The doctor’s words stayed with me all the way down the marble flight of steps of the clinic, down the length of the exclusive London road, reserved primarily for offices of the medical profession, and into the busy bustling shopping street, heaving as it was with Christmas shoppers. It had been too much to anticipate a simple solution to my problems from the one consultation. But I had hoped for some answers at the very least; only what I had actually ended up with were a hundred more questions.
Nothing about the session had gone entirely as I had imagined, I mused, as I allowed myself to be carried along on a wave of shoppers and tourists, all busily trying to seize whatever bargains there were to be had in the days before Christmas. The clinic itself had been far more elegant and exclusive than I had expected, while the doctor’s offices had been far less intimidating; no scary leather consultation couch, no men in white jackets waiting in the wings to escort me to some secure facility if my story sounded just too outlandish to allow me to continue to live among ‘normal’ people.
Even the doctor had been unexpected: female, when I had been expecting male, and far more maternal and warm than the Freudian-like physician I’d been anticipating. She had been professional enough to get me to open up completely about my bizarre misconception of the past five years, and kind enough to make me feel that nothing I said was even remotely weird enough for her to press the panic alarm, which must surely be hidden somewhere in her office.
What I hadn’t been expecting was that this would only be the first of many sessions we would have to share in order to piece together my lost past. Medically, I had already undergone all the tests and procedures that were necessary to diagnose any physiological problem, but I was still crushingly disappointed that there would be no quick-fix solution. I suppose I had secretly been harbouring hopes that some form of medication or treatment could be offered to dispel my illusions and make my new reality feel… well, feel real. Dr Andrews had been kind but firm when clearing up that particular delusion.
And when I asked the final question, the one whose response followed me now like a shadow on the busy London pavements, she had at least been honest.
‘Rachel, I cannot tell you when your memory will return. It could be tomorrow, or next week, or indeed it may take a good deal longer. And, although it is rare, I do have to be honest and tell you that in some very exceptional cases, the lost period of time remains just that, for ever lost.’
For ever lost. The words haunted me as I walked, echoing hollowly as my feet trod the glistening thoroughfares of the capital.
Not that the entire consultation session had been all doom and gloom. Dr Andrews had at least made me feel slightly better about the weird imagined sensations that I had been experiencing. Apparently auditory and olfactory hallucinations were by no means uncommon for those who had undergone head trauma, and when I questioned why the things I could smell and hear were so specific, she even had a reasonable theory for that too. The fragrance of my father’s aftershave would have very specific connotations of safety and security for me, and as the sense of smell is particularly evocative in taking us back to somewhere in our past, the doctor guessed that the hallucination probably mirrored feelings of physical safety I had felt as a child, when held by my parent. Her reasoning about the imagined sirens was even more prosaic – for she guessed that when I was taken to hospital after the mugging, I had not been entirely unconscious and the ambulance’s siren had somehow implanted itself into my memory, and was now being arbitrarily replayed as my confused mind struggled for a foothold in reality.
She was a little less sure of why I was also hearing alarms that were not there, but assured me that in time we would uncover all of the mysteries. In time. And there it was in a nutshell. I would have to be patient and let the truth uncover itself one fact at a time, and she assured me that with each emerging element I would then be able to let go of a comparable piece of my imagined history, until at last only the real past would remain.
It sounded like a very slow business to me, and I still couldn’t help but think it would have been so much better if I could have been given some short sharp treatment – however horrible – to make it all happen much more speedily.
The one thing I did like very much about Dr Andrews was the way she hadn’t laughed when I’d answered her question of why I thought I had two entirely different past lives. Her reaction was nothing like Jimmy’s had been when I offered up my earlier theory of parallel worlds. At least she didn’t laugh out loud and blame it all on my somewhat fantastical literary choices. I hastily slammed the door shut on that line of thought. I had resolutely not allowed myself to think of Jimmy all week, and now, in the offices of a psychiatrist who was skilled at probing out a person’s innermost secrets, was definitely not the time to journey down that path again.