The Amnesia Clinic

by James Scudamore

  ‘That’s something else you don’t get to find out about yet,’ she said.

  Fabián, who had retreated to the corner with a beer, now cautiously advanced again and sat at the table with us. Brewed coffee and dried lime juice had sweetened in the wood of the cabin to a smell like brown sugar – a microclimate, trapped inside by water. This day would not be consumed in a blaze like the one before: it was drowning.

  We sat in silence beneath murky rafters and half-broken lantern strings, amid the shattered timbers of chairs and tables, as water beat down on the sand outside.

  ‘Ray should be back soon,’ I said, clearing my throat.

  ‘Meanwhile, why don’t we go and see if it’s arrived,’ said Sally.

  ‘What is it you’re waiting for?’ said Fabián.

  ‘You’ll see. Come with me.’ She stepped through the curtain of water and on to the beach.

  Great steps of shoreline had been munched away in our absence and the water continued to pound in, grey as dishwater. Needle-sharp rain drilled from above, combining with the onslaught of the Pacific overbite to create a damage machinery of jaws and sewing machines. Sally seemed at home in the storm: whilst Fabián and I squinted against it, her face appeared to free itself up, relaxing into the weather.

  ‘Can you see anything?’ she said.

  ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘The horizon should look different. The texture of it will change. Then you’ll know.’

  Fabián looked as mystified as me. We followed awkwardly after her. Plenty of storm-tossed debris fretted the shore – nail-studded driftwood, a rusty oil drum, palm leaves, green coconuts – but none of it could be said to fit her description.

  ‘Maybe the storm’s holding it back,’ she mused. ‘Maybe I’ve got it wrong.’ She had taken off her boots and now trod the sand with a mixture of anxiety and anticipation. ‘It needs to be here, you know. I can’t stay if it doesn’t get here. Have either of you got any binoculars?’ Streaks of rain dabbed away at the dust on her face.

  The rain eased off a little. A thin gauze of mist drifted in.

  ‘I need it to get here. Then I can relax.’

  ‘What is it?’ said Fabián.

  ‘It’s my livelihood.’

  ‘Yes, but what is it?’

  ‘Did you say the texture of the water had to change?’ I said.

  Between swells, fifty feet out to sea, the water seemed rougher than ever, almost jagged. A low, wide shape, floating mostly unseen beneath the surface, was washing up; alarmingly, it seemed to be moving.

  A drip of water fell off her nose and Sally Lightfoot smiled.

  ‘Here she is,’ she murmured.

  Whatever it was seemed simultaneously to be trafficked and buffeted by the water, and not to obey its rules. Its ripples didn’t make sense. The shape shifted in the mist even as it drew near. I became conscious of a sound, too: a squabbling, squawking noise of disagreement, emanating inexplicably from the object in time with the strange movements on its surface.

  ‘I’ve been pursuing her for a week now. There’ll be no money if I only get part of her. Okay, we can go back inside now. She’ll still be here in the morning.’

  ‘Can you please tell us what that is?’ said Fabián.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? It’s a dead whale.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Pause.

  ‘Sally. If the whale is dead, then why is it making a noise?’

  ‘Oh, that. Those are my helpers. They only get to work on it when it’s very near the shore, when they know they’re safe.’

  Pause.

  She glanced at us and sighed in exasperation. Then she opened her arms to the rain, grinned broadly and shouted:

  ‘Vultures!’

  We stared dumbly out to sea.

  ‘Come back inside and I’ll explain.’

  We followed in silence, keen not to say the wrong thing in this world of new rules.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ she said, walking round the side of the bar towards the main roadside entrance to the cabins. She untied ropes and lifted a tarpaulin that covered the open back of her blue pick-up truck. The whale bones heaped beneath it gave off an oily, faintly rotten smell and were piled in chaotic clusters where they had been thrown. It was like peering into a desecrated mausoleum.

