‘I know.’ There was compassion and understanding in his tone.
‘I don’t know why I’m surprised, I should have been expecting it. But he was the first person who I’ve met who I know well; who I really care about. He’s my friend, for God’s sake and he didn’t know who the hell I was!’ I thought of the pub full of familiar faces, none of whom had recognised me. ‘No one does.’
I couldn’t blame Jimmy for failing to come up with some soothing rejoinder. What on earth could he say that could offer any comfort?
‘It’s almost as though it’s not me with amnesia… it’s them! I’ve literally been erased from their memories.’
‘Hey, you’re not going all sci-fi on me here, are you?’ Clearly his mind was going back to the theory I had first put forward when we were last in London: the one about a parallel world, where everyone still existed, leading a similar but subtly different life than this one.
‘It is a theory…’ I offered tentatively.
‘A crazy one.’
‘But what if it were real: crazy or not? What if something happened to me when I hit my head during the mugging? What if I actually did somehow swap places with another version of me?’
Jimmy laughed. But when I didn’t join in, the amusement quickly died.
‘Rachel, you really cannot be serious about this,’ he began gently. ‘I know there are loads of unanswered questions here, but I really don’t believe that people can go zipping about in time and drop in on their other lives.’
‘I’m not talking about time travel. Maybe something happened on that night, and it created… I don’t know… some sort of anomaly in the space-time continuum?
‘Do you even know what a space-time continuum is?’
‘No. But maybe we could find an expert or a scientist in this field. Someone who would have some of the answers.’ Someone who wouldn’t think I was totally insane, I finished silently in my head.
‘Rachel, honey, that stuff only happens in books and movies. In real life you can’t find Weird Scientist Guy actually listed in Yellow Pages. Where would we even begin?’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied mulishly. I knew what he was saying was right. I just didn’t want to hear it.
‘Do you want to hear what I think?’
I turned in my seat to see him more clearly.
‘Go on.’
‘What I think is that something did happen to you when you hit your head. Something very unusual and unique. Something that is allowing you to… I don’t know, maybe read minds, pick up some sort of psychic energy and interpret it into memories… I don’t know.’
‘And why would none of this neurological damage have shown up on the multitude of tests they’ve run on me?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Like I said, I think that it must be incredibly rare. Perhaps it is on the tests but the doctors don’t even know what they’re looking at. You might be the only person this has ever happened to.’
His suggestion did have a degree of rational credibility, I had to grant him that. But it didn’t seem to fit, not in the way my own idea did.
I could go two ways with this: keep on insisting there was something more supernatural – for want of a better word – going on here, and risk losing his support completely, or be the bigger person and let it go. I chose wisely.
‘So I’m unique then, am I?’ I said with the beginnings of a smile. ‘One of a kind?’
‘I’ve never doubted that for a single minute of my life.’
I couldn’t help it: my smile just kept getting broader and broader, until I was in danger of resembling some demented version of the Cheshire Cat. I also couldn’t help noticing that he looked more than a little pleased by my response.
A few more miles down the grey ribbon of motorway, I brought up the topic again. ‘But what if we never get to the bottom of it? If we never find out the answers? What do we do then?’
Jimmy was quiet for a long moment. ‘Well,’ he said finally on a long and considering tone, ‘you remember the first eighteen years of your life just fine, don’t you?’
‘Yes. Right up to the night of the car accident.’
‘So, in the grand scheme of things, we’re really only talking about having inexplicably… lost… a small piece of your past. I guess what you have to ask yourself is how much time and energy you want to spend on looking backwards.’ His voice changed then, the timbre becoming softer and lower. ‘But speaking personally, it’s not your past that interests me so much as your future.’