by Sam Taylor
He was so surprised to hear his name that his bowels relaxed and let out a machine-gun fart of extraordinary duration. There was a brief silence, during which James held his breath, then his father said something and suddenly there was a banging at the door, a strange man’s mocking voice, and peals of laughter. The door handle moved up and down and James stared desperately at the slender bolt, praying it would not give way. Sweat poured down his face. The stink in the bathroom was unbearable now. Finally, to James’s relief, the voices went quieter and a door closed, reducing them to a distant murmur.
When he was finished, James washed his hands and face and opened the bathroom door. He looked out warily into the hallway. It was empty. He was about to go upstairs and hide in his room, but curiosity overcame him. He hadn’t even known his parents had friends; now, it seemed, they were at the centre of a lively social circle, and his father, normally so shy and gruff, had turned into some kind of raconteur. It was all too strange, and James felt compelled at least to see these people’s faces.
Trying not to make any noise, he pressed down on the handle and opened the sitting-room door a few inches. He could smell cigar smoke and hear music and echoing conversations. But still he couldn’t see anything more than a few inches of wallpaper, so he pushed the door again. It squeaked on its hinges and the room fell quiet. A hundred eyes were staring at James. He was about to mumble something and leave when a man’s loud voice said, ‘James! Come in, mate, we were just talking about you!’
Astonished, James looked at the man who had spoken: he was florid-cheeked, balding, obviously drunk, and dressed in a check suit and bow tie. More to the point, despite his familiar tone, James felt certain he had never seen the man before in his life.
‘Sorry?’ he said in a cold voice.
‘Sorry?’ The man cruelly imitated James’s voice, and then laughed. ‘Ooh, aren’t we posh?’ The room was filled with shrieking, braying laughter.
Without really knowing what he was doing, James moved towards the man. ‘Who are you?’
‘Who am I? Blimey! Didn’t the doorman introduce me? Have him sacked, somebody - that’s outrageously negligent!’ Again the room erupted into laughter, and the man, clearly enjoying himself, pressed home his advantage. ‘Or perhaps he did introduce me and you didn’t hear because you were too busy farting?’
There was uproar at this - hoots, cackles and a whole range of imitation trump noises. Furious, James scanned the faces for his parents and grandmother. He was sure they must be equally angry at this man’s rudeness. He wanted his dad to grab the man by the arms and brusquely escort him outside. He wanted his mum to slap the man’s face, his gran to knee him in the balls. But then James finally saw them, all three together, and realised that they were laughing too.
The man was staring insolently at James. When the laughter had died down, he said, ‘Your parents and your gran were just telling us about when you were young, James. You were a strange one, weren’t you? Writing poetry! Too shy to go out with girls! Always ill and daydreaming, playing with your imaginary friends . . . Such a sensitive boy, as that Portuguese doctor said when you had your first asthma attack.’
James gasped. He couldn’t believe his parents would have revealed such personal details to a stranger.
‘And how about that time you pissed yourself in someone else’s house because you were playing Monopoly and you were afraid someone would cheat if you left the room? Ha! Or the day those older lads called you a bum boy and stole your trousers and hung them from the top of the tree in the school grounds and you had to run back home in your underpants, crying! That was a good one, eh?’
The people around the man were weeping with laughter. James wanted to punch his face, but the cruel words seemed to disable him. He was so shamed by these forgotten memories that it was as if he had become that small child again, weak and helpless in front of everybody.
‘Oh yes,’ said the man, when the laughter had died down again. ‘Some of the things you did were quite funny. But then you got older, didn’t you, James? You became a teenager. A sulky, stuck-up, smart-arsed teenager. You know what it was like living with you then? Do you? What was it like, Maggie?’
‘Hell,’ said his grandmother, in a venomous voice.
James stared at her, dumbfounded.
‘How would you describe it, Brian?’
‘A living nightmare,’ said his father, without irony.
‘What about you, Penny?’
