His eyes dart around the room again, searching for something to trigger a memory.
Remember! Remember something.
He looks back out to the hallway. She’s holding a file now, some notes, she’s nodding as she flicks through the sheets of paper. She’s a doctor. Okay. Is that good? She’ll be coming any second and he can’t remember who she is or why this is all so incredibly important.
Is she dangerous? Should I run?
He flicks his eyes across to the only other exit in the room. The large floor-to-ceiling windows, rain-spattered. He is on the second floor. Outside the insistent glow of the hospital the pale sky hangs listless. In the distance, the blur of dark treetops, a forest.
His breath catches in his throat. A forest.
And then it comes. A memory.
…the cold of a forest.
The tiniest flash of memory; he squeezes his eyes shut, chasing it. He’s running through a wood, at night, running fast over the slippery mulch of the forest floor, his chest heaving, his throat burning as he struggles to catch his breath. Underfoot twigs snapping, his clothes snagging on branches, the echo of his footfalls resounding through the deep chill of the night. His heart is pounding. And then he hears something else. Another person’s breath, right next to him, the soft gasp of it. A girl’s breathing. Labored, scared.
His eyes flash open.
Oh God. That doesn’t seem right. That doesn’t seem good. What does it mean? Why am I running?
Dread fills him. Something is very wrong with what he just saw. He looks up now at the hallway. Someone is pointing over in his direction, saying something he can’t quite make out, and suddenly she is looking straight at him. Her eyes locking with his. All her focus on him.
Her expression flickers, she seems to sense his fear, he can read it on her face, her concern, her empathy. But who is she? Her face shows the briefest flash of confusion.
* * *
—
Emma looks back at the patient sitting at the far end of the dayroom, silhouetted against the pale glass of the windows. Behind him the rain-soaked landscape rolls all the way to the North Sea. He is watching her. But it’s the way he is watching her. His expression. He recognizes her. She feels a flutter in her chest. Does she know him?
The look in his eyes, it reminds her of someone a long time ago—but it can’t be, it can’t be him. That would be impossible. She knows it’s not him. He’s gone. Long gone, one way or another. The patient doesn’t even look like him, he’s too young to be him, his features too dark, too chiseled. The man she knew was softer. But the eyes, the eyes have the same quality. She tries not to let herself think it but…but there’s definitely something about him. An understanding of what went before.
She then does something without even thinking: while the nurse beside her talks on, she nods back directly at the man. It’s almost imperceptible, but he sees it.
His breath catches in his throat.
He remembers the warning he was given. Don’t fuck it up.
Easier said than done.
You need to speak to her. So you have to remember.
She says something to the nurse, smiling, and she starts to make her way toward him.
She’s coming.
His heart is racing now, adrenaline sizzling through him. He rises from his seat as the prickle of pain in his skull spikes. A fresh throb of it rips through his head; the room spins out beneath him and suddenly he’s falling. His palms and knees smacking down hard onto the plastic flooring. The dayroom swirls around him, in and out of focus. His eyes find her somehow, her shoes nearing as she runs to him, then her hands touch his shoulder and finally her face comes into view, inches from his, the unexpected warmth of her breath on his cheek.
“Can you hear me, Matthew?” she says.
And just like that her name comes back to him.
* * *
—
Emma can’t quite make out what he says, it’s mumbled. The patient’s breath coming in loud snatches as he tries desperately to stay conscious. She leans in closer to catch it, her ear close to his lips.
He says it again.
“Marn?”
She pulls away sharply to look at his face, her eyes wide in shock; she needs to see the look in his eyes as he says that, to see who he is, to see what he means. But she is too late. As she pulls back, he crumples down in front of her, unconscious.
Emma orders the junior doctor to monitor the patient; blood pressure and vitals are taken. According to the patient’s notes he’s blacked out three times since he was admitted eight days ago. Emma reassures the ward staff that the patient’s losses of consciousness are most likely the result of stress response. But she instructs them to test for the usual physical causes—cardiac, neurological, orthostatic, metabolic, or drug-related—to be safe.
She doesn’t mention the look the patient gave her just before he collapsed. And she certainly does not mention what he said to her, or that he spoke at all.
As people had rushed to assist them it became clear that no one else had seen, or heard it. She had barely heard it herself.
If she heard it at all, she thinks. Because he couldn’t have really said that, could he?
He couldn’t know that name. They’ve never met; she’d remember meeting someone who looked like him. Besides, he would have been too old to have been at school with her back then, he’s about ten years older than her. The first time she saw him was online two days ago, when she googled his case after speaking to Joe. All her knowledge of her patient comes from her research, the grainy YouTube footage from the beach, the photos in the newspapers, and his medical records.
But then, why would he say “Marn”? She blinks back the emotion. She hasn’t heard that name for years.
She casts her eyes quickly around the busy ward; other patients are filing into the dayroom from breakfast. Is it a joke? she wonders. A prank? But that would be in pretty poor taste. And patients don’t tend to lose consciousness as a joke.
