Community Page 9

  Michael was puzzled to see that Isobel’s tire-tracks took the right-hand fork, into the clinic. He followed them through the open gates and into the parking lot, but the parking lot had been swept of snow this morning so he couldn’t see where she had left her Jeep, if indeed she had.

  This was really bewildering. She said that she had gone to Ray’s Food Place for groceries, and she had indeed come back with groceries, some of which were Ray’s own brand. But the evidence in the snow was that she hadn’t gone there at all.

  He stood there for a while, with the chilly wind fluffing in his ears. Then he walked slowly across to the clinic’s front doors, climbed the steps and pushed his way inside. It was warm in here, with a shiny marble floor. His senses seemed to be heightened, and the clacking of women’s heels sounded so loud that he could hardly hear himself think.

  Catherine had not yet finished with her previous patient, so he sat down on the beige leather couch in the waiting area outside her office. A selection of magazines was spread out on the low table in front of him, and he picked up a copy of Scientific American and started to flick through it.

  He read a few news items about the Large Hadron Collider, and bird flu, and how Alzheimer’s patients could benefit from some cancer drugs. Then he turned the page and saw an article about soil erosion.

  He thought: I know all about this. I know all about soil erosion, and what a threat it is to the country’s economy. Every year, agricultural topsoil the size of the state of Indiana is washed away down our streams and rivers, drastically reducing our ability to grow crops, and polluting our waterways, and costing us billions of dollars.

  He put down the magazine. He didn’t have to read the article because he knew so much about soil erosion that he could have written it himself. He knew all of the facts, and all of the financial figures.

  But I’m a marine engineer. How come a marine engineer is some kind of expert in ecology?

  The door to Catherine’s office opened and a middle-aged man with his head in bandages came out. He went limping off toward the reception area and then Catherine came out, wearing a smart scarlet suit. She beckoned to Michael and called out, ‘Gregory! Come on in! How are you doing today?’

  Michael got up and followed her into her office. As she sat down and opened up her case-file, she said, ‘You’re looking a little tired, Gregory, if you don’t mind my saying so. That walk from Isobel Weston’s house isn’t too much for you, is it? I could always have someone drive down there to give you a ride.’

  ‘No, no, I’m fine,’ said Michael, sitting down beside her. ‘I’m a little out of it, that’s all. You know, inside of my mind. I think maybe my neurons are beginning to regenerate. Isn’t that what you said would happen?’

  ‘Well, well, you’re becoming quite an expert already!’ said Catherine, brightly. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I’m beginning to remember things. Not very clearly, but they’re definitely coming back. Like I just picked up that Scientific American in the waiting area, and there’s an article in it all about soil erosion. Don’t ask me how, but I know at least as much about soil erosion as Professor Whatever-his-name-is from Cornell University who wrote that article. Maybe more.’

  Catherine pressed her hand thoughtfully across her mouth. Her fingernails were polished scarlet to match her suit.

  Michael said, ‘Maybe I’m reading too much into it, you know? But inside of my mind it feels like kind of a breakthrough.’

  Catherine stood up, and put down her case-file on her desk. ‘Will you excuse me for a couple of minutes?’ she said.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘No, no. Not at all. I forgot to give a message to Mr Vane, that’s all. I’ll be back as quick as I can.’

  She left the office, and hurried away down the corridor, leaving the door open.

  Michael sat there for a while, looking around the office. On one side, there was a bookshelf full of books with titles like Concussion and Brain Injury, Simple Salves for Severe Brain Trauma, Coup and Contrecoup Injuries and Antioxide Therapy for Cellular Brain Damage.

  On the opposite side hung a selection of photographs of Doctor Connor with her family – a serious bespectacled man with pattern baldness who must have been her husband, and two small children. In almost all of the pictures, Mount Shasta was somewhere in the background, snow-covered and remote.

  After five minutes, bored, he stood up and walked over to the door. Outside, in the waiting area, there was a wheelchair with a girl sitting in it, with her back to him. She was wearing a blue knitted bobble hat which he recognized at once. It was the girl who had screamed at him at the community meeting.

