Look Behind You (6 page)

‘But I know I’d never try to kill myself.’

He remains silent. Just looks at me in a calm, doctorly way that says he’s seen it all before and nothing surprises him anymore.

‘What do you mean by a moderate amount, anyway? How much would I have taken?’ A tingling sensation starts under my scalp. I rub the back of my head against the pillow.

‘Probably only three or four tablets. Enough to make you very sleepy.’

‘But will I get my memory back?’ I ask shakily. ‘I’ve lost seven weeks. I need to know what happened. I need to know if…’ What do I say? If I’m mad? If I’m hallucinating? If I tried to commit suicide? ‘I need to know if there’s someone out there who’s going to come back for me.’

‘The brain is a very complicated piece of machinery, and unfortunately, there’s no cure for amnesia, but many forms do fix themselves. Sometimes patients with amnesia that’s not caused by a brain injury experience the return of their memories spontaneously or over time. It’s a waiting game, I’m afraid.’

I feel a pain in my chest, as if someone has dealt me a swift blow. ‘A waiting game?’ Waiting for some unknown person to come back and kill me. Lost in limbo until he’s caught and locked up.

‘I have no definitive answer for you. Your memory could return in a matter of days, weeks, or even months. It could return in bits and pieces or it could happen all at once. Your long-term and short-term memory seem to be functioning correctly. It’s just this small period of time that is missing. But I’m very optimistic you’ll make a full recovery eventually.’

‘And in the meantime, I won’t know if this person is still after me.’

‘I’m sure the police are doing all they can.’ He smiles, as if that’s supposed to reassure me somehow. It doesn’t. Nothing will until I know what really happened. ‘The police have spoken with me about you accompanying them to the area you were found wandering.’

‘They said they would talk to you.’

‘I think we need to wait at least a day and see how you’re feeling then. Physically, you have no major injuries, although you’re still a little weak. We’ll take the drip out tonight, but I want to make sure you’re strong enough before you leave the hospital, even if it’s only for a short while.’ He stands up, presses his folder of notes to his chest. ‘Try not to worry too much. Getting stressed won’t help your recovery.’

How can I not worry? It’s already burrowing a dark tunnel beneath my sternum.

‘Another doctor will be in to see you later to do a psychiatric evaluation.’