James looked at his mum pleadingly. She bit her lip, looked away, and said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said James.
‘Sorry?’ laughed the man. ‘We’ve hardly begun. Better wait till we’ve finished before you start apologising, you little twat.’
James does not remember all the vile accusations the man made against him during the long, awful minutes that followed, all the personal embarrassments and petty misdemeanours he exposed to this group of drunken, laughing strangers. Some of the incidents seemed unfamiliar and James began to wonder if the man was making them up, but after a while he lost the power to distinguish fact from fiction. Even if they were invented, he told himself, that doesn’t mean they’re not true: deep down, you must deserve the hell this stranger is giving you, not for the minor crimes he has inventoried, but for a major one that he hasn’t. Something large and dark and unspoken. Something only he, James, knew about, and which he had forgotten. His own guilty secret.
After that he must have said or done something because the next thing he knew, the whole room had been silenced, and all the laughing eyes had grown shocked and serious. People were shaking their heads, turning away in silence. Quickly and quietly the strangers said their goodbyes and filed out of the room, each of them pausing before James to stare contemptuously. And then he saw his mother crying, and his father and grandmother comforting her.
‘Mum,’ he said, but no one seemed to hear.
Alone, he left the room and climbed the stairs.
The next morning, when James woke up and the memories returned to him, he told himself they couldn’t be true. His gran would never had said ‘Hell’ like that. His parents would not have let a stranger insult him. His memory must have merged, during the night, with his dreams, and now he could no longer tell where one ended and the other began.
Even so, he still had the uneasy sensation that these little lies were half-covering some bigger truth. Again he thought of the three missing years. What had happened to him? What had he done? It suddenly occurred to James that he should ask his parents. They hadn’t been in H. with him, of course; they might not know the whole story. But surely they would have some inkling, some vague idea.
There was a soft knocking at the door. ‘Come in,’ James said, deciding that he would apologise to his mother for all he had ever done to upset her, tell her how much he loved her, and then ask her to help him with something. When he looked up, however, he saw that the person carrying the heavily loaded tray towards his bed was not his mother but his grandmother.
‘Good morning,’ she said cheerfully, her voice vibrating slightly with the effort of holding the tray.
‘Gran, let me help you . . .’
‘No, you’re all right!’ she shouted, lurching suddenly to one side. Some tea spilled on the floor and pain creased her face.
James got out of bed quickly and steadied the tray with his hands. He could hear his grandmother breathing fast. On the tray was a pot of tea, a rack of toast and a full English breakfast. ‘You shouldn’t be carrying all that,’ said James.
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Her face was red and she was swaying.
‘Sit down, gran. Have a rest.’
‘Well, maybe for a little while.’
She sat on the bed. When she had got her breath back, she urged him to eat his breakfast.
‘Delicious,’ he mumbled.
She explained that his parents had gone away for a few days, so she would be ‘looking after’ him instead. James felt a
spasm of anxiety at the news - why and where had his parents gone? - but smiled so as not to alarm his gran. ‘That’s nice,’ he said, ‘although really I should be looking after you.’
‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ his gran replied. ‘Do you remember when I used to look after you when you were a little boy? You used to come to my house every other weekend.’
James frowned. There was a fuzzy picture in his mind. ‘Was there a gas fire?’
‘That’s right. And we used to sit and eat toasted crumpets in front of it in the evening. Do you remember that?’
‘I think so. So did I sleep at your house, then?’
‘Many times. And when you did, I’d always make you a full English breakfast and bring it to you in bed. You remember that, don’t you?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Oh, I thought you’d remember the breakfasts.’ She looked crestfallen. ‘What about our backgammon games? And when we made boats out of paper and floated them in the reservoir? And when I took you to see my boss Johnny at the bookmaker’s and he’d spin you round on his chair . . .’
James shook his head. ‘Sorry.’
