The Amnesiac

by Sam Taylor

  I must have been eight or nine years old, and I was obsessed by the idea of time travel. I don’t think I had read H. G. Wells by then, so my fantasies were probably inspired by the television series Dr Who. Even without that model, however, I suspect the idea of travelling through time is something I might have dreamed up on my own. I was fascinated by it. One rainy holiday I spent days, weeks, inventing and building my own time machine. It was made from paper and cardboard and painted beautiful colours and I kept it under the desk in my bedroom. Each morning I would crawl in there, strap myself in, close my eyes, and count backwards from 100. When I reached zero I would open my eyes and find myself in Ancient Rome or medieval England or the Wild West, or I would go and visit my grandparents, back when they were young, in the days when everything was black and white. But the journey that excited me most of all was when I visited the future.

  The future! How that word used to thrill me. Later, when I was a teenager and had given up my time-travel fantasies, I would stand with my face pressed to the bedroom window, looking down at the suburban street and imagining that I would suffocate if the future did not, in the very next moment, swoop down and rescue me from the prison cell of the present. The future! How did I see it, when I was nine? Oddly perhaps, my visions were not of shining cities or high-speed spacecraft, but of myself, grown, changed, living in a world that was subtly different to the world in which I lived then. In the future, I believed, I would not exist within the confines of days and nights, waking and sleeping, working and eating, staring through windows, as I had always done before. No, in the future, I would truly live . . .

  I remember being nervous at the idea of meeting the grown-up me; nervous that he would not recognise me, or would disapprove, or be embarrassed by my presence. It never occurred to me that I might be less than enraptured by him - by the person I had become. I talked to my dad about this, and he pointed out that, theoretically, there wouldn’t be only one future version of myself, but literally thousands. The thought enchanted and disturbed me: all those future me’s, those nearly identical versions of myself, like Tomas Ryal’s Mnemen, one for each day of my life, existing somewhere, watching my progress through time . . . I remember wishing that I could befriend one of them: a me slightly older than I was then; a kind and caring me who could recall how confusing and frightening it felt to be eight or nine or ten; who could hold my hand and guide me through the labyrinth of childhood.

  I don’t remember if I ever ‘met’ any of my future, adult selves. The one image that remains with me from those childish yearnings is of a handsome, wide-shouldered, unshaven, sleepy-eyed young man in a leather jacket, standing in a sparsely furnished loft apartment, sunshine pouring in through the skylight, bending down to wake the drowsy naked girl beneath the sheets on the vast double bed: an image taken, I am fairly sure, from a TV commercial for a credit card or a car. Yet how ironic it seems to me now that, in the moment when my life began to come undone, I was living in a world that corresponded almost perfectly to my nine-year-old self’s idyllic vision of the future.

  James put down the pen and the notebook. That was the end of the memory. I watched him from the other side of the room, barely breathing, wondering if he might make the next mental leap and discover my identity. But, as usual, he was distracted by his emotions. What he was feeling now, spoiling his excitement about this discovered fragment of the forgotten past, was a mixture of sadness and regret. A picture of Ingrid flashed in his mind again, and he blinked it away. He made himself a cup of tea, ate some chocolate and talked to his grandmother for a while. Then he went back upstairs and opened the third box.

  Hours passed and he was crawling over a carpet of photographs. It was like staring into a gigantic smashed mirror, his face reflected a thousandfold, and seeing only strangers. Finally, halfway through the final packet, James found a picture that made something move inside him.

  It was a photograph of himself, standing on a train platform. He wore a faded denim jacket which looked too big for him - his wrists seemed tiny, emerging from the wide cuffs - and carried a large rucksack. His face, though tanned, was covered with spots. A stranger might have guessed that the boy in the picture was fifteen or sixteen, but James remembered the moment it was taken and he knew that he had in fact been eighteen, and on his way to Paris for the first time. He closed his eyes, now, in the present, and saw and heard the bustle of the station around him, felt sunlight on his face, wind in his hair, saw his parents standing in front of him, his mum looking anxious, his dad winking through the viewfinder of the camera. And he felt again the queasy melancholy he had felt then, and remembered its cause.

  James sighed. He had found it at last: a crack in the wall of time . . . a tunnel into the past. He opened the white notebook and began to write.

  Memoirs of an Amnesiac

  CHAPTER 2

  My parents waved as the train pulled away. I waved back, but I was facing the other way, so the farewell was a brief one. In a few seconds they were gone from my frame of vision and the horizon was rushing towards me. I felt excited, but with the faintest stain of some other emotion: some subtle commingling of sadness, regret and the desire to forget. What was it I wished had not happened? What was it I was trying not to remember? Her name was Jane Lipscombe, and I had known her since I was a little boy.

