Chapter 15 #2
“Yes. Thank you. Can’t remember anything. That’s what I was going to say.”
* * *
Nikolas had his hand on the phone to call Andrea Gillian, but Squeezy had already done it. She came into the kitchen half an hour later with a very subdued Tim and Squeezy, and made Ben sit at the table once more. She sat opposite him.
“My name is Dr Gillian. Do you remember me?”
Ben shook his head. “Sorry.”
“No need to apologise. I’m going to ask you a series of questions.
They may confuse you. Please just answer truthfully to the best of your knowledge and not worry too much about them.
” She actually managed a smile. “I might throw some trick ones in just to try and catch you out and test if you’re fooling around… how old are you?”
Ben nodded as if glad to start with an easy one.
“Twenty-two. I’m taking this seriously, trust me.
” If he felt the tension in the room rise a notch at that answer, he didn’t show it.
He did occasionally flick his eyes to one side, as if trying to see Nikolas, who had moved to stand in a darker part of the kitchen.
“What’s your name?”
“Ben Rider. Benjamin, although only my mother calls me that.”
“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’s mind that he'd underestimated 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.”
“It may have been the best thing you could have done.”
He turned and she continued, “It’s why I asked him not to look around the house.
We really have very little knowledge of treating this kind of autobiographical amnesia, but it’s caused by stress and shock—it’s the mind’s protective glass, if you like, an attempt to prevent the glare of reality causing pain.
We have to protect him from more stress. ”
“And you think me telling him we’re…that I’m…will cause more stress?”
She seemed puzzled. “Well…he thinks he’s twenty-two. What was he doing when he was twenty-two? Not this. He wasn’t gay! That could…”
“Fuck. He thought he was being outed on national TV. They boasted they were going to kill him because he was gay.”
She appeared to think about this for some time. “That’s a considerable stress factor I’d not considered, yes.” She sighed.
“As I said, it’s why I asked him not to look around the house…all the evidence of your life here together.”
Nikolas winced. He wondered. If Ben wandered around.
What would he see? Not a single photo of them anywhere.
The bed, yes, but it was neatly made, clean linen—he didn’t pay his cleaning service to leave cum-splattered sheets on his bed.
The shower? He had three bathrooms, four bedrooms. Ben had nothing here other than a few clothes.
No, he didn’t think looking around their house would cause Ben Rider—for that was, apparently, who he was again now—any problems at all.
“What am I going to do?”
For the first time Nikolas asked a question Andrea Gillian apparently couldn’t answer.
For the first time he asked a question in a tone of voice that appeared to break her habitual veneer of callous indifference she’d adopted with Nikolas.
She ran her fingers through her styled hair and said nothing.
* * *
Some things, obviously, Ben had to be told.
He had to be told he was older than he thought he was and that he’d effectively lost the last ten years of his life.
He was told he wasn’t in the army—that he actually worked now for Nikolas.
Nikolas told Ben he was a bodyguard—his bodyguard.
Friend and bodyguard. He allowed himself this addition.
Insisted Ben call him Nikolas. Ben wouldn’t and seemed happy calling him sir, as he once had, before things had changed between them.
Kate had been looking after Radulf, so they both arrived together. Tim had called and told her, so this time she didn’t arrive into a scene of horror as she had on their return from Devon once, being told Ben was dead and seeing her friends broken and battered.
She needn’t have worried too much. Ben remembered Radulf and, more confusingly, he recognised her. He’d known neither of them when he was twenty-two. Nikolas couldn’t decide whether this was a good thing or not. Knowing Radulf was okay. He allowed Ben that.
Ben knew the dog was called Radulf, knew this meant wolf of the house, but appeared to recollect nothing about why or how he knew him.
He didn’t know why the dog was blind, only that he was.
The confusion made Ben upset and he took his anger out on everyone there.
Andrea Gillian calmed things down with a glance to Nikolas.
Kate questioned him gently on what he recalled about her.
Ben thought she was his girlfriend, although this clearly only confused him more, because, as he admitted with an anguished appeal, she looked so bloody old!
Everyone found this funny and then felt awful and apologised to Kate, trying to explain.
Nikolas didn’t need to do either, but then he hadn’t laughed.
* * *
Ben was tired. Andrea Gillian stressed it was symptomatic of his condition and not to fight it—he should sleep as much as he needed.
Tim showed Ben to the room he and Squeezy used when they slept over.
It appeared lived in—alarm clock, a book on the table, some clothes in the wardrobe that could easily belong to him.
Ben wasn’t suspicious and wasn’t worried too much about anything he was told anymore.
It was all so confusing he’d decided not to try and pick out individual things that bewildered him—until he glanced in the mirror later, when he went into the en-suite to piss.
That terrified him, and he made a choked sound of alarm.
He heard someone come into the bedroom and turned to see his big, blond boss.
The man was gazing at him with an almost blank expression.
Ben had always been good at reading people, but he got nothing off this man at all.
