The Amnesiac

by Sam Taylor

  He put the letters side by side on the kitchen table and stared at them while he waited for the kettle to boil. His heart was speeding. Calm down, he told himself, you’re only making a cup of tea. He went outside in the garden and looked around. The sky was low and grey. A sparrow chattered from high up in the apple tree. The smell of cooking came from one of the neighbouring houses. From the corner of his eye, James noticed a movement in an upstairs window. He span around quickly and stared up at the attic: the window was half open, but as far as he could see the room beyond was empty. I really ought to go upstairs and shut the window, he thought. Otherwise the rain will get in.

  Back in the kitchen, the kettle was boiling furiously. James switched off the gas and stared at the letters again. He made himself a cup of tea and stirred in some milk. He picked up the letters and weighed them in his hands. He span around quickly and stared out into the garden.

  Nobody.

  I’m getting paranoid, he thought.

  Feeling like a real detective, he held the first envelope above the kettle’s spout until it was slightly damp, then slid a butter knife under the flap. It came away easily. He sat down at the kitchen table and shook out the contents. It was not, as he had thought, a single piece of paper, but several small squares. On each square was printed a letter of the alphabet. A letter full of letters, thought James. He put them all the right way up and, without thinking about the order in which he was arranging the letters, placed them side by side. This is what they said:

  V S M E L A G T O

  James had no idea what this could mean, but he had read enough detective novels to realise it must be a clue. Could Malcolm Trewvey have sent him the two letters, in order to test whether he would open them? Might these nine letters, then, be nothing but a red herring? It was possible. But it was also possible that the letters really had been intended for Malcolm Trewvey, and that these letters inside represented some kind of information . . . some kind of code. The wheels in James’s mind were whirring now. One word, or several words? He experimented by moving the letters around and writing down the results in his green notebook. This is what he wrote:

  GLAT MOVES

  STEAM GLOV

  LOVE STAG M

  SLAVE TOM G

  SAVE TO GLM

  LOAVES GMT

  There were a finite number of possible combinations, yet James could find nothing that seemed to make sense. Not enough vowels, he thought. He wondered for a moment if there were an ‘I’ missing, but the envelope was empty. This was all there was. The message had to be here. He worked for another hour, getting nowhere, and was beginning to think the message itself must be in code, when he noticed something odd. He had, without meaning to, put the letters in four groups. This is what they said:

  MT

  LS

  AV

  EGO

  It was EGO that he noticed first; more Freud, he thought. He looked the word up in the dictionary and discovered that its definition was ‘the part of the mind that reacts to reality and has a sense of individuality’. That was interesting, but if it was a clue, then James wasn’t sure what the clue could be telling him. However, as he looked at the letters on the table and thought about this, something about those first three pairs of letters snagged on his memory. He had the feeling that he had seen them somewhere before, but he couldn’t remember where.

  Tired of thinking, he went out in the garden. For a while, he walked around aimlessly, breathing the cool, humid air and looking at the trees and houses visible above the top of the surrounding fence. He recognised these views - each slotted into place in the jigsaw in his mind - and yet they did not bring the rush of memories for which he had been hoping when he first saw the house from the outside.

  It was odd: he had imagined that simply re-entering this place would unlock the black box of the past. And in a sense it had. But the first black box had opened to reveal another, also locked, inside it. James’s next task, he knew, was to find the key to the second black box. But he couldn’t escape the suspicion that all he would discover inside it was another, and another, and another . . . a Russian doll of locked black boxes. Russian dolls were not infinite, however; there was always a last one, the tiniest and most important of all. Inside that one, James thought, I will discover the secrets of my past.

  He stood under the apple tree and looked up into its branches. The apples appeared to be ripe. He reached his hand up to the nearest one and pulled; it came away with the stalk intact. It was the size of a cricket ball, quite heavy and perfectly firm. James didn’t know what kind of apple it was, but it certainly looked good: golden-green with hints of red, its skin not too rough, not too glossy. It had a strong, sharp scent that made his mouth water. Instinctively he glanced around - might the garden’s fruit be forbidden? - but there was nobody, and besides he could not remember any mention of apples in the contract.

