So it's a bit of the edge at the moment. I'll be happy to be sitting down for most of the day again. That part will be good. I'm not as tired as I used to be at the start of the week after a hard days work and my feet don't hurt me that much anymore.
One good thing that's come out of this experience is I've lost weight. Believe it or not, retail working seems to make people lose weight. It must be all the moving around. You don't really stop, so I guess all the sweating and walking becomes good for something.
So, to stop dwelling on my work experiences, here's the next chapter of Do You Remember Me?
Chapter 6
I was dragged through the hospital. I was told to take my clothes off and put this stupid gown thing on, it was really revealing. You could probably see quite a few cuts and bruises on my back. I knew they were there, I just hadn’t seen them.
Apparently I’d looked pretty bad because the Nurse looked at me with pity in her eyes.
“What’s your name, sweetie?” She asked as she flashed a light in my eyes.
“Jeff.”
“Right. What happened, Jeff?” I’m guessing she knew that my name really wasn’t Jeff, but she went along with it anyway.
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I woke up a few days ago in this ranch house a few days ago. I didn’t know how I got there.” I replied.
“Okay.” She wrote something down on a sheet of paper. “Right, Jeff, we’re going to give you a couple of x-rays, make sure nothing’s broken. Then we’ll get a CT-scan on your head. See what’s going on in there.”
“Right.” I had no idea what all of that meant.
“Sit down in the chair for me, please.” I did as I was told. She was a nice girl. I liked her.
The nurse has just informed Inspector Malcolm of what was about to happen. X-rays and such. He was standing outside the hospital waiting for the Smiths to arrive. He knew they would be quick. They’d been waiting for this day for a long time.
“They’ve found him. They’ve found Danny.” Jim shot out of bed. Quickly rushing through his morning routine of showering and dressing whilst Maggie made him a quick bowl of cereal for his breakfast.
As soon as Jim came down the stairs, his hair still soaking wet and a pair of jeans and a shirt, it’s buttons messed up, Maggie picked up the phone to call her daughter’s college so that they could make sure she was out the door the second they came to pick her up.
The phone rang once. Twice. Three times. God, don’t people answer the phone anymore?
“Hello?” A male voice answered.
“Hello. This is Maggie Smith.”
“How my I help you, ma’am?”
“Can you give a message to my daughter, Jamie, to get out of the college as fast as she can?”
“And what might the occasion be, miss?” Is this man clueless? Of course he knows the only reason we’d take Jamie out of school. Maggie thought.
“They’ve found her brother, Danny, he’s at the hospital.”
“Oh… well, that’s great news. I’ll send the message immeadiately.”
“Thank you.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.” Maggie said hurriedly, slamming the phone back down on the receiver. She rushed her husband with the rest of their breakfast and immediately after Maggie grabbed her bag they were out of the door.
Jamie’s day started normally. She woke up before her parents as usual, that meant she could take as long as she wanted to do everything. She casually ate breakfast and went through her normal routine and told her mother she was leaving for college and left the house.
Jamie had to be early today, it was the day where her lectures started early. She had English 101 at 8:30 sharp. They would not wait for her to turn up.
She hummed a tune to herself as she drove herself to Haven College. Their city, Ovid Park, was not known by many, it wasn’t large, but it wasn’t a small city either. It was known by most for other reasons than the ones that most cities are known for. Like New York is known as the city that never sleeps. But Jamie was happy to be living her. It wasn’t too big for her and it wasn’t too small that you couldn’t find what you really wanted.
Pulling up at the College, she was met by the blistering heat of summer. It was nearly summer, nearly a year since her younger brother had gone missing. They were on a school trip. A school campsite trip. She hated how people just moved on and acted like they never existed. The people who remembered them believed them dead. It was sad to see how people gave up. Danny would never have given up.
Jamie felt often that she was betraying her brother. That by going on with life, instead of hunting him down, like he would have done for her, was a form of betrayal. That Jamie was moving on with life.
Jamie knew for a fact that her family hadn’t moved on. Her mother seemed to have aged a decade in a year. Worry and stress of losing her son setting in. Her usually enthusiastic father had dampened down. He never really told a joke anymore. It was as if he’d created a protective shell around himself. She hated to see him like that. She was beginning to think that she’d probably see this version of her father for the rest of her life.
Jamie had finished two of her morning lectures when she’d gotten the call from the office. She was halfway through the third when the lecturer Mr Warren got a phone call from the office.
“Hello?”
“Yes. Yes. Dear God, did they really?” Her attention was peaked now, as was the rest of the auditorium’s was.
“Christ Almighty. I’ll send her now. That’s great news. Do you know anything more than that?” The thing about Mr Warren was he came from England. Everything he spoke was through an English accent. But it wasn’t posh like you’d expect it to be, he was ‘lower on the food chain’ as he liked to put it, with a smile of course. Mr Warren was one of her favourite teachers. Not for the fact that he was amazing in the subject. He believed that her brother was still out there. Still alive.
“Right. Okay. She’ll be out as soon as possible. I’ll send a message to her other lecturers that she’s been given permission to take as long as she needs off. Right. See you now. Bye.”
He hung up the phone.
“Jamie Smith.” He called. I was anxious now. “Get out of here, your mother just called. They’ve found your brother. From what we can tell he’s alive. Your mother is coming to pick you up to take you to the hospital to see him.” My heart fluttered with joy, the problem was I was frozen with shock. It took maybe a whole thirty seconds to get back to the real world.
Danny was alive. That was the best news she was probably going to ever get. She jumped out her seat. Grabbing her stuff and stuffing them rapidly into her bag. She raced out of the room, shouting a quick ‘thank-you’ as she left.
The car was silent as the Smiths arrived outside the hospital, quickly finding a place to park the car in the visitors car park. They got out and looked for Inspector Malcolm, quickly finding him standing outside the hospital main doors.
“Hello.” He said. “First let me warn you. This might be tough. Not just for you, but for Danny as well. He’s lost all of his memories. He seems quite jumpy at the moment. He’s gone to have some x-rays and CT-scans. He’ll be out shortly.”
“Right.” The Smiths answered in unison. It was time to reunite with their son.
They walked silently along the corridors. They’d just been told by one of the nurses that their son was waiting in one of the rooms. They were keeping him overnight just to be on the safe side.
They knocked on the door before entering, prepared for the worst.
“Who’re you?” Was the first thing that greeted them as they entered the room. It was only then that it sunk in what ‘post-traumatic amnesia’ meant truly.
I was originally going to go straight to the meeting of the family again. But I decided that this was probably the better way, you get a sort of introduction to Jamie, the sister of the family. I'll probably be doing a lot of this throughout the story, so that new characters will get introduced. Well, characters that'll probably be of use. Ones that Danny himself really can't explain in depth.
Moving on. I hope you all enjoyed. These chapters just seem to be getting longer and longer as the days go by. That's a good thing. So tomorrow will probably just be the Smiths reuniting. It should be pretty interesting. We'll see where my imagination takes me.
Night!
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