  ‘See? These are what I’ve collected so far. I’m cutting her nose-to-tail, and it’s a race against time. Her skull rides up front with me on the passenger seat and the rest of her is back here – apart from what’s left in the blubber. She’s only a baby, of course, or I’d need a much bigger truck.’

  ‘Bit muddled up,’ I said, trying to work out which bit went where.

  ‘I’m sure someone at the museum will know how to put her back together,’ said Sally. ‘All I know is they sure as hell won’t pay me unless I give them the complete package.’

  ‘Who won’t?’

  ‘Natural History Museum of Caracas. Flat fee of $5,000: One Complete Humpback Whale Skeleton. Tax free, no questions asked. They want it to put in their lobby. Been tracking her down the coast since she washed up dead halfway down Colombia last week. She washes out to sea every couple of days, then comes back in with the next tide. I watch her wash up, spend the day cutting what bones I can out of her – with a little help from my friends – then I let her go out again and head south.’ She drew the tarpaulin back over her hoard. ‘You think this Ray will be back yet? I’m starving.’

  She was already out on the beach by the time Fabián and I got up on Saturday morning. For some reason, Ray was unsure about the new arrival and aired his suspicions whilst frying eggs for us behind the bar. How can something so commonplace as breakfast have so much power? I can still taste the eggs Ray prepared for us that morning: the browned, crispy edges of the white; the velvety yolks, burst open by us over hunks of dark, heavy bread.

  ‘All I want to know is, on what authority is she going round cutting up that animal?’ he said, jerking the cast-iron pan around before him. ‘You know, if everybody went around dissecting every animal they came across … I don’t like it. It doesn’t seem right.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like you,’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t she do it, if it’s there and it’s already dead? Why shouldn’t she make the money rather than let it sink into the sea?’

  ‘I’ll tell you why. Because it’s disrespectful to the animal,’ said Ray, poking in my direction with his spatula. ‘You kids think you’re smart, but you don’t know everything.’

  Fabián was swabbing his face with alcohol – something he seemed to have been doing almost obsessively since we arrived. ‘I agree,’ he announced, dropping cotton wool freighted with grease into a shell ashtray. ‘I think it stinks, what she’s doing.’

  He’d picked an odd time to evolve a conscience, but I ignored it. ‘What are we doing today?’

  ‘I said I’d take Sol treasure hunting again,’ said Fabián, lighting a cigarette.

  ‘How are you going to find any more “treasure”?’ I asked. ‘You only had one of those medallions to start with.’

  ‘Well, maybe today we’ll find some real treasure, shit-stick. But I take it you’d rather stay here and bum-suck that weird woman.’

  ‘At least she’s not underage,’ I said under my breath. I was terrified Ray might overhear, so it wasn’t a very effective retort. I ended up saying it so quietly that I don’t think Fabián heard it either, which in hindsight could only have been a good thing. He looked daggers at me anyway, so I drained my coffee and walked out on to the beach.

  Sally Lightfoot knelt in lively morning surf and decaying whale blubber, sawing away with a large carving knife. Her bandanna rode high on her head and she wore a pair of blue rubber gloves that covered her right up to the armpits. As she worked, the vultures argued with each other across the contours of the flesh like truculent old men, their heads darting in and out from their ragged, brown bodies. Several even burrowed their heads all of the way into the whale so that their slender necks resembl
ed the wrists of hidden, rummaging hands. Evidently the birds were entirely at ease by now with their strange human companion.

  ‘Aren’t they afraid of you?’ I asked.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ she said, without looking up or stopping to cut. A thin strip of blubber adhered to her cheek, which was coated in a thin film of sweat. Her hair had fallen forward over the bandanna again. ‘They’re very pushy indeed. Doesn’t bother me, though, so long as they don’t get cocky and steal any of my bones. I’m getting to the end of her now, and the bones in the tail are much smaller, so I have to watch them a bit more.’

  She pushed back the hair with a curled left wrist and I noticed the sag in her glove at the point of the missing finger.

