‘You’ll be all right,’ the man said quietly. It was the last thing he said; while Joe was seeing the doctor, he vanished. None of the nurses had seen him go, or seen him at all, and Joe started to think he had got himself to the hospital alone, and that the man had been a benign hallucination.
There were two hospitals. The first was the Colonial Free, which was a dark, frozen place where all the windows stayed open to air the wards, and an exhausted doctor referred him, urgently, to an asylum over the river. Then there was another cab ride, by himself, paid for by the hospital. He curled up under his coat on the way, cold right to the marrow now. More of the black streets glided by, the terraces like widow’s lace. Then there was the Tamise: black too, and so packed with cargo ships that a limber person could have got across the whole breadth of it jumping from deck to deck. Normal, all normal. Except he felt like someone had left him on the surface of Mars.
The second hospital was called La Nouvelle Salpêtrière. It was a much nicer place than Joe had expected. South of the river, in Southwark, it was an impressive building that looked much more like a museum or a bank than a hospital. He had imagined it would be grim and white inside, but in fact it was hard to tell that it was an asylum at all. The entrance hall was all marble and pillars, nice couches, and chandeliers of electric lights. Someone deep in the building was playing the piano.
On the way upstairs to the consultant’s office, the nurse took him past two cells lined with cork, but the doors were open and nobody was inside. There was, said the nurse, a criminal wing, where the cases were far more serious, but it was separate. The only other sign that perhaps not everyone was to be trusted was the cages around the fireplaces.
While he was waiting outside the consultant’s office, a man lent him a copy of Le Monde and claimed to control the weather. Joe sat holding the paper, looking at the words and the typeface, and trying to trace why it was all wrong. It didn’t say anything extraordinary. There was the weather in one column – it didn’t match what the man predicted – an advert for silk shirts, one for a M. d’Leuve’s brand-new invention, an electric corset which was apparently very good for feminine discomforts. He wondered at that, because Madeline had never seemed so uncomfortable that she would need electrifying. He frowned at his knees when he realised he had remembered a name, and her face; a small woman with dark hair, who suited dark green. He couldn’t think of a last name, or if she was a sister or a wife, or neither.
The doctor’s office was airy, with a bleak, beautiful view over the hospital’s frosty lawns. On the wall was a certificate from an academy in Paris. The desk had bite marks on one leg, near the top. Joe looked round for the dog that must have done that but couldn’t see one, which was a lot more disconcerting than it should have been. All the details landed in his mind like bright pins, sharp and pricking and very unpleasant.
The doctor explained that he would be there for a week, on the understanding that the accommodation fees would be waived. ‘Now, you’ve been referred from the Colonial Free, I see. I can tell you now exactly what you’re suffering from. It’s a seizure; a form of epilepsy. With any luck, it will go off soon.’
‘A seizure?’
The doctor set the notes down and smiled. He was young and smartly turned out, Parisian; on colonial placement, probably, to rack up experience before returning to France. Joe felt hopeless. The more he thought about it, the more he realised he knew general things, but nothing specific.
‘Yes,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m personally very interested in this particular epilepsy type, so I’ve been asking for cases, hence your referral. It’s what we’re calling silent epilepsy; it doesn’t come with convulsions, only the symptoms we would usually associate with an epileptic aura – amnesia, paramnesia, visions. Had anything of the latter two?’
‘What does paramnesia mean?’ Joe asked. The doctor’s voice was so posh that he could feel himself furling up inside with the urge to keep his answers short, and not to ask questions or to waste time.
‘The blurring of something imaginary and something real. Most commonly, déjà vu; the sense you’ve seen something new before. And its opposite, jamais vu, which is when something that should be familiar feels wholly alien.’
‘Yes!’ Joe said fast, and felt his eyes burn, desperately grateful to hear someone name the feeling. ‘Yes, that second one, ever since that man found me at the station! I didn’t think the Gare du Roi was in London, all the streets looked wrong, the – newspapers look wrong …’
‘Textbook,’ the doctor said gently. ‘Absolutely. Now, I can promise you that you do know Londres, because you’ve got a very strong Clerkenwell accent.’ He smiled again. ‘Let’s see what happens if we keep you here in the quiet for a few days. I’m putting you down as a curable,’ he added, motioning at the form in front of him.
‘What if it doesn’t go away?’ Joe said. He was having to speak carefully. It felt like he hadn’t spoken for a long, long time, which was absurd, because he had spoken before, at the other hospital, and the train station. But the order of words felt wrong. French, they were speaking French of course, and the man at the station had spoken English; maybe it was just the switchover.
‘Well, let’s talk about that in the—’
‘No, let’s talk about it now, please.’
‘There’s no need to be aggressive,’ the doctor said, sharp. He drew back in his chair a few inches, as though he thought Joe might punch him.
Joe frowned. ‘I’m not being aggressive, I’m really scared.’
The honesty seemed to take the doctor by surprise. He had the grace to look awkward. ‘You understand my caution. Your notes say you arrived at the Colonial Free speaking English, and that coat you’re wearing now has a tartan lining. The train you were on came from Glasgow.’ His tone turned from questioning to accusatory by the end.
‘Sorry?’ said Joe, lost.
‘If I say the Saints to you, does that ring a bell?’
Joe searched for it, but got nothing. ‘Is that a church?’
‘No, it’s a terrorist group that makes a habit of bombing trains and random sections of the Republic.’
‘Oh. And they …’
‘Speak English and wear tartan and occupy Edinburgh, which does not have a railway connection, for obvious reasons, to Londres. They use Glasgow.’
Joe stared down at the lining of his coat sleeve. ‘I … can’t see myself bombing anything. I think I’d go to pieces under pressure. I am going to pieces. Have … gone.’
The doctor must have thought so too, because he relented. ‘If it doesn’t go away, it means that there may be a lesion or a tumour pressing on part of your brain, in which case, there’s very little we can do, and it will probably prove fatal eventually.’ He said it bluntly, punishment for Joe’s having scared him before. ‘Meanwhile, we’re putting your details and description in the papers. See if we can find you some relatives.’
Joe knew he should say thank you, but it was an uphill struggle to say anything now. ‘And if no one comes?’
‘The county asylum is free, so you could go there.’ The doctor winced at the idea, and Joe tried not to imagine what the county asylum was like. ‘But as I say, we’re putting you up for the week, so we have until next Tuesday.’