by Sam Taylor
James nodded.
‘Completely understandable,’ said Dr Lanark. ‘Come with me and I’ll give you a drink. How about a glass of brandy?’
James followed him silently through the laboratory full of trilling chicks and into a small, cosy room with a log fire and two leather chairs. ‘Welcome to my parlour,’ the doctor said proudly. ‘Do sit down, Mr Purdew. Make yourself comfortable. ’
‘Um . . . my clothes?’
‘Are on their way, don’t you worry. I’ve already sent a security guard to fetch them. They should be with us quite soon. While we wait for them, though, I wondered whether we might have a chat?’
James nodded as the doctor handed him a large glass of armagnac. He sniffed it suspiciously, but it smelled fine. Dr Lanark sat in the chair facing James and sipped the amber liquid from his own large glass. ‘Ah, this is more like it, don’t you think. Cigar?’ James shook his head. ‘Mind if I . . .?’ Again, James shook his head. ‘Well, then, let me say first of all, Mr Purdew, that I was fascinated by what you told my colleague. Don’t worry, I have no desire to drug your drink, lever open your skull and suck out part of your brain. Really, neurosurgeons can be so crude at times. I myself, though I am well acquainted with the science of the brain, have a background in psychology and philosophy. These fields of enquiry require more than mere intelligence and training. They require sympathy, imagination, humanity . . . qualities in which my colleague, as you saw, is sadly lacking. However, it would be wrong to single him out in this respect; the truth is, I am afraid, that the vast majority of scientists have similar failings. You see, the myth remains that scientists are disinterested and pure in motive, but in truth they are as pettily ambitious and as morally blinkered as everyone else. They are rats in a maze, frantically searching for the key to the next door or level, never sitting still and wondering what the purpose of the maze is; never imagining, even once, the possibility that they are being ‘tested’ by some other, unknown, infinitely greater power - chance, fate, God, whatever you wish to call it - in ways that may be random or meaningful, but whose meaning, if it exists, will always elude us. The highest form of human wisdom I have ever come across is that line from the Upanishads, have you read it? “To know is not to know; not to know is to know.” So simple, so profound; the very antithesis of modern science. But anyway, Mr Purdew, that is my own personal bugbear and I apologise for burdening you with it. More brandy?’
James held out his empty glass. He had another sip and sighed appreciatively. The leather chair was tremendously comfortable, and the fire was warm and mesmerising. In truth, he hadn’t been paying much attention to this first part of the speech, despite Dr Lanark’s evident passion, but what he said next made James sit up and take more notice.
‘But let us turn our attention to your condition, Mr Purdew. Do tell me, is it actually the case that you remember nothing about those three years? Nothing at all?’
‘Well, not quite.’
The doctor sat back, looking pleased with himself. ‘Ah . . . I thought as much.’
‘I know where I was during those years, for instance, and I can remember certain places, certain emotions . . .’
‘Sorry to interrupt, Mr Purdew, but would you mind telling me: where were you?’
‘Here.’
‘Here?’
‘In this city, I mean.’
‘I see. So you’ve returned, in a sense, to the source of your amnesia. You have come, as Proust put it, à la recherche du temps perdu . . .’
‘Yes,’ James agreed quickly. He was worried that Dr Lanark was about to launch into another long speech. ‘That’s right.’
‘And has anything come back to you?’
James considered telling the doctor about the brief vision of the dark-haired girl he had seen when he bit into the apple, and the image of the train that had affected him so strongly in Dr Lewis’s office, but they seemed too odd, too vague to describe. So in the end, he just said, ‘No.’
The doctor nodded thoughtfully. ‘Tell me, Mr Purdew, do you ever have what you might think of as daydreams or hallucinations? ’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, they can take many different forms, but amnesiacs often experience what seem to be strange, unknown images, or inexplicable emotional reactions, or blackouts, or recurring dreams, or instances of déjà vu. Sometimes, it is as though one’s body can remember what one’s mind cannot. Have you ever had anything along those lines?’
