Mr. Nobody

by Catherine Steadman

  I think of Matthew in his room on the ward two floors below me.

  I let my mind go to a place I haven’t let it yet. I know the thought is slippery and dangerous but I indulge it for a moment. A man shows up, out of the blue, who knows my real name, he knows what happened fourteen years ago, and he says he’s been looking for me.

  Did my father send Matthew? Could he still be alive, really?

  Could he somehow have sent me Matthew to tell me something? To give me a message? An explanation? Or, perhaps, simply to tell me where that godforsaken money went?

  Don’t go down that road, Marn. That way madness lies.

  I look up and watch the snow drifting slowly through the air outside; funny that looking up doesn’t make me dizzy, only looking down. The muffled sounds of hospital life and death play out behind me. But how can I know if Matthew has something to do with my father? I can’t just ask him. I’m his doctor—more than that, I’m his psychiatrist. I can’t introduce my own delusions into his burgeoning memories. No, that really would be crazy. The only thing I can do is wait. I’d need to wait and see if he brings it up. If he gives any indication at all. But until then I need to put it from my mind. I need to forget it. I take a deep shuddering breath and try to clear my head.

  Rhoda is on the ward to greet me; she gives me a soft look of concern and then she eyes my bandaged hands.

  “Broken window,” I say blithely, and hope that’s the end of it. Everyone in the hospital must have heard the news by now. Everyone here knows about my past. My family history. God knows what they think. I give her a faint smile and drop the subject.

  “Okay. Matthew’s made his list,” she says brightly, then adds, when I frown, “The list you asked him to make, places he should visit to jog his memory. He seems keen. And perhaps a day away from the hospital might do you both some good?” she suggests carefully.

  It’s not a bad idea. We’d have a police chaperone, we could slip out the back and do it today. And if there is something Matthew needs to tell me, now might be the best chance.

  When I enter Matthew’s room he rises from the chair by the window and heads straight over to meet me. To my surprise he pulls me close into a hug. “Are you okay?”

  I pull back gently. “Yes, I’m fine. Um, thank you, Matthew.” He must have heard the news; he’s allowed online now, after all. Everyone in the hospital must be talking about it too.

  I step back from him, wary of the growing intimacy. He notices my hands and I shake my head. Don’t ask. He nods.

  I don’t think I’ve ever had this level of connection with a patient before. It’s strange. It’s not that I don’t like it—the problem is that I do, and that is entirely inappropriate.

  He clears his throat and turns to grab a folded sheet of notepaper. His list. “This is the best I could come up with, I’m afraid.”

  I unfold the list, which is short and carefully written.

  Train station?

  Beach

  Local harbor?

  Forest

  “Why the harbor? I get the train station, that was my suggestion. And the beach and forest. You have fractured memories of those places, but why the harbor?”

  He shrugs. “I overheard someone saying the police should have checked the harbor for unattended boats. I just thought, maybe I have a boat? Maybe that’s how I got here? I don’t know, it sounded as plausible as anything else.”

  I feel myself smile as I fold up the list. The simplicity of his reasoning is disarming. “Yeah, it does. Shall we do this then? Are you ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be.” He moves to the bed and grabs his jacket. “Is it just you and me?” he asks, a subtle brightness in his tone.

  It throws me for a second. He wants time alone with me. I feel that slippery thought from earlier skimming across my mind: Does he have a message for me? I push the thought away. “Er, no. We’ll have a police officer chaperoning us. It’s only a precaution, of course—we’ll try to avoid the crowd,” I say off his frown. “It’ll be the three of us. But I don’t want you to feel inhibited or on show in any way; they’ll only be there to ward off any unwanted attention.”

  He holds my gaze and gives a quick tight smile. “Great.”

  I need to get my stuff from the office and let Graceford know what the plan is, so I arrange to have Rhoda escort Matthew down to the service entrance to meet me in fifteen minutes. We’ll meet Graceford at the car and head out together.