  ‘It’s getting to the point where I could cut the tail away from the rest of the body, then take it away myself to dissect in private and leave all this behind. But the truth is, I think I’d miss them working there alongside me. You probably think that’s a bit weird, don’t you? Ngah! Get out of there.’

  She had managed to cut away most of the flesh from a large bone towards the front of the whale’s tail, but still it wouldn’t come out. I stepped forward to help.

  ‘No you don’t. There’s no room for brute force in this job. Be typical if I got this far only to have some eager little monster like you stepping in and snapping a vertebra. Besides, I’m doing this on my own. That prize is going to be all mine when I go to claim it, and that means I have to do all the work myself.’ I turned away to head back to the bar. She stopped cutting momentarily. ‘But that doesn’t mean you can’t stay and talk to me while I work.’

  I sat down in the sand next to her, trying to stay upwind of the sickly, decaying smell that emanated from the whale and simultaneously to stay as far away from the bickering vultures as I could. Fabián and Sol emerged together from the bar and walked away from us in the direction of the cliffs below the dome. They were tossing a ball between them, and Fabián was already smoking his first joint of the day. I hoped he wasn’t going to do something stupid like trying to get Sol stoned, though as she was Ray’s daughter she’d probably been toking since she could walk. Let him be, I thought. Something told me it was the best policy. I would talk to him later and make sure that everything was okay.

  ‘Want to tell me why you’re called Sally Lightfoot, then?’ I said.

  She leant back, scowling, as the whale’s body voided some new pocket of trapped odour.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘It goes like this. When I got married, I was told that the reason why I was expected to take the name of my future husband was that this was the person in whom I could trust from now on. This was who I relied on. This man was my life,’ she grimaced, tearing away at a difficult strip of cartilage. ‘Could you please scratch my nose? Not there. Higher. Oh, yes. Great. Thanks. You can wipe that off your hand on to the back of my shirt if you want.

  ‘Anyway, let’s just say that after a year and a half of marriage I found out that all this reliability was a myth. One person is always a crutch for the other. And in my case it turned out that my man didn’t just expect to lean on me, but to beat me up from time to time as well. Not what I had been led to expect, I can tell you. So, after we had … gone our separate ways, I decided that the next name I took would be one in which I really knew I could trust. The obvious thing might have been to take back my old name, but I didn’t want that either. I decided to become someone new. Could you shoo away that vulture? Just take a swing at him with the spade if he won’t go. Thanks.

  ‘Anyway, I ended up working as a marine biologist out in the Galápagos. That’s what I trained as. That’s how I know how this lovely lady works, and how to chop her up. There I am one day, sitting on an island populated by no human beings at all, watching the turtles, minding my own business and playing with my wedding ring – just wondering whether or not to throw it into the sea there and then, but aware that I might soon be needing it for the money. And something in the movement of the metal attracts this crab. This huge crab. Two things you need to know about the Galápagos: one, the animals aren’t afraid of people, because they’ve never known any predators; two, you get bigger versions of everything there, for the same reason.’

  ‘I know. I was there last year.’

  ‘In that case I’m surprised you’ve never heard the name Sally Lightfoot before. It’s a kind of crab. Named after a famous dancer from the Caribbean. It only exists in the Galápagos. A stunning bright blue and crimson crab. One of the most beautiful things you ever saw. And it’s the kind of crab that scuttled up and snipped at my wedding finger, just at the point when I was wondering what to do with myself. It cut about halfway down the finger, right down to the bone, then scuttled off again. It was like a sign.’

  ‘It only cut your finger a bit?’ I said, waiting for the rest, picturing a bloodbath.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, what …?’

  ‘Well,’ said Sally, calmly, ‘I cut the rest off myself. I went back to my little boat, took a scalpel from my medical kit and finished the crab’s job off for him. It was obvious to me that that was what I had to do. I’d never felt so good in all of my life. I sat on this black shelf of rock near my boat and cut straight through the middle joint, letting the finger and the ring tumble away into the water in front of me. The ring disappeared straight away, but the finger sank more slowly. I remember watching this smoky, rusty trail it left as it went down, and I just sat there, watching the fish crowd round and holding the place where it had been. At the time, it didn’t even hurt. I bet it got eaten in seconds. And now there’s a nice, clean little piece of bone of mine down there somewhere. Just … like … THIS one. Got it.’

  I stared intently at the edge of a pile of grey blubber, lapped at by the surf. I was certain that if I looked up, I wouldn’t be able to take my eyes away from Sally’s missing finger.

  ‘The crab had made my decision for me. Taking that piece of me away, however painful, would make me stronger, even if it meant sacrificing a piece of myself. I called myself Sally Lightfoot after the crab. And now that is my name.’

  Sally Lightfoot tossed the bone she had just extricated into the red plastic bin beside her. She glanced at me before going back to work.

  ‘You did ask,’ she said.

  In the morning, I had watched as Fabián and Sol picked their way along the cliff base at the north end of the beach. I planned on keeping an eye on them to see how far they got, but at a certain point they disappeared from view. I stayed with Sally for most of the day, making a couple of trips to the bar to fetch a beer or some sandwiches, but she never moved from the carcass and barely looked up from her work during our conversations. She had resolved to finish the job before the whale left Pedrascada.

  ‘This is almost a dangerous mania, you know,’ I said, slurping a beer. ‘If you aren’t careful, you’ll be washed back out to sea with her and the vultures will start picking away at you too. Zoologists will marvel at it: the blubber of a whale, with the skeleton of a woman … remarkable … Have you ever seen anything like it, Jones? And you’ll be sent off on round-the-world tours to be looked at in museums alongside shrunken heads and frozen Inca princesses.’

  ‘Quite an imagination you’ve got there,’ she said, cutting away quietly.

  ‘It’s no joke. Without me here you’d be in serious danger.’

  As the day wore on, I’d been glancing towards the north end of the beach at regular intervals. Sea-spray spouted intermittently over the rocks. Above, the northern rock pile towered, and beyond it shone the occasional glint of light from the lurking, malevolent dome. Of Fabián and Sol there was no sign. I was conscious of the tide, which would soon be coming in and sealing off their return pathway. But as afternoon became early evening, just when my niggling worries were building to genuine anxiety, two details of colour appeared on the jutting headland and became the moving figures of Fabián and Sol.

  Leaving Sally at work, I picked up a fresh beer from the bar and walked up the beach
to meet them as they climbed off the rocks. Bursts of their laughter filtered back to me between blasts of wind.

  ‘Find any more treasure?’ I said, passing Fabián the beer as he reached me.

  ‘Most kind,’ said Fabián. ‘Not as yet.’

  ‘But we will,’ said Sol.

  ‘We will,’ he confirmed. ‘You can’t get lucky every day.’

  We ambled back to the cabins.

  ‘But,’ said Fabián, ‘we did find something very interesting. Sol showed me this cave you can get to if you climb round the cliff base. Obviously you can only make it there when the tide’s out, but when you do, it’s awesome. It goes really far back into the rock. So far that we didn’t even get to the end because it got too dark to see. But Sol says she thinks there might be a tunnel cut in there, with steps, that allows you to get all the way up to the dome.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, really. Wouldn’t it be cool to find some secret passageway up there, like a smuggler’s cave or something?’

  I spoke evenly. ‘After what Ray said, I’m not so sure it’s a good idea to be trying to get up there.’

  ‘You do what you like. We’re going back tomorrow with a torch, aren’t we, Solita? It’s up to you whether or not you join us.’

  ‘And what have you been doing over there all day?’ I said.

  ‘Usual cave-like activities. We caught this monster crab in a rock pool, and I wanted to cook it over a fire but Sol wouldn’t let me, so we set it free again. Then we looked for treasure for a while. Told each other a few stories.’

  ‘Fabián told me all about how you beat up the muggers in Quito. The ones who attacked you with knives and water bombs,’ said Sol.