What Remains

by Garrett Leigh

  “No, mate. I won’t. I promise. I’m sorry about what happened at the hospital.”

  Blankness hit Jodi. “What happened at the hospital?”

  “Erm . . .”

  Rupert glanced at Sophie, a clear plea for help if Jodi had ever seen one. A faint flicker of curiosity tickled his belly, but was gone before he could act on it. He turned away and flopped back on the couch. Sophie lingered, like she wanted to say something, but settled for a tight hug before she kissed his cheek and left.

  The front door closed with a quiet clunk that sounded deafening to Jodi. He looked around the living room, at the plain walls, the photographs, the blank TV, anywhere but at Rupert. Somehow, he’d missed him venturing into the room and taking Sophie’s place, perched on the coffee table.

  “It’s late,” Rupert said. “You’ve got some medication to take. The antiseizure pills give you a bit of a stomachache if you don’t eat. How about we get you to bed and I bring you some food before you take them?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Rupert picked up the bowl of brown gloop Sophie had left and gave it a dubious stir. “Not up for Sophie’s infamous chilli, eh? Don’t blame you.”

  “Sophie can’t cook?” It wasn’t a question by the time Jodi finished the sentence. A click in his brain revealed years and years of dodgy roast dinners and soggy sandwiches, surreptitiously chucked in the bin the moment her back was turned. “She can’t cook.”

  Rupert smiled. “No, bless her heart, she stayed up half the night making that swill. She does make a mean pot of builder’s tea, though. She’s left one in the kitchen. Fancy a cuppa and something less terrifying for your dinner?”

  I own a goddamned teapot? What the fuck happened to me? Jodi couldn’t think of a sensible answer to Rupert’s questions or his own. He nodded and settled back on the sofa while Rupert disappeared into the kitchen, wrapping himself in the soft grey blanket Sophie had insisted on covering him with when they’d come home. The blanket smelled nice, like coffee and pine needles, and it was all he could do not to bury his face in it and go back to sleep. Idiot. You’ve tried that already.

  “Nutella on toast.” Rupert returned and held out a plate with a single slice of chocolate-covered toast.

  Jodi had to admit it looked far more appetising than Sophie’s efforts. “Do I like that?”

  “I’d say so. You used to eat it enough, especially on a hangover. I slice a banana on top of mine. Drives you mad— Um, anyway. Take these and eat up.” Rupert brandished a handful of pills far bigger and scarier than the tiny codeine Sophie had slipped past Jodi’s lips.

  “What the fuck are they?”

  “The same ones you’ve been taking in the hospital. You don’t remember?”

  Jodi thought hard and made himself dizzy. Hospital, pills, doctors . . . no, nurses. Yup. He remembered the nurse—Caz—who’d appeared three times a day, clutching a tiny paper cup of mysterious medication. “I remember taking them, but I don’t know what they are. No one told me.”

  “Do you want me to tell you?”

  “I think so?”

  Rupert set the plate of toast down and spread the pills over his palm. “Okay, but you should know most of these are preventative, so don’t let them freak you out too much.”

  Easy for him to say. “Start with the big one and work your way down.”

  “The big one is your antiseizure medication. Do you remember having seizures while you were in hospital?”

  “Maybe.” Jodi recalled a vague memory of a similar conversation. “Actually, no. I remember Sophie telling me about them. When did I have them?”

  “They started a few months ago, but you haven’t had one for a while. That’s why they let you come home. That and . . .”

  “And what?”

  Rupert shook his head. “Nothing. You just made some big improvements quite quickly. You couldn’t hold a conversation like this a few weeks ago, and before that you didn’t talk at all.”

  That rang a bell. Sophie had told him about the weeks and weeks he’d spent bumbling around the hospital, mute and useless. “How long was I like that for?”

  “Three months.”

  “Did you visit me?”

  “Every day.”

  “Why?”

  The colour drained from Rupert’s already pale complexion and left him ashen. Jodi frowned. What the fuck was his problem? It was a fair question, wasn’t it? A question, it seemed, Rupert didn’t want to answer, since he got up and turned his back on Jodi so fast Jodi’s mind spun with him.

