The Debt by Simon Kernick

Author:Simon Kernick [Kernick, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448166619
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

One

I’ve been worried that I’m not who they say I am for a while now.

It started a week or so back after I fell down the cellar steps en route to getting a bottle of red wine and smacked my head on the stone floor. They kept me in the local hospital overnight as I was showing the symptoms for mild concussion, and ever since they let me out, things haven’t felt quite right.

To be honest, the whole set-up here’s pretty odd. According to my sister, she’s been looking after me at her house for over two months now, and that feels about right, although it’s impossible to tell for sure because the days just seem to drift into one another in a kind of soft fog. The thing is, I’m not sure whether I’m being paranoid or not. When you’ve got no long-term memory you’re as helpless as a young child, which means you’ve got to trust the people around you. And particularly those whose job it is to bring your memory back – like the man sitting opposite me across the room.

Dr Bronson’s a big, dapper man at the wrong end of his fifties with a quite magnificent mane of black hair, tinged with silver, and a long, thoughtful face that would have been described as ruggedly handsome a few years back but which is now beginning to lose its fight with gravity. Even so, you can still imagine that he’d have his pick of single ladies of a certain age. He has that kind of gravitas, but at the same time he also gives off the impression that he doesn’t take himself too seriously – not if the clothes he’s wearing today are anything to go by, anyway. His latest adornment is a tweed three-piece suit, a red bow tie that matches the rims of his glasses, well-worn brown brogues, and loud pink socks.

‘So how have you been, Matt?’ he asked me, his voice soft, yet sonorous and reassuring. We’d been seeing each other twice a week every week here at my sister’s, and this had always been his opening line.

‘OK, I guess. Nothing much changes really.’ Which up until a few days ago had been the truth. Now, though, I was less sure.

‘I sense you’re looking a little despondent today,’ he remarked. ‘Don’t lose hope, whatever you do. Recovery from the kind of immense brain trauma you suffered takes time. Sometimes months. Sometimes years. We’ve both got to be patient through this process.’

The brain trauma he was referring to was my car accident. Early one morning some months back, I was driving in a semirural stretch of Hampshire when my car left the road, went down an embankment, and hit a tree. For some reason I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, which possibly saved my life, because I was thrown clear of the car, straight through the windscreen, and was twenty feet away from it when it burst into flames. I was in a coma for three months, and when I woke up my life was this.

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