The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

by Claire North

  The Hulne family as a whole attended my adopted mother’s funeral, when she finally died in that third life. My father said few words, and I stood by him, a seven-year-old boy dressed in borrowed black trousers and jacket from Clement Hulne, the cousin three years my senior who had tried in my previous life to bully me, when he remembered that I was there to bully. Constance Hulne, leaning heavily on a walking stick with an ivory handle carved in the shape of an elephant’s head, spoke a few words about Harriet’s loyalty, strength and the family she left behind. Alexandra Hulne told me that I must be brave; Victoria Hulne bent down and pinched my cheeks, inducing in me a strange childish urge to bite the black-gloved fingers that had violated my face. Rory Hulne said nothing and stared at me. He had stared once before, the first time I had stood here in borrowed clothes burying my mother, but I, consumed with grief that had no means of expression, hadn’t comprehended the intensity of his gaze. Now I met his eyes and for the first time saw the mirror of my own, of what I would become.

  You have not known me in all the stages of my life, so let me describe them here.

  As a child I am born with almost red hair, which fades over time to what the charitable would describe as auburn, and which is more fairly carrot. The colour of my hair comes from my real mother’s family, as does a genetic predisposition towards good teeth and long-sightedness. I am a small child, a little shorter than average and skinny, though that is as much from a poor diet as any genetic inclination. My growth spurt begins when I turn eleven, and continues until the age of fifteen, when I can, thankfully, get away with pretending to be a boyish eighteen and thus skip three tedious years until manhood.

  As a young man, I used to sport a rather ragged beard in the manner of my adopted father, Patrick; it doesn’t suit and in its untended state I can often come to look like a set of sensory organs lost in a raspberry bush. Once this revelation was made I began to shave regularly, and in doing so revealed the face of my true father. We share the same pale grey eyes, the same small ears, lightly curling hair and a nose which, along with a tendency to bone disease in old age, is probably the least welcome genetic heritage of all. It is not that my nose is especially large–it is not; but it is undeniably upturned in a manner that would not be ill-suited to the pixie king, and where it should be angularly delineated from my face, rather it seems to blend into my skin like a thing moulded from clay, not bone. People are too polite to comment, but the merest sight of it has on several occasions reduced honest infants from neater genetic lines to tears. In old age my hair turns white, in what feels like an instantaneous flash; this event can be brought on by stress earlier than its norm, and cannot be prevented by any cure, medicinal or psychological. I require glasses for reading by the age of fifty-one; distressingly my fifties fall in the 1970s, a poor decade for fashion, but like nearly all I return to the fashions I was comfortable with as a youth and choose rather demure spectacles in an antique style. With these balanced across my too-close eyes I look every bit the ageing academic as I examine myself in the bathroom mirror; it is a face which, by the time we buried Harriet for the third time, I had had nearly a hundred years to become acquainted with. It was the face of Rory Edmond Hulne, staring at me from across the casket of the woman who could not have been my mother.

