There were other things about life he remembered. He knew that it was a British trait to talk about the weather with strangers, he knew that smoking could damage a person’s health, he knew not to admit to the nurse that he had been stabbed in a fight. It was strange, like he had everything he needed to exist in the world, without any of the background.
“What do you know about amnesia?” he asked, as Nurse Hobson tied off the last stitch and snipped the thread free with her scissors.
“Amnesia?” she said, surprised.
“It’s when someone loses their memory,” said Michael.
“I know what it is,” she said, “I was wondering why you were asking.”
“No reason,” said Michael.
“I see.” She said it in the same way she had when he told her that he had stabbed himself, like she didn’t believe him. “It’s rare. It can happen when someone has gone through a trauma, or if they’ve had a bump on the head. Have you had a bump on the head?”
“No,” said Michael. He had woken with a headache, but there was no bruising or blood on his skull.
“Well, it’s usually only temporary. Unless it’s a serious brain injury, people get their memories back gradually over a few days or weeks.” She snapped off her latex gloves and laid them on top of the mess of bloodied cleansing wipes on her equipment tray. “I just need to get the doctor to sign off on this, I won’t be a moment,” she said.
She swished aside the curtain and went out to find the doctor. As she swished it shut again behind her, Michael worried that he had said too much. The last thing he needed was to be hospitalised by a doctor concerned he had some sort of brain injury. He had been in the hospital long enough, he decided, and needed to go.
On the examination bed next to him was his bloodied shirt, or what was left of it after the nurse had cut off the sleeve. His torso was naked and, although he wasn’t cold in the warmth of the hospital, that wouldn’t be the case if he went outside.
He hopped off the bed, just as the curtain was pulled open. He thought it would be the doctor come to examine his head, but instead it was the girl from the waiting area.
“You’re Michael, aren’t you?” she said.
“Yes.” He crossed his palms over his chest, embarrassed that he was half naked in front of her. Not as if they covered up much.
The girl bit her bottom lip to disguise her amusement, getting reddish brown lipstick on her teeth. In the harsh light of the examination cubicle, he saw she wore subtle make-up to create the impression of flawless skin. A line of black drawn under each eye emphasised her wide brown irises, which didn’t so much look at him, as look into him.
She brought out a scrunched up bundle of light blue fabric from behind her back. “You might want this,” she said, handing it over.
Michael took the bundle. It was soft, made out of artificial woollen fibre. He unfolded it to see it was a long-sleeved jumper about his size. “Where did you get this?” It looked too big to belong to the thin girl.
“From a couple of cubicles down,” she said.
“You stole it?” said Michael, trying to figure out why a girl he didn’t know would be stealing clothes for him.
“The man won’t be needing it,” she said. “He died ten minutes ago.”
Startled, he dropped the jumper on the bed. His hands felt dirty from touching something worn by a dead man and he wiped them on his trousers.
The girl giggled. She looked up and down his naked torso, adding to his embarrassment. “You don’t want to go out like that,” she said. “And you’ll need to go soon if you don’t want the men to catch you.”
“Men?” A chill passed through him and he shivered in the warmth of the hospital air.
“They’ve been walking through the hospital looking for a stab victim called ‘Michael’. They’re pretending like they’re police, but they’re not police.”
Michael looked at his blood-stained shirt with only one sleeve scrunched up on the bed and, next to it, the dead man’s jumper. He had no choice, he grabbed the jumper and put it on. The wool felt soft and warming against his skin.
“How do you know all this?” he asked.
“I’m a perceiver,” she said, as if it was obvious.
“What’s that?” said Michael.
Her penetrating gaze surveyed his face and looked into his eyes, so deep that it made him feel uncomfortable. “You really don’t know, do you?” she said.
A noise of voices – deep, men’s voices – startled them both. The girl turned and snatched a quick look through the curtain. “They’re checking the cubicles now,” she said as she turned back. “You haven’t got long.”
