But I kept quiet. It was surprisingly easy to lie, although I hated lying to Joe, to Mum. I’ve put them through enough over the years, the least I can do is protect them from more fallout.
Thankfully, Mum has been all right since the news about our family broke. Her friends were so supportive when they found out who Mum’s husband used to be, they rallied around her, protective and unimpeachable. I can’t believe how wrong I got them. They were there for her, her rocks, and they couldn’t understand why she’d kept something so big a secret from them.
I understand why she did, though. It’s hard to learn to trust again after the person you trusted the most lets you down the most. But if there’s one thing she’s taught me, it’s that it’s never too late to learn new things, to put yourself out there, to try again.
After Matthew’s death Joe rushed up to Norfolk to meet me. He stayed over, helped me move back to London the next day, helped me while I healed. Thankfully, I didn’t need to go back to the hospital. Chris collected my belongings from Princess Margaret’s and brought them to Cuckoo Lodge. I don’t know what I would have done without Joe and Chris in the days afterward. They shielded me from the press and worked with Peter to get me home as quickly and painlessly as possible. Joe collected me after my operations, dutifully took care of my food shopping and cooked up healthy meals while I recovered.
Chris visited me in the hospital and afterward, during my recuperation, his towering presence filling my tiny one-bed flat. He’s been visiting ever since.
He and Zara filed for divorce last month. Zara was heartbroken when they split, of course, but as one door closes another is jimmied open. Chris tells me she’s fine now, she’s resilient, she’s moving to Manchester to take a job at the Manchester Evening News. I wish her the best, no hard feelings my end, we’re all just trying to get what we need. I hope she gets hers. I know I should feel bad about coming between them, but if I’m brutally honest, I don’t. I’ve known Chris since we were children. He feels like coming home. It doesn’t feel wrong. It’s like everything that was good from my past has somehow been kept alive in him. He makes me feel like none of the bad stuff back then happened, or rather that it did happen but it’s okay that it did, because I’m still me. Either way, he feels like home to me and I haven’t had one of those for a really long time.
Sometimes I fantasize about what would have happened if I had never left Norfolk, if none of it had ever happened and Chris and I had got together straight after university. I like to imagine what our children would be like now, what our house would look like. I’ve never felt that way about anyone before. It’s strange, it’s nice. We don’t want to rush into anything but Chris has mentioned transferring to London for work. But the more I think about it, the more I think I could move out of the city myself and commute—we’ll see.
I didn’t say goodbye to Rhoda in person when I left Norfolk, but I sent her a letter thanking her for all her help with Matthew, and for her bravery that day. She wrote back and told me she’d given a reading at Matthew’s funeral, a poem she’d read him in the hospital that he’d enjoyed. He would have liked that, I think. The part of him that wasn’t broken would have definitely liked that.
I looked back over the Unknown Young Male case a lot in the weeks and months after his death. What a hard and terrifying life to have to live. Every time he forgot, he was accused of faking his symptoms; by his early twenties he was homeless, nameless—without a social security number or a bank account he had no choice, he was forced to live outside society. He moved from hostel to hostel, unable to get a job and heave himself out of his nightmare. The doctors who treated him, Groves included, didn’t test him thoroughly, they took no fMRIs, so they never saw the incontrovertible proof that he wasn’t faking. That his hippocampus simply wasn’t responding the way it should. No one helped him. He had no name and they wouldn’t let him have a new one. I can’t even imagine how it must have felt for him to be told there was nothing wrong with him when he couldn’t even remember his own name. But he didn’t crumble, he adapted, he adapted to survive. He morphed into something else, something that, in the end, even he couldn’t stand to remember.
He could have had that operation. It might have worked, and after rehabilitation, he would have stood trial. I could have testified to his diminished responsibility on all counts. There is a legal precedent that those who cannot remember committing their crimes cannot be charged with those crimes. But he didn’t want that. He knew he would be tried for the crimes he’d committed and, with a condition as rare as his, my expert testimony might not have been enough to get him treatment instead of a life sentence. He may very well have been sentenced for crimes that, in a sense, he hadn’t actually done himself. Like being sentenced for a crime you committed in a dream. Either way, he would have been institutionalized for life. I wish I could have helped him.
I hope he died happy. I hope I helped that lost soul trapped inside him just a little bit at the end; I hope he had some small piece of happiness between all that horror.
It’s funny, I remember watching Ben Taylor’s parents leave the hospital that day, their receding figures walking away down the corridor, hand in hand. I hoped then that they’d find it in themselves to stop looking, to stop searching for the thing they’d lost, and to finally carve out their own little piece of life in the time they had left.
