The Amnesiac

by Sam Taylor

  He was alone. He had devoted the last three months of his life to renovating this house - and for no one but himself. He sighed again, and looked warily, wearily up the dark flight of stairs. Of course, he thought, my work is not finished. The rest of the house is still up there, lightless and cold and mired in the past. There is a long, long way to go. And yet the thought of starting the first floor today was unbearable to James. He had worked so hard, so intensely, and he deserved some kind of rest. He deserved some kind of celebration.

  James decided to go out. He put on his coat and opened the front door. Outside, it was snowing. He looked up at the immense black-blue void, at the tiny, white crystals falling slowly towards him, and felt a sudden shiver of consciousness. He was alive and the world was beautiful. He was thirty years old and time was slipping away. He stood on the threshold for a moment, inhaling the cold, fresh-smelling air and watching his breath steam and vanish in the darkness, and then, in the distance, he heard music. It was a familiar song, and it made him feel happy and sad at the same time. No, not that song. This was a carol, sung by children. In an instant its melody carried him back to his childhood, to the suburban estate in which he had grown up. He thought of his parents, his grandmother, and with a flicker of panic he checked the date function on his watch. He knew it was a Wednesday, but what was the date? 24-12, his watch replied. Christmas Eve, thought James. He went back into the house, packed his rucksack, and within an hour was in the white van, driving south.

  In my own van - which is black, not white - I followed, a discreet distance behind.

  IV

  THE TIME MACHINE

  He stood with his elbows on the windowsill and watched the rain pour blue down the glass. Across the street was a row of identical houses, their eyes curtained and lightless; the shapes of chimneys and satellite dishes and floating raindrops were discernible in the sodium haze of the streetlamps. It was nearly midnight and the cul-de-sac was empty.

  The room in which he stood had once been his bedroom, but these days his mother called it the guest room and his father the study. It held various layers of history. Many of the objects it contained (the books on the shelves, the board games in the drawers, the brass and glass ornaments on the desk) were relics of James’s earliest childhood. The furniture, in contrast, was new, and incongruously sleek and businesslike. As for the room itself . . . well, this was not James’s childhood home - his parents had moved house when he was eighteen - but its yellow wallpaper and beige carpet provoked memories of three distinct periods of his life: the summer of the World Cup, when he had been unwell; the winter and spring when he’d been working in the pub and the warehouse, and then as a freelance journalist; and the summer before he went to university in H.

  In his mind, these memories flared, and for a few moments it was as if he were travelling through time. He turned around and saw his dream brothers in typical poses: the twenty-one-year-old hunched tensely over the computer; the twenty-five-year-old reading a newspaper in bed; the eighteen-year-old standing next to him at the window, staring out into suburban gloom. After a few moments the ghosts dissolved, and he was alone once again in this blank present, dimly aware that he too would soon be past . . . just another vague flickering sensation in the mind of some future James.

  From the room next door, he could hear his parents arguing in loud whispers. Wearily, uneasily, James thought back to the moment of his arrival, three hours earlier.

  His mother had answered the door. As soon as she saw him, she had seemed embarrassed. They had thought he wasn’t coming; that he must be too busy. Of course she was pleased to see him, but . . . couldn’t he have called to warn them? She had run upstairs to make up the sofa-bed while his father had put the kettle on and made him a sandwich. Then they had fetched his grandmother and the four of them had sat in the living room together and had a slow, distracted conversation. The five of them, I should say: James, his mum, his dad, his gran, and the television.

  ‘So,’ said James’s dad over the blare of sirens, ‘how’s it going with that house you’re doing up?’

  ‘Not bad,’ James replied. ‘I’ve finished the ground floor.’

  ‘Good. It’s progressing, then?’

  ‘Yes. It’s progressing.’

  ‘There’s one thing I don’t understand,’ said the television. ‘The window was closed, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It’s a lot of work, I imagine.’

  ‘It is, yeah. A lot of work.’

