‘Oh, I see it all!’ shouted Arthur, as he staggered out into the rain and lifted his face to the onslaught, squealing as the mad urgency of nature whipped his eager senses. The air rumbled with the cannon sound of thunder, and the lightning bounced from field to tree to field.
‘Arthur! Get back!’ I shouted, as he fell close to the side.
Again thunder and lightning triumphed, the splintering sound of fractured wood tore through the valley; the loud thump of rain as it hit the river surface before being enveloped by the rising mass. Nelson shook behind Arthur’s legs, and again Arthur shouted out into the storm and railed at the loss of his boy, his hallowed gentle boy he’d feel and know no more.
I didn’t hear my phone ring, not the first time – the thunderous noise maybe, or the inconsistent signal that faltered during storms. But as the storm moved over and left us with the feeble spray of sunlit rain, that’s when I heard it, the ring suddenly echoing amidst the quiet exhaustion of the scarred river valley.
‘Elly,’ the voice said.
‘Charlie?’
‘Elly, they’ve found him.’
The moment I’d waited for. I held my stomach. My legs suddenly shaking. I reached for Arthur’s hand. What had they found? What thing had they found that had declared him, him? And as if he could read my silence he quickly said, ‘No, Elly. They’ve found him. He’s alive.’
. . . to a passer-by he might have looked like a man sitting on a bench overlooking Lower Manhattan, enjoying a quiet moment of aloneness away from the wife, from the kids maybe, from the pressures of work. He might have looked like an insomniac, just like the joggers who ran the promenade in those early hours. He might have looked like either of those things, because he was shaded by the trees and nobody would have been close enough to see that his eyes were shut; not close enough to see the trickle of blood from his ear or the dark wet patch that matted his curls on his swollen head; because they weren’t close enough to see, he could have been a drunk, sitting on a bench in the early hours of the morning. And nobody was interested in a drunk.
He was found unconscious at three o’clock in the morning on 11 September 2001, on a stretch of the promenade at Brooklyn Heights, a place he always went to, to think about life.
It was quite a walk from his house, Jenny, but he did it at night, often instead of a run. He loved the bridge, loved to walk the bridge and never felt afraid of the city’s vacant aggression that hugged darkness, because it thrilled him and emboldened him. Could quite simply arouse him. And he was found by a young man who approached him for a light, a man who saw up close the bruising around his mouth, the swollen features of a bursting head. This young man phoned the police and saved his life.
They found nothing on him. No wallet, no phone, no keys, no money, no watch. Nothing to say who he was or where he was from. He wore only a faded red T-shirt and old chinos and brown Havaianas on his feet. He never felt the cold. Not like me. Remember how I’d shiver.
They rushed him to the ER, where they drained the fluid and worked on his head until the swelling retreated. They took him up to the ICU where they put him with four other patients and there he stayed, waiting for his mind to return to gently inform the rest of his body to awaken and live. And there he stayed, quite peaceful, apparently, and immune, until the morning he awoke and tried to pull the tube from his mouth. He didn’t know his name or where he lived or what had happened. Or what would happen next. He still doesn’t.
All this is fact. What we’ve just learnt. Will let you know more, Jenny, as it comes.
Ell xx
Her name was Grace. Grace Mary Goodfield, to be exact, and she was a registered nurse, and had been for twentysix years with no thoughts yet of retiring. Her folks were from Louisiana and she still holidayed there.
‘Have you ever been?’
‘No, not yet,’ said Charlie, the first day they met.
She lived alone in Williamsburg, had the ground floor apartment in an old brownstone, a happy place, good tenants above and below. ‘Space enough for me,’ she’d said. ‘Kids long since flown; man long since gone.’
Like so many others she wasn’t supposed to be at work on 11 September. She was doing mainly night shifts that week, and her morning was to be spent changing over the curtains to heavier ones in preparation for the coming fall. But even before the Towers fell she rushed to the hospital to take up her position like all those others, waiting for the mêlée of survivors and their tales of luck from those upper floors. But, as we know, that didn’t happen.
She wasn’t needed in ER, and so she went to her office on the ICU floor, and went around the rooms to boost morale, to hand out cookies, and always with a smile, because she was the best shift leader and she knew her staff and she knew her patients. Just not the new one, though, not the unconscious one. No one knew him.
She called him ‘Bill’, after an old boyfriend who liked to sleep. She would sit with him when the others had visitors, and she would hold his hand and tell him about her life or tell him about what she’d cooked the previous night. She’d tried to look for him on the Missing Persons websites, but it was useless because thousands were missing. The police wanted to help but there was nothing they could do whilst he was under, their minds and resources directed elsewhere; directed to the horror unfolding beyond those safe walls.
