Splintered Memory - By Natascha Holloway Page 0,53

the female staff at the hospital in the months following his abandonment by Charlie.

He’d known at school and at uni that girls had found him attractive, and he’d never had to make any effort to get their attention, but he’d only had eyes for Charlie. So he’d never realised that as a doctor – a good looking doctor, he was able to get pretty much any woman that he wanted.

The endless one night stands were satisfying enough. He could remain cold and unfeeling, and he could simply walk away from the women the next morning without any feelings of guilt or remorse, but Emily complicated things and he was unsure why he continued to see her on a personal basis.

Whilst sex was a useful release, he still had to find ways to pass the days and the endless hours when he was at the hospital. Home wasn’t as bad. He either always had company, or in the event that he was alone he ensured that he had enough valium or nitrazepam to knock him out.

At the hospital though, when he wasn’t caught up in back to back emergencies that kept his mind busy he had time. It was then when thoughts of his old life with Charlie would torment him. It was then when the pain of losing her tore his heart and soul apart, and then when it all felt like more than he could stand to bear.

To try and manage his pain, and in an attempt to help stabilise his moods, he’d begun to use a range of drugs. To counter the valium and nitrazepam that he was taking to sleep, and to keep his soul destroying guilt and depression under control, he was using a variety of amphetamines. In fact he was using anything and everything he could get his hands on at the hospital without being caught. He’d also taken to stealing Emily’s prescription pad to get more drugs. He knew that if he used his own it would draw attention to his growing addiction, and Emily never seemed to notice him using hers.

Matt knew that he’d gotten into a vicious cycle, but he just couldn’t stop himself. He knew that he’d become completely dependent on drugs to either stay awake or go to sleep, and he knew that he now needed them to get through the days and the nights. The larger concern, could he find it in himself to care, was that he was becoming increasingly reckless with the doses that he was taking.

He knew the risks of what he was doing, and he was also more than aware of the blatant disregard that he was showing for his own life. Yet he didn’t care. Without Charlie around, life no longer seemed worth living.

Part Three

Claire

She was sat by the window in the Café Nero in Clapham Junction Station, feeling both nervous and guilty. Charlie had called her forty five minutes earlier to say that she’d just arrived at Paddington.

Claire wasn’t entirely sure why Charlie was coming to see her, and she wondered if Matt had told her that they used to be best friends. She wondered if Charlie now knew that they’d shared every secret that either of them had ever had, since the moment that they were old enough to know what secrets were. Yet she pondered more uneasily whether Charlie had been told this information not by Matt, but by her parents whilst she’d been living back at home in Cheddar.

She hoped that she wasn’t going to have to spend the next couple of days re-telling Charlie all about their past and trying to reassure her. It had been this type of situation that she’d been actively avoiding since Charlie had woken up after her accident without a memory, and was the reason why Claire hadn’t once visited her after she had been released from hospital.

When Claire had walked into Charlie’s hospital room, she’d been so relieved to see her awake and sat up talking to a nurse that she’d forgotten what the others had said to her about Charlie’s condition. She’d been instantly reassured that everything was going to go straight back to how it had been before the accident, and she’d breezed into the room and sat down on Charlie’s bed.

Charlie had seemed so much like her old self as Claire had sat down. She’d looked the same, smiled the same, and she’d even sounded the same. Yet as Claire had tried to make jokes, and re-visit conversations that they’d