  He bit into it: crunchy and bittersweet. And, beyond the simple pleasure of the apple’s taste in his mouth, James felt something else. A great and foreign emotion was rising inside him; an emotion he had experienced before but had, until now, forgotten. He had no name for this emotion, but it was a bit like the happy sadness he felt when he listened to The Go-Betweens, only much more profound and overpowering; as though what he felt when he listened to The Go-Betweens was but a faint echo - the glimpse of a reflected shadow - of the original emotion.

  Where had it come from, this wave of feeling? James sensed that it was connected to the taste of the apple, but that it went far beyond it, could not be of the same nature. What did it mean? How could he grasp it? He looked at the apple and saw, in the perfectly white bitemark he had left, a little pink stain . . . a trace of blood. He closed his eyes and the garden whirled around him in a multitude of weathers and was, for an eye-blink, populated with figures at once strange and familiar, evening sunlight, distant music, some sweet and heavy perfume, a dark-haired girl with her lips near his, all of which instantly dissolved again into blackness. James opened his eyes in astonishment. What had been happening to him? What had he been doing? He had been remembering.

  Or had he? When he tried to resummon the image that had flashed up in his mind, he began to question the authenticity of what he had seen. Was this a real memory or was it merely the kind of thing he expected to remember? A thin, dark-haired girl with her lips near his. This might be nothing more than wish-fulfilment. And yet he had certainly felt something. The emotion that had invaded him had been unbidden, unexpected. Whatever tricks of imagination had embellished it, there was surely a core of truth there. James felt a surge of hope and was about to bite into the apple again, when he realised he couldn’t move. He was remembering something else: the odd thing that had happened to time when he was sitting in the garden on his first afternoon in the house; the way the sun had seemed to grow briefly warmer, the sounds of other voices he had heard, and then that sudden silence and a glimpsed shadow on the grass. Yet, while the vision of the dark-haired girl filled James with hope, the silence and the shadow gave rise to a different emotion. He wondered what it could be. And then his memory supplied the name. It was fear.

  Hope and fear. James thought about these emotions. He had always considered them to be opposites: one white, the other black; one good, the other bad. But he sensed now that they were more like reflections, each an inverted copy of the other. Or two sides of the same object. What is fear, after all, but hope in the dark? What is hope but fear bathed in light? Implicit in all hope is the fear that the hope will not be realised; implicit in all fear is the hope that the fear will not be realised. Hope/fear must be like the moon, then, thought James: we can see it half, full or eclipsed, bright or occluded, blood-red or golden . . . but always, behind this, is the same grey sphere.

  But where had all this come from? He blinked. What had made him start thinking about hope and fear? What was it he was remembering, when he bit into the apple? James frowned for a moment, racking his brains, but it had gone. It had slipped his mind.<
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  He ate the rest of the apple, then realised he was still hungry, so he stood up and walked towards the kitchen, thinking of the lunch he would make. Bacon and eggs, maybe, or spaghetti bolognaise . . . Not looking where he was going, James again stepped on the flat stone. As he did so, he felt a chill run through him. He looked down and those two letters looked back up at him: ID.

  The chill faded and James had an idea.

  He sat at the kitchen table and stared at the letters written on the squares of paper. MT, LS, AV. He felt sure he was right now: these must be initials; the initial letters of people’s names. But which people? And where had he seen those combinations of letters before? His mind was blank so he began to make lunch. He chopped an onion, which made him cry. He boiled water for the spaghetti, fried the onion with butter and minced beef, and warmed up a tin of tomato sauce. It began to rain. The drops of water sounded heavy as stones through the plastic roof of the kitchen. James opened a bottle of red wine and poured himself a glass.

  And then, for no apparent reason, it came to him.

