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  I wander back and call in to a Sainsbury’s for some essentials. And two bottles of wine. By the time I’m home it’s almost five. I’ve decided what I will do. I send a text to Rachel, reassure her that all is well and repeat, more or less, what I said to Josh, but without mentioning Nicole. I sense that somehow I would not have told my sister about an affair. I also suspect that if I had, she would have broached the subject by now. Reconnecting with Nicole might have helped with my recovery. Another face as a trigger. Rachel would not have been shy about bringing her to my attention.

  I get a text back telling me that home-schooling is in-sodding-sane, Ewan is fine but that Rosie seems to be coming down with another fever and that the dog has learned to chew slippers.

  It sounds like she’s having fun. My mobile rings. It’s Rosie. She wants to tell me to remember to wash my hands for twenty seconds and sings Happy Birthday twice so I know how long twenty seconds is. I can hear her hacking cough. I tell her and then a slightly frantic-sounding Rachel to look after themselves and that I will be fine. I use the landline to phone a different number. No one answers, so I leave a message. I find some decent clothes to put on, lay them out and have a shower.

  I’d better make an effort because I’ve just asked Nicole over for a drink.

  14

  Nicole arrives at 7pm on the dot. I’m on the first floor so I buzz her in and then wait with the flat door open for the lift to arrive. She’s smiling as she steps out and stands in the hallway. There’s an awkward moment as we regard one another and then I invite her in and close the door. She looks around, her body language tense.

  ‘This is nice,’ she says.

  ‘You’ve never been here before?’

  Her smile is tight-lipped. ‘No. This was Emma territory.’ She slips off her coat. She’s changed out of her workday clothes into tight jeans and something strappy and sleeveless. I think Rachel would call it a camisole. But I don’t attempt that. Given my aphasic luck, it could come out very wrong.

  ‘Come through,’ I say, and Nicole follows me into the living room. The only room with decent chairs. Her bare shoulders and arms look toned and she moves with a fluid grace. But when she crosses the threshold, she stops and stares at my wall. After a few seconds she approaches and her eyes dart from one photograph to the next, tracing the lines I’ve drawn to connect them.

  I feel the urge to explain.

  ‘This is to help me remember who everyone is. Or was.’ I point to my mother’s image labelled by Rachel.

  Nicole’s eyes open wide as she reads the label beneath. ‘You don’t remember your mother?’

  I shake my head. ‘Or Emma, or my father, though he lives abroad anyway. I didn’t recognise Rachel when I woke up in the hospital in Turkey. Everyone here’ – I sweep a finger to indicate the wall – ‘had to be reintroduced to me. Like you. Some bits have come back but they’re random.’ I tap the side of my head. ‘Last week I had a vivid image of a seaside town and me and Rachel playing on a beach. She said it was more than likely Tenby, where we always went on holiday. When I googled it, there it was.’

  I’m standing close to Nicole. She’s wonderfully fragrant. Her eyes never leave the wall. ‘They said at the practice that it was a severe injury. That you’d suffered some brain damage. But I didn’t appreciate how bad.’

  ‘You’re not going to cry again, are you?’

  She sniffs and it turns into a laugh. ‘No. I promise.’

  ‘My neurosurgeon says that I had massive bruising of both frontal lobes and my parietal lobe on one side. They had to give me drugs to reduce the swelling. Those bits are responsible for memories, comprehending language and interpreting meaning and emotion. And then there’s the diffuse axonal injury.’

  She turns towards me, eyes wide open.

  I stand behind her, inhaling. ‘There was a concrete jetty where a tourist ship tied up; a kind of sailing ship. Cheap boobs and… I mean booze and loud music. They’d sail around the bay and party for a while, then go off somewhere else. They think I might have fallen off this jetty in the dark and hit my head on a metal truncheon. I mean stanchion. Either way I suffered what’s known as a blunt deceleration injury. It causes a shearing force in the white matter.’

  Nicole turns from the wall to look at me, horrified.

  ‘Sorry. I know this stuff off by heart. I’m telling you because it’s the reason I’ve taken so long to reintegrate. The reason I’ve only just started getting about.’

