp her existence. Why, he often asks himself, did he marry a woman who, as soon as she was married, thought of herself as a wife, whose sole raison d'être became the catering to his creature comforts? And she now thinks of herself as a wife and a mother, and she tries to reconcile the two. Yet, for all her busyness, there is a vacancy behind her self-imposed labels.
Before his marriage DC Hawkins had thought there was something elusive about his wife. He had married her to capture that elusiveness. Only, in domesticity, to realise that there was nothing there, that his imagination had endowed her with a mystery that she did not, does not, possess, nor aspire to. A vacancy is all there has ever been. And, here before him, is a man with a contracting density and no labels.
Who can he be?
You're the detective, he tells himself, detect.
"You carne in here what time today?"
"This afternoon. I don't know what time. The nurses wear their watches upside down. But I was taken to Emergency first." After all his negative answers the man is excessively pleased to be able to give information.
"What happened?"
"I... don't know," the man sinks back against the pillows, "The nurse, she's gone off now, said I collapsed in Harborough Road."
"Why did you collapse?"
"I don't know. I've got a bruise on my head."
"Do they know what's wrong with you?"
"They haven’t said."
DC Hawkins pauses,
"I'll see the doctor later. Now... I take it you weren’t wearing pyjamas when you collapsed?'
"My clothes are in there," the man eagerly points to the bedside locker.
Moving his briefcase to the end of the bed, DC Hawkins spreads the clothes out upon it. His search is more thorough than the nurse's. Not only does he turn out every pocket he also feels along the seams, knocks on the rubber heels of the shoes, examines the insteps for dirt. There is none.
Taking up his notepad, aware that he is being watched by the family of Indians, DC Hawkins lists each item of clothing, make, material and colour. He notes the shoe size.
"All very ordinary this. Nothing to help us here. Except what isn’t here. No money, no wallet, no keys. Not even a bus ticket. Think you could’ve been mugged?"
The man wonderingly touches the bruise on the back of his head.
"The doctor said I probably banged my head on the ground when I collapsed. Do you think I could’ve been mugged?"
"In Harborough Road? Unlikely. And we’ve got another puzzle here," he reaches over and picks up the blue quilted anorak, "Why this? It was a hot day today. What I saw of it. You’d have been boiling in this."
The man frowns. Eventually he limply lifts his hand, lets it fall. DC Hawkins folds and returns the clothes to the bedside locker. Profession? he fingers the shirt and trousers. Semiskilled. The clothes aren’t up to much, could do with a decent clean. Nor are they anywhere near sharp enough for a salesman. Hands aren’t callused.
"Can you drive?" he asks as he rises from the locker.
"I don’t know." Too neat and clean for a derelict. Probably a diffident office-wallah. Or self-effacing long term unemployed.
DC Hawkins sits back on the chair. The man takes sips of water. He’s right-handed. Pity. The water shakes in the scratched beaker. I know who I am, DC Hawkins thinks, I cannot escape who I am. Which must mean, my thinking it, that I must want to. And I envy him because he’s magicked away his past. Watching the water dance in the shivering beaker he thinks — and yes, freedom is frightening.
"You said you can remember some things. What?"
"Well... I can remember how to speak. I know what things are. The names for them. And some things I almost take for granted. Like being able to read... Other things I have to think about. Like using a knife and fork. You see, although I can remember how to use a knife and fork, I don’t remember ever having used them before."
DC Hawkins has been listening to his accent. No habitual affectations. Straightforward Southern Standard English.
"What were you doing in Harborough Road?"
"I don't know," the man shakes his head, "I don’t even know what it looks like. Sometimes I think it has trees in it. Sometimes I just see houses. One of the nurses said it has garages in it. But all I see is a road. It's a name, a word. Like if I think of dog, I just see all different breeds of dog. Not any one dog in particular."
"Why should you think or dog? Did you have a dog?"
"I don't know," he looks directly at DC Hawkins, "Why does no-one believe me?"
Because it's too bloody easy, DC Hawkins thinks, to cancel the past. He should be so lucky. Wipe out all the shames, run away from all the mistakes. His wife had thought his main virtue safety, and he’d been flattered, so he had married her; when the inside him had felt insulted, but being used to it he had bowed his head and donkeylike had done his duty. To negate all the chances missed. The old schoolfriend who had invited him into his electronics firm and he had been truly tempted, but the family voices of common sense had prevailed, a high risk venture, shit or bust; and here he is a detective constable in Northampton and his friend is a dollar billionaire in California. I hate myself. Envy and resent him. No wonder no-one wants to believe you.
"What do the doctors say?"
"I’ve only seen one. He said my memory'll come back of its own accord."
"When?"
"He didn't say. Just told me to relax."
DC Hawkins grimacing sighs,
"I've got to assume it won't. Dc you have any objections to giving me your fingerprints?"
"No," the man frowns, "Why should I?"
"I don't know. Don't know why anyone has come to that. But if you do have a criminal record, then with your prints I’ll be able to find out in a couple of hours who you are."
"That soon?"
The man gratefully accepts the least information. Maybe he is telling the truth.
"What if I haven’t?"
"It'll take longer. We’ll see. If your memory does come back it’ll all be academic anyway. If it doesn’t, and you don’t have a record, we’ve still got a few more strings to our bow. Then there’s your family. Though it will be 24 hours before they can officially register you as missing. If they’ve missed you already, and if you’re from Northampton, then we should know who you are almost straightaway. If you’re from somewhere else it will take longer of course. But all of that depends on your having a family who’ll register you as a missing person. No memories at all of a family?"
He looks a family man, as if he belongs to someone. A taken for granted household fixture. A drab wife buying drab clothes for him. Husband of... Father of... a man who no longer exists in his own right, who probably spends his weekends digging the garden and getting shouted at. He definitely has the anxious look of the family man about him. Or is he simply an anxious man? If his memory has gone he certainly has good cause to be anxious.
"No..." the man is shaking his head, "I see snapshots. Family groups. But none of the same family. Is this Northampton?"
"You didn't know that?"
"No."
"Where would you have expected to be?"
"I don’t know."
"Do you know where Northampton is?"
"I think so... Pictures of maps. About sixty miles north of London. Between Coventry and Oxford?"
"More or less. And exactly sixty miles from London. Think you come from London?"
"No idea."
"Then again you could know the distance from a signpost here. Remember any signposts?"
"Not specifically. Blue and white. No, all I can see is a vague map."
"So you were travelling, and probably on the motorway. They have white on blue signs. You do know this is Britain?"
"I suppose so. I hadn't thought about it. Northampton is in Britain. It follows."
"Not necessarily. There's a Northampton in Australia. Several in America."
"But this is Britain?"
"Yes."
DC Hawkins decides to believe that the man is telling the truth.
"Let's take these prints." He smiles as he pulls the card and ink pad from the briefcase, "Never know I might be arresting you tomorrow."
The man watches his prints being transferred from the ink pad to the card.
"Ever had this done before?" DC Hawkins asks.
'This is new," the man fervently declares.
Two more prints are taken.
"You’re a man or absences," DC Hawkins tells him, "Absence of indentations on your fingers — where a ring may have been. Absence of a sun tan line — where you might have worn a watch. Let's see if having your photograph taken stirs any memories."
Returning the ink pad and card to the briefcase DC Hawkins takes out a polaroid. He stands self-consciously at the foot of the bed, camera before his red face.
"Look straight at me." The man blinks in the flash. Other patients and visitors look to them, turn away.
DC Hawkins sits again beside the bed,
"I can't promise any quick results. In fact I can't promise any results at all. Over 7,000 people go missing every year. Within that same year 2,000 of them will turn up again. But the other 5,000..? Who knows? Maybe you're one of those who've never been heard of again... If you haven't heard from me by first thing tomorrow morning it'll mean you haven't got a record. So you can breathe a sigh of relief on that score. To be quite honest it'd probably be much easier for us to trace you if you were dead. Forensic could then take you to bits, find out where the pieces used to fit. But alive... what you tell us, what we think you tell us, what you appear to know... all of it can mislead us. For me, now, it'll mean my having to go through all the missing persons files, see if I can find a near enough fit. I'll also try to get the local paper interested. If, in the meantime, your memory does come back, can you get one of the nurses to let me know? Here's my number. Save me a lot of work."
