by Sam Taylor
Time passed, as it does. Monday to Sunday, sunrise to sunset. Spring - Summer - Autumn - Winter - Spring. Eat and drink, fuck and sleep, earn and spend, shit and piss. In one end and out the other.
I read somewhere that everybody has their own basic level of happiness, like a pulse rate, which remains more or less constant throughout their life. You can boost it by falling in love and depress it by falling out of love; increase it through success and lower it through failure. But in the end it always finds its level. A few days or weeks or months after whatever it is has happened, your life returns to the everyday, the inbetween, that gently undulating, unmemorable quality that people have in mind when they say they are ‘fine’.
For the next four years, that’s how my life was. Fine. I was happy enough, most of the time; probably the happiest I’ve ever been. But what do I have to show for all that happiness? Vague memories; no more.
And what is happiness, anyway? Of what does it consist? Is happiness nothing more than the sum of its absent negatives? Not being frightened, not being sad, not being cold or hungry or ill or in pain; not suffering from insomnia or depression or addiction; not feeling lonely or trapped; not dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. Is that it?
I’ll tell you the problem with being happy. Because you cannot conceive of ways to make your life better than it already is, you end up repeating yourself: today is a facsimile of yesterday, and tomorrowof today. Slowly, inevitably, the image loses its sharpness. The decline is so predictable, you could chart it mathematically.
Euphoria + Time = Happiness
Happiness + Time = Contentment
Contentment + Time = Complacency
Complacency + Time = Boredom
But of course, this is only how I see it now. For example, I might ask myself whether my dissatisfaction, my withdrawal from the present, was gradual. It bloomed in the heat, festered under the plastercast, I can see that; but was it there before, as a tiny seed, a slowly spreading virus? Did vague malcontent turn by increments to disgust? Perhaps, but to be honest I don’t remember. Doubtless I could look back and isolate incidents which proved such a theory, and I could do so without lying, without being wrong. But, had I said yes to Ingrid, had I moved with her to Waterland, had we made children together, then I believe I would equally have been able to look back on the same nearly five years and see in its mists the signs of my growing certainty, our deepening love. And, again, without lying or being wrong. Because this is how it is: the past always reflects the present. The past is like a fortune-teller; it tells you what you want to hear.
As for documentary evidence . . . my diaries reveal nothing. Or rather they reveal only facts. The names of the places where we went on holiday; the objects we gave each other at birthdays; the furniture we bought; the movies we saw; the meals we ate; the magazines we read; the music we listened to; the squash games we played; the family gatherings and drinks with friends; the floors I planked and the doors I hung. Only facts.
I suppose a few things happened, over the years, that I should mention. In my first full year, I took an evening course in electrical engineering and started earning more money. In the second year, my friend Leon went to live in Chile; Ingrid got promoted and started working longer hours. In the third year, Ingrid’s sister had a miscarriage; Johann’s firm went bankrupt, and I joined a large construction agency. In the fourth year, my father went to hospital to have one of his testicles removed; Ingrid and I became friendly with Harry, who ran the bar at the end of our block. This year, my last in Amsterdam, there was a heatwave; I broke my ankle; Ingrid got a new job in Waterland.
So that’s the story: beginning, middle, end. Reading it back, I realise that what I have written is little more than a gigantic list. A list of lists. Consecutive or descriptive, it makes no difference. Life cannot be written in the form of a list. Lists are for death, for afterwards.
I also notice something else: the limitations of the first-person narrator. The single I. Try looking through one eye: you can still see perfectly, but everything is surface; you have no perspective. It is the same when you look through one I. This chapter is the story of two people, but one of them is conspicuous by her absence. I mean Ingrid, of course. What were those years like for her?
I am tempted to say, ‘the same’. Why not? We were together most of the time, weren’t we? We ate the same food, breathed the same air. We went to bed together and woke up together. But sharing a bed is not sharing a dream; those cannot be shared. What is together but the plural of alone? We may as well have taken a mirror to bed. Each of us projected their own desires on to the image of the other for so long that they dreamed up another person altogether. I think of us now not as two people, but four: Ingrid and James, and the boyfriend and girlfriend that Ingrid and James invented.
So who was the real Ingrid? Can I conjure her up through words? Through the stories she told me about her childhood, the look on her face when she slept? I could try - I could describe her scent, her mannerisms, the contents of her wardrobe - but unless there were some way to steal her memories, or to spy on her dreams, I can never know what I meant to her. Perhaps even then, I wouldn’t be able to scale the walls of hindsight. The Ingrid who loved me is gone, if she ever existed. She is in the past. Lost in time. All that remains is my memory of her double; and, perhaps, her memory of mine.
On reflection, I even feel a little jealous towards my double; after all, it was him that Ingrid fell for, not me. What was I to her, in the end? A bitter disappointment. The worm in the flesh of the fruit. A faceless being, wearing the mask of the man she loved, and tearing it off at the final, crucial moment.
For most of my adult life, I have been haunted by the suspicion that I am, in fact, nobody. Most of the time this feeling has lain dormant, but on certain nights it rears up, cold and enormous and undeniable.
