by Bryce THOMAS
‘Hospital? Like me then?’
‘Well, yes, I suppose it is. Only I’ve been having treatment for nearly a year on and off. Got a bit fed up of it really.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me. I can’t even remember my time in hospital and I was still glad to get out of there!’
‘But I suppose I don’t make friends very easily, anyway,’ Loanne continued to explain. She looked a little embarrassed. ‘I was bullied a lot at school,’ she added eventually. Then, seeming to cheer up from a momentary lapse into melancholy, she added, ‘Do you have a lot of friends?’
‘I’m not sure.’
Loanne sighed. ‘Oh, I forgot again! You’re so easy to talk to.’
‘And so are you.’ Lucy was trying to imagine what sort of people would bully such a sparkling young girl, but she didn’t want to change the mood back again.
‘Daddy says my friends have to be good listeners.’ Loanne chuckled cheerily. ‘What’s your dad like?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
Loanne sighed. ‘There I go again!’
‘No, it’s not that I can’t remember so much as my mother says that she’s a single mum. We live with my grandparents.’
‘Do you remember any of them yet?’
Lucy shrugged and pulled her mount to a halt facing the neighbouring house once more. ‘Not yet,’ she said with a deep sigh. Loanne stopped alongside. They both stared at the windows of the old white farmhouse but there was no movement behind the half drawn curtain. If anyone was looking out then they were all the way back into the room, keeping well out of view.
‘I’m glad Daddy invited you over,’ Loanne said eventually.
‘So am I.’ Lucy didn’t take her eyes off her target.
‘Is it helping you, do you think? Being here, I mean?’ Lucy shook her head. ‘Not really. In fact I am more confused than when I left hospital and went home with my mother.’ She adjusted the strap of her riding helmet under her chin.
‘Oh, I’m sorry about that.’
‘No, I didn’t mean it that way. According to my mother, who I still only know as my mother because she tells me so, I’m a townie, I never liked the countryside, and have never been near a horse in my life. On top of that, I can understand things I am not supposed to.’ She explained what had happened in the hospital.
Loanne nodded. ‘Daddy told me about that.’ She paused and then said, ‘Gosh, do you think they’ve got you mixed up with the wrong person?’
Lucy giggled. Her eyes were still fixed on the house next door. Shaking her head she said, ‘I can’t see how. Everybody who should know me seems to know me. Like my grandparents. They’re sweet. But they could be from another planet as far as I can remember.’
‘Yet you remember how to saddle up and ride a horse.’
‘Remember? Not really. It just came to me like when I spoke to those Chinese people. I don’t actually remember anything.’
‘So they might have got you mixed up with somebody else then?’ She chuckled. Raising her eyebrows and with her eyes open so wide that there was a ring of white all around the dark brown centres, she postulated, ‘Perhaps there is someone else still in the hospital who looked just like you and who has had an accident and they’ve mixed her up and think she’s you, you know, like babies getting put with the wrong mothers!’
Lucy shook her head. ‘That’s not likely though is it? I’m hardly likely to have been swapped!’ She stroked Romax on the neck. They stood quietly for a minute, still gazing at the old farmhouse. ‘It’s strange though,’ she said eventually. ‘When I woke up in the hospital I was really surprised at how young I was. It’s as if I thought I was somebody else, somebody much older.’
‘But you can’t remember who?’
‘Well if I could, it wouldn’t exactly fit my present form. I mean, do I look older than thirteen?
‘Not really.’
‘So not only can’t I remember who I am, but who I am doesn’t seem to be what I am if you get my meaning.’ Loanne was just about to agree when she suddenly shouted out. ‘The curtain moved!’
‘Yes! I saw it. There is definitely somebody looking out at us.’ Lucy waved and waited to see if it was acknowledged, but there was no movement at the window now. The face had vanished. So still was the curtain, in fact, that they both began to wonder if they had really seen it move. Lucy turned her horse’s head. ‘Come on, I’ll race you back to the stable!’
But then, suddenly, ‘Wait!’ shouted Loanne.
