In the octave between crack and thud, the cherry jam hits the vinyl floor tile. Cherry jam is tasty. Glad the jar didn’t break. I bend to retrieve it, but the shush of cascading Coco Pops straightens me up. I’d forgotten the open box tucked against my chest. A second later, I’m sitting on a swarm of chocolate puffs of rice, listening to them crunch beneath my weight. The second incident like this in as many days. Last night I started running a bath, stripped off in my room and forgot about it, until a shout came from the kitchen. Overflowing water had dripped through the ceiling and fused the lights. My housemates were sympathetic. How could they not be?

            I bite a hair from above the knuckle on one of my splayed fingers and spit it into my palm. I study the hair, thinking how easily sliced it was. Last Friday, so far as I know, I didn’t lose one.

Rummaging for the dustpan and brush in the downstairs cupboard, I find the running shoes I lost when I moved in. They were supposed to help me get rid of my beer gut. That was the excuse for buying them. Maybe the excuse for losing them too. I try them on and wonder if a run might burn off the porridge between my ears.

Mum phones, but I don’t answer. She’s been ringing me every day since I got out of hospital, fretting over the details. It reminds me of granny when her Alzheimer’s became noticeable. Conversations would be repeated in long word-perfect loops all evening, until it was time for bed. Mum’s repetitions are out of concern though. Concern and shock. In my head, I plot out a conversation where I tell her what’s been happening with me. But even in the imaginary conversation, I lie and say I’ve taken a sleeping tablet and we’ll talk properly tomorrow.

My phone beeps to indicate low battery. I run upstairs to plug it in, kick my running shoes under my bed, then return downstairs to make a coffee. That’s when I rediscover the spilled cereal. Glad no one else came home in time to find it. If I leave the room, I might forget again. Pushing all the Coco Pops together, I awkwardly scrape them into a carrier bag, crushing and crackling their brittle structures in the process. The floor is still messy. I put the kettle on while I fetch the vacuum cleaner, hoping the boiling sound will draw me back to the kitchen if I get distracted. I remember the kettle anyway, and think it’s a sign I’m feeling clearer, but then I try to put the kettle into the fridge instead of the milk. I wouldn’t have realised except the kettle is too big for any of the shelves.

With the kitchen cleaned and a cup of coffee downed, I’m soon upstairs, sat on my bed flicking through TV channels. I’m not much of a coffee drinker, but I’ve been guzzling buckets of it this week to make me more alert, and although I’m wide awake, my thoughts are no clearer. I resent people who use the word junky when describing their caffeine intake, but right now, with each thought spiralling up into my head then fizzling out like a failed firework, I see what they mean.

Remembering Hugh is difficult. I can picture details about him: the amalgam fillings, flat on top of his bottom molars, on display when he laughed his wide-mouthed roar: the same noise he would make, I suspect, if he was screaming; the piercing through the cartilage of his right ear; his curly hair he liked to keep short but always had a half-curl because he didn’t visit the barbers often enough. I’m unable to combine these elements into a face. I can remember his voice, but nothing we’d talked about. I hope those will all come back to me soon.

My last memory of Hugh, definite memory, was the weekend before last, when we went to see Speed Racer. The movie was awful, but we stuck it out because we’d paid. The cinema was a dive with sticky carpets but one of the few places you could still smoke. We’d skinned up beforehand. Hugh sparked joint after joint and blew smoke over the head of the bald guy in front of us. It looked more cinematic than the screen, the way the silver smoke broke into waves and spread out in different directions as it met that shiny half-moon cranium.

My stomach rumbles, as if prodding me in the gut to remember to eat. I haven’t left the house much since I got out of hospital, only to go to the shop at the end of the street, but I need to force myself to go out more. There’s a danger I could become a shut in. I don’t fancy cooking tonight, so a familiar path takes me to the Chinese on the corner of Wellesley Avenue. I buy my usual: Szechuan beef with egg fried rice, mixed into one portion to eat while walking. I consider getting a beer from the off-licence next door, but with my scrambled head, I’m not chancing it.

When the paramedics arrived, I was wandering around the field, asking for directions to Belfast. I kept bursting into fits of laughter but was manageable enough to let them put me into the ambulance. My trusty, rusty Ford Fiesta had rolled off the M2 at seventy miles an hour, they reckon, and crumpled like a crisp bag. I seem to have been thrown from it. Was the crash my fault? Was it another driver? Was it a problem with the car? I can’t remember any of it. As far as I knew, I’d went to bed on Thursday night and woke up on Saturday morning in hospital, with a groggy unfamiliar taste coating my mouth and a body that felt as though I’d been kicked through a brick wall. I didn’t even realise there had been a day in between. Physically I was fine though. It sounds like an exaggeration to say there wasn’t a mark on me, but there wasn’t. I examined myself thoroughly looking for bruises, looking for scratches. Once I’d slept off the shock, I didn’t even feel odd twinges; the pain I woke with on Saturday had entirely disappeared.

The doctor told me I was conscious and seemed compos when I reached the hospital, and also when they took me for a CT scan, and an abdominal scan. I tried to give them Hugh’s phone number as my emergency contact. I can’t remember any of that.

