All is recollection save for the slender membrane of now. Every present thought, every present feeling, collides with a league of their familial ghosts. And if our lives in this moment seem flimsy, that is because they are. We dwell on that slim edge of experience while the waters of all that has been foam and swell.
I can remember that occasion on the Carter farm as if actors were playing it before me on a stage. I can remember the smell of the bonfire, the taste of the beck when we plunged beneath its surface. I can remember Billy and Kimberley and their brothers, and the potatoes and the bales of hay. These memories have many facets, like a precious gem slowly rotating between a jeweller’s fingers. I can recall my own part, but I can also imagine myself as Joe Palmer, or as Billy Fletcher, or any of the others. I can see the scene as if through their eyes, as if we are all sectors of one whole. And most of all, I remember the event as Eve – brave Eve – diving beneath the water to save Joe Palmer. Imagining myself as her. Inhabiting her. And the same goes for Billy Fletcher’s expulsion, and the speech Mr Henton gave upon that stage, though it all feels so unreal, like my mind has conjured an extravagant version of a more mundane truth. I can feel the breath of every person in that hall. I can feel the hand of the policeman on the back of little Billy Fletcher’s neck, pushing him into the car to be driven away.
I told Sita that I’d been thinking about Billy. It was 2017 and I was living in York again, working in the bar of the independent cinema and trying to write another novel. After Billy had been expelled from school, he left our lives almost entirely, though there were moments of return when we would see him or hear of him or wonder about where he was or how he lived. But now, eighteen years later, he was back, hopping around in my mind with all the other recollections like an unwelcome wraith. Sita asked about his significance, and I told her that there was none. ‘He was honestly just a boy at my school who was a bit wild and who went off and did some crazy stuff.’ I related the story we’d heard of him breaking into the Carters’ farm, partly because it was so salacious and I enjoyed recounting it. A couple of years after he was expelled from school and sent to live elsewhere, he turned up again at his former foster home. First, he stole a moped from the centre of town and rode it all the way out there, along the winding roads and muddy tracks, cutting across the field of a neighbouring farm and destroying some crops. Then he got into the Carters’ tractor and drove it straight through the wall of their barn, then clean out the other side, leaving two gaping holes and shards of snapped wood. Next, he hot-wired one of their cars – an old Volvo estate – and sped off in it down the A64 pursued by the police. One of the officers was the dad of a girl in our year and we all went round to her house one day after school to hear all about it. He reported seeing Billy Fletcher clutching the steering wheel with two scrawny hands. The boy hadn’t properly shut the boot, so debris kept flying out as he sped along: shopping bags and dog toys and electrical cables. The car’s hazard-warning lights were blinking the whole time. Eventually, the police caught up with him, arrested him, sent him to a juvenile detention centre. I don’t know how he got on there. Presumably he had a tough time. And I don’t know where he lived after he got out.
The first time I met with Sita, she asked me about my earliest memory; my elemental impression of consciousness. Her consulting room was dimly lit and smelled of incense. I’d originally been given her name, as far as I could recall, by one of the men who now claims to have no idea who I am, and when I told her this in my initial email, she expressed delight – he’s a significant figure, after all, and it was understandable that she would have been pleased to have been on his radar. Now that I’m slowly reconciling myself to the idea that I never in fact met him, I’m left to surmise that I must have spotted her name somewhere or other –possibly when researching psychoanalysts to help my younger brother, Jos – and it must have burbled up from somewhere in my brain.
I placed my hands on my knees, studied the ceiling and tried to answer her question. ‘My dad rowing a boat,’ I said. ‘I was standing on the beach, watching. He was out on the waves. It was rough. I remember it being rough. And I was scared for him.’
I tried to figure out where it was, and when. I guessed that I was perhaps three years old, but she reminded me that veracity wasn’t the point, and I studied the floor and the soft rug with its knotted vine-leaves.
We return to the image often. She asks about the fear I felt in that moment, and I find it difficult to respond. We interrogate the motif of the turbulent sea and why I was on the shore alone. One week it represents the deep unconscious with my tiny self unmoored. The next week it is a broken mirror.
In recent years, I have had difficulties with my memory. It began a couple of years ago, or rather, I began to be aware of it a couple of years ago. In truth, I think the problems commenced earlier, but just how much earlier I do not know. Although there was a catastrophe – a moment that we might usefully refer to as a breakdown – there was also a gradual accrual of uncertainty; a kind of fog that descended upon me over time, and the breakdown was as much a rapid dispersal of that fog as it was its most opaque point.
It was not a sickness of forgetting. I did not have too few memories, but too many. They came at me like du Maurier’s birds: one, then two, then abundantly. Memories of three discrete events, only fabricated. A psychic concoction. The details were astonishing, not only in their quantity but in their quality. The evidentiary layers; the scope. Each was furnished with familiar touchstones, or content upon which my mind could depend. There were incidents from real life – I mean, from my verifiable life – and from my family’s history, and these slotted together with the marvellous so adroitly that I can forgive myself for relinquishing control. The persons I remember were – indeed, are – as real to me as anyone else I have ever encountered. Yet – I am told – I never met any of them. They are likewise wraiths, who came to me with news. Recollections of their own. Fabulous tales.
