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Chapter 2

Daniel

Stamford

29^th December 2017, 3.18 p.m.

It turned out I didn’t need to take Thomas back to his mother’s early after all, as Katie suggested that they went to the park to play whilst I met up with Will. Then we could take Thomas back to his mum’s together. Before I could say anything, Tom was putting his shoes on to leave.

‘Are you sure, Katie?’

‘Of course. We’ve not spent this much time together before.’

‘Honestly, it doesn’t matter if we take him back.’

‘Dan, honestly. It will be fine. I love your little boy. I want to spend some time alone with him.’

‘Katie, come on, let’s go!’ Thomas said, pulling on her jumper and away from me.

‘Right, you need to wear a hat and gloves, it’s freezing out there today,’ she said playfully whilst trying to wrestle his coat on. I asked if she needed a hand, but she told me she was fine.

I had known Katie for two years. She had known Thomas for just over one, and after kissing them both I watched them walk out of the house without me for the first time. It felt good, and weird all at once.

With the house quiet, I got myself ready and drove to Will’s for our session. The hour we spent together mostly followed the same routine as usual, we talked about how I’m feeling, I told him about how I remembered the taste of blood in my mouth, and the pain of a broken bone.

‘Have you told anyone about this?’ he asked.

‘Yes, my mother.’

‘But not Katie?’

‘No, not Katie.’

‘What did your mum say?’

‘She laughed and told me I had been watching too many action movies.’

He agreed; it was my imagination faking memories. I knew the term for it, confabulation. It was common for people with my condition.

As I left we scheduled our next meeting to be just after the Easter weekend. But he told me if anything new happened that I wanted to talk through, he was always on the end of the phone.

In the car on the way back I let myself reflect on my chance encounter with Katie; I often did so after seeing Will. I guess it was because with Will we spoke of a past I didn’t know, but thinking about how Katie and I met, that was from a past I did and our memories, our past, helped me supress the knot in my stomach that sometimes swelled.

Pulling up on the side of the road by the park, I could see the two people I love the most in the distance. He was climbing the ladder to the top of the slide and Katie stood close by, her face glowing in the cold weather. As I walked towards them I took it all in. The crisp winter air, the sound of the breeze creaking through the limbs of the exposed trees. Thomas’s laugh over it. Her laugh. Bright and unreserved.

Thomas saw me approaching and waved. I was expecting him to run over for a cuddle, but he was so wrapped up in playing that he carried on running from the slide to the swings, dragging Katie with him. He climbed into the bucket seat and asked Katie to push him. It warmed me despite it being so cold that the frost had not melted from the night before. I watched them, not wanting to interrupt for a few minutes, and then glanced down at my watch and sighed. It was nearly time to go. It would be getting dark soon. But I didn’t want to move, I wanted to stay in this moment forever. The cold air, the warm laughs.

Thomas shouted for Katie to push him harder, although she was clearly pushing with all of her strength. He was swinging so high it made my stomach turn. Each time he swung into the air I was sure he would shoot off the seat and fly ten feet into the air before hitting the frozen floor. I felt my muscles in my legs ready to spring, my arms ready to catch. He was screaming and for a moment I saw a flash of something from before. It was dark, almost pitch black, a woman’s scream echoed, her shrill bouncing off a low ceiling, and I was running, hard, and crashed through a door.

As quick as it landed it was gone. It took me a moment to realize he was screaming in glee and she was smiling and making rocket noises behind him. He was fine. They both were. Katie looked at me, a quizzical expression on her face. She had seen my reaction. I smiled weakly at her, trying to assure her that everything was fine. No doubt another moment of confabulation; I had seen something similar on the BBC perhaps, and mistaken it for a memory.

I turned my attention back to Thomas, shaking the last of the adrenaline that shot into my chest. I looked at his hands wrapped around the freezing chains, and his feet dragging across the ground each time he passed. It amazed me how big he was getting. Time moving at a pace that I couldn’t keep up with changing him from a defenceless baby, to a gabbling toddler, to a little boy with his own mind and ideas and plans for who he wanted to be. Thomas shouted he was going to be sick and the swing slowed down, being grabbed from behind by Katie to help the process.

I watched as he jumped off, and grabbing her hand he dragged her to the roundabout to push him on it. She smiled over at me and I smiled back. She was good with him and looked so happy. I wanted to get up and join in, but it was important for them to have their time alone.

There was no doubt that Katie and I had a future together. I had known it for just about as long as I had known her, despite not wanting to admit it at the time. She was kind and thoughtful, and her laugh lit a fire. When she learnt about my condition she didn’t judge, she didn’t ask questions. She accepted it, and me. She offered patience when I occasionally forgot a word, and she would soothe me when I woke from a bad dream as the crash haunted me. Because of her I had pieced together some small moments from the boy I once was. We discovered that when I was drifting to sleep she could ask me questions and occasionally things would lift from my subconscious. She wrote them down and sometimes I would recall what it meant. If only for a moment. When I had my lightning bolts of recollection of past moments, she waited until I was ready to say what I had seen. Her patience and understanding were more than I felt I deserved at times.

As Thomas continued to scream for Katie to spin him faster and faster I let myself picture a future with us three in it, just for a second until it was broken by Thomas running over to me, dizzy and smiling from ear to ear.

‘Daddy, did you see how fast I was spinning?’

‘I did,’ I replied smiling back.

‘Come and spin with me.’

‘Thomas, darling, it’s time to start heading back.’

‘Do we have to, Daddy?’

‘I’m afraid so. But don’t worry, next weekend will come quickly, and we will have the whole weekend together to play games and go out for yummy food. How does that sound?’

‘Can we go ice-skating?’

‘We can even do that.’

‘Will Katie be there too?’

‘Would you like her to be?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah?’ I said grabbing my boy and hugging him tightly. ‘Well, let’s see what Daddy can do.’

I took his little hand and the three of us started to walk towards the cars, Thomas pausing to grab hold of Katie’s as well so we could swing him between us. With the sun setting behind us, our shadows were stretching out over the frosty ground. The three of us, hand in hand walking together.

Back at our cars I gave Katie a kiss and told her I wouldn’t be long. She and Rachael knew each other and got along well. We often met up with her and her new husband, Sean, for dinner. She liked him too, as did I. As hard as it was to accept that Rachael had moved on, at least it was with a decent man who Thomas really liked. After they had first met, Sean called me to talk about how he wasn’t trying to replace me in Thomas’s life. Like he had replaced me in Rachael’s.

Thomas was nearly four when we, actually she, decided it was best for us to separate, for the sake of our son. It had broken my heart. More because I wouldn’t be with Thomas night after night. But we both knew it would be the best thing for him in the long term. No courts would be involved. I could talk with Thomas whenever I wanted and big events, like birthdays and Christmases we still came together, even when she had married Sean. We did it for Thomas at first, to make sure he didn’t feel like he wasn’t loved because of love breaking down in other places. But now, we did it because, despite everything, we were friends. That’s why the five of us would all be seeing in the new year together, as a giant family.

Although Rachael and Katie got along, Katie didn’t come with me to drop Thomas off. She said it was time for his mother and father to catch up, to make plans for the coming week and ensure things ran as smoothly as possible for him. The little things, like this, made it easy to love her.

As I unlocked the car, Thomas let go and ran back to Katie to give her a hug. His little arms wrapping around her waist. Katie kissed the top of his head and then smiled at me, the kind of smile that made me want to burst. He said goodbye and ran back over, climbing into his car seat. Katie mouthed that she loved me, and I mouthed it back. She blew me a kiss, got into her car and drove away. I watched her disappear down the road.