This was very strange indeed. How was it possible that Sarah didn’t know the details of something that must have been such a major event in my life? We’d always shared everything. Surely I would have told her all about it? But apparently not, she reported. Oh she’d certainly tried to get the story out of me on many occasions, but apparently I had refused to tell her anything.
‘Was I really upset about it?’ I queried.
‘Yes. Very. But you still wouldn’t give me any of the details. And believe me, I tried to get them out of you!’
I laughed then, imagining the third-degree tactics she had probably employed, all – apparently – without success.
She wagged her finger at me in warning, ‘And this is precisely why you should never keep secrets from your best friend. Because you never know when one day you’re going to get amnesia and need her to fill in the blanks!’
The restaurant was beginning to empty around us by then. And when I looked out the window I could see the day had darkened under a slate-coloured sky. There was still so much I wanted to talk to Sarah about but we’d simply run out of time. We settled the bill, and in order to eke out our last few minutes together, I said I’d walk with her to the taxi rank.
We were standing by the crossing, waiting for the lights to change, when it happened. The pedestrian lights had just turned to green and Sarah had already taken one step into the road when I first heard the siren. Strangely it didn’t sound far away and distant, but was instantly loud and strident, as though its arrival were imminent. My head darted up as I looked left and right for the approaching emergency vehicle. But the long grey road appeared clear in both directions: nothing was heading towards us. Yet the sound was everywhere, the discordant two-tone klaxon reverberating off the buildings and pavements. I looked around in confusion as other pedestrians began to traverse the road, surely walking blindly into the path of a speeding vehicle. Later it would occur to me how similar the situation was to my recent dream; the one where only I could see there was impending danger and everyone else was oblivious. But for now I had only one thought in mind, to snatch Sarah back from the looming threat. The siren was now so loud I could scarcely hear my own cry of warning as I reached out and grabbed her coat sleeve, literally snatching her backwards onto the kerb. I fully expected the thunder of the vehicle to cover the space where a moment earlier my friend had stood, but nothing came whistling past us in a blaze of flashing lights. The road remained empty.
The other pedestrians, those who had been crossing the road with Sarah, had by then all successfully made it safely to the other side, never once realising how close they had been to disaster.
‘Where did it go?’ I asked Sarah, unaware that my strange behaviour was now the object of some attention by the gaggle of ‘survivors’ on the other side of the street.
Sarah, to her credit, only looked a little shaky; as though being plucked from the path of invisible non-existent jeopardy was something she regularly contended with.
‘Where did what go?’
‘The siren.’ And when she continued to look at me blankly, ‘You must have heard it? It was heading right towards us!’ My voice trailed off as it slowly began to penetrate through my panic that the sound of the siren was actually not there any more. A horrible feeling of déjà vu came over me.
‘You didn’t hear it, did you?’
She shook her head.
‘But it was so deafening, as though it was almost on top of us.’
Another slow shake of the head.
I didn’t need her to tell me that no one had heard the sound but me, I could already see it in her eyes.
‘Has this happened before?’ she asked gently.
I thought of the alarm clock that wasn’t there, beeping in the night, and the numerous times my father’s aftershave had surrounded me like a cloud.
‘There’ve been a couple of times,’ I admitted slowly, ‘where I’ve heard things, smelt things even…’ My words died away.
‘You have to tell the doctor about this when you see him this week,’ she urged, and I knew she was right, even though I was loath to add another inexplicable symptom to my ever-increasing accumulation.
‘It might be something that’s really common with amnesia cases,’ she suggested, then seeing my gloomy response she tried a different tack altogether. ‘Or maybe, since you bumped your head, you now have these incredibly acute senses, and can hear and smell things the rest of us can’t.’
‘What, like a dog, you mean?’
She laughed then and gave me a hug. ‘Yeah, but a really pretty pedigree one.’