  He looked left and right. There was nobody else around. He hesitated for a moment and then he walked across the waiting area and stood a little way away from her. He didn’t want to surprise her and set her off screaming again.

  She was sitting in her wheelchair with her hands clasped together staring at nothing at all. Michael thought that she was beautiful, but he felt that he had only come to recognize how beautiful she was through familiarity, through knowing her. Those high cheekbones, that tilt of her nose, those slightly parted lips. Yet how could he possibly know her? The first time he had seen her was at the community meeting.

  She slowly turned her head and stared at him. She opened and closed her mouth as if she were about to say something, but then she turned away again.

  I know you, he thought. I know you, I know you, I know you.

  Catherine came back along the corridor. When she saw Michael standing beside the girl in the wheelchair she stage-whispered, ‘Gregory!’ and beckoned him urgently back into her office.

  Michael said to the girl, ‘I’ll see you again, OK? Maybe we can talk.’

  The girl didn’t respond, so Michael left her there, still staring at nothing.

  TEN

  They spent an hour talking about Michael’s childhood, and what he could remember from his earliest days.

  He could remember sitting on a wide yellow-painted window-sill, looking out over a sunny back yard. He could remember a red-and-yellow rocking horse, but not clearly, and he couldn’t remember if it had been his rocking horse or not, nor where it had been.

  One problem was that he kept remembering the photographs that his sister Sue had shown him, and he wasn’t able to work out if they were genuine memories or not. Had he really been on Moss Beach that day back in 1991? He thought he could remember the sand, and the wind, and the seagulls crying like lost children, but maybe that was just his imagination helpfully providing background effects for a day that in fact he couldn’t recall.

  After an hour, though, Catherine said, ‘That’s enough for this morning, Gregory.’

  ‘I’m fine, Catherine, I truly am. I don’t mind carrying on. I think I’m beginning to remember some of the stuff I learned in high school, or college maybe.’

  ‘That’s very promising. But it’s a mistake to push yourself too hard. You can start to create false memories, just because you want so much to believe that your life is all coming back to you.’

  ‘Come on – knowing all about soil erosion, that’s not a false memory. I know about soil erosion. How it happens, what it costs, how to prevent it. You can’t just make that up.’

  ‘I know, Gregory. But I don’t want you getting overtired. It could undo all of the progress you’ve made so far. Like I say, the signs are very promising, but we don’t want to run before we can walk. Before you go, I’m going to give you a shot of PDT, which is an enzyme designed to increase the blood flow in your brain, and I want you to up your daily dose of Vinpocetine.’

  ‘OK. Anything to speed things up. I’m sure I’m beginning to get better.’

  He was about to tell Catherine that he thought he recognized the girl in the blue bobble hat, even though he didn’t know how he recognized her, or why, or where from. But something stopped him from mentioning her. He didn’t know what it was. For some reason, he felt protective towa
rd the girl, and he was afraid that if he told Doctor Connor that he knew her, he might never see her again.

  Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree.

  As he walked out of the clinic gates, he saw Jack bustling toward him up the snow-streaked road, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, his shoulders hunched against the cold.

  ‘Jack!’ he called out. ‘Hi there, how’s it going?’

  ‘OK, man,’ said Jack, doing a little dance to keep himself warm. ‘I’m just going in for my physio session. Stretching and pulling and bending and all that shit. I hate that shit. How about you?’

  Michael nodded back toward the clinic building. ‘That girl who screamed at me, at the community meeting – I saw her just now, in the waiting room.’

  ‘Well, come on, man, that don’t surprise me. She’s probably being treated for being physically or psychologically fucked up, the same as us.’

  ‘Yes. But I’m sure that I know her. In fact, I’m totally convinced that I know her.’

  ‘No shit. Where do you know her from?’

