The Amnesia Clinic

by James Scudamore

  ‘Find what?’ I said.

  He didn’t turn round. ‘You know damn well what. The Amnesia Clinic.’

  ‘I thought we agreed not to—’

  ‘Fuck you and your agreements. I’m going up there to find it. You never know. That clinic might be up there. My mother might be up there. We have to at least try. Wouldn’t you rather know for sure?’

  ‘I DO know for sure,’ I shouted. ‘And so do you.’ This time I grabbed the bad arm. He spun round quickly with the pain.

  ‘And why is that?’ he said. The hatred in his eyes shocked me.

  I took a breath before speaking. But I had to say it.

  ‘Because I made it up,’ I said. ‘I faked that newspaper article to make you feel better. I made the whole idea of the clinic up, and you know that I did. And you know it isn’t real, don’t you?’

  He said nothing. His face contorted again into that expression of disgust, as if I had said something in bad taste, and his voice quavered as if he were trying to shake away my words.

  ‘Shut up. Shut up.’

  ‘You know that,’ I repeated.

  ‘Of course I know!’ he screamed, eyeballing me and pushing at my chest. ‘Idiot.’

  He was crying again and he shook me once more as he spoke, more quietly this time: ‘But that doesn’t mean it won’t be there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He sighed. ‘You never understood it at all, did you?’

  ‘Obviously not,’ I said.

  He grabbed me by the front again and my lungs clenched inside me. He drilled each word into me, calmly, methodically, channelling his fury: ‘It’s good. I should be happy that you made me tell the truth. Are you happy now? You cunt. You fed me a bad lie. That’s what you did, bringing me here. You told me something you could never back up. Fucking clinics. Dr Menosmal. You’re a fucking bad liar.’

  I was panicking, and I spoke quickly. ‘Don’t tell me you believed it. Don’t you tell me you believed it, because I know you’re not that stupid. It was only meant to help you. To show you that I believed you.’

  ‘This never had anything to do with me at all. You pretended we were coming here to make me feel better, but it was only ever for you. Some fucking sightseeing tour before you go home to your new school. You make me sick. You’re nothing but a fucking tourist.’ He spat at me, and it flew over my shoulder and down towards the rising, slopping sea. I reasoned that I had to find some way of calming him down. I decided that I ought to be the one who stopped us going to the cave once and for all. Somebody had to end this Amnesia Clinic stuff, and I was the one who had started it. So, quite placidly, I stepped forward and slapped him in the face.

  Some sounds travel well through time. Some barely make it through intact at all. I remember the feel of the slap as if it were five minutes ago – the soft stubble of his cheek on my palm surprised me – but I have no memory of the sound. Other sounds from that day – the crack of skull on submerged rock, for example – are much clearer.

  ‘You’re going to regret that, you little shit.’

  I realised that he was making me very angry. ‘What did you do to Sol?’ I said, screaming now myself. ‘Did you touch her? Is that what this is about?’ And then there were no more words, and there was no more composure. He grabbed me and tried to throw me backwards against the rocks, but I managed to escape his grip and I leapt away from him, scrambling upwards and around the headland towards the cave mouth.

  My palms slipped on rocks dampened by the sea-spray as I climbed. I told myself to concentrate on getting away, to move as quickly as I could, upwards, to reach the cave. At that moment, I felt his hand round my ankle, cold, like a steel manacle, and I began to slip on the rocks.

  ‘Let go!’ I shouted. ‘You’ll kill us both.’

  He gripped my ankle even more firmly and I felt my chest begin to tighten again. I struggled against it, trying to climb higher, but he had both strength and gravity on his side, even with one wounded arm.

  In my panic, I raised my foot and drove my heel downwards. Both of us lost our footing and slipped as one towards the water. My arms flailed around me, looking for a new handhold, and my legs bicycled in the air around his head. I managed to place my foot again but, as I looked down, I saw his hands reaching once more for my legs. This time, however, his broken arm was so weakened that he couldn’t grip me with any force. My kick must have scored a direct hit.

  I know now that when he reached for me the second time it was for support, and not to drag me down, but in that instant I thought differently: I assumed he was trying to grab me, to do me harm. So I kicked out again, at his head this time.