  She sat next to me, our first day in junior school; I remember thinking how annoying it was that I had to sit next to a girl. She had shoulder-length, dark blonde hair and a somewhat solemn face with soft unfocused freckles that looked, from a distance, like smudges of dirt. She was tall for a girl, even then. She used to chew her lips. I didn’t think much about her at the time, but she quickly became obsessed by me. All the other girls in the school would fall in love with someone new every week, but for a reason I could never fathom, Jane singled me out as the sole, enduring object of her affections. For most of the school year, this obsession would manifest itself as little more than a general mooniness: she was forever following me silently down corridors, sitting close to me at lunch and assembly, watching expressionlessly as I played football with my friends in the playground. Both of us were teased about this, of course; Jane seemed not to mind, but I did, and would sometimes say and do horrible things to her in order to show the others that our apparent closeness was nothingto do with me. She never took offence, though, even when I yelled at her to leave me alone or put a spider in her hair or called her ‘Jane the Pain’. Only once did I hurt her. It was Valentine’s Day and she had baked me a whole box of heart-shaped biscuits. She put it on my desk and kissed me on the cheek. Everybody jeered. Blushing, I began breaking the biscuits into pieces and sharing them out with the rest of the class. ‘I baked them for you,’ Jane told me afterwards in a serious voice. I felt so ashamed, I couldn’t speak. We were ten years old.

  When we moved up to secondary school, the atmosphere changed. The school was a large comprehensive in a mining village a few miles from the suburban estate where we lived. I didn’t like most of the boys in my class: they were thick and aggressive and bigger than me. But I did like the girls. They were bigger than me too. I remember them, at that age, all being tall and thin, standing round me in a circle and telling me their dirty secrets. I don’t know why they chose to confide in me - perhaps because I looked (and was) so innocent - but within a few weeks I knew exactly who had been fingerfucked by their boyfriend the night before, who was on the pill, whose nipples were constantly erect, who used to ‘go all wet’ at the sight of the lads in the sixth form playing football. This was the most intensive, useful education I ever received, and it was worth going to school for those lunch-break tutorials, if nothing else.

  As for Jane the Pain, well . . . she disappears from my memory around this point. She was in a different registration class, and I suppose we saw each other less often. The next time we sat together was in German. This was in the second or third year, so Jane and I would have been twelve or thirteen. Our teacher was a middle-aged German woman whose
name I don’t remember, but who was obviously of a rather nervous disposition; such weakness is always picked up on by groups of schoolchildren, and Frau X was relentlessly teased and bullied. She responded by either running out of the room in tears or screaming and throwing things at us (blackboard rubbers, pencil sharpeners, crumpled homework assignments): both responses which delighted her pupils. As a result of her wild temperament, the classes were invariably anarchic and soon became an opportunity to do whatever we pleased. For Jane and I, this turned out to be a kind of erotic tickling. I have a vivid memory, possibly an amalgamation of several different times, of the two of us sitting at the back of the classroom, white daylight (snow?) shining through the windows behind us, blue-uniformed adolescents shouting and standing on desktops in front of us, and the two of us oblivious to it all, exploring each other’s erogenous zones with thumbs, fingertips and palms. Sometimes this would get painful, but mostly it was pure pleasure. I used to get an erection just thinking about German.

  Despite this weekly intercourse, I never thought of Jane in ‘that’ way. She was (kind of) a friend; she made me laugh, and she gave me a hard-on; but, perhaps because I had developed the reflex of pushing her away from me during those years in junior school, she never even entered my mind when I thought about possible girlfriends. (And I thought about possible girlfriends pretty much all the time back then.)

  This situation changed one evening, at a school disco. It must have been summer because I remember the curtains in the assembly hall being closed to keep out the daylight. I also remember that the hall was lined with plastic chairs, on which the girls sat, while the boys hung around the drinks table, downing plastic cups of lemonade and cola in the same nonchalant but determined way they would later knock back pints of beer. I spent most of the evening in a state of inertia, hopelessly eyeing up my current favourites, but then - how and why I have no idea - I worked up the nerve to ask Tess Mallow to dance with me. Tess had long dark hair, a pretty face, a slim body, and was above all very quiet, sweet and mysterious-looking; the kind of girl with whom I would, I thought, stand no chance. It must have been the last song, a slow song (‘True’ by Spandau Ballet? ‘The Power of Love’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood?), because we danced in each other’s arms. As the music ended, Tess moved her face towards mine. I pursed my lips, and felt a soft tongue. She looked at me curiously, and then tried again. This time we kissed, awkwardly, messily, sexlessly, but I didn’t care. It was my first kiss, and it was Tess Mallow. I couldn’t believe my luck.

  I didn’t see Tess the next morning, but I spent the hours floating around school, dreaming of her. This was, I think, the last day of term. Certainly, it has that feel in my memory. I have a vague recollection of there being balloons on the ceiling, and of us having a lot of free time. Anyway, I can find no other explanation for the fact that Jane was able to ask me out while we sat in the school library. She did so very calmly and gently; she didn’t seem nervous, although I suppose she must have been. I said no with equal gentleness and calmness. I am proud of myself in retrospect, even if the answer I gave was the wrong one. I explained that I liked her a lot and normally would have been happy to go out with her, but that I had kissed Tess Mallow at the school disco the night before and, even though I didn’t know what would happen between us, I felt I had to give that relationship a chance to develop. (It seems strange, I admit, that at thirteen I should have been speaking like this - like an adult - but that is how I remember it.) Anyway, Jane didn’t give up that easily. I remember her pleading with me - seductively, not whiningly - for what felt like half an hour or so, saying that I’d only had one little kiss with Tess, but that she and I had been touching one another for a whole year; that, in effect, she was real while Tess Mallow was only an illusion. ‘We have fun, don’t we?’ she said. I agreed that we did. ‘So think how much more fun we could have if we were going out together . . .’ The strange thing to me now is that I don’t even remember feeling tempted: I had given my heart to Tess Mallow, I said, and there was nothing I could do to change that.

