The Amnesia Clinic

by James Scudamore

  ‘Just a moment.’

  My mother stopped in mid-sentence. Her head whirled round to face him.

  ‘Your embarrassment is endearing, Madam,’ he said, with a wan smile. ‘And it is considerate of you to give your son this public dressing-down for my benefit, however unnecessary. In fact, I found Anti’s story quite stimulating and interesting. As well as the reception it received.’

  I’d seen the look on his face somewhere before. It took me a few seconds to realise where: it was an echo of that same expression of distaste I’d twice seen on Fabián’s face in Pedrascada, when he had seemed to want to shake my timid, imaginative shortcomings out of his head.

  My mother paused. ‘I’m staggered,’ she said, ‘that you see fit to praise Anti’s outrageous flight of fancy like that. I thought we were here to get to the truth.’

  ‘We’ll get there one way or another. However, I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy listening to what Anti gave us.’

  ‘What he said was ridiculous,’ my mother protested. ‘Banquets. Secret societies. Scuttling ships. Nobody could possibly believe it.’

  ‘My dear woman, even if I agreed with you about that, which I do not, I should tell you that I gave up long ago the unfortunate habit of believing the mere plausible.’

  He allowed himself a brief smile – a distant flare of his old self, ignited by the negotiations – and then it was gone.

  ‘I’m afraid that only confirms my suspicions about you, and your elastic view of the truth. I’ve been wondering for some time, given the bizarre things my son says after staying at this house for the weekend, whether it was wise to allow him to continue. Now I see that my fears were entirely justified.’ She slammed her wineglass down, but it glanced off the edge of the table, splashing wine on the top of her hand. She patted it off swiftly with a napkin.

  Suarez turned his full attention on her slowly, dangerously. ‘As I trust my opening remarks made clear, I had hoped to avoid apportioning blame during the course of this discussion. It would be terrible if we were to make an occasion of great personal tragedy – specifically to me, if you don’t mind my saying – any more painful by getting into an unpleasant cycle of recrimination. Let us not forget that these events were precipitated principally by your son. Please – let me finish. I see now that I bear some of the responsibility for what has happened. It’s true that I encouraged Anti, up to a point, to indulge Fabián’s delusions, so long as they remained harmless. And I stand by my advice,’ he added, before my mother had a chance to interject. ‘In spite of the way Anti chose to interpret it.’

  ‘You’re as mad as each other,’ said my mother. ‘What about the facts?’

  Suarez gave her what must have been an infuriatingly dismissive shrug of the shoulders and reached again for the olives.

  In her desperation, she turned to my father and said, ‘You’re very quiet.’

  ‘I’m thinking,’ he replied.

  Suarez seemed to enjoy this minute exchange more than anything he’d heard all evening. I could have sworn he tried to suppress a grin.

  ‘Sure you won’t have a glass of wine, Anti?’ He seemed perkier than ever.

  I shook my head sorrowfully, but inside I felt triumphant. Somehow, he was back on my side. The relief was astounding. My breathing had never been clearer. I could feel my chest relaxing and filling with oxygen in spite of the nauseating, adult atmosphere in the room, of wine, and tobacco, and olives. But it wasn’t over.

  Suarez’s face slackened again into seriousness. ‘Unfortunately, Anti, your mother is right. We haven’t quite finished. Much as I enjoyed your story, we both know that a story is all it is.’

  I swallowed.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t realise, but I went to Pedrascada myself while you were in hospital. You look surprised. Do you think I wouldn’t want to see the place where my nephew died? And, as it happens, I know exactly what your mysterious dome is. Do you want me to tell you? It’s a holiday home, owned by a man who led this country two or three presidents ago. In his retirement, he is cultivating a long-held passion for astronomy. There’s no more mystery to it than that. Now, while he wasn’t the most incorruptible politician we’ve ever had, I seriously doubt that endangered-species banquets such as the one you describe are his cup of tea. As I recall, his environmental track-record was one of the few laudable aspects of his tenure. Nor, before you suggest it, do I think he has gone into the business of curing memory loss in his retirement. As far as I can remember from his days in office, having a selective memory served him rather well.’

  He allowed himself a chuckle at his own joke, then met my eye again. ‘I am touched by your story, Anti. I applaud it. But now we need the mundane version, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s nothing but a formality. A boring one, I know, but quite necessary. Whatever it is you have to tell me, however banal, I need to hear it. From tonight, you may remember what happened in Pedrascada however you please. With my blessing. Add to it all you like. That is your prerogative. But first, if you please, the facts.’

  His voice suddenly hardened. ‘Now.’

  This time, I spoke very quietly, very quickly, looking at nobody. I was not interrupted.

  ‘We’d always told each other stuff that wasn’t true. It was our thing. I thought we both knew when things had gone too far, and when to stop. But down at Pedrascada things went over the top. Fabián was telling more and more stories that couldn’t possibly be true. And I … I suppose I got a bit competitive.

  ‘It started on the journey. The night before we picked up the mountain train. He disappeared for the whole night and left me on my own in this weird little town in the middle of nowhere. All mist and mountains. In this hostel, run by some crazy old woman who kept these screeching, scratching, shitting birds everywhere. It scared the hell out of me. I barely slept all night. I was ready to turn around and come home on my own.

  ‘And when he finally turned up the next morning, he didn’t even apologise. He just told me this bullshit story about a brothel, about how he’d got laid then got into trouble with the pimp for not paying his bill. I was furious with him. And determined to get him back.