  Chapter 5

  I am of a good age to be enlisted at the outbreak of the Second World War, and yet for my first few lives managed somehow to avoid all the dramatic moments of conflict which I would later read about from the comfort of the 1980s. In my first life I enlisted of my own volition, genuinely believing the three great fallacies of the time–that the war would be brief, that the war would be patriotic and that the war would advance me in my skills. I missed being embarked for France by four days, and felt deeply disappointed in myself that I had not been evacuated from Dunkirk, which at the time seemed like a very triumphant defeat. Indeed, the first year of my war seemed to be spent on perpetual training exercises, first on the beaches as the nation–myself included–waited for an invasion that didn’t come, then in the mountains of Scotland as the government began to toy with retribution. Indeed, I spent so much time training for an invasion of Norway that by the time it was finally decided that the exercise would be futile, I and my unit were accounted of such little use in desert warfare that we were held back from the initial embarkation to the Mediterranean theatre until we could be retrained or something else worked out useful for us to do. In this sense, I suppose I achieved one of my ambitions, as with no one seeming to want us to fight, I found myself with nothing better to do than study and learn. A medic in our unit was an objector who had found his conscience in the works of Engels and the poetry of Wilfred Owen, and who all the men in the unit, myself included, considered a weak-chinned toff until the day he stood up to the sergeant, who had enjoyed his power too long and too much, and in front of all the men lambasted him as the slobbering perversion of a childhood bully that he was. The medic’s name was Valkeith, and he received three days’ confinement for his outburst and the respect of all. His learning, previously a source of much derision, now became something of an object of pride, and though he was still cursed as a weak-chinned toff, now he was our weak-chinned toff, and from his mind I began to learn some of the mysteries of science, philosophy and romantic poetry, none of which I would admit to at the time. He died three minutes and fifty seconds after we set foot on the beaches of Normandy, from a shrapnel wound which tore open his gut. He was the only one of our unit who died that day, for we were far from the action and the gun which fired the fatal shot was taken two minutes later.

  In my first life I killed three men. They were all together, all of them at once, in a tank retreating in a village in northern France. We’d been told that the village was already liberated, that there would be no resistance, but there it was, sat between the bakery and the church like a horsefly on a slice of melon. We’d been so relaxed we didn’t even notice it until the barrel swung round towards us like the eye of a muddy crocodile and its jaws released the shell that killed two of us outright and young Tommy Kenah three days later in his hospital bed. I remember my actions with the same clarity with which I recall all else, and they were these: to drop my rifle, to unsling my bag and to run, never ceasing in my shout, down the middle of the street, still screaming at the tank that had killed my friends. I hadn’t done the strap up on my helmet and it fell off my head some ten yards from the front of the tank. I could hear men moving around inside that beast as I approached, see faces darting through the slits in the armour as they tried to swing the gun round towards me or get on to the machine guns, but I was already there. The main gun was hot–even from a foot away I could feel its warmth on my face. I dropped a grenade through the open front hatch. I could hear them shouting, scrambling around inside, trying to get it, but in that confined space they only made it worse. I remember my actions, but not my thoughts. Later the captain said that the tank must have got lost: their friends had turned left, and they’d turned right, and that was why they’d killed three of us and been killed in return. I was given a medal, which I sold in 1961 when I needed to pay for a new boiler, and I felt a great relief once it was gone.

  That was my first war. I did not volunteer for my second. I knew it likely that I would soon be conscripted so chose to rely on skills learned in my first life to keep myself alive. In my third life I joined the RAF as a ground mechanic and ran for the shelter faster than any other man in my squad when the sirens went, until finally Hitler began to bomb London and I knew I could begin to relax. It was a good place to be for the first few years. The men who died nearly all died in the air, out of sight and out of mind. The pilots did not really interact with us grease men, and I found it all too easy to consider the plane my only care, and the man who flew it merely another mechanical part to be ignored and overcome. Then the Americans came, and we began bombing Germany, and many more men died in the air, where I only needed to lament the loss of their machines, but more began coming back, sho
t through with shrapnel, their blood on the floor just thick enough to retain the shape of the footprints that had scrambled through it. I wondered what I could do differently, with my knowledge of what was to come, and concluded that it was nothing. I knew that the Allies would win, but had never studied the Second World War in any academic detail; my knowledge was entirely personal, a thing lived rather than information to be shared. The most I could do was warn a man in Scotland by the name of Valkeith to stay in the boat two minutes longer on the beach of Normandy, or whisper to Private Kenah that there would be a tank in the village of Gennimont which had turned right instead of left and was waiting between the bakery and the church to end his days. But I had no strategic information to impart, no learning or knowledge other than a declaration that Citroën would make elegant unreliable cars and one day people would look back at the division of Europe and wonder why.

