The Final Minute

by Simon Kernick

  It wasn’t a decision I’d come to easily. I’d been totally reliant on Jane, Tom and Dr Bronson. They were my crutch, my defence against a dark, foreboding outside world in which I was a complete stranger. Put bluntly, they were all I’d got.

  But were they really helping me? I just didn’t know.

  So I formulated a plan. I knew I couldn’t get out of taking the medication, not with Tom standing over me, but whenever I could, I’d let the tablets lodge in the space between my cheek and gum and get rid of them afterwards. This was no easy feat though, so in the majority of instances I had to swallow and then, when Tom had gone, slip out to the toilet, make sure no one was within earshot, and make myself throw up as quietly as possible. Then I’d clear up after myself, spray a bit of air freshener around and return to my room, leaving no one any the wiser.

  So far my memories hadn’t started to come back, but I had experienced flashes of déjà vu. Visions of childhood – of kissing a girl; of riding a bike – flitted across my consciousness like wraiths, barely showing themselves before fading once again into the darkness. But they’d been getting more frequent.

  And now the dreams had started, and I was beginning to think there was a connection in there somewhere.

  Dr Bronson was talking about the importance of taking my medication, but I was no longer listening. I needed to get out of this room. It was suddenly oppressive.

  I got unsteadily to my feet, deliberately swallowing hard. ‘Jesus, I think I might throw up.’

  For a big man, Dr Bronson moved fast, shoving his chair backwards so he was out of range of anything I sent his way. Turning away, I made a pretence of staggering from the room and out into the hallway.

  I could hear Jane and Tom talking quietly in the kitchen. They must have heard me because Jane popped her head round the open door and gave me a puzzled smile.

  ‘Everything all right, Matt?’ she asked.

  I told her what I’d just told Dr Bronson and hurried up the stairs in the direction of the bathroom and my bedroom.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said as I went. ‘Let me get Tom to make something up that’ll calm you down.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I called back over my shoulder. ‘I just need a lie down.’ And, as I spoke the words, I thought two things. One: my sister looks absolutely nothing like me. She has red hair where mine’s dark; pale, freckled skin where mine’s touching olive; a short, petite build compared to my much taller, more solid frame. No obvious similarities at all. That was the first thing. The second was more worrying. I fancied her. I really did. I’d felt that way almost from the first time I clapped eyes on her after waking from my coma. When she’d told me who she was, I’d been shocked. Honestly. I’d thought the feeling might go away, but it hadn’t. In fact, in the absence of any other women in my life, it had got stronger. I didn’t even like to look at her any more. And as for Tom, I was jealous as hell of him.

  When I got to my room, I opened the door and shut it loudly again, but without going inside. Then I waited a minute before creeping back to the top of the stairs and listening to the whispering voices downstairs in the hall. The three of them were talking quietly but I could hear only snatched phrases uttered in tense, businesslike terms. ‘How much longer?’ I heard my sister hiss, just a little too loudly, and there was an irritation in her tone that was a marked contrast to her usual friendly, caring manner around me. It was pretty obvious she was talking about how much longer she was going to have to look after me, and it made me flinch because I’d grown used to relying on her, and it wasn’t nice to hear what she really thought.

  I thought I heard the doc say something about being close, then the voices faded away as they went into the kitchen.

  I stood stock-still, wondering what the hell I thought I was doing skulking there in the shadows. It made me feel like a naughty child, listening in on something I shouldn’t.

  And in that moment I experienced a sudden, perfectly clear vision of me as a young boy standing behind a half-open door listening to my parents shout at each other. And there’s someone standing next to me, older and bigger, and as I turn to him I can’t make out his face but that doesn’t matter because in that moment I know without a shadow of a doubt that it’s my brother.

  And of course there was only one problem with that. I wasn’t meant to have a brother.

  Two

  My sister’s house was a big, rambling place built some time round the turn of the last century, when things were built to last, and set on an isolated stretch of peninsula on the mid-Wales coast. My bedroom was tucked away at the back of the house, about as far away from Jane’s room as it was possible to get, which I’d assumed was so I wouldn’t be able to hear her and Tom at night. Unfortunately it hadn’t worked. It was a sparsely furnished space, and had probably been a kid’s room once, with a single bed, a couple of pictures on the wall, and an old photo of my parents on the bedside table. They were both dead now: my father of a heart attack in 1997, my mother of breast cancer five years later. Dr Bronson told me that I should look at the photo every day because it might jog a memory at any time – he’d even made me bring it into some of the sessions – but all I’d ever seen was two strangers staring back at me.

  Until now. As I sat down on the bed, the vision of my brother already fading, and stared at the photo, there was just a flicker of familiarity about them – that sense that I’d seen them somewhere before. It was vague, but it was something.

  There was a knock on the door. It was Jane.

  I lay down on the bed, putting on a suitably unwell expression, and told her to come in.

  She stepped inside, bearing a cup of tea and a sympathetic smile. ‘Are you OK?’

