Roses in December

I click through to the patient list, then search. I type 'memory loss', and press enter.

Twenty-eight results.

I click again, and type 'exclude temporary'.

Two results.

I click the first result. It records the information of Jeremy Stocker. He is a middle aged man, with a wife and a child. He lost all recollection of the past two years, and has inconsistent recollection of the three before that. He tripped over a kerb and hit his head against a stone wall. I close the record.

I click the second result. It records the information of Mark North. He is aged twenty-four, and there are no records of any marital partners or children. He cannot recall any event after his twenty-first birthday. He was knocked down on a remote coastal road and left comatose for two weeks. I click print.

I close the patient list.

It's 3AM.

~~~

It's 5AM.

Two hours since I finished my shift, I approach 37 Fawnwick Road. It's a long road of dark bricked terraced houses, all three storeys high. It's a pretty grotty estate, with the fronts of the houses peppered with empty bottles and faded wrappers. The numbers '37' are daubed in white paint on the wall by the door.

I crouch down by the door and remove a couple of strips of metal from my pocket. The first, with a bend on about a quarter of its length, I insert into the lock, pressing gently down on it. The other strip is straight with a ridge at the end. I push it into the lock, and run it along the five pins inside, pushing each of them up in turn. Pin three resists, then clicks up into the lock, before falling limply down again. Pin five does the same, then pin two, and pin one. I carefully lever pin four up. Click.

The barrel turns, I pull down the handle and enter the house, careful to shut the door behind me.

There are two doors. The one ahead, labelled 'a', is my mark. I run a gloved hand carefully along the top of the door frame. A key falls to the floor, and I stoop to pick it up, noticing a scattering of letters on the floor as I do. I pick them up and put them in my pocket as I unlock the door.

I ascend the stairs in front of me and briefly scan the pile of rubbish in the corner of the hall but spot nothing interesting.

I step through the first door off of the beginning of the hall, the bathroom. Tugging on a string to my right switches on the light, revealing black and white floor tiles and a simple set of bathroom furnishings. I spot a couple of bottles of hair-products in the shower. I look down at the sink and see a toothbrush, one toothbrush. He lives alone.

Good.

I exit the bathroom.

At the end of the hall there is another door on the left and a flight of stairs on the right. I walk through the door and find myself in a small space joining a kitchen and a living room. I enter the kitchen.

There are several plates and bowls sitting by the sink with old food crusting in them, along with a number of cooking implements lying around on the side. I open the fridge and see a couple of bags of ready-made pasta and some fruit juice. The freezer contains a couple of margarita pizzas and some faux-meat mince. The cupboard has a couple boxes of pasta and a jar of pasta sauce. A pan of water sits on an electric hob. I turn on the heat.

I hear a rustling behind me and look around to see a cage. Walking closer, I see two black and white rats looking rather unhealthy. I look around for some pet food and find a box of it. I grab a handful, open the cage, and drop it in the bowl. One of the rats stirs, but does not eat. I see another bowl, take it out, and fill it with water. I put that in too, by the rat's head. It drinks and does not stop. My hand brushes against the other rat. Cold.

I remember that the usual life-span of a rat is about two years. Mark North won't remember his pets. Not their names, not whether he had them, not anything.

I take the stiff rat out of its cage and put it in a small plastic bag, leaving it by the door so as not to forget to put it in the bin.

The water is boiling now so I pour in some pasta. I notice a couple of bottles of wine stood up against the wall and take one, opening it with the corkscrew set down near them. I pour myself a glass, sipping it for the ten to twelve minutes it takes for the pasta to boil.

I started doing this, robbing amnesiacs, about a year ago. It was an ingenious idea, dreamt up on a train journey back after three day weekend in Cornwall, spent wondering what the perfect crime was. Poisoning your elderly partner by intentionally cooking their food badly was one, but there wasn't too much to gain from that. People probably do it all the time anyway.

Doctors are in the perfect position to commit crime. We can get all the drugs we want, we have almost unquestioning trust from nearly everyone, we have large amounts of information about people, and... of course... we get to cut people up. But what can you do with that? Nothing much, unless you're a sadist or a voyeur.... But then it hit me: amnesia. If you can't remember something you're not going to complain if it disappears.

The pasta is done. I drain it, put it into a bowl, pour on some sauce, and carry the steaming plate into the living room. There's a two seater settee and a single seater, and I sit down on the former to eat my pasta.

There's a television at the other end of the room, positioned for prime viewing, but it's dusty and the remotes are all stacked up down the side, so it's probably not used very often. There's a computer on the coffee table in front of me, surrounded by bits of paper, a couple of programming textbooks, and a rather obscene magazine... another clear sign that he is single.

Finishing my pasta, I set down the bowl and accidentally knock the mouse. The screen flashes to life and the computer begins to hum slightly, before the display lights up to show what Mark was doing before he left. His email is open, and his web browser shows a couple of pages of news about something interesting but unimportant. I look through his list of emails, they're mostly spam or notifications. I see what looks like a more personal email, with the title 'Re: Re: Hello Mark in England', and click on it:



The date of the email is a couple of weeks ago. I hit the delete key and watch it disappear from both his and the computer's memory.

I turn off the computer and move to the bookcase. It's mostly fiction, with a couple of reference books at the end he probably uses for work. I note "City of Crime" next to "100 Medical Miracles" and smile slightly. I decide to take an entire shelf, since that would look less suspicious, and tip them into a generic looking bag I found by the table.

The few people who I've told about my hobby all asked the same question: what do you take? As if this is some kind of exercise in consumerism. I'm paid pretty well, I'm not in need of any extra income, I only do it because... well, it's interesting. People's lives are encoded in their houses, their possessions. I can see parts of people they have never shown anyone simply by going through their drawers. Mark misplaced three years of his life, and this house is the only record of it left. There are things here that no-one knows about, not even him, and the things I take... he will never know of. He abandoned those three years, so they're as much mine as they are his. It's a voyage of discovery, history, and archaeology.

I don't tell them that though, I say I took the TV or something. They wouldn't understand.

There's a stack of CDs too. I take a few at random. Music... how much music have I listened to in the past three years? Last year a fifth of my time was spent listening to music, and yet there's no experience like listening to a good album for the first time, it's like it's the best thing in the world. He'll get that, listening to all his favourite tracks, for the first time, picked personally for him by the person who knows him best, and yet someone he's never met.

I take the CDs out and put the cases back, so he'll remember.

That's all for this room, that I can see, so I move back out into the hall and walk up the stairs. On the bannister there are a couple of scarves and a coat. I go through his pockets and find a pound coin, a phone, and a letter. I leave the phone, since calling the people in the address book would be too tempting, but I sit down on the stairs and read the letter:



I stuffed the letter in my pocket.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm even a service to these people. Some things maybe they wish they could have forgotten, I help them not remember. His boyfriend... Chris, Mark won't even remember him, let alone the break up.

I walk up the stairs.

The first room is the guest room. It's bare. I take a look in the drawer, finding just a couple of books people put there just so it's not an empty drawer.

I carry on along the hall to find the inevitable: the master bedroom. It's always the one I come to last, and the one I spent the most time in, because it's where they store their most private of possessions. It's six AM now; the sky is getting paler, and the birds are waking.

There's a double bed against the right wall, one half of which is unmade. A number of tables stand against the left wall, seemingly for working on. Another television sits in a cabinet across from the bed, the remote lying on the bed-side table along with a couple of pens and an alarm clock set for 5AM.

I wonder where to start.

I sit down on the bed and slide open the drawer of the bed-side table. There's the usual, condoms, a jar of vapour rub, some tissues, but... on the top there is a map. Who needs a map by their bed? I take it out and open it up, looking for some annotations and finding some black dots drawn on the coast of north east Yorkshire. I fold up the map and put it in my pocket, it might be an interesting place to visit.

I slide off the bed and kneel down on the floor, peering under his bed. There are three boxes. I pull one out. It contains what looks to be an assortment of school things. I pull out a stack of exercise books and flick through them. His handwriting is comfortably scruffy, his titles never underlined and the date never put in the right hand corner of the page. He probably wasn't the best of students, though he seemed to study mostly academic subjects. There are a couple of art books, but they're not really filled in nor paid much attention to so the subject was probably compulsory.

As would be expected, as the schoolbooks get more recent he starts to become less motivated. Titled pages meant for notes are left blank, or peppered with little scribblings of inside jokes and feebly written dissent. He began to spend more time decorating the maths question-numbers than actually doing the questions, and one page is just a list entitled "Things I Would Rather Be Doing Now". A quick glance through his school report finds him a good contributor in lessons, but always achieving slightly less than the targets. His final exam grades were disappointing. After fourteen years of education, he simply didn't care enough.

Though that's just a guess.

I fish out a yearbook from the bottom of the box. His picture is pretty normal, and he appears to have been fairly sociable, appearing in quite a few party photos and events, but there is a notable absence of connections. He would always be standing a fraction further away from people, and... though he appears in large groups... there are no photos of him with one or two people, or even engaged in any kind of activity that didn't involve drinking alcohol or doing something physical.

Aside from a few textbooks he probably forgot to give back, there is nothing else in this box. I pull out the second.

It's full of box files, and a couple of ring-binders, all full of paper detailing what I guess to be his university course: software design. The notes are, again, rather scruffy, but there are a lot of them. Nothing really very interesting though, aside from a couple of photos of people who were probably important at the time but he doesn't know anymore. I push that box back under.