“Why are you doing this?” said Michael.
“Let’s say I know what it’s like to be hunted by people who don’t understand you.”
Michael joined her at the curtain and peered out. He took a deep breath as he saw the back of a man in a grey suit standing at the foot of a cubicle two spaces down, apparently talking to whoever was in there.
He turned back to the girl, knowing she was right. “Thank you …” He was going to use her name, but realised he didn’t know what it was.
“Jennifer,” she said.
“Thank you, Jennifer.”
He took another look out of the curtain and, while the man in the grey suit still had his back to him, he slipped out into the main part of the hospital. As quietly as he could, he retraced the way he had come, fearing at any moment he would hear the sound of pursuing men’s footsteps. But with his head down, resisting the urge to run, he walked through the waiting area without turning a suspicious head, out through the double doors and into the night.
CHAPTER THREE
MICHAEL WANDERED the streets until the sun lifted itself above the buildings and spilled its orange light onto the pavement. It chased away the chill of the night and warmed the surface of his skin. But inside he remained cold and hungry. He passed cafes opening their doors to early morning customers. They enticed him with smells of cooking sausages and bacon, but he could only stare through the windows. He had no money.
The streets swelled with people venturing out into the rush hour. Workers on early shifts in cleaner and shop assistant uniforms gradually gave way to office workers in suits and smart shoes. There were children in school uniform: boys in grey blazers with red trim and girls in black jackets and dark blue checked skirts giggling in groups of three and four. The people jumped on buses or caught taxis or rushed across pedestrian crossings. All with somewhere to be. Michael had nowhere to be. He just walked. Like a ghost walking among the living.
After a couple of hours, the traffic thinned and the schoolchildren, businessmen and women gave way to young mothers with pushchairs and the elderly. Michael kept walking, and the more he walked, the more people looked at him. An old man gave him a sideways glance while pretending to fiddle with his glasses. A woman adjusting the display of shampoo in a shop window stared at him as he walked past, then hurriedly looked away when he stared back. A toddler in a buggy pointed at him and shouted, “Teenager!” before his mother grabbed his hand and stuffed it back inside. One elderly woman with a large shopping bag even crossed the road to avoid him.
Michael stopped to look at his reflection in a shop window. Perhaps there was something on his face. Perhaps his arm was bleeding again. But something else reflected in the glass caught his attention. The same word, in mirror writing, that the toddler had called him: teenager.
Michael turned and saw it was part of a poster encased behind transparent plastic on the side of a bus shelter.
Is your teenager a perceiver? it read. Get them tested at school! It’s quick, painless – and absolutely free!
Another poster, printed on ordinary paper and taped to a lamppost, read: Get Teenagers Out of Your Head! Then, underneath, in smaller letters: Brought to you by Action Against Mind Invasion.
A radio blaring out of the open window of a hairdressers carried the words of a newsreader, ‘… are denyin
g claims that up to five per cent of teenagers are perceivers …’.
People stared at him because he was a teenager. Like Nurse Hobson, the population feared perceivers were seeing into their minds and reading their private thoughts. They knew that all perceivers were teenagers and didn’t seem to care that not all teenagers were perceivers. So they continued to stare at him, to steer their children away from him and to cross the road to avoid him.
~
MICHAEL SLEPT that night on a park bench. A fitful sleep, disturbed by sounds of wildlife in the trees, the loud voices of people walking home from the pub and the fear of being attacked. Huddled up to preserve his own body heat, he was small, vulnerable and alone. The night breeze leached away his warmth and he woke with the dampness of dew soaking through his jumper.
The days that followed passed in a stream of unmarked time. Time was a concept other people used to order their lives. For him, there was no lunchtime, no dinnertime and no bedtime. Just lightness passing into darkness and the constant search for food, shelter and warmth. He walked and he stopped, walked and stopped, wandering the streets like a vagrant.
No, not like a vagrant. He was a vagrant. A homeless person, a tramp, a bum.
Over the days that passed, he came to realise Nurse Hobson was wrong. His memories didn’t come back. Each day he woke hoping that he would remember something of his former life, and each day he was disappointed. He wondered, if perceivers really could read minds, maybe they could see into the memories that he seemed to have forgotten.
~
IN THE EVENINGS, Michael got into a habit of sitting on a wall opposite a chip shop. Even though the smell of batter frying in oil drifted across the road and clawed at his hungry stomach, the wall gave him a vantage point where he could watch the customers. Sometimes they stood outside and ate their chips before dropping the wrapper in the rubbish bin, from where Michael could retrieve it and eat the scraps of crispy bits left in the bottom. If he was lucky, they would leave whole pieces of fish in the wrapper. He tried to eat them slowly, to savour their taste, but usually he couldn’t stop himself and desperately gobbled them down.
It was early one evening as he sat with his bum soaking up the cold from the brickwork beneath him, that he saw Jack. He might not have noticed him if it wasn’t for the white of Jack’s plaster cast, caught in the light shining through the plate glass window of the chip shop. The boy didn’t go in for chips, he walked straight past, presumably on his way to somewhere else. In the moments that he watched him, there was no mistaking the straggly hair and pock-marked face of the boy from the hospital.
Suddenly excited, Michael hopped off the wall. He thought about shouting after Jack, but it was Jennifer he had a connection with, not him, so he decided to follow at a discreet distance.
It was a strategy that nearly caused him to lose sight of his target as, up ahead, Jack jogged over the road at a pedestrian crossing just as the lights were changing. The red man was already lit up by the time Michael got to the kerb and the traffic started up again. Frustrated, Michael saw Jack getting further away as cars sped past, making it impossible to cross. Eventually the green man appeared, cars obediently stopped and Michael dashed across the road.
Moving faster so as not to risk losing him, Michael saw Jack turn off the path towards a large red brick building. As solidly built as a house, but as large as a barn, it was enclosed in its grounds well away from other buildings. As Jack went inside, Michael wondered if he should follow him or wait for him to come back out again. It was then he saw the wooden noticeboard by the road which revealed the building to be a community hall. Pinned to it was a printed notice which advertised a drop-in centre for teenagers every evening of the week except Wednesday and Sunday. Michael assumed, whatever day of the week it was, it wasn’t Wednesday or Sunday. For the second time in ten minutes, he decided to follow.
The hall was dimly lit, full of music and teenage chatter echoing off the wooden floor and the high ceiling. It smelt of sweaty bodies and the musk of old buildings. All along the back wall were child-like paintings created with broad brush-strokes and bright, primary colours. Up one end was a more sober collection of notices with dates of choir rehearsals, a reminder of a price increase for Wednesday’s yoga class, and a thank you for those who helped to raise £104.26 for the local hospice on bingo night. The place didn’t belong to teenagers, they were merely guests five nights a week.
In the centre of the board, half-covering an old newspaper article about the community playgroup, was a hand-written notice: Teenage drop-in centre closes at 10pm sharp! No hanging around outside after hours.
At least, it used to say that, but someone had joined up the bottom of the ‘h’ in the word ‘hanging’ to turn it into ‘banging’, then in a different pen someone had crossed out ‘around’ and written ‘your girlfriend’. So it now read: No banging your girlfriend outside after hours. Stupid, but it made Michael smile.
He looked around in the semi-darkness. There were groups of teenagers huddled together, talking over the beat of the music from the sound system. Others sat at the side, staring at their phones and occasionally tapping the screen. None of them were Jack.
Something white caught the beam of a spotlight at the back of the hall. It was Jack’s plaster cast, emerging – attached to its owner – from the men’s toilets. Jack strode down the length of the hall and through a door at the other end.
Michael walked up to the door. It was closed. He didn’t know what was on the other side, it might be private. Michael decided he didn’t care, gripped the handle and turned.