She’d been doing so well. She hadn’t recognized a single face in the crowd gathered upstairs in the canteen. No telltale eyes boring into her. She’d been starting to think everything might just be okay.
Marn. The name burns in her brain. He knows her. He knows who she is. She tries to push it from her mind as she heads back toward the nurses’ station.
Perhaps he didn’t say “Marn,” she thinks. Surely she misheard. He could have mumbled anything. But the look of recognition in his eyes…well, patients with memory loss often pretend to recognize new people. Why should this patient be any different?
The duty nurse pulls up the patient’s notes on the system. “I’d be interested to find out exactly what happened just prior to his previous losses of consciousness,” Emma prompts the nurse, her voice steady. “What exactly the context was.”
The nurse nods and taps away at the keyboard.
As Emma waits, her phone vibrates. She turns away and fishes it out of her pocket. It’s a text message.
Any miracles yet? Lol
She stares at the message, her pulse racing. She reads it again. Her thoughts whir as she tries to process the words. Who sent this? She reads the message again, slowly; she checks the number, it takes her another second to register that it’s just Joe. Joe’s new number. She represses a sigh. Miracles, of course. It’s just her brother trying to be funny. She lets out a dry chuckle at her own paranoia and the nurse looks up at her in inquiry.
“Sorry,” Emma blusters, smiling. “Just got a text.”
“Ah, I see. Good news, I hope.” The nurse smiles and turns back to her screen.
Emma looks down at Joe’s text, her thumb poised over the keys, unsure if she should tell him what just happened. How could her patient have known that name? She wants to share the burden of it with every fiber of her being.
> But what if she misheard? Joe will think she’s gone completely nuts if she tells him what she thinks she just heard, she knows it. How would she even explain it to him? That somehow her new patient, who has no memory of who he is himself, or where he comes from, somehow seems to know her name? Her real name.
Marn. Marni. Her name. Her old name, before it happened, before they changed it, before their whole family had to move.
Or perhaps the patient had thought she was someone else called Marn?
Oh, come on, that’s ridiculous, it’s hardly a common name.
She used to spend half her time before the name change explaining that she wasn’t named after Hitchcock’s Marnie, she’d been named after the actress Marni Nixon. Nixon, “the hidden voice of cinema,” the woman who sang the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, Maria in West Side Story, Anna in The King and I, and countless other roles when starlets didn’t have the voice for them. A ghost singer. A Marni with an “i.”
Now, her thumb suspended over the phone, she hesitates. She can’t tell Joe what just happened. He’ll think she’s cracking up, cracking up again, now that she’s back here. She can’t tell Joe what she thinks her patient said, and she absolutely cannot tell him who her patient reminded her of, because that really would sound crazy. That person died, a long time ago. Best not to say anything yet, not until things start making more sense.
She exits the messages app and slips her phone back into her pocket.
She can’t tell anyone, she realizes, because the first thing anybody will try to find out is who, or what, “Marn” means. She needs to work this out herself.
She thinks of Joe’s text, she thinks of miracles. Of what happened eight days ago on the ward. But that wasn’t a miracle, she reminds herself, because there are no miracles—there are only people and their actions.
21
DR. EMMA LEWIS
DAY 8—ABOUT MATTHEW
“Has he spoken?” I ask carefully. “At all? To you? Has he said anything?” I’m sitting across from Rhoda Madiza in the hospital canteen. I want to keep the conversation as informal as possible, since I’m sure she’s wary of talking to anyone after the media mauling she’s been through over the last week.
As far as I can tell from the medical notes, Rhoda has been the patient’s primary caregiver for the duration of his stay here, which is highly unusual in an NHS hospital. Nurses tend to stick to departments, seeing whoever whenever; they do not move around with a particular patient. But Rhoda is the only person who’s been able to communicate with the patient since his arrival. And I need to know if I’m the only one he’s spoken to yet. If anyone could tell me, it would be her.
“No, nothing. He hasn’t spoken to me. Not a peep, from day one.”
My face must register a degree of disbelief, as she’s quick to add “I tried, trust me. If he’d said anything to me, I’d have been on the phone before he’d even finished his sentence. We’ve been trying language books and YouTube videos. But no. No talking yet, just pictures. He’s got a sketchpad like the police suggested.”
Oh God, just like the Piano Man. I bet the press lapped that up.
“He draws pictures of things, the forest mainly, the views from the windows. And it’s useful if he needs something—you know, he’ll just draw a picture of it, fold it up, and hand it to me. A hot drink. A snack. Something to keep him occupied. He enjoys jigsaws. But that’s as far as we’ve got.” Rhoda smiles warmly, but there’s a hint of disappointment there. I can see she wishes she’d gotten further by now. There’s a strength of character, a zeal to her—I can understand why the patient took to her so strongly. She blows on her tea before sipping.
I nod. “I see. So, no verbal communication.”
In that case he’s spoken only to me. Interesting.
