The Amnesia Clinic

by James Scudamore

  In a smooth see-sawing motion, and with far greater permanence than the supposed overthrow taking place in the country we lived in, my father’s career had faded into the background; it was understood that we would leave the country when her work was done, and not the other way round. He no longer had a say in their trajectory. Which isn’t to say that there was some sort of power struggle – just that he was perfectly happy to stay in her slipstream and keep his head down.

  On serious matters in which I hoped to have any say, it was always more advisable to approach him first, or at least the two of them together. Taking her on alone was suicide. So, as soon as the threat was uttered in the car, I knew enough to clam up and make no further comment on the subject of my education until dinner that evening, when I might hope for some backup.

  I stalled my mother as best I could until we were almost home by asking her about her work. The monologue that ensued gave me a much-needed opportunity to collect my thoughts, and start planning how I might respond to the threat she had issued. Finally, the jeep banked into a steep incline, punched through the fug of diesel and aircraft exhaust that clung to the city, and we landed on the well-tended lawns of suburbia.

  The neighbourhood where we lived was called Quito Tenis, and it was named after a tennis club; not an early hamlet, a river, or an ancient Inca burial ground, but a tennis club. Well-heeled settlers had been drawn as early as the 1970s to the area’s abundant tarmac surfaces, agreeable shrubbery and secure, gated developments, and it wasn’t long before a select community thrived: lawyers, politicians, doctors, engineers, foreigners. In spite of the fact that Tenis was situated high on the north-western lip of the valley, its architects elected to build several huge apartment blocks there. The result was a cluster of white earthquake-proofed columns that rose high up out of the smog. Picture a teetering tower of sugar cubes standing in a puddle of gravy.

  Our own block stood in a secure compound, with armed guards at the front gates. As our car drew up, they would open the huge metal doors that led down into the basement garage. When we’d first moved in I found it an exciting novelty – a bit like living in the bat-cave – but this had long since worn off.

  My mother brought the jeep at speed into its allotted space and turned off the engine with a snap. The radiator fan heaved hot sighs of relief. She had been furniture shopping, and the rear of the car sat low under the weight of a chair carved from highly polished rainforest hardwood, which I was instructed to bring up to the apartment.

  ‘But use the service lift, will you?’ she said. ‘Don’t want to get in trouble for scratching the floor of the normal one. And for God’s sake, stop sulking. Nothing’s been decided yet.’

  With that she was off, clacking away on the concrete floor of the basement towards the non-service lift, my bag dangling from her fingertips at a safe distance. I locked the car, shouldered the chair and struggled over with it to the service lift. Mahogany is heavy.

  Watching numbers turn yellow in the gloom as my mother ascended, I pressed the other, dirtier button that hailed the service lift. I’d never been in it before, and was surprised by what I saw when the doors slid open. The interior was padded with thick brown material, put there to absorb the blows of furniture or appliances as they were delivered to the show apartments above. It had absorbed more than that, too – the smells of stale smoke and sweat, of coffee and pollution. The residents’ lift, which I was used to, was finished in shiny, faux-industrial metal and contained no such soft furnishings charged with atmosphere. This one had the same dimensions, and led from the same starting point to the same destination, but inside it couldn’t have been more different. It was as if I had momentarily slipped into an alternative version of reality. Even the ping as the doors opened came through the same coarsening filter – it was louder, and more ragged, as if some crucial, restraining part of its apparatus had been snapped off. I put down the chair and sat enthroned on it for a moment, taking in these new surroundings. Then I reached up, pressed button number seven and wiped the oily deposit this left from my fingertip on to the brown cladding. The machine jerked into action.

  Halfway up to our apartment, the lift stopped with a jolt, the strip light overhead flickered and died, and a wheeze of dying machinery shuddered through the building. Due to the state of emergency over the war with Peru, power cuts were frequent, but they didn’t normally spread as high up the food chain as Quito Tenis. In its quest for energy conservation, the Ministry of the Interior preferred to reserve its strictures for those with fewer energy-hungry appliances and less political clout. Nevertheless, they did happen, and I knew I would have to sit this one out in the lift until the power came back on. My mother knew where I was, and would take steps to get me out if necessary.

  I inhaled deeply and relaxed into the chair. Now that the lift was in darkness, I was hypersensitive to the smells infused into its fabric sides. It smelt of the outside world; a world about which, in this country at least, I still knew very little. I pictured condors circling above waterfalls, Indians in ponchos trudging through misty mountain villages and olive-skinned kids playing with a battered football on the beach before realising that what I had in mind were mere holiday-brochure images of my adopted country. I had no more laid eyes on these sights than I had watched fireworks burst over the cathedral in Cuenca, mountain-biked down the slopes of Cotopaxi or ‘roughed it’ in some eco-tourism lodge in the rainforest. I might as well have spent the entirety of the past two years sitting in that darkened, padded cell, straining to imagine what lay outside, and now my chances of ever seeing it for real were dwindling by the hour. When the light stuttered back on and the lift lurched upwards again, I opened my eyes, in which boyish tears had sprung. I wiped them away quickly, and dried my hand on the lift walls just before the doors opened.

  The two lift shafts were side by side, but each lift had a corresponding hallway leading to different areas of the apartment: whereas the residents’ lift brought you to a reception area with a slate floor, the service lift delivered you before a garishly tiled vestibule leading out to the back – an area that we continued to refer to as the maid’s quarters, even though my mother had never bothered hiring a maid. ‘I don’t agree with it for one thing, and for another, I don’t see any reason to bring any nubile young girls to your father’s attention unnecessarily,’ she said. The idea that my father might dare to transgress with anyone, particularly under the same roof as my mother, was laughable, but the first reason she gave was deadly serious. So, although the apartment was fully kitted out for domestic servitude, the brass bell-push embedded into the dining-room floor had never been used except in jest, and the tiny maid’s bedroom at the back served as a box room for cartons of ‘essentials’ brought over from the UK, which had remained unopened since we arrived. Scowling at these reminders of ‘home’ as I entered, I lugged the chair inside, put it down and went to the kitchen. My father kept a tray of short bottles of beer at the back of the fridge, and I decided I deserved a surreptitious reward for my trouble.

  It wasn’t so much that my mother always had to have her own way; it was more that if you disagreed with her, the rhetorical power this unleashed would shock you into seeing things from her point of view. The minute she sensed resistance, all of her intellect would be summoned into an irresistible arrowhead of purpose, and the most sensible strategic approach was therefore never to disagree with her too forcefully. My father, like a farmer working the slopes of a much-loved yet active volcano, treated her with respect and knew when to back off, but I didn’t yet have the benefit of his years of experience.

  All you had to do was to know when to keep your mouth shut. It was elementary. And clumsy as I was, under normal circumstances I would probably have reached this conclusion. Apart from anything else, if I’d had access to Fabián that week, I would have been able to canvass his opinion and work out a more considered strategy. Instead, alone in my room in the hours before dinner, I decided that the best approach to the crisis was to blust
er through it, appealing to my mother’s heart. If she saw how much I had learned about South America, how much I loved it there, then she might come to see the value in my staying put. It was, after all, a passion of her own. All I had to do was persuade. Not for the first time, I wished I had Fabián’s bullshitting prowess. In its absence, I boosted my confidence with several clandestine trips to Dad’s cache of beer in the run-up to the meal.

  When the three of us were round the table, I hit the ground running, giving my parents one of Suarez’s most emotive tirades, on the subject of Machu Picchu. I held forth for a quarter of an hour on how the place had a talismanic power for South America, that it held collective memory and was therefore the key to the eventual realisation of the Bolivarian republic.

  ‘If talismanic power is what you want, go to the encyclopaedia and look up Stonehenge,’ my mother said.

  Scornfully, I dismissed Stonehenge as a pointless load of old rubble, knowing even as I said it that I was already off target. I was supposed to be demonstrating my love of South America, not my hatred of Europe.

  ‘It sounds to me as if your friend Suarez has been reading too much Neruda and not enough sensible journalism,’ my mother went on. ‘And as for you: you should be taking more of an interest in finding things out for yourself instead of blindly believing everything that man says.’

  It was only a matter of time before the subject of school came back up. When it did, I tried to keep things abstract and hypothetical, asking why we couldn’t just cross that bridge when we came to it and slipping in a request for the salt at the end of my sentence in the hope that this would start a new conversational thread. I could almost hear Fabián’s laughter at how badly I was performing.

  ‘We can see the bridge from here, Anti,’ said my mother. ‘There are big holes in it.’

  Even at this point, if I had been less hot-headed, or more sober, I might have let the comment pass, nodded quiet agreement and waited for somebody to raise another topic. My mother’s mind was capable of jumping about from topic to topic with all the agility of a mountain goat, and it might not take long for a new, mutually agreeable theme to arise, after which the previous assertion, however vehemently declared, would probably be forgotten. In my inflamed state, though, her implication here shocked me. I said that I didn’t see anything wrong with the International School, and that furthermore it was inhuman of the two of them to contemplate expelling me from Ecuador when they were planning on staying there themselves.

  ‘Spare me the emotional blackmail,’ said my mother, smiling. ‘You’ll enjoy it there.’

  I was fast running out of options. I turned to my father, who had been holding back up to this point, and appealed for assistance.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said, infuriatingly. ‘I think I’m going with your mother on this one.’

  My position was bad enough. But now, as if someone were out to get me, my chest tightened in preparation for an asthma attack, and all my last-ditch appeals were undermined by a crippling wheezing fit.

  Rarely for her, my mother lost her temper.

  ‘You can spare us the attack of consumption as well,’ she snapped. ‘You know perfectly well that the doctor said your asthma is ninety per cent psychosomatic, so don’t think you’ll get that much sympathy on that score. Besides, if it’s really that bad then getting back to the UK and away from this high altitude can only be a good thing.’ She took a sip of wine and looked me right in the eye. ‘Right?’

  My father put a hand between my shoulder-blades and told me to take deep breaths. I nodded weakly.

  ‘It’s settled then,’ said my mother. ‘We’ll aim to get you out of here by the end of this summer.’

  And after that I suspect there was an unedifying spell of shouting and door-slamming that is best forgotten about.

  There was an old knife-sharpener in Quito who did door-to-door calls in a pre-war pick-up truck. He used to announce his arrival by calling in the street outside, regardless of the neighbourhood he was in or the type of building. I had never before thought quite how ridiculous, and how glorious, he was – this relic, calling out to a whole apartment block, as if it were no different to him from a little hut in the mountains – until I watched him later that evening while smoking an angry, furtive cigarette out of my bedroom window.

  I had been two years younger when we left the UK. What going back to school there would be like now I had no idea, but I was not optimistic. I had visions of atrocious food and sanctioned violence. There was every chance this initiative might not go anywhere. My mother blustered quite a lot, particularly when contradicted, and often it meant nothing. On the other hand, she seemed quite serious about this, and I couldn’t count on my father to help me out. Even if he didn’t agree with this outrageous proposal, which I wasn’t so sure about anyway, there was every chance that he would roll over and let it pass without a veto.

  From our flat on the seventh floor, you could look down straight through the tops of the pine trees on to the street. I watched and listened as the knife-sharpener parked his truck and walked up and down with his canvas tool-bag, calling out lustily to entire blocks full of people who would never respond. In a gesture of solidarity, I shouted down at him and waved, but, as if he had never expected a response in the first place, he loaded his bag back in his truck and drove away without noticing me.

  I had a premonition of two traces of future emotion: first, the regret I would feel if I left this country without taking a proper look at it for myself; second, a terror of the sly, creeping approach of a more colourless world. As a result, I felt determined to make the present worthy of nostalgia while it lasted.

  FOUR

  The following Friday, I went to stay with Fabián and Suarez as per usual. But a shrill note of self-pity was already playing in my head over every custom I took for granted, as I began in earnest to feel as sorry for myself as I could. It’s something I have always been pretty good at. In spite of this, I was desperate to keep reality at bay for as long as possible and had resolved to keep quiet about my proposed exile for the moment, however much I was seething within.

  The three of us sat round the kitchen table, having dinner. Suarez was on the rum, and Fabián and I were drinking naranjilla juice. On any other day, I might have moaned about this, as I had never really got used to it and sometimes wondered why we couldn’t just have plain lemonade. But on this day, the juice – the fruit is a bizarre amalgam of orange and tomato – had become another familiar feature of the landscape that I was melodramatically preparing to miss, and I savoured every vivid, transient mouthful as a result. Such distinctive physical memories mean that my youth is nicely compartmentalised. I drank a glass of naranjilla from some exotic juice bar years after leaving Ecuador and a whole series of neatly bookmarked memories fell open – although on that occasion, I didn’t enjoy the taste at all.

  ‘I hear that Fabián is a hero,’ I said.

  ‘Is that so?’ said Suarez. ‘I didn’t think it was customary for heroes to do their own public relations, but I suppose you may be right. What is he said to have done this time?’

  I recounted the story about Fabián saving the girl in the earthquake, which had, over the course of the last few days, acquired several new and thrilling dimensions. One version had Fabián being tear-gassed by a rogue policeman during the rescue. In another, he’d had to hold off a rabid dog that was trying to steal the girl’s tripe sandwich.

  ‘Well, if that is what people are saying, then I suppose it must be the truth,’ said Suarez. ‘Congratulations, Fabi.’ He raised his glass in a toast.

  ‘It was nothing, Uncle. Just what any man would have done,’ said Fabián.

  ‘It was especially self-effacing of you not to reveal any of this to me on the day. No doubt the shock of the situation took it out of you, and you were unable to piece together what had happened until days after the event.’

  ‘No doubt, no doubt,’ said Fabián. ‘You’re the medical man.’

  Suarez
beamed. ‘Funny that I didn’t see any distressed children near you at the time. All I saw was a little huahua lying in the gutter, gazing up into the air, with all the stuffing knocked out of him. I must get my eyes tested.’

  ‘Maybe you should,’ said Fabián. ‘You’re getting on a bit, Uncle.’

  There was no late-night storytelling session with Suarez that evening. He went out, leaving us alone in the library with a couple of beers and Jerry Lee Lewis.

  I knew there must be more to the story of Fabián’s arm than what I had already heard. Or, more likely, that there must be less to it. In its current form, the portrayal of Fabián as hero was all very well, but I knew the truth would come out before long.

  It will be apparent that ‘the truth’ was something with which Fabián and I were fairly free. The best story was usually the one we believed. It was what defined our friendship. But there was also an unspoken understanding – or at least there was as far as I was concerned – that we both knew when things had gone too far from the realm of the plausible.

  He might be telling me all about a steamy clinch with Verena in a stationery cupboard, say, and I would go along with the story right up to the point where things started to stray too far. We had an accepted technique for establishing the truth without subtracting from the credibility of the storyteller, which went something like this: