Dispossession (3 page)

“You’re supposed to be resting,” she said, fussing with my
pillows and my pulse. “It’s no good battering your head against a brick wall,
you know, that won’t bring things back any quicker. It’s like when something
just slips your mind, you know? You have to forget about it, and then suddenly
there it is. Think about something else, and I bet you’ll start remembering
what you’ve lost. You’re trying too hard, that’s all. Do you want the telly on?
Or the radio? As you’re obviously not going to go to sleep?”

“No,” I said, relieved to find myself positive about one
thing in my life. “Thanks,” added a little belatedly; and then, “Do you know
where my clothes are?”

“In the locker there, what’s left of them. But you’re not
getting up, sonny Jim, so don’t you think it.”

I smiled thinly. “Last thing I want to do, believe me. My
legs ache like fuck,” which I said only to hear her cluck; I don’t much like
being ordered about by strangers. But she never twitched an eyebrow, and that
was points to her, so I explained more reasonably, “I only want to see what I’ve
got in my pockets.”

Just my luck, to land a maternal Tolkien fan. She hissed
softly as she opened a drawer in the bedside locker, and whispered “What has it
got in its pocketses?” And then she tipped the drawer upside down over my
knees, and said, “That’s the lot. Anything missing must have got left in the
wreck. I don’t know if Mr Coffey would approve of this or not, but it sounds
like a good idea to me. Maybe something here’ll trigger your memories.”

That’s what I was hoping also, or a part of it. She put the
drawer back into the locker and stood there, arms folded, watching with
interest; I kept my face neutral and my hands still, and said, “I thought
nurses were all desperately overworked?”

“Touchy,” she said, tutting at my manners. “If there’s
anything personal in there, lad, I’ve probably seen it already. I’m the one who
undressed you—well, cut the rags off you, mostly—and sorted out what was
savable.”

“Was I that much of a mess, then?” My body might be an
awkward and uncomfortable vehicle just now, but it didn’t seem to me so badly
damaged. Not from the neck down, at least. I wasn’t in traction, or even in
plaster so far as I could see.

She shook her head. “Cuts and bruises is all. But you looked
worse than that when you came in, and we couldn’t take chances. What I say is,
if you’re going to throw your car off the road, you shouldn’t wear Calvin Klein
to do it.”

“I haven’t got any Calvin Klein,” I said automatically.
Levis were my limit, I didn’t give a toss about designer labels on my clothes.

“Well, you haven’t now, that’s for sure.” I guess it was
becoming clear to her around about then that I’d make small talk for the rest
of the day and all night too, but I wasn’t going to look through my things
until she was gone. That realisation still didn’t shift her, though. She
glanced at the flowers in the window, and said, “Did that little wife of yours
show you the cards that came with these?”

“No.”
And don’t call her my
wife
—but I didn’t want to say that aloud, I just beamed it as a sullen
message of denial which penetrated not a millimetre into the woman’s skull.

“No? She’ll have been too much relieved to think of it, I
expect. Three days she’s been sitting by your bed, you know, even in the ICU
where she was just getting under people’s feet, and so we told her. We’ve sent
her home at night, of course, but she’s straight back again in the morning,
first thing. Ruining her beauty over you, she’s been, so I hope you’re properly
grateful...”

I said nothing, though Sue’s beauty didn’t seem to me to
have taken noticeable damage. Meanwhile, as she talked the nurse was gathering
up the florists’ cards from all the separate bouquets.

“Hard enough time we had of it, getting her to go and clean
up when you started to wake. It took Mr Coffey himself to tell her that it’d be
an hour or two yet before you made any kind of sense, you weren’t coming to in
a hurry; and besides she looked a mess, he told her, and she didn’t smell nice.
I think that was what shifted her, in the end. Went running off for a shower
and a change, and she was still back inside half an hour. Now, you’ll want to
know who else has been thinking of you,” she went on, in defiance of the facts.
Right now I wasn’t bothered, I didn’t give a damn; but she clearly did. Rather
than giving me the cards—“you don’t want to be fussing your eyes over these,
not with your bad head”—she read them to me.

