hair. It didn't do much to straighten it. 'Now, Abigail, is it all right if I call you that?' I nodded. 'And call me Charlie. I'd like to talk to you about your amnesia. Do you feel up to that?' I nodded again. 'Good.' He gave a faint smile. He had got on to his real subject and his talk, his whole manner, was more assured. I liked that. 'Now, this is the only time I'm going to behave like a real doctor, but I'd like to have a look at your head. Is that all right?' More nodding. 'I looked at your notes. Plenty of bruising all over, but no particular reference to headaches, soreness on the head, that sort of thing. Is that right?'
'My very first memory, from after the bit where I lost my memory, if you know what I mean. I woke up and I had a terrible pain in my head.'
'Right. Do you mind if I take some notes?' He took a mangy little notebook out of his pocket and began writing. Then he put it on the bed and leant forward. 'They're going to pop you into a machine later for a quick look at your brain. But this is a different sort of examination. Do you mind?' As he said this, he leant forward and very gently touched my face and all over my head. I love my head being touched. It's my secret fetish. The main thing I love about getting my hair cut is having my hair washed by a stranger, those fingers on my scalp. Terry as well. Sometimes we'd sit in the bath together and he'd wash my hair. That's what relationships are for, little things like that. Charles Mulligan gave a little murmuring sound as his fingertips pattered over my head. I gave a little cry when he touched above my right ear. 'That hurt?'
'It's just sore.' He looked more closely. 'Is there a problem?'
'Swollen and bruised but I can't see anything significant.' He sat back. 'There. That's all done.' He reached over for a file. It took some rummaging to find the right one. 'Now I'm going to ask you some questions. They might seem a bit silly, but bear with me. They'll take a bit of time. Are you up to it? I could come back later, or tomorrow, if you need a rest. I know you've had a hard day.'
I shook my head. 'I just want to do anything I can as quickly as possible.'
'Great.' He opened a large printed booklet. 'You ready?'
'Yes.'
'What's your name?'
'Is this part of the test?'
'That's sort of a philosophical question. Do you want to bear with me?'
'Abigail Elizabeth Devereaux.'
'When were you born?'
'The twenty-first of August, 1976.'
'What's the name of the Prime Minister?'
'Are you serious? I'm not that bad.'
'I'm testing various kinds of memory. It'll get harder.'
So I told him the name of the Prime Minister. I told him the day of the week and that we were in St. Anthony's Hospital. I counted backwards from twenty. I counted forwards in threes. I counted backwards from a hundred in sevens. I was rather proud of myself.
Then it started to get hard. He showed me a page of different shapes. He chatted to me for a moment about something stupid and then showed me another page of shapes. I had to remember which were on both sheets. He got a bit embarrassed as he read me a story about a boy taking a pig to the market. I had to tell it back to him. He showed me stars and triangles paired with colours, word pairs. He showed me four increasingly complicated shapes. The fourth one looked like a vandalized electricity pylon. It made me dizzy even to look at, let alone draw from memory.
'This is giving me a bloody headache,' I said, as I struggled with it.
'Are you all right?' he said, with concern.
'It makes my head spin.'
'I know what you mean,' he said. 'I get stuck at the counting backwards. Don't worry, there are just a couple more.'
He started to recite sequences of numbers. Groups of three and four were a doddle. He stopped at eight, which I could just about manage. Then I had to recite the sequences backwards that really made my brain ache. After that he brought out a sheet of coloured squares. He tapped them in an order which I had to repeat. Again up to eight. And then backwards.
'Fuck,' I said, when he put the sheet away.
'Yes,' he said. 'That's all. We're done.'
'So, did I pass? Am I brain-damaged?'
He smiled cheerfully. 'I don't know. I have no tests for the pre-morbid period. Sorry, that sounds grim. I mean for the period before the onset of amnesia. But I can't believe that it was much better than this. You've got a remarkably good memory. Your spatial recall in particular is excellent. I'd swap you any time.'
I couldn't help blushing. 'Well, thanks, um, Charlie, but.. .'
He looked serious for a moment and peered at me closely. 'What do you think?' he said.
'I feel fine. I mean, I don't feel fine. I have bad dreams and I keep going over and over things in my head. But I can think clearly. It's just that gap in my memory. I keep trying and trying to remember but it's like staring into pitch darkness.'
He began putting the papers back into files.
'Try looking at the boundaries,' he said. 'Take your image of an area of darkness. You could say that there is an area that's entirely dark and another that's entirely light. You could try concentrating on where the two areas meet.'
'I've done that, Charlie. Oh, God, I've done it. There's no problem for the afterwards bit. I woke up and I was there in that place. I didn't know how I'd got there, didn't remember being grabbed. Before it's different. I can't remember the last thing I did or anything like that. There's no cut-off point. I just have vague recent memories of being at work. It was like I went into the darkness slowly without noticing.'
'I see,' Charles said, and wrote something more. It made me nervous when he did that.
'But isn't there something ridiculous about it? The one thing I need to remember is gone. I don't want to know who the bloody Prime Minister is. I want to remember how I was grabbed, what he looks like. What I've been thinking is, could it be something that happened that was so disturbing that I've suppressed it?'
He clicked his pen shut. When he replied it was almost as if he were trying to hide a faint smile. 'And that maybe I could dangle my watch in front of your face and it would all come flooding back?'
'That would be very useful.'
'Maybe,' he said. 'But I'm sure your amnesia is unrelated to any form of post-traumatic stress. Or indeed any psychological symptom.'
'When I'm talking to Cross I mean the police it just feels so ridiculous.'
'It's unfortunate and frustrating,' he said. 'But it's not ridiculous. Post-traumatic amnesia after a closed head injury such as yours isn't uncommon. It usually happens in car crashes. They bang their head during the smash. When they wake up after the injury they don't remember the crash, but often they don't remember the hours or even days leading up to it either.'
I touched my head gently. Suddenly it felt so fragile.
'Post-traumatic,' I said. 'I thought you said it wasn't something psychological.'
'It isn't,' he said. 'Psychogenic amnesia -I mean amnesia caused by psychological influences, rather than an injury to the brain is rarer in cases like yours. And also how shall I say? more dubious.'
'What do you mean?'
He gave a wary cough. 'I'm not a psychologist, so maybe I'm biased. But, for example, a substantial percentage of murderers claim to have no memory of committing their murders. These are not people who have received physical injuries. There could be various explanations. They are often very drunk, which can result in memory black-outs. Committing a murder is, presumably, an extremely stressful thing to do, more than almost anything else that can be imagined. That could affect memory. Some of us sceptics might also say that there is often an incentive for a murderer to claim he has no memory of what happened.'
'But being kidnapped and threatened with death must be pretty bloody stressful. Couldn't that have made me forget for psychological reasons?'
'Not in my opinion, but if I were standing in court and you were a lawyer, you could get me to admit that it was possible. I'm afraid you're going to have a few other people prodding you like a lab rat to answer questions like
