Chapter 3
A Woman's Voice
You’re picking up where you left off.
On the Thursday they moved me up to neurology, two floors higher, to a two-bed room whose other bed was empty. The window looked out over the plateau, over ploughed fields and a row of poplars, and in the distance, between two copses, a scrap of valley where the Meuse must have been flowing, though you couldn't see it. All you could see was the mist rising from it in the mornings, like steam over a saucepan.
There was no screen above my bed any more. There were no more beeps. That night I heard the silence of a hospital, which isn't silence at all: trolleys in the corridor, a buzzer, a cough, a fire door closing slowly on its hydraulic arm.
Dr Collard came by on the Thursday morning with a junior doctor. She explained, separating the syllables as if she were dictating, that on the night of the accident, before the emergency services arrived, I had had a seizure. Just one. No one at the hospital had seen it, but they had seen the marks it left on my tongue, the fire brigade had noted in their report the state they'd found me in, and the EEG done in intensive care still showed an abnormal trace on the left side. It wasn't unusual after a blow to the head. It wasn't necessarily serious. But they weren't taking any chances.
“Levetiracetam,” she said. “A thousand milligrams, morning and evening. For several months. We'll reassess.”
She put a blue and white cardboard box on the overbed table, and the junior doctor pressed two white, oblong tablets out of a blister pack, scored down the middle.
“And no driving,” she added. “Six months at least. That's the law, and above all it's common sense.”
“I don't have a car any more,” I said.
She gave a little laugh, which she caught at once.
“That's true. Sorry.”
Antoine came every day.
He arrived around two, when the greenhouses could do without him, and left around six, when they couldn't. He brought a punnet of strawberries. Greenhouse strawberries, in October, small, very red, with a taste nothing like supermarket strawberries: a taste of sugar and wet earth. He put the punnet on the overbed table, sat down, and said nothing until I'd eaten the first one.
“Mara des bois,” he said on the Thursday. “An everbearer. It's the last crop, after that we turn the heating off.”
On the Friday he brought photos. Not an album: a brown envelope with about twenty prints he'd had made specially, at the supermarket in Jambes, on the self-service machine. I pictured him standing at the touchscreen with his earth-stained hands, selecting the pictures one by one. He handed them to me without a word and went to the window, so as not to watch me looking at them.
There was the farmhouse, a long, low house of grey stone under a slate roof, with greenhouses below it, and the Meuse behind, very wide, very slow. There was a village fête, paper lanterns, people I won't name. There was me, in a white dress, under a lime tree, laughing with my mouth wide open, a crown of flowers askew. There was Antoine beside me, in a grey suit, not laughing: he was watching me laugh.
In the photo, I was wearing a wedding ring.
I put the photos back in the envelope, in order, tapping the edges so they lined up.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You can keep them,” he said, without turning round.
He didn't ask me questions. He never asked “And this, does this ring a bell?” the way Lucie did, waving her phone under my nose with selfies of the two of us at the North Sea. He never pushed. He told me a little, if I asked, and stopped when I stopped asking.
I watched him the way you watch a witness.
I noted that he always said “the accident”, with the definite article, as if there were only one in the world. I noted that he never sat on the bed, only on the chair. I noted that he often looked at my left hand, and looked away as soon as I caught him at it. I noted that he looked like someone who hadn't slept for a long time, much longer than eight days.
Dr Tasiaux came on the Friday afternoon. A neuropsychologist. A small, round woman of about sixty, red-framed glasses, a hand-knitted woollen cardigan and the voice of a children's storyteller, which didn't fool me for a second: under the wool, there was a blade.
She spent two hours with me. She had me repeat lists of words, fifteen words, five times in a row, then again half an hour later. She showed me drawings, fifty drawings of ordinary objects, an umbrella, a key, a pear, and then pairs of drawings where I had to say which one I'd already seen. She had me copy a complicated figure full of triangles and crosses, and then draw it again from memory. She asked me to say as many words as I could beginning with the letter P in one minute.