  He ran to the bedroom and picked up the cardboard box in which he kept all documents pertaining to the investigation. In black capital letters on the lid, he had written the word ‘CLUES’. He took the box to the kitchen and looked through its contents. He found what he was looking for without difficulty: the print-out of the story from the newspaper, ‘TRAGIC TRUTH BEHIND PICNIC HORROR’. And there, in the fourth paragraph, were the names: Lisa Silverton and Anna Valere. LS and AV. James’s pulse quickened when he read the name ‘Anna’ and thought of the dark-haired girl he had seen in his vision. Could it be more than coincidence?

  Focus, he told himself. There’s one more name to find. He looked at the two letters again - MT - and then his eyes slid to the envelope from which the letters had come. Malcolm Trewvey. James laughed, and banged the table with his fist. Of course! It was so obvious. How could he not have seen it before?

  Malcolm Trewvey, Lisa Silverton, Anna Valere. The names of three of the people living in the house when Ian Dayton fell to his death. He read through the newspaper report again. There was no mention of Malcolm Trewvey in there, but there was a quote from a friend ‘who wished to remain anonymous’. James smiled. How typical. The desire for anonymity spelled out his identity more clearly than any name.

  All through lunch, James couldn’t stop grinning. It was true that he still didn’t understand how these names linked with the word ‘EGO’. It was true that he still didn’t know his enemy’s dark secret. But these were only details; they could wait. The important thing was that he was getting closer. Closer to the truth. Closer to the centre of the maze.

  That evening, James had a bath, shaved, brushed his teeth and put on some clean clothes, then walked to the union bar; he wanted to celebrate the breakthrough he had made with the letter of letters. He walked unhesitatingly, unerringly, even in the dark, and as he grew closer he felt a tight fluttering in his chest, as though a small bird was trapped in there, trying to escape. I must have come this way many times before when I was younger, he thought.

  Campus felt like a different place at night: the cold air rich with scents and laughter, and the buildings looming vast and mysterious, more like holes than objects. When he reached the top of the steps that led to the union bar, James flashed his old student ID card at the doorman and, to his surprise, was allowed to enter. He pushed open the double doors and the sound of dance music throbbed from the large dark room.

  The air smelled damp and faintly acidic, and the floor was sticky with some kind of black grease. In the queue for the bar, a girl in stilettos stood on his foot and a man spilled beer down his shirtfront. James ordered two pints and drank them quickly by the side of the dancefloor, watching the mass of bodies writhing under strobe lights. Everybody here was so strange, he noticed: their skin too smooth, their eyes too wild, their voices too loud, their bodies too alive. Young people. It was strange to think that he too had once looked and sounded like that.

  He had a couple more pints, but continued to feel bored and out of place. He was about to go home when he noticed another man standing alone against a wall, looking like James imagined he himself must look: older and less happy than the people around him. James approached the man, and was surprised to discover that he knew him. It was Graham, from the house on Newland Road.

  ‘Hello Graham,’ said James. ‘Remember me?’

  Graham glanced at James, then looked away. ‘What do you want?’

  James was taken aback by his rudeness. ‘I just wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘About what?’ His voice was sullen and expressionless.

  ‘There’s no need to be like that. Let me buy you a drink.’

  Graham didn’t respond, but James bought him one anyway, and placed it on the bar. Graham took his pint without a word and began to sip it.

  ‘So . . . what are you doing here? Doesn’t seem like your scene.’

  ‘I’m a senior resident. I have to look after the first-years.’

  It was then that James noticed his name badge. ‘Graham Oliver - Senior Resident - 14 Newland Rd’, it said. To begin with, James didn’t click. He went on making small talk for a bit longer, while Graham continued to ignore him. After a while, though, the muddled, beer-blurred synapses in his brain forged the connection: Graham Oliver. It was his name James had seen in the report on the suicide. He had been Ian Dayton’s roommate. Without thinking the matter through any further, James blurted out: ‘Didn’t you use to live in Lough Street?’

