by E. M. Brown
“And what did you say Dennison was researching at Omega-Tec?”
“According to Professor Sloane, the theory behind faster-than-light travel.”
Kit laughed. “Well, there you are. Mackendrick has built a starship to take all his rich friends to another pristine world while global warming fries planet Earth. Quiz Mackendrick about that when you interview him, hm?”
“And get thrown out on my ear, sure.”
Kit picked up the bottle of Chardonnay and shook it. “Empty. Hell, that didn’t last long.”
Ella opened another and they moved through to the lounge, where Kit had lit the wood stove and dimmed the lighting.
They sat on the sofa, facing each other..
They chatted for an hour, making headway into the second bottle while Kit outlined a couple of political pieces she’d written for SFM. She was quietly insightful, delineating what she saw as problems of European policy and suggesting her own solutions. Europe was facing a critical dilemma, she said: Brussels was treading a diplomatic middle-way between the US and China, acting as peacemaker between the two super-powers while attempting to finance its military response to an increasingly belligerent Russia. Kit suggested a stronger alliance with China, which would stymie Russian aggression and leave the US out in the cold.
Later, the conversation having moved on to mutual friends from way back, Kit smiled and said, “You know what? This reminds me of old times. You and me, a bottle of wine, good conversation.”
“I’ve missed that,” Ella said.
Kit regarded her. “What, the wine, the conversation, or you and me?”
Ella stared across at her old lover, seeing in Kit’s homely face the faded beauty of the woman she had been. She said, deliberately, “The conversation.”
Kit nodded, as if acknowledging that that was the answer she had expected. “Ella, has there been anyone you were serious about since we…?”
Ella shook her head, not at all liking the direction the conversation was taking. “I’ve been too busy…”
“What clichéd rubbish!” Kit laughed. “Listen to yourself. ‘Too busy’? No one’s too busy to find someone who means something to them.”
Ella sipped her wine; she was drunk, but she needed to get even drunker. “And you think I deliberately…?”
Kit was staring at her. At last she said, “El, can I ask you a question? Do you understand why you left me back then?”
Ella found herself colouring. “I…”
“You never said,” Kit said. “I mean, you never really told me the real reason. Just some bullshit about needing space.”
Ella shrugged, uncomfortable.
“You know what I think, El?” Kit murmured.
Mute, Ella shook her head, dreading her friend’s words.
“I think it had to do with losing Annabelle, all those years ago.”
She didn’t look up. “That’s rubbish! How on earth could that – ?”
“When your sister was killed that day… her death killed something in you, too, El. You loved her; your loss affected your ability to give yourself. You know, the years we spent together… the years I showed you my love… I never felt that it was reciprocated. Can you begin to understand how that felt for me? Loving someone, but not having that love, that affection, returned?”
Ella shook her head. “That’s too… too simplistic a rationalisation.” She almost said too ‘American’ a rationalisation.
Kit shook her head. “Or perhaps…” she went on, “it’s all to do with guilt. You have survivor’s guilt, and it inhibits you, stifles your response to emotion. You can bring yourself to love anyone because you’re aware, on some level, that your sister was denied it.”
Ella looked up, anger flaring. “What’s this all about, Kit? Why are you – ?”
Kit sipped her wine, then said, “Because I’d like us to start over, El. Pick up where we left off. I still feel so much love for you, you know? I think we can give each other so much.”
She stopped talking and surprised Ella by standing up suddenly. For a terrible second she thought that Kit was about to step forward and kiss her, but to her relief she moved to the window and stared out.
A minute elapsed,and Ella found it impossible to break the silence.
“I’m turning in,” Kit said at last. “I want you to think about what I’ve said, okay? We’ll talk later.”
Ella nodded fractionally, and looked away as Kit left the lounge.
She sat in the warmth for a long time, watching the snow fall outside, and finished the bottle of wine. She considered Kit’s words.
Her wrist-com chimed: it was a text from Douglas, informing her that Duncan Mackendrick had agreed to see her for one hour at eleven tomorrow morning at his country residence, Hailes Castle, in East Lothian.
Still thinking about what Kit had said, Ella acknowledged the text and went to bed.
Extract of an email from Digby Lincoln to Ed Richie, 19th December, 2022
GREAT MEAL LAST night – we ought to get into Leeds more often.
Well, what I was fearing has come to pass, Ed. The pusillanimous BBC has called it a day with The State We’re In. I had an email this morning – they couldn’t even extend the courtesy of a phone call! That mealy-mouthed turd William Burton claims falling viewing figures… What I detest about the bastard, Ed, is that he can’t even be honest. We all know that ministers in the alliance have been putting pressure on him and the board.
What now? I despair.
Reply from Ed Richie:
THE FUCKER! I’M coming over with a bottle of Glenfiddich.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
December, 1988
“DON’T TRY TO move, mate.”
He groaned and attempted to lift his head from the cold, hard ground. His skull throbbed as if someone had hit it with an axe. He was freezing and the pain in his head was agonising, and if that were not bad enough he had a debilitating hangover. He lay on his stomach, his cheek resting against an icy cobble. Wincing at the pain, he squinted along a narrow mews with posh houses on either side.