  I sat up, and gave her a weak smile. ‘I’m a little better now.’ I was about to tell her I could do with some fresh air but I held back. If I told her I wanted to go for a walk she’d insist on either she or Tom accompanying me in case I got lost in the woods that seemed to stretch for miles around this place, and couldn’t find my way back. That was what they always said, as if I was some helpless kid.

  ‘I brought you this.’ She put the tea on the bedside table next to the photo of our parents, and I breathed in the faint scent of her perfume. My sister was an attractive woman. At thirty-six, she was three years younger than me, but she could easily have passed for thirty. With her clear, porcelain skin and petite build, she had a fragile, almost doll-like look, but there was also a confidence about her, a sense of quiet strength, that I imagined appealed to a lot of men. I know it appealed to me.

  She also looked absolutely nothing like either of my parents.

  I thanked her and picked up the photo. ‘Tell me about Mum and Dad.’

  So she told me. About how they met at a dance; how they married after a whirlwind romance; how Dad worked long hours running a small print business and Mum looked after the two of us; how we spent our holidays camping down in Cornwall, and occasionally in France. And as she talked the smile on her face looked both pretty and genuine. It felt like she was recounting real experiences, and yet I remembered none of them. I asked her to describe our old house in Sutton, and she did. In detail too. I tried to picture it, but couldn’t. I’d asked her a couple of weeks ago whether she could take me there and show me the street we used to live on in case it jogged some long-forgotten memories. She’d seemed to think it was a good idea, as had Dr Bronson, but we’d never actually gone, and neither of them had mentioned it in the past few days.

  ‘You’re going to get better, Matt,’ she said, touching my arm briefly before stepping away from the bed as if she thought I might grab her at any moment if she stayed put. Of course I’d never mentioned the fact that I occasionally had inappropriate thoughts about her, nor had I ever put any of those thoughts into action. If anything I was very much the other way, avoiding any physical contact, just in case. But I wondered then if she had an inkling that my view of her wasn’t entirely brotherly.

  I sighed. ‘Yeah, I know. I’m sure I will event
ually. But it just seems to be taking a long time.’

  ‘Dr Bronson said there’s been some progress this week. That you might actually be getting the first memories back.’

  I wasn’t sure that it was entirely ethical for Dr Bronson to be discussing my condition with Jane, especially as he always liked to inform me that anything I said would never go further than the four walls of my sister’s study where we always had our meetings, but I let it go. ‘I’ve had a few,’ I said, ‘but nothing substantial.’ There was no way I was going to tell her anything about the dream, and I was hoping that the doc hadn’t either. I didn’t want my sister thinking I was some kind of psycho.

  ‘He also says you didn’t want to do the hypnotherapy today,’ she added, wearing a vaguely reproachful look.

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘Did he now?’

  ‘You know, you’ve got to trust him, Matt. It’s costing me a lot of money to hire his services – these things don’t come cheap. He’s one of the best therapists in the country. So please, try to cooperate.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘He’s still here if you want to see him. It seems daft for him to come all this way from London and not manage to get a full session in with you. Especially when you’ve been making progress.’

  ‘I don’t think I can face it today. I’m sorry, Sis.’

  ‘It costs me six hundred pounds every time he comes here,’ she said, the frustration showing on her face.

  I didn’t want to upset her, and I could see I was doing a pretty good job of that, but there was no way I was going under today. ‘Well, as I said, I’m sorry, but I’m really not feeling up to it.’

  She breathed out loudly in a show of exasperation and, with an angry shake of the head, left the room, shutting the door behind her with something close to a slam.

  I’d never seen Jane like that before. She always went out of her way to be nice to me. But then, I thought, I’d always cooperated in the past, and now I was standing up to her. I remembered her words to the doc earlier: How much longer? They hadn’t sounded like those of a caring sister.

  I looked down at the cup of tea and decided there was no way I was going to drink it. God alone knew what Jane had put in there but I was sure it was more of the drugs they’d been feeding me these past two months, the ones that had always seemed to sap my energy. The irony right now was that, far from feeling sick, I actually felt better physically than at any time since I’d arrived here.

  A thought struck me then with absolute clarity. I had to get out of this house. I needed to breathe in some fresh air, to walk and to think.

  To remember.

  I waited for a few minutes until I heard Dr Bronson’s car pulling away on the gravel driveway, then got up and went over to the old-fashioned sash window. I flicked open the catch as far as it would go, which was only about eighteen inches. The view looked straight out on to a beech tree, the outer branches of which were tantalizingly close.

  Not even thinking about it, I crawled through the gap in the window and manoeuvred myself round so that I was half in and half out, before slowly letting myself down so I was hanging from the ledge. At this point I had no choice but to drop. The distance from my feet to the grass was probably about eight feet. It was a long way, especially given that spending the last few months sitting around had left me seriously unfit, but it was too late to worry about that now and I felt an unusual sense of exhilaration as I let go, as if I was finally doing something worthwhile after a lifetime of wasted opportunities.

