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She didn't answer. He lifted himself up again, and this time he managed to grope around with his left hand and grab hold of the seat-belt catch and hang on to it. He pushed the release button with his thumb but it was jammed.

‘Tasha?' he said again. ‘Tasha, just tell me that you're OK, darling. Please.'

Very gradually, the crushed and misshapen interior of the Torrent began to fill up with light. Part of the vinyl roof-lining was hanging down so Michael found it difficult to see anything out of his window.
Don't tell me that pick-up's coming back. Haven't they done enough to us already?

He jabbed at the seat-belt catch again and again, but still it refused to budge. Either it had bent, or he was hanging from it too heavily, so that it couldn't unlatch.

The light grew brighter and brighter. He could clearly see now that Tasha's skull had been smashed, and from the way that she was hanging there, motionless, she looked very much as if she were dead.
Even so
–
people with serious head injuries often survive, don't they? She could be still alive. Oh dear God, please let her still be alive. I don't care if she needs looking after for the rest of her life. Just please let her still be alive.

Michael managed to lean forward as well as lever himself up a little, so that his left shoulder was wedged hard against his door. He heaved himself sideways to take some of his weight off the seat-belt catch, and the third time he pushed the release button, it clicked open and he fell heavily on his hands and knees on to the upturned roof.

Immediately, he turned to Tasha. ‘Tasha, can you hear me, sweetheart? Tasha, it's Michael. Wake up, darling, please!'

He carefully extricated her skinny wrist from between the armrests, and drew back the sleeve of her sweater, so that he could feel if she still had a pulse. He couldn't detect one, but then he told himself that he wasn't a paramedic, so he didn't know for sure if he was feeling in the right place, and she did still feel warm.

He took hold of her seat-belt catch in both hands, ready to try and release her. He didn't want her to drop down to the roof as hard as he had, in case she knocked her head and worsened her head injury, or in case she had fractured her spine.

‘Here we go, darling,' he said. ‘Easy does it.'

But suddenly the light brightened to such an intensity that it bleached the color out of everything, and the inside of the Torrent was turned into an overexposed photograph. Before Michael could unfasten Tasha's seat-belt, he was overwhelmed by the four-trumpet blast of an air horn, and the stentorian bellow of a diesel engine. The horn blasted again and again, and then he heard the rubbery slithering of locked wheels on asphalt.

The slithering seemed to go on endlessly, growing louder and louder, until it began to sound like high-pitched, staccato laughter –
hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!
Then Michael felt a massive collision and the Torrent was slammed across the highway, spinning around and around in circles on its roof.

It ended up by the side of the interstate, crumpled up like a badly wrapped parcel.

The driver of the huge red Kenworth tractor-trailer parked his rig by the side of the highway and then shut down his bellowing engine, so that the only sound was the wind blowing the snow between his wheels. He unhooked his CB handset and said, ‘Bear Baiter, this is Bear Baiter, do you copy? I have a real bad mess-'em-up just past the six-mile marker north of Weed on I-Five! These folks are going to be needing a meat wagon, and fast! Better inform the Boy Scouts, too!'

As soon as he had made his call, he swung himself down from his cab and jogged across the scrub toward the wreckage. He was less than halfway there, however, when he heard an ambulance siren whooping and scribbling, and saw red and white lights flashing through the snow.

‘W
ell, good
morning
!' said a warm, woman's voice.

Michael tried to lift his head to see who it was, but he couldn't. His neck was held fast in a high pink polythene collar, and when he tried to raise his hands, he found that he couldn't move his arms, either. His ankles were fastened, too.

He was strapped flat on his back, so that all he could see were pale green ceiling tiles, with diagonal stripes of wintry sunshine across them, and two fluorescent light-fittings, and part of a curtained screen with large green water lilies printed on it.

‘Where am I?' he croaked. His throat was dry and his tongue felt as if it were three times its flush-centered size, and coated with very fine sand.