  ‘It must have been somebody she knew. She must have invited the killer into her home.’

  ‘But it’s going OK?’ his gran persisted. ‘You’re enjoying it?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s going fine.’

  ‘Good. That’s the main thing.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  They followed the murder mystery for a while. ‘It’s the stepfather, ’ his dad said. ‘It’s obvious.’

  ‘He’s got an alibi,’ said his mum.

  ‘It’ll be false. It’s always the same, this show.’

  ‘Shhh, you made me miss a bit.’

  ‘Sarge, did you see this?’ asked the television. ‘Could be a clue . . .’

  ‘So how’s work, dad?’

  ‘Same as always,’ came the toneless reply. ‘Work is work.’ Suddenly his father grew excited and shouted, ‘Look, I told you! What did I say? It’s the stepfather!’

  ‘It can’t be. It’s too early. There’s another fifteen minutes to go yet. This is a red whatsit.’

  ‘Herring,’ said his gran.

  ‘Exactly.’

  Later, when the murderer had been apprehended - it was the brother-in-law - James’s mum asked him about Ingrid. Did he want to talk about it, or . . .?

  ‘There’s nothing to say, really.’

  ‘OK. That’s fine. I understand perfectly.’

  He could see the pain and anxiety in her eyes.

  ‘She was a lovely girl, that one,’ said his dad. ‘I think you’re mad, letting her go.’

  ‘Brian, you don’t know anything about it,’ his mum scolded.

  ‘I know she was a nice girl.’

  ‘But you don’t know the . . . situation.’

  ‘We got a lovely card from her last week, didn’t we?’ added his gran.

  ‘What?’ said James.

  ‘Yes,’ said his mum. ‘She remembered us for Christmas. That was thoughtful. What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  James had not received a single letter from Ingrid since the day she left.

  ‘You know,’ said his mum in a soft voice, ‘sometimes you think something is over and it turns out later that it isn’t. It’s never too late, if . . .’

  ‘I don’t really want to talk about it, mum.’

  ‘Of course,’ she blushed. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I think I might turn in now, if that’s all right. I’m tired from the journey.’

  She kissed him on the cheek. ‘Good night, son.’

  His grandmother hugged him tight and whispered, ‘Sleep well, love.’

  His dad, eyes fixed on the screen, said, ‘Yeah, see you in the morning.’

  ‘Here are some handy hints if you’re thinking of brightening up your dull patio,’ added the television.

  He lay in bed, unable to sleep. The mattress was hard and narrow, and the pillow too thin. The radiator made loud clanking noises at irregular intervals. The light in the hallway had been left on, just as it always was when he was a child, and it spilled through the glass rectangle above his door, illuminating part of the ceiling and the far wall. Too tired to think, James found himself staring at this lit-up corner. His eyes kept crossing so the corner slipped in and out of focus. He closed his eyes.

  Hours passed, or seemed to, and still sleep did not come. He half-opened his eyes again and squinted at the corner. The lines were black and the surfaces milky white, but the longer he stared, the less sure he became of the divide between the two; they appeared to melt into one another. After a while, his head began to feel
strangely light, and he had the sensation that the corner was alive. It grew and shrank, in time with the filling and emptying of his lungs. Sometimes it was tiny and faraway, like a star; in the next breath it would invert itself and bulge towards the bed, looming over him like an angry ghost. He tried to sit up, but he couldn’t move. He knew now that the corner was slowly expanding, that the space was closing down on him; that, if the corner kept pulsing and growing in this way, soon it would fill the room and he would be suffocated silently beneath his bedclothes. ‘Mummy,’ he tried to call, but his voice made no sound. Terror gripped him. He was five years old and he was having an asthma attack.

  He was thirty years old and he couldn’t sleep.

  With a sigh of irritation, James got out of bed and put on his clothes. I may as well go for a walk, he thought. Downstairs he grabbed his coat, took the spare key from the porch, and walked out into the cul-de-sac. The rain had stopped now, and the pavements glistened. The evening snow, with its promise of whiteness, had not lasted more than a few minutes. Without thinking where he was going, James exited the cul-de-sac and crossed the main road.

