The Truth About Lies

by Tracy Darnton

  “I stayed up late and got up early to read it,” he says. “It’s a page-turner when you know what it’s really about. Who it’s really about.”

  “It doesn’t even cover the half of it. And?” I’m trying to read his body language. Does he think I’m a freak?

  “I can’t imagine remembering everything that happens. I’m still trying to get my head round it.” He reaches out and takes my hands in his and looks me in the eyes. “Thanks for telling me. It was brave. I’m guessing no one else here knows how amazing you are?”

  “No, but it’s not amazing,” I say. “Someone once said it’s a superpower but it’s really not. I can’t change anything with it.”

  “So you won’t be dressing up in Spandex and fighting the powers of evil?”

  “Sorry to disappoint you. It’s more of a … liability. I can be … difficult,” I say.

  He laughs. “I’ve already noticed. But you don’t get rid of me that easily.”

  We kiss for a long time, until my bottom lip is comfortably numb.

  “We can make lots of nice memories too, you know,” says Dan, putting his arm round my shoulders. “Can’t the good ones cancel out the bad?”

  “It doesn’t seem to work like that,” I say, wishing that it did.

  He flicks through Principles of Memory. “Bizarre that you were involved in all this.”

  “Coleman called it the Programme,” I say. “It went way beyond what she talks about in there. I thought she was helping me, but, well, she wasn’t. All the never-ending replaying images of the accident again and again – the red Range Rover which hit Mum, the CPR – I’d had enough.

  “Finding an email in Coleman’s files from Mum saying she wanted to pull me out of the Programme, was the push I needed to finally leave. Mum had shown me a prospectus for Dartmeet once, so I came here myself in the spring term. I got away from all that, from being the memory star turn.”

  I lean back into his shoulder, relieved to have finally told someone the truth. Or part of the truth. He doesn’t know they’re looking for me, that it’s not all in the past. Could they have realized about the money I took? Is that what they’re after?

  Dan taps at the author photograph of Coleman. “She looks so … normal. What about the rest of them?”

  “The nice ones didn’t stick around. I never knew exactly what Coleman was up to, how all these different aspects slotted together. I still don’t. Her book doesn’t fill in those gaps. She kept us in the dark, just familiar with our own areas.”

  “So there were others on the Programme?”

  “At first. The linguists, the super-recognizers…”

  “Say what?”

  “I never forget a face. But it’s not that special – about one per cent of people can do it. There’s a whole unit of super-recognizers with the Met Police in London. They can merge with a crowd, looking for known troublemakers, spotting targets that fixed cameras can’t reach.”

  I cringe as I remember the stupid crush I had on one – an Irish guy called Callum. Coleman was comparing the fusiform gyrus part of his brain to my hippocampus in EEG scans. That was the kind of thing that got her excited.

  “But she moved me and my hyperthymesia away from all that to a more exclusive part of the Programme,” I say. “Basically just me. I don’t want to go back to it, ever. She was working towards a big breakthrough but, honestly, I didn’t care once Mum died. At one stage, I tried ‘overloading’. I figured that my memory must have a limit; that there’d be a tipping point, when new information received plus information stored exceeds capacity. While Coleman thought I was sleeping or watching TV, I was reading, overloading. Everything in her study, everything on her laptops: even boring reports, financial information, every document I could find. That’s when I found Mum’s email.”

  I sigh and pick at flaky paint on the bench. “But all that information didn’t overload me in the way I thought it would. It didn’t make the painful memories go away. It became a mountain of facts and figures swishing around my head.”

  “But don’t you see?” says Dan. “That’s where you should start to work out what she was up to. It’s all in there.” He touches the front of my head. “The frontal cortex or thalamus or whatever you call it. You’re a walking encyclopaedia on what was really going on with the Programme. You’ve seen all the information with that amazing memory of yours but you haven’t processed it yet.”

  “Do you think I could churn them out and make sense of it now?” I ask, my brain whirring.

