3

It wasn’t even raining; that was the most puzzling thing. Why else would he be here holding his bike like a plonker in a trance under the dripping branches of a sycamore on the canal towpath, if not to hide from the rain? It was as if he’d just come round after a bloody fit or something. But if it had been a fit, he’d be on his back frothing at the mouth, or at the very least twitching like a pithed frog, wouldn’t he? Matt glanced at his watch. Almost eight-thirty. Bloody hell. Almost an hour since he’d had that riveting conversation with the Uruk-Hai cheerleader back at the General.

Matt groaned. Oh Christ, please don’t let this be some crappy escalatory consequence of the accident. All he needed now were random cognitive blackouts on top of feeling like crap almost every day and being as clumsy as a four-year-old. Am I really going to have to tell that bloody psychologist that I’m having memory lapses?

He moved out from under the the sycamore, considering that option for all of two seconds before chucking it down the pan. No way was he going to give the psychologist the pleasure of that oh so irritating “I told you so” smile. He’d rather eat his own head. But where the hell had all that time gone?

In his past, his student past, whole chunks of time could slide by when Matt had been under pressure for a test, or revising something he enjoyed. But at least when it was done, he’d had the benefit of knowing the names of all the nerves in the upper arm, or the gist of the coma-inducing Krebs cycle (he still managed to remember succinate to fumarate to malate quite easily for some reason—probably because it sounded like something from the shipping forecast). Even then, though, there’d never been anything like this big, gaping hole where his recollection should have been.

He looked at his watch again. Yep, now it was eight-thirty on the dot. Matt forced himself to think. He’d cycled away down Observatory Road, he remembered that bit. And then there’d been the accident on Walton Street. Yes, and then…it was no good. He knew that the plan had been to grab a bacon bap and head up to the weir, but now the beginning of a headache was beginning to pound away behind his left eye. What he craved were two paracetamol and a bed. He did not feel the slightest bit hungry; in fact, he thought he could taste the last remnants of some very nice sausages on his palate. He hadn’t been to the bacon butty van already, had he?

Matt sighed, wheeled his bike around and mounted. On his left, he could see the tower of the church in Jericho and the fronts of the few low buildings on St. Barnabus Street jutting out onto the wharf. He glanced at them as he passed, but gave them no more than a fleeting millisecond’s thought. Why should he? He’d never been inside any of them. Didn’t know what they housed. Didn’t care.

On the bike, Matt kept his head down and bypassed the usual morning traffic by negotiating the smaller streets and alleyways. It took him twenty minutes of hard pedalling before he approached the right turn off the Iffley Road into Fairfield Street. His “flat” there consisted of two rooms on the ground floor of an end of terrace house. The street itself was narrow made even narrower by the cars parked on both sides of it. A traffic nightmare between seven-thirty and ten every morning.

As with most of Oxford’s rented accommodation, the flat had been remodelled to suit the high turnover in this archetypal student town. In other words, it was cramped, badly designed, and about as welcoming as a Guantanamo toilet. A bolted-on lean-to at the rear housed a lecturer in ancient history. Upstairs was a bachelor bursar to one of the colleges. Lots of young men visited the bursar, ostensibly to discuss their student loans, but Matt suspected there were all sorts of withdrawals and deposits going on up there that had nothing to do with finance.

Matt opened the front door and kicked away the morning’s post before stooping to pick it up. Most of it was for people who hadn’t lived at the property for years. Of today’s mail, only two items were addressed to him. One was an electricity bill, the other an invitation to a time-share junket where he was “guaranteed to win a microwave!” Yeah, in exchange for signing up for one week in an apartment in the Costa del Ripoff in February, which was a snip at five thousand a year. Wow, sometimes it was difficult to believe how lucky a bloke could be. Matt crumpled the letter in his fist and threw it into an overflowing black refuse sack in the hallway, strategically stationed there for such eventualities.

He stuck his key in the door of his flat and leaned his weight on it. As usual, it stuck on the warped laminate flooring two feet into its travel. The stuffy smell of years of occupation hit him, together with the stifling heat of the storage heaters, which were always on, no matter what Matt tried to do to shut them off. He dumped his rucksack and shut the door. He needed a cup of tea and something for his headache.

The flat was tiny. It was six paces from the bay window looking out on Fairfield Street to his kitchenette. The sink, a cooker, about a yard of work surface, and a fridge were inelegantly shoehorned into an alcove. Behind that, the bedroom itself was furnished with a gigantic king-size bed that could accommodate a small horse (and, judging by the way it sagged alarmingly in the middle, probably had) and allowed room for the most minuscule of bedside tables. Most of Matt’s worldly possessions were on that table. A French window, specially designed to allow in drafts no matter which direction the wind was blowing, led out onto a gravel patio big enough to hold Matt’s bike, so long as he kept the front wheel at right angles to the frame. The bathroom opened off the bedroom and down some steps, and contained a pale pink suite the colour of an anemic grapefruit. The showerhead dripped constantly, and the only window in the room that might have allowed any sort of ventilation had been painted shut at about the time of Noah.

