The first time she remembers, they're on Castle Beach. She knows its Castle Beach because she's been told. Just like she knows they're in Tenby visiting her aunt because she's been told that too. And its in the same way she knows which room in her house is hers, which tree in the garden was her favourite to climb, the route to the village shop. She knows because someone has recounted it to her, softly, like she's a child, with hope in their eyes, and then disappointment as she accepts it as the truth but it does nothing to kick-start a flood of memories. There are some things that come naturally to her though. She knew how she took her tea – with a little more milk than her mam had put in the first time. She knew that her bedside table ought to be on the right hand side – tad had swapped it around. She knew where the dog liked to be scratched – Rhett's back leg had pounded into the floor in approval.
After two weeks in the house, her mam has grown despondent - still nothing, cariad? She would say. So, a visit to her aunt, another woman she should know but doesn't, has been arranged. Her mam doesn't say it, but when they get to the house, when she's gently welcomed by cousins she can't remember, when the wealth of new names and faces begins to make her head pound, she can see it in her eyes – still nothing. Her cousin suggests a walk on the beach, just they two, something she isn't opposed to – the first time she'll be without her mam in what isn't really very long, but in what feels like an age because of all she's learned and struggled to retain. She senses the unease with her mother, but her aunt encourages her to give her a hand with hemming her curtains, since she's so very good with the sewing machine, and reluctantly she permits it. Look after her, Gwen.
Gwen and her were close once, apparently, and she feels guilty as the other woman's warmth and friendliness tapers off when she can't meet it. They walk in near silence, her cousin quietly accepting that it may be more fruitful if she's just allowed to take in her surroundings. So she does. She loves being outside, she doesn't know why – maybe its because she feels as if she's going stir crazy inside that house, her mam by her side almost every waking minute, or maybe its because she used to love the outdoors. In a place like this, she's sure she must have. It seems apt that the first time she remembers – really, truly, remembers – its here.
Staring out into the sea, she doesn't know why it's St. Catherine's Island, but that's its name. And that's The Fort. A Palmerston Fort, granite and limestone, with big guns, her father would say. And here, right here, is where they would build a structure in its image. A fort of crates, a seaweed banner, a moat dug with saltwater that would seep from what seemed like the centre of the Earth to fill it, with driftwood cannons and a battle that would last all afternoon. Sand caking socks until they were peeled off and abandoned, wind whipping their hair, and David and Alan and Lowri and Gwen. She felt a hand on her arm, her cousin looking panicked – she thought she was having a spell. But she smiled, widely, for the first time in a long time.
After that it happens again and again. She doesn't need to be told how she climbed that tree – she can see the view from it in her mind, the little cottages, the fields, the birds she's so close to she feels like one of them. When she's allowed to walk Rhett alone she doesn't take him to the village shop and back in a rehearsed route, she forgoes her mam's instructions and turns left at the end of the road, heading for the pond she knows he lives for jumping in. She watches him leap through the water, laughing, knowing how many times she's been chastised for bringing him home soaked and muddy before. Gwen comes to visit and they talk like old friends, the old friends that they are, and she asks how little Helen and Ceri are doing – much bigger now, apparently. She begins to put together the pieces of her childhood, she begins to see how much she loved it here, what kind of life she had. And it feels good.
She knows that she left it behind though, that she went to London and studied nursing and worked in a big hospital and lived in a nurse's home. But again, she only knows that because she was told, and none of it lives on in her mind like her childhood is beginning to. Her mother doesn't want to tell her about those things, she can sense that much. Mam purses her lips together when she enquires, reluctantly revealing snippets as and when she asks for them, claiming that she didn't put all that much in her letters. And when she asks for the letters she sent, her mam says she doesn't have them anymore. She tries to keep London from her. She didn't want her to go in the first place. Still nothing, but she says it with far less disappointment this time. So she asks her tad, and he tells her of how she stayed in school all the way through as her peers dropped off one by one, getting married, getting jobs in the village or the town, he tells proudly her of her big dreams and her big mind that is now battered and bruised and broken.
Something is missing, she often thinks. Now she starts to realise there are gaps and she's desperate to fill them. Sometimes she trails off when she's speaking, the right word lost to her, but she knows it will come back into her head if she waits patiently, after a few seconds, or eventually. The cogs in her mind turn staggered and laboured, nuts and bolts gradually tightening with the help of invisible fingers, but they're moving and they're alive. The next time she feels as happy as she did on that beach, it's at Alan's house. There are more people she doesn't know there, but they tell her their names and this time they don't slip out of her mind after all of five seconds only for her to have to tentatively ask again, disappointing everyone. Their faces flood back into her mind, and that makes her happy enough. But then Harry limps inside, his face screwed up, and she stands instinctively, feeling her mam's disapproving gaze as she overexerts herself, scooping him up under the arms and setting him down on the kitchen counter. She thumbs away his tears and cuddles him and inspects his knee. The corner of a flannel and some antiseptic, she thinks to herself instantly. It's so raw he may need some gauze on that. She asks Alan's wife, Jean, what she's got in the cupboards and she tends to his injury with hands that seem so practiced – because they are. She knows what she's doing and it's coming so naturally to her.
She lies in bed that night, thinking so hard her temples burn with the effort of it, but Nurse Busby comes into the world again. She's a reality, not a story tad told her. She comes slowly, in snippets. Leaning over a pad of paper in a lecture, wheeling a gurney down hallways she knows like the back of her hand, in the rear of an ambulance, the siren blaring with red and blue illuminating the dark London streets. But she's real and they're the same person – almost. She wants to be her again, and she has a reason to remember now beyond making her mam and tad and everyone else happy. Because somehow she knows that being this person made her happy.
Nurse Busby pours over textbooks that lay unpacked in boxes that were kept in her mam's room for reasons she can't be bothered to argue about. Nurse Busby reads them slowly, struggling over words that aren't used in everyday conversation, in the newspapers her tad brings home from the village shop, in the books on the shelf in the living room. It feels like revision for an exam, it feels like reminding herself of things she learned long ago. Mam doesn't think she'll be a nurse again, and she doesn't want to agree with her but she can't be sure yet, but despite that this is undoubtedly doing wonders for her. Still though, as things she drilled into her brain repeatedly at a desk with untold mugs of coffee in her hand make sense to come back to her, she still can't remember her life in London, her life outside of this. Perhaps she didn't have one, perhaps she was completely dedicated to her profession and nothing else, but the way she smiles when a song she knows comes on, the way she enjoyed the two birthday parties she's been to now since coming home, makes her think that she certainly can't have been that boring.
The next time she has that feeling again, the one she had on the beach, and the one she had when dressing Harry's knee, that feeling of images flooding uncontrollably into her brain that seem like they were there before, she doesn't feel happy. She feels so very confused. Nothing prompted it, and perhaps that's why. She sits bolt upright in bed, reaching for the top button of her pajama shirt and thumbing it open, the sheen on her chest quickly evaporating, the sleep scratching the corner of her eye as she rubs it away. Knotted fingers and entangled legs, bodies pressed together and lips open on her neck, breathing gently together and breathing all out of time. She can't make sense of it. Did she dream it up completely? She must have. Perhaps it was a sign of the wild imagination tad talked fondly of returning, though she can't fathom why it would choose such things to conjure, why she, with her only life experience having been gained in the last couple of months, would even know what it was to be close to someone in that way. Unless she'd had someone in London, someone she hadn't told her mam about. Or perhaps she had just got caught in the moment with them, just once. She was a wild and passionate girl – she remembered well enough by this point what she was like as a child. She wasn't surprised or even disappointed with herself. She was just worried that someone might be waiting for her, somewhere.
She knew she ought to leave it be. If she had been caught up in such affairs in London, she knew well enough that it was probably for the best she had forgotten all about it, and until she could be sure that she'd just had a vivid but entirely fictional dream, she should really stop letting it occupy her mind. But the very next night she wills herself to think on it. As a girl she had always been able to control her dreams to some extent – if she put something in her mind firmly enough it would stay there as she drifted off. This time she doesn't jerk awake with her heart pounding, but as the sun flitted into her room like streamers through the gaps in the curtains, waking her gently, she doesn't open her eyes. This time it was chatting late into the night, it was going to the pictures and holding hands in the dark, pinching lint from clothes, and she wills it not to end. Delia was laughing, flirting, stroking blonde hair from her face. It was a woman.
She should be just as confused as she was the night before. She should be disgusted, outraged even. But she's not. For the third time since she had gotten home things clicked into place in the most pleasant way, perhaps even more wonderfully than they had before. And more than Pembrokeshire, more than nursing, she feels like she needs to know everything about what had just come back to her. Mam was worrying about her all the time now, thought she was having spells when really she was just lost in thought as she began to carefully, tenderly, piece back together this person. It feels as natural as breathing, the idea that she had all this tangled, broken apart love in her for a woman. And it feels just as natural to be realising it all over again.
Patsy. She says it out loud at the breakfast table one day, her mouth agape, and she's almost tempted to cover it after her outburst. Her mother turns, eyebrows raised. What about her, cariad? Surely mam can't know – she panics, and her mother coddles. She explains softly that she was her friend, the one she was going to move in with, the one who came to visit her at the hospital. Mam doesn't seem to know anymore than that, and Delia suddenly recalls the crying girl at her bedside. She struggled to form memories at first, let alone remember before. But right now she sees her, she sees her pained, tear stained face and she feels so terribly sad. She wonders where she is, what she's doing, if she's missing her – but somehow she knows that she is.
Its happening again, she's loosing her train of thought in her panic, her head is pounding as she struggles to put together a sentence with so many things swirling around in the back of her throat begging to get out and she feels sick. Has she written? Does she have their address? She wants to write her – she wants to go upstairs and write her a letter right now saying all the things she knows and asking about all the things she doesn't. But she can't, not if mam has to help her, and not to mention it takes her forever to write things and she wants to send her something this instant – she wants to run down to the post box and catch the postman on his rounds right now – mam would never let her though, she doesn't know where the postbox is. "Mam, I want…can I..." She stalls, knitting her brow.
"Don't stress yourself, Delia." Mam reaches across the table to cover her hand, looking concerned.
"Mam." She says, with desperation in her tone through the pain in her forehead. "I want to write to her."
Her mother sighs, looking concerned, and squeezes her hand, "Alright, cariad. You write to Patsy then. I'll post it when you're done."