Now, more than ever.
Since Ingrid left, it’s as though this feeling - this fear - has taken her place. It’s in my bed, it’s in the air, it’s in my head. It colours all my memories and thoughts of the future. I look back at the thousands of days through which I have lived, and feel awed by their inconsequentiality. My life resembles the writing in my diary (or perhaps it’s the other way round): the days, like the sentences, each making a kind of superficial sense on their own, but in the context of the surrounding sentences and days, creating not a narrative or a meaning, but the very opposite: a riddle without solutions, a labyrinth without exits. A chaos.
Looking back at the pages of my diary, I seem to have written nothing. Looking back at the days of my life, I seem to have gone nowhere. What keeps me awake at night is the terror of slipping through the whole of my life in this way: tracelessly, pointlessly.
Yet I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t always a nobody. Once upon a time I had dreams and hopes and plans. I am sure of that. I remember it.
What happened to that young man, that boy? Somewhere along the way I must have taken the wrong road. Something must have happened to me . . .
What changes is not the colour of the canal, but the perspective of the person who looks at it. Midnight, and I stare into the water. It is almost black and I can see the bright-lit outline of my head: the face a blank, the edges rippling and undefined. One question comes bubbling up recurrently to the surface. One mystery, simple and unanswerable.
Who am I?
It took James four days to write Chapter 5. When it was finished, he put it in a drawer and forgot about it. He didn’t know if it was any good, but he felt better for having written it. He felt lighter.
Five days later the doctor removed his plastercast. He used a small circular saw, which tickled James’s skin. James had been worrying about this moment for a long time, imagining his calf to be fleshless, or scarred, or seething with maggots, or vanished to nothing. In fact, it was only a little pale and thin. It didn’t even smell too bad.
When he first walked on it, he felt stiff and unsteady, but within a couple of days it
was fine. The hardest thing to get used to, he found, was moving without crutches; he had become so practised in that rhythmic swing that normal walking felt oddly slow and awkward.
On Wednesday 27 August there was a big thunderstorm. The heavens opened and the temperature dropped twelve degrees overnight. The next day was grey and misty. James unchained his bicycle and rode around the city streets for hours, breathing the cool damp air and thinking about the future.
His head was cleared, and he began to make plans. He went to check on his van, which he kept in a lock-up garage on the outskirts of the city; he renewed the insurance and had the van serviced. He emptied his bank account and converted most of the euros to pounds. He rang the manager of the construction agency and explained that he was leaving the country. He bought a ferry ticket for Monday 1 September. He packed his possessions into boxes.
While he was packing, James came across the white notebook. He sat down on the bare floor and re-read Chapter 5. He found it disappointing and slightly disturbing. The tone was so melodramatic, so relentlessly negative. It was strange to think that he had written it only two weeks before. James concluded that he had not been himself at the time; the heat and the plastercast must have been affecting him more than he realised. He thought of ripping out the offending pages and burning them, but decided in the end that he didn’t want to damage his notebook.
So instead he bought a bottle of whitener and painted over his words. When the liquid had dried, the pages were almost as good as new: rough and cracked in places, with hints of letter shapes showing through, but essentially blank. James looked at the white pages with satisfaction. Now he could forget Chapter 5 and begin again, later, with Chapter 4.
He had a wonderful time that final Sunday, dusting the apartment and singing along to The Go-Betweens. There was a breeze coming through the open, unshuttered windows. When he’d finished, he took a cold beer out to the balcony and gazed down at the streets, the canal, the people, all of them bathed in the same golden, late-afternoon glow. Then he turned around to look at the empty flat. He felt like he had shed a skin.
That evening he was sitting in Harry’s Bar when Ingrid’s brother Frank happened to ride past on his bike. That was how Frank explained it, anyway. They shared a pitcher of beer and, after some small talk, Frank asked him what he was planning to do. James showed him the ferry ticket.
‘How long do you think you’ll be gone for?’ Frank asked.
James shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
Frank was looking at him curiously. There was a moment when James thought he was going to say something, but he poured them both some more beer and avoided his friend’s eye. He didn’t want a scene. Frank seemed to understand this, and they talked about other things while they finished the beer. At the end they shook hands. Frank got on his bike and was about to leave, when he suddenly leaned towards James, his face serious, and whispered, ‘Ingrid says she hopes you can get things sorted out with Anna.’
‘With who?’ said James, but Frank had already started to pedal. He waved, then joined the traffic. James could see his head bobbing above the crowd for a long time after his bicycle had vanished.
‘Anna,’ James said to himself, as he lay in bed that night. That was the name Frank had said, wasn’t it? James supposed he might have misheard; that Frank might actually have said Hannah or Diana or Joanna. But no, none of those names meant anything to him. The name ‘Anna’ was different.
It conjured a picture in his mind of a dark-haired girl. The picture was blurred, hazy, but he had seen this girl before, he felt sure. And then he remembered: that brief blackout he had suffered, on the stairs, just before he broke his ankle; he had seen her then, and felt some strange emotion. James also suspected she was someone he had seen in his dreams. That must be how Ingrid had learned her name, he thought; I must have said it in my sleep.