Advertised as an ideal flat for a couple, it would have been if that couple were either conjoined twins or under three feet tall. If you were in any way normal, in that you might require some “me” time away from your partner for anything longer than twenty seconds, the place would have driven you bananas within a week. But as a bolthole to doss and exist as a single man about Oxford, it was fine. Fairfield Street was, Matt kept telling himself, a temporary solution to a temporary situation. The thought of it being anything else appalled him. Yet he knew that, for some, renting a place like this as a couple was often a first step in their quest to aspire to something better.

He’d rather eat crow shit.

An alarm sounded in his head. The words “crow shit” bounced off the inside of his skull like a pinball, setting off lights and bells. Not his usual choice of comparative reference at all. So where exactly in his mental lexicon that little scatological descriptive gem had been dragged out of, he had no idea. Matt poured water from the kettle, squeezed the steeping teabag with a spoon, added some sugar and milk, and sat on the sofa.

Memory lapses. Unusual phraseology. What next? Matt reached across and flicked on his iPod, which was charging on a speaker system dock. He pressed shuffle and waited. The song that came on put a tin hat on it. The Automatic’s metaphoric tilt at the demon of drink and drugs, “Monster.”

Unbelievable. Not his choice. Someone else’s. The very someone he was trying his level best to forget.

Silvy.

What the hell would she have made of 71 Fairfield Road? The answer was that Matt was clueless. In the few weeks that their “relationship” had lasted, there hadn’t been time to catalogue an extensive list of her likes and dislikes. They’d spent too much time making love, eating, making love, drinking, and having your actual amazingly wild fling (making love). But she had kept singing, “What’s that coming over the hill,” by said Automatic after she’d heard it once on the radio in his car. She’d kept on singing it, so he’d downloaded it for her.

Silvy.

The girl he’d fallen head over heels for. The girl he’d been driving home with and who hadn’t been in the passenger seat of the overturned car he’d woken up in after the accident. The girl no one could trace to any ambulance or hospital, and whom the calm psychiatrist suggested had been a figment of Matt’s imagination, even calling it “delusional depression.”

Matt remembered the enthusiasm glinting in the chap’s eyes as he said that. An enthusiasm that belied the even expression he’d maintained. He’d been pleased with his diagnosis, Matt could tell. Unusual in someone quite so young, he’d explained, but not unheard of. Probably respond to a dibenzothiazepine, he’d added. And so Matt was prescribed a drug with the crass and cringe-inducing name of Deluquel. Amazing to think that a drug company, which had spent millions steering the thing through the murky layers of government red tape it needed to navigate to get onto the chemist’s shelf, could not have come up with a better name than bloody Deluquel.

Matt hated the things. They made him drowsy, made his mouth dry, gave him constipation and blocked his nose. Worse, they made him exist in a cloudy, buzzy world where nothing mattered quite as much as it should. But he could have put up with all of that as long as they helped him forget about Silvy.

The problem was, they didn’t. He could not forget Silvy. She was as real to him as the steaming cup of Typhoo in his hands.

Up until Silvy, there had, of course, been a few others—few being the appropriate adjective. Some he had really liked, but they never seemed to like him with the same passion. Others were more relationships of circumstance—aimless dalliances that waxed and waned like pieces of driftwood on a spring tide. Matt hadn’t slept with all of them—scratch that, he hadn’t slept with nearly enough of them. Even when he had, the Richter-scale tremors he’d been led to believe might happen never did. Perhaps, he rationalised, it was because he was such a late developer in the romantic sense.

Up until he was almost seventeen he’d paid scant attention to girls, even while his schoolmates spent every waking moment playing CLF. Cherchez La Femme would have sounded way uncool, even amongst the bright top set who were his contemporaries, whereas the acronym was obscure enough to make it sound acceptably like a rap band to the uninitiated. In fact, Matt found the whole flirting thing a bit like a metaphysical forum on ethics in journalism: a complete bloody mystery. Often, he chided himself for not having paid enough attention to at least recognize romance when it sat up and tried to love-bite him on the leg. That was, he suspected, the main reason why he was so crap at it. Perhaps it was lack of confidence based on the way he had looked—still looked—smallish, slight, ordinary. His face, Matt supposed, wasn’t bad. Some of his ephemeral girlfriends had even called him cute. And he was working on trying to get rid of that expression he sometimes caught himself wearing, the one that showed how crushed and disappointed he was these days at what the world was dishing up.

