One Small Act of Kindness Read online

  ‘Longhampton?’

  That wasn’t right. Or was it?

  The nurse picked up the notes from the plastic shelf at the foot of her bed and clicked her pen. She smiled. ‘And now you’re awake, maybe you can help us solve a couple of mysteries. First off, what’s your name?’

  She opened her mouth to speak, and then it hit her like a sheet of cold water, out of nowhere.

  She didn’t know.

  The neurological consultant arrived a few minutes after eleven o’clock, followed by the same nurse.

  The nurse was Karen, she reminded herself. Karen Holister. She could remember things now. Now wasn’t a problem. It was just everything leading up to now.

  ‘So, good morning.’ He smiled, then pushed his glasses up his nose to study her notes. ‘I’m Jonathan Reynolds. I’m from the traumatic brain injuries department. You are . . . ?’

  ‘I told Karen,’ she said, trying to sound calmer than she felt. ‘I can’t remember.’

  The foggy black sensation in her head intensified, and underneath the artificial calm of the painkillers, she felt a distant wrench of panic. Hearing that made it real. And it didn’t prompt a sudden flood of information, as she realised she’d secretly hoped it would.

  Jonathan Reynolds murmured something to the nurse, who went to close the door. Then he took a seat on a chair next to the bed. He smiled calmly and crossed his legs.

  ‘That must feel distressing, but please, don’t worry. You suffered concussion as a result of your accident and it looks as if that’s resulted in retrograde amnesia. Memory loss, in other words. It’s really not uncommon. Things generally right themselves in a short time frame. You had a CT scan when you were brought in and you didn’t present with any significant neurological damage, which is a very positive sign.’

  He had a relaxed manner, but she could tell he was watching her, his sharp brown eyes moving behind his glasses. She’d been here two days. They’d been watching her for two days. And she had no memory of any of it.

  ‘Does that mean I’ve got brain damage?’ she asked slowly. ‘Or not?’

  ‘Yes and no. The brain’s a funny thing. I don’t know how much you know about how memory works,’ he went on, as if they were discussing the weather, ‘but we store recent memories and remote memories in different areas of the brain. If you bang your head, or sometimes if you have a very traumatic experience, the connections are broken and you can’t access things that happened in the recent past, but you can still remember things that happened when you were a child. Or things you’ve learned through lots of repetition, like walking or driving. All those things would seem to be fine with you so far. You can speak; you have coordinated movement. We just need to work out which parts of your memory have been affected and then see if we can’t coax the rest out. It’s very, very rare to lose your memory completely. So don’t worry.’

  ‘I don’t remember the accident.’

  ‘Well, that’s not surprising. The good news is that apart from a few cracked ribs and some rather nasty grazing, you managed to walk away from it with nothing broken. You’ve got some spectacular bruises, mind you.’

  She stared at him, cold under the warm blanket of the painkillers. He kept using phrases like ‘good news’ and ‘positive sign’, but how could that possibly be true if she didn’t even know who she was?

  ‘But I don’t know my own name.’ Saying it gave her a physical tilt, as if she were on a rollercoaster that had suddenly dropped. She felt weightless, balancing on the edge of every second. ‘I don’t know who I am. How come you don’t know who I am? Aren’t there . . . records?’

  The doctor (Jonathan Reynolds) turned to pass the question to the nurse (Karen Holister). She gave her a quick apologetic shake of the head.

  ‘We’re not quite at that police state yet. You didn’t have any ID on you when you were brought in. We were waiting for you to wake up properly to tell us who you were.’

  That didn’t make sense. ‘I had no ID? But what about my handbag?’

  ‘You weren’t carrying it. Or rather, the police couldn’t find one at the scene.’

  ‘No phone? Didn’t I have a phone on me?’

  ‘I know, it’s quite incredible, isn’t it?’ He smiled. ‘You weren’t carrying a phone either. The police are going through their lost property, in case anyone’s handed something in locally.’

