He drops the lens away from his face and wades into the water where I am, denim cuffs of his jeans getting wet. “You remember?”
The way he’s looking at me, you’d think he’d struck gold. Not me in a rare lucid moment. The closer he stands, looking into my eyes like he’s searching for the real me past the glaze of amnesia, the surer I become: I know this man.
“I saw you. Younger you.”
Same height. Smaller breadth. Lanky. Smooth-skinned …
I reach out, involuntarily, and graze my fingers across the stubble on his chin, amazed that he needs to shave at all. Forgetting he’s not a boy anymore. The hair prickles the skin on my fingers, and I retract my hand quickly. “Sorry!” I say, embarrassed.What am I doing?
“We were on Bronte Beach,” he informs me. “A Sunday afternoon in the Easter holidays. It was still hot. We’d been for a swim.”
I can imagine it all. I read once about a condition calledaphantasia, where people can’t create mental imagery. It’s not a challenge I ever faced. My mind is bursting with images and sounds and tastes—the imaginary world as intense as the real one.
“You’d just finished an English essay,” Drew says. “I proofread it. It was annoyingly perfect.”
More than a decade later, this thrills me. Academic praise has always been my love language.
“Then you bolted onto the sand. I took a photo when you turned around, splashing through the waves. I entered it in an exhibition we put on together.”
“We put on an exhibition?”
It sounds exactly like me. The spirit of me.
Suddenly, if this is the caliber of my teenage past, I’m thirsty for more. More information. Details. I want to hear everything about every moment Drew and I have ever shared, in the hope that it will dislodge this mental block and open a torrent of remembering.
“Do you still have the photo?” I ask.
His face clouds, jaw clenching. He seems to realize the cuffs of his jeans are getting saturated and steps back out of the waves, annoyed. “Oliver bought it,” he says. And, just like that, the magic is broken.
31
Drew
Oliver’s buying my photo was a power move I never forgave him for. He couldn’t stand to see me with something he wanted, even if it was my own intellectual property. I guess it was a mutual sentiment. It wasn’t just me who looked at Oliver Roche and saw a whole world to envy. Splashy house in Lane Cove. Luxury car at seventeen. Two parents invested in his life. And yet he managed to stay down-to-earth enough to be universally likeable. Or loveable, in Evie’s case.
I don’t know what he did with the portrait. It was never on display. The reason it won didn’t have anything to do with my photography skills; it was all her and the joie de vivre she had back then. She’d lit up the moment I pressed the shutter, but she would have done that with or without a camera stuck in her face.
“Maybe the portrait is at the house I shared with Oliver,” she suggests, walking backward away from me, as if she’s pulling me into a stroll.
I amble toward her, sand clinging to my feet, wet denim rubbing my ankles, every shred of common sense telling me to stop following this woman up the beach, into our past. I thinkshe’ll be disappointed if she goes looking for that portrait, but it’s not my place to accuse Oliver now. Never speak ill of the dead, they say.
Dead. It’s weird to think Oliver is gone. Even weirder that I’m the one here with Evie. Life twists and turns and things you never imagined possible strike in an instant. Suddenly you’re on a totally different path. Not that this is still our path. It’s a diversion. Get her memory sorted, and that’s it. I can’t let her get any closer than she already has. No more brushing my face with her fingers.
She’s down the beach a little way now, inspecting rock pools. I resist the temptation to take more photos. She’s similar to the teenage girl I remember—always in a world of her own—but now with the body of a woman. Every move she makes puts thoughts in my head that don’t belong there, not in these twisted circumstances. She looks up just as I’m banishing yet another idea. My body has always been under her spell, but it’s my mind I worry about more.
I have to snap out of this. I pull out my phone and search fordissociative amnesia. The more I know about what she’s grappling with, the better, although what I find only plunges me into a world of concern.
Severe memory loss that can’t be explained by a medical condition.
The patient can’t recall events or people from their lives, especially from a time of distress or pain.
Can’t recall upsetting events or traumatic experiences.
Increased risk of self-harm …
“Did you keep anything from when we were at school?” she asks. “Concert tickets, programs from school plays, photos?”
Armed with new details of her condition, I’m wary about how to answer. “Why?”