Here at last, for the first time since those early thoughts
registered that I was waking into pain but that there was a woman there to
cuddle and kiss me better, some things started to make sense. Or to sound
sensible, at least, to conform to the world that I lived in. These were names
that I knew, colleagues and friends.

But nothing lasts, nothing is reliable. Though there was
nothing from my mother, which again conformed to the world that I lived in, one
card read ‘with best wishes from Father and Mother Chu’. And apparently they
had been to visit, twice: a solemn, concerned and very Chinese couple, the
nurse said, who had sat almost without speaking, smiling apologies if they seemed
the least bit in the way, while their worried eyes shifted constantly from Sue
to me and back to Sue again. Their daughter, obviously, if anything in this
crazy mess was obvious. Whatever was going on here, I wasn’t facing a single
nutcase but an inscrutable conspiracy.

And no, there were no flowers from Carol; but the last and
largest bunch, the brightest and the brashest bouquet was from Vernon Deverill,
and what the hell, what the giddy
hell
was
he doing sending me flowers? Vernon Deverill spent a good deal of his time—and
hence his solicitors’ time—in and out of court, though so far as I knew he’d
never been convicted of anything more serious than speeding; but he wasn’t one
of our clients. We had something of a reputation for honesty, for straight dealing
with our clients and with the courts; Vernon Deverill wouldn’t recognise a deal
unless it was helical. The only time I could recall seeing him in the flesh, he’d
been standing on the steps outside the court building giving sound-bites to the
media, talking about police persecution and harassment after his latest
acquittal. Myself and ninety per cent of his auditors simply assumed that he’d
nobbled the jury again, though not even the stupidest reporter there showed any
signs of suggesting it.

And this man, this leading light of our business and
criminal fraternity who didn’t or shouldn’t know me from Adam, was suddenly
sending me flowers to wish me a speedy recovery? Well, it was just one more on
the growing list of impossible things that I was apparently expected to
believe; but it was a big one, that. Bigger than cars and clothes, at any rate.

As big as being married, maybe. All these things were
impossible, but some were more impossible than others, and I wasn’t even close
to giving those credence. One thing I’d known all my life, that people would
lie and lie again for their advantage—you had only to look at my mother—and
florists at least were easy people to lie to. Not their job to check up, to be
sure that the name on the message was the name of the sender.

γνϖθι σεαυντ,
know thyself
was the motto of the Seven Wise Men,
at least according to Plato. It used to stand inscribed on Apollo’s temple at
Delphi. I might have seen it with Carol, if it had still been there: we’d both
done a Classics option at university, that was where we met, and we’d spent a
long summer in Greece after, getting to know each other. I hadn’t needed to
take it on board as a personal motto also, because it was already there in my
head, had been a part of my private philosophy long before I ever thought I had
one.

I knew myself fairly well, I fancied; and even if I’d lost a
large chunk of memory, my personality hadn’t gone with it. I was still the same
man I used to be. I could feel that; every thought fitted to the old familiar
grammar, my abiding image of myself. Which meant that things done during the
time that was missing would have been done according to the same rules I’d
always set myself, an imperfect man trying to deal honestly with the world; and
that meant that there was fraud and deception here somehow, though I couldn’t
understand it. I was who I was, who I always had been: and the Jonty Marks
whose life I had lived would no more have got involved with Vernon Deverill
than he would have left Carol in order to marry a stranger...

o0o

I was drifting, daydreaming almost, trying to construct this
impossible world to see how it would look, and denying it even as I built.
Perhaps the nurse thought that I was sleeping at last. At any rate she left me,
as quietly as her heavy body would allow; and the click of the door’s closing
brought me back, and with no audience, no distractions, I could turn my fingers
and my thoughts, my spindizzy mind in my aching head to the scatter of stuff on
the bedspread.

Not the car keys, they presumably got mangled along with the
car and me; but my house keys were there, or I thought they were. Briefly. My
key wallet was: worn black leather, anciently familiar to eyes and touch. I’d
won it on a tombola stall at a church bazaar when I was thirteen, and always used
it since. But when I popped it open, most of the keys inside were wrong. Wrong
colours, wrong lengths and the wards made unfamiliar patterns against my palm.