  She says nothing, so I offer her a drink. It’s a sudden swerve. I resist the urge to tell her it’s all a part of what’s happened to me – technically, they’re called rapid flights of thought. Instead, she accepts the offer and we move across to the sofa. When we’ve both got our glasses half full of the best Riesling I could find in Sainsbury’s, I raise one to her. ‘Thanks for coming.’

  ‘Thank you for inviting me.’ Her fingers play with the stem of her glass. ‘As I say, I thought I’d never see you again.’

  ‘Well, here I am. Damaged goods, but still me.’ We clink glasses. ‘If you want to eat, I can send out.’

  Nicole shakes her head. ‘I’m not hungry.’ She taps a flat stomach. ‘Too many butterflies.’

  I don’t know how old she is. Younger than me, that’s for certain. My best guess is late twenties but age-gauging has never been my strongest trait.

  ‘Why did you ask me here, Cam?’

  Her question is fair and there is no point in me lying. I struggle with the nuances of that anyway. And Adam says blunt is better than saying nothing. ‘What you said to me yesterday gave me quite a shock. I needed time to detest it. I mean digest it.’ I shake my head. ‘I get words muddled up sometimes. I’m sorry.’

  Nicole’s brows furrow and she waves a hand in dismissal. ‘Don’t apologise. Now that you’ve had time to digest it, what do you think?’

  ‘What I’m wondering is, did Emma know?’

  Nicole’s head shake is vehement. ‘No. No way. I used to see her every day when she was locuming. No way could she have known.’

  ‘Didn’t she even suspend… suspect a little?’

  ‘No. I honestly don’t think she did.’

  I look at the wine in my glass. Swirl it around so that it mimics the thoughts in my head.

  ‘Have I made you feel bad?’ Nicole asks.

  ‘It doesn’t sound like a particularly honourable thing to have done.’

  She sits up then. ‘There is nothing for you to be guilty about, Cam. Not after what she was doing to you.’

  ‘Doing to me?’

  Nicole lets out a deep exhalation. ‘Emma had been playing away with someone at the hospital she did sessions at.’

  I want to say something, but suddenly I’m dumb. This is even more startling news. Why is it only now I’m hearing of this? Annoyance flairs but I check it, wondering again who else, if anyone, even knew. Nicole sees my confusion.

  ‘It had been going on for weeks. You suspected something and turned to me. You knew Emma and I were close at work. We, you and I, met in the same cafe we had coffee in yesterday. You asked me outright if I knew. I couldn’t lie to you. I couldn’t stand to see what it was doing to you. You broke down and… things kind of spiralled from there.’

  ‘So Emma had an affair first?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘All sounds very complicated.’

  ‘It was. But it isn’t anymore.’ Nicole puts her glass down and turns towards me. Our knees touch. I shift back.

  ‘Why didn’t I confront her?’

  ‘You were going to. You started looking for evidence.’

  ‘Evidence?’

  ‘You found some bills. Credit card receipts that Emma had from restaurants you’d never been to.’

  I get up and retrieve the folder Nicole gave me. I show her the photocopied receipts. Nicole lets out an empty laugh and her gaze slides up to engage mine. ‘I saw these, but I never twigged. You made copies but then you said they disappeared from your briefcase.’

>   We eye the sheets with new suspicion. Nicole adds, ‘This was all just before you were about to go away. You said it would be a great opportunity to get everything out in the open. No distractions.’

  ‘Didn’t you mind that I was going away?’

  ‘Yes. But it had to be done. Something was up with Emma. The person she was involved with had a terrible reputation.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘The rumour was that she might have been pilfering opiates.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘That’s what I heard. Some anaesthetist.’

  I try to process this, search for something to say. Come up with, ‘Is she still around?’

  Nicole shakes her head. ‘Long gone. The Middle East. Kuwait, or the UAE.’

  A longer pause. More processing. ‘So Emma stole the copies I made?’

  Nicole shrugs. ‘Looks like it. All I know is you couldn’t find them.’