She looked at his clothes, those meagre belongings bagged in his locker, and she could piece nothing together of his life. This useless anonymity scared her. She worried he might die lost, with no one knowing; parents and friends not knowing. I’ll be there for you, she said one night, as she left after a particularly hard shift.
She brought in different smells and oils and placed them under his nose, anything to flick the switch of memory. She introduced lavender and rose and frankincense to his mind, coffee too, and her latest perfume – Chanel No 5 – which Lisa from emergency had brought back from Paris. She encouraged the other four patients to talk to him if they felt well enough, and soon stories of wars and sex and baseball rebounded across the floor, and only quietened if a nurse was present, something more reminiscent of an old bar than the care unit it was. Sometimes she would bring in music and hold a headphone gently to his ear. She thought he was in his thirties and calculated what songs may have travelled with him throughout his life. She played Bowie and Blondie and Stevie Wonder – all borrowed from her neighbour’s collection, the neighbour who lived upstairs.
Almost three weeks later she got the call. Janice ran in and said Bill had woken up. Grace called for a doctor. When she entered he was grabbing for his breathing tube, panicking, his left arm sluggish. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘It’s OK,’ and she stroked his head. He tried to sit up on his own and he asked for water. They told him to sip it slowly, they told him not to speak. His eyes darted around the room. Gerry in the bed by the door said, ‘Welcome back, son.’
When he was strong enough, the police returned.
‘What’s your name?’ they asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is there someone we can contact?’
He rolled over.
‘Don’t know.’
He did well over the next few days. Ate well, slowly started to walk, but still remembered nothing. He recognised the Twin Towers as structures of architecture, not as places he’d visited for meetings, places that housed people he’d lost. They moved him out of ICU to a single room. They heard nothing from the police. Grace kept an eye on him, tried to see him most days, took him flowers and kept calling him Bill; he didn’t mind. And they would talk about magazine articles and watch films. He watched a film with the actress Nancy Portman and he decided he liked her and thought she was funny, and he would have been thrilled at that moment, had he known she was his aunt, but he didn’t, of course. He remained locked into a world solely of the present.
/> When he improved, Grace knew he’d eventually be transferred to a public psych hospital, and that would conceal him deeper, mire him further in a system from which, without memory, he could never return.
He was standing at the window, a forlorn sight, singing a tune he’d picked up from TV. He turned to her and smiled.
‘Know how you lost that tooth?’ she said, pointing to his mouth.
He shook his head. ‘A fight probably.’
‘You don’t seem like a fighter,’ she said. ‘Too gentle.’
Then one night, as he lay sleeping, Grace went to his locker and took out his clothes for the last time. They were the only clue she had. She picked up the faded red T-shirt and saw again the faint drawing of a woman – a starlet maybe? – with the words Six and Judy’s above it, barely visible. She turned it over. Could hardly read it: Sing with all your Hear across the back.
It was all she had.
She typed in Six Judy’s and pressed SEARCH. Waited. Nothing on the first page. She reached for her coffee. It tasted stale. She stood up and stretched.
Clicked on the second page.
The word was Heart. It was the nineteenth entry: Choir Sings for Sweet Charity
The Six Judy’s are an all-male choir specialising in show tunes and the era of Old Hollywood. We are a non-pro fitmaking group and have supported various charities, including Unicef, HelpAge USA, Coalition for the Homeless, Cancer Research Institute, as well as more personal projects like fundraising for kidney transplants and heart by-passes. If you’re interested in us, please contact Bobby on the number below.
It was late, too late to call, but she called anyway. A man answered. He wasn’t angry, just tired. She asked him if any of his singers were missing. One, he said. I think I’ve found him, she said.
‘He has a gap in the front of his teeth.’
His back was to me, framed by the window. The trees beyond were starting to change colour. A plane flew from right to left, skimmed the top of his head, trailed a plume of white lit by intermittent sunshine. It was a normal day outside. Inside, there was a vase of flowers, simple pink roses that Charlie had brought in a few days before; they were all he could get. I’d brought nothing. I suddenly felt shy, frightened maybe, of all he wasn’t. He was wearing the shirt I brought him from Paris, but he didn’t know that; he didn’t know me.
I’d had days to think about this moment. From the time of the phone call when we steered our storm-wracked boat back to shore and hauled our excited selves up the slope towards the house and my parents within. And from the moment I stood in front of them and told them all that Charlie had said and my mother said, ‘It doesn’t matter, we have him and that’s enough.’ And from the moment my father looked at her and said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and she held him and said, ‘He’s come back to us, my darling. No sorry.’
Charlie let go of my hand and motioned me forward.
‘Hi,’ I said.
He turned round and smiled, looked exactly the same; more rested, perhaps, but no bruising, just the same.
