Chapter 1

I'm still not right. Never will be. I don't mean right or wrong; I mean healthy. At least I remember now, apart from the actual days it happened. Those days are still blank.

"You are a very rare case," said my doctor. "Apart from those with permanent memory loss, practically every case gets memory back after a few months, and to lose your identity for so long ... but then we've not seen anyone else survive after the hammering your brain took."

Big deal. So I'm a rare case. It doesn't help; hasn't helped. Of course I'm much better now; I remember most things and people from before the injury except, as I say, the day of the injury itself. My short-term memory is still improving even after all this time. Sometimes it lapses and I panic, but I carry about my little electronic pad, and it tells me the most important things. Keeps me on track.

But I am anticipating. Let's start at the beginning. Settle down, it's a long story.

They told me what they knew at the hospital, Newcastle-upon-Tyne General. They were very patient, telling me the story over and over again, and over and over again I forgot it. Gradually it stuck.

I had been rushed into hospital on the twenty fourth of August 2001. Someone had phoned for the ambulance, which saved my life. I was in a very bad way: I had been badly beaten, ending up on a patch of waste ground.

Badly? My face had been thoroughly mashed and probably stamped on, and my skull was fractured. Most of my teeth were gone, my nose was a pulp, my jaw and cheeks broken. That was only my head.

My neck had suffered, my voice box slightly damaged. Ribs, one thigh and a shin on the other leg broken, kneecaps damaged and both ankles the same. There were some Internal injuries, not too serious amazingly; they had concentrated on my head. It was clear to everyone that the thug or thugs had tried to kill me, and more than that, had tried to obliterate my face.

My balls were bruised: they must have got a few kicks to my backside. I must have got into a foetal position because my penis remained untouched. We need to be thankful for small mercies, laughed the doctor. Joke. No comment.

Everything I had on me was stolen. In an attack of prudishness they left me my underpants, but that was all. The police, world-weary as always, were assuming it was a mugging carried to extremes, or that I was involved in some shady dealings in the underworld. It didn't change the outcome. Apparently they took my fingerprints but it turned out I was innocent. No records.

However, my injuries were the worst any of the medics had ever seen, and no one thought I would live. I was on life support in a coma for six months, but no relatives came forward to give permission to switch off the life-support. Not surprising perhaps; I had no identification on me, and I was not talking! So, at last, the hospital went to court to get permission to discontinue life-support. It took weeks to be resolved in the hospital's favour.

When they did turn it off I carried on breathing! A month later I began very slowly to come round, and all that legal stuff had been useless. So I survived one attempt by thugs, and another by the medical profession to kill me.

I came round slowly as I said; it took months. Gradually I began to make some sort of response to the prodding and pinching they did to assess my consciousness. I was at a very rudimentary level; I could not speak. I had to begin to learn to talk again. I didn't know how to do anything – I mean anything.

An additional problem was that I had no memory and didn't know who I was. Neither did anyone else. I had been unconscious or semi-conscious for nine months in different levels of coma, and two more months regaining what most would call consciousness.

Then came long months of rehabilitation. I was a rare case because I had no memories at all, not even my name, a condition which was almost unheard of. The medics and the police later thought I was pretending, since it was so unusual for memory loss to extend to identity; I had something to hide, probably the reason I was beaten up.

I learned to understand, to talk, to walk, to read, to dress myself, to wash and to use the toilet, not necessarily in that order! Much later I learned to write. The pain was intense and the struggle long and dispiriting. My emotional life was all to pot as well. I was by turns aggressive and docile, optimistic and deeply depressed, but utterly and doggedly determined, I am told.

Nearly two years after my admission I was physically fit enough to leave rehabilitation although I was still crippled, walking on crutches with pins in bones, but because my short-term memory came and went I was not able to live alone, so I had to remain at the rehab centre.

Some memory began to return: I had vivid nightmares the details of which I couldn't remember shortly after I awoke, and there were daytime flashes which I couldn't understand.

I remembered "no 'H', two 'Ls' and two 'Ss'". It made no sense.

They called me Aled Jones after the Welsh Tenor. It was a joke: they'd heard me singing in the shower. It was heavy irony also, for with my voice no one would want to hear me sing. As it happened the initials AJ were just right but no one knew that.

