The Amnesiac

by Sam Taylor

  James put on a jacket and left the house. It was a dry, windy day. He walked through the park and crossed Green Avenue. Staring straight ahead, avoiding the sight of the dark blue doors on the other side, he walked quickly up Lough Street. They should rename it Memory Lane, he thought, and laughed nervously under his breath. By an effort of will he kept the music out of his head; by taking deep, regular breaths, he kept the dread out of his chest.

  Suddenly he stopped and turned to face the houses on the other side. And there it was: 21 Lough Street. It was a large, detached, redbrick house with an old slate roof. Downstairs there were two bay windows, blank and lightless, one with a cracked pane. The two upstairs windows were boarded-up. The place was derelict, and must have been drastically changed from the last time he had seen it, but even so James felt absolutely sure. This was the place. Part of his past lay behind that door.

  He stood there on the curb for some time, gazing and thinking, in a deep trance. His thoughts came slowly. The house looked like a face, he decided: the face of a dead man. Eyelids closed; mouth stuffed or bound.

  Or perhaps he wasn’t dead after all, thought James. Perhaps he was only unconscious?

  A few cars passed in either direction. It started to rain, lightly. An old woman walked past, pulling a shopping trolley on wheels. The shopping trolley squeaked as it rolled by. The streetlamps came on, and the rain began to fall more heavily. For a long time nothing else happened, and James was on the verge of leaving when he noticed a small movement.

  He squinted through the rain. The front door of the house opened slightly. James held his breath. He continued to stare, and seconds later the door closed again.

  It had been the tiniest imaginable movement - most people probably wouldn’t have noticed it at all - but James knew it was significant. The house had opened its mouth, as if it were trying to speak. As if it were trying to tell him something.

  The rewiring of The Polar Bear’s lounge was completed on a Thursday afternoon. The landlord, having paid James a small daily rate before this, inspected the work, declared himself satisfied, and handed over the balance of the fee. That was how James came to have £500 under his mattress.

  Ever since he had seen the house on Lough Street, James had been unable to remove its image from his mind. Awake and asleep, he saw it all the time, like a vast brick and wood face: the eyes nailed shut, the cheeks bruised, but the mouth opening, ever so slightly, as if the house were trying to whisper its secret. And, of course, James was aware that the doors of houses did not open by themselves. Someone had been inside that house. Someone who had seen James, who knew him. Someone, James guessed, from his past.

  He remembered his first thought on arriving in the city. I am a private detective, he had told himself. Now, he decided, it was time to begin his investigation.

  On Friday morning he woke early and crept out of the house. It was not yet dawn and the air was cold. Pausing in the empty street before he got in the van, James watched his breath steam and felt suddenly very alive. He was the only person in this street who was not asleep. Everyone else was in their own dreamworld and he, alone, occupied the real world. He felt like a little boy, on the edge of some great discovery. The day is a blank page, he thought, and I can write on it whatever I wish.

  James drove randomly through a maze of sidestreets and alleys before entering Lough Street. He looked in the rear-view mirror every few seconds and couldn’t see anyone following, but it seemed wiser not to take any chances. It was 5.19 when he parked the van. Luckily there was a space on the even-numbered side of the road, directly opposite number 21. James had a perfect view of his quarry, but was far enough away to be undetectable.

  He made himself comfortable, and began his watch. In the cabin of the van he had a flask filled with black coffee, a small rucksack filled with food, a pair of binoculars, and a new green notebook, in which he would write his detective’s observations. All around, the houses seemed asleep, their eyes dark and curtained. He ate some dried figs. He scratched his stubble. He drank coffee. He stared at the house. At 5.55 a milkfloat passed; a vision of electric yellow, softly clinking. James wrote this down in the notebook, thinking it might prove significant. He began to wish he was a smoker, so he would have something to occupy his hands. He ate some cashew nuts and drank more coffee. At 6.27 he had to get out of the van to relieve himself. He did this against the roots of a chestnut tree, on a grass verge. The air was still cold, but above him the stars were fading, and over the park he could see the first stains of pink in the sky. His bladder must have been fuller than he had realised. After a while, as the steam rose from the treeroots and the yellow liquid ran in a sinuous line on to the pavement, James began to worry that it would never end; that he would be stuck here as the sun came up and the front doors opened and the pavement filled with angry residents, watching a stranger turn their street into a river of piss.

