by Bryce THOMAS
The doctor realized that was a question, not an answer.
‘Can you tell me where you live?’ he went on.
Lucy stared blankly at the bed clothes. Once again, with a sigh, she shook her head.
‘Can you remember your date of birth?’
Another shake of the head. ‘How old am I?’ Lucy asked plainly.
‘Try and remember.’
‘I really can’t remember. I thought I was… I thought
I was…’
‘Yes?’
‘I… I’m a little confused. I seem very young.’
‘So how old do you think you are?’ His manner was gentle and his voice reassuringly soft.
A big sigh from Lucy and then, ‘Please tell me.’
‘You are thirteen years old.’ He smiled. ‘There, I’ve given in first!’ He chuckled ever so softly. ‘Now it’s your turn.’
Lucy tried to smile but, instead, her mouth turned down at the corners as her heart told her she wanted to cry. She curbed the feeling by compressing her lips and then shook her head, water ebbing on her lower eye lids. ‘I think I’m older than I look.’ She bit her bottom lip. ‘But,’ she added after forcing down the emotion, ‘I really don’t know. It’s… it’s just a feeling.’ She looked the doctor straight in the eye. ‘Could I have been dreaming?’ And then, before he could reply, she burst into tears. ‘Am I going to be all right?’
The doctor took her small hand in his. ‘Well, of course you are. You had an accident but you are getting better now. It just takes a little time, that’s all.’
CHAPTER THREE
Nurse Lever returned every hour on the hour for the next three hours.
Exhausted by the questions and the effort of trying to recall even the simplest of things, with a feeling of complete and utter relief, Lucy fell into a bottomless chasm of sleep. When at last she began to stir, Nurse Lever was there, gently trying to rouse her. ‘Come on then, sleepy head,’ she said quietly. ‘Let’s see if we can’t disconnect you from all this paraphernalia.’ She carefully lifted Lucy’s hand and removed the adhesive tape on the back of it. She chatted away continually as she pulled out the needle and disconnected Lucy from the intravenous feed. Not once did she find any difficulty in dredging up topics to talk about while she worked, and all the time she asked questions like Don’t you think? and Doesn’t it? quite oblivious to any response from Lucy. Lucy wondered if Nurse Lever was married but didn’t get the chance to ask. It was only when the door of the room opened that the nurse paused to take a breath. ‘We need to do a few tests on you Lucy,’ Doctor Murray said as he pushed open the door of Lucy’s room and walked in. Another doctor dressed similarly in a white coat, and with a face lined like a thousand year old hillside in a stormy country, shuffled in beside him. Two steely eyes, looking through thick rimmed spectacles with myopic lenses and sheltered by a pair of dark bushy eyebrows, looked past Lucy, hardly acknowledging that she was the subject of their visit, as they glanced beyond her to a chart attached to the rear of the bed. He ran his hand over his short silver hair while he studied the data. His face was as serious as an outbreak of the plague. As the two doctors took up their positions beside the bed, Nurse Lever cleared away her paraphernalia and left.
‘Hope she hasn’t been too talkative,’ said Doctor Murray with an amused smile.
‘She does go on a bit,’ Lucy said, smiling back at him.
‘Her husband calls her RoboGob,’ the other doctor stated without so much as a smirk. ‘He and I share the same local, poor chap.’ But he didn’t elaborate. He said it so seriously that Lucy couldn’t tell if he wasn’t actually complaining.
She nodded as if that explained everything, even though it made not a jot of sense.
‘This is Doctor Boulder,’ Doctor Murray announced, confirming what Lucy had already read on his identity tag. ‘You have had a head trauma, Lucy. When you awoke earlier, it seemed that it may have affected the part of your brain that retains memory; not all of your memory, just that part relating to your own identity.’ After a pause, he added, ‘Doctor Boulder is an expert in the goings on in people’s heads.’
‘A psychiatrist then?’ Lucy suggested.