It was Eric who suggested I contact a psychiatrist. At first I told him to sod off, but after a while I decided I would play along. I was careful with the memories, being always aware of their absurdity even as I was – as it were – living them. But he and I had always been so close – so proximate in our mental movements – that the words came. We spoke on the phone, he in New York City, of course; I in the other York, in the house I shared with a woman called Elizabeth who worked for an environmental charity and basically considered me to be a complete degenerate because I drank alcohol, had casual sex and didn’t recycle. Eric expressed concern, his voice quiet but firm. As I say, I resisted, then relented. He said he’d check in with me the next day, and the next. And so he did. Sometimes he’d message and sometimes he would phone.
I was guarded in what I told my GP. Knowing something of the psychiatric process (having experienced the system when my brother was ill) I made sure to convey just enough to get a referral, not so much that I would be admitted to a ward. Although pressed into action by my distant friend, I thought myself highly skillful in all of this, as if my efforts were coherent. In my presence, the GP wrote a letter to a psychiatrist called Dr Raymond Hoggett, relating what I had described, keeping intact my chosen words, thus burnishing my sense of agency. I informed Eric that I had an appointment, and went to speak to Amelia about it too at her house one evening after she’d wrangled Romy into bed. I couldn’t understand why she was so concerned. It was amazing to me that neither she nor Eric – both so intelligent – were able to comprehend the logic behind what I was telling them. It all fitted together so neatly, after all. Why couldn’t they see it?
Dr Hoggett’s office was in a hospital across town, a building with long corridors, low ceilings, handwashing stations and works of art that were at once innocuous and ill at ease. He was handsome, Irish, in his forties. In a different context, I might have tried something, brought him home for the night and put up with the sharp looks from Elizabeth the next morning as I sent him on his way. But, as I say, that would be a different context.
He sat at his desk, turned occasionally towards his bright computer screen, listened and spoke. He was welcoming and lively and, in general, not at all what I had expected. I held back again, careful not to reveal too much, partly out of concern for his response, partly because I still believed. It seemed futile to give him the full story. Like Eric and Amelia, he seemed to think it all had something to do with ‘trauma’. With our recent bereavement. I agreed that it did, but not in the way they all thought.
Dr Hoggett prescribed Sertraline, which I’d been on before, and a mixture of Olanzapine and Aripiprazole, each of which was new. They were both anti-psychotics, although, as I explained to him, it wasn’t quite like that. It wasn’t quite like the illness I had witnessed in my brother, Jos. There were no hallucinations. No voices, at least, not in the here and now. Only memories. He told me he had never encountered a presentation quite like mine, which,
I’ll admit, made me feel both special and unhinged. I have always enjoyed standing out from the crowd, but this enjoyment is generally accompanied by a flickering panic, as if difference might lead either to untold riches or to being singled out and shot.
He explained that the waiting list for psychotherapy was very long and asked if I had funds to pay for my own treatment. I told him that I didn’t. But that I would. That’s how I met Sita.
‘Why do you think you’re here, Mary?’ she asked.
As I was paying for the service, I thought I should try to make the most of it. I breathed deeply and replied. ‘Basically, I have all these memories, and I need to work out whether or not they’re true. And I thought you might be able to help with that. They came to me after the event – as “flashbacks”, I suppose you’d say. But they’re very clear. They’re unbelievably clear, in fact. They’re so tangible and so detailed, it’s very, very difficult to believe they didn’t happen. But everyone around me is telling me that they didn’t, that they couldn’t have. And I do understand that. I mean, I see where they’re coming from. The content is completely insane and if someone came up to me and told me all about it, I obviously wouldn’t believe them. But the thing is, as I’ve said, these memories feel so real. They feel exactly the same as all the other memories I have knocking about in my brain. Every single other memory I have of my life, from childhood to adulthood. So, if they’re not true, what is?’
‘You’ve just used the word “insane”,’ Sita pointed out, calmly. ‘That’s very critical. Perhaps the critical mode is one that’s familiar to you.’
‘I guess. I mean, yeah?’ I wasn’t sure what to do with the prompt so sat in silence for a beat then continued explaining the dilemma. ‘You see, all the memories map on to what I suppose could be described as a grandiose conspiracy theory. It’s all very “high concept”. So, clearly, that raises alarm bells for people. I can absolutely see why it does. And, don’t get me wrong, it raises those concerns for me too. I can think rationally. I can see the insanity of it all. But, the thing is, it just so happens to fit. Not only do I remember being told these things by credible people; the content also happens to correspond to some unexplained details from my life, my family history, from my investigations into world history. And now I’m really sounding crazy. I know, I know. Believe me, I know. But you should at least hear me out. Broadly speaking, the flashbacks concern three distinct events – literary events in London that were, one way or another, so shocking I forgot the content immediately afterwards. I forgot the people I met and the things that were said to me. I forgot how I got home afterwards, all of that. And then, later, I began to remember them. The people. And I began to remember what they said to me.’
I trailed off. I had become aware that a layer of sweat had formed at the back of my neck. It was possible there was an immediate, physical cause: the room was warm. But when I thought about these events, I routinely became engulfed by a transparent terror, so perhaps that too had encroached.
After a while, Sita asked the question. She would rarely be so direct. ‘What is it that these figures said to you?’
‘They told me that my Jewish grandad assassinated Adolf Hitler.’
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From Awake Awake by Fiona Mozley. Used with permission of the publisher, Algonquin Books. Copyright © 2026 by Fiona Mozley.