  How I came to regret that decision! Things never worked out with Tess; indeed, they never even got started, though that was entirely my fault, not hers. What happened, I think, was that I asked her out that afternoon, in her form room; she was surrounded by friends and must have felt embarrassed, so she just said, ‘Maybe.’ I nodded and walked away, and she called out, ‘I’ll phone you.’ Two or three days into the summer holiday, my dad came to get me in my room. He said there was a call for me - ‘from a girl’. He may have winked, or perhaps he only raised his eyebrows. The telephone was in the hallway, and he and my mum were in the kitchen; the door between the two rooms was ajar. I don’t know if they were listening or not, but I was very aware that they were interested, and that knowledge made me desperate to end the call as quickly as possible; it also, to me, made it seem impossible that I could say yes. So when Tess asked if I would go to the cinema with her the following night - when the illusion turned suddenly real - I blurted out, ‘Sorry, I can’t, I’m busy,’ and hung up. My parents looked at me as I entered the kitchen; I only shrugged and said, ‘It was nothing.’ Poor Tess. I don’t remember ever speaking to her again.

  That must, I think, have been the summer that Jane Lipscombe walked on to the squash court where I was playing with my friend Philip Bates, and began undressing. Yet I may not be right about this: it’s all so mixed up. In my mind, the gap of time between her asking me out and her entering the squash court feels immense, more like two years than two months, but then time did move more slowly when I was young. And besides, I have no other way to account for all that lost time.

  When I bring the memory to mind, my body reacts now as it did then: muscles tighten, lungs graze, legs weaken as though I am standing in a suddenly descending lift. I remember the knowing, half-glazed look in her eyes when she opened the door in the back wall of the sweltering squash court. ‘Do you mind if I get changed in here, James?’ That voice, deeper than before, suddenly full of secrets. I shook my head. I don’t recall what clothes she was wearing, nor what clothes she changed into. But I remember watching her walk, with a strange, swaying assurance, towards the back corner of the court, out of sight of the viewing balcony above us, and slowly, casually strip down to her underwear. I remember Philip turning away from her, with an odd smirk on his face. I remember not being able to take my eyes off her. More than anything I remember the seeming vastness of her breasts, and my disbelief, akin almost to fear, at their growth. I remember the goosebumps on her thighs and the warm thickness of the air and the sound of the squash ball going thwack thwack thwack against the wall as Philip waited for her to leave the court.

  Could she really have changed so much in the space of a few weeks? I honestly don’t know. It may just have been that I wasn’t really looking at her before this; that I was blind to the changes taking place in her. Either way, the effect was the same. The balance of the scales tipped. The world turned upside down. From the moment she stripped off in that humid white-walled room, our positions were reversed: the years of hopeless desire were transferred instantly from her to me, and I felt at once the unbearable burden of wanting and not being wanted. I fell in love with Jane Lipscombe just as she fell out of love with me.

  I suppose, looking back, I was in love with Jane for the next five years - I was certainly in lust with her - but I should add that within that time there were various degrees of obsession. Were you to plot my feelings on a graph, you would see little hills and valleys, but only two major peaks. The first occurred during the late autumn and early winter following the squash court incident, when we were fourteen, and ended when Jane told me she had a boyfriend: a twenty-year-old car mechanic called Trev. The second peak rose more slowly during the upper sixth, when we were seventeen, and kept rising until the bitter end, a few days before I went to Paris.

  But between these two major blooms of love, I was not as faithful in my yearnings as Jane had been. At that age I was forever day
dreaming of sexual acts, leaving my shirt untucked to cover up the constantly painful bulge in my trousers, furtively rubbing my legs against those of strange girls and women who sat next to me on the bus. And I was forever falling in love. I remember the names of some of those girls now - Vicki Stead, Emma Morley, Claire Conn, Nikki Kewell, Katie Blair, Lisa Wyatt - and their sound is like a litany of beauty, ripeness, unattainability; like an atlas of far-off countries I would never get to visit.

  Reading my diary from that time, I am struck above all by the repetitiveness of the pattern of my falling in love. From a distance there seems something almost rhythmical about it. The process, from beginning to end, would last between two and six weeks, and afterwards there would be a disgusted period of désintoxication , during which I would go back to the other interests and obsessions that sustained my adolescence: poetry, politics, football, music, dreams of travel and writing. This period would last perhaps a couple of months, but after that I would begin to feel empty, restless, unfulfilled, and the process would begin again. It’s hard to say what was at the root of this peculiar persistence - the power of young hope? the unquenchability of young desire? Perhaps, but I suspect the truth is that I would simply forget. Forget the agony, the humiliation. Forget not to fall in love again.