  The last I saw of his face was a disbelieving look as his arms reached out around him for something to hold on to. There was a vivid flash of blue as he fell backwards and his shirt caught the wind. I heard a dense, sickening whack as his head struck the rocks beneath us, so loud as to be audible even over the suck and wash of the sea. Then, losing my handhold again, I slid down the cliff face. I tried to find a footing where we had been standing before, but my feet were quickly swept from under me by the pawing of chilling waves. I fell sideways, and a fist of salt water punched down my throat.

  I remember a lurch of nausea and a feeling of desperate, breathless panic as I thought about the need to escape the water, to get Fabián out, at all costs.

  And then there is nothing but darkness.

  SEVENTEEN

  My mind had hijacked the scene of the dream from a newspaper article I once read. It was about some poor soul who, attempting to kill himself at a station, ended up stuck between the train and the platform with his legs twisted round and round like a corkscrew beneath the trunk of his body. His wife and children were brought to the platform edge to say their goodbyes in the certain knowledge that he would be dead the moment anybody tried to move the train. The image had always affected me: a person so damaged that the movement of any component part of his environment would spell death, in a situation where remaining static was out of the question. In my dream, I found myself pinned to the platform of a high-altitude railway station in the same way, except that it was not a train that kept me there but a vast, dead whale, its barnacled skin ripping into mine as I struggled to get out. When I looked down, I noticed that the platform had changed into a giant version of Sally Lightfoot’s back, as, with great whale-sized snores, and facing away from me, she slept.

  I woke to find myself lying in a metal-framed bed in a green hospital ward. Trying to sit up, I found that I could not move, as if I were strapped in, and yet I could see no restraints. My tongue felt furry and was coated in the metallic taste of blood. Ancient plumbing bubbled and clanked, and the overwhelming smell was of formaldehyde.

  Looking ahead, I saw neon signs flashing on the wall at the end of my bed. Your name is Anti. You were found in a cave in Pedrascada. You killed your best friend. I could not turn my head but swivelled my eyes to another wall, where a new sign flashed up that read: Only joking. Everything’s fine really. Ha ha ha. Returning my eyes to the front, I found a man standing at the foot of my bed. He wore a white boiler-suit and small, round glasses with thick rims and had a moustache so tiny it might have been pencilled on. He carried a stainless-steel clipboard.

  ‘My name is Menosmal,’ he said in a clipped, precise tone. ‘I believe you have been looking for me. Although,’ he added hopefully, ‘you may not remember.’

  ‘You look like someone I know,’ I said.

  ‘It must be your imagination,’ said Menosmal. ‘You don’t know anybody, so far as I’m aware. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’ But even as he said it I became aware that with a slightly thicker moustache, and without the glasses, he would have looked, in the face at least, just like Suarez. I tried again to sit up, but my body would still not respond.

  ‘I know you can’t be Dr Menosmal,’ I said, ‘because he doesn’t exist. I made him up.’

  Menosmal made a tick on his clipboard. ‘Interesting. You are seeing thi
ngs you have invented. This is perfectly consistent with the behaviour of my amnesiacs. And it means that you are in exactly the right place. Now, I think you should rest awhile and see if anything comes to you. In some cases, my patients remember after only a few hours. Although I fear,’ he went on, ‘that this has become increasingly rare lately, as our amenities have improved. It’s almost as if some patients decide upon arrival that they rather like to be here, liberated of their memories …’ He winked. ‘More and more frequently, I find myself having to address delusions about their pasts that I know my patients have concocted within hours of being admitted here at the clinic.’

  ‘Is that right?’ I said.

  ‘Take this poor boy.’ He gestured towards the bed adjacent to mine with his pen. Looking over, I saw that the boy in question was Fabián. His broken arm, which was still streaked with fragments of his own dead skin, flapped as he waved at me, and I noticed that blood continued to trickle from the sides of his lips and nose as he smiled. He wore a green backless surgical gown. ‘He washed up here yesterday, remembering nothing,’ said the doctor. ‘Nothing at all. Didn’t even know his own name. And now, he and this other woman have suddenly decided that they’re mother and son.’

