Chapter 11: Lost

Jennifer Morris had thought long and hard over the nearly thirty-minute car journey home through quiet roads from the hospital on Monday night. She wanted to talk to someone, anyone, about all the confusing thoughts and hopes and wishes, desires even, which filled her head with the tumult of conflicting indices.

She briefly toyed with the idea of ringing Richard, even though she had forced him to agree never to call her again. She was racked with guilt over her affair, fearful of the inevitable fallout once Bob, or Tommy, as he appeared now to be, found out all the sordid details. Bob finding her in bed with her lover was the very last thing she had envisaged when she had set out to continue the affair, so brief had the original mistake been. Some day, some time he will remember. Then what?

As for Richard, he was an absolute arse. Stupid! Everything about what happened was stupid. He was stupid to agree to start up and she was stupid to suggest it in the first place. She was going to be forty next year. Forty and married, married for twenty years. It just didn’t seem possible that it could all crumble around her ears.

Was this what she wanted when she set out to charm the handsome desirable but difficult Robert Morris to her bed, twenty years ago? Was it design or desperation that made her chose a man, fifteen years older than herself as a mate when she herself was at such a tender age? He brought her security, she had to be grateful to him for that. He seemed to be a confirmed bachelor when they met. Several of the more mature women at the factory where they both worked had tried to snare the poor man. He had resisted all approaches until Jennifer Diplake, spinster of this parish, set out her stall to trap him into making her an honest woman for the rest of her life. Yeah, right, so how long did that honesty last?

Bob already had a tiny mortgage on a small house he almost owned outright at the time. He was a maintenance engineer at the company where Jennifer had started working a few months earlier, shortly after leaving secretarial college. He used to come into the office all the time. Bob was a quiet, reserved man; polite but rarely engaged in conversations, only speaking when spoken to. He dressed well, when he was able to discard his brown overalls and socialised once a month or so. The company organised regular subsidised and therefore oversubscribed outings throughout the year, to keep their workforce entertained and happy. In the summer they staged picnics in local parks, the seaside or to National Trust properties. In the winter they watched winter shows, and organised dinner dances. Bob reluctantly went in for most of these entertainments. The factory was mainly geared to assembling small parts, so was primarily staffed by women, some married, others single or divorced. Therefore the available single menfolk were at a premium and coercion was a tool much used by the primary organising committee, who had controlling fingers spread through the factory as efficient as any terrorist organisation. In fact some of the tactics used may well have been interchangeable!

Well, Jennifer thought as she drove home, she had won him over in those early months of their acquaintance, had kept and married him, and they had a great family life together. Just a couple of stupid mistakes on her part and what looked like some kind of reprieve at the eleventh hour. She had to hold on and see this thing out to the end, hoping that Bob would forgive her.

Jennifer knew that she loved Bob. It was just an age thing she was going through, she told herself. She was approaching forty, she felt she was getting old and her children were growing up into adults and leaving her behind. Although Bob was so much older than her, he did not seem to feel his age at all; his body was tight, firm and, she had to admit sensual. She still desired him. He was a considerate lover, better than anyone she’d ever had.

She couldn’t explain why she been so stupid and insecure to have done what she had done but that part of her life, she determined, was now over and done with. She declared to herself that she would never again be caught out like that. And there was only one way to guarantee never to be caught out again and that was to be completely honest to her man and maintain her innocence from this point on.

By the time she got home that evening, the kids were all ready in bed and their lights out, ready for the school day the following day. She thanked Emma, lovely, loyal friend Em, who she hugged for an extra long time, trying to assuage her guilt without completely breaking down and losing it.

“Tell me, Jen?” her friend asked, as she rubbed Jennifer’s back, “What’s going on? JJ’s really concerned and you’re so upset.”

“JJ’s upset?” Jennifer fought back a sob, “She doesn’t know the half of it!”

“Are you and Bob break-”

“No!” Jennifer snapped, then calmer as she released her grip on Emma, “No, not that. Bob is in hospital in Chesterfield.”

“No!” Emma gasped, “How is he?”

“He’s up and about and has been for a couple of days,” Jennifer answered, “Hopefully they will let him home in the next two or three days.”

“Has he been there all week?” Emma asked.

“Yes,” Jennifer had been rehearsing all the way home how she was going to explain this to Emma, “Bob was taken to hospital in Chesterfield after he stumbled into an attempted rape on Sunday. He was beaten up and left in a coma.”

Emma was astounded, “Never! Is he gonna be alright?”

“Yes, he’s going to be all right, he came out of the coma a couple of days ago,” Jennifer smiled, “The surgeon left him in the coma after the operation for about four or five days. His eyes are black and blue and can’t take strong light at the moment.”

“Thank God he’s alright!”

“But...”

“But? What do you mean, Jen, but?”

“Well, Bob took a blow to the head and...” Jennifer hesitated a moment, “He’s lost his memory, Em, he doesn’t remember me or the kids, or anything at all since his early twenties.”

“What?” Emma was trying to get her head around this. “Wait, you said he was some kind of hero?”

“Yes, he stopped the rape of a young girl, I met the mother, her girl is about two years older than JJ but she sounds-”

“Hold on, hold on, Jen, lets get this straight. He stops a rape, gets beat up and loses everything? Is he a ... vegetable?”

“No, no, he’s walking, talking, he has all his faculties, but he has lost most of his memories.”

