Splinter

8

This is impossible, Marc told himself. Quite impossible.

He couldn’t have dialled 112. Not at that stage. True, it was his mobile number on the A & E report to which the clinic had gained access, God alone knew how. But it couldn’t have been him. He’d lost consciousness at once after hitting his head on the door frame and steering wheel in quick succession. At once, not a quarter of an hour after the crash.

There was a knock at the door. Marc turned, expecting to see the neurologist reappear. She had left the room a few minutes earlier, looking worried. Instead, Bleibtreu materialized in the doorway, his face wreathed in an engaging smile that doubtless adorned many of the clinic’s publicity brochures.

‘What’s the meaning of this?’ Marc said sharply. ‘I thought I came here to forget. As it is, I’ll be leaving your clinic with a lot of my wounds reopened.’

‘I must apologize for Frau Menardi’s conduct, Dr Lucas. There’s been a regrettable mistake.’

‘A mistake?’

‘She wasn’t authorized to broach the subject.’

‘Not authorized?’ Marc clasped his hands behind his head. ‘You mean I really did call the emergency services?’

‘No.’

Bleibtreu made a gesture of invitation, but Marc preferred to remain standing by the window rather than resume his place on the sofa.

‘It was a passer-by,’ the professor explained. ‘The man who was first at the crash scene had no mobile phone with him, so he reached through the shattered side window and took yours.’

Several motorists were performing a horn concerto in the street eleven floors below them. It was either a traffic jam or a wedding. Marc parted the beige lamellar blinds but couldn’t see much. Immediately outside the window was some scaffolding swathed in plastic sheets.

‘How do you know all this?’

Bleibtreu stared at him in surprise. ‘There’s a copy of the accident report in your file. Your email expressly granted us access to it.’

Marc dimly remembered clicking a box on the download form. He couldn’t have cared less about anything that night.

‘Have you never seen the report yourself?’

Marc shook his head. He’d never even asked about it. He could happily dispense with any more grisly details about the most terrible day in his life.

‘I understand,’ said Bleibtreu. ‘You’re still in the preliminary phase of the grieving process, of course.’

1. Refusal to accept the truth. 2. Emotional turmoil. 3. Self-discovery and self-detachment. 4. A fresh attitude to oneself and the world in general. Marc knew those categories because part of his job was to counsel the street kids who washed up at his office. Although that configuration had helped him to gain a better understanding of those who had lost a close companion, he didn’t accept that it applied to himself.

‘I’m not in denial about Sandra’s death,’ he insisted.

‘But you’re trying to suppress it.’

‘I thought that was precisely your own recommended method, Professor. Forgetting!’

Bleibtreu had joined Marc at the window. The weather had turned stormy, and the tarpaulins over the scaffolding were being plastered against it by the wind.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘paradoxical as it may sound, before forgetting comes remembering. I’m afraid we’ll have to go over the circumstances of the accident together.’

Marc turned to him. ‘Why?’

‘In case we overlook any latent memories that may later sprout like weeds from the sediment of your subconscious.’ Bleibtreu laid an age-freckled hand on Marc’s shoulder, and for one brief moment this unexpected proximity breached his instinctive defence mechanism.

The preliminary phase. Denial, suppression.