“Where is your mother?”
Ben sniffed audibly.“I don’t know.She ran off years ago.When I was eight.”
“Is your father still alive?”
“No.”
“What do you do for a living?”
Ben hesitated and glanced at Squeezy.Squeezy nodded.“I’m in the army.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
Ben seemed to find this more difficult to answer.He began to draw small patterns on the table in the spilt tea.“I’m not sure.It’s all kinda jumbled like a fucking great…sorry, ma’am.”
“Don’t apologise, Ben.I’m a doctor, not a nun.Tell me your impressions if that’s all they are.Anything you can remember.”
“I don’t remember being on an op.I think I was home—at my cottage, maybe?Yeah, I must’ve been at home.Was I on sick leave?Was I shot maybe?”
“Okay, we’ll leave it there for a while.Ben, go out into the hallway, please.Please don’t wander around this house—stay in the hallway.I’d like to speak with Sir Nikolas privately.Is that all right with you?”
She was wasting her time with the bedside manner.Ben was a soldier.If a doctor told him to bend over and spread, he did—with a smart salute on the way down.He rose and went dutifully out of the door.Tim and Squeezy made to follow him, but Nikolas intercepted them by grabbing Tim’s sleeve.“Say nothing.”
Tim’s eyebrows rose in confusion, anger, horror—all the emotions he’d clearly been suppressing since bursting in expecting to see all his friends back and safe, only to be told by Squeezy that Ben was back but he was not the Ben they knew.“Say nothing about what?Where do I start not telling him?His life, Nikolas!He’s lost his whole…” He looked down at the hand on his arm.This time it was Squeezy’s.Perhaps that’s how he got his nickname.It obviously hurt.
Squeezy, eyes on Nikolas, just confirmed quietly with a nod, “Nothing.”
It crossed Nikolas’smind that he'dunderestimated this man.
He returned to the table and sat down.
Andrea Gillian waited until Tim and Squeezy had gone out and shut the door.“It’s some form of psychogenic—retrograde—amnesia brought on by situation-specific stress.It’s relatively common in soldiers, as you know.”
“Just like that he fucking forgets ten years of his life?”
“I don’t think he has entirely.He’ll have very mixed memories—some from recent and some from longer ago.”
“When will he snap out of it?”
“I don’t know.It can last for hours or…”
“Or what?Days?Weeks?”
“I was going to say years—but that’s more uncommon and more usually associated with childhood trauma.Abuse.”
Nikolas licked his lips.“Just like that.Ten years.Wiped out.”
Andrea Gillian gave him a little glance.“He may have been additionally susceptible to this, I’m afraid.It’s often linked to what’s referred to as a premorbid history of psychiatric illness…such as depression.”
“He wasn’t…”
“Aeroe?The suicide attempt?Devon?He’s still suffering nightmares and flashbacks from the coffin.”
“Fuck!”Nikolas rose and went to the counter.
“Why didn’t you tell him who you were?”
Nikolas didn’t turn around and after a few moments replied, “I couldn’t think what to say and then the moment passed.”
