Mr. Nobody(9)

Poole looks down at his feet, now turning blue. “Well, it’s fucking freezing, I know that much.” He gestures toward the dunes leading back to the car park. “Shall I go over, and meet the ambulance crew there? They should be here any minute.”

“Yeah, you go. Once they’ve picked him up we’ll sweep the area. See what we can find. ID, shoes, clothes, wallet…he must have had a bag or something. It’ll be here somewhere. He couldn’t have got here without it.”

Poole nods and heads off before suddenly turning back. He raises his voice, shouting over the wind. “Unless he didn’t get here by land? He might have got here by sea, if you know what I mean.” Without waiting for an answer, he shrugs and sets off at a jog back in the direction of the car park.

    Graceford looks down at the wet man, his ribs rising and falling. Maybe Poole is right, she thinks; maybe he came off a boat.

Another figure rises into view over the top of the dunes, unseen at first.

This figure is not a paramedic; he is not wearing a high-vis vest; he carries a camera in one hand, its neck strap dangling loosely above the wispy dune grass.

Graceford sees him first.

“Oh shit,” Graceford whispers to herself.

She rises quickly to her feet, takes a deep breath, and shouts as loudly as she can, her chest aching against the noise of the wind. She shouts in the hope that Poole will hear her.

“GET HIM OFF THE FUCKING BEACH, CHRIS!”

At the top of the mound Mike Redman doesn’t catch Graceford’s words but he catches her tone. He pauses.

He takes in the tableau stretched out before him. Graceford bent over a crumpled form, surrounded by miles of empty rolling sand. Beautiful.

A barefooted Poole, sprinting tragicomically toward him, mouth wide, mid-shout. Perfect.

Redman raises his camera. And starts to shoot.

Over the clacking of the shutter the wail of a siren whispers through the wind into audibility.





4


DR. EMMA LEWIS


DAY 6—THE PHONE CALL

I burst into my empty office, fumble on the lights, and grab the receiver halfway through the third ring.

“Hello?” It comes out louder and more flustered than I had anticipated. I feel a hot blush flash through my cheeks even though I’m the only person in the room. I’ve essentially just shouted at the world’s most preeminent neuroscientist. Happy Monday, Emma, you’re doing a sterling job.

There’s a brief pause on the other end of the line before the caller regroups.

“Um, hello, sorry. Am I speaking to Dr. Lewis?” The voice has the warm hum of an American accent. “This is Richard Groves calling for Dr. Lewis. May I speak with her?”

“Yes, sorry, Dr. Groves. Yes, it is, yes, Dr. Lewis speaking.” Complete gibberish. I take a second, cover the receiver, and try to catch my breath from three flights of stairs and too many busy corridors. “Sorry, Richard, that I missed your first call, I wasn’t available earlier. It’s a bit crazy here at the moment…well, always, actually…but you know what it’s like…I suppose.” I bury a groan in my free hand. Oh God, I should have thought about what I might actually say when I answered the phone. Bugger.

    But rich laughter greets me from the other end of the line. “That I do, Emma. That I do. Not to worry. I’ve got you now and that’s all that matters.” I raise my head from my hand. The voice is kind, there’s a calm authority to it. And it’s a voice I recognize very well, from the brief times we’ve met and of course from his TED Talks and audiobooks; there’s something instantly reassuring about it.

I realize he’s stopped talking.

“Er, so, how can I help, Richard?” I move a box of case notes from my office chair and sit down, hard, into its puffed leather.

He clears his throat, suddenly businesslike. “Well, here’s the thing, Emma—is it okay if I call you Emma? Or do you prefer Dr. Lewis?”

“No, no, Emma is fine.” Now I realize that I’ve already called him Richard and I didn’t even ask. Ugh.

“That’s great, Emma. Okay, so, I’ll cut to the chase. The last time we met was—”

“In Dubai?” I cringe at the thought of our last meeting.

“Yes, that conference on advances in neuropsychiatry, I think. We spoke about retrograde amnesia, and fugue. Misdiagnosis and testing methods.”

“Um, yes, yes we did.” We spoke about memory loss and psychological trauma. We spoke about misdiagnosis. I feel the back of my neck flush hot because I know what’s coming. I push on, regardless. “Yes, that’s right. I think it was in regards to my paper….”

“Yes. Yes, it was,” he agrees, and I hear a smile in his voice. His recollection of events obviously amusing him. Thank bloody God for that.

Our conversation in Dubai was the second time we had met and it had gone pretty well, in comparison to the first time we met.

    The first time we met he was giving a lecture on the neurobiology of amnesia at Stanford. I’d received a research grant and I’d used the opportunity to travel to the U.S. to hear the talk and try to arrange to meet him in person to clarify some points about the cases he’d worked on. Now, to be fair to me, I was young. I still had the idea that confrontational debate in an educational setting was a productive method of getting anything at all done. Which it turns out is not, in fact, true. And on top of that it turned out that I had also sort of misunderstood the tone of the evening. So when the Q&A finally opened out to the audience, it would be fair to say that, as I lowered my shaky hand and started to ask the first of my three questions, I was not greeted with quite the professional curiosity that I had naively expected from Groves’s eight-hundred-seater auditorium of paying guests.