For a minute, two minutes, five I played those keys between
my fingers, and recognised only a couple of them, the ones that would let me
into my mother’s house. Otherwise it seemed I could only open doors that were
strange to me, I knew not where. If this was a con—and surely, surely it had
somehow to be a con—then it was a mind-bendingly efficient one.

We might have changed the locks, I supposed, Carol and I, in
these two or three missing months. New keys for our old home, I might have; but
I didn’t think so. Especially when the next thing I picked up was my old purse,
just as certainly my own, and the first thing I saw when I opened it was a
photo of Sue smiling out at me from behind plastic. I felt like Patrick
McGoohan, waking to wicked if invisible chains. As an exercise in brainwashing
this was superb, except that everything they wanted me to accept was impossibly
out of tune with who and what I was. I’d never carried a photo of any girl in
my purse; didn’t see the point. I always had better and more intimate pictures
in my head, ever ready for private viewing.

The picture was a head-and-shoulders shot cropped from a
larger photograph. I slipped it out of the pocket designed to hold it, and wasn’t
at all surprised to find it inscribed on the back. ‘Jonty—all my love, Sue.’
Plain, simple, affecting, and I didn’t credit a word of it. Efficiency, that
was all. And Christ knew, if she’d sat at my bedside for three days she’d had
time enough to fiddle unobserved with everything that was mine. Except my mind,
except my mind, except my mind...

Her luck, perhaps, that my mind was letting me down; she couldn’t
have anticipated that. Which being the case, I didn’t see how she’d ever
expected this scam to work, whatever its purpose; but she’d worked so hard,
there must have been something. Some benefit to her in deceiving other people,
perhaps, even if she couldn’t have hoped to deceive me. And then I woke up and
my memory had holes in, and she thought maybe she’d have a try at the big
one...

Did I believe that? No. It didn’t work. Nothing worked. I
had the pieces of two separate jigsaws in my head, and try as I might they
would not fit together.

But perhaps they didn’t need to. One of them was mine, and
the other definitely not; I could throw that away, perhaps, and never heed it.
Sue had gone, I knew not where. She might not even come back. Please? Then I could
simply get on with recovering the life I knew, and not worry...

A quiet voice in my head somewhere, the whisper of reason
reminded me that there were too many questions unanswered that I couldn’t very
well walk away from; and it reminded me also that there was no sign of Carol
here, nor any message from her. No flowers, from a long-time partner who valued
all the traditional gestures: Christmas stockings and Valentine cards, Easter
eggs and birthday bonks and definitely, very definitely flowers and grapes in
hospital. I tried grandly to ignore that massive absence, with little success
until my eyes fell again to the personal knick-knacks spread across my lap.

After the photo and the keys, it was no major surprise to
find a ring also. Plain gold, the inside cut with initials, a date and a
promise.
JM & SCM, 29 Feb and for ever
.
Expensive business, setting up a scam: this was a good ring. And it fitted.
They hadn’t managed to make a paler mark on my finger, where presumably I was
supposed to have been wearing it, but perhaps I was supposed not to have had
time to acquire one. Less than two months, after all, and only weak spring
sunlight to take a tan from, even if my job ever gave me time to see the sun...

My job or my new wife, of course, they had that also to
argue with.

There was other jewellery here, though I never wore any. A
single long, dangling earring, cheap and attractive and undeniably female: not
Carol’s, of course, but Sue would presumably claim it as her own. More
verisimilitude, I supposed. A fine gold chain that might have been meant for a
man or a woman, though Sue only wore silver, at least so far as I’d seen in one
meeting; and if there was a message in that,
this
one’s yours, boy
, then there was a terrifyingly subtle mind at work
here. A stud and a ring also for pierced ears and in gold again, heavy enough
for a bloke; but they’d fallen down there at least, because my ears weren’t
pierced.

At least...

No mirror within reach, but my fumbling fingers found a
little dimple in one lobe and then in the other, where they stuck out below the
bandaging. I wasn’t even surprised. I’d gone beyond that, somehow, so far that
only their failure in a matter of such crucial detail could possibly have
surprised me. Cue the theme for
The Twilight Zone
,
and hear me hum along.