He heard a man talking in a deep, soft mumble, and then a woman's face suddenly appeared, looking down at him. She was ginger-haired, green-eyed, with a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Michael would have guessed her age at early forties. She was wearing a white overall with the italic initials
TSC
embroidered in green on the breast pocket.

She smiled at him and said, ‘How do you feel? Or should I say “
what
do you feel”?'

Michael stared at her for a long time, trying to work out if he knew her. His vision was blurry and he found it hard to focus on her clearly. There was something familiar about her – but, no, he didn't know who she was. She looked like a doctor or a nurse.

‘I feel … tired, still,' he told her. ‘Have I been asleep for very long?'

She brushed back his fringe with her fingertips, almost as if he were a small boy. ‘Yes … you have. But you're awake now. That's the important thing.'

He heard the man talking again. He was speaking very quietly, but Michael distinctly heard him say ‘…
Yes, I believe he will … but not for some weeks yet
.'

‘Where am I?' he asked, straining again to lift up his head. ‘I don't know where I am.'

Now the man appeared. He, too, was wearing a white overall with
TSC
on the pocket. He was tall, rather Arab-looking, with a shiny bald head but luxuriant black eyebrows. He was quite handsome, even though his nose was rather fleshy, and his eyes were very dark brown, but glittery, as if he had just been counting out gold coins in Ali Baba's cave.

He said, in his thick but reassuring voice, ‘This is the Trinity-Shasta Clinic, near Mount Shasta, and I am Doctor Hamid. You have been involved in a serious accident, my dear sir, and it is something of a miracle that you are still with us.'

‘An accident? What kind of an accident?'

‘A traffic accident, on the interstate. Your car overturned and you were almost killed.'

Michael tried for a third time to lift his head, but the doctor pressed the palm of his hand against his forehead. ‘Please to lie very still. Your neck was dislocated. We had to operate on you to fuse together two of the vertebrae in order to achieve realignment of your spinal column. We have every hope that you will recover completely, but I have to warn you that this usually takes some months.'

‘I feel like somebody's been beating up on me, and then kicking me while I was down.'

‘That doesn't surprise me at all,' said Doctor Hamid, smoothly. ‘One of the common symptoms of a serious neck injury such as yours is chronic pain in many different locations all over your body. But we have been giving you intravenous analgesics to ease your discomfort, and we will continue to do so for as long as you need them.'

Michael frowned, and said, ‘
Where
did you say this was?'

‘Trinity-Shasta Clinic, near Mount Shasta.'

‘Mount Shasta? What the hell am I doing way up here?'

The red-haired woman drew up a chair close to his bed and sat down. ‘This is the nearest trauma clinic to the location where you had your accident,' she said. ‘You were lucky. Well – you weren't lucky to have your accident, I'm not saying that. But Trinity-Shasta has one of the most advanced spinal units in the country. If you'd been taken in to some small-town emergency room, you could well have died, or been paralysed from the neck down for the rest of your life.'

‘I'm still trying to think what I'm doing near Mount Shasta. The last thing I remember I was …'

He stopped. What
was
the last thing that he could remember? Talking to somebody about something in some bar. He could remember the stained-glass window over the door, and the raucous sound of people laughing, but he couldn't think where it was, or who he had been talking to, or what they had been talking about.

The red-haired woman said, ‘Don't worry about it. It's not important. It will all come back to you. Are you thirsty? Maybe you'd like some water or some cranberry juice.'

Michael said, ‘We were talking about … something to do with light. That was it. The speed of light. Why were we talking about that?'

‘Who were you talking to?' the red-haired woman asked him.

Michael squeezed his eyes tight shut and tried to visualize the stained-glass window and the face of the man who was sitting underneath it, talking to him. But all he could see was a featureless blur, and all he could hear was a muffled blurting sound.

‘No,' he said. ‘It's no good. I just can't remember.'

‘My name's Catherine, by the way,' the red-haired woman told him. ‘Catherine Connor.
Doctor
Catherine Connor.'