  “I’ll get you some water.”

  Weirdo. Jodi watched him go, recalling the few instances he did remember of Rupert visiting him in hospital. The way he’d hovered and stared, like he was waiting for Jodi to spontaneously combust, only to disappear abruptly behind the curtain. Great. I picked a creepy flatmate.

  Rupert came back with a glass of water. “Ready for your pills?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Your medication.” Rupert proffered a palmful of pills. “Do you want me to go through the rest with you?”

  “If you like.”

  “It’s not about what I want.”

  Jodi sighed. Rupert had that moody look on his face again, the look that made his skin seem dull and grey, and made Jodi slightly nauseous, though he couldn’t say why. “Go on, then. Hit me.”

  “Okay, this one is your antiseizure, this one a strong painkiller to help you sleep through the night, this one an antibiotic for an infection you picked up from the catheter—”

  “Infection?”

  “A UTI,” Rupert said. “A urine infection.”

  Jodi absorbed that. He wasn’t altogether sure what a catheter was, but he recalled the burn plaguing his dick every time he took a piss and connected the dots. He pointed to the last pill. “What’s that one?”

  “An antidepressant.”

  “Why am I on antidepressants?”

  Rupert considered the smallest of the four pills in his palm. “I asked that too. Apparently depression is quite common after a brain injury, and there’s a slight scar over the area of your brain that controls emotions. This drug—citalopram—is supposed to regulate the balance of serotonin and help with your cognition.”

  “Cognition?”

  “Thinking ability.”

  Jodi snorted. “So it’ll fix my stupid, then?”

  “You’re not stupid, Jodi. You weren’t before, and you’re not now.”

  Yeah, yeah.

  Darkness hit Jodi like a thick, black wall of choking terror. He bolted upright—his version, at least—flailing with his good arm for something—anything—tangible to tie him down to the bed and stop the inky cloud from sucking him in. His hand hit the bedside table, but instead of the cheap MDF of the hospital, he found solid wood—thick, textured oak that felt all wrong.

  He lurched away from it, falling back onto pillows that were too soft and smelled like nothing he could ever remember smelling: a warm, spicy scent that made his heart beat too fast. His head swam, and every inch of his skin itched. Where the fuck was he? And where the hell was Sophie? He tried to call her name, but the power of speech had deserted him, and nothing but a garbled groan came out, a groan that was unnaturally loud in the heavy darkness of wherever the hell he was.

  Hell. Perhaps that was it. As the devil drilling holes in his brain picked up its steady, sickening tattoo, it was all too easy to believe. Then his gaze fell on the bag he’d brought home from the hospital, and it came flooding back—the consultant discharging him, the cab ride home. Sophie abandoning him with the weird blond bloke whose name escaped Jodi.

  Fuck this shit. Jodi fumbled around for a light switch. A lamp toppled to the floor and landed with a metallic clatter that set his teeth on edge. He swung his legs out of bed, stubbing his toe on the bedside table, and set off for the living room, the kitchen, anywhere but this black fucking death trap of a bedroom.

  The hallway was dark too, but a beam of light under the living room door drew
him in. He pushed it open. The blond bloke was throwing pillows on the couch. Jodi stopped short. In his headache-induced haze, he had forgotten about his babysitter. Rupert . . . yeah, that was his name.

  “Can’t sleep?” Rupert said.

  “I woke up.” It sounded stupid even to Jodi. “And my legs itch.”

  It was true. The pain in his head had woken him, but the creeping itch behind his knees was somehow worse.

  Rupert nodded. “That’s the painkillers. The doctors said a cool shower might help?”

  Fuck that. Jodi shook his head. His bed had felt like a straitjacket, and standing in the living room in his PJs, he was bloody freezing. “What are you doing?”

  “Making my bed.”

  “You sleep on the couch? Why? What’s wrong with your bedroom?”

  A long pause stretched out before Rupert replied, “I don’t have one.”

  That didn’t make any sense. Jodi had little memory of the flat, but he knew the room across the hall was a bedroom. “I don’t understand.”

  “Have you been in the other room since you came home?”