  I get up and walk across the room. Rain drums at the window. I pace a bit. It helps. ‘This is all so monkey… I mean murky.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.’

  ‘No. I need to know these things…’ The sentence trails off because I don’t want to say the words aloud.

  I need to know these things because of the bearing they might have on what happened in Turkey.

  I turn again to the wall and peer at Emma’s photograph. ‘I can’t remember her. I feel nothing when I look at her photo.’

  ‘And what about me, Cam? What do you feel when you look at me?’ Nicole gets up and joins me at the wall. This close she smells wonderful.

  I let my head drop. ‘I don’t know what to think.’ My default state.

  Nicole’s hand is on my chin, lifting it back up. ‘Maybe I could remind you.’

  Her kiss is soft and long and for a moment I’m paralysed. But she doesn’t move away and I let go, lose myself in the moment.

  Eventually, we break off and Nicole waits with a questioning look. My reply is to lean in and kiss her again. She pulls me back over to the sofa, pulls out her phone.

  ‘We had a playlist,’ she says. ‘Can I hook this up?’

  There’s a small, neat Bluetooth speaker on the bookshelf. Nicole walks over, presses a few buttons on the machine and her phone. Seconds later George Ezra is telling us all about Budapest. Nicole comes back to where I’m sitting and starts, slowly, to undress, swaying to the music, until, to my feverish astonishment, all she has on is matching dark underwear. She works out, no doubt about that. Her skin has a glowing tint. What I see is flawless.

  ‘Remember me now?’ she asks.

  I don’t answer. I can’t.

  ‘Where’s the bedroom?’

  I point. She holds out a hand and leads me to it. I want to tell her I haven’t slept with anyone since the accident, but somehow it doesn’t matter. With Nicole’s help I know what to do. And she’s very helpful. We do lots of things I don’t think I’ve done before. Or I didn’t know I could. Her hands are small, her fingers strong and probing. I think Nicole is adventurous. And I don’t argue. No man with a pulse would.

  A good hour later I get up and slip on a T-shirt and jeans and make us both an omelette. Nicole pulls one of my old rugby shirts from a drawer and pulls it on. She doesn’t bother with anything else. She joins me at the table in bare feet. She seems very relaxed, even laughs at my stupid jokes while we eat. I tell her about my journey from a hospital bed in Turkey to now: my slight limp, my funny foot, the scars around the left side of my face where they put me back together. And not forgetting my duff eye.

  I tell her what I truly can and can’t do. She tells me about the three weeks we spent together before Turkey. The clandestine meetings in cinemas and cafes. Sneaking into her bed when her flatmate was out. About how we were both upset about the change in Emma. How we were guilty about the duplicitousness but sought refuge in each other. How I was planning on confronting it once and for all.

  At one point she looks up and scopes my countertop. ‘Why are there two coffee machines?’

  ‘My sister bought me one. I liked it so much I bought another. In case the one she bought broke down.’

  She looks at me as if waiting for a punchline. There isn’t one.

  ‘Okay.’ She tries to keep a straight face but fails.

  ‘Rachel says I’m impulsive. But I don’t think it makes me a terrible person.’

  Nicole gives it up and throws her head back in a full-throated laugh. ‘There are worse things to be.’

  When we’ve finished, she asks for the bathroom. While I’m stacking the dishes, she comes back out into the kitchen again, naked. We go back to the bedroom. Another hour flies deliciously by.

  At around ten, Nicole gets up and dresses and sits on the edge of my bed. ‘I better go. I brought nothing to change into and I have work tomorrow. I wasn’t sure how this would go.’

  ‘I think it went well.’ I know I’m grinning.

  ‘Feel better?’

  I nod.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For letting me have this. I’ve waited two years for you to turn up at my door. Hoping you’d be a white knight.’

  I start. ‘I’m no hero. But I’m glad I went to Emma’s old practice. I’m glad you saw me.’

  She grins a delectably mischievous grin. ‘We can do this again. Any time. Softly, softly still if you like.’

  ‘I can’t believe you don’t have a boyfriend.’

  ‘Who says I don’t.’ Nicole tags a giggle on the end of her words.

