by Tim Weaver
I pushed down the doubts, started up the car and headed for the caravan park. It was about a mile inland, wedged between a couple of farms on the southern corner of the New Forest. The surrounding countryside was pretty, even in the rain: fields rolled off either side of the road, and were divided by high walls of ivy and ash trees that had begun to bronze as autumn set in. From the road, the campsite was hardly visible, but when I followed signs along a tarmacked lane, I discovered six fields of roughly half an acre each. Five of them were for touring caravans, and this time of the year all that meant was a relentless parade of empty pitches. The sixth was for static vans – they were lined up like white cargo containers in eight rows of ten.
I found Richard’s a couple of minutes later, tucked away in a far corner, big trees hemming it in. As I got out, I looked to see if he had any neighbours, but the units immediately adjacent to his were dark and empty and looked as if they might have been that way for a while. Further out, a few vans were occupied, likely privately owned and lived in permanently: there were hanging baskets outside, satellite dishes, washing lines and gas barbecues. Most of them, though, clearly hadn’t been used since the summer holidays. It gave the place a weird feeling, as if it were at the ends of the earth, and as I opened up Richard’s caravan I wondered if this was the best place for him – being here would surely only feed his sense of isolation.
The inside of the van was pretty standard – a tiny kitchen in front of me, a living room with a wraparound sofa, a table and a television, and then a series of cupboards at head height. A narrow hallway steered off right, down to where two bedrooms and the bathroom were. On the table, his laptop was plugged in, recharging, and next to the TV there were piles of DVDs, books and magazines.
The rain sounded like gravel against the roof as I walked towards the two bedrooms. In the first, the bed was unmade, the sheets crumpled, a glass of half-drunk water on the bedside cabinet beside a packet of ibuprofen. Across the hall, in the other room, two single beds had been stripped of their sheets and there was a box sitting on top of one of them.
I pulled it towards me, looked inside and found it was full of cuttings, photocopies and printouts. Richard had collected the media stories that had followed his discovery. I removed a front page from the Daily Echo. The headline read THE LOST MAN, and there was a picture of him, staring into the camera, a few days after he was found at Coldwell Point. He looked frightened and confused.
I took the box through to the living area, set it down on the table next to the laptop, and then returned to the bedrooms and started going through his wardrobes. Normally, in the search for a missing person, I felt no compunction about going through the clothes they’d worn and the belongings they’d once held dear. Looking at photos of them alongside the families that were mourning them, at private emails intended only for the recipient – it never bothered me, because if I didn’t do it, there was always the risk that something important would be overlooked.
Here, though, it felt different: these clothes were being worn every day, these drawers were being opened; any photographs he had, any notes he’d made or emails he’d sent, it was all part of a life happening now. It felt intrusive even going through the pockets of his jeans – an invasion of the limited existence he’d managed to carve out for himself.
I found nothing in his wardrobes, in his clothes, and there were no photos anywhere. That wasn’t so surprising, given he didn’t know who he was, where he was from or who his family were, but that also meant the search had immediately begun to contract, and that was unhelpful at the start of a case. I returned to the living area and sat at the table with the box.
At first glance, the media coverage looked limited and most of it seemed to have trod the same path. Even so, I arranged everything into chronological order and then went back through it, trying to plot a course from the moment he was found on 20 January. He’d chosen to do his talking in a controlled environment, where people sympathetic to him – Barton from Hampshire Police; members of the charity Starting Again; Reverend Parsons – were always at his side. He came across as he had at the church: quiet, eloquent, oddly old-fashioned in the way he spoke; timid, sometimes disconcerted and anxious.
I wondered whether his timidity was simply because of what he’d gone through, a reaction to the disorientating nature of memory loss, or whether it was a carry-over from whoever he’d been before. If he’d been timid before he woke up outside that lifeboat station, why was he timid? There were other questions too. Had he always spoken as elegantly? What did that say about his education, his family, about the area he was brought up in? I kept coming back to his accent, the strange amalgam of dialects. Surprisingly few of the media outlets had picked up on it, perhaps because it wasn’t the most compelling part of the story.
In all, there had been three separate attempts to use the press: one on 21 January, one on 29 January and then a third on 12 February. It was possible to chart the increasing futility of them directly from the decline in the coverage. Off the back of the first push, I found three front pages – one each in the Southampton and Bournemouth Echos, and one in the Plymouth Herald. The next week, with no breakthrough to report, just another plea for information, there were none. Tens of thousands of words about the Lost Man became thousands of words by 29 January, and then – the third time Richard was wheeled out – the story migrated to ‘Local’ sections, or sidebars, or easily missed pages deep inside the papers. I felt for him, for Parsons too, who had clearly worked hard trying to rejuvenate interest in the case, but less than a month after he’d been found, the Lost Man was already forgotten again.