  Back in the van James took out the binoculars and trained them on the downstairs windows of the house. He thought he could make out a faint rectangle of light, and the silhouette of some round shape; perhaps the edge of a sofa or a lampshade. He wrote this observation in the notebook and then settled back, his raincoat folded behind him as a pillow, to watch events unfold.

  When he woke the sun was shining directly into his eyes. He could hear a persistent tapping noise. James blinked and saw two laughing schoolchildren through the side window of the van. He shouted at them and they ran away. In panic he looked at his watch. It was 8.34. He must have fallen asleep. The cab was warm now, the roof of his mouth dry and sticky. He looked across the street at number 21: apart from the daylight on the walls and windows, the house appeared unchanged. James might have missed him, of course - he could have slipped away while James was asleep - but for some reason James felt certain that he was still in there. Who? The quarry. The client. The famous writer or singer or whatever. The man whose name probably began with the letter M. The person from his past. Him. Whoever he was. James drank deeply from a bottle of water and put the binoculars to his eyes.

  At 9.15 the postman went to the door of number 21 and slid something through the letterbox. At 9.24 James noticed a movement through the right-hand downstairs window. At 9.42 the old lady with the squeaky shopping trolley walked down the pavement. At 10.05 the front door opened wide and there was a movement in the doorway. A man - dark-haired, dark-coated - left the house and walked quickly, though with a slight limp, along the pavement on the far side of the road. James couldn’t see his face, of course, but he knew who it must be.

  He put the binoculars into the small rucksack and wrote in the green notebook, ‘10.08: M leaves #21 - 10.09: I follow.’ He watched as the man turned the corner into Green Avenue. When he was out of sight, James jumped from the van, locked it, and jogged to the bottom of Lough Street. At the corner he peered around and saw the man, twenty or thirty metres ahead, then began to follow.

  M walked all the way down Green Avenue until he reached the T-junction. Here he took a left, crossed the road at the next pelican crossing, and continued down Sand Street. Watching him, James noted that it was M’s right leg which dragged a little, though this did not seem to slow him down. Opposite a large pub called The Riversticks, he turned left again on to University Road. When James reached that junction he saw M crossing at a traffic light. He was headed towards campus.

  On campus there were more people around than there had been a few weeks before, although term still hadn’t started. James had to keep closer to M in order to avoid losing him in the crowd. Still he walked rapidly and decisively, never hesitating or glancing behind. James had the impression that this was a route M walked regularly. He was moving towards the library; James followed.

  At the turnstile the guard nodded respectfully to M and let him in without checking his bag. James watched as M walked through the lobby and then opened a door on the right marked ‘COMPUTER ROOM’. He closed the door behind him.

  For some reason the guard insisted on removing
every object from James’s rucksack. He held up the binoculars and asked James why he needed them in a library. James told him he had just been birdwatching. The guard regarded him suspiciously, but finally let him through.

  The computer room smelled of new carpet tiles and looked like a dentist’s waiting room, only larger. Four rows of wooden cubicles were lined diagonally across it. James walked through the aisles between the rows of cubicles, looking carefully at the backs of people’s heads. He counted eleven other people in the room, all sitting at computer terminals, but none of them were the man he had been following. There were no other visible exits. ‘Damn it,’ he hissed. He couldn’t believe his prey had got away. A woman in a blue blazer and skirt came over to James and asked primly if she could help.

  ‘No,’ he said, and then he had an idea. ‘Actually yes. Could I use one of these computers?’

  ‘That is the general idea of a computer room,’ she replied sarcastically.

