by Sam Taylor
On the ninth day, we took our last exam - the English oral - and then we were free. It was one o’clock in the afternoon; another scorcher of a day. We gathered, all two dozen of us, in the sixth-form block. Some people burned their essays and exercise books, others stared moodily at the school they were about to leave. After half an hour or so, we set off for the pub - The Archer, across the road from the school entrance - where we ate sandwiches and crisps for lunch and then got steadily drunk.
I have no memory of what happened that day. I never had any memory of it. When I woke the next morning, hungover and fully clothed in my bed, those hours were already a blank. I began to put the pieces of the puzzle together that afternoon, when Philip Bates came round for a cup of tea. He, too, was hungover, but he was in a light-hearted mood.
‘You were pretty smashed yesterday.’
‘No worse than normal.’
‘You’re kidding. Don’t you remember?’
‘Er . . . not much.’
‘Oh.’
‘Why, what happened?’
‘Well . . . I never knew you felt that way about Jane Lipscombe for a start.’
‘Didn’t you? I thought it was obvious.’
‘No, I mean, I knew you fancied her, but ...’
‘But what?’
‘You were all over her.’
‘Oh come on, we’re like that in English class ...’
‘I’ve never seen you crying in an English class.’
‘Crying?’
‘For hours. Fucking hell, do you really not remember?’
Eventually, after a tortuous hour of prompting, I was able to work out from Philip’s hints a rough sequence of events. I had begun, as I dimly recalled, by stroking Jane’s leg. Then I started kissing her hands, her cheeks, her neck, and telling her how much I loved her. She smiled through this, replying that I was just drunk. Then I began touching her breasts. She showed the first signs of embarrassment. I sat on her lap and attempted to kiss her on the mouth. After a while, she stood up to leave. I started crying. I pleaded with her not to go. I promised to be good. I asked her to marry me. At some point she mentioned that she had a boyfriend, and he probably wouldn’t be very pleased if she married someone else. ‘Oh bloody Trev,’ I slurred, ‘what a wanker.’ ‘He certainly is,’ she replied coolly. ‘I dumped him over a year ago.’ And thus I discovered that, for nine months, Jane had been single; had in fact been waiting for me to ask her out. But I had been infatuated with Clare Budd at the time, and then, just at the moment when I began paying more attention to Jane again, she had met Mark, her new boyfriend. It was too late. I had blown my chance. Apparently I wept desperately at this news, and had to be escorted out of the pub because my behaviour was upsetting the regulars. Jane tried to comfort me, but I was too caught up in my own tears, and in the end she left without even saying goodbye. After that, the details are unimportant: a taxi home . . . vomiting in the sink . . . more crying. David said I talked to him for about an hour before falling asleep: a rambling, incoherent monologue about Adam Draycott and dark-eyed schoolgirls, the death of youth and the need for poetry. ‘I tried to listen,’ David said, ‘but you were so pissed and confused, I just couldn’t make head or tail of it.’ I told him not to worry about it and thanked him for looking after me.
Two days later, I left for Paris.
I got there in the early evening and wandered around in a daze, searching for the youth hostel mentioned in the guidebook. By the time I found it, all the beds had been taken. A man explained how to find a cheap hotel nearby, but I soon got lost. I ended up sitting in the doorway of an office building, close to a pool of lamplight. It was not even midnight and I was terrified of being found and beaten, whether by criminals or police; I thought there was no chance I would actually fall asleep. The next thing I knew it was dawn.
I opened my eyes and the sun was rising behind the strange skyline, making the leaves on the plane trees shine green. Even the air seemed different there: warmer, velvety, rich with unnameable scents. I could hardly believe that I was in Paris, and that I had slept in a doorway. It was true that I was as alone as ever and that my back ached and I was shivering; true, as well, that I was too nervous to speak a word of French and too shy even to look anyone in the eye. In spite of all this, however, I couldn’t stop myself feeling happy. I had done the thing I always used to dream about as a teenager, staring from my bedroom window . . . I had, finally, entered the future.
