‘All good.’
She can tell Ajay wants to get down to business. She sits opposite him and tries to relax.
‘Rob says you’ve been feeling a bit unwell,’ he continues. ‘Maybe a migraine.’
She shifts on her seat and thinks back through the strange episodes of the last week. Ajay will be sympathetic. Scientific.
‘It was nothing,’ she says. She feels bad for wasting Ajay’s time, but she’d rather just confide in Bex for the moment.
Ajay senses her discomfort and gives her one of his chubby, reassuring smiles. She’s forgotten what a good bedside manner he has. He won’t rush her. He will bide his time until she’s ready to tell him.
‘He also said you’re making fantastic progress,’ he continues, beaming. ‘Thought you’d really turned a corner when he arrived last night.’
‘I’ve been feeling a lot better,’ she says, watching as Ajay removes a laptop from his attaché case and opens it on the table. He pulls out a headset similar to the one that Rob put on her earlier, also covered with electrodes.
‘He’s asked me to run some more recognition tests – try to establish whether the part of your brain that was damaged in the accident has fully recovered.’
‘Recognition tests? Sounds suspiciously like police work,’ Kate says. When she did her interview for the super-recogniser job with Wiltshire Police, she was shown inverted faces and altered images. There was also a ‘before they were famous’ test, in which she had to identify celebrities from poor-quality images taken when they were young.
Ajay smiles. He knows Kate never wants to work for the force again, but he agrees with Rob that her powers of recognition, almost non-existent after the accident, remain the best indicator of her brain’s overall recovery. The surgeon who operated on her talked of damage to her right temporal lobe, including the fusiform gyrus, the part of the brain that processes faces. He warned that facial blindness was a possibility. Kate was more worried about her ability to paint, particularly portraits of people.
‘We’re going to use the EEG headset to monitor a brainwave called a P3,’ Ajay says, checking his laptop.
‘What’s a P3?’
‘Electrical activity that occurs in the brain a fraction of a second after you recognise a face. The response spike is markedly stronger in super recognisers.’
‘Should I be flattered?’ Kate asks.
‘What’s interesting is that the reaction is involuntary – you can’t stop a P3 brainwave,’ he says. ‘It’s why they use it for lie detection.’
Ajay turns the laptop towards her and explains that she’s going to be shown two faces for five seconds each. She’ll then be shown hundreds of random facial images in quick succession, about ten per second, using a process called rapid serial visual presentation, or RSVP. Buried among them will be the two faces she was shown at the beginning. If her recognition skills are working, the deeper cognitive responses of her brain will trigger a P3 spike.
‘Are you ready?’ he asks.
She nods, adjusting her sitting position as he switches his laptop to full screen. A moment later, she studies each face for five seconds. First Brucie and then Jeff. Silly, she knows, but they used to use nicknames in the force when they were mentally storing images of faces, based on instant associations. Big chin? Bruce Forsyth. Prominent ears? Jeff Goldblum. It helps to make their faces stick.
Brucie and Jeff disappear and a series of images starts to flash in full screen before her eyes. She doesn’t have enough time to clock each one in detail, but she’s aware that they’re what they used to call ‘dirty’ shots, when the faces are partially obscured.
After thirty seconds, she feels tired. Despite the speed of the images, her brain is desperately trying to analyse each one, process it, match it against memories. The curse of the super recogniser. It’s like playing pairs on speed. Or Pelmanism, as her granny used to call it. Kate always used to win against her as a child, but it was put down to her younger brain rather than any special gift. She only discovered her ability to recognise faces a few years ago, although she should have seen the signs earlier. Whenever she watched TV, she’d recognise walk-on extras in the background that she’d seen in other films. She just thought everyone did.
She doesn’t know how long the test lasts – two minutes, maybe longer – but she’s relieved when it’s over.
‘That was hard,’ she says, blowing out her cheeks. It feels like she’s just sat an exam.
‘You have to relax,’ Ajay says, studying his phone. ‘Allow the images to wash over you, let your subconscious brain do the work.’
‘I don’t think I spotted anyone,’ she says.
‘You did.’ He turns his laptop for her to see. There’s a graph on the screen and a noticeable spike. ‘Image number 213.’
Jeff. ‘What about the other person?’
‘The spike was less pronounced.’ He scrolls through the rest of the graph and shows her more of a gentle hill than a mountain peak. ‘But it’s still an impressive response.’
She’s not convinced. Brucie got away.
Ajay pauses, shaking his head. ‘It’s still remarkable. Your powers of recognition are undoubtedly back, which is encouraging, given the damage that your brain suffered.’
She doesn’t need reminding. Six months ago, returning home after a particularly difficult day at work, she drove into a tree just outside the village. Not that she can remember any of it. They think she fell asleep at the wheel. She was lucky to survive, given her traumatic brain injuries. No airbags in a 1969 woodie. After an extensive investigation, the police concluded that it was a tragic accident.
‘Does that mean my ability to paint will return, too?’ She glances over at the canvas of Stretch on the easel.
‘It should do. In time. Rob’s so pleased,’ Ajay says, putting away the headset.
A part of her was hoping she could blame her funny turns on a still damaged fusiform gyrus. But if her brain is healing, it might not be playing tricks on her. And Rob might have been replaced by his double.
8
Jake
Jake snaps shut his laptop and looks around the cramped narrowboat. It’s not happening today. If he’s honest, it’s not happening every day. He thought he might write more after Kate left him, but his productivity has gone down, if that’s possible.
He locks up and steps onto the bank, glancing back at the boat. One end of the roof is piled up with logs seasoning for the winter, the other is covered with solar panels. All part of living off grid. He needs to water the flowerboxes down by the bow. They were planted with petunias by Kate and are dying.
The canal has a rare beauty this morning, layers of gossamer mist hanging above the surface of the water. A plump of moorhens retreats into the deep reedbeds on the far bank as he walks on down the towpath. Up ahead, Jake’s favourite bridge, a perfectly poised redbrick arch, reflects in the water to form a shimmering circle of sorts. It’s the one thing that keeps him going: this idyllic haven where he lives like a floating nomad.
The post office in the village has texted to say there’s a package for him. He enters with a spring in his step – maybe it’s a forgotten translation of one of his books? – and tries not to look at the croissants. He can’t even afford the gas to bake his own bread any more.