‘Right.’
A huge dog padded in and put its head on Joe’s lap, and looked at him hopefully until he stroked its ears. It was a relief to see that there really was a dog, and that it wasn’t a patient who’d gnawed on the table leg.
‘Don’t mind Napoleon, he’s very friendly. However,’ the doctor continued, as if he hadn’t mentioned the dog, ‘I’ve never seen a case that hasn’t cleared in a few days, if not a few hours. And it’s an incredibly common condition. We had a rush of people with it a couple of months ago and they all recovered perfectly. Not so bad as this, but precisely the same thing.’
Joe looked up from the dog. ‘A group of people with the same thing in the same timeframe implies an external cause that affects all of them. Doesn’t it?’
The doctor widened his eyes, then laughed, as if it was surprising that Joe would know words like implies and external. ‘Well, yes. A cluster does imply an external cause. But there is no geographical cluster. Patients from right across the Republic have experienced it, from Rome to Dublin. We’re looking into all sorts: weather, water tables, crops, air miasma. But don’t worry yourself. We’ll work it out.’
Joe nodded.
‘Settle down, have a game of tennis with someone. Plenty of veterans here, wonderful fellows, they just don’t get on so well with sudden noises. I’ll see you in a few days.’
Joe wanted to ask more, but that was that, because a woman drifted in holding a doll too tightly and pointed at the dog, and the doctor hurried up to ease her away again. The dog followed them.
2
The nurse, a thin white lady, was brusque. Most of the other patients were educated people, so he should mind his manners, thank you. A Clerkenwell accent, the doctor had said; that must have been code for scummy. She put him in a narrow room with a bed and a desk and a view over the gardens, berating him all the while.
He thought she was just being rude at first, but then realised that he was making her nervous, so he put himself in a corner and tried to think small thoughts while she explained where everything was and what time meals were. He felt disconcerted, because he wasn’t a big enough man to loom. What the doctor had said about the tartan lining of his coat chimed again. Carefully, like it might be on a fuse, he took out the idea that he might have something to do with terrorists. It still didn’t sound right. He was pretty sure hardened terrorists would have to be angry people, and though he wasn’t confident of many things, he knew he had about as much inclination towards explosive rage as a Joe-shaped pile of salt. Not everyone would want a lot of it, but it was, basically, neutral.
That, part of his mind pointed out, was a chemistry joke. How does English scum of the earth from Clerkenwell know chemistry?
No use wondering that for now.
‘Um,’ he ventured, ‘are there any books?’ If he couldn’t get away from it all, going somewhere imaginary seemed like the next best thing.
‘There’s a library. It’s designed to be improving.’ Her whole posture made it clear he could do with improving. ‘French classics of course.’
Classic sounded a lot like it would be about the horrors of life in slums, and Fallen Women who were never interesting enough to actually fall off anything. ‘Anything English?’ he said, not with much hope.
The nurse stared at him. ‘What kind of place do you think this is?’
She didn’t let him speculate before she strode to the open door and vanished into the corridor with a disgusted huff.
He put his hands into his pockets and turned them out on the desk.
He had a few francs, new-minted, with Napoleon IV looking the age he was. There was a case of cigarettes. They were home-made, but the tobacco smelled good. From the same pocket came a tin with an enamel lid and a tiny picture of a ship on the front. He thought it was a snuffbox until he opened it and found matches inside. Last, from his inside pocket, there were two train tickets. They were both singles to the Gare du Roi, from Glasgow. The ticket inspector had clipped out the ‘Glas’.
His heart missed a gear and crunched. Two tickets.
He turned towards the door, meaning to go after the nurse, but then realised he didn’t know who he wanted her to look for. He put the tickets aside uneasily and tried to let it go like the doctor had said, and went downstairs to explore. But no matter how often he reasoned that the man who had helped him would have noticed someone else, or that it was possible he had just picked up a stray ticket by accident, he couldn’t shift the certainty that he had wandered off oblivious from someone who had been looking for him. The more he thought about it, the more certain he was.
He strained again to think of the train, the carriage, whether there had been a woman with dark hair who suited green, but he couldn’t remember a single person.
‘Madeline, come on, she’s called Madeline,’ he said aloud, trying to trick his brain into letting just a corner of that forgetting-shroud slip.
Nothing.
He hoped she was looking for him.
Feeling only half there, he spent the rest of the day ghosting around the open rooms downstairs and the gardens, which were full of cherry trees. That he was taken with the latter made him think he wasn’t used to gardens, but it was only a guess. He tried to read a book later, unsuccessfully, because the tight feeling in his chest wouldn’t go away for long enough to gather up much concentration. He stuck to the papers. They were full of ordinary things. The Emperor was in residence at Buckingham Palace for the season, having just arrived from Paris; there were festivities open to the public at St Jacques’ Park all week, with fireworks. After a lot of work underground to properly heat the vineyards, the price of plantations in Cornwall was rocketing, and so was the price of slaves because the owners got through so many, what with the digging and maintenance of the hot air flow; the usually thriving Truro slave market was quite empty. He found himself in the evening classifieds. Joseph Tournier, memory-loss patient at La Salpêtrière, seeks relatives.
There was no change. He sat awake through the night, trying to listen to his own memory. The more he listened, the more hollow it rang. But that tiny recollection of Madeline was right. He could see her if he thought about it, so he did think about it, hard. He told her name to the doctor. The doctor promised to pass it along to the police, but looked grim when Joe said he still didn’t know where he lived. Tuesday, the deadline of his stay, loomed taller.
On Saturday morning, someone did come, and it was an unexpected someone: a pin-sharp, purple-cravatted gentleman. When the doctor showed the man into the visiting room Joe froze, wondering who he could have offended, but the man let his breath out and smiled.
‘It is you! Oh, Joe. Do you recognise me?’ French, Paris French.
‘No,’ Joe said softly. His stomach screwed itself into a knot. There was no way he could have any normal business with someone like this. God, what if the doctor had been right, what if he had been involved with the Saints? This man was easily well-dressed enough to be a police commissioner, or one of those government people who introduced themselves politely, showed you the red badge, and then took you away to what they called an inquiries facility.
He had a surge of anger with himself. How could he know about red badges and inquiry facilities but not who Madeline was or where he bloody belonged?