Both turned back to look at the house again. A dark blue car was driving up the lane towards the side door. It pulled up beside the silver car and the girls watched as a man in a sweater and jeans got out, taking a mobile phone from his ear and closing it before shoving it into his pocket. At the same time, a slender woman wearing a jacket and trousers, emerged from behind the house. The two exchanged a few words and then both the man and the woman went back around the house the way the woman had first appeared. A moment or two later, the two people re-emerged and the man got back into the blue car. As the woman was getting into the silver car, she looked over towards the two girls and scowled. Her face, Lucy thought, might just have launched a ship or two, for even at that distance she could see the features of a nose, the bridge of which indicated that it had been broken quite severely at some time.
‘Who’s that then?’ Lucy asked, nodding towards the woman who still stared persistently back at them. The horse fidgeted beneath her as if it, too, had discerned a certain air of hostility.
Loanne shrugged. ‘That’s the one.’
‘The dirty looker, you mean?’
‘Yep. Couldn’t give a dirtier look if she tried.’
‘I can tell! But why?’
‘No idea. She comes every day. Then she normally goes when the man arrives. He stays behind usually. It’s like changing shifts or something. A bit strange really.’
Lucy’s brow was furrowed. For a moment her gaze was locked with that of the woman. At first, it might have seemed that she didn’t want to be out-stared; but it was more than that. She felt transfixed. The face, for some reason, stirred some faint and distant memory at the back of Lucy’s mind, and whilst she struggled, trying to recollect just what it was, her gaze was fixed on it.
Suddenly, before Lucy could dredge up any memory, Dirty Looker broke the tussle and opened her car door. She got in and started the engine, gunning it mercilessly for a second or two before reversing back along the side of the house. She backed it around the front corner and then, after noisily shifting gears, drove away without so much as another glance back. The blue car reversed out and drove away after her, desperately it seemed, trying to keep up.
‘She’s really strange,’ Loanne stated frankly.
Lucy was rubbing her chin pensively with her thumb.
‘Hmm,’ was all she said as she squeezed gently on Romax’s sides with her legs and set off at a gallop only to see Loanne edging her horse closer as they headed across the field.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
For the first time since waking up in hospital, Lucy felt happy. She was beginning to realize just how important in life, love is, in all its varying shades, colours and degrees. Before this morning, she had been finding it very hard to come to terms with her condition. It had scared her; not just a little scare, one that you get one minute and get over the next. It was a deep and lonely, inextinguishable dread that left a void within her, an aching empty space as if she had been hollowed out. Having had her emotions stripped from her memory, she had felt empty, been empty. She knew no one and had no one to love, nor did she know anyone that she had loved.
But now the void was gradually filling, perhaps not in a satisfactory way for the people who already knew and loved her, but enough to diminish the drawn, lonely, empty feeling with which she had awakened. In the space of less than two days Lucy had gained a mother, two grandparents, a very concerned doctor and a new friend.
If things carried on at this rate, she thought, she would soon have a
full compliment of relatives and acquaintances. And anyway, she was beginning to like her newly discovered self. From what she had learned about her old self, she had sounded a bit boring and immature. And now, although she hadn’t regained any memory of who she was, by finding out all the things she could do, she was discovering herself; and that was interesting and exciting. Doctor Murray had been right; it was an adventure and, like any adventure, it had to have an explorer travelling into the unknown.
Lucy and Loanne chatted pretty well non stop for more than two hours, during which time they discussed everything about Lucy, which wasn’t a great deal up to now, and a substantial amount about her new friend.
Loanne explained about her own mother, and how she, like herself, had been very ill, but unlike Loanne, had succumbed to the illness when she, her daughter, was only six years old. Loanne had seemingly got over the loss, but listening to her describe it, Lucy discovered more lost or missing emotions, those of compassion, sadness and empathy for a friend. She began to feel that her life was like a dried out lake after a drought, gradually filling as the liquid, life-resuscitating components gradually trickled back into place.