  Having reasoned myself so eloquently into this position, I continued once again to have a thoroughly unremarkable war. I oiled the landing gear of the planes which would destroy Dresden; I heard rumours of boffins attempting to design a jet engine and how the engineers derided the notion; I listened for the moment that the engines of the V1s stopped, and for a brief period for the silence of a V2 that had already fallen, and when VE day came I got horrendously drunk on brandy, which I don’t particularly like, with a Canadian and two Welshmen who I’d met only two days before and who I never saw again.

  And I learned. This time I learned. I learned of engines and machines, of men and strategies, of the RAF and the Luftwaffe. I studied bomb patterns, observed where the missiles had fallen so that next time–for I felt 60 per cent confident that there would be a next time, all this again–I would have something more useful to serve myself with, and potentially others, than a few personal recollections about the quality of tinned ham in France.

  As it was, the same knowledge which protected me from the world was in later times also to put me in great danger and, by this route, indirectly introduce me to the Cronus Club, and the Cronus Club to me.

  Chapter 6

  His name was Franklin Phearson.

  He was the second spy I ever met in my life, and he was hungry for knowledge.

  He came to me in my fourth life, in 1968.

  I was working as a doctor in Glasgow, and my wife had left me. I was fifty years old and I was a broken man. Her name was Jenny and I loved her and told her everything. She was a surgeon, one of the first female surgeons on the ward; I was a neurologist with a reputation for unorthodox and occasionally unethical–though legal–research. She believed in God. I did not. Much must be said of my third life, but for now let me say simply that my third death, alone in a hospital in Japan, had convinced me of the truth of nothingness. I had lived and I had died, and not Allah, Jehovah, Krishna, Buddha, nor the spirits of my ancestors had descended to take away my fear, but rather I had been born again exactly where I had begun, back in the snow, back in England, back in the past where it had all begun.

  My loss of faith was not revelatory, nor intensely distressing. It was a prolonged growth of resignation, one which the events of my life had only reinforced, until I was forced to conclude that any conversations I had with a deity were entirely one way. My death and subsequent rebirth back where I had begun rounded the argument off with a sort of weary inevitability, and I viewed it with all the disappointment and detachment of a scientist whose test tubes had failed to precipitate.

  I had spent an entire life praying for a miracle, and none had come. And now I looked at the stuffy chapel of my ancestors and saw vanity and greed, heard the call to prayer and thought of power, smelled incense and wondered at the waste of it all.

  In my fourth life I turned away from God and sought out science for an explanation. I studied as no man has studied before–physics, biology, philosophy–and at the last fought with every tool at my disposal to become the poorest boy in Edinburgh university, graduating top of my class as a doctor. Jenny was drawn to my ambition, and I to hers, for the ignorant had snickered the first time she took up a scalpel, until they saw the precision of her cuts and the confidence with which she wielded a blade. We’d been together for ten years in unfashionable but politically pointed sin, before marrying in 1963 in that swell of relief that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis; and it had rained, and she had laughed and said we both deserved it, and I had been in love.

  So in love that one night, for no very special reason, and without much very special thought, I told her everything.

  I said, “My name is Harry August. My father is Rory Edmond Hulne, my mother died before I was born. This is my fourth life. I have lived and I have died many times before now, but it is always the same life.”

  She punched me in the chest playfully and told me to stop being daft.

  I said, “In a matter of weeks a scandal is going to break in the US which will topple President Nixon. Capital punishment will be abolished in England, and Black September terrorists will open fire in Athens airport.”

  She said, “You should be on the news, you should.”

  Three weeks later Watergate broke. It broke gently at first, aides sacked across the sea. By the time capital punishment had been abolished, President Nixon was in front of Congressional hearings, and when Black September terrorists gunned down travellers in Athens airport, it was obvious to all that Nixon was on the way out.

  Jenny sat on the end of the bed, shoulders bowed and head low. I waited. It was an expectation that had been four lifetimes in the making. She had a bony back and a warm belly, hair cut deliberately short to challenge the conceptions of her surgeon colleagues, and a soft face that loved to laugh when no one was looking. She said, “How did you know–all of this–how did you know it would happen?”