I’m not sorry for what I did. For lying. I’m happy to take the money and walk away. Because there’s a limit to how far we should go for others.
I watch Bahareh as she talks, her voice soft and meandering, her plight so clear, so poignant. If she could only see herself through my eyes. But that’s my job, isn’t it, to shine a light back on her.
I still find it strange how easy it is to see solutions for others but not for yourself. Those years I slogged out sixteen-hour days, no weekends, no holidays, no life—it’s hard to recognize compulsion when you’re in the thick of it. The compulsion to fill the hole you left, Dad. It’s only now I really see it. I’ve been replaying the same story. I’ve been replaying you, with every patient, replaying the imagined moment I could have fixed you. Over and over again. Classic PTSD. But I couldn’t have fixed you then. And I can’t fix you now.
I didn’t see you that night at the bottom of the stairs, Dad, you didn’t put your coat on and leave; you were just a figment of my addled brain. You’re gone.
At the back of my mind, I suppose, I always knew you died, but I was so enamored with the idea you might come back one day and explain it all. Explain it all away. Tell me you didn’t do what you did. Or I’d explain it for you, through someone else, through my job; finally I’d work out why you did what you did. Why people do the things they do. Somehow I’d uncover your reasons. But I’ve been scrambling around for too long now trying to gather together the broken pieces of you, the shattered fragments you left all over our lives. I’ve been so focused on putting those pieces—and you—back together again that somewhere along the way I came apart at the seams.
But now it’s time for me to put myself back together.
Bahareh’s warm eyes find mine. “I just don’t know why I’m doing any of it anymore. You know?” she coos. “I used to try so hard to please him, to make him love me…but now—” She breaks off, lost in thought.
“Now?” I prompt.
“Now I realize. We can’t change people, can we?”
“No. No, we can’t,” I answer. “People have to change themselves.”
FOR ALL THOSE CHASING GHOSTS
Acknowledgments
Thanks go to my fantastic editors at Penguin Random House in the U.S. for all their hard work, faith, and creative support on Mr. Nobody: the brilliantly inspiring and supportive Kate Miciak, and the truly wonderful Kara Cesare. And in the UK, at Simon & Schuster, huge thanks to the genius that is Jo Dickinson. It has been such a pleasure to get to work with this world-class team of women.
/>
I’d like to thank my wonderful, clever, and creative agent Camilla Bolton at Darley Anderson. Thank you for answering that first email and everything that followed. You’re an absolute diamond!
And thank you to the rest of the fantastic teams at Penguin Random House: Kara Welsh, Sharon Propson, Quinne Rogers, Allison Schuster, Kim Hovey, and Jesse Shuman—and at Simon & Schuster: Jess Barrett, Hayley McMullan, and Anne Perry.
This book would never have come about without a news story that lodged in my head back in 2005. The story of the Kent Piano Man was the jumping-off point for this novel and when I took the idea to my publisher and subsequently looked into the history and research around the fugue cases I was hooked. Dissociative fugue is a truly fascinating/horrifying condition that has the ability to instantly catch the imagination. I encourage anyone who is interested in learning more to search out one of the many fascinating documentaries on fugue sufferers. The moral and philosophical questions this neurological condition raises on the nature of self are endlessly engaging.
Thank you to Dr. Anthony Jack, associate professor of philosophy, psychology, neurology, and neuroscience at Case Western Reserve University, for your medical/neuroscientific eye and technical advice—thanks for making sure Emma knew her stuff.
To Sam Carrack, thanks for letting me pick your brains on the Piano Man case and the media manipulation around it. It was great to meet someone else who was as captivated as I was by the story of an unknown man found fifteen years ago.
Finally, thanks to my wonderful husband, Ross Armstrong, for his week of loneliness in the Caribbean whilst I sat in a hotel room and put the finishing touches to my first draft #deadline #firstworldproblems—Ross, you’re a constant source of happiness and inspiration—thanks for being such a lovely and understanding human being.
BY CATHERINE STEADMAN
Something in the Water
Mr. Nobody
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CATHERINE STEADMAN is an actress and writer based in North London, UK. She is best known in the United States for her role as Mabel Lane Fox in Downton Abbey. Her debut novel, Something in the Water, was a Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine pick and a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller. It was long listed for the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger Award and shortlisted for the Macavity Award and the ITW Thriller Award for Best Debut Novel, and it has been optioned for film by Hello Sunshine, Reese Witherspoon’s production company. Mr. Nobody is her second novel.
Twitter: @CatSteadman
Instagram: @catsteadman
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
Mr. Nobody Page 33