Michael Ridpath - Amnesia

‘Hi, Alastair,’ he said tentatively to the old man. He proffered his hand, and the old man shook it, staring at Jerry hard. ‘I’m Jerry, your neighbour from Corravachie, the cottage further down the loch.’

The old man scratched his scalp and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Jerry. I’m afraid I’ve had an accident and my memory has gone.’

‘You don’t remember me at all?’

The old man’s eyes betrayed a mixture of sadness and frustration. ‘No. Were we friends?’

‘Kind of,’ said Jerry. ‘Good neighbours, certainly. I’ve only been here three weeks, but we have had a few conversations, a couple of drinks. I come from California? I write songs? You told me a lot about your time in Australia.’

‘Eagles,’ said the old man. ‘Wedge-tailed eagles. I remember those.’

‘That’s right. And being a doctor out there. And how the weather was much better than here.’

‘My wife. I had a wife called Helen. Did I talk about her much?’

Jerry winced. ‘A little. She was an ex-wife. To be honest, you didn’t seem to like her much. You’ve been divorced for years. She’s passed away now, so you said. Don’t you remember her at all?’

The old man shook his head. ‘Not in the slightest.’

Clémence made them all a cup of tea and they sat down around the kitchen table. Jerry, with his neatly trimmed beard, his jeans and the white T-shirt peeking out from under his lumberjack shirt, looked very American in this very Scottish cottage. The old man examined his neighbour closely, hungry for information, for memories.

‘So you don’t remember anything at all from before the accident?’

‘I’m beginning to,’ said the old man. ‘Thanks to Clémence.’

‘We’ve been reading a book together,’ she said. ‘It’s a kind of memoir, written by Alastair. It starts in the nineteen thirties.’

‘Oh, really?’ said Jerry. ‘That sounds fascinating. Can I take a look?’

Clémence nipped upstairs to fetch Death At Wyvis from her bedroom and handed it to Jerry. ‘Angus Culzie, huh? Just like this cottage. And you say that’s you, Alastair?’

‘It looks like it,’ said Clémence.

‘Can I read a bit?’ said Jerry.

Clémence reached out and grabbed the book out of his hands. She realized she didn’t want Jerry to read the first page, at least not in front of the old man. ‘Sorry. It’s, um, private. You might ask how a published novel can be private, but it is, at least for now. So please don’t read it.’

Jerry seemed a bit taken aback, but he shrugged. ‘OK.’ He glanced at the old man, who looked troubled. ‘So you think your memory is coming back?’

‘Slowly,’ said the old man. ‘But it’s just scraps of the past from many years back. Although, interestingly, I can remember my childhood quite well. It all goes very vague when I get to university.’

Jerry smiled. ‘I remember our talks together with pleasure,’ he said. ‘It’s a shame you’ve forgotten them.’

‘They might come back,’ said Clémence.

‘What do the doctors say?’

‘That the memories might come back,’ said Clémence. ‘Or they might not. “Jogging” helps, which is what we have been doing. But they really don’t know.’

‘Can you tell me a bit about Australia?’ asked the old man. ‘At least what I told you.’

Jerry told him what he could, but he couldn’t remember himself precisely what the old man had said. He had emigrated to Australia in the sixties, got a job in a town in the hills outside Perth — Jerry thought it was called Montgomery, but Clémence and the old man agreed it must have been Mundaring where Jeanette was the librarian. He had become an eager bird watcher and travelled around Australia, looking in particular for eagles. Jerry remembered a couple of stories featuring eccentric patients at his clinic and some barbed comments about Helen not letting him travel as much as he wanted to. There wasn’t really very much, but the old man lapped it up. Clémence could see that the dread he seemed to feel when listening to Death At Wyvis was banished.

By the time Jerry left, promising to drop in again the following day, the old man was in better spirits.

Jerry drove back to his own cottage. He made himself a cup of coffee and sat in the living room, looking out over the loch. He had had to check out the old man for himself, and he was relieved with what he had seen and heard.

He picked up the phone and dialled.

‘It’s me, Jerry... the stalker’s wife was right, he has forgotten everything... he doesn’t recognize me.’

He listened.

‘No... no... no, we’re fine, I’m sure of it. He definitely doesn’t remember me pushing him down the stairs.’

Tuesday 16 March 1999, Wyvis

The old man woke up early. His brain had had a busy night, dreaming frantically, as if it was trying out a whole series of connections to find one that worked. People from his past, his whole life, had come and gone in a bewildering swirl of locations: Brimham Rocks in Nidderdale, Oxford, Tiberius’s villa, Wyvis, a low bungalow amongst tall trees which he assumed must be his house in Australia. Clémence was with him all the way through, except sometimes she changed into Sophie.

He woke up totally disoriented.

He looked out of his window at the loch and the flank of Ben Wyvis, more brown than white now that the snow melted. That was familiar. He decided to get out and go for a walk before breakfast.

Clémence was awake, but not up; he could hear the radio on in her bedroom. He set off along his familiar route: striking out on to the hill and then down to the loch beside Wyvis Lodge.

The fresh air, the exercise and the familiar landscape comforted him. It was cold, the breeze carried a damp chill and clouds were pressing in over the top of Ben Wyvis, promising rain later, or perhaps snow. Over on the other side of the loch, an eagle was soaring to a height just below the cloud base. A group of hinds threaded their way up the hillside from the water. They were only a quarter of a mile away, and it took them a few moments to notice him before they bounded off.

The isolation, the desolation, the emptiness, lifted his heart. Up here on the moor he could see for miles, but in those miles there were only three signs of habitation — the empty Wyvis Lodge at the head of the loch, Culzie, and the cottage of Corravachie further down.

And yet the moorland was teeming with activity. Birds bustled and twittered, melted snow hustled down the hillside in hidden gullies, bogs and unseen burns. The mountain was alive with skylarks and water.

His walk took him down to the shore of the loch and then along the track towards the boathouse, where a pair of swans were calmly floating. He stopped and stared at the wooden structure.

Eventually, Clémence would read about what happened to Sophie there; her death must be the Death At Wyvis of the title. And when Clémence read it, she would hate him. He already hated himself; despised himself. Perhaps somehow a still-functioning part of his brain had tried to erase the unpalatable past from the other damaged part. Helped the amnesia along a little. Was that possible? It seemed unlikely, but he would ask the doctors. Although that would mean admitting that he was a murderer to them. He really didn’t want that.

He was ashamed to be who he was.

He decided not to walk past the boathouse that morning, but to take a narrow path through the woods directly back up to Culzie. It was hard work, the path fought its way uphill through large boulders and small stones, and leafless branches reached out and tugged at him. Twice he nearly slipped.

He paused and sat on a mossy log, ignoring the dampness on his arse. He could do it. The balance was the tricky bit, and his right knee was stiff, but he was still physically fit for an eighty-three-year-old.