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second?’
    â€˜It’s my
birthday
, Greg! Fancy you forgetting that! I want to see you on my birthday!’
    â€˜OK, Mom. I’ll pass you back to Sue.’
    Sue was rummaging in her purse for something, so Michael held on to the cell for a moment. He was about to tell his mother to hold on for a moment, when he heard her say, ‘Oh, shoot, George! Look at that snow! I wanted to go to Ray’s Food Place this afternoon!’
    Sue said, ‘Aha! Here it is!’ She lifted up a yellow photo wallet, and Michael handed the cell back to her. Sue took it and said, ‘Hi, Mom – look, I’ll be back around this time tomorrow afternoon. You have that doctor’s appointment, don’t you? OK, no problem. OK. Lots of love, then. Greg is blowing you a kiss. Bye.’
    â€˜Well?’ she asked Michael. ‘Anything?’
    â€˜If you’re asking me if I recognized Mom’s voice, then the answer is no. She sounded like some old woman to me, that’s all.’
    â€˜Try these, then,’ said Sue. She passed over the photo wallet, which contained about twenty glossy pictures. Michael looked through them, while Sue gave him a commentary, tapping each one with her red-varnished fingernail.
    â€˜There’s you and me, on the beach. I was seven then, which means you must have been five. There’s you with your first bike, when we lived in Emerald Lake Hills. There’s you with your friend Carl. Love the hairstyle! You were inseparable, you two; you didn’t need a brother, you had Carl. And that’s you the day you graduated from Cal Maritime Academy.’
    Michael examined the photographs carefully. There was no doubt that it was him, or some boy who looked uncannily like him. He turned some of them over, and they had scribbled captions on the back like ‘
Gregory and Carl, Roy Cloud Elementary, April 1989
’ and ‘
Greg at Moss Beach, September ’91
.’
    He handed them back. ‘Thanks, but they still don’t bring anything back. Even if I can’t remember it, though, it looks like I was pretty happy. I mean I wasn’t half-starved and dressed in rags and I didn’t have to beg for money on the streets.’
    Sue said, ‘Come on – let’s try to stop remembering things for a while. Doctor Connor told me that prompting you with photographs and reminiscences was all very well, but it’s your own brain that needs to do all the work, and that you need plenty of rest as well as people like me trying to jog your memory.’
    â€˜What do you want to do then?’
    â€˜Anything you like. I’m happy just to sit here and watch TV. It’s going to take us some time to get used to each other. There’s no point in us trying to swap stories about childhood if you can’t remember any of it, is there?’
    â€˜No, I guess not.’
    He switched on the TV in time for
Days Of Our Lives
. Sue held his hand again, to show him that even if he didn’t remember her, he was still her brother, and she loved him. It was a strange feeling, watching TV while holding hands with a woman he didn’t know, but it was unexpectedly reassuring, too. Before, he had felt that he was adrift in the ocean, without any landmarks in sight. Sue, at least, was some kind of landmark – some point of reference from which he could start to rediscover who he was.
    He suddenly woke up. The TV was still on, but it was mute, and Sue’s chair next to him was empty. He must have dropped off halfway through
Days Of Our Lives.
    He gripped the side of the bed and lifted himself out of his chair. He felt stiff all over, especially his neck and his spine. He was often dozing off like that, but he supposed it was all part of his brain and his body trying to conserve his strength.
    He looked out of the window. It was still snowing, but only lightly. He was about to sit down again when he saw the revolving door in the middle of the