Watch Me Disappear


 
 
 
 WATCH ME DISAPPEAR
 ROSS ARMSTRONG
 
 
 
 Ross Armstrong is an actor and writer based in North London. He studied English literature at Warwick University and acting at RADA. As a stage and screen actor, he has performed in the West End, on Broadway and in upcoming shows for HBO and Netflix. Ross’s debut title, The Watcher, was a top twenty bestseller and has been long-listed for the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger.
 
 
 For all those whothink differently
 
 
 Contents
 Chapter 1
 Chapter 2
 Chapter 3
 Chapter 4
 Chapter 5
 Chapter 6
 Chapter 7
 Chapter 8
 Chapter 9
 Documented Telephone Conversation #1
 Chapter 10
 Chapter 11
 Chapter 12
 Chapter 13
 Chapter 14
 Chapter 15
 Chapter 16
 Documented Telephone Conversation #2
 Chapter 17
 Chapter 18
 Documented Memory Project #1
 Chapter 19
 Chapter 20
 Chapter 21
 Chapter 22
 Documented Memory Project #2
 Chapter 23
 Chapter 24
 Chapter 25
 Chapter 26
 Chapter 27
 Chapter 28
 Documented Memory Project #3
 Chapter 29
 Chapter 30
 Chapter 31
 Chapter 32
 Documented Telephone Conversation #3
 Chapter 33
 I Remember, A Note, She Passed... Documented Memory Project #4
 Chapter 34
 Chapter 35
 Chapter 36
 Chapter 37
 Chapter 38
 Afters
 Acknowledgements
 
 
 1
 “Dee. Dah dah dah dee dah, dah dah, dee dah...”
 It was a year of miracles. The year I learned how to walk and talk again, the year I met Emre Bartu and the year the girls went missing.
 But first came December.
 The weekend before my first week as a Police Community Support Officer began. The last week in which my brain’s valleys, ridges, streets and avenues remained in perfect working order.
 Back when I thought a lot differently. Before I became “Better Than Normal” as Ryans says. He says that because in some ways I definitely am. Better than you, I mean. No offense.
 It’s a Christmas gift that will lie under my brain stem, wrapped in the folds of my cerebellum, romantically lit by my angular and supramarginal gyrus, for the rest of my grateful life.
 So let’s go back to the last week when the inside of my skull was anatomically “correct” and aesthetically as it had been since the day I was born.
 When my brain functioned as it does for the “normals.” The others. The ones devoid of irregularity or uniqueness. No offense.
 Before the fractures. Before the accident.
 If it was an accident.
 
 
 2
 “So it’s you
 The one I thought I knew, I knew,
 No matter what we put the other through
 It’s always you”
 The truth about Gary Canning is revealed to me by Anita herself. Like most things, I don’t see it coming.
 I imagine Gary as a PE teacher, displaying his sporting prowess and gym-earned physique to the kids of Tower Hamlets as he coaxes the unwilling into exertions like rugby, basketball or maybe even worse. But in actuality, Gary is a Geography teacher with a fair to middling beard. It has pretty good coverage but is patchy in a way that suggests inconstancy of character, a fatal lack of conviction in his genes, or a rather flawed grooming technique. I know this because I find his picture on social media. That’s when I first see the face of Gary Canning.
 Gary Canning blogs about food and travel and seems to have ambition beyond the school system. Photos find him caught candidly by the camera lens in clearly orchestrated scenarios, curated to paint him as a soulful character; playing a banjo with his eyes closed, or blowing bubbles with some sort of child, or larking in a European villa while holding a float to his head like it’s an antenna, in a move that will soon be lauded by his fawning friends as “classic Gary banter.”
 He lists his favorite world cities as Tangier, Iquitos and Bobo-Dioulasso. Only half of one of which I’ve ever heard of. But I guess it isn’t surprising Gary Canning has been to places I’ve never even heard spoken aloud. Given that I’ve never even been to Paris. I thought about taking Anita once but then I forgot to book the tickets and my life moved on. But I’m sure Gary Canning’s been to Paris. Paris is child’s play for Gary Canning. Gary Canning probably went to Paris without even realizing it. Because that’s just Gary Canning. Good old Gary Canning.
 Anita’s hours have always seemed wildly inconsistent for a job I’d always thought was fairly strict in terms of time frame. Which I’ve never wanted to bring up for fear that it will seem like I’m misunderstanding her life, or being sexist, or teacherist, or some kind of combination of everything that shows me for the true chauvinist idiot I didn’t know I was.
 When her late-homes stretched to late nights, I stopped asking questions, as I disappeared into my world. One dominated by online gaming and films I’d seen when I was younger but wanted to watch again to check if they’re still good. Or the lure of sports results on my phone, or direr still, merely staring blankly at the screen glow waiting for that appetizing hit of something. Not even current affairs; I can’t handle that, everything is a killing or a manhunt and it gets me down. No, I prefer the safer land of sports news. Where the only tragedies are poor tactics. Where the only manhunt is inane “gossip” about a Portuguese manager “tracking” some sixteen-year-old French-African midfield wunderkind.
 The Thursday night before the Monday I’m due to start my latest career experiment begins typically. Anita arrives home and I detach myself from the smart phone umbilical cord to greet her with my best conversation and the second half of a bottle of wine that I’ve started before her arrival. Already one in, having apparently “decompressed” with a single glass on the way home “with her colleagues,” she tells me about her day and I listen loyally, retroactively defending her where appropriate