  “Why not? You’re a repository of her secrets. She shouldn’t be allowed to screw anyone else over. I’ll meet you in the library after running club. Jeez. And you said you didn’t have a superpower to fight the forces of evil!”

  He may be right. All those documents Coleman doesn’t know I’ve seen are in my mind-library waiting to be understood. I just need to retrieve them.

  21

  Certain drug combinations produce pathological disturbance.

  Principles of Memory – Professor A.E. Coleman

  I’m not used to going out with someone. Even the word ‘dating’ makes me think of forty-five-year-olds looking for a perfect match on Snog.com. But this evening feels strangely intimate, as if I should light candles and stream jazz and wear my best underwear. More so than if we were going to sleep together. I bet Dan’s never had a ‘date’ like this before. At least I’m quirkier than the other girls he’s been out with, whose bedrooms he seems to know so well.

  We meet in the smallest study room at the library. The librarian stuck up a sign saying ‘Keep calm and carry on studying’ that someone changed from ‘studying’ to ‘snogging’. You can only fit two people in there and if you wedge a chair against the door you buy yourself some privacy.

  “This is cute,” says Dan. “I haven’t been in here before.”

  I’m glad. I’d wondered if Keira had featured it, and all its charms, on her orientation tour.

  He smells good. I’m getting wafts of shower gel and shampoo.

  “How was your run?” I ask.

  “Muddy. You’d have hated it. But I’m getting to find my way around the moor.”

  There’s a slightly awkward silence. Stripping naked in front of him would be less embarrassing than this. “This is strange,” I say. “Reading my brain out to someone.”

  “Chillax. This is my first time too.” He grins and nudges my arm playfully. “…Of brain intimacy. Is that even a thing?”

  I smile back and relax slightly. “It is now.”

  “It’d be easier if I were Mr Spock from Star Trek and could do a Vulcan mind-meld with my fingertips but instead we’ll have to use the old-fashioned method of you telling me what you see in your head.” He sits down and gets out a pen and paper. “Strictly confidential. What happens in Memory Club, stays in Memory Club.”

  I exhale. I’ve already thought of where I want to begin. I pull Coleman’s book Principles of Memory out of his bag and hand it back to him. “Page 143, halfway down.” Dan finds the page and starts reading, though I finish the sentence with him from memory: “And certain drug combinations produce pathological disturbance, though they can alter perception of events.”

  “I want to find out exactly which drug combinations she might have been giving me.” I don’t dwell on the ‘pathological disturbance’ side effect mentioned. I don’t want him to think I’m a complete fruit loop. Saying it out loud I realize how dumb I was to take it all on trust – ‘vitamin’ pills, injections, drips. Mum had signed consent to everything; we were receiving considerable payments for ‘expenses’. But we trusted Coleman.

  “Do you remember any mentions of ‘mg’ or ‘ml’ or chemical names or symbols?” he asks, pen poised.

  I start walking through the mind-library in my head, thinking where I should try. “There were strange lists in the black notebooks in her study cabinet,” I say. “She kept it locked but I’d seen her type in the code.”

  “Let’s start there,” says Dan. “T
hey’re bound to be important if she’s locking them away at home.”

  I go back to my mind-library, make my way to an oak-panelled room, select the shelf for November last year, take down the book labelled 15th November and open it up. All in my head. Then I play the scene as a movie and give Dan the director’s commentary.

  “That day, she had to work late. A meeting. As I said, I wanted to fill up my memory. To block out the accident and Mum. I worked through the study bookshelves then I tackled the cabinet. The top shelf was full of black hardback notebooks marked with dates on the covers. I thought they might be diaries but they weren’t that interesting. Just lists.”

  Dan clicks on his pen. “Fire away. But not too fast.”

  I open one up in my head and read aloud the first page: “CV MG 1st October AB 5 ml, 4th October AB 10 ml, ACh 115%…”

  I carry on through the book until Dan begs for a break because his wrist’s aching. My head’s throbbing. I sit back and massage my temples. I’m drained.