They returned to the house early in the afternoon and as they sat at the dinner table eating a lunch of pasta topped with cheese and a tomato sauce, Lucy watched her mother chatting effortlessly with Doctor Murray. It began to cross her mind that the doctor possibly had another reason for inviting the two of them to stay the weekend. He may have invited Lucy but was there just a hint of an ulterior motive?
Amazingly, her mother was changing before her very eyes. She wasn’t the same woman she’d seen by her bed when she woke up in hospital. Now her mother seemed to smile effortlessly and, somehow, her pale, sallow complexion had disappeared and, with it, years had miraculously lifted off her age. It was becoming clear that her mother wasn’t middle aged at all. She was, to Lucy’s surprise, a youthful and vibrant young woman. She looked happier than yesterday and was more alert than at any time since Lucy had first set eyes on her. Now her mother seemed to be taking an interest in things around her. But then, Lucy thought, it shouldn’t have been such a big surprise. As Mrs. Lockhart had sat and watched her, Lucy realized that sadness and worry would have been the least symptoms of a mother looking at and seeing her daughter in a coma. And while her mother had been visiting her and carrying out her vigil at Lucy’s bedside for days on end, perhaps the doctor had got to know her much better than she had first realized.
She paused from eating and thought about it for a moment. Was this yet another emotion being rekindled? Wasn’t she just a little jealous? But then, as quickly as the feeling had spiked into her thoughts, it evaporated, leaving her thinking about the events of the day and all the other new emotions that had filled it.
For a while Lucy ate silently, looking at her food. It needed a little more spice, she thought, and lifted her head to ask Loanne to pass the pepper. Loanne was already handing it to her across the table, beaming broadly. Lucy tilted her head curiously and thanked her, then smiled back as they all continued with their meal.
Something kept drawing Lucy’s mind back to horses and riding and all the things that had transpired during the morning. She had rediscovered so many different emotions, but there was more. Something definitely linked to her subconscious self was tweaking and pulling at her. There was unquestionably another emotion lurking somewhere near the surface of her mind, preparing itself for revelation. Gradually, she was realizing what it was. She felt angry but, yet again, it was a feeling that she was going to have to evaluate. Like all other emotions there are varying degrees and shades of anger, and thinking about them, she wasn’t just a little cross or irked at the actions of the people she had seen at the neighbouring farm house. There was something about them and the place that, now she thought about it, made her insides well up with rage. She stopped chewing her food, stiffened her neck, tightened her jaw until the muscles on the side of her face stood out and danced as the pressure moved from one side of her face to the other, (a little like her father’s had when he’d been angry, her mother thought as she watched her), and just gazed through the thick pine table top.
‘What’s wrong Lucy?’ her mother asked, instantly catching her mood. ‘Are you feeling all right?’ She reached across and placed her hand on Lucy’s. ‘Lucy?’
‘Huh?’ Lucy broke the trance. ‘Oh, I… er…’ She scowled. ‘I was just thinking,’ she said, her voice fading off as she tilted her head in thought. She raised her hand to her cheek and deliberated another moment. ‘I was miles away, wasn’t I?’ she stated, suddenly looking at all around her and smiling slightly. She shrugged and gave a look of bewilderment which matched the looks on all their faces and then, still rather pensive, and still watched by her companions, she looked down at her plate and began to eat again. It took a moment or two for them to do the same. They were obviously expecting some new revelation. Her demeanour had set the track. But they were going to have to wait a little longer.
Lucy ate in silence. For her the moment had passed. As soon as her thoughts had been interrupted, they had instantly evaporated, leaving her wondering. For some reason not yet clear, there seemed to be some kind of link between what she had seen and her present state of mind. Possibly, she had recognised them, but could not remember from where? Or were the events just a trigger, some thing or some action that was trying to jog her memory about some other person or some other place?
