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He heard a single sharp tap at the door, and turned around. Jack was glaring in through the window and jerking his head to indicate that Michael should hurry up. Michael gave him a thumb's-up and mouthed, ‘OK.'

He laid his hand on the girl's shoulder and gently shook it. She didn't show any signs of waking up so he shook it again. Maybe the doctors had given her a sedative, and nothing would rouse her.

‘Hello?' he said. ‘Hello, can you hear me? I need you to open your eyes.'

She licked her lips with the tip of her tongue and murmured, ‘
Why did you
…?'

‘Can you hear me?' he repeated. ‘I need you to open your eyes. I need you to talk to me. I need you to tell me your name.'

Again she licked her lips, and then her eyelids fluttered.

‘Please,' said Michael. ‘Please wake up and tell me who you are.'

He shook her shoulder once more, harder this time. Still she didn't open her eyes.

‘
Please
,' he repeated. ‘Please wake up.'

There was another single knock at the door, and there was Jack, giving him the evil eye through the window. He shrugged to show that he was having no luck. Jack pointed furiously to the metal bracket at the end of the bed which contained the girl's medical notes.
Look in there
, he mouthed, silently.
See if you can find her name in there.

Michael lifted out the folder. It had a stiff pink cardboard cover with the name
Natasha Kerwin
written on it, in black felt-tip pen. Underneath was printed
G. Hamid, Snr Consultant
and – in parentheses – the words (
semi-substantial
).

Michael opened the folder and quickly leafed through the notes. He couldn't make sense of any of them. There were twenty pages or more, crowded with statistics and graphs and comments like ‘Temporal dynamics in layers II/III have unusually fast 4–5 Hz oscillation' and ‘Cortical trauma could jeopardize prospect of conversion to s.s.'

He closed the folder and touched the name
Natasha Kerwin
with his fingertips, as if by osmosis it could give him some clue as to who she was. Her name seemed faintly familiar, but he couldn't think why. It told him nothing more than those flashing lights he kept seeing, and that girl's voice saying
you shouldn't
, and that tantalizing waft of perfume.

He slid the folder back in its bracket, and looked at the girl again. To his surprise, her eyes were open and she was staring at him.

‘You're awake,' he said, coming around to the side of the bed.

She opened and closed her mouth without saying anything, but she lifted up her right hand as if she wanted him to take hold of it. He clasped it between both of his hands, and it was shockingly cold.

‘Jesus, you're
freezing
,' he told her. ‘Why don't you put your hands under the covers?'

She licked her lips again, and then she whispered, ‘You shouldn't let me go to sleep like that.'

‘What?'

She looked around the room, frowning. ‘Where are we? Is this our hotel?'

‘This is a clinic. You've been in some kind of an accident. You've been hurt.'

‘Accident?'

‘I really don't know. It could have been an auto wreck.'

‘But
you're
not hurt, are you?'

‘Me? No. I
was
, but that was months ago. I'm pretty much recovered now, except for my memory.'

‘Have you come to take me home?'

‘I can't,' said Michael. ‘You're still having treatment. Your name's Natasha, right? That's what it says on your notes.'

The girl stared at him as if he had said something completely absurd.

‘My
notes
? What are you talking about?'

Michael was about to explain when there were three rapid knocks at the door. Jack was pulling faces outside the window and making frantic hand signals.

Michael looked quickly around the room. There was a door on the left-hand side, which was half open. He could see a white-tiled wall inside, so he presumed that this was the bathroom. Next to the bathroom, there was a closet. He went over and opened it and saw that the only clothes hanging up inside it were a pale green toweling robe and a gray dress that was still covered in plastic from Shasta Dry Cleaners.

Jack knocked again, twice, and even more urgently. Michael turned to the girl and said, ‘Listen – you haven't seen me, OK? I was never here.'

‘But aren't you going to take me home?'

‘Later. Not yet. But I will. I promise.'