  “No.”

  “Come with me?”

  For a moment, Rupert looked like he might hold out his hand, a notion that made Jodi feel slightly strange, but it passed quickly, and Rupert turned away.

  Jodi followed him back to the hallway, to the closed door of the second bedroom. Rupert opened it and motioned inside. “Do you remember this?”

  Jodi peered around Rupert. The room was like nothing he’d ever seen before. The white walls he’d expected to see were striped with candy pink, except the one by the window, which was painted blue and decorated with football paraphernalia, punctuated by a wooden slatted blind that alternated with the same shades of pink and blue. A tiny cabin bed completed the picture . . . blue duvet, pink pillow.

  “Did a hermaphrodite kid throw up in here?”

  “Not quite. It’s my daughter’s room. You decorated it yourself.”

  “Your daughter’s room?” Rupert was taking the piss, he had to be. Stoned and half-dead Jodi may have been, but he would’ve noticed a child in the flat. Besides, he didn’t even like kids. Why the fuck would he consent to living with one?

  Then he remembered the photographs in the living room. “The blonde girl. That’s your daughter?”

  “Yup. That’s Indie.”

  “She’s pretty.” It was all Jodi could think to say, and it was true. He couldn’t recall ever meeting a child he liked, but the girl was beautiful.

  And by Rupert’s smile, it was clear he thought so too. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. So, where is she?”

  “With her mum. She stays here every other weekend, though I wasn’t sure if . . .”

  “If what?” Jodi studied the pink stripes. The colour was vile, but he had to admit he’d done a cracking job at keeping them straight. Shame he could barely pull a pair of socks on anymore. “What weren’t you sure of?”

  Rupert stared into space before looking back at Jodi. “I wasn’t sure if you’d want her here, or if it’s a good idea for her. There’s so much you don’t remember, and you were close, really close. I don’t want her getting upset when you don’t know who she is.”

  “Upset?” Jodi jerked his head up a little faster than was sensible. “I wouldn’t do that, would I? Am I that much of a bastard?”

  “You’re not a bastard at all. Indie loves you, but she won’t understand why you don’t remember her, and I can’t let her get hurt like that. I’d move out if I could, but . . .”

  Rupert’s voice fell away, and though Jodi didn’t understand the anguish in his gaze, an odd urge to dispel it swept over him, and it came to him far clearer than anything else had in a long while. “Does she know?”

  “Hmm?” Rupert blinked, apparently startled, like he’d forgotten Jodi was there. “Know what?”

  “That I don’t remember her, or you?”

  “No. Haven’t quite figured out how to explain that one. I’ve told her some pretty heavy stuff before, but this . . . Shit. She won’t understand this.”

  Jodi wondered why Rupert’s pain mattered so much, but though the blank void in his brain made Rupert a stranger, the hurt in his hazel gaze felt somehow like Jodi’s own. “I don’t understand it either. Maybe it’s better if you just let her forget.”

  Rupert’s life had become a monotonous sequence of waiting rooms and squeaky chairs. It was a pink chair today—that vile, salmon pink that made him think of salmonella. The MRSA posters on the walls weren’t much better, though they did remind him that no matter the tragedy of the last few months, Jodi had at least been spared a hospital-acquired blood infection. The persistent UTI had been bad enough.

  The thought did little to cheer him up. Jodi had been home for a week or so, but the only change it had brought was they were now strangers to each other in the privacy of their own home rather than under the all-seeing gaze of the hospital team. Not that Jodi seemed to realise he was at home half the time. Barely an hour passed without him staring around the flat, confusion colouring his sunken features. And it was worse on the rare occasions he truly looked at Rupert. The doctors had said there was a good chance Jodi’s amnesia would fade as he rehabilitated in once-familiar surroundings, but as the days passed and nothing changed, the other side of the coin—the dark, bleak side, where Jodi remained a subdued, bewildered shell of the punchy man he’d once been—became horribly more real.

  “Are you waiting for me?”

  Rupert tore his gaze from the shiny waiting room floor. Jodi stood in front of him, sulky and tired, like a teenager who’d just been scolded by their headmaster. “Of course I am. Said I would, didn’t I?”