Too weary to speak, I can only nod.

~~~~

I’m sipping a cup of tea the orderly has just brought round the ward. I don’t usually have sugar in it, but I asked for three in this one. All the better to get my strength up. I don’t want to stay in this place any longer than I have to in case I end up in the loony bin again.

I’ve been going over and over it my head, and I’m sure now. Absolutely positive that what I described did really happen. It wasn’t a hallucination. It wasn’t a relapse.

It must’ve been the head injury that’s made me lose my memory. I just don’t know how I got the injury, or how I woke up in that place.

Or was it the sleeping tablets?

Think, Chloe!

But the more I think, the more muddled my head gets.

I flip the sheets back, swing my legs over the bed, and sit up. The room tilts before my eyes. I take a deep breath and gently touch the lump on my head. It’s solid, like a hardboiled egg under the surface.

I wait for my vision to clear and stand up, gripping onto the bedside cabinet with my left hand for support. On unsteady legs, I tentatively test the weight on my sore ankle. It’s painful, but at least I can support myself. I’m wearing one of those horrible hospital gowns with lots of ties at the back that you can never do up properly yourself. Holding onto the back of it for modesty with my right hand, I take small steps around the room. Back again to where I started. When I turn round to repeat the exercise, a man is standing in my doorway, watching me.

I freeze.

He has a shock of grey hair, thick grey eyebrows, and a grey goatee beard. He’s wearing dark green cord trousers, a white shirt with a small stain of something that looks like coffee on the front, and a tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbow, giving him a grandfatherly appearance. The look on his face…it’s creepy, like he recognizes me somehow, but I’ve never seen him before in my life.

‘Stay there!’ I say, pressing the emergency bell by my bed.

He smiles but doesn’t make a move towards me. ‘Very good move, Chloe. You want to make sure I’m not a threat, but I can assure you I’m a doctor.’

A nurse rushes to the room. ‘Is everything OK?’ She glances between the man and me.

I point a wobbly hand at him. ‘He says he’s a doctor, but he doesn’t look like one. Is he?’

She gives me a relieved smile. ‘Yes, this is Dr Drew.’

It’s then I notice the ID badge pinned to his shirt pocket, although it’s too far away for me to read. I sit on the bed, my shoulders relaxing with relief. ‘Thanks,’ I tell her.

‘Do you need anything else?’ she asks.

‘No. Thank you.’

She walks out, and Dr Drew takes off his ID badge, holding it out for me to inspect. I take it and read:
Dr Albert Drew, Consultant Psychiatrist, Mental Health Unit, Queen Elizabeth II Hospital.

‘Sorry,’ I mumble, handing it back to him.

‘No, that was very wise, under the circumstances.’ He nods to the chair beside the bed. ‘Do you mind if I sit?’

‘I don’t mind.’ Or maybe I did, depending on what more bad news I was going to get.

‘Do you recognize me?’ he says after he gets comfortable, resting his hands on his ample belly.

‘No. Should I?’

He gives me a warm smile. ‘I was in charge of your treatment when you were admitted in April.’

‘Oh. Right. I…I don’t remember that.’

‘Yes. So Dr Traynor informed me.’ He steeples his fingers. ‘Do you think you could tell me what happened before you were brought in this time?’

I flop forward, cradling my head in my hands, my long hair swinging down over my face like a curtain. ‘Oh, God,’ I groan. I don’t want to go over it again.

‘I know this is very traumatic for you, but we’re all here to help you.’

I lift my head and search his eyes, looking for some kind of trap, but all I can see is kindness and compassion there.

‘Tell you what, let me rustle up some tea and biscuits, and I’ll come back in a minute.’ He leaves the room.

I swing my legs back into bed, pull the sheets over me, and stare at the ceiling. He returns a few minutes later with two mugs of tea that look like dirty dishwater and a plate of biscuits on a tray. He puts them on the bedside table then settles back into a comfy position on the chair and waits for me to speak. I ignore the foul-looking tea and tell him what I’ve told everyone else.

He watches me expectantly, nodding every now and then without interrupting me.

When I finish, I say, ‘Do you think I made this all up?’

‘Did someone say you had?’

I think about the look in Dr Traynor’s eyes. Maybe I mistook his lack of belief for concern. But Liam…no, he definitely didn’t believe me. I don’t know if the police even think I was telling the truth. ‘I don’t think my husband believes me.’ I bite my lip. ‘But I didn’t make this up. I know I didn’t.’

I know I’m not mad.

Don’t I?

I mean, not mad as I apparently was when I was sectioned.

He regards me for a moment with a kind smile then leans towards me slightly. ‘I don’t think you’ve made this up. What’s important is what you
believe.
And you believe this did happen. But…’ he pauses here. ‘What you’ve described is a reaction very similar to what happened with the antidepressants before when you were sectioned.’

‘I know.’ I exhale a lungful of breath in defeat.

‘On the other hand, you have slight abrasions on your wrists, which could point to you being retrained. You’re dehydrated, scratched and bruised, and you have a bump to your head. Something has obviously occurred. In which case, there is a possibility you could still be in danger.’

7

‘That’s what I’m scared of. I don’t know who took me. I don’t know
why
they took me.’ A rising panic forces my chest muscles to constrict.

‘Indeed. It’s natural to be scared, but I think we need to leave the investigation to the police and let us doctors handle the other side of things. I was more concerned about finding out if you were a danger to yourself.’

‘Myself?’ I say cautiously.

He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t need to. I can see everything he’s not saying reflected clearly in his eyes. He clears his throat. ‘When you were released from hospital before, you had one follow up appointment with me, but you mainly wanted to talk about the loss of your baby.’

A twinge of grief rips through me so hard it physically hurts deep inside, leaving me raw.

‘I encouraged you to write a journal or a letter to your baby as a way to let the grief out.’

‘Did I do that?’

‘I don’t know. As I said, you only had one appointment, but you thought it sounded like a good idea.’

‘But I wasn’t depressed, was I? I didn’t think about killing myself? It was just grief?’

‘There can be a fine line between depression and grief. Sometimes the symptoms of depression are similar to the emotions of the grieving process. But in our outpatient appointment, I saw no signs that would indicate clinical depression.’

‘But I
was
depressed when I went to my GP after the miscarriage?’

He purses his lips, as if he’s weighing up how much to tell me. ‘Apparently, your GP believed you were; that’s why she prescribed the antidepressants and sleeping tablets. Liam also believed you were depressed.’

‘Dr Traynor thinks that after I came out of hospital, the grief turned into depression again. He thinks I tried to kill myself with the sleeping tablets, but I had another adverse side effect and I’ve hallucinated this whole thing.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t know. I mean, this is all just…’ I shrug hopelessly. ‘It’s so confusing. I don’t think I would’ve tried to kill myself. And I know I wasn’t hallucinating when I was kept confined in that underground place. I remember it all so vividly. The terror. The feel of the walls when I touched them. The rat. The dripping sound of water. Scraping away at the doorframe. Running down the corridors and through the woods.’

Dr Drew looks skeptical. ‘When you had the episode with the antidepressants, you also believed the hallucinations were very real, too.’ He pauses for a moment then says, ‘Perhaps we should talk about the time you do remember. The time before the party.’

‘Will it help me recover my lost memories?’ Hope and desperation emanates through my voice.

‘It’s possible. It may trigger something in your brain, and it could help us determine your state of mind at the time this new incident began.’ He scratches his head. ‘I believe you could be suffering from dissociative amnesia, which means amnesia caused by trauma or stress. It’s a form of denying a distressing event as a coping mechanism. Since there is no brain injury involved here, it’s likely that you may begin to recall the trauma over time, and talking about your past could help with that. It is possible that the trauma of the miscarriage itself has brought this on.’

I frown, confused. ‘Wait, Dr Traynor didn’t mention anything like that. He said the amnesia could be from concussion or as a side effect of taking the sleeping tablets, the Sil…Sil—’

‘Silepine.’

‘Yes, that.’

‘Well, all of our theories are entirely possible.’ He sounds a little defensive, and I wonder if there’s some kind of departmental rivalry going on about my diagnosis. ‘Unfortunately, there is no exact test we can do to prove the correct one, which is why we need to look at everything.’

‘I see,’ I say, except I don’t see at all. I feel like I’m stumbling around in the dark still, blindly bumping into things. I take a sip of water and swallow slowly. My fingertips itch under the gauze and I fight the urge to scratch them. ‘Where do I start, then?’

‘How were things going before the miscarriage?’

‘Well…things weren’t perfect, I suppose. I mean, whose life is perfect?’

‘I would imagine it depends on your idea of perfection. What was your home life and work like?’ He looks at me as if I’m a curious specimen.

‘Work was good. I teach A Level English Language to college students. Of course, you get the odd pupil who likes to muck around and have fun, but on the whole, they’re a good bunch of teenagers. It’s a sixth form college affiliated with Cambridge University. Most of the students are from good backgrounds and want to go on to Cambridge, so it’s not like I’m teaching in an inner city school, which brings its own set of problems.’

‘That must be very rewarding.’

‘For the most part it is. Liam doesn’t like me teaching.’

‘Why not?’