‘I’m not sure,’ James said cautiously.
‘Or have you ever had memories of day-to-day events that seem - how can I put this - unrealistic? In other words, they are as vivid and clear as normal memories, but when you consider them rationally, they seem so outlandish that you conclude it must have been something you dreamed or imagined.’
James’s heart was beating fast now, as he recalled the librarian with Larkin’s memory, the pub full of astrologers . . . ‘I might have done,’ he said warily. ‘What are they? What do they mean?’
The doctor stared at him for a few seconds, as though trying to read his face. ‘The first phenomenon that I described - the strange images and emotional reactions - are a classic symptom of retrograde amnesia. They go under various names - Pierre Janet called them “hallucinations”, Freud and Breuer “hysterical reminiscences”. They are what we might call “leaks” from the past. Hence the apparent strangeness.’
Again James thought of the blood-stained bitemark in the apple and the vision of the dark-haired girl; he thought of the train he had seen, pulling out of the station, and how wretched it had made him feel. He also remembered the bittersweet, hollow feeling that had come over him when he was feeding the ducks in Pullen Park, and the unaccountable euphoria he had felt, walking along Lough Street, with the dry leaves crunching beneath his feet. Finally, the vaguest memory returned to him - of having seen and felt something in the back garden of the house, the day he moved in. Some clouds, a sudden silence, a shadow on the grass, a surge of dread . . . He exhaled and looked around him at the warm parlour, the flickering firelight, Dr Lanark’s thought-lined face; the reassuring solidity of the present. Could these have been ‘leaks’, he wondered ? Could he, during each of those moments, have been living in the past? He nodded mutely, and the doctor continued.
‘The second set of phenomena is . . . well, that is a particular theory of mine. I have observed such unsettling confabulations, such mergings of dream and reality, many times among my patients, and have even had them myself once or twice. I call them “dreamemories”, Mr Purdew. An elegant conflation, don’t you agree? They are often associated with the influence of intoxicants, but not exclusively so. They may also be brought on by some kind of trauma, or a general feeling of stress or confusion or fatigue. Indeed, the more I investigate the matter, the more I wonder if they are not, to some degree, an everyday part of life.’
‘You mean . . . it’s normal?’
‘To some degree. You see, memories are not as most people imagine them to be. The modern analogy with computer memory is deeply misleading: human memory has more in common with an ocean than a microchip. This is not only my opinion, by the way. Most neurosurgeons and molecular biologists and psychologists would agree with the basic principle: that memories are fragile, constantly mutating, easily distorted. Memory is eight parts forgetting to two parts daydreaming, as Tomas Ryal put it. Have you ever heard of the term “dissociation”, Mr Purdew?’
James shook his head.
‘Perhaps the easiest way to imagine this is to visualise a river with another river following its course underground. In this underground river are all the monsters too dark and disturbing to be allowed in the first river. You know the monsters must exist somewhere, but you can’t find them no matter how long you spend fishing in the first river.’
‘But then, how do I catch the monsters? How can I fish in the underground river?’
‘Bravo, Mr Purdew! That is, if I may say so, a highly perceptive and intelligent questio
n.’
James blushed. ‘Thank you.’
‘To which the answer is: one must fish more deeply.’
‘I don’t understand.’
The doctor smiled, as though he had just hooked a fish himself. ‘Hypnosis. Would you allow me to . . .’ The next thing James knew there was a silver watch on a chain swinging gently before his eyes. Soon after that, the watch was still and the parlour was spinning. ‘Close your eyes,’ said a voice and, in the darkness that followed, it echoed somnolently: ‘We are going back in time, James Purdew . . .’
James opened his eyes and saw Dr Lanark sitting across from him, only now there was a desk between them, and the room they sat in was not the warm, luxurious parlour, but a beige-painted office with a single high window through which daylight leaked in a desultory way. The room smelled faintly of body odour and Dr Lanark looked suddenly thinner. He was writing something on a piece of paper while James watched. ‘I knew you before,’ James said. ‘You were my . . .’
