‘It’s…’ Keisha appeared to be choosing her words carefully. ‘Difficult.’
‘You’re telling me. Can I tell you something that’s going to sound stupid?’
‘Go on.’
‘And you won’t tell any of this lot?’ Clive let his gaze dart about the place, checking none of the staff were nearby.
Keisha gave a non-committal shrug.
Clive considered for a second. He didn’t want to prolong his stay here by letting the staff know he was short of more marbles than he was willing to admit. Although if they did find out, it would prevent him going home like they were threatening. It might be worth the risk.
‘I’ve been asking them lots of questions and they’ve finally told me their version of things. So if I am a bachelor, like they say, and all of these thoughts of a wife are down to delirium, it doesn’t explain some of the other memories that have cropped up. I convinced myself there was a picture of her in my wallet. I even checked to make sure.’
‘I take it there wasn’t?’
‘No, but the memory is there. Like it was real. And remembering her chicken and asparagus pie. I can recall how it tasted. Lots of little memories. I couldn’t have come up with all these different fragments in half an hour, could I? I can’t have been delirious for long. All these snippets couldn’t have turned up that quickly.’
‘I don’t know…’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to keep going on. I’m just feeling a bit lost.’ The last word sparked something in Clive’s memories and he felt compelled to hold Keisha’s hand. To bring her closer. To be less lost. To make sure no one else would hear. ‘You must help me. You must help me get out of here. We need to find somewhere else for me to live. You must. We must. Promise me we will.’
Without thinking about it, Clive brushed a finger over her scar. The one that she’d tried to hide with permanent ink.
Keisha flinched, only slightly. It was barely perceivable, but it was there. Of course it was.
‘I’m not sure what I can do to help.’
He’d not glanced at his own scar for years. But it was important that he told her – that was the good thing about scars – eventually they would fade. Not just from the skin, but from the memory.
He shrugged off his jacket and rolled up the sleeve of his pyjamas to inspect it. To see if it was even recognisable for what it was. It was in the crook of his elbow. A wide, silvery shadow from the past. Over the years, it had faded. In his younger days it had been red and angry; now it was only noticeable in the right lighting. It gleamed like a snail trail on a dewy morning, an echo of something that had passed.
‘You see,’ he said, brushing his finger over the faint mark. ‘We’re the same, you and I. We have to help each other. Nobody knows about this. This is my secret. And now it is ours.’
15
Keisha
There are a lot of scenarios a first aid course can’t prepare you for. It pains me that I’m the nominated first-aider at work, but it’s been proven in the past that it should fall to me as the only sensible option. The only problem with the training is they don’t teach you how to deal with the way people react. Nor do they school you on how to keep a tab on your own reactions.
In my years at the lab, so far I’ve only had to attend six first aid incidents at work and, happily, none of those have been emergencies. Considering we mostly focus on the field of cardiology, and most of our subjects have had some kind of cardiac history, this is something of a miracle.
The incidents included a dot of an old lady tripping on a step and banging her knee. She’d not wanted any fuss, but as her graze was bleeding I’d had to insist she at least have a plaster and a hand getting up. Then there’d been the time someone had walked straight into the glass panel without realising it was a wall. It was part of the snazzy rebuild and the design, although chic, was not user-friendly. The gentleman hadn’t responded well to the incident, but it was fortunate that the main thing that had been hurt was his pride. I only had to administer an ice pack for