Unless, of course, I imagined it. The last time I was here so many things happened. I wasn’t thinking clearly before we left. Could coming back here be subtly weeviling its way into my mind? Has it made me paranoid? I am definitely experiencing stress being back here, but can I realistically be suffering from full-on delusions so quickly? No. He definitely spoke, but there’s surely a strong chance I might be wrong about what he said to me.
Rhoda puts her cup down.
“And how does he seem to you?” I ask next. “Aside from the silence, has he shown any signs of mental illness? Any suicidal tendencies?” She blinks at the question, not what she was expecting.
Rhoda takes a thoughtful breath before replying. “Sorry, you just threw me a bit. Doctors don’t tend to ask my medical opinion very often.” She smiles. “It’s nice.” She clears her throat and considers her answer. “Well, at first when he checked in I thought maybe he could be suffering from schizophrenia or a personality disorder. But I’ve cared for patients with both and he’s—I don’t know—much more switched on, if you know what I mean. He isn’t listless and he hasn’t let himself go.” She gives a little frown, suddenly embarrassed that I might think she was referring to the way he looks. How handsome he is. Strange how no one is mentioning the way he looks. How good he looks. But then, that wouldn’t be appropriate, would it? We all know that wouldn’t be appropriate.
“The doctors are saying maybe depression or manic depression. But it’s not. He seems fine most of the time, you know, happy, in spite of everything that’s happening. More levelheaded than some people who actually work here.” She gives me a quick smile.
She’s not a doctor but her insights are important. They’re based on clinical observation, and are even more important in this instance, when the patient himself can’t describe his own symptoms.
“So, would you say he’s presenting quite normally except for the lack of communication and the panic attacks he’s been having?” I stop myself, I shouldn’t have mentioned panic attacks. I don’t want to lead her answers; I need to choose my words more carefully. “Sorry, is that how you would describe them? Panic attacks?”
“No. Not attacks, exactly.” She shakes her head thoughtfully. “It’s more like…well, this will sound strange, but more like he suddenly remembers something. Like he sees it in his mind’s eye. It’s not panic so much as he shifts up a gear into a…like a heightened state, I suppose.”
Okay, now we’re talking.
What she’s describing is PTSD. But, of course, I don’t want to be the one to say it. As it’s my primary hypothesis I need to be certain I’m not the one seeding it in Rhoda’s head. She needs to tell me herself in her own words.
“Heightened in what way, Rhoda?”
She gazes out into the canteen concourse, frowning.
“Like a dog in a fight, I suppose. Like he sees something and he suddenly doesn’t know whether to run or to fight. Every time I see it happen to him, that’s what it reminds me of. But then, I’m not a doctor,” she concludes self-deprecatingly.
PTSD patients relive their traumatic event; they replay it every time something triggers the memory. The same event over and over in their heads. Anything can trigger it, a face, a tone of voice, a sound. It’s called hyperarousal and it’s one of the key symptoms of PTSD.
“How is his sleeping?” I ask.
Rhoda gives a throaty laugh. “No problems in that department.” She shakes her head merrily. “He loves an afternoon nap.” But she catches herself. “But, come to think of it, he does do most of his sleeping in the day, to be honest. I hadn’t thought of that until now. I couldn’t say if he sleeps at night, I’m not here for the night shift and no one’s mentioned anything.”
“That’s interesting.” Insomnia doesn’t work like that. What this sounds like is that his circadian rhythm is out of sync, his sleep hormones firing at all the wrong times.
“Rhoda.” I lean forward. “The incident with Mr. Garrett…Would you say the patient displayed any skills or knowledge that the average person on the street might not?”
She looks suddenly suspicious, like I’m trying to trick her into saying something foolish. “I’m not really sure what you’re asking exactly,” she says carefully.
“Did he look, to you, like he might have any police or military training?”
“Oh!” she exclaims, surprised, and raises her eyebrows as she considers the idea. “Well, he seemed to be very sure of himself, of what he was doing, yes. Like he’d done that sort of thing before maybe, that he could handle the situation. And you know, I think that’s the reason Mr. Garrett let Matthew end it—it just seemed like the right thing in the situation.” She looks at me hopefully; she clearly likes this line of reasoning. I smile at her.
“Rhoda, it would be really helpful if you could try and get down on paper anything else you may have noticed about the patient. In particular, the context surrounding any losses of consciousness he’s had. I’ve already asked for the ward notes but I’d really like your version of events. You’ve had more time with him than anyone else, and that way we can try to build up a picture of what might be triggering him.”
Why did seeing me trigger him? I think of his face across the dayroom looking back at me, his expression. How did he know my name and why would that trigger him?
“Yes, of course. Not a problem.” Rhoda smiles, clearly delighted at being asked to be so heavily involved in his diagnostic plan. But why shouldn’t she be? She’s been the one looking after him, she’s the only continuity he has here.
“Rhoda, can I also ask you—” I stop myself, this is tricky territory.
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