  ‘I… I assumed…’

  She puts her hand on my chest. ‘That’s the other reason for keeping this low-key for the moment. There is someone but it isn’t serious. Nothing like what we had. What maybe we could still have.’

  I stare into her eyes. They stare back into mine.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘I will sort that out within days. That is if you want me to?’

  I blink. Still so much to process. I say, ‘Why do you think Emma wrote pants on fire in her notebook on the last but one page?’

  Nicole tilts her head back. ‘Guilt? There were other things too, weren’t there? Dates when you’d be away, am I right?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Then maybe she was planning things with her junky lover and felt bad that she was lying to you.’

  I wince at her words. Emma’s been portrayed as this perfect partner. It’s hard for me to hear she might not have been.

  ‘We’ll never truly know, though, will we?’

  She’s right. We will never know. I get up and follow her to my door. Let her out.

  ‘Text me when you’re ready,’ she says. ‘I’ll be waiting.’ She kisses me once again and then she’s gone. I go back to the living room to look at the wall and realise, with a pang of regret, that I have no photograph of Nicole to put up there. Then again, if I did I’d need to explain who she is and I’m not quite sure I’m ready to do that yet.

  She said we could do this any time. I’d like that. Very much. But first I have to think. I sit down and stare at the wall aware that in the space of forty-eight hours everything has changed. But in reality, nothing has. When I went to Turkey with Emma, our relationship might not have been in the best of health. But, besides Nicole, I am the only one who has this knowledge.

  Or am I?

  15

  There’s still some wine left so I half fill a glass and flip open my laptop. The screen lights up with the last image I’d viewed. A film I was halfway through when I lost concentration. That happens a lot, wonderful film though it was. One of Josh’s special recommendations. ‘A simple tale of seafaring folk’ in his words.

  Duuun dun duuun dun…

  Yeah. Thanks, Josh. It didn’t exactly give me nightmares but it has made me think twice about going to the beach. Now I know why Josh so loves saying, ‘We’re gonna need a bigger boat’ whenever he gets the opportunity. Which seems to arise at least twice a week.

  I ope
n up Chrome and navigate to Emma’s memorial page on Facebook. There are lots of posts. But none from me. It was Josh who explained that Facebook have a process for deceased people. They will mothball accounts unless told not to do so. The way they avoid that is with legacy accounts. A page like this will have a legacy contact who manages it. In Emma’s case it’s her sister, Harriet. She decides who can post, which profile pictures can be seen, and what last message from Emma’s profile can be read by random visitors like me.

  Some people think it’s macabre; especially since designating a legacy contact is done by the Facebook page owner while he, or she, is alive. But I can see the sense of it. Of course I can, under the circumstances. Though it has made me wonder what could have made Emma ponder her own mortality enough to act on this and even discuss it. Perhaps it was a pact they made. The sort of thing sisters do. That’s sheer conjecture on my part and I should probably ask Harriet. Or I could stick my head in a wasp’s nest. It’s a toss-up which one would be the more excruciating.

  But the memorial page fulfils a function. Emma’s friends got no chance to say goodbye. This gives them the opportunity to do so. It lets friends and family post memories and stories. Everyone except me. Josh says Harriet went a ‘bit mental’ over what happened.

  She certainly went more than a bit mental when she verbally accosted me at the cemetery.

  I scroll through the messages of condolence. They’re called tributes now. It was Emma’s birthday last month and that triggered a flurry of posts. Some names I recognise from contacts and photographs Rachel has talked me through, but most are meaningless to me. I would have liked to have posted something, even a simple ‘thanks for the memories’ birthday thing, but no chance. Sometimes I wish that I could message Emma herself, see if she’s still out there somewhere, or her spirit at least. See if she has any answers to the questions my trip to the surgery and meeting Nicole has thrown up.

  But that’s just wishful thinking.

  I fall asleep a little after eleven, my concentration shot to pieces. Partly because of Nicole and the wine, partly because I forgot to take my modafinil that teatime, allowing this evening’s quetiapine to work unopposed. A real brain-musher when mixed with too much alcohol.