  “Wow, you’re amazing,” says Dan. “I’m struggling to keep up. Reading all this would send me bananas.”

  “What if it has sent me bananas?” I say, lying my head on the desk.

  “Maybe take a break,” says Dan. “Do something physical instead.” He strokes my hair gently and tucks a stray wisp behind my ear. I’m wondering what he means by ‘something physical’.

  “I’ll stay here while you take a walk down to the drinks machine in the Common Room,” he says. “I’ll research what we found out so far. Bring me a hot chocolate.”

  I’m disappointed. Maybe seeing me like this is putting me into the friend zone.

  I go slowly back through the library and out into the courtyard. I take welcome breaths of fresh air and wait for it to work its magic on my headache. I walk to the terrace and look out over the darkness of Dartmoor. The moon’s bright tonight and a rabbit hurtles across the lawn. But I have a strange sensation, like I’m not alone, and turn around quickly. Maybe Dan came down after all. But no one’s there. “Hello?” I say to the empty terrace. Footsteps crunch on the gravel. “Quit freaking me out, Dan!” But there’s no answer.

  I get a grip. I’m letting myself be scared by rabbits or badgers, as Maya or Keira would be. I walk quickly to the Common Room and the relief of a busy room. Here it’s all noise and bustle, pool, table tennis and loud music. I say hello to Felix and Makoto and feed coins into the vending machine to get my drinks. A dose of normality’s just what I need to stop me hearing things.

  *

  Dan’s looking pleased with himself when I get back to the library. “Prepare to be amazed by me for a change, memory girl,” he says. “Are you ready for a biology slash chemistry lesson with a dose of pharmacology?”

  “My favourite subjects.” He thinks I’m joking.

  “Some of the words that kept cropping up are definitely pharmaceutical drugs. AB stands for sodium amobarbital.”

  “That was used by the US army to patch up soldiers with shell shock and ship them back to active service,” I say. “They thought it would block out the bad stuff.”

  “You are better than Wikipedia. Except the soldiers were too drugged up to be much use. It can be used to mess about with sleep patterns too.”

  “They did that to me,” I say. “To see what would happen to the laying down, or encoding, of memories.”

  Dan taps at the laptop. “It’s also been used to anaesthetize portions of the brain to see which parts are responsible for recall.”

  “I’ve seen sodium amobarbital written somewhere else, not just in the notebooks,” I say. “I need to process where.”

  “Maybe because it’s still prescribed for anxiety in some countries,” Dan says. He checks his notes. “You listed another drug a lot too. Propranolol: often used to treat PTSD. It disconnects any anxious reaction from the memory.”

  “That’s what you want to achieve with post-traumatic stress sufferers,” I say. “Dampen those emotions. Coleman talks about that in her book.”

  “L-DOPA – that’s synthesized dopamine – and ACh is Acetylcholine,” continues Dan. “Both of these act as neurotransmitters in the brain, chemical messengers sending signals between cells.”

  “Manipulating levels of those is used in the treatment of brain disorders,” I say. “I’ve read journal articles on it.”

  We press on through the list. A cocktail of drugs all acting on my brain in unknown ways to see what they can do to memory. Page 143 again: Certain drug combinations produce pathological disturbance. I don’t dare tell Dan how much I think my personality may have been affected. A flash of guilt about how I treated Hanna washes over me. The mean things I said to her when I knew she was struggling. The things I didn’t say.

  “How do we prove it?” says Dan, leaning back on his chair with his hands behind his head. “Even if we had the actual books, even if you could match the doses listed in the book with your reconstructions of every day you were there, remembering injections or ‘supplements’ you took, is that enough? She doesn’t actually cite your name anywhere in that list you gave me. Unless … MG crops up at the beginning of all the books you read out. I assumed it meant milligrams for dosage but maybe she has the same pet name for you as I do.”

  “Memory Girl? But that still doesn’t prove anything,” I say. “And what does CV mean? We’ve nothing to show anyone. It’s literally all in my head. What sort of evidence is that?”

  He’s silent. We’ve done so much and got nowhere.

  I crush the empty drinks cups in frustration. “Do you think these chemicals are still washing around my system, having an effect on me? Could I show that?”

  “The college has the right to drug test our urine, though they’re probably thinking more about grass than an obscure neurotransmitter. Who would do that testing here? They’d know what the test could pick up.”

  “Dr Harrison,” I say, thinking I just can’t get away from the man.

  22

  Continue the room-system technique. You’re in a beautiful house in Kensington. Everything is white. The staircase is wide and grand with a polished wooden handrail. The hall has a tiled floor and a hat stand…

  Work Your Memory

  How to broach the subject with Dr Harrison? He’s sitting at one of the long refectory tables by the window. I take my tray and ham salad and sit next to him. He seems touchingly pleased and surprised I’ve chosen to share his company. I actually feel sorry for him. There’s a tomato-sauce stain on his crumpled shirt, a button missing from his cuff and he needs a decent shave and haircut. It won’t be long before the Principal puts two and two together and realizes he’s sleeping at Mandela Lodge.

  “Ah, Jess. I’m going to walk the hike route tomorrow to make sure it all works. I’m placing stamps and a notebook in a tin at each checkpoint, like Dartmoor letterboxing. You sign the book and stamp your card at each point. Then I’ll check the books when everyone makes it back to school; geocaching without the technology.” He beams at me. What a saddo.

  I tap my teacup. “Peppermint. Caffeine-free today,” I say. “To help with sleep, as you suggested.”

  He looks pleased to have been useful.

  “Talking of caffeine and, er, other drugs,” I say and cringe inwardly. He looks up, confused, but I plough on with my weak link. “I was wondering how long certain things stay in your body? Drugs – prescription drugs, I mean, not cocaine or anything.” I laugh nervously. Dr Harrison stares at me, his fork suspended in mid-air with a piece of spaghetti slowly unravelling. I probably make things worse by adding quickly: “And I’m asking not for me, I’m asking for a friend.”

  He places his cutlery back down on his plate and wipes his mouth with a napkin. He looks pale. “Like what? Painkillers?”

  “No, more something like, ooh I don’t know, dopamine, amobarbital or propranolol?” I say, pretending those names are on everybody’s lips.

  He says nothing.

  “Maybe anxiety medication,” I add, in case he doe
sn’t know what they are. I was stupid to give such a long list because now I definitely seem to know a lot about it, suspiciously so.

  He takes a sip of water. He’s looking clammy and loosens his tie. Maybe he’s been drinking already.

  “So would it still be in your bloodstream or hair follicles months after taking it?” I persist.

  “That would depend,” he says quietly. “Probably not.”

  “Would someone be able to investigate and prove it after time has passed, like months, or would it only be detected at an autopsy? My friend would really like to know.”

  Dr Harrison stands up suddenly and pushes back his chair, knocking his glass over the table. “Sorry, sorry.” He dabs at the spillage with his napkin. “I’m, I’m not feeling well. But the answer is no, these drugs are hard to detect, probably impossible after lots of time has passed.” He swallows as if he’s going to puke right here, right now, and dashes for the door, clutching his stomach.

  Keira sits down opposite me. “Wow, do you always have that effect on men?” She smiles so falsely I want to punch her but I just smile back. She tucks into her spaghetti and I let her take three big mouthfuls before I say: “Poor Dr Harrison. Food poisoning. I’d go easy on the Bolognese if I were you. It’s gone straight through the doc.”

  I leave her spitting out the last forkful on to her plate. Not very ladylike.

  I head outside, looking for Dan. Felix tells me he’s still down on the tennis courts by the paddock. As I get nearer, I can see he’s practising his serve, firing ball after ball across the court. I whistle.

  “Hey, you. You just missed me thrashing Felix,” he calls. He wipes his face with a towel and pulls on his sweatshirt. His shirt rides up as he lifts his arms above his head, and I can’t help looking.