THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

FORTY-TWO

Back Matter

ONE

You know it’s going to be a bad day when you wake and feel pavement against your face.

My first thought: Oh, no, not again.

Then, context: Hi, I’m Kyle. I’m seventeen. I have epilepsy. This happens to me a lot.

I’m lying face down, twisted like a fifty-storey splat, the pavement wet and cold and gritty beneath me, the dampness of this morning’s rain shower spreading through the leg of my jeans. There’s a moment when I think I must have fallen asleep, because why else would I be lying down with my eyes closed? But then the world settles into place around me and I realize it’s happened again.

I’m on the high street in town. Grey concrete, leaden sky. Shoes and legs crossing indifferently across my field of vision. In the spaces behind them, I catch glimpses of familiar shop fronts, built like nuclear fallout shelters: Poundland, Specsavers, Boots, Timpson.

I hate this bit.

Coming back from a seizure makes you feel a special kind of rubbish. Hot and cold at the same time; my throat tastes like burnt pennies; my eyes feel like somebody took them out and put them in the wrong way round. I wait for the rest of my memory to come back. It always takes a few minutes, it’s the familiarity of the routine that keeps me from panicking. They call it postictal confusion. I call it sulky-brain-syndrome. Epilepsy is like a loose wire fritzing in your skull. You get a spark and that spark sets off other sparks and then the whole thing blows a fuse. All I can do now is sit tight and wait for the BIOS to reboot.

I roll on to my back and haul myself up until I’m sitting against the wall of the WHSmith. Pins and needles start up immediately in the arm that’s been crushed beneath me so I know I was out for a few minutes at least. I feel a tiny pinch of indignation that nobody checked in on me in all that time. They just went right on with their shopping.

I groan, maybe a little theatrically, maybe for effect. Is it wrong that I pretend I’m the action hero in an old war movie when I’m coming back from a seizure?

Go on without me. I’ll hold them off as long as I can.

It’s been a couple of months since my last seizure and I’d started to think I might actually have things under control this time. But I guess not.

I do my checks.

Have I wet myself?

No.

Have I messed myself?

Er … no.

Have I vomited?

No. Not yet anyway.

Hey, maybe today’s not going to be such a bad day after all!

You have to take the little wins with epilepsy. I had a fit in a public toilet once and woke up to find the whole world and my mother bundled into the gents, my trousers around my ankles and the remains of somebody’s damp cigarette lodged under my tongue.

That was a bad day. This is nothing.

But still … no context.

The first fingers of panic flicker in my chest. Usually it’s come back by now, the memory of what I was doing right before my brain decided this would be a perfect time for a lie down. But not this time. There’s just a hole. No, not even a hole: an absence, like somebody forgot to hit the record button and whatever I was doing before didn’t get saved.

I try to push the thought away. My brain is in brownout, bits of it are offline. The memories always come back in the end.

But what if they don’t?

This sort of thing bothers me sometimes. If I forget everything I ever was does that mean I’m still me?

Let’s not go there.

Epilepsy does weird things to your brain. It makes you feel like your thoughts aren’t entirely your own. My post-seizure brain is like an overeager puppy trying to sniff every urine stain in the park at the same time. Images flicker against the inside of my eyes: a storm that will swallow me whole if I’m not careful.

I look outwards instead. The street, the shops.

This is my town and I hate it; I remember that much.

It’s one of those grey little ex-mining towns in the Midlands. A kind of cross between an open prison and a theme park, where all the rides are rubbish but you can’t find the exit so you queue up anyway to pass the time. It’s the kind of town where anyone in their right mind packs their bags and gets out as soon as they can.

I’m working on that.

I try to think through the journey that would have brought me here, hoping it’ll jog some memories. Over the bypass, under the railway bridge. There’s a jacket potato truck just round the corner where I used to go for lunch when I was still at school. It’s only twenty minutes from home. I could have walked here or Mum could have dropped me off before work.

There’s just one problem with that theory.