  ‘But no one’s called looking for me?’ Another strange sensation rippled through her: quick and shimmering, too quick to pin down. Her whole identity reliant on someone else, someone finding her, naming her. Bringing her back.

  ‘Not so far. We’re checking the missing person reports, obviously. But actually, we do have one thing,’ said Nurse Karen. ‘The police found this in your back pocket. Does it mean anything to you? I’m afraid the people at the address didn’t know you.’

  The nurse handed her a small Ziploc bag with a piece of paper in it.

  An evidence bag, she thought, like on television dramas. I’m in a television drama. I’m the mystery woman. It felt as if they were all talking about someone else.

  The paper was a page torn from a notebook, and on it was written:

  Jason and Libby Corcoran, The Swan Hotel, Rosehill Road, Longhampton.

  A phone number was scrawled underneath.

  Disappointment rose up her chest, spiked with panic. It meant nothing. It wasn’t a clue at all – more like the back of a piece of paper with something more important on the other side.

  Is that my handwriting? she wondered. Neat capitals, very clear and precise.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘That . . . that’s not bringing anything back.’

  ‘No? No problem,’ said Mr Reynolds. If he was disappointed, he didn’t show it. ‘What we’re going to do to begin with is try to work out when your memory stops and starts, by running through some questions. Is that all right? Do you feel up to it?’

  She nodded. What choice did she have?

  ‘Don’t think too hard about your answers. Just say whatever pops into your mind.’ He clicked his pen and glanced down at his notes, but a thought pushed its way out of her before he could ask the first question.

  ‘What have you been calling me? While I’ve been here. What name’s been on my notes?’

  She felt vulnerable, completely at the mercy of these strangers. The nurses didn’t ‘know’ any of the patients on the ward, but they had names. They had an identity, the start of a conversation. Clues to who they were – an Elsie, a Camilla, a Natalie.

  ‘We’ve been calling you Jo,’ said the nurse kindly. ‘Short for Joanne Bloggs. We were waiting until you were conscious so we could ask you what your name was.’

  Her eyes widened. Joanne. I’m not a Joanne. But that’s who I am now. That’s who they’ve decided I am.

  ‘Or if you didn’t know, what you’d like us to call you,’ the nurse (Karen) went on, as if that were completely normal.

  They were both looking at her. Waiting for her to say what she wanted to be called. Who she wanted to be.

  ‘Um, I don’t know what I want to be called.’ She struggled between wanting to help them and, at the same time, not feeling able to make a decision so huge.

  ‘We’ll come back to that – give you time to think.’ Mr Reynolds (Jonathan) smiled. ‘So, where do you live?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘OK. Mum and Dad. Where do they live?’

  ‘They don’t.’ It came out automatically; it was a fact, not something she felt. ‘They’re both dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry. How long ago did they die?’ It was conversational, but she knew he was aiming the questions carefully, pinpointing something technical, medical, within the soft emotional fabric of her life.

  She squeezed her eyes shut as the thick pain in her head increased and the detail of the memory slipped away. It was there, but she could
n’t get it. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We’ll come back to that,’ he said easily. ‘It’s a good sign that it’s there. How about you? Where do you live?’

  She opened her mouth, but . . . nothing. She shook her head.

  ‘Do you live here? Do you live in Longhampton? Or nearby? Martley? Rosehill? Much Headley?’

  She shook her head again. None of those places sounded familiar.

  ‘Don’t think of a name. Just think of home. What can you smell? What can you hear?’

  The blackness behind her eyelids thickened. She panicked, and then suddenly something made her dry lips move.

  ‘I think . . . London?’ It was a vague sensation of windows high up, counting red London buses. The smell of fried chicken and hot streets and a park with scrubby grass. Noise.

  ‘London! Very good. Well, you’re a long way from home, in that case.’

  ‘Not recently, though,’ she said, without opening her eyes, carefully probing the memory, trying to sneak up on something unawares so it popped into her mouth like a fact. ‘I think that was when I was younger.’