"Yes. Certainly," the man takes the piece of paper, studies the numbers.
"Now let's have a look at this," DC Hawkins presses a button on the camera, removes the photograph, waves it dry, "That a good likeness?"
The man pales as he looks at the photograph of the man with red-centred eyes in the hospital bed. He bites on his lip,
"I don't know."
Tuesday, 9 October 2007
Two
Voice off. Human beings possess no intrinsic self-criticism. Only through other human beings does an individual human being know of itself.
The old man opposite is still sat in the padded red chair, a washed out green blanket folded over his knees.
The man holds the old man’s gaze a disinterested moment, then lets his sight and mind drift elsewhere.
The ceiling of the long ward has been lowered, slopes up to the tops of the high windows. The two ranks of supine beds do not keep pace with the tall windows: less windows than beds. The lower panes of the windows are of frosted glass. Through the upper panes is a view only of small rounded white clouds in a blue sky.
Behind each bed is an assortment of wires and tubes. Beside a few of the beds are upright iron cylinders. Across each bed is a narrow cantilevered table. Between each bed, apart from the folded back curtains, is a locker and a chair. Some of the locker tops are crammed with bottles of different coloured drinks, upright angled cards, bowls of fruit, boxes of tissues, vases of flowers, books, magazines and papers. A few patients have spread their occupancy to adjoining windowsills; others keep tidily to themselves. Yet other lockers, like his, have only a transparent jug and a beaker of water.
The dark green floor of the ward gleams with semicircular smears of polish. At the far end of the ward is a large table and two stacks of brown plastic chairs. Taped to the square pillars in the centre of the ward are hand-printed notices telling visitors that not more than two chairs are allowed beside each bed.
At this end of the ward, on either side of the unseen entrance, wooden partitions enclose small rooms. His bed is one bed away from a glass-walled isolation room. Vacant.
Half way down the ward is a gap between the beds where, on either side are double doors. Patients have been shuffling in and out of those doors. From the opening doors on the opposite side he hears the blare of a television, shuttered by the bumping door. A patient emerges from the open doors this side with damp hair and a white towel over his arm.
Groups of people, in variously coloured street clothes, sit around two of the distant beds. Strained laughter comes from one group, respectful murmurs from the other. The two patients, sitting up in bed, are being politely attentive.
A few of the beds are empty, some temporarily vacated, others smooth and untenanted. Two patients lay asleep. Most are sitting up in bed or are curled on their sides reading. One patient is sat beside another’s bed watching, with him, a small white television.
A sparse-haired man, three beds down on the opposite side, smiles and lifts a white hand in a flaccid wave. The man returns the smile, feels muscles move over his face.
He examines the other patients. None are young. All have an unhealthy pallor, even the fat black man further down the ward and the overweight Asian in the bed beside him. All look grey, their abundant flesh dragged down, as if their excess fat has given up the fight against gravity and they have collapsed inside themselves. Surreptitiously he feels around his own body. Flesh to spare, but not fat.
Nor is it just their being fat. A black nurse chiding a patient is small and round and plump. But there is a solidity, a sheen, a vitality in her flesh, a brightness to her eyes that these drooping men don't own. A lustre even to her hair. She is wearing a grey and white striped uniform.
Names are clipped to the bedrails. The printed names — Assan and Burton — are the doctors’. The patients' names are all hand-written. He turns in his bed. ‘Assan’ only is attached to the bedrail above his head.
He turns back to the ward. Some of what he has seen is new to him; much, though, is familiar. Has he been in hospital before? The unaccountably familiar disconcerts as much as the apparently new. Anxiety, like a prickling gaseous bubble, rotates within his gut.
A woman in a blue overall has been slowly pushing a tea trolley around the ward. At each bed she has glanced to the charts at the bottom of the bed before asking the patient what he wants.
Curtains have been drawn around one bed. Two nurses and the doctor move behind that curtain, exchange crisp remarks. The nurses are not those who attended him. One nurse has a dark blue uniform trimmed with white lace. The telephone rings occasionally in the nurses' rooms near the entrance.
The woman with the trolley arrives at the Asian's bed. The overweight Asian takes his tea without milk or sugar. The Asian grunts his thanks.
"And how do you like your tea?" the woman stands by her trolley and smiles at the man, the newcomer. She didn't smile at the Asian. The men searches inside himself for a response. Sucking on a deep breath, he shrugs.
"Milk? Sugar?" She stands waiting. She has neatly curled hair.
"Try him milk without sugar," the dark nurse appears, "Don't want to start you in any bad habits." She smiles at the man and adjusts the bedside table. The cup of tea in its green saucer is placed before him.
"I'm going off in a minute. I just came to tell you that we've called the police and they're sending someone around to see you. No luck yet?"
"No."
"Don’t worry," she pats his arm, "Drink your tea."
Obediently, gratefully, he swallows a mouthful of tea. All he can taste is its hotness. The Asian, belching, makes a disparaging remark to him about the tea. Three nurses come walking into the ward, start picking up charts from the bottom of beds, saying hello to the patients.
"Home tomorrow?" a nurse in a white uniform asks the patient in the bed the other side of him.
"Tomorrow morning. Eleven o'clock," the patient makes a show of rubbing his hands together. He has grey hair swept back. The man wonders how he knows the patient has a Scottish accent, and yet he doesn’t know if he takes sugar in his own tea. Again the gaseous bubble rotates trembling within.
Both sets of visitors, with a clatter of street shoes, hurry up the centre of the ward and out. A nurse in a blue uniform, blue belt, with short blonde hair has unhooked the charts from the bottom of his bed.
"Says here we've got to keep an eye on you," she brings the charts around the other side of the bed, "Better start as we mean to go on."
Her manner is easy, relaxed. Taking a thermometer out of a cup fixed to the wall she flicks it. Glad to know what is expected of him, he opens his mouth, puckers his lips around the cold tube of the thermometer. Holding the watch pinned upside down to her tunic, she takes his wrist.
"Fresh in today?" she asks. He nods.
"And what have you been up to?"
"I don't know," he says around the thermometer, and feels himself grow hot.
The blonde nurse frowns, concentrates on her watch, glances up to the single name on the bedrail. He reads her reactions: now she has recognised him. Before he was just a patient, this day's intake: he imagines her only half-listening to the nurses as they chattering went off-duty.
Releasing his wrist she makes a note, removes and reads the thermometer.
"Blood pressure as well I'm afraid," she says as he thirstily reaches for his tea.
Removing the dark-spotted cottonwool from the crook of his arm, she pumps up the black strap, watches the mercury fall. A shiny blue and red dressing gown is draped over the end of a bed across from him. The inside red stitches of the dressing gown are like Arabic writing. How do I know, he asks himself, what Arabic writing looks like?
The nurse packs the tubing and strap away into its long box.
"I also require," she pauses significantly, "a urine sample."
With an apologetic smile she hands him a long-necked white plastic flask,
"Want the curtains drawn?"
"No thanks."
Urine is yellow and comes out the penis. The feeble patient who waved to him took a flask off another nurse. Like him the man slides the flask down under the bedclothes, fishes inside his pyjamas for his penis and places it in the downsloping neck of the cold flask. Telling him to put the flask on his bedside locker when he has finished, the nurse disappears up to the ward offices. To consult with others on him, he guesses. And he feels and hears his hot urine trickling into the flask. And he wonders that he knows what to do but cannot remember ever having done it before. Something so functional, so ordinary, so everyday... and yet he has no other days but this one.
Following the other patient’s example, he twists in bed to place the flask on the bedside locker, then pulls the narrow table with his tea on it back to him. The other nurses have worked their way down the ward, taking temperatures, bestowing headslanted smiles. The blonde nurse reappears, takes his urine sample, gives him a clean white flask.
"Remember anything yet?" she says. He smiles, his guess correct,
"No. If anything it seems to get worse. More confusing. Realising how much I don't know."
"Well... Take it easy," she squeezes his shoulder.
Lying back against his pillows he watches the influx of new nurses establish the order of their shift, notes the care with which they treat him, the precise omission of his name, the cheerful unconscious use of the other patients names; and he looks inside himself and he wonders where, whoever he was, he has gone.
He watches nurses bringing newly delivered flowers to patients, listens to nurses passing on phone messages from relatives, and with wonder he picks up his knife and fork when dinner is wheeled around, and he watches himself eat and he wonders that he cannot recall ever having eaten before yet he knows how to do it. He also knows, approximately, what the potatoes and the greens will taste like before they enter his mouth. The cubes of grained meat he leaves around the outside of the white plate. And twice more his temperature, blood pressure and pulse are taken; and he glimpses their uneven progress across his chart. That much he knows about himself.
The old man opposite is still sat in the padded red chair, a washed out green blanket folded over his knees.
The man holds the old man’s gaze a disinterested moment, then lets his sight and mind drift elsewhere.
The ceiling of the long ward has been lowered, slopes up to the tops of the high windows. The two ranks of supine beds do not keep pace with the tall windows: less windows than beds. The lower panes of the windows are of frosted glass. Through the upper panes is a view only of small rounded white clouds in a blue sky.
Behind each bed is an assortment of wires and tubes. Beside a few of the beds are upright iron cylinders. Across each bed is a narrow cantilevered table. Between each bed, apart from the folded back curtains, is a locker and a chair. Some of the locker tops are crammed with bottles of different coloured drinks, upright angled cards, bowls of fruit, boxes of tissues, vases of flowers, books, magazines and papers. A few patients have spread their occupancy to adjoining windowsills; others keep tidily to themselves. Yet other lockers, like his, have only a transparent jug and a beaker of water.
The dark green floor of the ward gleams with semicircular smears of polish. At the far end of the ward is a large table and two stacks of brown plastic chairs. Taped to the square pillars in the centre of the ward are hand-printed notices telling visitors that not more than two chairs are allowed beside each bed.
At this end of the ward, on either side of the unseen entrance, wooden partitions enclose small rooms. His bed is one bed away from a glass-walled isolation room. Vacant.
Half way down the ward is a gap between the beds where, on either side are double doors. Patients have been shuffling in and out of those doors. From the opening doors on the opposite side he hears the blare of a television, shuttered by the bumping door. A patient emerges from the open doors this side with damp hair and a white towel over his arm.
Groups of people, in variously coloured street clothes, sit around two of the distant beds. Strained laughter comes from one group, respectful murmurs from the other. The two patients, sitting up in bed, are being politely attentive.
A few of the beds are empty, some temporarily vacated, others smooth and untenanted. Two patients lay asleep. Most are sitting up in bed or are curled on their sides reading. One patient is sat beside another’s bed watching, with him, a small white television.
A sparse-haired man, three beds down on the opposite side, smiles and lifts a white hand in a flaccid wave. The man returns the smile, feels muscles move over his face.
He examines the other patients. None are young. All have an unhealthy pallor, even the fat black man further down the ward and the overweight Asian in the bed beside him. All look grey, their abundant flesh dragged down, as if their excess fat has given up the fight against gravity and they have collapsed inside themselves. Surreptitiously he feels around his own body. Flesh to spare, but not fat.
Nor is it just their being fat. A black nurse chiding a patient is small and round and plump. But there is a solidity, a sheen, a vitality in her flesh, a brightness to her eyes that these drooping men don't own. A lustre even to her hair. She is wearing a grey and white striped uniform.
Names are clipped to the bedrails. The printed names — Assan and Burton — are the doctors’. The patients' names are all hand-written. He turns in his bed. ‘Assan’ only is attached to the bedrail above his head.
He turns back to the ward. Some of what he has seen is new to him; much, though, is familiar. Has he been in hospital before? The unaccountably familiar disconcerts as much as the apparently new. Anxiety, like a prickling gaseous bubble, rotates within his gut.
A woman in a blue overall has been slowly pushing a tea trolley around the ward. At each bed she has glanced to the charts at the bottom of the bed before asking the patient what he wants.
Curtains have been drawn around one bed. Two nurses and the doctor move behind that curtain, exchange crisp remarks. The nurses are not those who attended him. One nurse has a dark blue uniform trimmed with white lace. The telephone rings occasionally in the nurses' rooms near the entrance.
The woman with the trolley arrives at the Asian's bed. The overweight Asian takes his tea without milk or sugar. The Asian grunts his thanks.
"And how do you like your tea?" the woman stands by her trolley and smiles at the man, the newcomer. She didn't smile at the Asian. The men searches inside himself for a response. Sucking on a deep breath, he shrugs.
"Milk? Sugar?" She stands waiting. She has neatly curled hair.
"Try him milk without sugar," the dark nurse appears, "Don't want to start you in any bad habits." She smiles at the man and adjusts the bedside table. The cup of tea in its green saucer is placed before him.
"I'm going off in a minute. I just came to tell you that we've called the police and they're sending someone around to see you. No luck yet?"
"No."
"Don’t worry," she pats his arm, "Drink your tea."
Obediently, gratefully, he swallows a mouthful of tea. All he can taste is its hotness. The Asian, belching, makes a disparaging remark to him about the tea. Three nurses come walking into the ward, start picking up charts from the bottom of beds, saying hello to the patients.
"Home tomorrow?" a nurse in a white uniform asks the patient in the bed the other side of him.
"Tomorrow morning. Eleven o'clock," the patient makes a show of rubbing his hands together. He has grey hair swept back. The man wonders how he knows the patient has a Scottish accent, and yet he doesn’t know if he takes sugar in his own tea. Again the gaseous bubble rotates trembling within.
Both sets of visitors, with a clatter of street shoes, hurry up the centre of the ward and out. A nurse in a blue uniform, blue belt, with short blonde hair has unhooked the charts from the bottom of his bed.
"Says here we've got to keep an eye on you," she brings the charts around the other side of the bed, "Better start as we mean to go on."
Her manner is easy, relaxed. Taking a thermometer out of a cup fixed to the wall she flicks it. Glad to know what is expected of him, he opens his mouth, puckers his lips around the cold tube of the thermometer. Holding the watch pinned upside down to her tunic, she takes his wrist.
"Fresh in today?" she asks. He nods.
"And what have you been up to?"
"I don't know," he says around the thermometer, and feels himself grow hot.
The blonde nurse frowns, concentrates on her watch, glances up to the single name on the bedrail. He reads her reactions: now she has recognised him. Before he was just a patient, this day's intake: he imagines her only half-listening to the nurses as they chattering went off-duty.
Releasing his wrist she makes a note, removes and reads the thermometer.
"Blood pressure as well I'm afraid," she says as he thirstily reaches for his tea.
Removing the dark-spotted cottonwool from the crook of his arm, she pumps up the black strap, watches the mercury fall. A shiny blue and red dressing gown is draped over the end of a bed across from him. The inside red stitches of the dressing gown are like Arabic writing. How do I know, he asks himself, what Arabic writing looks like?
The nurse packs the tubing and strap away into its long box.
"I also require," she pauses significantly, "a urine sample."
With an apologetic smile she hands him a long-necked white plastic flask,
"Want the curtains drawn?"
"No thanks."
Urine is yellow and comes out the penis. The feeble patient who waved to him took a flask off another nurse. Like him the man slides the flask down under the bedclothes, fishes inside his pyjamas for his penis and places it in the downsloping neck of the cold flask. Telling him to put the flask on his bedside locker when he has finished, the nurse disappears up to the ward offices. To consult with others on him, he guesses. And he feels and hears his hot urine trickling into the flask. And he wonders that he knows what to do but cannot remember ever having done it before. Something so functional, so ordinary, so everyday... and yet he has no other days but this one.
Following the other patient’s example, he twists in bed to place the flask on the bedside locker, then pulls the narrow table with his tea on it back to him. The other nurses have worked their way down the ward, taking temperatures, bestowing headslanted smiles. The blonde nurse reappears, takes his urine sample, gives him a clean white flask.
"Remember anything yet?" she says. He smiles, his guess correct,
"No. If anything it seems to get worse. More confusing. Realising how much I don't know."
"Well... Take it easy," she squeezes his shoulder.
Lying back against his pillows he watches the influx of new nurses establish the order of their shift, notes the care with which they treat him, the precise omission of his name, the cheerful unconscious use of the other patients names; and he looks inside himself and he wonders where, whoever he was, he has gone.
He watches nurses bringing newly delivered flowers to patients, listens to nurses passing on phone messages from relatives, and with wonder he picks up his knife and fork when dinner is wheeled around, and he watches himself eat and he wonders that he cannot recall ever having eaten before yet he knows how to do it. He also knows, approximately, what the potatoes and the greens will taste like before they enter his mouth. The cubes of grained meat he leaves around the outside of the white plate. And twice more his temperature, blood pressure and pulse are taken; and he glimpses their uneven progress across his chart. That much he knows about himself.
Wednesday, 3 October 2007
Novel as blog, blog as novel
I have so many novels backed up and waiting to be published, and as I'm getting on in years, and can't see when I'd be likely to even get around to approaching a publisher with this one, I thought I'd try an experiment and publish chapters from it at the rate of one a week in a blog.
The novel is called John John and here it begins.............
One
The mind roots itself in a body, anchors itself in a head, looks out through a pair of pink lids.
Blue-green curtains hang from a grey squared ceiling. White sheets are cold on hot body. A rocking motion.
A woman, dark curly hair, rises from beside the bed. White cap, blue tunic, pale blue belt, olive skin.
A gasping sucking breath; trying to hold the thin air in the inextensible lungs.
Another nurse rises from the opposite side or the bed. Short fair hair, pink skin, white uniform, white belt.
The rocking stops. The two nurses have been making the bed. The dark-haired nurse smiles,
"So you're back with us again?"
Another deep trembling breath pulled into the strained lungs.
Again?
The bed sways. The squared ceiling recedes. Arms move to counterbalance. Arms trapped under tight white sheets. Panic.
“Steady,” the dark-haired nurse reaches out a hand. The nails are pink against the brown skin.
Jaws clenched, neck arching, another breath is pulled into the body. Sweat cools on the hot exposed skin. The pink nurse looks on through grey eyes. Curtain and ceiling move away.
"Take deep regular breaths through your mouth," the dark-haired nurse instructs him. Opening wide the jaws the lungs are ventilated.
The pounding within diminishes. The belaboured breathing becomes superfluous. Tension leaves arms, legs, shoulders.
"That's a good boy," the dark-haired nurse bestows a rewarding smile.
Boy. Male. Child.
He studies the smile. Why should a showing of white teeth have a calming effect?
With a friendly double pat the dark-haired nurse removes her hand from his chest.
The curtain around the bed billows out. Soft rapid footsteps on the other side. The pink nurse listens to two low female voices. The sheet again presses down on him. He tugs his arms free. The pink nurse lays her fingers on his forehead, smiling tells him to lie still. Each of her fingers feels cold. He decides he doesn't like her. Why doesn't he like her?
The dark nurse has collected a clipboard from the bottom of the bed. A red chair beside the bed is pushed back against the curtain, alters its folds. She lays the clipboard upon the red chair seat.
"You've had us quite worried..." the pink nurse says from the other side of the bed. She has put laughter into her voice. Her words though... He puzzles on the remembered sound of them. The smooth pink face doesn't look worried.
A woman laughs somewhere within the building, a startled laugh, trailing quickly off. He searches for words of his own, composes them, studies them, rearranges them, practises them with closed mouth.
"Where am I?" he asks the dark nurse.
"Would you believe,” taking his wrist she grins at him, "in hospital?"
Hospital...
He looks at the green and white striped pyjamas on his arm, at his inert brown-pink hand beyond the probing fingers of the nurse.
He has a large crooked thumb, four bent fingers, a criss-crossing of lines on his plump palm. Not a child's hand. More words to be shaped and practised.
"How’d I get here?"
"Don't you remember?" her brown eyes flick up from the watch pinned to the breast of her tunic. He looks inside himself. A vacancy.
"No," he says without having practised the word.
"You collapsed in the street," the pink nurse tells him, “Early this afternoon. You recovered consciousness in Emergency. You remember that?"
Again he looks inside himself. Nothing.
"No," he tastes the movement of his tongue, "This isn't Emergency?"
"This is the heart ward," the dark nurse releases his wrist and busily writes on the clipboard. "You have a very erratic pulse. I need a name on this. Surname?"
Both nurses have name tags clipped to their tunics. His name? Surname? He has no memory of a name tag. He searches for other memories. But this is all he knows of himself: his being here.
"I don't know," he tells the dark nurse, “How did I get to this ward?"
"A porter brought you," the pink nurse smiling tells him, "No beds in ITU. So you were brought here.”
The dark nurse has inclined her head. The pink nurse stares a second at her, then parts the curtains and leaves.
"We can take your temperature anyway," the dark nurse flicks a thermometer, reads it. "Open your mouth." The glass thermometer scrapes over his lower teeth, is cold under his tongue. "Close your mouth. And while that's cooking I’ll take your blood pressure."
Breathing noisily through his nose he watches the nurse unclip the lid of a rectangular box and extract a black armband and tubing. Pushing up his pyjama sleeve she straps the armband around his biceps. Putting the two curved pieces of a stethoscope in her ears, she pumps up the inflatable armband, then watches the mercury fall in the tube on the inside of the lid. She writes more figures an the clipboard.
While she is doing this he wonders how it is that he knows what a stethoscope is, knows that she is taking his blood pressure, that these things are familiar to him. Has he been in hospital before? Looking about him he realises that he also knows what a curtain is, and a bed, and that this is a hospital ward; and yet he doesn't know his own name.
"Don't worry about it," the dark nurse has taken his blood pressure again, "It’ll come.”
Can she read his thoughts? He examines his thoughts. His sole thought is himself examining his thoughts. Curtains, bed, pillow, sheets, blanket, chair, bedside locker... he names all the things about him.
Turning his free hand over he examines the freckles on the back of his hand, the wrinkled knuckles, the short black hairs on the white wrist. A hand. He doesn't recognise it as his own. A hand, nothing more.
The nurse removes the thermometer, reads it and makes a cross on the chart.
"Still high," her smile says that it is nothing to worry about, "Any luck yet?"
He knows to what she refers, gives a slight shake of the head.
"What street did I collapse in?" he asks her, listens to himself speaking, wonders where he first learnt to form words.
"I'll find out later for you," she pushes herself up from the chair.
A doctor in a white coat steps through the curtain, is followed by the pink nurse. The man wonders why he isn’t pleased to see her. Because she feigned concern?
The doctor is young. How old am I, the man wonders, feels the hammering up a tempo within him and breathes deep to quieten it.
The doctor has looked to the bottom of the bed for the charts, sees the clipboard on the red chair. The dark nurse steps out of his path. The doctor glances over the clipboard, takes the man's left wrist.
"I'll need an ECG," he says. Both nurses exit through the curtain.
The man listens to the doctor's slow breaths. The doctor has a pallid complexion, red spots on his cheeks. The man wonders how he knows he himself is a man, recalls the dark nurse calling him a good boy. He is beginning to learn. That thought pleases him.
The doctor looks tired, the eyes dull and blurred. His pale hair is cut short at the sides, long on the top. Straight hair it stands up at odd angles, looks unclean. With his free hand the man feels over the top of his own head. The hair is clipped short. It is damp at the roots from his sweating. What colour is it? He doesn't know.
Releasing his wrist the doctor makes a note on a pad.
"Name?" he says, waits with yellow pen poised. The man doesn’t answer: the question has struck no chord in him. When the doctor looks over to him, the man gives a shrug. The doctor makes a one line stroke on the pad.
"Address?" The man knows what the word means, pictures an envelope. The word, though, has no meaning for him.
“I don't even know where I am now," he gives a weak apologetic smile, wants the doctor to smile back at him as the dark-haired nurse did. The doctor doesn't.
"Date of birth?" The question is meaningless. Days, months, years...?
He doesn't know what figures apply to him. What year is this? Age? He again examines his hand. He is not young. Is he old?
The doctor is watching the sweat form on the man's brow and nose.
"Amnesia is very rarely total or permanent," the doctor tells him, "Relax now." The words hold no kindness, are a professional observation touched with impatience for the man's unnecessary fears. "Do you think you can sit up?"
The man thinks about it — thinks about pushing his body up the bed with his legs, raising himself on his elbows and forearms. He wishes that the two nurses would return to help him.
“Yes,” he hears himself say, and begins to move his limbs, the muscles on the tops of his legs contracting to raise his knees.
The doctor lays his pad on the bedside locker and helps pull him up out of the bedclothes. The hands of the doctor are thin and smooth.
Once upright, the man sits forward, flat hands pressing down on the bed, the smooth covers seeming to float away from below him. The doctor’s voice is telling him to take deep breaths through his mouth. A man beyond the curtain calls pipingly to a nurse.
“Better?" There is no concern in the doctor's voice, simply a question that requires a yes or a no answer to establish a fact. The man, concentrating on taking deep breaths, nods. The giddiness has gone.
Going behind the man the doctor manipulates the metal bed and piles up pillows.
"Lie back now."
The man, exhaling, obeys. The doctor scrutinises his eyes, his pallor. From a blue cardboard wallet he extracts a form, hands the man the yellow ballpoint. The man takes it in his right hand, holds it between his fingers.
"Can you sign this? It’s a form of consent for any treatment we may consider necessary."
The man studies the cross beside the line on which he is to write his signature. He weighs the pen in his fingers. He is sure he knows how to write, doesn't know, though, what to write. The dizziness returns. He moves the pen sketchily about above the paper.
Nothing. No response from within telling him what to write.
"I’m sorry," he lets out a breath, glances up to the doctor, "Nothing." The doctor's expression doesn't change,
"Next of kin?" The man looks sharply inside himself, hoping to catch himself off-guard. Wife? Sons? Daughters? Mother? Father? Family snapshots; but of no particular family. Brother? Sister? The doctor removes the pen from the man's fingers.
"Do you know what day it is?" It is day. He shakes his head.
"Do you know the days of the week?"
"Monday. Tuesday," he hears himself reciting, listens to learn, "Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Saturday. Sunday."
"Know what month this is?" Month?
"Do you know the months of the year?”
"January. February..."
Again he listens to himself to learn. The doctor studies him, says as he writes on the form, "Wednesday 6th of August." A Wednesday in August.
The pink nurse comes through the curtains pulling a machine on a trolley. Through the momentary gap in the curtains the man glimpses a white bedside locker, part of a railed bed and a grey-haired man sat in a red chair beside the bed. The old man has a blue dressing gown on over pale green pyjamas.
Out of lacklustre eyes the old man looks directly back at him. Behind the flat grey head is a brown vase of orange flowers.
The doctor ignores the pink nurse's attentive presence.
"Unbutton your pyjama top," he tells the man; and from his white coat pocket he pulls a silver and black stethoscope.
Again, as with the pen, the man's right hand does as it is bid.
Plugging the stethoscope into his ears, the doctor presses the cold diaphragm against the man's chest. He listens, makes notes, moves the stethoscope, tells the man to breathe deeply, to hold his breath. He makes notes. The man passively watches him, awaits instructions.
The doctor is an untidy man, has violet biro stains on the breast pocket of his white coat, and both the collar of his brown check shirt and tightly knotted green tie are askew. His fingernails are bitten down. The man looks to his own nails. They are uniform.
Telling the man to sit up, the doctor gestures to the nurse to help the man take off his pyjama jacket. Once the man is sitting forward the doctor moves the stethoscope over the ribbed back, makes notes, then goes over the bare back tapping upon his own fingers.
"Lie back," the doctor tells him, adds to his notes. The pink nurse uninterestedly looks on.
The stethoscope is crammed back into the doctor's white coat pocket and a pointed stick, with a disc of white rubber on its end, is brought forth. The doctor tells the pink nurse to pull back the bedclothes, asks the man to slide down the bed. The pink nurse hovers helpfully while the man eases himself down.
He now hopes that she won't help him: the moving about is making him feel better. He flinches as the doctor runs the pointed stick across his stomach. The surprise makes him smile. The pink nurse nervously answers his smile. The man wishes that the doctor too would smile at him. He curiously examines this wish.
The man’s arms are folded back on themselves, are straightened. Unbuttoning the man's pyjama trousers the doctor feels around the abdomen, presses his fingers into the soft flesh, asks the man if it hurts.
"Do you have pain anywhere?" Pain? The man searches through his body,
“No. I was just finding it hard to breathe. And I felt dizzy."
The doctor nods, lifts the man's leg and hits his knee with the rubber end of the stick.
"No chest pains? Stomach pains?'
"No." The man awaits the blow on his other knee.
"Relax," the doctor curtly orders him. The man lets out a breath. His knee jerks.
Having run the pointed end of the stick up his curved soles, the doctor tells him to sit up and to put his pyjama jacket back on. He gestures to the pink nurse to remake the bed.
While the man and the nurse co-operate the doctor sits on the bedside chair and adds to his notes.
"Have you ever suffered from a heart ailment?” he asks the man.
"Not that I know of," the man says. The doctor grimaces, apparently disapproving of the man's consistent ignorance. Why should he be disbelieved, the man wonders. Why should he lie?
“Do you remember collapsing in the street?" the doctor testily asks him. The man holds the word street in his mind, sees rows of houses facing one another. It doesn't seem to be any particular street.
"No." More notes are made.
Laying aside the notes the doctor stands and takes a heavy silver cylinder from his pocket. At its top is a black cone. Through this cone the doctor peers into the man's ears, then into his eyes. Inside the cone is a small yellow light. Staring, as instructed, into that light, the man tries to avert his face to avoid inhaling the doctor's stale breath. More notes are made. The man is told to follow with his eyes the yellow pen the doctor moves from right to left before his face.
The pen is used to make more notes. The doctor feels under the man's chin and down the sides of his neck. The man is told to open his mouth. The doctor presses the man’s tongue flat to look down his throat. He frowns, reaches down and picks up the man's hands. He turns them over, examines both sides.
"One thing we do know about you," the doctor belabours a dramatic pause, "you don't smoke." The pink nurse dutifully smiles.
The doctor is feeling the man’s armpits when the dark-haired nurse returns. She smiles at the man. He finds himself happy to see her. Watched by the two nurses the doctor searches up over the back of the man's head.
"How did you get this bruise?" Bruise?
"No idea.”
Grunting his scepticism, or his exasperation, the doctor makes more notes. With a flicker of her eyes the dark nurse indicates that she wishes to talk to the doctor. The man has seen the exchange.
"Prepare him for an ECG," the doctor tells the pink nurse, and goes outside the curtain with the dark nurse.
The pink nurse asks the man to undo his pyjama jacket, folds down the bedclothes.
"Don't you remember anything?" she asks as she helps him slide back down the bed. Her watch, hanging from her tunic above him, is upside down. Glancing to her face he sees that her interest is genuine.
"Nothing that means anything,” he tells her, "Not as far as I can make out."
"Don’t worry," she says, unlooping wires from the trolley, returning to her concept of confident professionalism, “it'll all come back.”
Spreading white cream from a tube onto suction pads, she presses the cold pads onto his bare chest, explains to him the function of the machine.
“Electrocardiograph,” he says almost to himself.
"You know that then?" the nurse regards him curiously.
“Yes,” the man looks inside himself for what triggered the recognition, "But I know language," he says to himself and the nurse, "I haven't forgotten that. Trouble is," he voices the thought as it forms, "I can't know what it is that I've forgotten.”
The doctor and the dark nurse return. The pink nurse makes way for the doctor, joins the dark nurse at the bottom of the bed. The doctor checks over the machine, sets it running.
"He knows what an ECG is," the pink nurse blushes. The doctor looks from her to the man, nods without expression. He studies the printout from the machine, moves one of the suction pads, watches the new printout.
The two nurses are listening to a conversation between a nurse and a male patient beyond the curtain. Both smile at something the nurse sharply says. The doctor tears off the printout. Nudged by the dark nurse the pink nurse hurries to remove the suction pads from the man. The doctor slips the ECG printout into the cardboard file. The dark nurse helps the man to sit up, pulls the covers back over him, stands on the opposite side of the bed to the doctor. The pink nurse is relooping the ECG wires. The man is no longer dizzy.
"Now I require a blood sample," the doctor says.
Taking a syringe from a clear plastic bag, he finds a fat blue vein on the inside of the man's arm, pushes the needle into it and withdraws some maroon blood. He injects the blood into several small tubes with different colour tops. The dark nurse tells the man to take deep breaths through his mouth. The man smiles at her. The doctor presses a piece of white cottonwool onto the dark hole in the vein, folds the arm onto it, tells the man to keep it there.
The man and the nurses wait while the doctor reads back through his notes. With a tired sigh the doctor clips the notes into the file, for the first time looks at the man full face on.
"All I can safely say is that you appear to have had a shock of some kind. Any idea what it might have been?" The man shakes his head. "You also have a slight concussion. Now, whether the bang on your head caused you to collapse, or you banged your head when you collapsed, I don't know. At a guess I’d say that you banged your head when you collapsed. Does the word ‘epilepsy’ mean anything to you?"
“I think I know what it is."
"Are you an epileptic?"
"I don't know. I don't think I have fits. I know what the word means, that’s all."
The doctor, who has been carefully studying his reaction, now looks aside.
"Sister says,” his eyes come back to the man, “you collapsed in Harborough Road. Do you remember that?"
"You said I collapsed in the street before," he tells the pink nurse.
"No. Harborough Road," the doctor says. Street/road, road/street, the man turns the two words over: he sees again rows of houses facing one another, but this time houses painted different colours and with large trees outside their garden gates and cars parked beside a pavement.
"Are there trees in Harborough Road?" he asks. The doctor glances to the two nurses.
"Garages and things," the pink nurse is uncertain, "I don't think there're any trees."
The man pictures the open forecourt of a garage, petrol pumps, glass paybooth. The oily interior of a repairshop, a car up on an hydraulic ramp. Neither picture seems connected with him.
"Do you have any objection to Sister looking through your clothes?" the doctor asks. Why should he object? Could he object? What clothes? He wants now, as much as they, to know who he is.
"No," he says, "No objection."
The dark nurse kneels to the bedside locker and removes a pile of neatly folded clothes. Setting them on the bed beside his legs, she shakes out a dark blue nylon anorak, feels inside its pockets.
"Nothing,” she reports.
"Recognise it?" the doctor asks the man.
“It’s an anorak."
"Do you recognise it as yours?”
The anorak is well worn, has grease patches on the creased cuffs; an anorak owned by someone. By someone he doesn't know.
"No," he ruefully shakes his head.
The nurse finds nothing in the pockets of the grey trousers, nor does the man recognise the red underpants, the blue shirt, grey socks or faun suede shoes. All are well worn.
"Do you remember shaving this morning?" the doctor asks. The man feels his chin, watches the nurse fold his clothes.
"No.”
"What’s the Prime minister called?" After a moment's reflection, the man shakes his head.
"What am I called?" the doctor holds his hand over his badge.
“I don’t,” the man hesitates, “seem to be able to remember names."
"What else," the doctor smiles crookedly, "can't you remember?"
"I don't know," the man gladly answers his smile, "until you ask me."
The doctor slots the cardboard wallet under his arm, prepares to leave. The two nurses stand aside.
"What I can tell you," the doctor says to the man, "is that, for some reason, you’re in shock. Apart from that, I can't find anything wrong with you. Now I want you to rest, stay in bed. The police will have to be notified. Possibly they will be able to shed some light on your identity. Does that bother you?"
"What?"
"The police being notified."
As for every other direct question the man has to analyse his own reactions.
"No," he says.
"We’ll have to do some more tests. And tomorrow morning you'll see Mr Assan. For the moment, however," the doctor edges between the curtains, "relax."
The dark nurse asks if he wants to lie down. The man, though, is watching the pink nurse as she raises her hand to a seam of the curtain.
to be continued.....
The novel is called John John and here it begins.............
One
The mind roots itself in a body, anchors itself in a head, looks out through a pair of pink lids.
Blue-green curtains hang from a grey squared ceiling. White sheets are cold on hot body. A rocking motion.
A woman, dark curly hair, rises from beside the bed. White cap, blue tunic, pale blue belt, olive skin.
A gasping sucking breath; trying to hold the thin air in the inextensible lungs.
Another nurse rises from the opposite side or the bed. Short fair hair, pink skin, white uniform, white belt.
The rocking stops. The two nurses have been making the bed. The dark-haired nurse smiles,
"So you're back with us again?"
Another deep trembling breath pulled into the strained lungs.
Again?
The bed sways. The squared ceiling recedes. Arms move to counterbalance. Arms trapped under tight white sheets. Panic.
“Steady,” the dark-haired nurse reaches out a hand. The nails are pink against the brown skin.
Jaws clenched, neck arching, another breath is pulled into the body. Sweat cools on the hot exposed skin. The pink nurse looks on through grey eyes. Curtain and ceiling move away.
"Take deep regular breaths through your mouth," the dark-haired nurse instructs him. Opening wide the jaws the lungs are ventilated.
The pounding within diminishes. The belaboured breathing becomes superfluous. Tension leaves arms, legs, shoulders.
"That's a good boy," the dark-haired nurse bestows a rewarding smile.
Boy. Male. Child.
He studies the smile. Why should a showing of white teeth have a calming effect?
With a friendly double pat the dark-haired nurse removes her hand from his chest.
The curtain around the bed billows out. Soft rapid footsteps on the other side. The pink nurse listens to two low female voices. The sheet again presses down on him. He tugs his arms free. The pink nurse lays her fingers on his forehead, smiling tells him to lie still. Each of her fingers feels cold. He decides he doesn't like her. Why doesn't he like her?
The dark nurse has collected a clipboard from the bottom of the bed. A red chair beside the bed is pushed back against the curtain, alters its folds. She lays the clipboard upon the red chair seat.
"You've had us quite worried..." the pink nurse says from the other side of the bed. She has put laughter into her voice. Her words though... He puzzles on the remembered sound of them. The smooth pink face doesn't look worried.
A woman laughs somewhere within the building, a startled laugh, trailing quickly off. He searches for words of his own, composes them, studies them, rearranges them, practises them with closed mouth.
"Where am I?" he asks the dark nurse.
"Would you believe,” taking his wrist she grins at him, "in hospital?"
Hospital...
He looks at the green and white striped pyjamas on his arm, at his inert brown-pink hand beyond the probing fingers of the nurse.
He has a large crooked thumb, four bent fingers, a criss-crossing of lines on his plump palm. Not a child's hand. More words to be shaped and practised.
"How’d I get here?"
"Don't you remember?" her brown eyes flick up from the watch pinned to the breast of her tunic. He looks inside himself. A vacancy.
"No," he says without having practised the word.
"You collapsed in the street," the pink nurse tells him, “Early this afternoon. You recovered consciousness in Emergency. You remember that?"
Again he looks inside himself. Nothing.
"No," he tastes the movement of his tongue, "This isn't Emergency?"
"This is the heart ward," the dark nurse releases his wrist and busily writes on the clipboard. "You have a very erratic pulse. I need a name on this. Surname?"
Both nurses have name tags clipped to their tunics. His name? Surname? He has no memory of a name tag. He searches for other memories. But this is all he knows of himself: his being here.
"I don't know," he tells the dark nurse, “How did I get to this ward?"
"A porter brought you," the pink nurse smiling tells him, "No beds in ITU. So you were brought here.”
The dark nurse has inclined her head. The pink nurse stares a second at her, then parts the curtains and leaves.
"We can take your temperature anyway," the dark nurse flicks a thermometer, reads it. "Open your mouth." The glass thermometer scrapes over his lower teeth, is cold under his tongue. "Close your mouth. And while that's cooking I’ll take your blood pressure."
Breathing noisily through his nose he watches the nurse unclip the lid of a rectangular box and extract a black armband and tubing. Pushing up his pyjama sleeve she straps the armband around his biceps. Putting the two curved pieces of a stethoscope in her ears, she pumps up the inflatable armband, then watches the mercury fall in the tube on the inside of the lid. She writes more figures an the clipboard.
While she is doing this he wonders how it is that he knows what a stethoscope is, knows that she is taking his blood pressure, that these things are familiar to him. Has he been in hospital before? Looking about him he realises that he also knows what a curtain is, and a bed, and that this is a hospital ward; and yet he doesn't know his own name.
"Don't worry about it," the dark nurse has taken his blood pressure again, "It’ll come.”
Can she read his thoughts? He examines his thoughts. His sole thought is himself examining his thoughts. Curtains, bed, pillow, sheets, blanket, chair, bedside locker... he names all the things about him.
Turning his free hand over he examines the freckles on the back of his hand, the wrinkled knuckles, the short black hairs on the white wrist. A hand. He doesn't recognise it as his own. A hand, nothing more.
The nurse removes the thermometer, reads it and makes a cross on the chart.
"Still high," her smile says that it is nothing to worry about, "Any luck yet?"
He knows to what she refers, gives a slight shake of the head.
"What street did I collapse in?" he asks her, listens to himself speaking, wonders where he first learnt to form words.
"I'll find out later for you," she pushes herself up from the chair.
A doctor in a white coat steps through the curtain, is followed by the pink nurse. The man wonders why he isn’t pleased to see her. Because she feigned concern?
The doctor is young. How old am I, the man wonders, feels the hammering up a tempo within him and breathes deep to quieten it.
The doctor has looked to the bottom of the bed for the charts, sees the clipboard on the red chair. The dark nurse steps out of his path. The doctor glances over the clipboard, takes the man's left wrist.
"I'll need an ECG," he says. Both nurses exit through the curtain.
The man listens to the doctor's slow breaths. The doctor has a pallid complexion, red spots on his cheeks. The man wonders how he knows he himself is a man, recalls the dark nurse calling him a good boy. He is beginning to learn. That thought pleases him.
The doctor looks tired, the eyes dull and blurred. His pale hair is cut short at the sides, long on the top. Straight hair it stands up at odd angles, looks unclean. With his free hand the man feels over the top of his own head. The hair is clipped short. It is damp at the roots from his sweating. What colour is it? He doesn't know.
Releasing his wrist the doctor makes a note on a pad.
"Name?" he says, waits with yellow pen poised. The man doesn’t answer: the question has struck no chord in him. When the doctor looks over to him, the man gives a shrug. The doctor makes a one line stroke on the pad.
"Address?" The man knows what the word means, pictures an envelope. The word, though, has no meaning for him.
“I don't even know where I am now," he gives a weak apologetic smile, wants the doctor to smile back at him as the dark-haired nurse did. The doctor doesn't.
"Date of birth?" The question is meaningless. Days, months, years...?
He doesn't know what figures apply to him. What year is this? Age? He again examines his hand. He is not young. Is he old?
The doctor is watching the sweat form on the man's brow and nose.
"Amnesia is very rarely total or permanent," the doctor tells him, "Relax now." The words hold no kindness, are a professional observation touched with impatience for the man's unnecessary fears. "Do you think you can sit up?"
The man thinks about it — thinks about pushing his body up the bed with his legs, raising himself on his elbows and forearms. He wishes that the two nurses would return to help him.
“Yes,” he hears himself say, and begins to move his limbs, the muscles on the tops of his legs contracting to raise his knees.
The doctor lays his pad on the bedside locker and helps pull him up out of the bedclothes. The hands of the doctor are thin and smooth.
Once upright, the man sits forward, flat hands pressing down on the bed, the smooth covers seeming to float away from below him. The doctor’s voice is telling him to take deep breaths through his mouth. A man beyond the curtain calls pipingly to a nurse.
“Better?" There is no concern in the doctor's voice, simply a question that requires a yes or a no answer to establish a fact. The man, concentrating on taking deep breaths, nods. The giddiness has gone.
Going behind the man the doctor manipulates the metal bed and piles up pillows.
"Lie back now."
The man, exhaling, obeys. The doctor scrutinises his eyes, his pallor. From a blue cardboard wallet he extracts a form, hands the man the yellow ballpoint. The man takes it in his right hand, holds it between his fingers.
"Can you sign this? It’s a form of consent for any treatment we may consider necessary."
The man studies the cross beside the line on which he is to write his signature. He weighs the pen in his fingers. He is sure he knows how to write, doesn't know, though, what to write. The dizziness returns. He moves the pen sketchily about above the paper.
Nothing. No response from within telling him what to write.
"I’m sorry," he lets out a breath, glances up to the doctor, "Nothing." The doctor's expression doesn't change,
"Next of kin?" The man looks sharply inside himself, hoping to catch himself off-guard. Wife? Sons? Daughters? Mother? Father? Family snapshots; but of no particular family. Brother? Sister? The doctor removes the pen from the man's fingers.
"Do you know what day it is?" It is day. He shakes his head.
"Do you know the days of the week?"
"Monday. Tuesday," he hears himself reciting, listens to learn, "Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Saturday. Sunday."
"Know what month this is?" Month?
"Do you know the months of the year?”
"January. February..."
Again he listens to himself to learn. The doctor studies him, says as he writes on the form, "Wednesday 6th of August." A Wednesday in August.
The pink nurse comes through the curtains pulling a machine on a trolley. Through the momentary gap in the curtains the man glimpses a white bedside locker, part of a railed bed and a grey-haired man sat in a red chair beside the bed. The old man has a blue dressing gown on over pale green pyjamas.
Out of lacklustre eyes the old man looks directly back at him. Behind the flat grey head is a brown vase of orange flowers.
The doctor ignores the pink nurse's attentive presence.
"Unbutton your pyjama top," he tells the man; and from his white coat pocket he pulls a silver and black stethoscope.
Again, as with the pen, the man's right hand does as it is bid.
Plugging the stethoscope into his ears, the doctor presses the cold diaphragm against the man's chest. He listens, makes notes, moves the stethoscope, tells the man to breathe deeply, to hold his breath. He makes notes. The man passively watches him, awaits instructions.
The doctor is an untidy man, has violet biro stains on the breast pocket of his white coat, and both the collar of his brown check shirt and tightly knotted green tie are askew. His fingernails are bitten down. The man looks to his own nails. They are uniform.
Telling the man to sit up, the doctor gestures to the nurse to help the man take off his pyjama jacket. Once the man is sitting forward the doctor moves the stethoscope over the ribbed back, makes notes, then goes over the bare back tapping upon his own fingers.
"Lie back," the doctor tells him, adds to his notes. The pink nurse uninterestedly looks on.
The stethoscope is crammed back into the doctor's white coat pocket and a pointed stick, with a disc of white rubber on its end, is brought forth. The doctor tells the pink nurse to pull back the bedclothes, asks the man to slide down the bed. The pink nurse hovers helpfully while the man eases himself down.
He now hopes that she won't help him: the moving about is making him feel better. He flinches as the doctor runs the pointed stick across his stomach. The surprise makes him smile. The pink nurse nervously answers his smile. The man wishes that the doctor too would smile at him. He curiously examines this wish.