‘Who are the people next door?’ she suddenly asked between mouthfuls of pasta. The doctor had made a respectable meal. Lucy wasn’t sure just how much work went into making a spaghetti Bolognese. She thought that perhaps she should know. But then, perhaps she had never been the domesticated kind of daughter. Possibly the five a side, under-thirteens football team had been her thing. But strangely, despite realizing that she was really quite fit and athletic, since she had left the hospital, she hadn’t had any compunction to rush out and start kicking a ball about.
‘Next door?’ Doctor Murray looked puzzled. With knitted brows he looked across to the window that faced out towards his neighbour.
‘You know, at the farmhouse, Lucy means, Daddy,’ said Loanne, flicking a stray tress of hair off her face and sipping at her glass of water.
Shaking his head and looking back at the assembled faces, he said, ‘No idea.’ He put his fork down and thought for a moment. ‘I really only know what Loanne has told me. She spends hours nosing at what other people are doing, especially over there. She’ll grow up to be a curtain twitcher, mark my words.’
‘Daddy!’
‘Well you will my love. Honestly, you seem far too preoccupied with what’s going on over there. Neighbours are neighbours.’
‘Tell me about it!’ said Lucy’s mother, lifting her eyes in an I-know-just-what-you-mean sort of way. ‘When you live in a street, you know all about neighbours!’
‘In what way?’ asked Loanne.
‘In the way that you don’t really know much about any of them at all, that’s what I mean. You can live next door to somebody and never set eyes on them, or worse still, when you do see them, you never have a word to say to each other.’ She shrugged. ‘Then on the other hand you can have neighbours that are entirely the opposite; never out of each other’s houses.’ She paused and then added, ‘It gets easier to know your neighbours when you have children.’
‘Huh,’ Loanne grunted and looked at her father reprimandingly. ‘You haven’t answered Lucy’s question though, have you? She just wants to know what I want to know, Daddy.’
The doctor rubbed his chin with his knuckles. The familiar dark shadow was already forming on his face.
‘Well, at first I thought perhaps they were holiday makers,’ he said pensively. ‘But then I remembered that the old man who used to live there had been an old miser, or so the story goes. I didn’t actually ever meet him. He was away in an old folk’s home somewhere when I bought this place. Died soon after as far as I know. So then when people kept turning
up and leaving again without actually moving in, I got to thinking that they were perhaps in the throws of doing a thorough search of the place to find the supposedly hidden hoards!’
‘The people who call there all the time don’t seem to be dressed for tearing up floorboards or anything like that,’ Loanne suggested. ‘And what about the man who seems to be being kept out of sight?’ she persisted as her father resumed eating.
‘Perhaps that’s the mystery man’s job, searching the house,’ put in Lucy’s mum. ‘Or,’ she said in an even less serious tone, ‘perhaps he’s hiding! He’s a Russian spy!’
Lucy scowled reproachfully. She could tell she was being goaded. ‘I’m not even going to answer that.’
‘Or he’s a policeman on surveillance!’ Loanne joined in the mood. ‘What have you been up to Daddy! Or perhaps he’s…’
‘Just somebody minding his own business,’ Doctor Murray said, waiving his finger at his daughter.
Everyone was giggling, except Lucy. But, in the giddy mood that had overtaken them, nobody noticed.
‘I don’t know what you’ve put in this pasta,’ said Mrs. Lockhart, still chuckling, and taking a fork full into her mouth. She chewed it and swallowed. ‘Whoever he is,’ she said, patting Lucy on the arm, ‘he’s probably a lonely old man whose son and daughter visit every day.’
Lucy just shook her head as they all resumed their meal in silence.
For a while no one spoke as they all concentrated on eating their pasta. But had they looked up, they would have noticed that Lucy’s eyes had opened wide, her jaw had dropped in quite an unsightly way, considering that her mouth was full, and her face had suddenly lost a little of the colour gained from the outside activities of the morning. In the background, Lucy heard the conversation regain some momentum, but she was unsure just what topic it was about. Her mind was racing. Something, nothing certain or concrete yet, but something small and seed-like was tickling in the deep empty chasm that had once been her memory. After a long moment, she closed her mouth and carried on chewing until her mouth was empty, then she put down her fork and rubbed her temple.