  Jodi shrugged like he didn’t care, and it was likely he didn’t.

  The psychiatric nurse who’d escorted Jodi to the waiting room peered around him, a kind, sympathetic gleam in her life-hardened eyes. “Come on now, Jodi. We talked about Rupert today, didn’t we? He’s taking care of you.”

  “If you say so.” Jodi’s eyes drifted to the window. There was nothing there, save a car park and a few tired trees. Rupert wondered what was holding his attention for so long. “Can we go home now?”

  Rupert sighed as the nurse spared him another professionally pitying smile. An ever-fading glimmer of hope had carried him through the long months that had passed since Jodi’s accident, but it was almost gone now. It had left, unbidden, the moment he’d realised Jodi had lost five years of his life.

  “He’s missing five years,” Sophie whispered, her face streaked with tears. “He thinks we’re still together.”

  Rupert sat down heavily, his breath leaving his lungs in a soft whoosh. His head had known this was coming—his short, fractured exchange with Jodi had told him so—but the stupid, naive idiot in him had held on to the hope that it was all a fucking bad dream.

  But it wasn’t a dream. Jodi was missing five years—five years that held the entire life he and Rupert had built together. Their past and present. Their future. Rupert stared hard at the hospital floor, sure he could see the remnants of their broken dreams, ready to be ground into the linoleum by the heels of whoever passed by next. He closed his eyes and whispered the question he already knew the answer to: “Did you tell him who I am?”

  Sophie’s voice cracked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know what to say.”

  Rupert had wanted to be angry with her, but he couldn’t. After all, he hadn’t told Jodi, and no one else had either. How could they, when Jodi had reacted so badly to the doctor’s first, failed attempts? Rupert remembered Jodi curled in a ball, sobbing in pain, and then later, when the drugs had kicked in and two days of silence had taken hold, and it had felt like they were back to square one.

  Fuck that. Rupert couldn’t be the reason Jodi’s recovery faltered, and there seemed little chance Jodi would remember on his own. Save for a few minor details about random things—where the airing cupboard was, the name of next door’s cat—h
e hadn’t remembered anything, and he’d shown next to no interest in trying. No one knew the best way of persuading him either. Prompting him. The psychiatrist—one of a long list of outpatient appointments Rupert had brought Jodi to that week—had been his last hope, but his private consultation with Rupert hadn’t gone well.

  “In cases like Jodi’s, it’s often best to allow the mind to heal in its own time. We can help him, of course, but pushing him to remember things he might not be equipped to cope with yet could be catastrophic.”

  Jodi’s neurologist, Dr. Nevis, had agreed. “Try to be as honest as you can, but avoid planting ideas in his head. It’s better to use intact memories to stimulate acceptance of new information.”

  Arguing that the “new information” was their whole bloody lives had been pointless, and he’d known the doctor was right. What the fuck had he expected? That they could sit Jodi down, hit him with every little detail of the lifetime he’d forgotten, and expect him to accept it all and just get on with it?

  It wasn’t going to happen, but that crippling realisation had left Rupert lost. Jodi had walked into the accident as a man who’d often described himself as a loose bisexual, but he’d woken up looking for his girlfriend with no memory of being anything other than straight, like he’d lost his entire sexual identity. And that had left Rupert as not much more than a barely tolerated babysitter.

  “Rupert?”

  Rupert came back to the present with a surprised jolt. Up till now, Jodi hadn’t addressed him by name. Shame he didn’t sound too happy about it. “Yeah?”

  “Are we going, or what?”

  There was no “or what.” Rupert gave himself an internal shake. It was time to go home. He said good-bye to the hovering nurse, took Jodi’s arm, and led him out of the hospital. Jodi didn’t protest. He’d given up on that after Sophie had scolded him for being rude. Besides, Rupert wasn’t taking his weight and guiding him for fun. To the outside world, Jodi probably appeared to walk pretty well, save the slight drag of his left foot, but when he’d had a long day, his balance often deserted him, leading him to stumble and trip, something that could do him far more damage than discovering he liked a bit of cock.