At that moment he heard voices outside the door. He couldn't make out exactly what they were saying, but it sounded as if somebody was asking Jack what he was doing there, and Jack was trying to explain that he was lost. For twenty or thirty seconds after that, there was silence, and then suddenly the door opened. Michael quickly stepped inside the closet and closed the door behind him, although he had to leave it a half-inch open because the catch was on the outside, and he didn't want to lock himself in.

A deep, accented voice said, ‘What's this, Natasha? You're awake!' Michael recognized it immediately as Doctor Hamid. ‘Did you have another one of your nightmares?'

The girl didn't answer, but another man's voice said, ‘Her heart rate's up. Blood pressure's down.' This voice was sharper, and higher.

‘I shall have to give you another sedative, my dear,' said Doctor Hamid. ‘You need all the sleep you can get.'

‘Maybe we should think about bringing her SS forward,' said the other man.

‘No – not yet,' replied Doctor Hamid. ‘SS is quite traumatic enough without perceptual impairment at the same time.'

‘So, when do you think, then?'

‘I don't know. If we can see within the next few days that function is returning to the parietal lobe, then, yes, maybe we can go ahead. Otherwise – well – there's not a whole lot of point, is there?'

‘She'll be a good guinea-pig for our drug program.'

‘Possibly, yes. But as far as SS is concerned, it's not as though she has anything to offer intellectually, is it? And she won't be much good as a companion, if she's suffering from chronic PTSD. We might as well pull the plug.'

Doctor Hamid and his associate stayed in the room for another five minutes, while Michael remained in the closet, breathing as quietly as he could, his knees aching, his neck growing stiffer and stiffer, praying for them to hurry up and go. They said very little more to each other, and nothing that Michael could understand, although Doctor Hamid spoke to the girl as he injected her with a sedative.

‘There, Natasha, this should give you much more pleasant dreams,' he said soothingly.

The girl said nothing at all.

Michael heard a rattling sound, and then a cough, and at last he heard the door opening and closing as the two men left. He waited for a few seconds more, and then he stepped out of the closet. He bent over to rub his knees, and then he stood up straight to stretch his back.

He crossed over to the girl's bedside, but the sedative had already taken effect and she was asleep. He took hold of her hand again. He couldn't believe how cold she was, as cold as if she were dead, although she was still steadily breathing. He tucked her hand underneath the woven cotton cover.

He stood there for a while, just watching her, trying to make sense of the way he felt about her, trying to understand who she was, and what was happening to her.

‘Natasha Kerwin,' he repeated. ‘Natasha Kerwin.'

Why had Doctor Hamid said that ‘we might as well pull the plug'? Had he seriously suggested that they were going to take her off life-support? Because that was what it had sounded like. But why? Because she ‘didn't have anything to offer intellectually', whatever that meant? Because she was ‘too traumatized to be a companion', whatever that was?

Michael felt such a strong urge to protect her, and take care of her, although he didn't understand why that should be. She had asked him if he had come to take her home, and he wished that he could, except that he didn't know where her home was, and she obviously wasn't well enough to go anywhere.

He leaned over her bed and kissed her on the forehead. Her eyelids fluttered but that was all.

‘Natasha Kerwin,' he said, one more time, and then he left her bedside and opened the door to the corridor. There was nobody in sight, so he quickly stepped out and closed the door behind him. Now he had to find out what had happened to Jack.

He walked rapidly back to the reception area. It was deserted. He tried looking into one or two rooms nearby, but they were empty, too. The clinic was totally silent. Even the sound of the floor-polisher had stopped, and the television had been switched off.

Doctor Hamid must have told Jack to go home, and it was so cold outside that Jack wouldn't have waited for him. Michael took one last look around, and then he pushed his way out through the clinic doors. The night was clear and frosty, and the sky was prickly with stars.

He walked back to Isobel's house and quietly let himself in. When he undressed and slipped into bed beside her, she turned toward him and murmured, ‘
Emilio, it isn't true
,
I swear it
.'