  I hit the ground hard and rolled on to my side, gritting my teeth against the jarring pain in my Achilles tendons. I lay still for a couple of seconds, waiting for the pain to subside before slowly getting to my feet and peering in through the utility room window. The door was open and I could see into the kitchen where Jane was talking with Tom. He was leaning back against a worktop nodding as she spoke to him animatedly, moving her hands a lot. She looked stressed. Tom didn’t. He looked calm. But then he always did. He was a big man with a big presence, the kind of guy who didn’t need to raise his voice to get what he wanted. As I watched, he put a hand on her shoulder and smiled. The gesture seemed to calm her, and she leaned up and kissed him, jabbing me with a most unwelcome shard of jealousy.

  But at least they hadn’t noticed me. I turned and ran across the lawn, into the welcoming embrace of the trees. I didn’t know where I was going, or how long I was going to go there for, but it just felt good to be out of that house, which had seemed to resemble a prison more and more these days.

  As soon as I was well into the trees I slowed to a walk, taking in the sounds and smells around me. It was a sunny, warm mid-September day with a feel of summer about it. Jane had lived out here on the peninsula for ten years now, ever since the death of her husband. He was older and had left her a lot of money in his will, and she’d decided to come here to retreat from the world. She’d shown me photos of the husband – apparently we’d met a few times over the years, and he’d liked me – but needless to say, I had no memory of him whatsoever.

  I hated what I’d become. An invalid, a slave to the vagaries of my mind, a husk of a man with nothing to talk about and, apart from a woman who may or may not have been my sister, a nurse who looked like a soldier, and a shrink who I wasn’t at all sure wanted to cure me, no one in the world to talk to.

  I was completely and utterly alone.

  Gingerly, I touched the four-inch scar that ran in a flattish diagonal line from the tip of my hairline across my forehead before turning down towards my left temple. It was the width of a child’s fingernail and a direct result of the injury that had made me lose my memory. No one knew what I’d been doing out on the road that night. The car I was in hadn’t been my own. No one knew whose it was. It had been so badly burned out that it was impossible to ID from the plates; apparently even the serial number had been erased by the flames. The fact that I’d been carrying no ID on me when I’d been found unconscious and alone twenty feet away, following an anonymous 999 call, only added to the mystery. It was only when Jane reported me missing and actually started contacting hospitals that she’d managed to find me, over a week later – which now, when I thought about it, seemed a pretty big coincidence.

  I had other scars too on various parts of my body, at least two of which didn’t look like the result of any kind of an accident (and which Jane hadn’t been able to explain either), but I was always drawn to the one on my head. It was a little tender to the touch after the tumble in the cellar, and still looked too new to be a scar. I kept it hidden from the world under a floppy fringe but I inspected it regularly – five, ten, twenty times a day, as if I was hoping that I’d look one day and it’d be gone, and my memory miraculously returned to me.

  I heard someone call my name from somewhere back in the direction of the house. It was Tom, and there was an urgency in his voice. So they’d discovered I was missing. That had been quick. I wondered if Tom had gone up to make sure I’d drunk the tea and discovered me gone.

  I broke into a run. I knew it was never a good idea to piss Tom off. One time I hadn’t wanted to take my medication. I’d genuinely felt sick and had asked him if he minded me doing it in my own time. He said he’d wait, and I’d said there was no need, he could trust me. But he’d insisted, and not in a nice way either. His exact words, delivered in slow, harsh tones that seemed to require all his self-control, were: ‘My job’s to make sure you take those fucking pills, so that’s what I’m going to do. OK with you?’ I’d looked in his eyes then and seen a coldness there that made me think that nursing had definitely been a poor career choice for him. It had also made me decide against arguing.

  But I was going to risk his wrath now because I wanted to be alone. No, scotch that. I needed to be alone.

  I quickened my pace. Within the space of a minute I got a burning sensation in my lungs and my breaths turned into long, laboured pants, but even so, I felt good. I was alive. I was free. Even if it was just for a few hours. Unfortu
nately, the woods didn’t provide much cover. Plus, Tom was a hell of a lot fitter than me so it wasn’t going to take him long to catch up. And then he was going to be mighty pissed off. I could hear him continuing to call my name. He was still some distance away but not as far as I was expecting, and there was an edge to his voice now.

  I needed to make a choice. I could skirt the edge of the woods heading in the direction of the mainland. I’d walked there before with Jane. There was a farm about half a mile down with a number of outbuildings and a rundown garden which offered plenty of hiding places, but there was no guarantee I’d get there before Tom ran me down. Alternatively, I could head left and make for the end of the peninsula where the land tumbled down sheer cliff faces to the sea; but it was too exposed out there, and that made me wonder what the hell I was thinking about, running away like this. It wasn’t like there was anywhere for me to go. I had no money. No friends. Nothing. I was always going to have to head back to the house eventually.