An ugly goblin squatted beside him, his face a gargoyle mask with missing teeth and sunken cheeks. He gripped a can of Tennant’s extra strong lager in one hand and a smouldering roll-up in the other.
“Don’t move, mate. There’s an ambulance on the way.”
Overwhelmed, he murmured, “Thank you.”
“Good job I came along, mate, or you’d’ve froze to death. Reckon someone done you over. I saw you lying there and hammered on a door. Rich bastards wouldn’t answer. Then a posh bint sticks her head out and asks what all the din was about. Practically had to beg her to ring an ambulance. Cunt!”
“Thank you.”
“You’ll be right, mate. Get you to hospital and checked over. You’ll be fit and well in no time.”
He managed to move his right arm and lodge it beneath his face, like a pillow.
“Remember what happened?” the goblin asked.
He thought about that. “No. Nothing.”
“Out for a drink last night, eh? On your way home and some bastard jumped you, that’s what it looks like to me, mate.”
Last night? He tried to think back, work out where he’d been, what he’d been doing, but his mind was a complete blank. He had flashes, visions that came at him like images from a nightmare: a big house on the edge of moorland, a sun-lit island, a small house on a typical London street… none of them the stuff of nightmares in themselves, but nevertheless imbued with a terrible sense of foreboding.
“Good news is the bleeding’s stopped. Reckon you were knocked out. Don’t think your skull’s fractured, not that I’m a doctor.” The goblin thought this funny and chuckled to himself, then took a long swig of beer.
“Where am I?”
“Just off Fulham Broadway, mate.”
“London…”
“’Course, London. Where’d you think you were?”
He tried to smile. “Really no idea.”
&nb
sp; “Here, you know who you are, mate?”
He thought about it, long and hard. Who was he? A name came to him. Ed… Edward? That seemed somehow appropriate. He wondered if he should be more concerned about his inability to recall anything about his past… but it seemed oddly irrelevant. He had the strange feeling that he was all right now, that he had somehow escaped from a nightmare that had been haunting him. But when he tried to probe the feeling, tried to work out exactly why this should be so, his mind slipped and slithered around a nebulous intuition that refused to coalesce into anything definite.
“Edward,” he said.
“And I’m Migger.”
Migger? What an odd name. Perhaps his ugly saviour was a goblin, after all?
“And here’s the bloody ambulance at long last. Hey!” Migger yelled, standing up and waving. “Down here!”
The vehicle backed down the mews and stopped. The first paramedic in lemon-yellow fluorescent jacket examined his head, murmuring reassurances, while the second questioned Migger.
“Nasty gash. Concussion,” the first paramedic reported to his partner. Then, “What’s your name, son?”
“Edward.”
“Edward. Got a second name, Edward?”
He said, “Can’t think.”
“Do you know if you’re on any kind of medication, Edward?”
He tried to laugh. He had no idea. “I don’t know.”
“Okay, we’ll take you in, get that head sorted out. Your memory will return in time. You’ll be fine.”
He heard a crackle as the second paramedic spoke into a cell-radio on his lapel.
He was eased onto a stretcher and lifted into the back of the ambulance, Migger in solicitous attendance, clutching his Tennant’s.
“Thank you, Migger,” Edward called out.
“Watch how you go, mate.”
Then the doors were slammed shut and the ambulance drove off.
The medic unbuttoned Richie’s jacket and shirt, and applied a monitor to his chest. He closed his eyes and heard a constant bleeping above the thrumming of the ambulance’s tyres on the road. He felt a prick in the back of his hand, and soon the pain in his head abated; he seemed to be floating, in the grip of a wonderful lassitude.
The next thing he knew, with a dreamlike transition, he was being wheeled down a hospital corridor, watching the fluorescent strip-lighting strobe overhead. Then he was in a small room, sitting up, while a nurse did something to his head. He knew she was applying stitches to the wound, but the sensation wasn’t at all as if needles were piercing his scalp: it was dull, and oddly reassuring.
“There, that’s you patched up and as good as new.”
He was back on a trolley, then, with something thick and padded beneath his head. At one point a medic shone a bright light into his eyes, left and right – and he experienced that odd, nightmarish intimation again, associating bright white light with something to be feared. Then the sensation was over and the young woman doctor was saying, “And I’m told you can’t recall much at all, Edward?”
“No… Very little.”
“Very well. Now, I’m going to ask you a few questions, and we’ll see how we get on, hm?”
“Okay.”
The doctor was slim and blonde and beautiful.
“How old are you, Edward?”
He shook his head. “Sorry…” He stared down at his hands; he was young – in his twenties? But why, then, did he have the odd feeling that he was much older than this?
“Do you know your address?”
“No, sorry.”
“Are you from London?”
“Ah…” He thought not, though he had half an idea that he lived in the capital now.
“Very well…” She wrote something on a clipboard. “Now, can you recall if you have family, friends who might recognise you?”
