The Man Who Forgot His Wife Read Free Page B

Bernard’s speculation as completely ridiculous, and then later that afternoon felt a flush of fear and guilt as I was informed that there were two policemen waiting for me in the ward sister’s office. In fact, they had not come to arrest me for war crimes against the people of Bosnia, as Bernard suggested. It turned out that they had come with a large file of ‘Missing Persons’ which they now went through very slowly, staring carefully at each photo before looking studiously at me.
    ‘Well, that one’s clearly not me,’ I found myself interjecting, desperate to see if I was on any of the later pages.
    ‘We have to give due consideration to every single file, sir.’
    ‘Yes, but I’m not that fat. Or black. Or a woman.’
    They looked at me suspiciously to see if I might have attempted to cover up my African, feminine features and then reluctantly turned the page.
    ‘Hmmm, what do you think?’ said the officer, looking between my face and the photo of a wizened old pensioner.
    ‘He’s about eighty!’ I objected.
    ‘A lot of these people look older than they actually are, sir – they might have been on drugs or living on the street. How long have you had that beard?’
    ‘Er, well – since before I can remember …’
    ‘Just roughly speaking. A month, a year, ten years?’
    ‘I don’t know! Like the nurse said, I am suffering from retrograde amnesia, so my mind is a blank about everything prior to last Tuesday.’
    They looked at each other, gently shook their heads in exasperation, then continued looking for any similarities between my appearance and the photos of a teenage girl, a Sikh, and a Jack Russell terrier, which at least they conceded had been put in the wrong file.
    The fact that no one had reported me missing seemed to tell a story of its own. There had been no urgent reports on the news, no tearful appeals from a loving family, no full-page adverts in the newspaper for this dearly missed husband, father or work colleague. Had I been this lonely before my fugue, I wondered; had that been the stress that provoked my mental Etch-a-Sketch into shaking the screen clear to start again?
    Whatever my past, all I could think about was being rescued from this desert island in a city of eight million people. I wanted to build a big fire on the beach, put a message in a bottle, spell out giant letters for passing aircraft.
    ‘Could we get something in the newspaper?’ I kept suggesting to the ward sister. ‘A sort of “Do you know this man?” feature next to my photo?’ Despite her general air of never having enough time or appreciation, she eventually agreed that this might be a good idea, and I sat in her tiny office while she nervously rang the news desk at the
London Evening Standard
. She explained my situation, but I only heard her side of the conversation, as she covered the mouthpiece and relayed their questions about me.
    ‘They want to know if you are really brilliant at the piano or anything like that?’
    ‘Well – I don’t know … I can’t remember. Maybe I should speak to them?’
    ‘He doesn’t know.’ Another pause. ‘Are you, like, an incredible linguist or a maths genius or anything?’
    ‘I don’t think so. I can only do the easy puzzles in Bernard’s Sudoku book … Should I speak to them?’
    ‘Er, he can do easy Sudoku puzzles. Does that help at all?’
    Apparently the paper didn’t have the staff to send anyone round to the hospital, but said they might run the story if we sent over all the details with an up-to-date photo. The next day in the centre pages there was a huge double spread headed ‘Who’s the Mystery Man?’ Beneath it was a picture of a well-groomed young man standing beside Pippa Middleton at a charity polo match. I went through the paper twice, but there was nothing about me. It trans pired that they had been intending to run my story, but then the scoop about the mystery companion of Prince William’s sister-in-law had broken, and the