“So, will he get them back some time?” Emma sat down on a kitchen stool.

“Bob reckons his shrink, Phoebe, says ‘maybe’,” Jennifer filled the kettle for a brew.

“Phoebe?” enquired Emma, with raised eyebrows.

“Yeah!” Jennifer laughed for the first time since leaving the hospital, “Bob is different, Em, very different.”

“How?” Emma smiled, pleased that Jennifer’s sombre mood was lifted.

“He seems younger, chattier, more flirty,” Jennifer looked Emma in the eye, “Funny and ... Oh! Gosh! He’s hot! Hotter than he has been in a long while.”

“I’ve always thought he was hot, Jen, especially since he took up running and developed that incredible bod.”

“So, you’ve thought he was hot all this time, did you, and didn’t make a move on him?”

Emma shook her head, “I’ve got both my hands full with Rich. Besides, you’re my best friend, Jen. I couldn’t do that to you.”

“No?” Jennifer said quietly, adding, “Of course not.”

Emma nodded, “So, when will your hot hunk be able to come home?”

“Tomorrow is unlikely, more like Wednesday or Thursday he thinks, but I’m going in early in the morning to see if I can catch the doctor on his rounds and find out more. His nurse says I can visit Bob at any time during the day. They have fixed visiting hours, but relaxing it for next of kin. I may just have to go and have a coffee when they need to do anything to him.”

After they had their tea, Emma couldn’t wait to get home and reassure her husband Richard that his best friend, that he had clearly been concerned about for over a week, was safe and coming home as a hero in a matter of days.

Tommy Barlow was sucking his teeth, wondering what he was going to do with the new complications in his life. He had dreamed again towards dawn, at least it was his most recent dream that he remembered when we awoke. He was convinced that he had been rolling down a wooded hill in the dark. Then he appeared to be in a graveyard, surrounded by headstone and statuary. This was confused with flashing lights now and again, then he was off rolling again, hitting gorse bushes and being scratched by thorns and finally coming to rest and sleeping, being aroused by Helen pouring water onto his face.

He only remembered snatches of the dream and tried to fit the images and sensual input into the framework of what he understood had happened to him, but frustratingly unable to fit the pieces of the jigsaw together into something meaningful.

It had been late morning on Sunday, he understood from what he had been told, when he stumbled into the two abductors and was beaten up for his trouble. Tommy believed what Rachel told him in her summary the previous day. The sun was high and bright, with tree branches blowing in the breeze, that must have been the flashing lights in his dreams. His eyes were damaged by the light and the dehydration probably meant his eyes were dry and the lids open to the sunlight, before it all went black.

Awake this morning, Tuesday, he was still trying to figure out what was concrete fact and what were hazy dreams. Helen said she poured water over his sunburned face, and he coughed, it was only at that point she realised he was alive and ran off to get help. That must be the sensations of being wet. Hitting gravestones must be the beating he received confused with the feeling that this meant he was preparing himself for the end of his life.

But memories of family life, of Jennifer, his wife of nearly twenty years, there was absolutely nothing. Last night Jennifer and he had briefly discussed their three children. He was told he had lived with them for all their lives, between 14 and 18 years. Of them he could again remember nothing. All his memories, fresh as if they happened only yesterday, were over thirty years old.

He comprehended that he had somehow lost thirty odd years, the evidence of his own eyes in the washroom mirror were enough to convince him. He was old and grey and wrinkled, unlike the youthful face with pimples that he had looked at when he last shaved. For him that seemed less than a week ago.

So, he knew he was old and had responsibilities that he had to pick up and deal with as soon as he was released from hospital. He had no choice, it was a challenge he simply had to take on board. Yet inside he felt like he was still just a kid, funny, cheeky and with a devil-may-care attitude to life. He remembered his young wife Sally with a vivid recollection that hurt deeply, he missed her, missed her with an ache that left a void a mile wide in his heart. It was as if Sally had suddenly been wrenched from him and replaced by a bunch of strangers who had unrealistic expectations of him.

Meanwhile, in the intervening years, Sally must have coped with his abandonment, remarried and set up a new life in a far off continent. What else could he call what he did, other than abandonment? She didn’t leave him, he left her. Why? He couldn’t wrap his mind around how that could have happened. But it did. Mum had left the photos with him, that he had poured over all yesterday and ever since waking up this morning. The proof was there. Sally was left alone to face childbirth and child upbringing. She had got on with her life and was now a grandmother.

Life, and he would have to get used to this sooner rather than later, had moved on without him. One moment he was a young man, the next he was already a grandfather.

Even when he had visitors yesterday, they failed to trigger anything in his recent experience. Marcia, the bubbly young mother of an impossibly mature daughter who he was supposed to have saved from a fate worse than death. This act was painted as a daring deed by Marcia. But he had absolutely no recollection of the incident, it was as if that had been performed by a different person entirely, a complete stranger.

Then his wife, Jennifer, had visited with him last night. His supposed wife, as his subconscious persisted in reference to her. Jen was a complete stranger, albeit an attractive and personable one, easy to talk to and engage with, but she brought no memories to the surface. He had shown her the photos he remembered of his youth and the newer ones of which he had only a vague understanding of who everyone was. Even his mother had forgotten who some of the people in the pictures were and kept changing her mind, which was confusing.