Brrt, brrt.
Brrt, brrt.
Brrt, brrt.
Come on.
Brrt, brrt.
Come on.
Brrt, brrt.
I really don’t want to leave a message.
Brrt, bshuffle “yeah, got it, uh.” distant.
“Hello?”
Closer, shockingly: “Hlo?”
“Kath?”
“J, man, what d’ye want? You ok?”
“Not really.”
“Fuxake, dude, five fuckin... what’s up?”
“I really need your help.”
“Y’know, I’d already got that.” Kath is not a morning person. She sniffed and cleared her throat. “What d’ye need?”
“I, er, need your advice.”
“My advice?!” Kath coughed a laugh. “Here it is: ‘you don’t have any money’ - now go back to sleep.”
“I haven’t slept yet.”
“Some of us would like to.” There was a rustling and shuffling as she clearly got herself into a more comfortable position and, faintly I heard “S’at?”
“Kath, where are you?!”
She made a noise between a grunt and throat-clearing. “What’s the fucking advice already? Mine would tend to otherwise revolve around: ‘get some sleep, you daft cow’.”
“Kath, this is serious.”
“I am being serious - sleep is a grand thing some of us are lacking right now.”
“Fuck’s sake, Kath!” I yelled. “I got drugged last night! I have no memory of Thursday and Friday! Some bastard’s stolen my watch! It could get more serious, but it would have to involve loss of life or limb!”
“Holy Mary.”
“Zackly,” I said, quieter now.
“God, but... God, who?”
“I - that doesn’t matter right... I...”
“J, do you know this person?”
“Kath, no, look, it’s... it’s more complicated than...”
“Do I know this person?”
“Kath...”
“Coz if...”
“Kath!” Imageshift. Pictures flicked through my head of the defence mechanisms of the Greely Twins. Quieter: “Kath, I don’t need this right now.”
“Sorry.”
“Ok.” We were quiet for a bit. Mel stopped hovering on the landing and went into her room.
“What can I do?”
“I need to know about memory loss.”
“What?! Why me?”
“You’re the only person I know with a psychology degree.”
I could hear her raising her eyebrow. “Five years ago and...”
“Please.”
Sigh. “Okay, tell me about it.”
So I found myself telling yet another person the edited highlights.
Afterwards: “So why, again, are you asking me?”
“Because BZ-drugs would cause only anterograde amnesia and...”
“And this is retrograde. Yeah. Hmm.”
“Well?”
“Well. Ok.”
“Dude!”
“I’m thinking.”
“Ok.”
Eventually: “Ok, look, the human memory - saving your presence - isn’t exactly perfect, even all that efficient. We remember what we want to and forget what’s uncomfortable and generally lose stuff like coins down the back of a sofa.” Pause. “Yeah, I know, I’m a poet.” I frowned, a little confused. “And sometimes we throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
“What does that mean?”
Luckily she understood me: “Means that sometimes we overcompensate when we want to lose something that makes us uncomfortable, so we lock not only it away, but a whole bunch of stuff around it.”
“Like... sweeping off a whole mantelpiece onto the floor because we hate one picture.”
“Exactly like.”
“Locked away?”
“What?”
“You said locked - not thrown.”
“Yeah. Most of the time when we forget something - and I appreciate this might be something that’s foreign to you so I’ll have to dig out more metaphor - we don’t lose the stuff entirely, it doesn’t get destroyed, we just lose the key.”
“I never lose my keys.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“What, really never?”
“Really never; unless someone else moves them.”
“So there’s your metaphor right there.”
“Shit.”
Kath did a bunch of breathing and I said: “So, um, what next?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what drug would do this, and will I get my memory back and...”
“What? I dunno! You need a doctor for this sort of shit.”
“I don’t know any doctors.”
“Quit whining and yes you do. What? Really? Yeah - Brian’s big brother Carl. You met him that time...”
The click-flitter-shuffle of my card-index brain whirred back into gear. “In 03, yeah, with the green shirt on. JJ72 fan, har, har.”
“Gotcha.”
“Big brother?”
“Didn’t you...?”
“He was sitting down.”
“Yep, bigger than Bri.”
“Shit...”
“Aaaaaanyway, you know that sleep thing?”
“Shit, sorry, yeah, fuck. Er. You got a phone number?”
Silence. “You called me, remember?”
“For. Carl.”
“Hold up. Ehm. No, no we haven’t. P might have Brian’s. Or, no, Hannah probably does - she lived with him last year.”
A minute easily went by. I realised I was chewing my lip - something I haven’t done for a long time. Dent, dent, dent went my front right teeth, lip tucked in a way so there were no marks, not even if I... shit...
“J? J, you there?”
“Sorry. Yes. Um.”
“Fuck, get some sleep, girl.”
“Thanks, Kath, I. Yeah.”
“Yeah. Gwan.”
We said our rather vague and truncated farewells at this point, Kath no doubt turning back to the arms of whoever had been in the background, or revolving into her clothes, amid gratifyingly regretful farewells and sincere flatteries, and off into the next taxi she passed. If I spent any more of my pitifully small brain power on guilt for inconveniencing however many friends it had been I would entirely cease functioning, juggling guilts. I would just have to deal with it later or - here was a good one - blame it on friggin Sandra Lester.
Hello? Hello, detail - Sandra Lester you say? I realised I was clutching my phone hard when it squawked in protest. I stared at it. The thought of ringing yet another friend, then ringing some near-stranger, spilling the details of this... it roiled in my guts; every nerve rebelled at it.
What the hell - I had enough information. And broadband. Yeah. Go to.
Google. Wikipedia. Even Ask Bastard Jeeves. Yahoo! Answers I eschewed, though my humour quirked at the thought of laying it out for that pile of attention-seeking miscreants to get their dead-of-night teeth into. But Google and Wiki, let me tell you, are your friends, should you ever be slipped a mickey by a pretty, dark-haired lesbian.
My search terms narrowed, refined, got more complicated and baroque. I learned new words, and a Brief History of Anti-Depressants. I love a language that has the word ‘amnestic’ in it. I learned more about the freedom afforded by antipsychotics and the slavery stolen by scopolamine-glazed bosoms than anyone really should have to. I became ever more elated and depressed with each new turn in my virtual road, as my knowledge increased in breadth and depth and illumination cast hideous, teeming dark shadows that mirrored the human soul and I found illustrations of my species’ ingenuity that I really could have done without.
Oh, it’s a cliché, sure, but for every man finding a tool to raise us higher, there’s a man wanting to screw money out of us for the privilege, and another examining the angles to see how best to make it into a weapon. And bollocks to your PC-burdened, gender-non-specifics and anti-heteronormativity. God, there’s times when I just want to puke on kindly, careful language, you cretinous, idle...
I slept. Crashed, drawn up and over by my ineluctable bed, fully-dressed, head jangling, jaw buzzing from its clenching, some time around dawn.