Stupidly, I’ve taken a wrong turn, perhaps on purpose, perhaps hoping to experience something fresh, unexplored, to remind myself there will be new things to remember. Now I don’t know how to get home. Have I ever been on this street before? Maybe this is luck. I could keep walking, stop trying to find my way home.

I tell myself to enjoy being lost, but whimsy has never appealed to me. After the crash, I thought I would begin to appreciate each miniscule detail of my life, but I’m relieved to find that hasn’t happened.

A vibration against my leg tells me I’ve got a text. I check my pocket and remember my phone is in the house. A phantom sensation told my brain something was there when it wasn’t. I look at my hand and feel a wave of panic as I imagine it not there. I shovel Chinese into my mouth. The tangy sauce, the crunchy vegetables, and the chewy meat combine to distract me from how close I came to losing, not just the arm that put those sensations in my mouth, but the ability to feel sensations full stop. The Chinese tastes less spicy than usual, so I chuck it half-eaten in the first bin I pass.

The funeral is tomorrow. Hugh’s parents are keeping it private, just family. They were short when I spoke to them on the phone. I can’t blame them. They didn’t say they blame me, but they’re bound to. Guilt arrives in short bursts I fight to distract myself from. I’ll take my time acknowledging this.

I have one small spot of resentment for Hugh, that I’m holding on like a freshly picked snotter. I roll it between my thumb and forefinger getting ready to flick it away when it feels dried out. The night I got home from the hospital he knocked me sideways. My phone had been off because it had run out of battery. When I put it on to charge, a text came through telling me I’d a voicemail. It was from Hugh saying he was waiting and to hurry up and call round for him. For a good thirty seconds, I actually questioned if Hugh was alive, and I’d imagined the whole thing. I was woozier than I am now, but when I listened back to it and the automated voicemail bot gave the date of the message, I realised he’d left it the day of the crash. I felt so feeble, like my granny when she forgot the names of people she’d known her whole life.

I’m lost. Properly lost. I don’t recognise this street. Maybe I’ve never been on it before. The red brick houses are the same as on mine, but the trees are different, different spacing. Half of Belfast looks like this.

Tension flattens its hand against the back of my neck and squeezes slightly, reminding me it could put me in knots in seconds. Panic threatens to surface while I belly breathe to calm myself. I check my pocket for my phone, but I’m glad I’ve forgotten it; I’d be too embarrassed to call anyone. I may be melodramatic but only in private. It’s not melodrama though, however much I try to dress it up: a friend of mine died, and he died while I was driving.

I haven’t cried about Hugh. Mum says I’m in shock; that it’ll come, but her constant phone calls have convinced me to force down the remorse like fizzy bursts of heartburn, just to see how deep I can push it. That I can feel something tells me I need to push harder. There’s a wall between me and grief. Not just my grief: Hugh’s family’s grief, the grief of others I don’t even know about. Their griefs should come first.

I read somewhere about a remote tribe who believe a person isn’t dead until everyone who remembers them is dead. I’d hoped to find strength in that, but it feels silly when I apply it to Hugh. I’ll hold my own remembrance for him, when my head untangles.

I’m seeing my doctor in the morning. She’ll send me for tests. I’m not sure I trust tests anymore, not after the ones they took at the hospital. Did they mix up my results? Has some innocent idiot been arrested and is stuck in a cell wondering how he had cannabis in his blood when he’s never smoked a joint in his life? I was definitely stoned. All Hugh and I ever did in that car was drive around stoned. Me at the wheel and him in the passenger seat skinning up. Imagine the tests were right though; the one time I crashed was the one time I was sober.

I turn a corner, then another. I pass a street sign. The sight of it combines with the metallic green of a car parked further down. Their familiarity tells me I’m a street away from where I live.

What if this isn’t concussion? What if my head has some undetected damage? I could lose whole chunks of my past, forget what I did, maybe who I am, like that concert pianist who showed up in a skip outside Burger King in a different country from where he went missing, remembering nothing about himself. Maybe I could do that. Wait to forget. Maybe as I forgot, I’d lose familiar parts of myself and become someone new.

I’m at the end of my street, then outside my house, or I’ve passed it. I take another step further away from my front door, half from momentum, half to sustain that fantasy of walking away. But a residue of duty, or safety, definitely guilt, turns me back and makes me walk to the front door, puts my key in the lock, pushes me through familiar motions, hoping they stay familiar motions. Regardless of what I forget, I’ll fight to hold on to that picture of Hugh at the cinema, blowing smoke on that bald man’s head until I end up in a nursing home not even able to remember my own name.

Gerard McKeown

Gerard McKeown is an Irish Writer living in London. His work has featured in 3:AM, Fuselit, and Neon, among others. His story Dunvale was highly commended in The Moth’s 2015 Short Story Competition, and his story The Longest Nickname in the World was longlisted for Over The Edge’s New Writer of the Year award.

Belfast death friendship grief Irish Fiction literary fiction memory loss Story Sunday survival trauma