The man’s arms are folded back on themselves, are straightened. Unbuttoning the man's pyjama trousers the doctor feels around the abdomen, presses his fingers into the soft flesh, asks the man if it hurts.
"Do you have pain anywhere?" Pain? The man searches through his body,
“No. I was just finding it hard to breathe. And I felt dizzy."
The doctor nods, lifts the man's leg and hits his knee with the rubber end of the stick.
"No chest pains? Stomach pains?'
"No." The man awaits the blow on his other knee.
"Relax," the doctor curtly orders him. The man lets out a breath. His knee jerks.
Having run the pointed end of the stick up his curved soles, the doctor tells him to sit up and to put his pyjama jacket back on. He gestures to the pink nurse to remake the bed.
While the man and the nurse co-operate the doctor sits on the bedside chair and adds to his notes.
"Have you ever suffered from a heart ailment?” he asks the man.
"Not that I know of," the man says. The doctor grimaces, apparently disapproving of the man's consistent ignorance. Why should he be disbelieved, the man wonders. Why should he lie?
“Do you remember collapsing in the street?" the doctor testily asks him. The man holds the word street in his mind, sees rows of houses facing one another. It doesn't seem to be any particular street.
"No." More notes are made.
Laying aside the notes the doctor stands and takes a heavy silver cylinder from his pocket. At its top is a black cone. Through this cone the doctor peers into the man's ears, then into his eyes. Inside the cone is a small yellow light. Staring, as instructed, into that light, the man tries to avert his face to avoid inhaling the doctor's stale breath. More notes are made. The man is told to follow with his eyes the yellow pen the doctor moves from right to left before his face.
The pen is used to make more notes. The doctor feels under the man's chin and down the sides of his neck. The man is told to open his mouth. The doctor presses the man’s tongue flat to look down his throat. He frowns, reaches down and picks up the man's hands. He turns them over, examines both sides.
"One thing we do know about you," the doctor belabours a dramatic pause, "you don't smoke." The pink nurse dutifully smiles.
The doctor is feeling the man’s armpits when the dark-haired nurse returns. She smiles at the man. He finds himself happy to see her. Watched by the two nurses the doctor searches up over the back of the man's head.
"How did you get this bruise?" Bruise?
"No idea.”
Grunting his scepticism, or his exasperation, the doctor makes more notes. With a flicker of her eyes the dark nurse indicates that she wishes to talk to the doctor. The man has seen the exchange.
"Prepare him for an ECG," the doctor tells the pink nurse, and goes outside the curtain with the dark nurse.
The pink nurse asks the man to undo his pyjama jacket, folds down the bedclothes.
"Don't you remember anything?" she asks as she helps him slide back down the bed. Her watch, hanging from her tunic above him, is upside down. Glancing to her face he sees that her interest is genuine.
"Nothing that means anything,” he tells her, "Not as far as I can make out."
"Don’t worry," she says, unlooping wires from the trolley, returning to her concept of confident professionalism, “it'll all come back.”
Spreading white cream from a tube onto suction pads, she presses the cold pads onto his bare chest, explains to him the function of the machine.
“Electrocardiograph,” he says almost to himself.
"You know that then?" the nurse regards him curiously.
“Yes,” the man looks inside himself for what triggered the recognition, "But I know language," he says to himself and the nurse, "I haven't forgotten that. Trouble is," he voices the thought as it forms, "I can't know what it is that I've forgotten.”
The doctor and the dark nurse return. The pink nurse makes way for the doctor, joins the dark nurse at the bottom of the bed. The doctor checks over the machine, sets it running.
"He knows what an ECG is," the pink nurse blushes. The doctor looks from her to the man, nods without expression. He studies the printout from the machine, moves one of the suction pads, watches the new printout.
The two nurses are listening to a conversation between a nurse and a male patient beyond the curtain. Both smile at something the nurse sharply says. The doctor tears off the printout. Nudged by the dark nurse the pink nurse hurries to remove the suction pads from the man. The doctor slips the ECG printout into the cardboard file. The dark nurse helps the man to sit up, pulls the covers back over him, stands on the opposite side of the bed to the doctor. The pink nurse is relooping the ECG wires. The man is no longer dizzy.
"Now I require a blood sample," the doctor says.
Taking a syringe from a clear plastic bag, he finds a fat blue vein on the inside of the man's arm, pushes the needle into it and withdraws some maroon blood. He injects the blood into several small tubes with different colour tops. The dark nurse tells the man to take deep breaths through his mouth. The man smiles at her. The doctor presses a piece of white cottonwool onto the dark hole in the vein, folds the arm onto it, tells the man to keep it there.
The man and the nurses wait while the doctor reads back through his notes. With a tired sigh the doctor clips the notes into the file, for the first time looks at the man full face on.
"All I can safely say is that you appear to have had a shock of some kind. Any idea what it might have been?" The man shakes his head. "You also have a slight concussion. Now, whether the bang on your head caused you to collapse, or you banged your head when you collapsed, I don't know. At a guess I’d say that you banged your head when you collapsed. Does the word ‘epilepsy’ mean anything to you?"
“I think I know what it is."
"Are you an epileptic?"
"I don't know. I don't think I have fits. I know what the word means, that’s all."
The doctor, who has been carefully studying his reaction, now looks aside.
"Sister says,” his eyes come back to the man, “you collapsed in Harborough Road. Do you remember that?"
"You said I collapsed in the street before," he tells the pink nurse.
"No. Harborough Road," the doctor says. Street/road, road/street, the man turns the two words over: he sees again rows of houses facing one another, but this time houses painted different colours and with large trees outside their garden gates and cars parked beside a pavement.
"Are there trees in Harborough Road?" he asks. The doctor glances to the two nurses.
"Garages and things," the pink nurse is uncertain, "I don't think there're any trees."
The man pictures the open forecourt of a garage, petrol pumps, glass paybooth. The oily interior of a repairshop, a car up on an hydraulic ramp. Neither picture seems connected with him.
"Do you have any objection to Sister looking through your clothes?" the doctor asks. Why should he object? Could he object? What clothes? He wants now, as much as they, to know who he is.
"No," he says, "No objection."
The dark nurse kneels to the bedside locker and removes a pile of neatly folded clothes. Setting them on the bed beside his legs, she shakes out a dark blue nylon anorak, feels inside its pockets.
"Nothing,” she reports.
"Recognise it?" the doctor asks the man.
“It’s an anorak."
"Do you recognise it as yours?”
The anorak is well worn, has grease patches on the creased cuffs; an anorak owned by someone. By someone he doesn't know.
"No," he ruefully shakes his head.
The nurse finds nothing in the pockets of the grey trousers, nor does the man recognise the red underpants, the blue shirt, grey socks or faun suede shoes. All are well worn.
"Do you remember shaving this morning?" the doctor asks. The man feels his chin, watches the nurse fold his clothes.
"No.”
"What’s the Prime minister called?" After a moment's reflection, the man shakes his head.
"What am I called?" the doctor holds his hand over his badge.
“I don’t,” the man hesitates, “seem to be able to remember names."
"What else," the doctor smiles crookedly, "can't you remember?"
"I don't know," the man gladly answers his smile, "until you ask me."
The doctor slots the cardboard wallet under his arm, prepares to leave. The two nurses stand aside.
"What I can tell you," the doctor says to the man, "is that, for some reason, you’re in shock. Apart from that, I can't find anything wrong with you. Now I want you to rest, stay in bed. The police will have to be notified. Possibly they will be able to shed some light on your identity. Does that bother you?"
"What?"
"The police being notified."
As for every other direct question the man has to analyse his own reactions.
"No," he says.
"We’ll have to do some more tests. And tomorrow morning you'll see Mr Assan. For the moment, however," the doctor edges between the curtains, "relax."
The dark nurse asks if he wants to lie down. The man, though, is watching the pink nurse as she raises her hand to a seam of the curtain.
to be continued.....
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