  Sitting down at the nearest cubicle, he went online and typed the words ‘21 lough street’ into a search engine. This produced nothing of interest: a website on ancestry; an episode resumé for a 1980s American TV show called 21 Jump Street; a map of bus routes in Belfast; the minutes of a council meeting for the City of Imperial Beach, California.

  Remembering Mrs Quigley’s cryptic words, James added the name of the city and the word ‘tragedy’. Then he pressed enter. The first item on the list was a news story dated Thursday 3 June, 1993. It was from the archives of the local weekly tabloid newspaper, and the headline was ‘STUDENT SUICIDE’.

  A first-year Psychology student died yesterday when he fell from the attic window of a house in Lough Street. The tragedy occurred about 2.30 p.m., police said, and is being treated as a probable suicide. There were several witnesses to the death. They are being counselled by university health employees. The student was taken to the city hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. The student’s name was not immediately released, pending the notification of his family.

  James read this report twice, but it meant nothing to him. He scrolled down the list of items until he came across a longer report from the same newspaper. This was dated Wednesday 15 September, 1993. The headline was, ‘TRAGIC TRUTH BEHIND PICNIC HORROR’.

  A nineteen-year-old student who killed himself in June was a ‘gifted but sensitive’ person, an inquiry has heard.

  Ian Dayton, a first-year Psychology student, committed suicide about 2.30 p.m. on Wednesday 2 June by jumping from his attic bedroom at 21 Lough Street. His death was witnessed by most of the house’s other residents, who were in the garden eating a picnic. All have since been treated for shock.

  Recording a verdict of suicide, Coroner John Morton said there was no way the tragedy could have been foreseen. Although no note was found, police added that there was nothing suspicious about the circumstances of the death.

  The coroner read a series of statements about Dayton from his professors and friends. The head of the Psychology department, Dr Lanark, described him as a ‘very bright student’ who had ‘seemed increasingly distracted’ during his final term. Lisa Silverton, 20, a friend of Dayton’s who lived in the room across from his, said he was ‘intelligent and lovely, but very very sensitive’. Former room-mate, Graham Oliver, 19, said Dayton had seemed ‘moody and isolated’ in his last weeks. Anna Valere, described by several people as Dayton’s girlfriend, did not attend the inquiry.

  One friend, who wished to remain anonymous, said he thought that Dayton had been feeling guilty about something. ‘He told me once he had a secret he could never tell anyone,’ said the friend. ‘I don’t know if that has anything to do with what happened.’

  Dayton’s sister Catherine made a statement on behalf of the family. ‘Ian was an emotional, imaginative person for whom the real world could never quite live up to expectations, ’ she said. ‘We will miss him more than words can say.’

  The university chancellor described the event as a ‘tragedy’ and said his thoughts were with the student’s family and friends.

  Ian Dayton. Ee-yun day-tun. James made the sounds of the name silently in his mouth, but they did not provoke any physical reactions. There was no photograph accompanying the article. James had no idea if this was someone he had known. He studied the other names mentioned in the article: John Morton; Dr Lanark; Lisa Silverton; Anna Valere; Graham Oliver. They were just names. Anna, of course, was the name of the girl with whom Ingrid had wanted him to ‘sort things out’, but there might be hundreds of Annas in a city this size. Perhaps the story has nothing to do with me, James thought. And yet it had taken place in the garden of that house, during the period of time of which he had no memory. At the very least, it was worth investigating. He printed both stories and put them in his rucksack.

  Each of the next three days was spent in the cab of the van, eating and drinking and staring through binoculars at the house. In order to keep himself awake and alert during the day, James drank strong black coffee and trained himself to observe the minutest details of his surroundings. He took notes about changes in the weather; about the fragments of human speech and birdsong he overheard; about the clothes and shoes of every passerby, the expression on every face seen in every window. He plotted the positions of lampposts and postboxes and telegraph poles. He drew pictures of each chestnut tree and the pattern of their fallen leaves. He counted the number of aeroplanes that unzipped the pale sky and the number of stars that sequinned its night-time blackness.