  ‘But that’s a start. Do you live with someone? Are you married?’

  She opened her eyes and glanced down at her hands, but they didn’t help. No ring. No pale mark where a wedding ring would have been. No nail varnish, no bitten nails. Just average hands.

  This is surreal, she thought, her head aching with the effort of it, that I’m looking at my body for clues to my life. What else would her body tell the doctors that she couldn’t? Was it possible that she could be a mother and not remember, yet have a caesarean scar on her stomach? Had the nurses already looked, checking her naked body for clues while she was unconscious? Did they know something about her that she didn’t?

  The lurching, edge-of-a-cliff sensation swept through her again.

  Who am I?

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  ‘How old were you last birthday?’ Mr Reynolds asked, and she heard herself say, ‘Thirty,’ without thinking.

  ‘Good.’ He sounded pleased.

  But her brain was beginning to tick over now. ‘How do I know that’s right, though? What if that’s just the last birthday I remember?’

  ‘Possibly. But we know you’re at least thirty,’ he replied with the same conversational ease, glancing over the top of his glasses. ‘I don’t think anyone imagines their thirtieth birthday before they have to have it, do they?’

  She looked past the consultant to the nurse. To Karen, she made herself think. ‘Has no one called at all? In two days?’

  Surely after two days someone would have noticed she was missing? If not a husband, then work colleagues?

  Her chest felt tighter and tighter. What sort of person didn’t have anyone to miss them? Or what if someone was missing her but couldn’t find her?

  ‘Well, we don’t know that they aren’t calling. You might be a long way from home. They might be trying local hospitals first.’ Nurse Karen’s eyes were brown and sympathetic. ‘Don’t worry – there’s a good network for missing people. The police are on to it. They’ve called quite often to check on you – makes a change from investigating missing tractors and shoplifters.’

  She looked down at her hands again. There was a long graze down her wrist, and a bandage on one palm where – she guessed – she’d scraped it along the road surface. Questions were rising now like dark birds from the back of her mind, set free as the sleepiness wore off. What if no one comes? What if my memory doesn’t come back? Where do I go?

  ‘Can you remember where you were last Christmas?’ Jonathan Reynolds asked, and without warning a deep sadness filled her.

  ‘No.’

  Exhausted tears rushed up her throat, filling her head, flooding her gritty eyes, and she saw a movement – the nurse glancing at the consultant, the briefest twitch of her eyebrows suggesting this was enough. She felt grateful: the doctor was curious, and he wanted to solve the problem in front of him, but she was still struggling to get her head around the fact that she was the problem. However keen Jonathan Reynolds was to work out who she was, it was nothing compared with how much she wanted to know.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I can’t . . . My head . . . it’s aching.’

  ‘Of course. I think that’s probably enough for now,’ he said. ‘Rest is going to be crucial. We’ll leave some paper and pens here, and if anything pops into your mind, just jot it down or call one of the nurses and let them know. I’ll drop by later.’

  Was that a test too? she thought. Whether I can still write?

  She picked up a pen gingerly. Her fingers gripped it and she felt nauseous with relief.

  ‘And please don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Most patients with retrograde amnesia find that everything comes back after a day or two. Like turning the computer on and off again.’

  She found herself mirroring his reassuring smile. But she didn’t feel very reassured at all.

  Chapter Three

  Before Libby moved to Longhampton and began her new career as a semi-professional breakfast chef, she had had no idea that there was a right and a wrong way to cook bacon.

  Or rather, there was ‘a’ way, and there was ‘Donald’s’ way.

  ‘That’s it,’ Margaret instructed from her perch at the kitchen table; despite Jason’s insistence that they’d handle morning duties from now on, Margaret still got up most days to coach Libby in the art of proper breakfast preparation. ‘Now put the press on it.’ She nodded with approval as Libby dutifully pressed the bacon and the pan sizzled. Under the table – where he definitely shouldn’t be, according to the health and safety guidelines Libby had been reading up on – Bob thumped his tail against the chair leg. It sounded like Morse code for ‘Two rounds for me, please. No ketchup.’