The third box isn't very interesting either, just a box full of bank statements, documents, and other bureaucratic memorabilia. Or... actually... there is something at the bottom. Four small bags containing what might be fine brown sugar but is probably heroin.

They must know, the doctors, right? That he's an addict. But then again... how would they? Being in a coma for two weeks probably didn't give him any chance to display any symptoms. What exactly happens if you have a craving for drugs but don't know you're an addict, or to what you're addicted to? If he picked it up in the past three years... he might not even know...

Unless he found this.

Is it right to interfere? Is it my place to take back his choice to do drugs? I mean... he might work it out and take them up again anyway... but he might not...

I quickly pocket the bags and shove the box back under the bed.

I move away from the bed and sit down at his desk. There is the usual assortment of paper-clips bent into odd shapes by boredom, drawing pins stuck into bits of blue-tack, unintelligible notes written in short form on post-its ("left down, Tess"), and a tally chart for something nameless stuck to the wall. I look in the waste paper bin and find a couple of unfinished drafts for the letter I read earlier:



I empty the waste paper bin into my bag and look further along the desk. There is an analogue camera, a couple of spent black and white films, and a stack of photographs. I pick up the photographs and leaf through them. They are mainly of people and objects... there's a couple of photographs of someone who is probably his mother. She looks nice enough. There are also a few of who I presume to be Chris, some of them with Mark in too...

They're in love, as only the young can be, their fingers are locked into eachother's like a puzzle you might spend hours trying to figure out. They walk in step, and blink in time.

Then things start to get to Chris. He hates being touched while he's eating, or when he's just woken up. He needs some physical space, and Mark doesn't quite understand why.

I don't see them together now, in fact I barely see them in the same frame. After a while I don't see Chris at all.

I put the photos back. I consider taking one... but taking a nice one would strip that memory from him, and taking a sad one... I don't really want that.

There are a couple of drawers under that surface and I pull them open. The top one holds some more films, but the bottom one holds something more interesting... photos. Big blown-up photos this time. They look professional... but no, I recognise this.

All too frustrated with their inability to live their passion in the shadow of their day job, the guilty artist hides their work away. Poet's poems stay in the notebook, musicians play to themselves in the dark, and photographers take photos when no one's around and keep them in drawers.

There are involving scenes of bottomless lakes, still lives of pens and cluttered desks, long exposures of the moonlight through an overhead window, and deserted rocky beaches in high winds with lighthouses pointing at the horizon.

More memories...

I move to the wardrobe and open it, searching through the clothes at the bottom for something very particular. Something I just found:

The box.

There was a theory, I read, that stated that memories don't exist in our brains, but they exist in objects. Instead of a photo or a scarf or a smell evoking memories, they in fact store them, our brains merely collect the information from the object. When you pick up a shell from the beach, you keep your experiences of that day in it, ready to be retrieved whenever you come across it.

If that is so, then the box is where we store our most precious memories.

Everyone has one, a shoe box, a jewellery box, a gift box, containing the memories we most want to keep and are least likely to forget.

Mark's is a toolbox. I set it down on the bed, pause a moment, and open it.

A couple of shells are scattered on a large photograph of Chris, a high quality close-up, with his green-grey eyes staring out to some imperceptible distance. I lift it out. Underneath is one glove, a hair-band, a feather, and a napkin, all of these items unintelligible to me. There is a journal though, with 'Dreams' markered on the front. I open it and flick through a few pages:



They all say same back until February 23rd, when it says:



Dreams are strange, from my point of view, because keeping them in your memory is so difficult. You can wake up, and the dream will be as vivid as if you were still in it, and then by noon it's only the memory that you had a dream you wish you could remember. That's why he wrote about them, so he could remember. Ironic really...

I dig further back in his box of memories, past a Christmas cracker toy, past a candle in the shape of a heart that was never lit, past numerous spoons stolen from restaurants, way past the memory loss, and I find a Valentine's Day card, from his school-days I presume. It's not for him though, it's from him, probably never delivered, to Dave...

I take the envelope addressed to Dave out of my pocket, slide the card into it, tape it shut, and leave it on the desk.

It might as well have been him... for all he knew. It should give him something to start with I guess...

Then I remember the letters, from his front door. I take them out of my pocket and look through the envelopes: bill, bill, bank statement, interesting looking letter (but I can't open it, because it's postmarked after his accident), bill, and... another letter...

I pick up the letter I just sealed to Dave, compare the handwriting... and it's the same. Why would he write a letter to himself? On the day he got knocked over...

I open the letter, and as dawn draws a red outline on the landscape outside, I read:



My hands shaking, I turned it over.

There was a book of matches, taped to the back.

And in small black writing:

"Some things are best forgotten."