The Final Minute Read Free Page A

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