Michael lay awake for almost an hour after that, and the night was so silent and so still that he almost felt as if he could feel the world turning underneath him.

He could think of nothing but Natasha, her white and perfect face, and Doctor Hamid saying that he ‘might as well pull the plug'.

A
fter breakfast the following morning, Michael told Isobel that he was going to take an early walk. Toward dawn, the wind had changed around, and clouds had rolled over, pillowy and gray, with that dull orange tinge that usually warns of impending snow.

‘I thought you might want to come back to bed,' she told him, smiling at him over her second mug of herbal tea.

‘For sure – well, yes,' he said, although he could feel that his own smile was tight and defensive. ‘But maybe later. I don't want to get myself caught out in a blizzard.'

‘Well, your loss, lover,' she shrugged. ‘But you know that you're more than welcome, any time.' Her pink silky robe was open at the front so that he could see she was wearing nothing underneath, only a shiny silver pendant like a gibbous moon.

He went through to the hallway and pulled on his boots. As he was buttoning up his coat Isobel came out of the kitchen and said, ‘By the way, I'm having some friends around this afternoon. Just a little social get-together. I hope you're going to join us.'

‘OK. Fine. What else would I be doing?'

‘I don't know. I have the feeling you're not very settled, that's all. I just wanted to make you feel at home.'

‘I'm fine. Really. It's this amnesia that's bugging me, that's all. I keep remembering bits and pieces but I don't know what they mean, or how they all fit together.'

‘How does Doctor Connor think you're getting on?'

‘Catherine? She's increased my meds, but I'm not sure that's made any difference. Not yet, anyhow.'

Isobel came up to him and put her arms around his neck. She looked up into his eyes and said, ‘You know that I'll do anything for you, don't you? And I mean
anything.
You're my whole life now, Greg. I hope you understand that. I couldn't live without you.'

He gently prised her arms open, and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Like I said before, Isobel, I'll be able to give you a whole lot more of myself when I know for sure who I am.'

‘I love you,' she said.

Michael knew how happy it would make her if he said the same thing back to her, but he couldn't. He simply smiled that tight, defensive smile and squeezed those chilly hands of hers.

‘I won't be too long. I'm only going for a walk around the block, just to keep Doctor Hamid happy.'

He opened the front door and went out into the blustery cold. Already a few snowflakes were whirling around, and they flew into his eyelashes and on to his lips so that he could taste them as they melted. He had taken his walking stick with him, but he was beginning to hobble a little less, and even since yesterday his knees seemed to have lost some of their stiffness.
If my body's on the mend
, he thought,
maybe
my memory is, too.

And then he thought:
Natasha. Natasha Kerwin. I
know
you, Natasha. God knows why, but I don't care why. I know you and there's no way that I'm going to let Doctor Hamid pull the plug on you, whatever that means, and whatever his reason for doing it.

He walked down past the community center and then up the slope toward the loop where the Endersbys lived. The snow was coming down much thicker now, although the wind was blowing it in wild, unpredictable patterns, as if ghosts were dancing all around him. He went up to the front door and pressed the doorbell. Inside, he heard a two-tone chime, and after a few seconds a light was switched on. Through the hammered-glass panel beside the door he saw the fragmented image of Bill Endersby coming to see who was there.

‘Bill!' he said, cheerfully, when the door opened up.

Bill Endersby looked whiter and sicker than ever. He was wearing a baggy green cardigan and gray flannel slacks that must have been three sizes too big for him.

‘Yes?' he blinked, as if he didn't know who Michael was.

‘It's Greg Merrick, Bill!
Greg
– Isobel's companion.'

‘Oh, yes. What do you want, Greg? It's damned cold here, with this door open.'

‘I'd like to talk to Jack, if I could.'

‘Jack?' said Bill Endersby. He sucked at his dentures, and then he said, ‘'Fraid that won't be possible. No.'

‘Why's that, Bill? Isn't he here right now? I can come back later.'