Someone Else's Life

A Willerby Story

Neil never could pinpoint exactly when the unfamiliar memories began because, to start with, he thought they were just dreams and he’d never taken much notice of those.

But slowly, as if sliding into fever, they strengthened rather than faded in the way dreams usually did.

To begin with, there was only a handful of them, and they were unremarkable – every day 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 an unfamiliar living room.

Then 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 must have known and must have forgotten.

Then, memories he knew could not belong to him began inserting themselves among those that did.

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 greeted by two excited and happy children who were not his own.

Neil told his wife, Helen, about the memories, but she was in her third trimester and too distracted to take it all in.

“Dreams are weird,” she said, chopping an onion, “I used to dream about 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 intensity of the memories grew, Neil increasingly spent more time alone, pondering and poring over them.

A hedge of lavender threaded with bumblebees.

A pair of spaniels staring 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 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 bolognese sauce.

“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 his strange memories.

“Is everything all right at home?” Keith, his manager, asked after calling Neil 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 through the countryside, sitting on decaying 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.

But with more time alone came more memories.

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

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

Running in a rising field beneath a setting sun.

The trickle became a flood, washing away his own memories – the anchors of his past – disassociating him from his own life and making the distinction between himself and the person within him seem absurd.

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

Who was he now?

Who was he becoming?

Newer 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.

One cold evening Neil arrived at a detached cottage he knew it to be his 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. There were 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, it’s you again, isn’t it? 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 all that was left of Neil was his body - shook his head.

“Please, Emma,” he said, “Let me in. Just one more time. It’s so cold out here.”

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 always, John said yes, as he knew she would, Emma always let him in.

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

Just as she had every other time.

Just as they both knew she would again.

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

…

It was dawn, 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.”

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