A Trick of the Mind

by Penny Hancock

  His bright blue shirt smelt clean and almondy, as if all his health defied the antiseptic smell of the ward he’d been in. He did something to me. He exerted a forceful pull on me, as if I couldn’t help but lean towards him. As I pushed him out of the foyer and across the forecourt, towards the car park, my senses seemed heightened to the sheen on the skin of his neck and arms as it caught the light. How badly I wanted to run my fingers over it. It must have been all that sailing I’d seen in the pictures on his mobile that had kept him so toned, healthy-looking.

  ‘Have you got all your stuff?’ I asked him.

  ‘I hadn’t packed for a three-week stay when I left the pub,’ he laughed. ‘So yes, just my pyjamas and a toothbrush, which the boys brought down for me.’

  ‘So we’re going to Wapping?’

  ‘Yes. That’ll do for now. As I say, the boys said they would leave some stuff out for me. And I’ve got work to get on with. It’s nice and close to amenities for rehabilitation – they’ve referred me to a physio at the London Hospital. So London, please, if it’s all the same to you.’

  ‘You’ll have to direct me to your flat,’ I said.

  ‘Of course!’ He put his head in his hands. ‘Stupid me! You haven’t actually been there before have you? Look, just drive back to London and I’ll navigate for you.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘It’ll be good to get back. I’m no good doing nothing. Got fish to fry, et cetera.’ He rubbed his finger and thumb over his stubble. ‘I could do with a shave as well – I’ve let myself go in there. I’ll have to make an appointment with Bruno, for a haircut, wet shave, the whole works. There’s so much to do. I’ve got to organise physio pretty pronto,’ he went on. He waved towards his right leg. ‘Got to get used to the prosthetic. The other one will heal, they say, but I’m not supposed to put weight on it so I need to get my new one working. You can’t hang about in my world, Els. You’ve got to keep up with the markets. I can’t afford to lose clients.’

  I stopped myself asking him what markets he was talking about, in case I was supposed to know.

  ‘Is this your car?’ he asked, frowning.

  I gulped.

  I would have to say something now. I opened my mouth then shut it again.

  There were hundreds of silver blue cars and his memory was still damaged. He was handing me his bag. It could wait. Now wasn’t the moment. I unlocked the boot, my head down, putting his bag in.

  ‘Let me help you,’ I said then, opening the passenger door, holding out my arm for him.

  ‘NO! I must do this by myself.’

  ‘But don’t you need a bit more time, to get used to the leg, to practise?’ I asked.

  ‘Been practising all week. It’s driving me stir-crazy. I want to get home, get moving. Get my life back.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘It’s OK! You’re helping by being here. Take me home! And I want to know the latest about your painting on the way. We need to discuss what kind of prices we’re talking about if I suggest to my clients to invest. And May’s cottage. Where you’re up to with it. I’ve forgotten what you told me. Everything’s still a bit of a blur, you’ll have to forgive me.’

  I looked down at his black hair, finely cropped and dense as velvet above the smooth and tanned runnel of his neck, and as I helped him into his seat I had to fight the urge again to bend down and press my lips into it. I was discovering that the moral guidelines I’d always lived by could be subtly transgressed. Yes, I was being a little deceptive, was going along with his delusion that I was a girlfriend, but now it was happening I was finding it intriguing, playing a role, seeing where it would take me. And I realised then that my fear had metamorphosed from one of being discovered to a terror of losing him. Now the thoughts began to nag at me again. If I told him the truth about why I’d first visited him, would he still feel this attraction to me? Or would he reject me?

  So could I just keep quiet forever? You couldn’t conduct a whole relationship on the back of a lie. Could you?

  I shut the passenger door, walked round to the driver’s side and made a decision. I’d take him home, check he was alright, that he could manage, and then, at the pertinent moment, explain everything. I’d offer to do what I could for him, to help him rehabilitate. And I would just have to hope with all my heart that he would forgive me for keeping the truth from him, and admit that there was something developing between us so that we had to move forward together. I would tell him I would stand by him, support him, be there. And he would pull me to him as he had done in the hospital bed and I’d feel again that powerful surge of desire I’d never felt before.