‘Er, that’s right,’ said Doctor Boulder taking over the conversation. He pulled a notebook from his side pocket and slipped out a pencil from the top pocket of his white coat. Holding onto the side of the bed, and with an almost silent groan, he seated himself on the chair at Lucy’s side and cleared his throat. ‘Now then Lucy, can you tell me anything about yourself?’
‘I… I’m…’ She paused to think it out. ‘You keep calling me Lucy. Is that my name?’
‘Well I was hoping you’d tell me.’ Doctor Boulder waited for a response to his comment. Lucy was still frowning. After a minute or so of silence, he went on.
‘Who do you think you are?’ He asked bluntly.
‘I thought,’ Lucy said carefully picking her words, ‘that I was called something else.’
‘And that is?’
‘I’m not sure.’ She paused for a second. The dream she’d had just before she awoke was still vividly scored on her memory. ‘Perhaps my name is Dianne,’ she suggested.
The doctor gave a deep sigh and shuffled on his seat. Lucy wasn’t sure if it was because he was simply uncomfortable or if he was showing a degree of impatience. ‘Hmm, I see.’ He made a brief note on his pad. Lucy watched the pencil as it scribbled the words, in surprisingly clear and bold writing for a doctor, Patient suffering from a form of dissociative fugue amnesia.
‘Dianne what?’
‘Derby,’ Lucy put forward confidently.
‘I see.’ Another note was scribed. ‘And you are how old?’
Lucy scowled. Somehow, what she was going to say wasn’t going to make the doctor’s day. Or perhaps it was, come to think of it. He probably looked forward to meeting people whose minds were all jumbled up like long strands of spaghetti mixed with a bowl full of Smarties. ‘I’m not sure, but… I think I’m about thirty.’
The doctor raised his eyebrows. He breathed in heavily through his nose and cleared his throat once again. ‘I see.’ More scribbling. Perhaps, having noticed Lucy watching him earlier, this time he held the book slightly out of range of Lucy’s line of vision.
‘I know it doesn’t sound right,’ Lucy added. ‘I’ve seen my body.’
‘You have?’ Then the doctor nodded. ‘So it doesn’t really make any sense to you either?’
Either! So it wasn’t making sense to him. And he was the psychiatrist. ‘I presume that the woman who was here earlier knew me?’
‘Your mother,’ Doctor Murray put in, getting a don’t- interfere-while-I’m-asking-the-questions look from his colleague. He looked suitably reproached, and Doctor Boulder cleared his throat again to regain the initiative.
‘Did you not recognise her, then?’
Lucy shook her head.
‘You don’t remember your mother at all?’
Lucy was confused. A picture of some other person had appeared in her mind. She tried to remember the things she had done with her family in the past, struggling inside to put the few pictures that were coming through into some order that made sense. ‘Not really.’ She waited while her inquisitor finished making another note. Then she asked, ‘So who am I supposed to be?’
‘Supposed to be?’ He rubbed the pencil against his cheek. ‘Well actually, you are Lucy Lockhart,’ he said with great emphasis on the present participle. ‘You are thirteen years old and, according to everyone I have talked to, your mother has been at your bedside every day since you were admitted to this hospital.’
Perhaps it was the easy option, but the relief that Lucy felt, to have been given some information that would answer the questions she had already asked herself, was short lived. Who were the people around her bed when she opened her eyes? What was her name? Okay, she knew the answers to those questions now. But why was she only thirteen; why was her body so petite and young; and why did even her voice so
und strange in her own ears? ‘What happened to me?’ she asked, gripping the bedclothes beside her anxiously. ‘What sort of accident did I have?’
‘You were knocked off your bicycle, Lucy. By a hit and run driver.’
‘And my mother has been here with me?’
‘Every day.’
‘What about my father?’
An interrogative look from Doctor Boulder. ‘As far as we are aware, you have no father,’ he stated.
Lucy scowled. ‘Well, that can’t be right.’
‘Can you not remember?’
‘No.’ She paused and then asked, ‘What’s going on?’
‘How do you mean?’
