The Sister(138)

Snippets of conversation returned. Soon he was back in the room with Anderson.





‘It’s extraordinary he can remember so far back, even taking into account the trauma of falling into a fire. He was ten months old!’ Anderson nodded as Ryan continued. ‘It isn’t acquired false memory syndrome either because I checked that out with his mother immediately afterwards. It actually did happen.’ Ryan rubbed at his eyeball. ‘Have you made any progress?’

Anderson looked exasperated, ‘He’s an impossible subject for hypnosis. He just resists no matter what.’

‘Call yourself a hypnotherapist?’ Ryan said.

‘I'd like to see you try!’ Anderson retorted.

‘Well, actually I did, when he first came in to see me while you were on holiday.’ Ryan caught the light on his pencil and continued talking without looking in Anderson’s direction. ‘Did he say anything significant about the rest of his early life?’

‘He spoke freely about everything he could remember leading up to the age of fifteen – it’s all in my notes – then he just clammed up for the entire duration of that year. The number of near-death misses he’d had, he seems to remember all of them. He even jokingly said, “I could write a book about the times I nearly died”. In every single case, it seemed; he was saved by some timely intervention, and I found that most strange.’





Totally absorbed; he continued to read from his notes.

The boy had survived more than a dozen near fatal incidents, most of them involved rescues from water. His grandfather had turned up to save him virtually every time, but there was one exception.

Milowski had gone with friends to a public pool and was hanging onto the side of the when someone pulled him away for a joke, perhaps thinking it might encourage him to swim, but he’d gone under straight away.

I remember coming up the first time, grabbing a breath, going down. At that stage, it wasn’t a problem – I wasn’t panicking. I bounced along the bottom and reaching the side; launched myself back up, but I collided with someone’s elbow on the way up, swallowed a big lungful of water and panicked. I couldn’t get back to the surface. Then someone grabbed me and hauled me out.



The long corridor of his memories led him out into the room with Anderson again. ‘What do you think of that?’ he’d asked, referring to the many coincidental rescues performed by the grandfather.

Anderson didn’t answer.

Ryan rapped his pencil three times on the table.

Startled, the hypnotherapist gabbled, ‘I’m sorry, I just...’ A puzzled look screwed his face and then he shot an accusatory look at Ryan as he realised what had just happened.

A small, self-satisfied smile creased the corner of Ryan’s mouth, and he continued, ‘I made a few enquiries and found out a couple of interesting things. Apart from the fact they were remarkably close, it seems the old man had a history of turning up just at the right time, and not only where Bruce was concerned. There’s a bit of a list – various friends in the army, his wife. No one quite knows how he was able to just-be-there so many times. It seems he possessed some kind of finely tuned intuition, a sort of radar for picking up distress signals.’

‘That’s impossible. Didn’t you ask him how he did it? You do surprise me,’ Anderson said.

Ryan didn’t answer at first; he clicked away at the pencil again. Anderson looked at it warily.

‘I didn’t ask him because he’s dead.’

‘Oh.’ Anderson’s lips encircled the word; the O shape remained for a full second as possibilities ran through his mind. ‘So, you think his grandfather was somehow alerted by a subconscious link when Bruce was in danger?’

‘It’s possible. He was thought to be psychic, but he died two weeks before the last incident at the pool. The last rescuer hadn’t been among the original party of boys who went to the pool, deciding only at the last minute to go. He told his mother someone had to look out for Bruce. As soon as he arrived at the pool area, he saw Bruce struggling below the water, and he got him out.’

‘Who was it?’ Anderson asked.

‘The rescuer at the swimming pool is most likely the reason the guilt complex is so deeply rooted,’ he said, looking directly into Anderson’s eyes. ‘It was Brookes.’

The accuracy of the recollections Ryan had just experienced amazed him. This was what notes were all about. It was a firm belief of his that not one single thing was ever truly forgotten. All memories lay dormant, just waiting for the right trigger to reactivate them.

He pushed his glasses up, rubbing at his good eye from below the lens allowing them to drop back onto his nose. He toyed with the idea of a cup of tea, but instead poured himself a glass of water from the jug Stella had thoughtfully left him. The water was no longer cold, but it slaked his thirst. Wiping his lips with the back of his hand, he continued sifting through the notes, coming across records of further conversations with Anderson. He drifted back in time, recalling once again.





‘You know, Michael, before I decided to become a psychiatrist; I had an overriding interest in the latent powers of the human mind. I spent hours poring over old books and case histories covering impossible feats of strength or endurance.’ Anderson appeared more interested in reading his newspaper than listening. Ryan carried on regardless.