‘You’re Elly?’ he said, and put his hand to his mouth, started to bite his nails; a gesture that made him, him. ‘My sister.’
‘Yeah.’
I went towards him, went to hold him, but he held out his hand instead and I took it and it felt cold. I pointed to his mouth.
‘You did that playing rugby, by the way.’
‘Ah, I wondered,’ he said.
I hadn’t seen the gap in years, since he broke the crown on a rogue piece of crab shell. I wondered if I should tell him. I didn’t.
He looked at Grace and shrugged. ‘Rugby,’ he said.
‘See, I says you were no fighter, Joe.’
She said ‘Joe’ as if it were a new word.
We had to go slow. The doctors said that. He was a blank photo album. I wanted to replace all the pictures, but the doctors told me it was important for him to create new ones. Go slow, they said. My parents entrusted Charlie and me to bring him home. But not just yet, the doctors said. Go slow. Work backwards. Allow him to unravel by himself. Go slow.
I saw her in the corridor as I was speaking to my parents. She was relacing her sensible black shoes, styled for comfort, not for fashion. What would I do with fashion? I could hear her say. My parents made me put her on the line, thanked her, invited her to Cornwall, to stay as long as she wanted; ‘For ever,’ my babbling father shouted, and he meant it, of course. Grace Mary Goodfield, who smelled so wondrously of Chanel and hope. I will know you for the rest of my life.
Charlie and I had already said our goodbyes, and we sat on the bed and waited.
‘Well, Mr Joe,’ said Grace. ‘This is it.’
‘I know.’
She reached for him as he moved towards her.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
And he whispered something neither of us could hear.
‘You keep in touch now. Get that aunt of yours to send some signed photos for us all. Item of clothing for the raffle would be nice,’ she added, laughing.
‘We’ll send her over in person. Get her on a few ward rounds,’ I said.
‘Do her good,’ said Charlie.
‘Even better,’ said Grace.
Awkward silence.
‘And don’t forget – Louisiana – always nice in spring.’
‘Spring it is then,’ we said.
‘I’ll never forget you,’ said Joe.
‘Told you, you were no fighter,’ she said, pointing to his mouth.
I am here but I am not yours.
He leant against the cab window, distant, quiet, non-reciprocal. We crossed the bridge and the lights lifted the dusk, and Joe eased his face towards the view beyond.
‘My God,’ he said as the illuminated world fired his imagination until I realised, naïvely, that this was probably the first time he had ever seen it.
‘And where were the Towers?’ he asked.
Charlie pointed. He nodded and we didn’t say any more after that; not about that day or where he was found or how that bridge used to be his favourite bridge – there would be time for that. Instead, we followed his gaze and quietly re-experienced the awe of the city neither of us had felt in years.
Charlie paid the driver and as we got out I felt a sudden chill I hadn’t prepared for.
‘This is home,’ I said to Joe, and ran up the steps expecting him to follow. He didn’t. He wandered into the middle of the road and looked up and down the street; trying to get some bearing, I imagine. He was nervous about entering an environment that would give clues to who he was.
Charlie patted his back, encouraged him towards the door. ‘Come on,’ he said naturally.
The hallway was lit and I could still smell the candle scent of two nights before; the night Charlie had filled me in on what to expect, the night we’d got stinking drunk into the early hours.
The house felt warm and the lighting cast shadows around the hearth and stairwells, and made the rooms look strangely bigger. Joe followed me in; he stopped and quietly looked around. He looked at the photos on the hall walls – a set of three Nan Goldins he’d paid thousands for – but he didn’t say anything, and instead ran upstairs and we heard him pacing on both sets of landings, until he ran back down to us and then beyond to the kitchen below. We heard the back door open. The sound of footsteps on the fire escape.
I met him again in the living room. I was kneeling in front of the hearth with a small pile of sticks in my hand.
‘I can do that,’ he said, and started to place them on the bed of newspaper, awaiting only a taper. It was one of the many moments where his memory divided at a crossroads and allowed him the knowledge of how to light a fire, but not to remember when he last did it, or who he was with. He turned to me and smiled. Would learn to smile a lot; smile when he didn’t know what else to say; smile when politeness, fear of hurting – all those things families don’t bother with – sat between us.
‘Do you think you could talk to them?’ I sai
d. ‘Just to hear your voice would be enough.’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Whatever you want.’
I left him in the room. Caught the odd words like, ‘home’ and ‘doing well’ and lots about ‘Grace’, and I knew it was my mother talking to him, this woman who had read up on so much since his discovery; a woman who was not forcing in her conversation, a woman who could wait that bit longer because she’d already waited and it was enough he was in the world.
He found us in the kitchen. Came down the stairs as if they were fragile. I handed him a glass.