Lucy was quiet for a while. She was trying to put together the picture of who she was. She felt that Dianne Derby had a father and that father was an old man, though she had no real memory of him either. ‘It’s hard to explain,’ she said eventually. ‘I thought I was much older.’ She considered the dream she had been experiencing just before she gained consciousness. ‘Could I have dreamed that I was older?’
‘That is quite possible.’ Now he was making progress. His face lit up. His patient was beginning to realize that she was fantasising. ‘However, it doesn’t solve the problem that faces us at the moment,’ he continued.
‘Which is?’
‘Which is, your remembering who you actually are. No dreams, no fantasies. The real you.’
‘So what do we do now?’
Doctor Boulder made another note on his pad, placed the pencil back in his top pocket and closed the notebook.
‘Now?’ he said eventually. ‘Now you have to be placed where your real life and the people in it can stimulate your memory into clicking back into gear.’
Lucy got the feeling his eyes weren’t focussing on her until he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
‘You see, you haven’t really lost your memory, Lucy. You have simply mislaid it. The things you did and the person you are will have been recorded and filed away in your mind as they are with any normal working brain. What we have to do is unlock the compartment in which that information has become entombed.’ He paused again and then added, ‘Then you’ll be as right as ninepence!’
Ninepence? Lucy desperately struggled to remember something about currency. ‘So you have no answers for me?’
‘All I can say is that for some reason, you are not only suffering from a form of amnesia, you are also…’
‘Delusional?’
The doctor raised his dark eyebrows which seemed to somehow miraculously lift away from his glasses like two lids on a couple of biscuit tins. He was intrigued by the intelligence of this young patient. He nodded. ‘That’s about the size of it,’ he replied as he pushed himself up from the chair and shuffled over to the window at the other side of the bed. He gazed out at the green landscape for a minute or two while Doctor Murray and Lucy just watched him in silence. Lucy wasn’t sure if he was actually thinking or just admiring the scenery. Eventually, without turning around, he said, ‘There might be a simple explanation.’ Then, turning towards Lucy, he lowered his head slightly and, without any recognisable expression on his face, he said, ‘Let’s wait and see shall we?’ With that, he signalled to Doctor Murray that he was leaving by pointing to the door. He turned to go and said in his gravelly voice, almost as an afterthought, ‘I’ll see you again.’
CHAPTER FOUR
‘But what has happened to my child?’ Mrs. Lockhart asked. Her face was crumpled with the agony of remaining unrecognised by her daughter. Doctor Murray was seated behind a big, grey, steel desk with his back to the window. A Venetian blind was adjusted to let in some light but tilted enough to keep out the marauding beams of a searching sun. The desk was strewn with papers and folders, none of them neatly positioned. She wondered if he was a deep believer in the chaos theory or had just fallen into untidy habits. She had an overwhelming urge to set about tidying up. She resisted. He leaned back in his chair, ran his fingers through his mop of straight black hair and looked at her, his eyes black as coal as he faced her, silhouetted against the window. He waved for her to take a seat and as soon as he saw she had settled, he spoke.
‘All I can say, Mrs. Lockhart, is that your daughter has suffered a traumatic shock to her brain and that shock has caused a period of amnesia in which she has lost her ability to recall some or all of her past. On top of that, it seems that it has caused her to forget her own identity.’ After a short pause he continued. ‘There is a symptom that, when it occurs, is usually a result of a traumatic experience rather than a physical trauma to the head. It is called a dissociative fugue, and it results from a patient repressing something in their memory, something they can’t live with, and in doing so they invent a completely new identity so that the particular traumatic memory could not have existed.’ He paused to think and then added, ‘Perhaps she is repressing the memory of what happened at the time of the actual accident.’
‘And just what can we expect from that?’ Mrs. Lockhart asked with a sniffle.
The doctor shook his head. It was at moments like this that he wished that the consultant psychiatrist had remained on the hospital campus. He was a surgeon, not a psychiatrist. He recalled what Doctor Boulder had explained. ‘It isn’t easy to predict, but the dissociative fugue is sometimes accompanied by a patient’s sudden and unexpected need to follow some unknown adventure or path in their newly formed life.’ He reflected that Doctor Boulder must have given him that description directly from a textbook. In fact, Doctor Boulder had probably written the textbook.