He nodded back at the mirror. “Sorry, it was a bit of a shock, sir.”
“Good one or bad one?”
“I’m blond. Sort of.”
“It’s growing out. It was for the op.”
“Yeah, I got that. I’m fucking old, too.”
“Ben?”
“Sir?”
“Please don’t swear when you work for me. I don’t like it.”
“Fuck, sorry. I mean…yeah, okay, sir.” They stood and stared at each for a while, until Ben asked, frowning so deeply that the tall stranger almost disappeared, “Were we just speaking…?” His voice hitched up in panic, and his boss came to his side, a hand on his arm, very lightly reassuring him.
“Yes. Danish. You still remember.”
“Danish? I don’t know how to fucking speak Danish! Do I?”
“You learnt. In the time you don’t remember.”
“But I remember it?”
“Apparently.”
“That’s your accent? You’re Danish?”
“Yes, you learnt Danish when you came to work for me.”
“Oh. Wolf of the house. Radulf. I knew that.”
“Yes, you did.”
Ben turned to the mirror once more. “I’m so old.”
His boss, Nikolas, offered hesitantly, “I’m forty-five.”
Ben turned, his eyebrows lifted. “Fuck me.”
Nikolas turned sharply away and left.
Ben cursed.
He forgot he wasn’t supposed to swear.
* * *
Nikolas made a sudden, unilateral decision, told Ben he could sleep on the way, and took him home to Devon.
There wasn’t anything very personal there either, he reflected, so it wasn’t going to challenge Ben’s mind unduly. He sent Squeezy on ahead, nevertheless, to move Ben’s clothes into one of the guest suites.
Nikolas elected to drive, which, despite being very tired, Ben clearly found odd. “What exactly are my duties, sir?” This was asked hesitantly as Nikolas took to the outer lane of the M4, the green English countryside spinning past them.
Nikolas took a while to reply but managed calmly enough, “Whatever I decide them to be. Mostly you protect me. I run a charity.”
This non sequitur confused Nikolas, and he’d said it, so he wasn’t surprised when Ben commented wryly, “That dangerous, is it then, sir? Charity work.”
Nikolas actually smiled. There was a first time for everything.
After another few minutes, Ben, gazing out at the scenery asked,
“So, how long have I worked for you, sir?”
“Eight years.”
“Eight years? Christ. That’s a long time, yeah? Is that a long time?”
“Quite long, yes.”
“So, we know each other pretty well?”
Nikolas glanced over. “Why do you ask? Are you remembering things?”
Ben blushed suddenly, just pinpricks of red high up on his defined cheekbones. Nikolas knew every flush in Ben Rider’s repertoire. He caused most of them, after all. Ben didn’t reply to the question and turned back to look out of the window.
After a few more miles, at exactly the same time, Nikolas asked if Ben was hungry and Ben complained he was starving. They both laughed, then frowned, then both coloured, and Nikolas acknowledged deceptively lightly, “You’re always hungry by this point and we always stop.”
Who would have thought it would be the banal, trivial aspects of their missing life together that would hurt so much?
Was this like separation after death? If Ben were dead, would it be the remembering of him eating an egg and bacon sandwich and feeding bits to Radulf that would cause Nikolas’s grief-stricken heart to stop?
They carried on. Ben insisted he was fine and wanted to drive. It seemed harmless enough so Nikolas let him. He put the radio on and listened to the worsening situation in the Ukraine. More money coming his way. Good.
Ben drove steadily and carefully for a while, overtaking nicely and not sitting in the middle lane. Until he swore lightly to himself, cranked the vehicle up to a hundred and ten, and flashed his lights at a Porsche holding him up in the outer lane.
“Your memory is returning.”
Ben grinned. “Why do I remember driving a Range Rover sport?”
“I’ve no idea. I definitely don’t own one of those.”
“Huh.”
An hour later, Nikolas had a moment of panic as they approached the slight rise to the collapsed gateway.
Had he made a huge error bringing Ben here?
Surely out of all places this one would bring Ben’s memory crashing back to him?
He’d remembered it from being a child here, four years old. Could you forget remembering?
Ben apparently had. He pulled in on the hillside across from the house and then slid out of the car, staring. He licked his lips. “You…that’s your house?”
“Mine, yes.”
“My God, it’s…is it made of fucking glass? What’s that? Blue thing? Is that a swimming pool? Long one. Fuck, look at that bit coming out of the tor! How far are we from Okehampton? I know Dartmoor really well, don’t recognise that tor though. Is that a stable? Where do I live?”
Nikolas turned from contemplation of Ben’s beautiful house to study the familiar face. “You live in the house, too. All ANGEL employees have rooms.”
“So…” Ben blushed once more and toed the ground. “Are you married, sir? Do I guard your wife, too?”
Nikolas returned to the car. “I’m divorced.” He should call Philipa, advise her of the situation.
Suddenly, he sank his head into his hands. Advise her of the situation?
He wished someone would fucking advise him of it.
* * *