  I run through our destinations in my head as I get the lift upstairs. We can try the harbor in Wells-next-the-Sea first, it’s the closest harbor to Holkham Beach, and if that doesn’t trigger anything then we can try Brancaster harbor maybe. In terms of his forest, I’m hoping the woodland backing Holkham Beach will suffice as a starting point. A forest is a forest; it should trigger something.

  When I get to my office there is a photocopied sheet on the desk. It’s the list of names I asked Chris for the other day. The names of everyone who worked at Waltham during the years I was a student there. He did it. I run my eyes over the names. Some I recognize; others are a mystery. But I don’t have time to investigate fully now and I’m not sure how useful the list really is at this stage. Whoever Matthew is, I don’t think he worked at Waltham House. I quickly pick up the office phone and press Trevor’s extension at the security front desk and ask him to have Officer Graceford meet us outside the service entrance in ten minutes.

  I trot down the hospital back stairs as lightly as I can on my still-tender feet, and my mind flashes to Chris. I think of my kiss with him last night, the warm flush of it. Of how it didn’t feel awkward being with him this morning, it didn’t feel wrong. How Chris took me in his arms. And then I think of Matthew, of that same desperate hungry kiss but with Matthew. Even the thought sends a hot blush straight up the back of my neck.

  I don’t notice the footsteps on the staircase above me at first. Not until they pick up in pace, tapping out behind me. The tempo changing suddenly to the clatter of an emergency. I pause mid-step and look up through the central stairwell, my vertigo making the perspective swirl and my stomach clench. Several flights above, a male hand, moving quickly, the sleeve of an outdoor jacket. A male nurse heading outside for a sneaky cigarette break? But why so fast? Then a voice, aggressive and coarse, echoes loud down the stairwell.

  “Where’d the money go? Eh?”

  Adrenaline crashes through me. He’s talking to me. Oh my God, this can’t be happening. No, no, no. My heart rate kicks up a gear, and I burst into a run, taking two steps down at a time. My bandaged hands cling for dear life to the banister as I spin around to the next flight, his pace relentless behind me. How the hell did he get past security? I pound on as I hear the footsteps behind me speed up, scrabbling and skidding around the stairwell above me.

  “That’s right. You’d better run, you fucking bitch.”

  My blood runs cold—he’s going to hurt me, I can hear it in his voice. I suddenly realize just how vulnerable I am and momentarily lose my footing on the smooth concrete steps. I manage to grab the handrail again before my ankle twists beneath me and a flash of memory from fourteen years ago blazes through my mind. A fully grown man running at me from across a road, his arm raised, his face contorted, his words loud and filled with hate. And then, out of nowhere, Joe pushing me out of the way. I’d hit the ground hard but Joe had taken the brunt of the man’s impact. The anger people had toward us back then, the family who stole their money. All the events like it in the days and weeks that followed, the fear, the hatred, until we finally left our home. Until the police finally had to move us for our own safety. I foolishly thought it couldn’t be as bad this time around. But here we are. I guess I was wrong.

  I can’t let him reach me. There’s no Joe here to protect me this time. No police to change my name and relocate me. It’s just me, all alone and already wounded. My feet sma
rt as I leap down onto the second-floor landing and swing around on the banister to the next flight, my chaser coming into view a flight above me. Medium build, graying hair, a neat goatee, a flak jacket, but the thing that makes me jolt forward suddenly, barely in control of my own movements, is what I see in his hand.

  He has a gun.

  I open my mouth to scream for help, but like in a nightmare, I can’t catch my breath. No noise comes. Oh God, I am going to die. I’m going to die. Images of my father’s faceless body flash through my mind. A shotgun wound to the head. The blood and bone and skull.

  I hear myself whimper as I crash down another flight, praying there is someone at the base of the stairs who can help me.

  I hear the gunman’s footsteps closing in on me, but I know he’ll need to slow before he can raise his weapon steady in his hands and fire. As long as I hear him running I am safe, I tell myself.

