Free Survival of Thomas Ford, The by John A. A. Logan

safer place, no memories of her on that spot of carpet.
    Had that really been him on the street, the driver of the red car, with the birdlike features? Thomas smiled and bit his lip. No, he couldn’t trust his judgements now. He had to accept that this whole situation rendered him a very poorly calibrated instrument indeed.
    Thomas got up stiffly, walked into the kitchen, filled a pint glass with water. He returned to the sofa and started drinking. He looked to his left and realised he was sitting there to leave space for Lea to join him. He looked over at the thick brown chairs, three of them, used by guests. Lea and himself, even when they argued, had stayed together on this sofa, a couple.
    Thomas sighed and reached over for the slip of paper on the table. Dr Nissen’s contact details. Psychiatric Department. Radthammon had been sly, never stating that the doctor he was referring Thomas to about those chest pains was a psychiatrist. Radthammon thought the pains were all in his head. Thomas blinked. No, they had been in his chest. And maybe he shouldn’t underestimate the instinct that had made him get out of the car and try to follow that man in the crowd.
    Thomas leaned back, positioned his neck and head against the sofa, closed his eyes. He tried to imagine that a seatbelt held him securely in the sofa. He raised his hands and imagined fumbling with them, in a panic, to release the seatbelt. He moved his hands faster and faster, jerkily, trying to duplicate the movements Lea had made while he had tried to get past her hands and undo her belt in the car. Thomas tried to clench his fists tight and small, like Lea’s hands. He tried to imagine what it had felt like for her, as her hands had knocked his own hands out of the way that day. He knocked his right hand against the left, as though the right hand was Lea’s panicking hand and the left was his own hand, trying to reach her seatbelt release button. Why had it been so hard, so impossible, to reach one red plastic button?
    Thomas tried to remember the size of the button. He wasn’t sure.
    And there was a feeling that it was not himself, or Lea, he was remembering in the car at all. As though everything personal to himself or Lea had vanished the moment the car fell to the water. After that, they had become something impersonal, to themselves, to each other. They had become one with every dying thing that had ever wanted badly to live. Their personalities had been put aside so that something more fundamental could step in and take over. In Lea’s case, this had taken the form of panic, and it had killed her. In Thomas something else must have happened, but he had no memory of it. All he had was the memory of the police and doctors and nurses’ eyes that had looked at him after the accident, the way their eyes had been when they asked him how he had escaped the car and he had only been able to answer that he couldn’t remember.
    The eyes had looked at Thomas as they came to an unspoken conclusion.
    Thomas opened his own eyes and looked at the ceiling, as though he was trying to read there the formula of this conclusion everyone was coming to about what to them was only a story: man and woman and car enter water, only man comes out.
    Man remembers nothing, except red car no-one else has ever seen, bird-faced driver, square-jawed passenger.
    It was an off-balance equation that couldn’t be made to add up.
    Einstein or Newton might have fashioned it into something workable, but unfortunately it only left Thomas Ford drained and flopped on the over-large sofa, eyes to the ceiling, Dr Nissen’s contact details beginning to crumble already in his sweaty grip.

Chapter Eleven
     
    Robert was making Jimmy a cup of coffee in his mother’s kitchen. Robert’s mother had gone to her room in the far end of the bungalow. She wasn’t comfortable with Jimmy.
    “They had me tied down to a fucking bed eh? Couldn’t believe it man! If it wasn’t for my dad I think I’d