After that I became slightly braver. I visited the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, Notre Dame and the Pompidou. I slept three nights in a row at the hostel, and on the fourth night I caught a sleeper train to Nice. I have a vivid memory of waking up and seeing the rose-lit vineyards and olive trees move past, of opening the window and breathing in the already warm air. The beautiful south. How I loved it there! I shared a room with two Irish girls, one of whom spent the night in bed with me, much to the displeasure of her friend, who kept rolling around in bed and sighing heavily to let us know she was still awake. Later I travelled to Venice, Verona, Rome and Munich, where I lost my virginity in an enormous marquee tent to a very drunk Australian girl. At the end, when I came, she mumbled someone’s name - Greg? Geoff? I don’t remember, but it certainly wasn’t mine. I wondered afterwards if the whole event had been a case of mistaken identity, but she was probably just remembering someone she had once been in love with. When I woke the next morning, she had gone. I have no memory at all of what she looked like.
It was in that marquee, eating breakfast on my own the next morning, that I first began to wonder about the meaning of my life - or, rather, its lack of meaning; its inconsequentiality. For years I had imagined the loss of my virginity as either the culmination of something or the beginning of something. In both these versions, the sex was an event that formed part of a narrative; it possessed, beyond the physical pleasure of the moment, a purpose, a significance. Had it happened with Jane Lipscombe, for instance, it would have made sense of a long series of flirtations, frustrations and misunderstandings. Those years would have been given shape and substance by their end result. Now, however, I was forced to contemplate the probability that I would never see Jane again, that all we had shared had led to nothing, that those thirteen years had been inconsequential. Similarly, what happened with the girl in the tent . . . that was neither culmination nor beginning; it was merely a random event. Her drunkenness, the fact that I never knew her name, her having gone by the time I awoke . . . all of this gave the experience an air of unreality. And if she was really drunk, I thought, then perhaps she doesn’t even remember. Images of that golden day in Cornwall came to my mind - the milk bottles, the schoolgirl, the clever dog - and I realised that already they were fading. Again I was confronted with the brutal responsibility of being the only one who remembers; of the inevitable paling of my memory being equivalent to the slow death of those moments. As I packed my bag and walked to the train station that day, I made a resolution. The past is dead, I told myself. It has vanished, meaninglessly. Now you must find a future that does mean something, that cannot be forgotten. To me, at eighteen, my mind filled with romantic adolescent ideas, this meant only one thing. It meant Love.
A week later, back at home, I got my A-level results. A in everything. I phoned Philip Bates; he had the same. The two of us went out to celebrate, and he told me that Jane had failed, but she did-n’t care; that she was planning to marry Mark and have kids. I
pretended not to have heard. In late August my grandad died. His funeral was in the south-coast town of S., where he and my grandmother had been spending the summer. We drove down there and buried him under the bluest sky imaginable. In September, I was ill. I had a chest infection, and lay in bed for a fortnight, coughing up phlegm, feeling nauseous and re-reading the complete works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I cried at the end of The Great Gatsby. I remember all this because I kept a diary until the day before I left for university. For what happened next there is no record. The days are steeped in fog and I
. . .
James stared blankly ahead of him, his mouth open. His eyes were pointing at the page on which he had been writing, but that was not what he saw. Something strange had happened. He had been about to write ‘I don’t remember’ when suddenly he realised that he did. The fog was clearing.
And the strangest thing was that his memories, fragmented as they were, made him think insistently of the story he had found beneath the wallpaper of the house in H: Confessions of a Killer, Chapter 1. In the memories, he was following a girl down a long, misty street; he was standing in darkness and staring at the façade of 21 Lough Street; he was climbing a narrow staircase, filled with fear and desire.