‘Oh, right,' said Michael. He was beginning to think that she was quite attractive, in a gingery way, even though she must be four or five years older than him. ‘Doctor of what, exactly?'

‘Post-traumatic therapy, both physical and psychological. I help people to get over traumatic events in their lives, like severe shocks or brain damage or spinal injuries, which is why I'm here talking to you.'

‘Nothing personal, Doctor, but you sound expensive. How am I going to pay for all of this?'

Dr Connor smiled and shook her head. ‘Don't worry. You won't be charged. The Trinity-Shasta Clinic is a non-profit research foundation, privately funded. You may not believe it, but we'll be getting a whole lot more out of
you
than you'll be getting out of us.'

‘How long do I have to stay strapped down like this? I feel like Frankenstein's monster.'

‘That depends on Doctor Hamid. When your vertebrae were dislocated, that injury also tore your neck muscles, your blood vessels, your ligaments, your nerves and your esophagus. But of course we'll be taking regular CT scans, and as soon as we're confident that you can move without causing yourself any further injury, we'll get you up on your feet. I personally believe that patients should start movement therapy as soon as possible.'

‘OK. Thanks,' he coughed. ‘Maybe I could have that drink now. What do I call you – Doctor Connor? Or Catherine?'

‘We're going to be seeing a whole lot of each other, so Catherine is fine.'

‘Sorry I can't shake your hand, Catherine. I'm …'

He stopped. He felt as if a black shutter had slammed down inside of his head. He simply couldn't think what his name was. Not only that, he couldn't think of
any
names, so that he could run through them and try to remember which one was his.

He stared at Doctor Connor in complete bewilderment, blinking. How could he not remember his own name? But there was nothing.

Doctor Connor reached out and stroked his fringe again. ‘Your name is –
what
?' she coaxed him, very softly. ‘Don't try too hard to remember it. Think of your mother instead, calling you. Think of what your friends used to sing, when it was your birthday.'

She paused, and then she sang, ‘
Happy birthday, dear la-la-la! Happy birthday to you
. Can you remember the cake, and the candles? Can you hear them singing, inside your head?'

Michael listened and listened, but there was nothing inside his head, only blankness and silence. He couldn't remember his mother. He couldn't remember the sound of her voice. He couldn't even remember what she looked like.

After a while, he gasped like a swimmer coming up for air. ‘I don't know, Catherine! I just can't think of it!'

‘Don't get upset,' she told him. ‘It's not at all unusual for people to suffer from amnesia, after an accident. There are ways of rebuilding your memories, and that's one of the things that you and I will be doing together, little by little.'

‘But how the hell can I not even know my own name?'

‘It's really not uncommon. I worked with young marines who came back from Iraq, suffering from just the same problem. Your brain has suffered from such a shock that it has simply shut down, like somebody hiding under the bedcovers and refusing to come out.'

‘Tell me some names.'

‘What?'

‘Tell me some names and maybe I'll be able to tell if one of them is mine.'

‘That won't work. You may pick a name simply because it rings a bell. It might not be your name at all, and that will only confuse you even more.'

Michael lay there staring at the ceiling. Then he glanced sideways at Doctor Connor. The sun was shining in her hair so that she looked almost like an angel. He had only just met her and yet he felt desperately dependent on her. How else was he going to find out who he was and what he was doing here, up near Mount Shasta?

The strange thing was that even though he couldn't think of his name, he knew that he didn't belong around here, and that he lived someplace far to the south. It was where that bar was – that noisy bar with the stained-glass window, where he had been talking about the speed of light.

‘My accident,' he said. ‘Do you know what happened?'

‘Not in any detail, no. The paramedics said that your SUV crossed over on to the wrong side of the interstate, and got hit by a truck coming the other way.'

Michael closed his eyes again, and tried to imagine it, but he couldn't. The black shutter remained firmly shut. How can you get hit by a truck and not remember it?