The Man Who Forgot His Wife Read Online Free

editor had ruled that they couldn’t have two ‘mystery man’ stories in the same edition. The journalist who had taken our initial call was now on holiday, so the potential story was now assigned to another reporter. ‘Tell me,’ she asked, ‘are you, like, really brilliant at the piano or anything?’
    I found it hard to sleep at night, and sometimes slipped away to the dark and empty Day Room, which boasted a great view of the hypnotic London skyline. It was on the fourth night, staring out at the million tiny lights of the city, that it hit me that this was my life now; that this syndrome wasn’t some temporary blip. Someone was called to investigate the loud thumping noise coming from the tenth floor. It was there that one of the orderlies found me, banging my head against the glass over and over again. ‘Hey, mate, don’t do that!’ he said. ‘You’ll break the glass.’
    Sometimes I would pass a few hours in the television room. It was on one of these visits that I discovered
Mr & Mrs
, which had been reinvented featuring celebrities and their good-looking spouses. This programme became something of an obsession with me. I just loved how these couples could remember so much about one another, and I laughed along with every marital faux-pas and basked in the couples’ easy familiarity.
    ‘Ah, found you!’ declared Bernard in his unmistakable high-pitched nasal whine, just as the second half of the programme was about to begin. ‘Look, I got a couple of books for you from the newsagent’s in the lobby:
How to Improve Your Memory in Just Fifteen Minutes a Day
! I don’t know why we didn’t think of this ages ago!’
    ‘That’s very kind of you, Bernard, but I’m guessing that’s more for general forgetfulness than retrograde amnesia.’
    ‘Well, it’s all degrees of the same thing, isn’t it?’
    ‘Er, no.’
    ‘Believe me, I know what you’re going through because I can never remember where I’ve put my keys.’
    ‘See, I don’t suffer from that, actually. I can remember everything I’ve done since coming to this hospital. But I just can’t remember a single thing about my life before that day.’
    ‘Yes, yes, I see what you’re saying. So you might need to do more than fifteen minutes a day,’ he conceded, opening the book at random. ‘
When you are introduced to a new person for the first time … try repeating their name out loud to lodge it in your memory. So instead of just “Hello” you say “Hello, Simon”
. Well, you could try doing that for a start!’
    ‘Yeah, but you see, I don’t think that’s going to unlock the first forty years of my life …’
    ‘Scissors is the other one. I can never remember where I left the scissors. Sometimes I think they must be deliberately avoiding me! Ooh, this is a good one: “
If you have problems remembering telephone numbers, try making associations. For example, if a friend’s number is 2012 1066, then just remember it by thinking, London Olympics and the Battle of Hastings
.”’
    ‘Okay – great. If that particular number comes up, I’ll definitely remember it like that.’
    ‘You see!’ said Bernard, gratified that he’d been such a help. ‘And it’s only fifteen minutes a day. Ooh,
All-Star Mr & Mrs
!’ I’d love to go on that programme. You know, like, if I was famous … and had a wife.’
    When my favourite TV show was over for another day, I announced I was heading back to my bed, but Bernard jumped up ‘to keep me company’, triumphantly revealing the other book he had bought on the ground floor. He had decided that one way to trigger a memory of my own identity might be to read out every single male name in the worryingly thick tome entitled
Name Your Baby
. Part of me wanted to scream in frustration, but I knew that in his uniquely unhelpful way, Bernard was only trying to be helpful.
    During the course of that long afternoon it became clear why
Name Your Baby
has never been a huge hit as an audiobook.