But what sense did that make? How could Malcolm Trewvey have written a story based on James’s own private memories? To do that, he would have to be able to read his mind, see inside his dreams . . . As James thought this, however, he remembered the look on Trewvey’s face, that time he had seen him reflected in the sex shop window - how sure he had looked, as though he knew more of James’s past than James himself - and he shivered. Was it possible?
I held my breath.
No, James told himself, after a long pause; what must have happened was that his memories of the time in H. had been contaminated by his memories of the story he had read, and . . .
His train of thought was interrupted by some odd noises coming from below. Closing the notebook, he went downstairs to investigate and discovered that his parents had returned. They had been gone four days, during which time he had done nothing but sit at the desk in his room, remembering and writing. It was late afternoon now and the sky outside was dark. Eating dinner with his parents and grandmother, he thought about asking them what had happened to him in H. But when he recalled the shocked look on his gran’s face a few days before, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had hurt these people enough already. There was no need to dredge up even more painful memories.
After dinner he went back upstairs and looked at the words he had written. He had remembered. He could remember. And however contaminated his memories may be, they were still clues. A door that had been locked was now open. He knew he ought to re-enter the past now, to start writing again before the memories had a chance to fade, but for some reason he found he couldn’t. He was too tired. Not frightened, he told himself, just unbelievably weary. Travelling through time was hard work, after all; it was perfectly normal that he should need a good night’s rest. Fear had nothing to do with it.
Just before he went to bed, James plugged in his mobile phone to recharge the batteries and discovered that there was a message for him. The message was three days old. James pressed play and listened. This was what he heard: ‘Hello, Mr Purdew, this is Mr Harrison, from Harrison Lettings. I trust you’re well. I have a message for you from our client. He says: it is time to start work on the next floor. That’s all. I’ll be in the office all day tomorrow if you need to talk to me. Goodbye.’
James slept badly that night. The next morning, he woke early, packed, showered, dressed, and ate a quick breakfast. His parents and grandmother stood in the driveway in their dressing gowns to see him off. As James pulled into the street, he looked in the van’s wing mirror and saw them waving woodenly like figures in a cuckoo clock. They got smaller and smaller and smaller until finally they vanished.
V
AT THE CENTRE OF THE LABYRINTH
It was with a feeling of relief that James steered the van into Lough Street and saw the empty parking space in front of number 21. He had been haunted during the journey by the fear that he was being followed: every time he looked in the wing-mirror or through the side window, he seemed to see a black van, otherwise identical to his own, just behind or just ahead of him. Crossing the bridge into the city, it had finally disappeared from sight, and he had been worried that he would find it here, taking his rightful place. He got out of the van and looked around: there was no sign of it. James sighed. He wasn’t too late, after all.
Walking under the bare-branched chestnut tree, through the gate and up the driveway to the front door, James looked up at the house’s closed eyes - the boarded first-floor windows - and said to himself, you have been as blind as this house. Now he saw the world as one whose blindness has been suddenly cured. He saw all his mistakes, his denials of the truth, as culs-de-sac leading from the central passageway of the maze. It had all been so easy, so clear. And yet, each time he had found a clue, he had been frightened by the darkness of the place into which it seemed to be leading him, and had found an excuse to turn away. What he had lacked was something all good detectives possessed: not intelligence, but courage.
He knew perfectly well where the trail of clues was leading him next. In some way he had known all along.
He took the ladder out to the front of the house and unboarded the two first-floor windows. They fell into the overgrown front garden with a crash like thunder. Then he went upstairs. With each step, the air grew colder. Dust and dimness gave the light an underwater quality. He felt like a diver exploring a shipwreck.
At the top of the stairs he stood still and took in the details of the scene that greeted him. It was a large, sombre landing with four closed doors. It smelled damp, faintly rotten. The first door he opened, to his near left, revealed a long, narrow bedroom. The second, to his near right, led to a large bathroom containing two toilet cubicles, two sinks with mirrors, and two shower cubicles with their plastic curtains drawn. The third door, on the right-hand side of the far wall, opened into another bedroom, smaller than the first but otherwise identical. None of these rooms provoked any physical reactions in James. They were not completely unknown to him, perhaps, but seeing them again did not feel significant. They were not part of the mystery.