A conversation stopped mid-sentence. Five teenagers sitting on chairs in a rough circle turned to look at him. One of the five was Jack, and next to him sat Jennifer.
The room was small and sparse. Plain, white-painted walls with desks of light beech around the edge. It had one very small window high up on the exterior wall.
“Oi!” yelled the teenager at the back. He was older than the others, large and muscular with a crop of shocking blond hair. “Ain’t you ever heard of knocking?”
Michael instantly felt he had made the wrong move.
“Hey, it’s that skank from the hospital,” said Jack.
“Oh yes,” said the girl, her face softening into a smile. “Hello Michael.”
“Uh … hello,” Michael managed.
“Still wearing that jumper, I see,” said Jennifer.
Michael looked down at the jumper he’d been wearing ever since she gave it to him, now a grubby version of its original light blue. “Yeah,” he said.
“Who gives a ferret’s nipples about his soddin’ jumper?” said Jack.
“Do you always have to be so polite?” said Jennifer.
“Not with norms,” said Jack.
Michael could almost taste the hostility in the air. “I’m sorry,” he said, turning away from the four pairs of unfriendly eyes staring at him, “I didn’t realise you were in here.”
He backed out, pulling the door shut behind him. But Jennifer stood and caught the door before it closed. “Ignore that lot,” she said. “What do you want?”
“It’s nothing,” said Michael.
“I can perceive it’s not nothing.” She looked deep into his eyes and Michael felt a connection between them. Simultaneously intrusive and caring.
“Jen, get out of his head and get back in the circle,” the blond one called over.
“He wants something pretty damn bad, Otis.”
“So?” said Otis. “Get rid of the skank and sit down.”
Otis’s tongue was not as sharp as Jack’s, but his large muscular frame and deep, fully broken voice commanded more authority.
Jennifer didn’t seem to care. “I won’t be long.” She hustled Michael out of the door. They were back in the main hall with its cliques of teenagers and loud music. A peel of giggles erupted from a group of girls standing little more than a metre away.
“Let’s go somewhere quieter,” said Jennifer.
&n
bsp; She led Michael past the noticeboard, with its instruction about banging girlfriends, down the length of the hall and towards the toilets. Michael thought they were going to stop in the corner, but Jennifer headed straight for the women’s loos. She pushed open the door with a hard slap of her palm. Michael hesitated, knowing he shouldn’t go in there, then followed.
A short girl with hooped earrings who washing her hands at the sink, looked startled when she saw Michael. She stopped rubbing her hands under the tap and the stream of water ran uselessly past her fingers. Jennifer returned a smile as if everything was normal. The girl shook her hands dry, wiped them on the seat of her jeans and hurried out.
Jennifer checked the cubicles and confirmed that she and Michael were alone. She leant up against the main door with all her body weight so no one else could come in.
“What’s so important?” she asked.
Michael was suddenly embarrassed. Seeing Jack in the street and following him was a spur of the moment decision. He hadn’t thought of what he was going to say. A cascade of words rolled through his head, myriad possible explanations. All of them sounded lame. “I … this is so hard.” He took a breath and slowly, in a string of bumbling and confused sentences, told her about his amnesia. “I was wondering … could you look into my mind? Can you see – I mean, perceive – my memories? Who I am? My family? My home?”
Jennifer looked doubtful. Michael’s moment of hope slipped away. “Perceivers aren’t mind readers,” she said. “I know that that’s what people say, but it’s not entirely true. I perceive feelings and emotions, I pick up on thoughts occasionally – strong ones, especially. But to look into someone’s head and see memories they have forgotten …?” She finished off her sentence with a shake of her head.
Despair descended. His only idea in days of living on the streets – dismissed with one shake of her head.
Jennifer must have perceived what he was feeling because she responded with a sympathetic smile. “Well, maybe I could try,” she said. “I can’t promise … but it wouldn’t hurt to try.”
Mind Secrets: A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller (Perceivers Book 1) Page 2
