The Gaps (Episode 1 of 4) - "Home"

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This is The Gaps, Episode 1. Home.

0:27 I should tell you about The Gaps before I tell you anything else. I've had them since I was 26. That's how I think of them, as a thing I have, like a bad knee or a sensitivity to certain foods. A management problem. I was assessed by a psychiatrist at 27, a careful woman in Islington, who used precise language and didn't rush, and she gave me a name for what was happening and a framework for living with it, and I took both and used them and got on with things.

0:59 This is, I have been told, an impressive response to a difficult diagnosis. I mention this not to seem capable, but because it's important that you understand who I am before any of this begins. I am a person who gets on with things. I have been getting on with things for a very long time. The gaps work like this.

1:25 I am present, doing something ordinary, making tea, sitting at my desk, walking to the shops. And then I am present again, somewhere else in time, with no seam between. No warning, no fade. Just a cut, like film edited badly. The gap in between is not darkness, and it is not sleep. It is simply not there. I have no access to it. I never have. I keep a journal.

1:57 I have kept one for eleven years. Every day, every gap, Every deviation from routine. Not because I enjoy journaling. I find it somewhat tedious, actually. But because the record is necessary. It is how I know what day it is after a long gap. It is how I reconstruct what I've missed. It is the system. And the system is what makes the condition manageable. And manageable is what I am. My name is Nora. I am 38 years old. I grew up in a market town in Derbyshire called Ashwell. The kind of place that hasn't changed much since the 80s that smells of cut grass in summer and coal smoke in autumn where everyone knows the names of everyone else's parents.

2:50 I left at 18, went to university in Leeds, then London and stayed in London for 15 years. I built my life there. Remote work. A flat in Walthamstow. A routine so precise it could run itself. My mother had a stroke in September. Minor, the doctors said, though I noticed they used that word carefully. Minor as in not fatal, not minor as in small. She needed help through recovery.

3:19 Six weeks, we thought. I packed for six weeks. I drove up on a Sunday. The motorway gave way to A-Roads. and then to the particular narrowing of roads I remembered from childhood, hedgerows close on both sides, the light lower and more angled than London. Ashwell announced itself with its church spire and its market square, and the smell I had not smelled in years but recognised immediately, without wanting to.

3:48 I had not been back in four years. This is relevant. I had been back infrequently for a long time before that, I had reasons I didn't examine too closely. My mother was thinner than I remembered and more cheerful about it, the way she is about most difficulties, determined not to make a fuss, slightly annoyed that her body had made one on her behalf. Her speech was mostly returned. Her left side was weaker than it should be and she was working with a physiotherapist twice a week and being very good about it, which is to say she was complaining precisely the right amount and no more. I set up my workstation in the spare room and established a routine and told myself six weeks was manageable. The first

4:35 gap happened on the third day. I was at the kitchen table with my laptop, mid-morning, working, and then I was at the kitchen table with my laptop, mid-afternoon, and the light through the window was entirely wrong and there was a cup of tea going cold in front of me that I had no memory of making. I checked my phone. two hours and fourteen minutes. I opened my journal and wrote, gap, approximately two hours, ten minutes, 11.04 to 13.18. Location, kitchen, same as before. I noted the tea.

5:13 I noted that I felt slightly tired, the way I often do after a gap, as though something has used up energy I wasn't aware of spending. Then I closed the journal and reheated my tea and went back to work. The next morning I went out early to move my car, which I'd left at a slight angle the night before.

5:41 Our neighbour Claire was coming out of her gate at the same moment, a woman in her mid-sixties, warm, slightly too much in everyone's business, in the way that is nonetheless genuinely kind. She'd known my mother for thirty years. She knew me as Anne Fielding's daughter, which is most of what anyone in Ashwell had ever known me as.