  Graham stared at him. ‘So?’

  ‘Number twenty-one.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  For some reason, Graham’s defensiveness, his blatant rudeness, made James feel bolder. He felt himself becoming a private detective again, seeing the clues all around. Graham had been there at the time of the tragedy, a witness. As hostile as he seemed, he might well be able to help James discover the true nature of Malcolm Trewvey’s guilty secret. ‘I wanted to ask you about what happened there. Ten years ago, wasn’t it?’

  James watched Graham’s face when he said this, but he could see no evidence of surprise. All he noticed was a slight cringe, as though he’d touched Graham in a sensitive place.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘I’m a private detective,’ James said. ‘So, shall we go and talk somewhere quiet or do you want to have this conversation in front of your first-years?’

  The next thing James remembers, he and Graham were locked in a toilet cubicle together. Graham was silent, his arms folded, his back to the door, staring angrily at James, who was thinking of what questions to ask. James stumbled, almost falling over the toilet, and laughed as he regained his balance. He was more drunk than he’d realised, and this made him feel slightly alarmed, but he knew there was no going back now. He had to pursue this line of inquiry. He had to keep probing.

  Graham was wearing a white shirt with sweat stains under the arms and crease-covered brown trousers. In an attempt to lighten the atmosphere, James made a joke. Something about people imagining the two of them were taking drugs.

  ‘Just ask your fucking questions,’ Graham hissed.

  James saw suddenly what a bad position he had put myself in: locked in a toilet with a very large man who seemed to harbour an intense and unreasonable dislike for him. He decided to play it cool.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What is your full name?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your full name. Is it just Graham Oliver or . . .?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s not Edward Graham Oliver, by any chance?’ Graham Oliver stared at him blankly. ‘Or Everett Graham Oliver?’

  ‘Are you pissed?’ Graham snorted. ‘I don’t have the faintest fucking clue what you’re on about.’

  James had been thinking, almost unconsciously, of the letters, EGO, but now, realising his mistake, he changed the subject.‘How did you like living in 21 Lough Street, Graham? I’m there now, you know. It’s a
nice house. Beautiful garden.’

  ‘What the fuck do you want?’

  ‘The truth,’ James replied. ‘Tell me about Ian Dayton. How did you find him, as a roommate?’

  ‘You’ve got a tape-recorder! You’re a journalist!’

  James was beginning to think that Graham was a bit of a psycho. The way he kept getting angry about nothing . . . or perhaps it wasn’t nothing. Perhaps he was not mad, but guilty? Perhaps he actually had something to hide? Something larger than James had yet imagined.

  ‘No tape-recorder.’ He opened his jacket to prove it. ‘And I’m not a journalist - I’m a private detective.’

  Graham looked unconvinced. ‘If I answer your questions, you’ve got to promise you’ll never bother me again.’

  ‘All right, I promise. I’ll never bother you again. So answer the question. How did you get on with Ian Dayton?’

  There was a long pause. Graham had turned his back on James now. He was staring at the door of the cubicle. James could see the thick dark hairs on the back of his neck and smell his acrid body odour. ‘I didn’t have a problem with Ian Dayton. ’

  ‘Why did he commit suicide, do you think?’

  A short, bitter-sounding laugh. ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘All right. How would you describe his relationship with Anna Valere?’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Answer the questions and you’ll never see me again. I promise.’

  ‘He liked her, I suppose.’

  ‘And what about you? Did you like her?’

  A long silence. ‘I don’t see what this has got to do with . . .’

  ‘All right. So tell me about the other people in the house. Was there anyone you didn’t like?’

  ‘Fucking hell,’ Graham said. His shoulders were shaking; James couldn’t tell if he was trying not to laugh or not to cry.

  James wondered whether he should mention Malcolm Trewvey’s name, but he decided against it. It was best to stay vague, he thought, to let Graham reveal the details. ‘Was there someone in that house you blame for Ian Dayton’s death?’