  I had to push the passenger seat as far back as it would go to accommodate his long legs and the fact he couldn’t bend the damaged one. I placed his crutches next to him and Pepper, who had been asleep on the back seat, woke up. His nose shot into the air as he spotted Patrick and he let out a low, menacing growl.

  ‘Shshhh, Pepper!’ I said. ‘This is Patrick. Patrick’s a friend.’

  He sat down again, doubtfully.

  Patrick was too big for my little Nissan Micra. He looked like the Fisher-Price pop-up toy Ben had found at Aunty May’s – squished down into a container that he would spring out of if the lid was lifted! I smiled to myself, turned the key in the ignition and we set off towards London.

  ‘When will you be going back to work?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh, straight away. The containers need managing, and I need to check a consignment of fish for Malaysia. But it can all be done over the internet. There’s a bit of a rush on glass eels.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Never you mind, Ellie. No one who’s not in fish gets it. Business probably isn’t your forte, is it?’

  ‘It certainly isn’t.’

  ‘All you need to know is I can manage the portfolio perfectly well, one-legged.’

  ‘What are these containers you mentioned?’

  ‘Steel containers. Managing a shipment down at Trinity Buoy Wharf. I’m letting them out, as offices and so on. Need to get down there, check them out.’

  As we pulled away from the hospital I felt a kind of buzz, the like of which I hadn’t felt since – since when? Since I was a child? No, it was more recent. It flitted in and out again. I’d felt like this on my way down to my cottage before the hit-and-run happened. When I believed my life with Finn was over and I was about to embark on something fresh and unknown, that there were vast expanses of uncharted territory lying before me. I was discovering you could go down different paths to the ones mapped out for you and it was exhilarating.

  I glanced sideways at Patrick. He looked back at me with a kind of adoration in his eyes and my stomach did a back-flip. We drove in silence for a while.

  He squeezed my hand periodically, and at one point ran the back of his hand down my face. I liked it. A lot.

  As we got closer to London I looked at him again, and as I caught him unawares for a second he had a different look about him from the affectionate one I’d seen earlier. He looked tense, set, staring ahead as if he couldn’t bear how slowly we were going – the traffic on the A12 was heavy, crawling along as we approached London, as the buildings reared up on either side.

  He fidgeted a little.

  ‘Try going in the fast lane,’ he muttered impatiently at one time, and I pulled out, wanting to please him, or not wanting him to think badly of me. I wanted him to like me, I realised, not just the me he thought I was, but the real me as well.

  Whoever I was turning into.

  I wasn’t sure any more.

  At last we were passing the Olympic Park.

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, how quickly a different landscape becomes familiar,’ I said, wanting to fill in the silence. ‘Do you remember the marshes when there were just dilapidated warehouses and worn-out storage units? Not even that long ago.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. Seeing the Velodrome brings it home to me,’ he said. ‘It’s not just walking, my cycling’s a thing of the past
as well.’

  ‘Cycling?’

  ‘I won’t be getting on a bike for a while, will I?’

  ‘You used to cycle? What, long distance?’ I kicked myself. How much did he think I knew about him?

  ‘Of course,’ he said without suspicion. ‘It’s OK,’ he added. ‘I used to run, cycle, play golf and sail. But look at the Paralympics – you can still compete even without the right limbs.’

  ‘Patrick . . .’

  ‘So, it’s OK.’

  The frustration he was feeling must be overwhelming! No wonder he was irritated by traffic, he was someone used to working and playing hard, someone for whom doors opened. He wasn’t going to tolerate them closing for him.

  ‘How can you bear it, Patrick?’ I blurted out then. ‘How can you bear to face life without your leg when you were so active?’