  Below me the ground-floor doors loom into sight and somehow I manage a shout. My voice echoes loud, reedy and terrified, down the empty stairwell ahead of me, frightening me even more. Behind me he clears the corner as I hit the ground floor hard, scramble to my feet, and burst through the double doors into the service corridor.

  Then I see them both at the other end of the hallway, silhouetted in the open doorway, daylight framing them. Rhoda and Matthew. They stare wide-eyed at me, startled, unsure what exactly is happening. Then suddenly Matthew is moving, somehow making sense of the situation. He bursts toward me at a sprint. I want to warn him that the person behind me has a gun, but even as the words reach my lips I hear the doors behind me explode open, the gunman careening through after me. He must see Matthew and Rhoda—I hear him slow. And I whip my head around just in time to see him raise his weapon.

  “Get down! NOW!” Matthew shouts, and I do not think, I dive onto the slippery concrete floor, crashing down hard, the impact vibrating through every bone in my body. Matthew flies past me.

  A shot rings out, deafeningly sharp as it echoes through the thin corridor. I roll and see Matthew slam into the gunman. But there is no struggle. In one concise movement Matthew twists the weapon from the man’s hands, sliding it away and clear. He spins the gunman around as if they were dancing. A sharp kick to the back of the man’s knees forces him to the floor and then Matthew is on him, pressing my attacker’s screaming face into the ground.

  I rise to all fours and look up the corridor to Rhoda, unsure if the shot fired connected with anyone. She’s crouched low to the floor, her mobile phone in her quivering hand, her eyes as aghast as mine must be, but she isn’t injured. Somewhere along the corridor, out of sight, there are more shouts. Without thinking, I crawl toward the abandoned gun. And that’s when I see it. A white tuft of feathers sprouting from the shoulder of Matthew’s down jacket. He’s been wounded. The bullet clipped him. I search his face for a reaction but his expression is unreadable as he watches me reach for the gun.

  36

  DR. EMMA LEWIS

  DAY 12—FIVE’S A CROWD

  Outside, with dirty bandaged hands that won’t stop shaking, I bum a cigarette off a security guard and carefully light it with his Day-Glo pink lighter.

  I start to give Graceford a brief and garbled rundown of events, but she notices the tremors of shock running through my muscles and sends someone to fetch me sugary tea.

  I take a greedy pull on the cigarette and let the hot surge of it fill my chest, the engulfing burn and release of it. A little death. God, I’ve missed that feeling. I know people shouldn’t smoke—I’ve seen a smoker’s lung, I know—but everything will kill us in the end, life itself kills us in the end, and like it or lump it, smoking feels good. And right now, it’s making me happy.

  I’m sheltered here around the back of the building, and although the press are aware of some kind of commotion on this side of the hospital, they can’t get to us here, security gates and guards block their way. I don’t know how my attacker got through all the security. I think of what could have happened to me if Matthew hadn’t been there, if that man had got hold of me, and I shudder. His words as they took him away. She’s done more harm than me. Who paid for her training, eh? How many people have to suffer for her? Ask her that! I feel shame, thick and inescapable, pulling me under.

  Rhoda walks over to join me. She eyes my cigarette, and I manage to hide the tremor in my hand as I lift it back to my lips. Not that I think she would judge me, not after what just happened.

  Rhoda didn’t rush forward to help, but then she didn’t run away either, which is brave. She is a half-hero, if there is such a thing.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, sipping her hot tea. I take her other hand in mine and give it a little squeeze.

  “Not your fault. At all.”

  I look back past her at Matthew down the corridor, his wound being assessed by Triage. I can’t see the extent of it clearly.

  “Is he okay?” I ask Rhoda as she follows my gaze.

  “It only nicked him. They’re popping a few stitches in. He’s lucky.” She looks back at me with a shaky smile. “But then, we knew that already, didn’t we?” I see the uncertainty behind her eyes.