‘James!’
He was surrounded by darkness and a voice was calling. James thought at first it was his mother’s voice; that he was asleep and she was waking him. It must be time to go to school, he thought. ‘Just a bit longer, mum . . .’
‘James!’
It was not his mother. The voice was harsher than hers and the room in which he lay was warmer than his bedroom.
‘James!’
He opened his eyes and he was back in the parlour. It felt as though he had been gone a long time, but around him the scene was unchanged: the leather armchairs, the gently licking flames in the hearth, the half-smoked cigar in the ashtray, the empty armagnac glasses on the low table; the only thing that had changed was Dr Lanark. He was now a woman.
James blinked. It was Dr Lewis. Her voice and expression were as they had been before, in her office, but now she was leaning back in the armchair, her legs crossed and suddenly visible without the intervening desk. She wore black stockings and, where her white lab coat ended, halfway up her thighs, he could see her lace stocking tops and the beginnings of suspenders, some snow-white flesh and a triangle of shadow. James looked down and saw a large tent in his hospital gown. Dr Lewis was talking, but he had missed most of what she had said so far. Something about the two Dr Lanarks being clones, each mentally altered by the use of experimental medicines and conditioning. James heard himself say, ‘like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, and saw Dr Lewis smile - she was wearing red lipstick - and say, ‘Quite so.’
After that, his memory is vague and fragmentary. He remembers her red lips around the head of his penis. He remembers following her through empty white corridors. He remembers feeling cold and sad and angry and helpless. He remembers getting dressed in a men’s toilet and seeing a man who looked like Dr Lanark pissing in a urinal. He remembers discovering the exit and running through the park. He remembers lying on the ground and not being able to see. He remembers being lifted by someone else, a man in a dark coat. He remembers dozing in the back of a taxi cab with the silent man holding him round the shoulders. He remembers sitting in the back of a taxi cab and holding a thin, dark-haired girl around her shoulders. He remembers a train pulling out of a station.
James did his best to forget about this distressing experience, and because he had suffered no physical damage, this proved easier than it had after he’d been beaten up by Graham Oliver. He told himself it was just a bad dream. Dr Lewis left several messages on his mobile, but James erased them straight away and eventually she stopped calling.
Throughout the dark weeks that followed, his mental life was as smooth, blank and featureless as the surfaces he plastered and painted. Memories, like electrical wiring, were neatly covered up and hidden away. He knew they must be there, somewhere beneath the surface, but he had no desire to expose them again. What purpose would it serve?
Instead he threw himself into work, as if work were an ocean, and the days came and went like waves. He was carried by them and deposited by them. Often he thought of himself as a shipwrecked mariner, clinging to a piece of driftwood, alone in that grey and unanimous expanse of water, with nothing to see in any direction but the endless, circling horizon. The driftwood was his diary; and, just as a sailor might orient himself by the sun and stars, James took his bearings from the names of the days. Routine was his compass.
On Monday mornings he took his expenses form to Harrison Lettings. On Tuesday and Friday mornings he went to the Happy Shoppa to buy groceries. On Thursday and Sunday mornings he went running, unless it rained, in which case he did press-ups and sit-ups. On Saturday mornings he rode his bicycle to the municipal pool and swam twenty lengths. On Sunday afternoons he went to The Polar Bear to eat lunch and watch the football on television. On Wednesday, Friday and Saturday evenings he went to The Green Man. These events were his markers. All the rest of his life was white and black: the white of the paint he applied to the walls and the black of sleep.