  “I told you,” I replied. “This is the fourth time I’ve lived it, and I have an excellent memory.”

  “What does that mean, the fourth time? How is it possible, the fourth time?”

  “I don’t know. I became a doctor to try and find out. I’ve run experiments on myself, studied my blood, my body, my brain, tried to see if there is something in me which… isn’t right. But I was wrong. It’s not a medical problem, or if it is, I don’t yet know how to find the answer. I would have left this job long ago, tried something new, but I met you. I have for ever, but I want you now.”

  “How old are you?” she demanded.

  “I’m fifty-four. I’m two hundred and six.”

  “I can’t… I can’t believe what you’re saying. I can’t believe that you believe.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you a spy?”

  “No.”

  “Are you ill?”

  “No. Not by any handbook definition.”

  “Then why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why would you say these things?”

  “It’s the truth. I want to tell you the truth.”

  She crawled on to the bed next to me, took my face into my hands, stared deeply into my eyes. “Harry,” she said, and there was fear in her voice, “I need you to tell me. Do you mean what you are saying?”

  “Yes,” I replied, and the relief of it nearly burst me open from the inside out. “Yes, I do.”

  She left me that night, pulling her coat on over her shift and slipping into a pair of wellington boots. She went to stay with her mother, who lived in Northferry, just beyond Dundee, and left me a note on the table saying she needed time. I gave her a day then called; her mother told me to stay away. I gave it another day and called again, begging Jenny to ring me. On the third day, when I rang the phone had been disconnected. Jenny had taken the car, so I caught the train to Dundee and a taxi the rest of the way. The weather was beautiful, the sea perfectly still against the shore, the sun low and pink and too interested in the moment to want to set. Jenny’s mother’s cottage was a little white thing with a child-sized front door set back from the edge of a charcoal cliff. When I knocked, her mother, a woman perfectly designe
d to fit through that implausibly low door, answered and held it open on the chain.

  “She can’t see you,” she blurted. “I’m sorry, but you have to go away.”

  “I need to see her,” I begged. “I need to see my wife.”

  “You have to leave now, Dr August,” she exclaimed. “I’m sorry it’s this way, but you clearly need help.” She closed the door sharply, the latch clicking behind the creaking white wood. I stayed there and hammered on the door, then on the windows, pressing my face against the glass. They turned off the lights inside so I wouldn’t know where they were, or perhaps hoping I’d get bored and go away. The sun set and I sat on the porch and wept and called out for Jenny, begged her to speak to me, until finally her mother phoned the police and they did the talking instead. I was put in a cell with a man brought in for burglary. He laughed at me and I throttled him to within a few heartbeats from death. Then they put me in a solitary cell and left me there for a day, until at last a doctor came to see me and asked how I was feeling. He listened to my chest, which I pointed out in my calmest possible voice was hardly a rational approach to diagnosing mental illness.

  “Do you consider yourself mentally ill?” he asked quickly.

  “No,” I snapped. “I can just recognise a bad doctor.”

  They must have rushed the paperwork through, because I was taken to the asylum the very next day. I laughed when I saw it. The name on the door was St Margot’s Asylum. Someone had scrubbed out “for Unfortunates”, leaving an ugly grammatical gap. It was the hospital I had thrown myself from in my second life, at the age of seven years old.

  Chapter 7

  Mental health professionals are, by the 1990s, expected to themselves seek regular counselling and observation for emotional and mental well-being. I tried being a psychologist once, but found the problems I had to diagnose either overwhelming or too subjective as to bear consideration, and the tools at my command either childish or overblown. In short, I did not have the temperament for it, and when I was committed to St Margot’s Asylum for the second time in my existence, albeit the first time in this life, I felt a mixture of fury and pride that my sanity, cultivated despite severe provocation, could be so misunderstood by the ignorant mortals around me.