  ‘Did you know Donald had that press specially sent from America?’ Margaret went on. ‘After that wonderful trip to Boston Jason arranged for our anniversary. Oh, the bacon we had out there was marvellous.’

  ‘Was it?’ Libby checked on the toast. She did know. She’d heard about it so many times that sometimes she forgot that she and Jason hadn’t actually been with them in the luxury Winnebago, but reminiscing seemed to bring back a flicker of the old Margaret, so Libby was happy to listen. She was still trying to work out how best to handle her mother-in-law’s grief – the Corcorans were very ‘No, no, let’s just get on with things’ sort of people – and this was as close as she got to talking about her loss. Libby was trying her best, but like a lot of habitual helpers, Margaret couldn’t, or wouldn’t, let her close enough to help. So if she wanted to talk, Libby didn’t mind listening.

  She mentally ran through Monday’s tasks as Margaret waxed lyrical about the diner brunches, the magnificent fall leaves, Donald’s daily calls to the hotel to check it wasn’t burning down in their first ever extended absence. She and Jason were supposed to be starting room six that evening and Libby was looking forward to watching Jason wielding the wallpaper steamer. There was one major advantage to Margaret’s refusal to come near the renovation process, she reminded herself, stifling an exhausted yawn. The privacy. And the steam.

  ‘. . . missed Bob too much. You and Jason were so generous,’ Margaret concluded with a sad smile. ‘I’ll never forget that fortnight. Such happy memories.’

  ‘I’m glad. You two deserved a nice holiday.’ Libby concentrated on pouring the egg into the fried-egg mould, another element of the perfect Swan Hotel breakfast, then added, because it had niggled her in every telling of the anniversary vacation tale, ‘But you know Luke went halves with us on the trip?’

  Luke was Jason’s rarely seen older brother. The black sheep of the family, although Libby couldn’t quite see why – he’d had a tricky adolescence, by Jason’s somewhat admiring account, then joined the army, but now he had his own business installing burglar alarms and bespoke home se
curity systems. Luke would have paid for the whole thing if Jason hadn’t insisted on it being split equally, so instead there’d been some competitive flight upgrading, champagne in hotel rooms, the lot – the trip had ended up costing more than their own fortnight in Bali.

  Libby tried not to think about Bali. The days of expensive foreign holidays were well and truly over now; what money they had was earmarked for turning the hotel into the sort of cosy haven people would spend two and a half hours driving out of London to visit. Her life now revolved around other people’s holidays. Which was fine, she reminded herself. This fresh start had the potential to turn into a life that was actually better than the one they’d had to leave behind.

  ‘It was Jason’s idea, though, wasn’t it?’ persisted Margaret. ‘He planned it all. He’s always been exceptionally organised. He takes after his father like that.’

  ‘Well, to be honest, Margaret, we all planned it – it was a team effort.’ Libby’s hand hovered over the toaster. Had Mr Brayfield in room two ordered white or wholemeal? ‘I’d been researching a documentary about the Boston Tea Party for BBC Four, so I worked out the route. Luke sorted your flights. Jason’s PA did a fair bit too – she spent hours on the internet finding you the right hotels! Can you remember, was it white or brown?’ She looked up and saw Margaret was pouting.

  ‘I know, dear, and we were very appreciative, but Jason had such a highly pressured office job,’ she said. ‘Donald and I were particularly touched he made time for us.’

  Libby reached for her double-strength coffee. She was happy to indulge Margaret all day long when it came to Donald, but much as she loved Jason, currently snoring away in bed while she and Margaret handled breakfast, he was far from the perfect son of Margaret’s fond imaginings. There was a reason they were here in Longhampton right now and not planning their next long-haul jolly. Besides which, Jason wasn’t the only one with a highly pressured job: Luke had been just as busy, yet still unpicked a flight hiccup while on some job in Dubai.