  Fabián had been joined by a slender, dark-haired woman in her mid-forties. She had the same striking green eyes as Fabián, and when she got up and walked over to the bed to shake my hand, she smelled of fresh peaches.

  ‘Of course, it’s ridiculous,’ said the doctor in a low voice when she had left my bed and returned to sit at the foot of Fabián’s. ‘She’s one of my oldest patients. Been here almost since I started up. She’s never said anything about a son to me before. It’s just what she wants to believe.’

  Straining my eyes to look at the bed to my right, I saw that the woman had now begun stroking Fabián’s hair with one hand and swabbing his face with alcohol-soaked cotton wool with the other. He was smiling up at her.

  ‘I must admit, however,’ said Menosmal, ‘that it is a delusion that both patients share. One of the more powerful I’ve seen. She is also quite convinced that she is his mother.’ At this, Fabián and his putative mother both waved in my direction as if they were posing for a cheesy holiday snap, then tilted their heads at each other, smiling continuously. ‘Still, if it makes them happy, I suppose they might as well believe it until the real truth comes along.’

  ‘You’re an unconventional doctor, aren’t you?’ I said.

  ‘You’re an unconventional patient,’ said Menosmal. ‘I’ve treated some extraordinary cases in my time, but nobody has ever claimed to have invented me before now. That’s really something.’

  We both laughed.

  ‘Can you explain something to me?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Why am I unable to move? It’s because I’m still asleep, isn’t it?’

  He looked around, nervous all of a sudden.

  ‘Admit it,’ I said.

  Briskly, he slotted his pen back in his top pocket and began whistling. ‘Must be going,’ he said.

  ‘Ha,’ I said. ‘Got you. I knew I’d made you up.’

  ‘Clever boy,’ said Menosmal, snapping his fingers and turning into a blue-footed booby.

  I closed my eyes.

  When I opened them tentatively some time later, an intense yellow light burst in, so I closed them again straight away, electing to concentrate this time on potentially relevant sounds. I could hear the near-silent hum of efficient air-conditioning, the faint rustle of newspaper pages, a peppering of high heels on hard floor. I shifted on cold, clean, cotton sheets, and found that, although the rest of my body was now fine, I still could not move my right arm. I felt the residue of terrible pain in my elbow and the promise of more to come.

  ‘He’s awake. Did you see? He moved.’ The voice came from the direction of the heels. My mother.

  The newspaper was lowered with a scrunch.

  ‘Make sure you don’t wake him up.’ My father.

  ‘He’s been out for two days. We need to get to the bottom of this.’

  Two days? What had I been doing for two days? Perhaps events had been repeating themselves in my head. I kept my eyes closed to try and fix what had happened with more clarity, knowing that when I opened them there would be no time to think. Confused memories began to seep back, and I felt the beginnings of a kind of mischievous happiness at what we had dared to do. I wanted to see Fabián as soon as possible, to make my peace with him and to begin the exquisite process of preparing a version of our adventures worthy of public dissemination. But before the pride, there would have to be contrition: I must avert my eyes sorrowfully, mutter profound apologies, offer reparation. However much I might want to feign sleep until my parents went away, they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. So I took a deep breath, ready for the onslaught of questions (What did you think you were doing? How could you lie to us? What were you and Fabián fighting about?) and opened my eyes.

  The buttery yellow light blazed though Venetian blinds on to a grey linoleum floor and off-white walls. A battered TV clung on to a metal arm that dipped out from a corner opposite the bed. My father sat beneath it on an aluminium chair, his jacket crumpled, the newspaper open in his lap. My mother stood on the opposite side of the room in a powder-blue suit, staring distractedly through a reinforced glass porthole in the wooden door. She spun expertly on a stiletto as my movements registered.

  ‘Anti,’ she said, and stepped towards the bed. ‘Anti.’

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘You’re in hospital in Guayaquil,’ said Dad. ‘Don’t you remember? You were talking nineteen to the dozen when we arrived – though not much of it made sense. Who’s Sally?’