I did my best. It was easy, and I didn't pretend to find it hard. There's one thing people don't know about interpreters: we're trained to retain. A thirty-word sentence in one language, rendered in another two seconds later, while the next sentence is already arriving. I gave her back her fifteen words in order. I didn't miss a single one of her fifty drawings.
“Remarkable,” she said, ticking boxes. “Truly remarkable. Your working memory is excellent. Your short-term memory is intact. You remember everything that's happened since you woke up?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now we're going to talk about something else.”
She closed her notebook, folded her hands over her stomach and asked me to tell her about my life. My childhood in Namur, my mother from Puglia, my father who repaired clocks, my studies in Mons, my first trials, my flat on Rue Saint-Nicolas. She asked me the name of my first schoolteacher, the name of my first cat, what I'd eaten on my twentieth birthday. She asked me who the Prime Minister was.
“Alexander De Croo,” I said.
She noted it down without a word.
Then she asked me to talk about the summer of 2021. The floods. What I was doing on the 14th of July, the 15th, the 20th. She asked what was on my bedside table at the time, what book I was reading, what series I was watching, and when I'd answered, she asked what came after. After July.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Nothing at all? Not one image? A smell, a song, a face?”
“Nothing.”
She looked at me for a long time over her red glasses.
“Do you know what bothers me, Mrs Delvaux? Your scan doesn't justify a gap like that. And your gap is too clean. Usually it frays at the edges. There are islands, bits floating about. With you, it's a wall. July 2021, and then nothing, as if someone had drawn a curtain.”
She let a moment pass.
“It happens,” she went on. “We call it functional retrograde amnesia. It means it isn't only your head that took the blow. That something in you would rather not go there. It's a form of protection. Part of you doesn't want to remember.”
I didn't lower my eyes.
“Perhaps,” I said.
She smiled. She put away her drawings, her lists, her stopwatch.
“We'll see each other again. Every week, to begin with. We won't force anything. But I'm warning you, I'm stubborn.”
“So am I,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “It's in your file.”
Maud came by on the Friday evening. She wasn't on duty in neurology: she said she was coming up to see a colleague and thought she'd look in on me while she was there. She was wearing a denim jacket over her blue scrubs, a bag across her body, her car keys in her hand. She didn't sit down. She stayed in the doorway, one hand on the frame.
“You're looking better,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“And the rest? Are things coming back?”
“No.”
She nodded. She looked as if she wanted to add something. She didn't add it.
“Goodnight, Inès.”
When she left, the smell of orange blossom lingered for a while in the doorway. I rang for the night care assistant and asked her to close the door. She told me they always left it ajar, so they could keep an eye on patients. I insisted. She closed it.
Benali came back on the Saturday morning, with a laptop this time, and a small round speaker that she plugged into it and set on the overbed table, between the punnet of strawberries and the box of tablets.
“I shouldn't be doing this,” she said. “But you're the victim, and it's your phone. And I've run out of ideas.”
She clicked.
First there was a crackle. The operator's voice, calm, professional: “112, what's your emergency?” Then breathing. Short, jerky breaths, from someone who had been running or was frightened, or both.
“An accident. On the N92. After Wépion, the bend by the golf course. A car down the bank, at the bottom, by the water. A woman. She's breathing. She's… she's having a fit, I think. She's shaking. Come quickly.”
“Madam, can you give me your name? Madam? Are you still on the line?”
A rustling sound. A click. Silence.
Benali let the silence go on. She was watching me.
“Eleven fifty-two,” she said. “Nineteen seconds. She didn't give her name. She didn't wait for the emergency services. She left with your phone. A woman's voice, fairly young, French-speaking, a local accent. That's all I've got.”
I was looking at the little round speaker.
“Could you play it again?” I asked.
Benali raised an eyebrow. She clicked. The crackle, the operator, the breathing. The voice. A woman. She's breathing. The rustling. The click.
I listened to the end. I listened to the breath between the words, the way the voice rose on “fit” and fell on “quickly”, the little click of the tongue before “I think”.
“Does that voice mean anything to you?” Benali asked.
“No,” I said. “Nothing at all.”
She closed the laptop.
Ten years in the courtroom have taught me that you never hear a voice the first time.