It is strange how I am remembering these things now. Things I must have seen and done. And yet I am still without any sense of who it is that I am.
The door opens and a man in a white overall steps into the room. He is quite tall, and maybe around my age, or older. I can see that beneath his overall he wears a T-shirt and jeans. His hair is unconventionally long for a medical man. Reddish in colour, and luxuriant once, perhaps, but thinning now a little across the top. He has a warm smile, and the freckled complexion of someone who spends time out of doors. I have not seen him before.
As I rise, he waves me back into my seat, shaking my hand and telling me not to disturb myself. I would have thought I was probably pretty disturbed already, without any further prompting, from myself or anyone else. He has an odd accent, almost imperceptible, and his English is just too perfect to be British. ‘Dr Wulf Kimm,’ he says. ‘I am the resident psychiatrist. You’ll excuse me if I don’t use your name, since neither of us seems to know it.’ He smiles as if this is a joke, and I return the smile to humour him. Germans, and their sense of humour.
He sits down on the other side of the desk, opens up a folder that he has brought in with him and lays it before him, spreading the several sheets it contains across the desktop. He takes a pair of silver-rimmed reading glasses from the breast pocket of his overall and puts them on to skim-read the notes in front of him. Then he removes them, letting them dangle from his thumb and forefinger as he looks at me thoughtfully.
Quite unexpectedly he says, ‘I was a junior doctor at this hospital more than twenty years ago, you know. Best days of my life. I spent most of my time, when I wasn’t working, riding around the island on my motorbike. Of course, it was a pretty rackety old thing in those days. Now I have a Honda CB1000R.’ As if this should mean something to me. ‘I went on to specialise in psychiatry back in Münster. You can imagine my joy when this job popped up on the online noticeboards. I jumped at the chance to come back.’
‘Sometimes,’ I say, ‘the past doesn’t live up to your memory of it when you revisit.’
He cocks his head and looks at me curiously. ‘And you know this how?’
I shrug. ‘Experience, I suppose.’
‘But you can’t recall the experience that taught you it?’
‘I wish I could.’
He takes out a large spiral notebook from a desk drawer and opens it up. Selecting a pen from the same drawer and replacing his reading glasses on his nose, he scribbles some notes in it, then looks up again. ‘My colleagues can find no physical reason to explain your loss of memory. Neuroimaging reveals no brain damage.’
‘Which is why I have been handed over to you.’
‘Indeed.’ He pauses. ‘I am going to ask you a few questions, sir. I would appreciate it if you would answer me as honestly as you can.’
‘Of course.’
‘But first, let me establish... You remember nothing at all about yourself?’
I think about it. ‘I can remember feelings. Emotions. Over the past few days I have had some fleeting fragments of recollection. Mostly from my childhood. My mother. Another child. I’m not sure whether it’s a brother or a sister. But nothing concrete or detailed. It’s like dreaming. You wake up and the detail of it is gone, like a mist evaporating in sunshine.’ I scratch my head. ‘You know, it’s weird. When I washed up on the beach, I had no idea at first where I was. And yet, now, the island seems very familiar to me. But I’m not sure if that’s a familiarity I’ve learned or remembered.’ I turn towards the window. ‘Just a few minutes ago, I was looking out across the moor. I know it’s the Barvas Moor, and I know that I have driven across it sometime in my past. But I don’t actually remember doing it.’
He nods and makes some notes.
‘Later, we’ll go over the experience of finding yourself on the beach, exactly as you remember it. But for the moment I’d like to focus on other parts of your memory. Have you ever, to your recollection, had blackouts? Blank spells? Memory lapses.’ I shrug and smile at the irony of it. ‘I don’t really remember.’
He doesn’t smile. ‘What about time? Do you ever lose time? You know, have gaps in your experience of time?’
And suddenly I remember driving. It was night. I was going home. From work, perhaps. Things on my mind. And when I turned my car into the drive, I couldn’t remember a single thing about the journey. Not one gear change, not one set of traffic lights. Nothing. Just as if it had never happened. So I tell Dr Kimm and he makes some more notes.
‘From what you remember about yourself, would you say you were someone preoccupied with details? You know, rules, lists, schedules, that sort of thing.’
‘I know that detail is important to me,’ I say. ‘Just from my experience of the last few days.’
‘To the point, perhaps, of losing sight of the reasons for having them in the first place?’
‘I have one single preoccupation, Doctor. And that is to find out who I am, and why I am here. So, of course, every detail is important. But I’m not likely to lose sight of why.’
‘And the detail of what happened that led to your being washed up on a beach with no memory, that is just as important to you?’
‘Of course.’
‘You want to know what happened.’
And for the first time, I hesitate. Do I? Do I really want to know? What if I killed that man? Is that something I want to find out about myself? That I am a murderer. That I am capable of taking the life of another human being by smashing his head in. I look up and find the doctor watching me closely.
‘What did you think when you found the body of that man on that island?’
I can’t even bring myself to answer.
‘Did you think you had killed him?’
I did. It was the first thought that went through my head, and I can barely make myself meet the doctor’s eye as I nod my head.
Chapter twenty-four
Gunn made a half-hearted attempt to clear away the mess on his desk to make a place for the good doctor’s interim report. He shared his office with DC Smith, who was out on a job, and it was his chair that he offered to Dr Kimm when he came in. He had heard the roar of the motorbike out in Church Street, but had not associated it with the imminent arrival of the psychiatrist from the Western Isles Hospital. Until the man entered wearing his leathers, a helmet under one arm, the other holding out his report.
‘I knew you were in a hurry for this, Mr Gunn, but it will take me some time to produce a detailed report. This is just a digest, a summary of my findings.’
Gunn glanced over the printed sheets and his heart sank. This would not be light reading. ‘Maybe you’d like to give me a quick verbal,’ he said optimistically.
The doctor glanced at his watch. ‘I’m hoping to get down as far as Leverburgh today,’ he said. ‘Taking the Golden Road. The forecast’s good, but I want to leave myself time to get back before dark.’
‘Doesn’t have to take any longer than you want it to, Doctor. Just a thumbnail sketch of your conclusions.’ He knew he wouldn’t have a chance to wade through the report, interim or not, before his meeting with the CIO, and he didn’t want to face him without all the details at his fingertips.
Dr Kimm laid his helmet on Smith’s desk and unzipped his jacket. ‘Well, Mr Gunn, it is a good job that this psychiatrist is also trained in basic psychology. You got two for the price of one.’ He grinned, but Gunn didn’t see the joke. ‘Your man, for want of a better way to describe him, has no physical injury, no brain damage to explain his memory loss.’ He paused. ‘He is suffering, in my opinion, from dissociative amnesia.’