"It would be useful," she said, offering a pen.
I shrugged and signed. "I don't envy you," I said. "So, what do we do now?"
"I'd like to talk," she said. "Or, rather, I'd like you to talk. Just talk and see where it takes you."
And I did. I gave myself up to it. Irene Beddoes went into the building and returned with sandwiches and salad and fizzy water and tea and biscuits, and the sun moved across the sky and I talked, and sometimes, as I thought of the sheer tiredness that my life had been over the last year, I cried, but mainly I talked and talked and talked until I was exhausted and the courtyard had become dark and cold and she led me through echoey corridors back to my room.
There was a large bunch of daffodils on my bed, and a note scribbled across the back of a used envelope. "Sorry you weren't here. I waited as long as I could. I'll come back as soon as I can. Loads of love and I'm thinking of you, Sadie."
I sat on the bed, weak with disappointment.
"How's the investigation going?"
"We're short of anything to investigate."
"There's the women."
"There's five female names."
"Six. Including me."
"If you .. ." Cross paused and looked awkward.
"If I remember anything," I said, 'you'll be the first to know."
"This is your brain."
"My brain." I looked at the scan spread out on the light board in front of us and then touched my temples. "How odd to look at your own brain. Well, is it all right?"
Charlie Mulligan smiled at me. "It seems pretty good to me."
"It's a bit shadowy."
"It's the way it's meant to look."
"But I still can't remember. There's a hole in my life."
"Maybe there always will be."
"A disaster-shaped hole."
"Or perhaps memory will gradually return and fill it in."
"Can I do anything about it?"
"Don't fret away at it. Relax."
"You don't know who you're talking to."
"There are worse things than forgetting," he said mildly. "Anyway, I ought to be getting on."
"Back to your mice."
He held out his hand and I grasped it. It was warm and firm. "Back to my mice. Get in touch if you need anything."
If I need something you can do anything about, I thought. But I just nodded and tried to smile.
"I read somewhere that you only really fall in love twice, maybe three times, in your life."
"Do you think that's true?"
"I don't know. Maybe. But, then, I've either fallen in love lots of times, or hardly ever. There's the bit where you can't sleep and you can't eat and you feel sick and breathless, and you don't know if you're very happy or completely wretched. You just want to be with him and the rest of the world can go hang."
"Yes."
"I've had that feeling quite a lot of times. But it doesn't last long. Sometimes just a few days; sometimes until the moment after you've had sex. It settles down and then you have to see what you're left with. And usually it's not much. Like ashes after the fire's gone out. You think: God, what was that all about? And sometimes you still care, feel affection, desire. But is that love? The time I was most intensely in love was when I was at university. God, I adored him. But it didn't last."
"Did he leave you?"
"Yes. I cried for weeks. I thought I'd never get over it."
"What about Terry? Has the relationship with him been stronger than other ones?"
"Longer, at least, which must count for something, some kind of commitment. Or endurance." I gave a laugh that didn't sound quite like my normal laugh. "I mean, I feel I know him really well, now. I know him in a way that I hardly know anyone. All the intimate little things, all the things he hides from other people .. . And the more I know him the more reason there is to leave him, but the harder it gets to do it. If that makes sense?"
"You make it sound as if you're trapped."
"Lots of people feel trapped in their relationships at times, don't they?"
"So you feel trapped at work and trapped at home?"
"That's a bit dramatic. I've just let things get into a rut."
"Which you've wanted to escape from?"
"You get into things gradually, and you don't realize quite where you are until it's a crisis and you suddenly see."
"So you're saying .. . ?"
"This is my crisis."
The next day when Irene came to my room .. . My room. I would catch myself saying that. As if it was where I was going to spend the rest of my life. As if I wouldn't be able to cope with a world outside where I would have to buy things for myself, make decisions.
She was as composed as always. She smiled and asked me how I'd slept. In the real world, people might sometimes ask you how you were, but they didn't really want to know. You were just meant to answer, "Fine." They didn't ask you how you'd slept, how you were eating, how you were feeling, and really want to know the answer. Irene Beddoes wanted to know. She would look at me with her intelligent eyes and wait for me to speak. So I said I'd slept fine, but it wasn't true. That was yet another thing about hospital. I had my own private room, of course, but unless your room was on an island in the middle of the Pacific you were always going to be woken at about two thirty in the morning by some woman screaming. Someone would come and deal with her but I'd be left staring at the dark, thinking about dying and being dead and about that cellar and the voice in my ear.
"Yes, fine," I said.
"Your file arrived," she said.
"What file?"
"From your GP. Your basic NHS file."
"Oh, God," I said. "I'd forgotten about that. I suppose it's full of stuff that's going to be taken down and used in evidence against me."
"Why do you say that?"
"It was just a joke. Now you're going to say that there's no such thing as "just a joke"."
"You didn't tell me you'd been treated for depression."
"Have I?"
She glanced down at her notebook. "You were prescribed an SSRI in November 1995."
"What's that?"
"An antidepressant."
"I don't remember that."
"Try."
I thought for a moment. 1995. University. Wreckage.
"That must have been when I split up with Jules. I told you about that yesterday. I got into a terrible state; I thought my heart was broken. Well, I suppose it was. I wasn't getting out of bed in the morning. I was crying all the time. I couldn't seem to stop. Strange how much water there is inside you. So a friend of mine made me go to the college doctor. He prescribed some pills, but I can't even remember taking them." I caught myself and laughed. "When I say I can't remember, I don't mean more amnesia. It just never seemed important."
"Why didn't you mention it to me before?"
"When I was about eight I was given a penknife for my birthday. Unbelievable, but true. About eight minutes later I was trying to carve a bit of wood in the garden and the knife went into my finger." I held up my left hand. "Look, there's still quite a nice scar. It bled like anything. I may be imagining it, but when I look at the scar I can feel what it was like when the knife slipped and went in. I didn't mention that either."
"Abbie, we've been talking about your mood. We've been talking about how you react to stress. But you didn't mention it."
"Are you saying that I forgot it, the way I can't remember being grabbed by this man? But I did mention it. I told you about it when we talked yesterday."
"Yes, but you didn't mention that you received medical treatment."
"Only because I didn't think of it as relevant. I had an affair with someone at university then got depressed when it went wrong. Oh, OK, maybe it's relevant. Everything's relevant, I suppose. Maybe I didn't mention it because it was so sad and I felt so abandoned."
"Abandoned?"
"Yes. Well, of course. I was in love and he wasn't."