His gran sucked her false teeth and he thought for a moment she was going to cry. But finally she said, in a low thoughtful voice, ‘Never mind. It’ll maybe come back to you when you’re older.’
He looked at her, surprised. ‘Do you think so?’
‘Oh yes. I remember ever so much more now than I used to when I was your age. It’s probably because I spend more time remembering now. The older I get, the more details I can make out, like with a telescope, little things far off in the distance. All the way back to when I was a ween.’
‘Hang on, I thought a ween was a baby.’
‘Aye. A toddler. A littlun. I remember being pushed in my pram and laughing at the big faces. I remember walking for the first time, and falling into my dad’s arms . . .’ James looked at her sceptically. Such memories were, he was fairly sure, impossible. Presumably his gran merely imagined she could remember such events. ‘I remember the bedroom I used to sleep in with my brothers and sisters. There were five of each, you know; I was the youngest of eleven kids . . .’
James, impatient, interrupted her. ‘Gran, do you remember what happened to me when I was at university?’
There was a long pause and his grandmother’s face turned white. ‘Well . . .’ she said finally, her voice weak. ‘Well, you were ill, weren’t you, love?’
‘Ill?’
‘Yes. You were . . . not yourself.’ She gave him a fearful look. ‘I don’t know any more than that, love. Just that you weren’t well and now you’re better. Some things are best forgotten, you know.’ She stood up and began straightening the duvet, her hands shaking slightly. ‘So anyway, I grew up with all these brothers and sisters, and I still remember when . . .’
James sighed. Evidently his grandmother wasn’t going to tell him any more than she already had. She continued talking, but James had heard all this before and he soon stopped listening. He was thinking about what she had said earlier. She remembered more because she spent more time remembering. Could this be true? If so, it meant his cause was not hopeless after all. The few blurred fragments that he could recall from his childhood . . . perhaps if he spent more time thinking about them, they would sharpen into focus, other details would be revealed, forgotten events called back from the darkness. He thought of the previous attempts he had made to write his memoirs. He had been trying to follow the thread back through the maze, but these attempts had failed because the thread had been cut long before. The only way to retrieve those lost years was to enter the maze at the beginning. But the true beginning - his birth - was for ever lost. What he needed was some other entry point; a crack in the wall of time. Not a memory - they were too hazy, too prone to change - but something solid. Something immutable. Suddenly it came to him. ‘Gran, do you have any photos?’
‘Of course, love - I’ve got a big book full of ’em. Right from when I was a baby to when I got married . . .’
‘No, I mean photos of my childhood.’
‘Oh, right. I’ve got the lovely framed ones, but I think your dad put most of the old pictures in boxes. To protect them, like.’
‘And where are the boxes?’
She pointed with her eyes to the ceiling.
There were three boxes, all made of thick grey cardboard, with neatly fitting lids. James brought them down from the attic, one by one, and wiped away the coating of dust. The boxes were heavy. On the first box, in black felt pen on a white label, it said, ‘72-76’; on the second, ‘77-84’; and on the third, ‘85-92’.
He opened the first box. Inside were eighteen packets of photographs, each marked with a season and year. He laid the packets out in chronological order on the floor of the spare room and began with the earliest: Summer 72. This was a year before James’s birth. The photographs seemed to have been taken mostly on a foreign holiday: there were palm trees and mountains and dramatic sunsets in the background. It was strange to see his parents looking so young - younger than he himself was now. In the photographs, his father was always laughing; he had shoulder-length hair and a gingery beard, and wore shorts and T-shirts and little round sunglasses. Less extrovert, his mother tended to smile beatifically; she had long hair and her pert breasts were clearly visible beneath the blouses and summer dresses she wore. Both of them looked happy and in love. James could not believe these people had become his parents; or, rather, he could not believe that his parents had once been these people.