6:02 She smiled and said, Wasn't it nice we'd had a chance to catch up yesterday? I said yes, very nice. She said she hadn't realised I'd stayed in touch with Martin Hale. That it was lovely, she thought. That I still visited the family. That she hoped Deborah's mum was keeping well. I said I hoped so too. I got into my car and I sat there with both hands on the steering wheel and I did not move for quite some time. Deborah Hale has been dead for 12 years.

6:34 She was my closest friend from childhood through university. She died in a single vehicle accident on the Thornfield Road, two miles outside Ashwell, on a Tuesday night in October, when she was 26 years old. I was the last person to see her. I gave a eulogy at her funeral, and I have not spoken to her brother Martin since the reception afterward, and I have not been to the Hale House, and I have not had any conversation about Deborah with our neighbour Clare. I went back inside. I opened my journal to yesterday's entry. Gap. Approximately 2 hours 10 minutes. 11.04 to 13.18. Location. Kitchen, same as before.

7:20 I had written nothing else. There was nothing else. There is never anything else. I have never, in 11 years, had any record of what happens during a gap. I come back to myself and I write what I know. the time before, the time after, my location on return. The gap is blank. It has always been blank. But Claire had spoken to me. The other me, the one that exists in the hours I can't account for, had been to see Martin Hale, had talked to Claire about Deborah's mother, had done these things as me, with my face and my voice, during the hours I was not there.

7:59 I knew this was possible because in the way that I knew a great many things about my condition that I preferred to regard as theoretical. The psychiatrist in Islington had told me that dissociative episodes could involve behaviour I wasn't conscious of. I had noted this and moved past it, because the alternative, imagining an active, functional version of me, doing things I had no access to, was not compatible with the system. You cannot manage what you cannot monitor, So I had filed this as theoretical and continued. It was no longer theoretical. I spent the afternoon working. I am very good at continuing to work. My mother napped after her physio session and I sat in the spare room and answered emails and revised a section of documentation

8:56 I'd been circling for days. and did not think about Deborah Hale or Martin Hale or what version of me had visited them yesterday and why. I thought about it all night instead. The following morning, before my mother was awake, I went out to my car. I want to tell you I had a clear reason for doing this. I don't.

9:19 I think some part of me had already started to suspect in the way that the mind suspects things before it will allow itself to name them. a low-frequency alarm that hadn't yet found its way to conscious thought. I went to the car and I opened the driver's side door and I looked at the floor mat. There was mud on it, not the dark soil of my mother's garden, which I'd been tracking in all week. This was pale, pale and clay-like. I knew this colour. I had grown up in Ashwell. I knew the particular pale clay of the path that runs along the eastern edge of St.

9:56 Michael's Churchyard. The path you take from the lane gateway to the older section, where the stones are closer together and the yew trees keep the ground soft. The cemetery where Deborah is buried. I checked the door pocket. There was a receipt folded once. A petrol station in a village called Hartington, 40 minutes north of Ashwell on the Tissington Road. Time stamped yesterday at 12.47, the middle of the gap. I have never been to that petrol station.

10:28 I don't drive north on the Tissington Road. I had no reason to be in Hartington. The receipt was paid in cash. I don't carry cash. I checked my purse. There was less in it than I expected. I stood in the street outside my mother's house in the early morning with a receipt in my hand and mud on my floor mat. and felt, for the first time in eleven years of gaps, something other than the flat management of it. I felt afraid. Not of the other Nora.

11:00 I want to be clear about that. The fear wasn't of whatever was doing these things during my blank hours. The fear was older than that, and aimed somewhere else entirely. At the specific road north of Ashwell. At a name I had not said aloud in years. At the question of what the part of me I couldn't monitor... might have decided it needed to find. I went back inside.

11:26 I made breakfast. I sat with my mother while she did her hand exercises, and I watched her fingers move, and I thought about what it meant that I had been to see Martin Hale, and I had been to Deborah's grave, and I had driven 40 minutes north to a village I didn't know for a reason I couldn't account for. I thought about what the other Nora was looking for, And underneath that, much quieter, a thought I barely let myself complete, whether she might have good reason to be looking.