‘But Lucy is only thirteen years old, for goodness sake. I can’t have her going off in search of Eldorado if she thinks she is Lieutenant Martinez!’
The doctor chuckled. ‘I really don’t believe she thinks she’s that sort of adventurer, Mrs. Lockhart.’ He scratched his designer stubble beneath his chin – not that it was designed or anything; he just needed to shave too often for the time slots he could make available in any particular day. He thought for what seemed like minutes. Mrs. Lockhart watched him expectantly, wondering if he was ever going to speak again, or whether it was a cue for her to get up and leave. ‘What I really mean,’ he said eventually, just as she had decided it was the latter and was placing her hands on the arms of the chair to push herself up, ‘is that she may believe she is someone else. It could be someone really quite ordinary. It will all depend on what fantasies and daydreams she has had in the past.’
‘Well, for goodness sake!’ she replied, shaking her head and sitting forward. ‘That could mean anything! What if she thinks she’s a princess or something? How on earth are we going to cope with that? It really doesn’t bear thinking about.’
Doctor Murray stood up and walked around his desk. He put his hand on her shoulder. It seemed very settling and reassuring at that particular moment in time. It was all in the touch. Must be a doctor thing, she thought.
‘Now, come along, Mrs. Lockhart,’ he said, smiling down at her. She looked up into his face, trying hard to avoid direct eye contact. Over the past five weeks her eyes had met his a few times and it seemed that, despite her own wish to be silent, their eyes wanted to converse.
‘We really don’t know what she is thinking at the moment. It’s important for us not to imagine the worst. We must keep an open mind and tackle any eventuality as it arises.’ He paused to consider the options.
Mrs. Lockhart stood up but said nothing.
‘I think,’ he continued after remaining pensive again for another long minute, an interlude that helped to steady her nerves a little and stop her head spinning, ‘that she needs to be surrounded by the things with which she is familiar. She needs to be close to you and her family. She needs to be in surroundings that will stimulate her memory so that it will kick back into action.’
‘Do you mean she can come home?’
The doctor nodded. ‘I think that’s the best thing for her. There is nothing physically wrong with your daughter now. The problem is in he
r mind. But you must keep an eye on her, of course. We don’t want her wandering off thinking she is doing something completely normal when all the time she is carrying out some action totally contrary to her actual character.’ He paused for a moment while he motioned with his hand that she should proceed to the door, and then added, ‘If you get my meaning.’ After another pause, waiting for the nod of understanding from Mrs. Lockhart, he added, ‘In the meantime, I will arrange for her to have expert therapy.’ Almost as an afterthought, he bent forward past her shoulder to the desk and picked up a pen. He scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to her. ‘This is a psychiatrist who deals with our patients who are in need of therapy,’ he stated. ‘He has already seen Lucy. His name is Doctor Boulder. He might strike you as being a little strange, but he is very good at what he does. I’ll arrange for him to contact you directly so that you can make an appointment to visit him soon.’
CHAPTER FIVE
The routine of being discharged from hospitals varies from one local health authority area to another. In the North Wieldworth General the routine was set in stone and discharge papers had to be signed in triplicate after reading (under supervision) all of the small print. Any patient being discharged, regardless of physical ability, had to be plonked in a wheelchair at the side of their hospital bed and wheeled by a porter like a barrow of garden waste to the main door. This is for no other reason than that of a purely administrative precaution, because a patient is not legally discharged until he or she is off the premises. And who knows what could happen to a normally physically agile human being on the way from the inner ward to the outer door of the building? What happens to a patient once outside the building seemed to be of little concern to anybody.
Anyway, Lucy was finding it quite amusing. ‘No,’ the senior nurse stated when Lucy said that she was, although still a little shaky, perfectly fit enough to walk. ‘We have set procedures and you must abide by them.’