  ‘That’s the frustrating part about it. I can’t remember. But she’s not just some girl I went to college with, or met at some party. I really know her.’

  ‘Can’t you remember her name?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘No. I can’t. I don’t have any idea.’

  ‘Maybe you should ask her. What’s the worst she could do? Scream?’

  ‘She didn’t scream today. She just stared at me and didn’t say a word.’

  ‘Well, like I say, dude, next time you see her, ask her.’

  ‘You’re right. I should.’

  Jack clapped a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Anyhow … I have to go get my spine stretched and my knees unlocked. Maybe I’ll catch you later.’

  ‘That would be good. On your way back, why don’t you drop into my place for a drink?’

  Michael limped the rest of the way home, and let himself in with the key that Isobel had given him. She was sitting on the couch in front of the TV, her legs curled up under her, watching The Doctors and nursing a green pottery mug of herbal tea.

  He went over and kissed her, and she lifted one hand and touched his face.

  ‘How was it?’ she asked him.

  He felt like saying: I saw your tire-tracks, and you didn’t drive to Weed for those groceries, so where in hell did you get them? But he felt the same sense of caution that he had felt when he had been tempted to ask Doctor Connor about the girl in the bobble hat. He felt that he needed to find out a whole lot more about Trinity and the Trinity-Shasta Clinic before he started to ask challenging questions.

  Not only that, he felt that he needed to find out a whole lot more about himself. He still didn’t totally discount Jack’s suggestion that he might still be in a coma, and hallucinating all of this.

  ‘You hungry?’ Isobel asked him. ‘I could fix you a sandwich if you are. I have some of that delicious marmalade-roasted ham.’

  ‘Maybe later.’ Then he said, ‘You don’t have a laptop, do you?’

  ‘Sure. It’s in the spare room. The Internet connection isn’t too brilliant, but you can try it.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She smiled at him, a strangely dreamy smile. Although they hadn’t fully consummated their love-making last night, she gave him the feeling that he had satisfied her, and that she was very pleased and comfortable to have him staying here.

  He went into the small spare room. It was chilly, and cluttered with cardboard boxes and shoes and suitcases and a vacuum cleaner. Underneath the window stood a cheap pine desk with a silver laptop on it, as well as a mug filled with pencils and ball pens, a clock that had stopped at five after twelve, and a wood-framed photograph of a woman who might have been Isobel’s mother, by the look of her.

  Michael sat down at the desk, opened up the laptop and switched it on. It seemed to be working, and he made an Internet connection almost immediately. He typed in Trinity-Shasta Clinic.

  Up came a list of hospitals and clinics in the Shasta and Trinity areas, but no Trinity-Shasta Clinic.

  He typed in Kingsley Vane. He got nothing.

  He typed in Doctor Catherine Connor. There were several doctors with the name Catherine O’Connor, but none of them were trauma therapists. Two of them practiced in Dublin, Ireland, and the only Catherine Connor was not a proper doctor but a dermatologist in Cleveland, Ohio.

  Next he typed in Gregory Merrick, and got nine results, but none of them was a marine engineer in San Francisco, as he was supposed to be. One was the fire marshal at the township of Irondequoit, near Rochester, New York; another was the vice-president of human resources at Canyon Resorts in Salt Lake City; another ran his own communications company in Canada and yet another called himself a ‘music professional’.

  He was trying to think what to search for next when the laptop’s screen went blank. At first he thought it might need recharging, so he plugged it into the socket in the wall. He pressed the on button again, but the screen stayed blank, and none of the laptop’s indicator lights came on.

  He went back into the living room. Isobel was watching Let’s Make A Deal. Outside the window, it was starting to snow again.

  ‘I think your laptop is kaput,’ he said. ‘I was right in the middle of checking something and it just went phut!’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Isobel. ‘It does that sometimes. In any case, I only ever use it for my writing.’

  He sat down next to her. ‘What do you write?’

  ‘All kinds of things. Articles, stories. Poetry.’

  ‘You should let me read some.’