There was an unintentional side issue too. Enlisting the local press meant the case became something it may not even have been: the story of a local man found at the edge of a Hampshire river. In fact, Richard might not have been from Hampshire at all, or Dorset, or Devon, or anywhere on the south coast, but because he didn’t know where he was from, the assumption just got made and, understandably for the media based in those areas, that became the heart of the story. Pretty soon after that, it became an accepted truth that Richard Kite was from the local area and the problem with that was that it had a bleed effect. If anyone else in the country was even paying attention to the story in the first place, they would have soon stopped once it looked like the person in question was from the south coast.
Of course, that didn’t mean Richard wasn’t from there. The hard R’s that seeded his accent were certainly consistent with the type of dialect you’d find in parts of Dorset, in Devon too. But, so far, nothing I’d heard from him – or read about him in the newspapers – confirmed it for sure one way or the other.
I pushed the box aside and turned to his laptop.
It was an old HP, scuffed along its sides, the keys shaded with grime, the screen specked with dirt. Next to the track pad was a blue sticker saying it had been reconditioned by a local computer repair shop. I punched in the password he’d given me and found a clean, well-organized desktop, with a series of folders and documents on the right-hand side. In one of the folders there were scans of more newspaper articles, some of which were repeats of cuttings I’d already been through. In the next one, I found images he’d sourced from the Internet, hundreds of them: photograph after photograph of different coastlines, cliff faces and lagoons, different-coloured seas and different beaches – sand, shingle, pebble, some shores as white as chalk, others as grey as ash. It was obvious what it was: an effort to try and find the beach he could remember in his head, something that would spark off another memory, a lead, an idea, anything. It had proved every bit as futile as the newspaper coverage.
In one file, composite.jpg, he’d even used an editing program to crudely cut out segments of the other photos he’d collected, then attempted to stitch them all together into one picture that most closely represented what he remembered. It was messy, but I wondered if it might prove useful, not least because what he’d described to me earlier was almost like this, but not quite.
He’d only talked about a beach, but in the picture he’d included grass in the foreground, before the sand even started – so was this the lawn of the property he was in, or just beach grass?
I moved on in my search, but the only other thing that really grabbed my attention was a Word document. It contained a list of all the things he thought he knew about himself.
My name is Richard.
I know how to swim.
I know how to drive.
I spent part of my childhood next to a beach.
I remember a TV show where the
But then the list stopped.
The memory of the TV show wasn’t something he could be certain about, and neither really was his recollection of being at the beach as a kid. He knew how to swim because he’d been in a pool or out in the sea, and he knew how to drive because he’d sat behind the wheel of a car at some point and, even if he hadn’t taken it out on the road, something had clicked. It was reflex, instinct, knowledge buried deep that had shuddered to the surface. It was possible the TV show was the same, his recollection of the beach as well, but he couldn’t be absolutely certain because he couldn’t prove them. He remembered the beach, but hadn’t been able to locate it. He recalled a TV show, but it could just as easily have been a web video, an advert, even a static image in a comic or magazine that his memory had brought to life. Even his name was a feeling, not a proven fact. That was what made memories so dangerous.
The mind invented things.
As I looked at the list again, rereading the first three lines, I felt profoundly sorry for Richard Kite. In a strange way, his list may have been one of the most distressing things I’d ever read; a short, meagre testament to what his life had become, nine months after he woke up in a world he didn’t recognize. He was a man without an anchor to his history. He was a story that couldn’t be finished because his story hadn’t even been started. He was five incomplete lines on a page – and maybe not even that much.
In the end, the press had been right about something.
This was a man that was lost.
5
Before Richard arrived back at the caravan, I went through his emails and calls.
His inbox only held one thing of any interest: an information breakdown that Reverend Parsons had written, which he’d then emailed to Richard. It was compiled from various sources: DC Barton, things that had run in the media and been printed or put online, and material that Starting Again, the charity, had been able to get hold of. It wasn’t a case file in the traditional sense, but it wasn’t far off. I emailed it to myself, and then turned my attention to Richard’s phone account.
He’d given me the username and password for it and I’d logged in online and been back through his texts and calls, from 2 February – when he first got a mobile phone – to 24 October, which was yesterday. He made few calls and sent even fewer texts. There were no names attached to the numbers, but it didn’t take long to run them down. The numbers that appeared most often were for the warden at the caravan park, the office of his psychologist, Naomi Russum, and Reverend Parsons’s landline and mobile. Other numbers turned out to be just as innocuous. Richard had repeatedly phoned an 0345 number during the first few months, which turned out to be a National Insurance helpline. He’d also made calls to a journalist at the Daily Echo, Barton at Hampshire Police, and the local doctor’s surgery, where he’d gone for check-ups in the weeks after being found. Mostly, though, it was the same people on repeat.