  After a few minutes, he came to a place he recognised. He was standing in the centre circle of a football pitch, the goal-posts shining like vague symbols at either side. Ahead he saw the low wide bulk of the junior school. This was where he had spent half his life between the ages of four and ten. As he traversed the muddy ground, images came to his mind of small boys running, games of marbles and conkers, grey hours spent in detention during playtimes, a black, green and white anorak he used to wear, a frightening teacher with bad breath called Mr Murray, an ugly girl called Lydia Knight showing him her ginny for 20 p in the red-curtained reading corner. All of this was a reassurance: his memory worked. He was not a nobody, an amnesiac. This place was a part of his life and, now he was here, the past would reassemble itself before his eyes; he would remember.

  And yet . . . how small everything looked. Could this tiny building really be the repository for such fathoms of wonder and fear? Of course, James told himself, it looks small because you’ve grown. Once upon a time you sat in little plastic chairs like those, you stared longingly out of the window at this minuscule football pitch and thought how grand and green and magical it seemed. But could that really have been me? he wondered. Somehow the disparity in scale made him question what he had always taken for granted. Could he truly once have been a child?

  James wandered across the playground and came to a classroom window. He looked through the glass at the shadowed desks, the blackboard on the wall, the Santas made of toilet rolls, cotton wool and tinsel hanging from the ceiling like executed prisoners. Without knowing why, he felt guilty. Something to do with the determined happiness of the decorations and the way the darkness seemed to mock them. Something to do with a grown man spying on children’s innocent secrets. Once he had belonged here, but now he was an intruder and he looked for a way out. He passed the dining room and saw chairs stacked on tables. He passed the gymnasium and saw hula hoops lined neatly against a wall. Finally James found a pathway that led him to the main road. As he looked back briefly at the school and its grounds, his heart filled with an ache he couldn’t name.

  He followed the road up to the crest of the hill. It was the middle of the night and the estate was asleep. There must be thousands of people here, James thought, and I am the only one awake. Are they dreaming me or am I dreaming them? Exhaustion made him feel floaty, unsolid. He read the names on the street signs - Denbury Road, Oakfield Close, Chapel Lane - and his head was flooded with pictures. In one of those houses he had undressed an older girl called Sharon; in the pub at the end of this road he had been sick on someone’s shoes; in the woods behind that garden he had built a den with friends.

  He began taking paths at random, following the endless trail of streetlamps and staring at the illuminated pavement as he walked. Cocooned in memories, he drifted aimlessly, sightlessly, and when next he looked up he realised he had no idea where he was. He looked around: anonymous suburban houses, their windows dark; a long straight road, grass verges and young trees, circles of orange light; and, somewhere in the distance, a silhouette under a streetlamp. It was silent, but he could hear music: a well-known song whose chorus never seemed to arrive, as though the record had stuck. On James walked, his pace slowing, and imperceptibly the street seemed to change: the houses grew taller, narrower, older; the road broadened slightly and parked cars appeared along one side; front gardens shrank and iron gates appeared. And, at his side, there was someone else . . . a girl. He could feel her shoulder leaning against him, and instinctively he put an arm behind her back. He was wearing a long, heavy coat with a silk lining and he could smell the girl’s perfume, sweet and familiar, and as they continued walking, ever more slowly, as though reluctant to reach their destination, her head touched his shoulder and he felt her hair on his face, and now he could remember her name in his mouth, his jaw lowering, lips widening, the tip of his tongue touching the hard strip of flesh above his front teeth to make the beloved sound. Ahead of him the silhouette moved forward and he saw that it was a policeman. The policeman stared at them for a moment, then said ‘Good evening’, and James nodded in reply. The girl murmured something, her breath warm on his neck as she spoke. And then, just as he was feeling utterly blissful and content, something odd happened; something irreconcilable. He was no longer walking with the girl along the street; he was watching the two of them (her and himself?) from above. The air was warmer now, he could smell honeysuckle, and the bliss he felt before had turned sour, haunted, anguished. He said her name again, inside his mouth, and then everything was black and James didn’t know where he was.