  It might appear that his efforts were wasted, but James did learn some valuable information from his days in the van. It was during this time, for example, that he worked out the identities of two neighbours, both of whom would have a part to play in the story that follows: the tiny, sallow-skinned man who lived at number 19, and who always emerged from his doorway blinking, as if unpleasantly surprised by the daylight; and the middle-aged businessman at number 12 who walked to the bus stop at the bottom of the road every morning and stood there filling in the Times crossword until the 7.45 bus arrived. James thought of asking these people about M. He thought of questioning them to discover if they knew what had happened in that house ten years before. But to do that he would have had to break his vigil, and he was afraid that even a moment’s inattention would be fatal. Besides, they seemed so preoccupied,so deep inside their own worlds, that James guessed they were not even aware of each other’s existence. He began to suspect that he was the only human being on this street who saw the subtle connections of neighbourhood: the spidersilk threads of coincidence and proximity that bound together these houses and the people who lived inside them, and whose patterns he sketched in the pages of the green notebook.

  Re-reading those notes now, they seem to me a much more accurate and complete record of the days in which they were written than any of James’s diary entries. His visual memories of those September days are surprisingly vivid and correspond almost exactly with what is written in the green notebook. This is, I suppose, because he managed to eliminate himself from the picture. Most of the time we do not really see the world when we look at it; what we see is a ghostly mirror image of ourselves; as when we look out through the window of a lit room at night. By cutting his thoughts and emotions off at the source - by switching off the light in the room - James was left with an objective viewpoint. He was an observer, and thus he saw what others did not see.

  His mistake was to think that, by seeing objectively, he was seeing the street in its entirety. What he didn’t see - what he completely missed - was the strangest and most remarkable sight in the whole of Lough Street: an unshaven, wild-eyed man sitting in a parked van, staring at an empty house through binoculars and furiously taking notes.

  On the evening of the fourth day of the vigil, James decided to treat himself to a few drinks at The Polar Bear. It had been a grey and miserable day, and he felt he deserved a break. He was on his way to the pub when he realised that his wallet was almost empty. So he went back to Newland Road and u
p to his bedroom.

  Glancing out of the window, he saw a man in a dark coat walking towards the park. It looked like M, and for a moment James thought of following. Then he got a grip. You’re working too hard, he told himself, you’re becoming obsessed. A man in a dark coat: it could be anyone. Just get the money, then go and have a few drinks.

  He slid his hand beneath the mattress. There was nothing. James grasped blindly for several seconds, then lifted up the mattress and stared at the bare wooden slats of the bedstead. The money was gone. He searched under the bed. He pulled up the carpet. He ripped off lengths of wallpaper. He hurled his shirts and trousers from the wardrobe and emptied every drawer in the chest. The money was gone. Eight hundred pounds. Two weeks’ work. Gone.

  James lay on the mattress and stared at the ceiling. Something dark twisted itself into knots inside his gut. Without money, he could not pursue the truth. The need for money was just another locked door in the labyrinth, preventing him from going where he wished.

  Suddenly an image appeared in James’s mind. It was a picture of money. In the picture, however, money did not wear its usual disguise, of paper or metal or plastic; rather, it appeared as itself, naked. What did money look like? In James’s mind it resembled a leech; an ugly black leech stuck to his skin. The bigger it grew, the more blood it needed; the smaller it shrank, the harder it sucked. It would never stop sucking and it could never be removed.

  James covered his face with his hands and moaned softly. He felt like screaming or weeping or banging his head against the wall, but it seemed pointless when there was no one to hear or see. He thought of all the money he had earned and spent in his life, all the hours he had given to its joyless pursuit, all the precious thoughts wasted on how much of it he had and how much he needed. And all for what? Money didn’t even exist. It was a conspiracy of belief and remembering. If only we could all just forget it, James thought. Watching him, I couldn’t help laughing. He may as well have wished the earth flat. People forget most of their lives, but they never forget how much money they have, nor how much other people have.