  She feels it too. That uneasy relief.

  Thank God Matthew had been there. I wouldn’t be here if not for him. Perhaps neither of us would be. But how the hell did he do what he just did? I’ve never seen anything like the speed, the certainty, and the economy of his movements. He must have been trained, though for what, I don’t know. Shouldn’t someone with that kind of training be missed by someone? Yet here Matthew is in a general hospital deep in the Norfolk coast, in borrowed clothes, desperately clinging to borrowed memories.

  Leaving Rhoda to give her statement, I grab some dressing packs from the triage nurse and head to the doctors’ locker room to clean myself up. I change the bandages on my hands in the sink under the mirror. I look gaunt in the reflection, drained of color. I examine my features objectively, hair ruffled, a speck of Matthew’s blood on my blouse. I could have died today, I try to let the reality of that sink in. I could have been killed by a stranger because of something someone else did fourteen years ago. My pale face blinks back at me in the glass. My haunted face. Places aren’t haunted, Emma, people are. I try to shake off the thoughts.

  I splash my face with warm water to force some color back into it. Outside the locker room Graceford is waiting; she won’t leave my side, she says. We head up to my office, and she stands guard outside. I have a moment to myself.

  I receive a call from Peter.

  He tells me not to leave the hospital. Someone from the MOD is on their way. I guess that training we’ve all noticed has raised some alarms along the chain of command.

  I think of the final fMRI question I asked Matthew three days ago: Have you killed? I think of how he responded. His expression this morning as I groped for the discarded gun on the hospital floor. We could be onto something now.

  Hands still shaky, I google “Princess Margaret Hospital.” I need to know who that gunman was. Today’s news springs up in the search results. It’s ironic that even I need to find out about my attacker from the Internet. The police knew nothing earlier, but the media have done their thing and the facts are rolling in online. The man’s name is Simon Lichfield, a fifty-three-year-old with a history of mental illness and some spurious connection to a far-right group. I don’t know him. He didn’t know me. Nor did he know any of the July 7 victims my father stole from. He just decided I deserved some justice. Maybe he thought I was lying, hiding the money, abetting a criminal, any one of the things he’d heard on TV. So he decided to do the right thing: he made his way here to the hospital armed with a sawed-off shotgun. And he waited for me.

  I close my laptop lid and shudder. What is it about me that makes people think it’s okay to kill me?

  People in military uniforms arrive that afternoon. Three of them are shown into my office. Two male
officers and a woman in plainclothes. The woman, in her forties, clearly outranking the men. The men take the two seats offered while she remains standing. She introduces herself as Dr. Samuels, looks at my bandaged hands and we do not shake. She briefly explains that they wish to meet Matthew and assess him. She asks if it seemed to me that he displayed any specialist training earlier. I tell her my thoughts as she leans against the tall filing cabinet watchfully. After a moment the older officer speaks.

  “And your patient, Matthew, he hasn’t mentioned military training or anything like that?” he asks, his gaze gliding over my little gray office.

  I slide my list of Waltham House employees deftly under some paperwork, hiding my embarrassing foray into detective work from sight. “No, he hasn’t mentioned anything at all about training,” I answer. “But I think—well, at this stage it’s entirely possible he may not even remember doing any.”

  The three faces opposite me hide their own particular brands of skepticism as my eyes flit between them. The woman finally clears her throat.

  “And it’s not possible, to your mind, Dr. Lewis, that your patient could be exaggerating his symptoms? Exaggerating his memory loss?”

  I shake my head. “I’d be happy to show you the fMRIs if you’d like, Dr. Samuels. I’d be interested to know if you’ve ever encountered a patient who was able to exaggerate the activation of their own hippocampus.” It’s a cheap shot, and childish, I know, but she’s basically just wandered in here and told me I don’t know my job. I may very well have almost been shot this morning but I know my fucking job.