For some reason he thought of the song of which he could remember only a fragment. He thought of the long blue-stained row of terraced houses . . . the boy and the girl walking . . . the watching policemen. These memories circled his head, that last night of summer, in those black spiralling seconds before he fell asleep.
You may wonder how I can possibly know all this; how I can see all the quicksilver, gossamer visions that flicker inside James Purdew’s mind, how I can feel every heart-swell and nerve-twitch in his body. But that, for the moment, must remain my little secret.
II
THE SCENE OF THE CRIME
James went up on deck and watched the harbour grow larger and clearer through the mist. He was exhausted from lack of sleep, but the smell of the sea awoke him. There is something about the odour of salt, he thought, that snaps you into the present tense, into tangible reality. The effect was helpful, because at that moment James was having trouble adjusting to the idea that this was really happening; that he was actually here.
The dislocation he felt was due partly to the fact that he had spent half the night reading a book in Spanish. It was the book by Jorge Luis Borges that Frank had forgotten to take when he moved Ingrid’s possessions from the flat. James had intended to send it on to Ingrid, but that would have required him to write a letter, and he hadn’t known what to say. All in all, it had seemed simpler to hold on to the book for a while.
It was a book of short stories and the title was Laberintos, which James was fairly sure meant ‘labyrinths’. His Spanish wasn’t good, so he read very slowly, and even then he only understood half the words. The stories enchanted him none the less. He had read two during the voyage: ‘El Otro’, about a man meeting a younger version of himself, apparently in some kind of dream, and ‘La Memoria de Shakespeare’, about a man who comes into possession of Shakespeare’s memory. James had emerged from the netherworld of this foreign text to discover that the night had passed. He had numbly eaten breakfast to a soundtrack of crying babies, and then taken the stairs up to the deck. And now here he was . . . and there it was.
He gripped the metal railing and stared at the approaching city of H. It was years since he had been here, and for a moment he could almost believe that he was travelling not through space but through time; that the shape on the horizon was truly that ‘unreachable land’ of the past. In the dawn light, the distant buildings shone mysteriously. All kinds of thoughts and images crowded James’s mind as he stood there, regarding this silverish vision of a city that was at once familiar and strange, old and new.
As the sun rose and the ferry moved closer, the banal details of the port revealed themselves - cranes, lorries, advertising billboards; the mingled stench of diesel and hops - and James felt simultaneously relieved and disappointed. The sense of going back in time had, he realised, been merely a trick of his mind, intoxicated by the stories he’d read and by his tiredness and the early-morning light. The place was only a place, after all.
And then, as these emotions faded and he thought of the memories he had lost in this city, he felt something else: a physical nervousness; a hollow thrum in his chest. James recognised this feeling. It was the same emotion he had felt on Ingrid’s staircase, when he saw the face of the dark-haired girl: neither hope nor fear, but something nameless in between.
An hour later, he drove out of the bowels of the ferry and through several vast car parks. A customs officer stopped him and spent a long time inspecting his passport, while other uniformed men searched the van. The customs officer held the photograph next to James’s face, and squinted from one to the other. ‘James Purdew - is that you?’ he asked suspiciously. James, feeling obscurely guilty, said it was. The other men signalled that the van was clear. The customs officer waved him through.
The drive from the port was grey and uneventful. James was struck only by the number of roundabouts and roadworks, by the sullen anger of other drivers. But when he crossed the great bridge into the city itself, he felt it: that unmistakable sensation of déjà vu: the feeling that each building and road sign and tree had an extra dimension, a deepened physical presence; that each
existed here and now and, at the same time, in his memory.
And yet, somehow, it was the startling realness of it all that most affected him. This was true not only of the parts that fitted with his memory, but even more so of the parts that didn’t, the tiny details he could never have foreseen: an abandoned crisp packet dancing along the pavement in a gust of wind; dark-skirted schoolgirls standing in line at a bus stop; a wrecking ball demolishing the remains of an apartment block. All these realities are new, he thought; they have happened without me. Those schoolgirls would have been toddlers the last time I was here. Someone would have been looking out from that apartment block: an old lady, perhaps, watering the plants on her balcony. Somehow the changes were a comfort to James. People lived here. Random events occurred here. The city existed . It was not merely something he had dreamed up.
He drove through the city centre, unconsciously looking away as he passed the train station, then took a left down Haight Road. Past The Polar Bear - he waved to its brown, expressionless façade - and right into Green Avenue. To his right he saw the city park, and to his left those endless-seeming Victorian streets flashed past, their names a litany: Cathedral Street, Hayes Street, Lough Street, Moone Street, Bach Street. He felt a rush of unfocused memories.
He parked the van at the side of the road and entered the park. It was still early, but the mist had already cleared. Above, the sky was a limpid, pale blue. Below, the grass was pearled with dew. All around, dogs barked, ducks splashed, mothers pushed prams along tree-shaded paths.
There were clues here, James felt sure, hiding behind trees and beneath shadows. The air was thick with clues. His past, present and future all converged at this point. Somewhere here he would find the thread that would guide him through the maze.