  She reached out her hand and said, ‘Come sit down.’ He sat next to her and she snuggled up close to him. ‘I don’t think you’d be very interested in what I write. Democracy, Sexuality, Death and Immortality in the Works of Walt Whitman. That was my latest essay.’

  ‘Sounds profound.’

  ‘Believe me, it is. Not that I’m suggesting that you wouldn’t understand it. I just think you’d find it boring. I’m sure you’d much prefer to read something technical about boats.’

  ‘I’m not so sure that I would,’ said Michael. ‘In fact I don’t think I’m a marine engineer at all. In fact I don’t even believe that my name is Gregory Merrick.’

  She sat up straight and frowned at him. ‘It must be. You had your driving license on you, didn’t you, when you had your accident? And your credit cards.’

  ‘I just don’t feel like “Gregory Merrick”.’

  ‘Who do you feel like, then?’

  ‘I don’t know, Isobel. I still can’t remember.’

  She snuggled up close to him again. ‘Doctor Connor told me that you would probably have doubts about your identity. Apparently it’s common when you have post-traumatic amnesia. Accepting who you are, that can be really hard, especially if you weren’t particularly happy before your accident – or you were lonely, or depressed, or you didn’t like your job.’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you if I liked my job or not. I know absolutely squat about marine engineering. Well – maybe that’s what the problem was. Maybe I was a marine engineer, but I was really crappy at it.’

  ‘Doctor Connor said I should try to keep you calm and happy.’

  Michael looked sideways at her, and then kissed her on the forehead. ‘You do,’ he said. ‘You’re a very attractive lady, and you make me feel very, very good – whoever I am.’

  A little over an hour later, when Isobel was in the kitchen preparing a chili, the doorbell chimed. Michael went to answer it, and there was Jack, with his hair and the shoulders of his leather jacket covered in snow.

  ‘Hi. You said come round for a drink. Is that still OK?’

  ‘For sure. Come on in. Better take your boots off, though. Isobel’s fussy about her rugs.’

  ‘Who’s that, Greg?’ called Isobel, from the kitchen.

  ‘Jack. You remember Jack from the community meeting? I invited him back for a drink.’

  ‘Of
course,’ said Isobel. She appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing a red-and-white checkered apron. ‘How are you, Jack? How are Margaret and Bill?’

  ‘Oh, they’re good, thanks, Ms Weston.’ He knelt down on one knee to unbuckle his biker boots. ‘I’ll tell them you asked after them.’

  Michael took Jack through to the living room and then went through to the kitchen to take two bottles of Coors out of the fridge.

  ‘How about you, Isobel?’ he asked her. ‘Glass of white wine?’

  ‘I don’t know why you asked him back here,’ she hissed. ‘He’s not exactly our kind of people, is he?’

  ‘I like him. He’s genuine. And who cares what kind of people he is?’

  ‘The Endersbys only took him because they couldn’t find anybody else.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘They had to have somebody when they lost Bradley, so they didn’t really have a choice, did they?’

  ‘I don’t understand. Why not?’

  Isobel didn’t answer, but furiously started chopping up onions.

  ‘Bill Endersby seems to like him,’ said Michael.

  ‘Well, like I say, he didn’t have any choice, did he?’

  Michael stood by the door, watching her scrape the chopped-up onions into the skillet. He considered pursuing the subject, but then he thought: No, leave it. I’m only going to end up with even more riddles than I started with.

  ‘So – how about that glass of wine?’ he asked her.

  She looked up at him, and suddenly broke into a flirtatious smile. ‘OK, then. I’m sorry. I guess you’re entitled to have friends, even if they are a little rough at the edges.’

  Michael gave her another kiss. Even if she didn’t speak a whole lot of sense, he did like her, a lot. At least she was somebody to talk to, and somebody to share a bed with.

  He went back into the living room while Isobel finished off preparing her chili, and handed Jack a beer.

  Jack said, ‘Going back to that girl, man, I definitely think you need to ask her who she is.’