The second and third packets were more or less the same, but with different clothes and backgrounds. There were gloomy-looking interiors and crowds of other people: James recognised certain relatives and friends, but most were strangers to him. The fourth packet contained his parents’ official wedding pictures, the fifth their honeymoon snapshots. James skipped these as he had seen them many times before. But the sixth packet - Winter 72/3 - was completely new to him. There were images of several houses, one of which he recognised as 46 Commercial Drive, the house in which he had grown up. The other houses, he guessed, must have been places his parents had visited with estate agents around the same time. He stared at these with fascination. Had they made a different choice, taken a different path, it might be these anonymous living rooms and staircases and brick façades that were making his heart swell.
He dwelled lovingly on the photographs with his old house and garden in the background. It was comforting to know that, even if the physical realities themselves had been erased, removed, destroyed, then at least these paper images of them remained, slowly fading perhaps, but not distorting or whispering lies as his memories did. And yet, as he examined the pictures’ little details - the patterns on carpets and wallpaper and curtains, the fabric of sofas and shirts and coats - he could-n’t help feeling slightly disappointed. Oh yes, he thought, that’s how it was. Now he could see these things before his eyes, they seemed suddenly less wondrous than they had before, when they had been only memories, floating hazily in his mind. For the first time it occurred to James that memory might, after all, be his mind’s way of making the past seem more beautiful and mysterious than it truly had been; that his memory, far from being an enemy, was perhaps his closest friend.
There was one strange photograph at the end of the sixth packet: it was taken in the kitchen and James could see the garden, dark with rain, in the background. In the centre of the frame his mother stood in profile, wearing striped pyjamas and lifting up the top so that her breasts were half-revealed. Yet there was nothing salacious about the picture. James couldn’t figure out what it meant until he came across an almost identical image in the next packet; the only differences he could see were that the garden looked brighter and his mother’s stomach slightly larger. And then he realised. His mother was not the subject of this photograph at all. He was.
I look like a gift, he thought: a small, mysterious shape covered in someone else’s skin. In the eighth packet the gift was unwrapped -
and there he lay, naked and screaming, swaddled and asleep. There were dozens of photographs of this small, helpless creature, but they meant nothing to James. Plainly there was no real connection between the newborn baby in the photographs and the thirty-year-old man who held and stared at them. They shared a name, a set of genes, but nothing else. They were not the same person. They were not even similar. James shook his head. He had imagined that looking at photographs of himself as a child would have helped him to understand how he had changed, but it seemed only to annihilate the possibility of any such understanding. It was inconceivable, and that was all. It could not be.
Through the next ten packets of photographs, James watched the impossible slowly occur. In poorly lit bedrooms and in dazzling gardens, the baby grew longer and thinner, sat up, began crawling, stood on two feet and took its first steps. There was no punctuation; there were no chapters to this story. James sat on his dad’s shoulders (the beard had gone now, he noticed) and James played football. James stroked a cat and James climbed a tree. James made a sandcastle and James slept on the sofa. He put the packets back in the first box and, as before, he was overcome by the certainty that he would never be able to write Memoirs of an Amnesiac, Chapter 1. Whatever his grandmother might say, the truth was that his early childhood was irrecoverable. Those pages must remain blank.
When he opened the second box, however, things began to change. Some of these photographs had been taken when he was nine or ten years old, and he recognised many of the locations and other people. But each time he closed his eyes and tried to let the memory unfold, he was disappointed. His mind was unable to move beyond the frame of the photograph. The sole exception to this was a picture of a large cardboard box painted silver and blue. As soon as James saw this, he felt a mysterious flame inside him. What was it? He couldn’t tell, but he knew that it had meant something to him, that there must be a story behind it: photographs of cardboard boxes did not normally make his heart beat faster. He examined the image more carefully: there were words and numbers written on the side of the box. What did they say? Unable to make them out, he took a magnifying glass from the drawer of the desk and looked again. ‘1995 - 2000 - 2005 . . .’ James gasped as the memory came to life. He grabbed a biro and his white notebook and began to write. This is what he wrote: