Page 45 of The Beach Holiday

NOW

I trace the pattern on the fabric of the sofa with my hand.

I try to conjure an image of Avril. Her face is not entirely clear in my mind.

Maybe I imagined the whole thing. It is always like that when you haven’t seen someone for a long time; eventually, their features become distorted in your mind, and you can no longer imagine them in full HD as you once could.

Their face is a mere smudge of what it once had been and all you have left is the idea of what you thought they looked like.

Or maybe it was the dissociative amnesia, the condition I had been told I was suffering with.

But all the while I was in the unit I saw so many vivid images.

Apparently I had made some progress and that was why I was now here, at my parents’ house in Dorset.

All this I knew. My parents talked regularly about things that they thought I would need a refresher on, like who had married who and who was living where.

I would one day remember, they said. But when they said that, a cold sweat came over me.

I thought about the tens of images I had drawn that I had stuffed in my wardrobe at the unit.

I had managed to tear each one into tiny pieces and then add them to a pile of rubbish I cleared out of my bedroom before I left.

Images of men in cages, of the blood on the beach.

‘Tea?’ A voice filters through my thoughts and brings me back into the room. I look at my hand on the sofa. The woman who was asking if I would like tea had introduced herself to me as my mother yesterday and as it did with my sister, Jane, my mind is slowly opening doors to forgotten memories.

I look at the photos of me above the fireplace and running up the staircase, which I can see from where I sit. It’s like watching a weird, surreal film. Was this all just a dream, and would I wake up and feel more whole and complete?

I look up at my mother and accept the tea. It seems to create a sense of calm and unity in the room. There is even a plaque that reads, Where there is tea, there is hope, so I am investing in that for now.

My dad is reading the newspaper, occasionally filling me in with what is happening around the world. I don’t tell him that his words are making my head spin.

The tea tastes fine, but my mind buzzes with flavours I expect my senses to experience.

But they don’t come. So I drink the tea with the milk and sugar the way I have been told I like it.

My mother perches on the sofa at the other end of me, trying not to watch me, but I can feel the flickers of stares.

She is waiting for me to get better as though that might happen with this first sip of tea, and I will suddenly stand up and shout, ‘I’m fine now,’ and she could then go on to tell the story years later of how one sip of a brew made by my mother was all it took to cure me.

I understand her frustrations because I imagine if I had carried and birthed a baby and then twenty-nine years later they looked at me blankly and barely spoke, I would be wanting and waiting for a miracle.

But I sip the tea and say nothing. The door to the living room opens and there stands Jane and suddenly I feel a little brighter because we spent all that time together in the unit.

I am so pleased to see her, my big sister looking out for me and protecting me.

But for a long time I had blocked out the memory of who she was.

I was told that was part of the recovery process; the brain needs to focus on getting well, so it blocks out anything else to concentrate on that task.

The prospect of staying here with my parents – these people who have so many memories of me running through their minds and scattered around the house – is disconcerting.

How am I supposed to act? At the psychiatric unit, I didn’t need to think about who I was supposed to be related to or whose feelings I might be hurting with my apparent aloofness.

My name is Sadie. I went to Fiji. I did something terrible, and the only friend I had ever really known is dead.

But I can’t tell them that, and I can’t tell them all the other terrible things I have done because I will be locked away.

So I stay mute, nodding in the right places but making out that I don’t remember anything.

They gave my condition a name. But it doesn’t matter.

Because I remember it all. How could I possibly forget?