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.
I haven’t left the house on my own for over a year.
Not since my GCSEs went so horribly wrong and I gave up on … life. Being outside, like this, is a big deal. It’s not something I’d have forgotten.
I groan again. This is more of a lost-my-keys-down-the-drain kind of groan than a war-hero groan. The nausea has kicked in. The thing about epilepsy that everyone knows about – the seizures – aren’t so bad because you’re not there for that bit. It’s the way it feels before and the way it feels after that really sucks. It’s like I’m about to throw up and fall asleep and dismantle myself all at the same time. I’m guessing it’s about mid-morning, which means I may as well write off the rest of the day.
I can’t get over the fact that no one has stopped to help.
The last time I passed out in this part of town, I woke up to find an off-duty nurse moments away from giving me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
If I’d only pretended to be unconscious a moment longer…
Don’t judge, I was fifteen – what did you expect?
Anyway, I threw up all over her instead.
But today: nothing. I suppose that was two years ago; I was a kid and nobody likes to see a kid passed out on the street. It’s different now. I don’t exactly look like an adult but maybe I look old enough for everyone to assume I’ve passed out from too much drink or drugs. That would explain why everyone’s walking right past me like I don’t exist.
I’m not sure whether I’m relieved or offended.
Then someone does stop and I wish instantly they hadn’t. I don’t see him coming; I notice him suddenly, standing right in front of me, staring at me. He looks a little surprised and a little worried and a little pleased all at the same time, like he’s staring at an Amazon package on his front step that he wasn’t expecting.
He’s a small, grey, rusty rake of a man. The scar on his head cuts a knotted track from temporal lobe to frontal lobe: a gruesome, twisted stretch of pinkish scalp where the hair will never grow back. It must be an injury, I think. I reach up and touch the small ridge of bone on my own scalp where the surgeon corkscrewed a hole in my head and cut out the epileptogenic lesion in my temporal lobe.
“Keep moving,” the man says, sounding kindlier than I’d expected.
“Wha—?”
“Keep moving or he’ll sniff you out.”
Fear rumbles inside me. His voice is so quiet I really shouldn’t be able to hear him but somehow I do. The sound and the colour of the rest of the world pales.
“You’re not where you think you are,” the man continues, urgent now. “When you figure that out, all you’ll want to do is close your eyes and wait it out. But you can’t, do you hear me? You’ve got to keep moving.”
Keep moving? I’m about to ask him what in seven-shades-of-hell he’s talking about when a woman comes up behind him.
Thirties, quite well-dressed, a bit school-teachery. She doesn’t see me, or she ignores me if she does. “Dad,” she says, taking his arm. “Come on, we need to get going.”
I watch them leave. For some reason I’m thinking about the time I was clearing out the garage with Grandad before he died. I upended an old armchair and a dead mouse hit the floor. I remember the shock, the cold drench. It wasn’t a mouse anymore, not exactly. Its insides had turned to dust decades ago. It was a dried up, furry husk with milky, unseeing eyes fixed on mine.