I picked out Naomi Russum’s number and tried calling her, hoping to arrange a time to meet, but the line was engaged, and when I tried again ten minutes later it was still engaged. Impatient about getting a better handle on dissociative amnesia, I went online and found some other clinics. After being rebuffed pretty much everywhere, I finally got some success when I called a place in London specializing in dissociative conditions, and spoke to a psychotherapist called Matthew Wilson, who was fascinated by Richard’s story.
‘I can’t talk about Richard specifically,’ Wilson said, ‘because I don’t know him and haven’t treated him, but typically dissociative amnesia is categorized as the loss of personal information that would not ordinarily be lost in the process of forgetting something. So it’s that autobiographical memory. Some patients can lose everything, even down to well-learned skills and known information about the world, although that’s much rarer. What’s more common is that the forgotten information – who they are, where they come from, family, history, et cetera – is no longer accessible to the conscious memory, but still influences behaviour.’
‘In what way?’ I asked.
‘You could have a child, say, who was locked in a cellar by an abusive parent, over and over again for years. With this kind of generalized amnesia, that person may have a fear of being in cellars or basements, or may outright refuse to go into them, but they will have no memory of the abuse they suffered, so will have no understanding of why they feel that way. They just do.’
‘Do the lost memories ever come back?’
‘They might.’
‘But they might not?’
‘It’s different for everyone. Some memories could return, or all of them, or none of them. Unfortunately, it’s hard to say with any kind of certainty. The only thing I see with any regularity is the impact. Patients can have difficulty forming relationships. They can become depressed very easily. They can sometimes be suicidal. As you can imagine, this kind of amnesia is a huge mental adjustment.’
That much seemed obvious already.
After I finished with Wilson, I glanced at the cardboard box, at the laptop, at the emptiness of the caravan, and thought about how little I still knew of Richard Kite – and, again, felt a murmur of disquiet. I tried to ignore it as I downloaded his texts, calls and Internet activity using an option on his account page, but, by the time I was done, the feeling still hadn’t gone away and, as I sat there in silence and waited for Richard to return, I started to wonder for the first time whether taking this case may have been a mistake.
6
Richard Kite arrived back at four-fifteen, soaked through to the skin. From the front of the caravan, I was able to watch him approach, free-wheeling a pushbike across the empty car park and then down towards me. He had a backpack on, and the same blue raincoat and grey beanie he’d been wearing at the church.
Once he was inside, he looked across the room at me, rolled his eyes and lowered his hood. ‘These are the days when I wish I could get a driving licence.’
I smiled. ‘Shall I stick the kettle on?’
‘That would be great.’
As Richard went to the bedroom for a change of clothes, I checked my phone and saw that I’d missed a text. It was from my daughter, Annabel. I messaged her back and told her I’d give her a shout when I got home, and then Richard returned in tracksuit trousers and a green T-shirt with the name of the caravan park on it. Without the beanie on, it was the first time I’d seen his actual hair. It was long on top, swept back from his face, but shaved at the sides. Where it was still wet, it had darkened slightly, a mix of red and brown depending on where the light caught it.
‘How was the rest of your day?’ I asked him.
He shrugged and held out his hands, turning them over. There were fresh cuts on his fingers, raw scratches all over his skin, criss-crossing like wire mesh.
‘Pyracantha thorns,’ he said.
I nodded and handed him a tea. ‘I’ve been through the box, through your computer. I saw that picture you’d created – the composite of the beach scene.’
‘I’m not very good at using that editing software.’
‘It wasn’t a criticism. I emailed a copy to myself because I think it’s quite interesting. There’s also something I wanted to ask you about.’ I brought up the picture. ‘This grass area at the front. Is it supposed to be lawn or beach grass?’
He leaned back on the sofa, eyes fixed on the picture.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said.
‘
But you think this might be where you grew up?’
His eyes were on the laptop again, his face strained, as if he were trying to pull old bones out of a deep hole. Eventually, he shook his head, and his breath caught in his throat. He’d been holding it in, trying to force an answer out, but all he managed was, ‘I don’t know.’
It had become a familiar refrain, but I felt reluctant to push him too much, because I still worried that he would fish some memory out of the darkness that wasn’t entirely accurate. The more he felt like I was turning the screw, the more he would feel like he had to give me something. I didn’t want that but, at the same time, these were small things that might build into something important; individual brush strokes in a bigger painting.
‘You know something weird?’ he said.
I looked at him.
‘I never dream.’
The change of direction surprised me for a second.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, I never have them. Ever.’
‘You haven’t had a single dream in nine months?’
‘Nothing. Or nothing I remember, anyway. It’s like …’ He exhaled, his body shrinking, as if punctured. ‘It’s like that part of me is gone.’
A heavy silence settled around us. I searched for something to say, something that might comfort him, but I couldn’t think of anything. Eventually, I looked at my watch.