“Family?” He thought hard. How did he know that his parents were dead, without being able to visualise anything about them? And friends? He saw a big, round-faced young man with a neat drooping moustache… His face was familiar, reassuring, but for the life of him Edward could not summon a name.
“One moment,” the young woman said. She moved off; Edward saw her in murmured consultation with a grey-haired doctor, who glanced his way from time to time and nodded.
The woman doctor returned. “Very well, Edward. You’re suffering from what I fully expect to be temporary amnesia. You’ve had a nasty blow to the head, but there should be no lasting ill-effects, so don’t worry yourself on that score. Now, what we have to do is keep you under observation for a while. There isn’t a bed free for the moment, unfortunately, so we’ll have you on a comfortable trolley in the corridor for a short while. Do you understand, Edward?”
He nodded, then thanked her.
He lay back on the trolley and was wheeled into a quiet corridor and left. Someone asked him if he would like a cup of tea, and he said that he’d love one. A nurse took his pulse and looked into his eyes, then an auxiliary appeared with the promised cup of tea and assisted him into a sitting position so that he could drink it.
The tea was sweet and milky, and he thought vaguely that this was not how he liked it.
He wondered if he should be worried that the attack on him had left him with next to no memory – had, in effect, temporarily robbed him of his identity. The odd thing was that he felt no real concern. He wondered if this were a consequence of his head injury. At any rate, the lovely doctor had said that his amnesia would be only temporary. Not to worry.
But the niggling sense of unease that assailed him in waves from time to time whenever he tried to concentrate on his past – what did that mean?
Something moved him to slip a hand into the left pocket of his jeans… but his wallet was gone. He felt a surge of panic which, he was aware, had nothing to do with his money and credit cards. They could be replaced, after all.
He leaned to his left, eased a hand into his back pocket, guided as if by instinct, and surprised himself by finding something there: a bus-pass holder carrying the photograph of a slim, elfin girl. She appeared to be in her late teens or early twenties, with high cheekbones and a pointed chin. She was smiling out of the picture, directly at him, and his heart surged.
But who was she? Try as he might, he could not supply a name, nor any associated memories.
He returned the photograph to his back pocket, oddly comforted.
He was transferred from the trolley to a bed in a four-berth ward, and a curtain was pulled around the bed for privacy. At some point he must have undressed, or been undressed by a nurse, as he was wearing a ridiculous hospital gown now. Every twenty minutes a nurse came and checked his pulse, looked into his eyes, and asked him the same set of questions, to which he gave the same answers. He slept.
He dreamed. He was on an island, swimming in a lagoon with an impossibly pretty blonde woman… and then he was in a bar, drinking with the moustached young man he partially recognised… Then he was no longer in the bar, but talking to the slight, fair girl in the photograph.
He woke up suddenly.
Annabelle…
Was that her name? For some reason he was sure that it was, but he knew nothing about her, who she might be, or his relationship with her. He recalled the fading, elusive images of his dream, and felt that odd shiver of unease again.
Later, the attractive doctor returned.
“And how are we getting along, Edward?”
“Feeling a little better, thank you.”
“And that memory of yours?”
He pulled a face.
“Again, I’m going to ask you a few questions, to see how you respond.”
She went through the same questions: his name, his age, where he lived, if he recalled family and friends. Then she asked, “And do you know the date, Edward?”
Something moved him to say, “May…? May, 1995?”
She quirked her lips in a smile. “Not quite, Edward. We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren’t we? It
’s December, 1988.”
“1988?” Why did that seem wrong?
“And do you know the name of the Prime Minister?”
“Ah…” He racked his brains. “Major? John Major?”
The doctor frowned. “Well,” she murmured to herself, “that might be a slight improvement. No, Edward, it’s Margaret Thatcher.”
He repeated the name, aware that it had negative connotations, but was unable to define them.
“Very well, Edward, what we’re going to do, seeing that you’re coming along reasonably well, is allow you to get dressed and sit in the day room. We might have to transfer you to another hospital, but first: how about something to eat?”
He dressed and was assisted by an auxiliary to an open-plan area lit by shafts of wintry sunlight. He was alone here, and the auxiliary returned with a tray of food: he ate hungrily, lasagne followed by sponge pudding and custard, and more milky tea.
His head no longer throbbed and his hangover had worn off; he felt much better, if a little abstracted from the reality going on around him.
He withdrew the photograph from his pocket again and stared at it.
The sight of the girl, Annabelle, produced an ache in his heart, a sadness he could not source. He thought of the moustached young man, and knew – without quite knowing why – that the oddly familiar stranger might be able to help him.
He stood up and walked to the window. He felt well, and the last thing he wanted was to be transferred to another hospital. He was seized by the conviction that if he were to be allowed to walk the streets of London, the things he would see, buildings and landmarks, would somehow provide associations, somehow jog his memory.
He moved to the door of the day room and looked up and down the corridor. When there was no one around, other than a shuffling fellow patient, he walked casually along the corridor, came to a double door and pulled it open. As he stepped out into a wider corridor and followed an exit sign, he felt both a quick stab of guilt at absconding, and asense of relief.