  ‘You know what I always say,’ he replied, putting his arm right round me now, his hand on my waist, under my top, so that concentrating on the road became an effort. ‘Regard every obstacle in life as a chance to grow. Every problem as an opportunity.’

  ‘That’s amazing, to be so positive.’

  ‘There’s no other way to be.’

  He was so different from Finn, who almost took failure for granted. His attitude was wonderfully fresh to me. An inspiration.

  We turned into East India Dock Road, through the underpass, and headed for the narrower, older streets of Wapping. He directed me down towards the river. Up above, glimpsed between the towering walls of the buildings, the sky was a smooth and uncomplicated blue.

  ‘Here?’ We’d stopped outside one of those converted old brick warehouses that you can only get into via an entry-phone and some automated gates. The kind of place only people with a lot of money can afford to live in. A high-end riverside ‘des res’ probably developed in the Nineties and redone in the Noughties and now, in the Teenies, it would have rocketed in value.

  ‘There’s a parking place just here, on the left,’ he said.

  It was good he could remember where he lived. He’d said it was ‘retrograde amnesia’ – that he could remember most things that happened a while before the accident, and could form new memories, but couldn’t remember what had happened in the immediate aftermath and in the few hours prior to it happening.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ He was looking at me, a half-smile on his lips.

  ‘Nothing.’

  I heaved the wheelchair out of the boot, unfolded it, pushing the seat into place and the footplates down.

  He levered himself up and out of the passenger seat in a swift movement that showed again how powerful his biceps were and how hard he must have practised while he was in hospital, and I helped him into the chair. I left Pepper in the car. I shouldn’t be long. Patrick held up a fob and the glass doors glided open. We were in a bare-brick vestibule, steel lift doors on the left, a vast window overlooking the river in front. The tide was in, and a boat had just passed, leaving an arrowhead in its wake; waves raced towards either shore, and the water was silvery beneath the spring sky. His fish business must be doing pretty bloody well for him to earn enough to live in a place with a view like this. It sent a little thrill through me. I’d never rubbed shoulders with the very wealthy before. My mother was comfortably off, true, but my parents had always frowned on ‘new money’ as if the only way to obtain it must entail some immoral activity. I’d grown up suspicious of it. But it seemed everything that was happening was teaching me to challenge my prejudices, the assumptions and values one is indoctrinated with at birth.

  I would throw off all kinds of learnt restrictions, and strike out alone. I was thrilled to discover where he lived, right on the river. All the time I’d spent having to seek out spots from which to take photos, to capture its essence, and here was Patrick living in the perfect riverside location.

  ‘Come up? Please?’

  We were beside the lift and the doors were sliding open and before I knew it we were getting out on the fourth floor and he was opening the door to his apartment. I followed him into a massive open-plan room with a minimalist steel kitchen area at one end and a black wall at the other with a door in it.

  There were views across the river to the Shard, its elegant pyramid of glass and steel rising to fine points over London like a giant’s church spire. It took my breath away. It was my dream situation.

  ‘What a fantastic view!’

  I looked around. On the exposed brick walls there were enormous black-and-white photos of glamorous women, close-ups, arty in a way though too slick for my taste, the kind of thing corporate buildings often display in their foyers. Not much else on show at all. No books, no CDs, just the bare wood floor, brick walls, large windows, and a flat-screen TV.

  Once he was installed and comfortable, I would blurt out my confession to him, then, if he wanted me to, I’d make an exit from his life for once and for all.

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you before I go?’

  ‘You’re not going?’

  ‘Patrick. Listen. I will get whatever you need, I will do whatever I can, but I need to tell you—’

  ‘That you’ve work to do. I know, Ellie, I don’t want to hold you up. But it’s just that, now I’m here, I do wonder how I’m going to manage.’

  For the first time he was letting his defences down, revealing some vulnerability about what had happened to him. My intention to reveal the truth retreated again as my heart went out to him. What else could I do but stay with him, make sure he’d got food in, drink, that he was comfortable and would manage with his wheelchair and on his crutches in the flat? Looking at him, sitting helplessly in the middle of the massive room, in the wheelchair, I tried to imagine what it must be like having to come to terms with such a devastating injury. To be restricted to a wheelchair after having been so healthy, so fit and sporty.

