Someone Else's Life

A Willerby Story

Neil did not know exactly when the unfamiliar memories began because, to begin with, he thought they were dreams and he’d never taken much notice of these.

But then, as if he were sliding into fever, they strengthened instead of fading the way dreams were supposed to.

At the start there was only a handful of them and they were unremarkable – everyday and mundane.

Drinking with friends he’d never met in a pub on a sun-drenched town square he’d never visited.

Driving down a twilight road through a forest.

Watching television in a comfortable but unfamiliar living room.

They became intrusive – so visceral and real that he drifted away when he should have been concentrating on other things, trawling his past for once familiar people and places he’d known but forgotten.

Then, more distinctive memories he knew did not belong to him inserted themselves among his own.

Sweating in a suit on a stifling bus surrounded by people speaking a language he did not understand.

Opening a door to a house he’d never lived in and being greeted by two excited and happy children that were not his own.

Neil told his wife, Helen, about the memories, but she was in her third trimester and too distracted to really take in what he was trying to tell her.

“Dreams are weird,” she said, chopping an onion, “I used to dream of falling all the time and I swear sometimes when I woke up, I was bouncing on the bed.”

“I know what you mean,” Neil said, “But it’s not like that.”

As the number and intensity of the memories increased Neil spent more and more time alone pondering and poring over them.

A hedge of lavender threaded with bumblebees.

A pair of spaniels looking at him with quizzical ginger eyebrows.

The two children – twins, a girl and a boy - on swings in the park, under bubbles in the bath, on sledges in the snow.

He took roundabout ways home from work in the evening, peering down strange roads searching for landmarks he knew he’d only know when he saw them, coming to himself with a start, realising he was miles away from where he should be.

“At the pub again?” Helen asked him once when he was especially late back. “Good for you, there won’t be time when the baby arrives.”

“Not that, not really,” said Neil, kissing her vaguely as he thought of his memories of a life that was not his.

“Then you should ask for more money, the hours you put in,” Helen said, stirring a pot of bolognaise.

“Yeah, maybe,” Neil said.

But he didn’t – work didn’t seem particularly important anymore and he spent most of his time in the office writing and then deleting fragments of the strange memories.

“Is everything all right at home?” Keith, his manager asked him after calling him into his cubicle office for a pointed little chat. “I’m worried about you. You seem distracted.”

“Fine”, Neil said, absently. “Everything’s fine.”

But the faraway expression in his eyes unnerved Keith who told him to take some time off.

Neil agreed but did not tell Helen.

Instead, he left the house each morning at his usual time and spent the days driving the countryside, sitting at rotting picnic benches in forgotten laybys and eating sandwiches on cold iron chairs in lonely parks until it was too late to put off going home.

Thinking.

Clearing his head.

Making space.

Fish and chips on a pier looking over a restless grey sea, someone’s arm comfortingly solid against his.

Brass band music playing in a Christmas market in a European city.

Running in a rising field under a setting sun.

The trickle became a flood, washing away the anchors of his past, disassociating himself from his own life and making the distinction between himself and the person inside him seem artificial and nonsensical.

A person – Neil realised on one his drives in the dark – was only ever the sum of their memories.

Who was he now?

Who was he becoming?

New-old memories began to attach themselves to places he saw on his all-day drives, and he knew he was drawing closer to the heart of the great mystery.

A school he had dropped children off at in the mornings.

A gym he knew the changing room lock code for.

A hospice.

A sign that said, “Willerby 3” beckoning him home.

He knew his house by the ornamental bay trees on either side of the door, a wedding present from his wife’s parents.

Emma.

Her name came to him as naturally and easily as his own did.

John.

He knocked. Footsteps and then the door opened.

She looked tired and greyer than he remembered but her green eyes were just the same.

“Can I help?”

“Emma,” said John.

She looked sad and shook her head.

“Oh, John, darling, you must stop this. It’s been too many times. It’s gone on for too long. It’s not good for anyone.”

“Can I come in?”

Emma shook her head again.

“I just want to see Louis and Lisey for a minute.”

“They’re fine,” said Emma, folding her arms. “Don’t you worry about us if that’s what’s making you do this, if that’s why you keep coming back. There are better and worse days, but we’re getting through it and you coming back all the time, it’s not helping. It’s time to let us go, please John, stop doing this.”

John – for Neil was gone and it was completely John now – shook his head.

“Please, Emma,” he said, “Let me in. Just one more time – let me in.”

Emma shook her head again and began to cry.

“I can’t, John – this isn’t right. You must see that. Please go.”

“But Emma, where?”

“I don’t know,” Emma wept, “Be at peace at least. I can’t stand seeing you like this again and again.”

John turned to go and walked back towards Neil’s car, but Emma called him back.

“Just one more time,” she said. “If I let you in one last time will that be the end of it?”

And as he always did John said yes, and as he knew she would, Emma let him in even though both knew what they’d agreed about it never happening again wasn’t true.

She showed him their sleeping children, showed him Louis and Lisey, and then they went up to bed.

Just as they both knew they would again.

As he drove away in the early hours of the next morning, John left Neil with a final memory; a dark tunnel with a bright light at the end of it.

…

It was dawn when Neil got home, and Helen was waiting for him in the living room, wild-eyed with worry.

“Keith rang,” she said, “what the hell has been going on? Where have you been?”

“I don’t know,” said Neil. “I think I got lost in someone else’s life.”