That left only one door: the door behind which he had imagined he would find the next clue. It had only been a hunch, but now he felt sure about it. This was the room. James touched the metal handle and exhaled. Courage, he reminded himself. He pushed down and entered.
Like the other rooms, it was at first sight unremarkable: a bare, pale space, crudely furnished by two sheetless beds, two desks with chairs, and a large wardrobe. Weak sunlight came through the grime-covered window. He moved forward and the sunlight was lower, a deep orange, and it shone more strongly through the suddenly clean glass, illuminating thousands of dust flakes. They were whirling, he noticed, as though in a draft of air. He felt exhausted, ready to sleep, but as he took a step further into the room, he noticed something odd on the floor. There was a pile of clothes: several pairs of trousers, a jacket, some shirts. He turned to the wardrobe and saw its doors flung wide open, the hangers bare. Then he looked across at the bed and there she was: a thin, dark-haired girl, in jeans and a T-shirt, her cheeks red, her chest heaving, her eyes shining - with anger? jealousy? desire? - and her mouth opened to say something and he blinked. The wardrobe was closed, the floor bare, the light dim, the girl gone. James walked to the window and stood before it, breathing shallowly. Below him on the street a man was walking his dog. James thought he heard something behind him, and turned quickly. The bare, silent room stared back.
But it was the same room, undoubtedly. The room in the memory or the hallucination or whatever it was he had just suffered, and the room in which he stood now: they were identical. James had been here before, and so had she.
When he had calmed down, James began to search for clues. He did so methodically, looking under the beds, behind the radiators, in the drawers of the desks, around the back of the wardrobe. Nothing. Finally he swallowed drily and stood up in front of the wardrobe’s closed doors. The key was in the lock: he turned it, and the doors fell open with a creak. And there, arranged neatly on hangers and shelves, were the remains of someone’s life.
A man’s clothes: jackets, trousers, shirts, socks, shoes. In the shelves he found some books, videos, records and CDs. A cardboard box full of notebooks and photographs. And, at the bottom of the cardboard box, some loose sheets of paper covered with typewritte
n words. The first page bore the title Chapter 2 and James realised immediately that it was the continuation of the story of Martin Thwaite: Confessions of a Killer. This must have been his room, James thought. Malcolm Trewvey’s bedroom. And he, James, had been here too. Perhaps they had been roommates, James and Malcolm? Perhaps, in searching for Trewvey’s guilty secret, James might also find the truth of his own life?
He read the first page in a fever of excitement - this is it, he thought, this is the next clue - but when he came to the second page he was confused to discover that it did not begin where the first ended. He puzzled over this for a while, then noticed that the pages were numbered: the first page was 20, the second 25. He flicked through the rest of the pages and found to his dismay that what he had in his hands was not Chapter 2, but mere fragments of the manuscript: twenty-three pages out of 100 or so. Shaking his head at this disappointment, James went back to the beginning. He would read what was here, he decided, as carefully as he could, and afterwards he would attempt to fill in the gaps.
CHAPTER 2
For two days and nights I did not leave my room. Indeed, I was barely awake during this time. The shock and exhaustion produced by the events of that strange night had taken their toll on my body and mind, which, seeking recuperation, plunged me into profound unconsciousness. When I finally awoke, it was late morning and I was frail with hunger and thirst. There was no food in my room so I went out to a tavern round the corner - The Green Man - and wolfed my way through a bowl of onion broth, a loaf of bread, two plates of mutton stew and two tankards of ale. Only after I had done this, and wiped my lips on the rough cloth napkin, and sat back in the wooden chair and thoughtlessly surveyed my surroundings for several minutes - only then did the memory of what had happened that night, and its sombre implications for my career, slowly dawn on me.