Silvy blew all that angst and self-doubt out of the water with one devastating smile. She’d been physical, always touching and wanting to be touched. She was taller than him by an inch, and even taller when she wore the kind of heels she liked. Part of the appeal, Matt knew, was the way she’d done all the running. She’d insisted on long walks on the beaches, and even longer weekends staying in doing nothing except eating pizza and ice cream in bed. Well, almost nothing.

Silvy had urges and she responded to them like any animal would. At least any animal that didn’t give a tinker’s cuss about anyone watching. At the end of the long walks, Silvy would invariably find a dune to lie down on. In bed, Silvy would find something interesting to do with the ice cream (and, on one very memorable occasion, an olive). It was exciting, liberating, and, so the psychiatrist had said, a total bloody fantasy.

Matt sipped his tea. Its hot sweetness massaged his tongue. He knew he should go to bed. He knew he should take his Deluquel and try and sleep in the hope that when he woke up things would be better. He knew that running this video over in his head was a total waste of time, and that the patronizing psychologist who was dishing out the therapy had shown him ways of pressing the stop button before it got into full swing. But remembering Silvy and the few things they’d (apparently not) done in those few weeks together didn’t seem like so much mental agony to Matt.

That, he surmised, was the nub of the problem. He reached into his rucksack and took out the necklace she’d given him on their second date. It was still damp from the exploding bag of saline. Attached to it was a pendant. Matt still wasn’t sure how best to describe it, except that it was a looped cross inside a circle, and it was white gold and had hung around his neck on the leather thong from the day she’d given it to him. It looked Celtic, or so he’d supposed. But when he’d asked Silvy, she’d shrugged and said, “It’s pretty. Wear it for me.”

It was quirky and ornate, just like Silvy. When he’d shown it to the psychiatrist as proof of Silvy’s existence, the bloke had simply stared at it impassively. Matt even toyed with the idea of trying to find out where she’d bought it, to see if the shopkeeper might remember her, but there were no markings at all that might help in that search. He could have bought it himself anywhere. At least that’s what the look on the psychiatrist face had implied.

Matt could understand that look. After all, what the psychiatrist saw was this bloke who’d survived an awful crash, obsessed with a long-legged blonde with a supposed libido the size of Mount Etna, waving a pagan symbol on the end of a bit of leather as the only evidence of her existence. What was worse was that Matt could not furnish any photos. Silvy hadn’t liked having her photo taken. She’d told him that Native Americans believed photographs stole their souls. He’d waited for her to laugh. She hadn’t, although he’d felt one building up inside him. But he’d swallowed it down and nodded instead.

There was something about that Teutonic accent of hers that lent gravity to everything she said. Made it all sound so plausible. And besides, anyone who looked like Silvy, and did the things that Silvy did, was allowed to have the odd foible, as far as Matt was concerned. Christ, she could have more foibles than a fencer’s kit bag, so long as she kept taking him for those long walks on the beach. True, they hadn’t mixed with any of his or her friends. She’d never mentioned any of her own and he hadn’t minded. They’d been too caught up in each other, Matt argued when the psychologist had inquired. But the answer he gave had not satisfied the shrink. He’d put a different spin on the whole thing, implying that it was also not beyond possibility that the bit of Matt’s head that controlled sexual fantasy had been jolted into overdrive as part of his post-traumatic stress.

Matt squeezed his eyes shut. They had all the bloody answers. Trouble was, they were all the wrong ones. He let his fingers roll over the pendant, slipped it back over his head and went to the bathroom. There was ancient lino on the floor that looked like an off-cut from a Jackson Pollock exhibition (had he done anything with lino?). It didn’t do to stare at it for long, because the shapes and stains began to writhe with a life of their own if you did. Matt blew out air and reached for the knob on the bathroom cabinet door. Inside was a haphazard collection containing an arrangement of razor-blade cartridges, shampoo, toothpaste, an unopened box of brufen (for when his legs hurt too much after the bike), and a bottle of Deluquel. He took the bottle out and looked at the label, his mouth a thin line.

“Sod it,” Matt said to the bloke who looked back at him in the mirror, reached in for the brufen and squeezed a couple out. For some reason, his headache was abating, but it wouldn’t do any harm to help it along. He took the tablets back to the tea he’d placed on the floor in front of the sofa, and gulped them down.

Outside, a drizzle greyed out the day. Matt put his head down and ran.

He switched off “Monster” and found some Kings of Convenience instead. The melodious strings of “Toxic Girl” bathed his ears. It was the soundtrack to his life.

“Sod it, sod it, sod it,” he said and threw off his clothes, searching for some not-too-sweaty shorts in the laundry basket. He put on his running shoes before he had a chance to change his mind. Three miles along the river would give him the best chance of sleeping. Besides, endorphins were much better for you than bloody Deluquel. Everyone knew that.

Even a mature second-year med student who’d survived a car crash on an empty road in good weather involving no other vehicle and whose lovely blonde passenger had disappeared from the face of the Earth.