  ‘How am I even going to unpack, sort myself out?’ he said now, a small wail entering his voice. ‘I’d only just got back from Corfu when I left that weekend. I hadn’t even had time to unpack. There’s my suitcase, look! Through there in the bedroom. How am I going to put everything away with these crutches?’

  I wanted to say I would help, that I wanted to, but where were his usual friends? It was obvious the woman he believed I was, the one he had met in the pub, had left the scene – but what about his family? If they were to arrive, or to call him, how would I explain my presence?

  ‘Patrick, look, I’ll check you’ve got food and so on, but then, isn’t there anyone else . . .?’

  ‘There’s no one else, Ellie.’

  ‘But your family? Surely they must be beside themselves worrying about you?’

  ‘I don’t have any family,’ he said.

  ‘I mean your mother . . .’ I said, remembering the thought that had come to me in the hospital, what a doting woman she must be.

  ‘I haven’t got parents, I don’t even know my mother,’ he said.

  ‘Oh.’

  I followed him as he wheeled his way across the vast floor to the bedroom, instinctively knowing not to ask him any more, for now.

  ‘Please, darling, would you open the suitcase? Help me put my things away?’

  The bedroom was almost completely taken up by a huge bed with a view out of the floor-to-ceiling window over the river. On the opposite walls were sleek tall cupboard doors. I did as he said, still wondering when I should tell him I wasn’t the right person to be taking out his clothes, some expensive, folded T-shirts – Ralph Lauren and Hugo Boss – and some fine linen pyjamas, putting them into the drawers, unable to resist the temptation to put them in my special colour order, a lifetime’s habit that was hard to break and that became insistent when I was nervous. Then there were more casual clothes in the bottom of the case, sailing shoes, a wetsuit squished into a bag.

  ‘Where do you want me to put your wash things?’

  ‘They can go in the bathroom, over there.’ I realised then there was another door disguised in the black wall.

  I
did as he said, laying out his things in the beautifully tiled en suite bathroom, dimly lit, with its stone sink and little lights around the mirrors. I went back to his room, fished the rest of the things out of his bag, putting his little alarm clock by his bed as he instructed me and then I stopped.

  There in the bottom of the bag was a framed photo of a pretty woman dressed in white lace, holding a bouquet of flowers. And beneath it, a black leather album.

  I swung round. Patrick was there, gazing at the photo over my shoulder.

  And something seemed to descend over his face, a kind of loosening – the moment of recognition.

  He looked at me, then back at the photo.

  ‘Who is this, Patrick?’ I asked. My voice had gone weak. It came out as a whisper.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘My memories are all topsy-turvy. I thought I’d told you, but I can’t have done. Everything’s gone so misty.’

  ‘Told me what, Patrick?’

  ‘That, Ellie, is my wife.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I left. I told him I was sorry, that there had been a mistake, and now I’d seen that he was OK I had to go.

  I ran down the stairs, onto the warm riverside street and fell into my car. My hands were trembling. I clutched the steering wheel tight as I drove. I cursed the traffic lights – every one seemed to be on red as I crawled back up the gridlocked East India Dock Road towards Mile End.

  My body was processing the new information slowly, like a drug gradually taking effect in my veins. A drug whose effects I couldn’t predict.

  Patrick had a wife!

  Where was she? Surely he couldn’t possibly have forgotten such a fundamental detail about his life, however bad his amnesia. But why hadn’t she been in to see him? Come to collect him? Why hadn’t the nurses mentioned her when I’d asked if he’d had visitors? And what about everyone else in his life – had he simply forgotten they existed too? Who did he think I was and what did he think I was doing, now he had seen the photo and remembered? It was one thing for me to be posing as a girl he had recently met, quite another to be replacing a wife who was out there somewhere, waiting to hear from her husband.