  ‘Slow down,’ said my mother. ‘We can get to that.’

  I lifted myself further up the pillows with some difficulty.

  ‘You’re a lucky guy, you know,’ said my father, folding his newspaper and standing up. ‘You weren’t that far from the war zone. It’s flared up again down in the Cordillera del Cóndor. Fifteen killed this week. Some of the wounded have even been brought to this hospital.’ He pointed at the paper in his hand for my benefit. ‘Though not over here in the expensive side, obviously,’ he chuckled.

  ‘For God’s sake.’ My mother pushed him to one side. ‘Anti, how are you feeling?’

  My father adopted a more concerned expression and took up a different position on the opposite side of the bed from my mother.

  ‘Listen, before you both start,’ I said, alternating between the two of them, ‘let me just say that I’m sorry. I’m sure you’re both terribly angry, but if you just let me explain why we did it, then …’

  ‘We’re not angry,’ said my mother, in a soft tone. She swept back the hair from my forehead with a fragrant hand. Something was wrong. ‘We’re not angry, Anti. But there’s some very bad news.’

  This, then, was not another dream.

  * * *

  His body was flung repeatedly against the base of the cliff as the tide came in and eventually found face down in the water, his foot snagging on the rocks directly beneath the red memorial hut to the unfortunate surfer. Not the sort of detail I was meant to discover, I’m sure, but somehow I did. I have since imagined that there might be another little shrine up there now for Fabián, and that whoever it was leaving out fresh flowers and lit candles for the surfer might now do the same for him. I hope I’m right.

  I left the country without even attending his funeral, so I never got to experience the pomp of an Ecuadorian send-off, but I had no difficulty imagining it. Fabián had furnished me on many occasions with such detailed and lurid descriptions of funerals that I felt I knew what it would have been like without having to go: women in black caught up in epic weeping fits; solemn processions; possibly even the traditional white coffin afforded to those who are considered to be too young in the eyes of the church to have committed any sin. All I have is my imagined version. I never got to stand there amid the incense smoke and th
e incensed relatives and look up at all the “plundered Inca gold”, as he’d called it, or see him buried, or cremated, or whatever it was they did to him. It wasn’t … required of me.

  But, as I have found, the more abruptly someone disappears from your life, the more vividly they live on in your head. It turned out that I didn’t really need to say goodbye, because Fabián has been within me ever since, tempered and channelled by regret, but living there still and showing little inclination to leave.

  I tell myself to try to let him go, that many people form intense friendships in adolescence that end abruptly and are never resumed, that this one just ended more definitively. And that only makes it worse, because one of the most difficult things to live with is the knowledge that we probably wouldn’t have remained friends, had he lived. We were heading in different directions: me to school and life in England, Fabián to whatever Suarez and he came up with out there – most likely involving college in the States and some lucrative profession or other. We’d have corresponded for a few years, maybe seen each other once or twice, but it would have gone no further than that. Our friendship would have dried up into dusty static images, and that would have been fine, because he wouldn’t be here now, in my head, had he lived. He’d be out there telling someone improbable stories, had he lived. I would barely remember him, had he lived. But I do remember him. His smile is fixed perfectly in my memory, like the grin of a new recruit in a sepia photograph. And I am left with three words that will tap away at my skull for ever, like a toffee hammer: had he lived.

  I hate him for that.

  As my parents and I left the hospital, we had to pass through the main casualty ward, the corridors of which were lined with soldiers wounded in a jungle ambush by the Peruvians, laid out, awaiting treatment. I met and returned the patience in their eyes. I walked stoically between them, looking calmly at each one in turn as if I were their Field-Marshal, inspecting the bandages around their various flesh wounds that were filling slowly with thick, arterial blood and even bestowing on one or two of them an approving or reassuring smile. My parents walked ahead of me, anxious to leave the building as quickly as possible, but I took my time. One of the soldiers, who could only have been a few years older than me, shot me a wink, then held his wounded hand up to his face. The bullet that had struck him had gone straight through his palm, and through a little red tunnel in the flesh I saw the glistening pupil of his eye, heavily dilated from painkillers, on the other side.