Mr. Nobody(104)

    And I found out what Matthew did to get me to the top of that list. To ensure that Groves picked me. The investigation has yet to find the missing doctor, Tom Lister; he disappeared after returning home from a backpacking holiday in Sri Lanka last October. Although, looking at Tom’s photograph online, I seriously wonder if he made it onto that plane back to Heathrow. Looking at him with Matthew’s eyes, he would have been a good match. The last CCTV footage of him leaving Heathrow Airport is grainy, and perhaps it’s my imagination, but the tall, dark-haired man caught on film has the same familiar set of shoulders, the same familiar gait, and I can’t help wondering if Tom ever actually came back from his trip.

But I kept quiet. It was surprisingly easy to lie, although I hated lying to Joe, to Mum. I’ve put them through enough over the years, the least I can do is protect them from more fallout.

Thankfully, Mum has been all right since the news about our family broke. Her friends were so supportive when they found out who Mum’s husband used to be, they rallied around her, protective and unimpeachable. I can’t believe how wrong I got them. They were there for her, her rocks, and they couldn’t understand why she’d kept something so big a secret from them.

I understand why she did, though. It’s hard to learn to trust again after the person you trusted the most lets you down the most. But if there’s one thing she’s taught me, it’s that it’s never too late to learn new things, to put yourself out there, to try again.

After Matthew’s death Joe rushed up to Norfolk to meet me. He stayed over, helped me move back to London the next day, helped me while I healed. Thankfully, I didn’t need to go back to the hospital. Chris collected my belongings from Princess Margaret’s and brought them to Cuckoo Lodge. I don’t know what I would have done without Joe and Chris in the days afterward. They shielded me from the press and worked with Peter to get me home as quickly and painlessly as possible. Joe collected me after my operations, dutifully took care of my food shopping and cooked up healthy meals while I recovered.

    Chris visited me in the hospital and afterward, during my recuperation, his towering presence filling my tiny one-bed flat. He’s been visiting ever since.

He and Zara filed for divorce last month. Zara was heartbroken when they split, of course, but as one door closes another is jimmied open. Chris tells me she’s fine now, she’s resilient, she’s moving to Manchester to take a job at the Manchester Evening News. I wish her the best, no hard feelings my end, we’re all just trying to get what we need. I hope she gets hers. I know I should feel bad about coming between them, but if I’m brutally honest, I don’t. I’ve known Chris since we were children. He feels like coming home. It doesn’t feel wrong. It’s like everything that was good from my past has somehow been kept alive in him. He makes me feel like none of the bad stuff back then happened, or rather that it did happen but it’s okay that it did, because I’m still me. Either way, he feels like home to me and I haven’t had one of those for a really long time.

Sometimes I fantasize about what would have happened if I had never left Norfolk, if none of it had ever happened and Chris and I had got together straight after university. I like to imagine what our children would be like now, what our house would look like. I’ve never felt that way about anyone before. It’s strange, it’s nice. We don’t want to rush into anything but Chris has mentioned transferring to London for work. But the more I think about it, the more I think I could move out of the city myself and commute—we’ll see.

I didn’t say goodbye to Rhoda in person when I left Norfolk, but I sent her a letter thanking her for all her help with Matthew, and for her bravery that day. She wrote back and told me she’d given a reading at Matthew’s funeral, a poem she’d read him in the hospital that he’d enjoyed. He would have liked that, I think. The part of him that wasn’t broken would have definitely liked that.

I looked back over the Unknown Young Male case a lot in the weeks and months after his death. What a hard and terrifying life to have to live. Every time he forgot, he was accused of faking his symptoms; by his early twenties he was homeless, nameless—without a social security number or a bank account he had no choice, he was forced to live outside society. He moved from hostel to hostel, unable to get a job and heave himself out of his nightmare. The doctors who treated him, Groves included, didn’t test him thoroughly, they took no fMRIs, so they never saw the incontrovertible proof that he wasn’t faking. That his hippocampus simply wasn’t responding the way it should. No one helped him. He had no name and they wouldn’t let him have a new one. I can’t even imagine how it must have felt for him to be told there was nothing wrong with him when he couldn’t even remember his own name. But he didn’t crumble, he adapted, he adapted to survive. He morphed into something else, something that, in the end, even he couldn’t stand to remember.

    He could have had that operation. It might have worked, and after rehabilitation, he would have stood trial. I could have testified to his diminished responsibility on all counts. There is a legal precedent that those who cannot remember committing their crimes cannot be charged with those crimes. But he didn’t want that. He knew he would be tried for the crimes he’d committed and, with a condition as rare as his, my expert testimony might not have been enough to get him treatment instead of a life sentence. He may very well have been sentenced for crimes that, in a sense, he hadn’t actually done himself. Like being sentenced for a crime you committed in a dream. Either way, he would have been institutionalized for life. I wish I could have helped him.