  He stared at the surrounding darkness in confusion. The ground was sloping upward as he walked. He breathed in and could smell rain, tarmac, planked wood, cat piss. And then it came to him: he was not on Lough Street, not in H. at all, but inside an alleyway in the suburban estate where he had grown up. James sighed and kept walking. It had not been real, after all; just another hallucination of the past. And yet still the mingled emotions lingered: bliss and anguish; one memory with two faces. And the song repeating in his mind . . .

  He wished it away and forced himself to concentrate on the here and now. An alleyway. The estate was veined with such paths, he recalled: narrow, ever-dark, steeply sloping. This one, like all the others, was protected on either side by tall wooden fences, and crossed above by overhanging tree branches. It seemed to go on forever. His calves were aching now, and he had to stop for a second. In the sudden silence he thought he could hear footsteps behind him, but when he turned around there was only darkness. He listened closely: no sound but the quiet internal roaring of his own lungs and blood. Another hallucination, James told himself, and began walking again.

  Halfway up the alley, he noticed a light in a window and stood still, staring at it. The drawn curtains were red and seemed to glow, like the inside of his eyelid when he closed it against the sun. With a shock, James realised where he was. This had been Jane Lipscombe’s house. Her bedroom window. His breaths grew slower, felt darker. In his mind, a decade was compressed into a second: he saw her in the window as the large-eyed six-year-old who used to follow him around the playground and, simultaneously, as the tall sixteen-year-old in the blue skirt, sitting at the desk in front, secreting pheromones that drifted over his maths test, blurring the equations, eating up the air in the room. Sighing, James moved on.

  As he entered more deeply into the alleyway, he found himself thinking of lost friends. Jane Lipscombe, Philip Bates, Clare Budd . . . He thought of all the people he had known here but with whom he was no longer in touch, their faces moving past in a floating identity parade. And then he tried to imagine what he had always taken for granted: that these people were alive, somewhere in the world, at this instant. That, if they looked up now, as he was doing, they would see that same moon, those same clouds and stars. (Or perhaps they wouldn’t. Perhaps they were on the other
side of the world, where it was daytime and summer.) He thought about the idea that these people were alive, not only now, when he was thinking about them, but all the time. At every instant. Doing something, thinking something, seeing, feeling, experiencing a life utterly estranged from his. He tried to imagine how he seemed to these other people. Did he ever cross their minds the way they were crossing his now? Was he anything more to them than a momentarily recalled image, an unidentifiable twinge somewhere in the stomach or the chest . . . He thought of ringing them up or writing to them, if only to ensure that he could, for that instant, exist again in their self-contained universe, pass across the sky of their mind.

  This is my life, thought James, looking around at the alleyway and the dark suburb beyond. This is where I entered the maze. This is where I come from.

  And yet, a cold voice reminded him, these events, these images lived only in his memory; the suburb knew nothing of them. The suburb existed only in the present. The people in his mind were surely long gone by now, living elsewhere, pursuing careers, perhaps even married, their ties to childhood as stretched and fragile as his own. For all his memories, James was a stranger here. He was alone.

  Emerging from the alleyway, he followed a path through a small wood and into a long, brightly lit street. For a moment he merely frowned - where was he? - and then recognition hit him. Of course . . . this was Commercial Drive. He turned right and walked past sloping driveways and front gardens, their details familiar but rendered strange by the lamplight. His heart was beating faster. Number 36, number 38, number 40 . . . he was nearly there now, he knew. Finally he came to number 46, and stood in the driveway, staring up at it. There it was: the house where his parents used to live; the house in which his childhood had been spent. Home.