Unconsciously he avoided his old haunts. Campus, with its youthful, happy, coupled masses, was a place to be visited only in emergencies, and he rarely went to the park or through the back alleys behind the house. It was too cold, for the most part, to sit out in the garden. And when he went to The Polar Bear he sat in the public bar, not - as he always used to - in the lounge. That still left a few places which had resonance but were unavoidable, such as the house itself and Lough Street, but he had been back in the city for months now, and the longer he stayed here, the more the new memories covered up the old. When he walked past the fountain and up to The Green Man and smelled hops in the air or was passed by a teenager on a bicycle, he was reminded of other occasions when the same confluence of events had occurred, but these occasions were more likely to have been ten weeks ago than ten years ago. The simile didn’t occur to James, but to me it seemed obvious that the city was being renovated in his mind, just as the house was being renovated at his hands. In both cases, the present was conquering the past: the old being erased to make way for the new.
Occasionally the telephone in the hallway rang, usually in the evenings. Its sound was melancholy and oddly familiar, but muffled by the wooden box, and by now James was more or less immune to it. Something in the drone of its ring made him feel the caller had no hope anyway - that whoever was at the other end knew the phone would never be answered - and this eased the guilt he felt at not answering. Even had the box not existed, he probably wouldn’t have picked up the receiver. He would hardly have known what to say, the sound of his own voice had grown so strange to his ears.
Yet still he clung to the driftwood; still he kept his diary. Nothing happened - there was nothing to write - but he wrote it anyway. His words, true to life, were stale and dull, but he could not bring himself to stop their flow. The black notebook was part of his life, and he was reluctant to abandon it. Even so, as the days grew ever shorter, the entries in his diary grew shorter too, and, after a while, less frequent. He missed the odd day, and then two or three at a time.
One day, bored and curious, he borrowed Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems from the university library. He flicked through it and, attracted by the title, read a poem called ‘Forget What Did’. This is what it said:
Stopping the diary
Was a stun to memory,
Was a blank starting,
One no longer cicatrised
By such words, such actions
As bleakened waking.
I wanted them over,
Hurried to burial
And looked back on
Like the wars and winters
Missing behind the windows
Of an opaque childhood.
And the empty pages?
Should they ever be filled
Let it be with observed
Celestial recurrences,
The day the flowers come,
And when the birds go.
James took this poem as a sign. He read it and he read it again. Then, even before he read it for a third time, he decided to stop writing h
is diary. He let go of the driftwood.
The effect was disorienting. It was like being drunk for the first time: there was a sense in which he felt giddy, liberated, rebellious; but some other part of him remained disturbed by the loss of control . . . by the idea of falling through time, of it slipping past him with no record, however small or pointless, of its ever having been.
These diaryless days made little impression on James’s memory. When he thought about them afterwards, what he saw was the slow but steady progress of the walls, floors and ceilings; the rooms turning white, one by one: the kind of scene that, in a movie, is always shown in montage, scored by light, hopeful music.
So fade the music and let us fast-forward to the moment, one dark cold evening, when James finished retiling the bathroom. He washed his hands in the sink and stepped back to look at the room. It was utterly, dazzlingly white: every surface reflected the fluorescent shaving light. He dried his hands on the white towel and walked into the sitting room. That, too, was perfectly white and finished. White sofa, white chairs, white coffee table - all as specified by the client. The white ceiling mirrored the white floor and the white walls mirrored one another. He opened the white door and went through to the kitchen. The white floor tiles, put down the previous week, gleamed stainlessly up at him. From the white vinyl work surface shone the white toaster, the white microwave and the white breadbin. James opened the white door of the refrigerator and stared at its contents, neatly arrayed on the white wire shelves: cream cheese, milk, eggs, natural yoghurt, mushrooms, white chocolate. He was hungry, so he broke off four squares of chocolate and greedily ate them. Then he walked to the hallway.
This, too, was white and perfectly finished; as were the two bedrooms that adjoined it. James exhaled with relief. He had done it. The ground floor was finished. He stood there in the hallway, waiting for a feeling of triumph to well up, but instead there was only silence - no one to whom he could tell his good news, no one to congratulate him - and a horrible emptiness deep inside him. Darkly he thought of the man who had commissioned this work: Malcolm Trewvey. He might ring to say thank you, James thought. He might send a brief note of encouragement. But James knew he would do no such thing. Malcolm Trewvey had forgotten all about him.