My body and face had been reconstructed over the months while I was comatose. I was grateful for that because it had saved me some of the pain. However, my face looked a mess; I mean my own reflection frightened me! I wondered from time to time what I used to look like before. The medics had done what they could; mustn't grumble. The female nurses used to say it gave me a unique charm, a rugged attractiveness. I was not taken in.

The thing was, I was obsessive about making progress. At least that is what they told me. I would get frustrated and angry, to the extent of throwing things around when I was not improving fast enough. It did mean that my doggedness made me progress more quickly.

I did puzzles, I walked and walked on my crutches and tried to walk without them too early, with disastrous results. I don't think I was nice to know. One thing I took to immediately was the computer they got me.

To help my short-term memory, I wrote everything that I needed to remember into my computer diary. There were emerging memories of childhood. For instance it came to me out of the blue that I lived in the Manchester area, not Newcastle.

Don't get the idea that I was all alone in all this. One nurse in particular took a special shine to me. She was the one who would come and visit me as I lay in hospital before I could walk. She held my hand and stroked it when I felt I couldn't go on any more. After she was moved to another department, she continued to come and see me.

Her name was Patricia Mary O'Toole. With her devilish sense of humour, she used to say that without the 'O' in O'Toole she'd have been a mental wreck. Get it? Initials PMT? Pre-Menstrual Tension? Never mind.

Trish had no trace of an Irish accent, after all she was born and brought up on Tyneside and her accent came from there. I found it delightful. She called me 'pet' and 'hinny', and had a way of injecting me with optimism when the pain and stress were at their worst.

She was a tall, slim girl, about twenty-five, perhaps a little older, pretty with a good figure; I suppose you might call it 'understated hour-glass'. She had a nice pert bottom which balanced her nice pert tits. She had thin but shapely legs. Auburn hair.

I wondered about her private life since she spent so much time with me, but she said she had no family left in Britain and she was not into relationships. She liked casual flings when she felt horny, but no strings.

She would regale me with stories about going out on Saturday nights in winter, wearing a skimpy top, micro-skirt, tiny knickers and high heels, 'on the pull' as she put it. It was not unusual for girls in Newcastle to do that, she said. It made me feel cold just to think about it! She did not go into sexual details.

To allow me to leave rehab she found me a flat and moved in with me, leaving her own flat for a while. She bustled round the flat, tidying up or making meals when I couldn't be bothered or was feeling too depressed to do anything. Once she was sure I could be left, she returned to her flat, but visited me daily, staying over some nights.

The other thing she did, and to that I owe my ability to tell this tale, she bought me a cheapish laptop computer (the hospital wouldn't let me keep theirs) and suggested that every night, and sometimes during the day, I should write everything that I did that day. It would help my memory, she told me, because I could go over previous day's activities repeatedly. She pointed out wryly that I had plenty of time on my hands.

So I began to keep a diary. At the beginning it took me a long time to write, but soon I became more adept at typing. Just as well, for my writing was very poor indeed: my co-ordination was all to pot. As my typing became more fluent and the pain in my hands decreased, I moved from only describing actions to discussing motives and making conjectures.

I have kept my diary ever since, a few minutes each night, and it is to that diary and the contributions of others you owe my story.

Initially Trish did my shopping but began to suggest that I try to do it myself. By this time I was visiting the hospital twice a week and I hated the short journey there. It was hard work on crutches, and I longed to be able to shield my face; I was embarrassed and ashamed of it. The expressions on people's faces when they looked at me: disgust, fear and worst of all pity, all reinforced those feelings. So I contrived to stay at home. It was Trish who tried everything to get me out. I suspected so that I would get used to the stares. The hours she spent over me!

It was ironic that I strove so hard in every other aspect of my rehabilitation while trying to duck that one aspect of it.

Trish and I talked about all sort of things but I would often bring the conversation back to one thing. I would complain and moan that apart from her there was no one who would ever want to live with me, marry me or even have a fling, unless they were in some sense perverted. She would sigh her disagreement and change the subject.

One day she snapped.

"I'm sick of hearing you moaning on about being ugly. You guys might look only at women's bodies but most girls are attracted to the sort of guy a bloke is. You are a nice man, Aled. The other nurses admired you, you have guts and determination and some of them fancied you. Why? For your qualities: you were thoughtful, considerate, gentle with them but hard on yourself, single minded, driving yourself hard."