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what I had for lunch last Tuesday,” she said, “and every word my hairdresser said to her boyfriend on the phone while she was doing my hair six weeks ago. But I can’t remember being at school.”
    The doctor blinked twice. “Were you happy there?”
    “At school?”
    “Yes.”
    “I don’t know, I can’t remember.”
    The doctor nodded. “Sometimes,” she said, “we choose to blot out whole chunks of our past, simply because they bother us, and we decide we don’t want to carry that stuff around with us any more. It’s a choice, not a medical condition. For example, I can’t recall a single detail of the first time I met my future brother-in-law. Judging by the fact that it was also the last time I met him, and every time my husband suggests we get together my brother-in-law says, ‘Keep that crazy bitch the hell away from me,’ I gather that we didn’t get on. Or, like I said, it could be mercury poisoning. I’d have to do tests. Also,” she added, “I’m a proctologist. You might prefer to consult someone with more appropriate experience.”
    “Right,” Lucy said. “But basically, in layman’s terms, either I’ve been licking old batteries or my head’s screwed up. Yes?”
    “Probably. Or it could always be epsilon radiation. Tell me, have you tested any high-yield photonic weapons lately?”
    Lucy shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’d remember something like that, I’m sure.”
    “Not necessarily,” the doctor replied, then, a second and a half later, “Just kidding. If it was radiation, one side of your face would’ve been burnt away.”
    “Thanks. And dementia?”
    “Well, you’re a programmer, so it wouldn’t be easy to tell.”
    Another joke, presumably. “What sort of tests?”
    Shrug. “Search me. I’m the world’s third most eminent specialist in the treatment of haemorrhoids. If you get any trouble in that department, call me. Otherwise—”
    “Yes?”
    “See a doctor.”
    She left the party an hour or so later and took a tube back to the office. On the way, she ran a couple of biographies of herself, the official one, and two unofficial. She learned that she’d been at six schools between the ages of six and seventeen. There were lists of people she’d been at school with who’d gone on to achieve some level of fame and glory: a movie actress, a finance minister, a bishop, an Olympic pole-vaulter, a man who did the weather on Channel XP21 Kiev. There were anecdotes, some favourable, some merely quaint, all watermarked with sufficient detail to carry conviction. There were several were-you-at-school-with-Lucy-Pavlov blogs, which she gave a cursory glance. By the look of it, she’d been everybody’s friend. Apparently at some stage she’d given one of her old schools twenty million dollars to build a new science block.
    Must just be me, then, she told herself. Maybe my head just fills up with things, and the older stuff leaks out to make room. To finish off, she did a SparkPlug search, narrowband: “Lucy Pavlov + enemies”. It came up blank.
    Yet another thing to be grateful for, then. All that money and power and cleverness, nice-looking too, and no enemies. Besides, if she had to have hallucinations, there were worse things than milk-white legendary fauna. A bit like the old saying: if she fell in the gutter, she’d catch a fish. When other people went crazy, they saw giant spiders and things with claws, but Lucy Pavlov got unicorns. Cool.
    Work took her mind off it all; work always did. It was one of the reasons why she still bothered with it. She spent the afternoon fixing a small problem with the PaySoft grammar-and-spelling elf— the poor thing had reacted badly to the latest compatibility upgrades, with the result that it’d taken to wandering forlornly across spreadsheets, curling up in a corner and sobbing uncontrollably — and was poised to drive the first crampon into the face of the internal-memos mountain when she