  ‘Then, on the train down to the coast, we got talking to this guy – a traveller – and for some reason he gave us all his weed.’

  Hesitantly, I looked at my mother. She shifted in her seat at this revelation, and one eyebrow shot up, but she retained what composure she had left and didn’t interrupt.

  ‘I suppose he was just being generous. Anyway, Fabián was delighted, and he threw himself into smoking it for the rest of the journey. I guess it was some sort of release for him. But he wasn’t being himself at all.

  ‘In Pedrascada, Fabián had a sort of … regression to childhood, I guess is how I’d describe it. He took to playing games all day with Sol, Ray’s daughter. He called her his little sister. It was quite odd, but on the other hand, he was the happiest I’d seen him for ages so I didn’t worry about it too much.

  ‘Then, on our second day, this woman, a Danish marine biologist, turned up in Pedrascada and took a cabin at the same place as us. We both liked the look of her immediately. Plus, she seemed … mysterious. Enigmatic.

  ‘She was following a dead whale down the coast. It washed up every night, then went out to sea again, and she was cutting out its skeleton for a museum. It had become a sort of quest for her.

  ‘Fabián and I tried really hard to make friends with her, but she was cold and standoffish. She got cagey when we asked her anything about her life, and didn’t seem to want to get to know us at all. So while she was kneeling in the water, cutting up this whale all day, Fabián and I sat around watching her, and just for fun, we sort of … made up her past. We even gave her a new name. We called her Sally Lightfoot, after those crabs you get in the Galápagos.

  ‘Finally, on her second night, she relaxed a bit and told us some genuine facts about her past. She’d had a rough time. Somehow, she had mana
ged to marry this horrible guy who beat her up all the time. And when she filed for divorce, he got so mad that he cut off her wedding finger with a carving knife. He said if she wasn’t going to stay married to him then he’d see to it that she could never put on a wedding ring ever again.

  ‘I know. Awful. She was obviously very messed up by it, and I felt guilty that we’d been so nosey as to get the truth out of her. But Fabián reacted in a strange way. I guess he saw her story as some sort of challenge – like she was in danger of putting him in the shade or something. In response, he told everyone round the fire the true story about the weekend his parents died. I think it was the first time he’d ever spoken about it properly.’

  ‘And what was this truth?’ said Suarez, quietly.

  I paused. ‘He said that he felt responsible for his parents’ deaths. That he knew his father was having an affair with their maid, that he’d seen them together in the maid’s pantry, and that if he’d told his mother the truth about it then his parents might not have gone off hiking together that weekend. He believed he’d killed her. Or made her disappear.’

  I looked up. My father was uncomfortably transferring an olive stone from one hand to the other. My mother looked concerned, no longer angry in the slightest. And – something I never thought I would see – Suarez was crying.

  ‘Anti, please continue,’ he said, blinking and shedding a half-tear that had been left behind. It plopped on to the table with no equivocation.

  I hesitated.

  ‘I’m fine. Please carry on.’

  ‘Fabián thought that I was somehow taking Sally’s side against him. He got so furious with me he wouldn’t even let me sleep in our cabin, so I spent the night on the beach. When I woke up the next morning, Sally had already left. Without even saying goodbye. But Fabián was too busy playing his stupid treasure-hunting games with Sol to have even noticed. I decided to disappear for a while, so I went for a walk in the town. It was a peculiar place – the street was knee-deep in mud because it had been raining a lot, and there was nobody around but fishermen and roosters – but eventually I found a bar and went in for a beer. I met a surfer there who was staying in the town, and he offered me something to smoke. I don’t know what was in it, but it made me feel hideously ill, so I decided to get away from the town, but I didn’t want to go back to the cabins.

  ‘Then I remembered something Ray had told me about an underground stream that ran under his cabins and away to a waterfall, so, looking for something new to do, I thought I’d go and find it. I was determined to show Fabián that I was capable of finding a good time on my own.

  ‘It was disgusting. The place where the water landed was nothing more than a cesspool, all bugs and shit and algae. The “waterfall” was nothing but a trickle of water coming out of a concrete pipe. From the smell, I thought that either it was a sewage outflow from the town or that an animal had died in it and was decomposing into the water. In my stoned state, I tried to go for a swim anyway, but the stench made me vomit.

  ‘As I walked back to our cabin with flies buzzing round my stinking face, I got more and more furious with Fabián. Our entire trip seemed to have been spent sitting on this stupid beach, getting wasted. I also thought that Fabián had scared Sally Lightfoot away by being so aggressive, which made me realise how sick I was of the fact that every story had to revolve around him. What’s more, he’d abandoned me again for a ten-year-old girl, leaving me alone for the day, playing in sewage. I got more and more angry the more I thought about it.

  ‘I found him in a terrible state. Yet again, he’d been drinking. He’d also got into this obsessive habit of cleaning his face with pure alcohol, and looked awful. To make matters worse, he’d had a falling-out with Sol. It was nothing serious – she’d just slipped in a rock pool when they’d been out looking for crabs – but I managed to build it into the attack on him that I unleashed when I got back to the cabin. I accused him of betraying me by hanging out so much with Sol. I was so angry, I didn’t know what I was saying. I even accused him of trying to … molest her.

  ‘And then I told him that I’d been with Sally. I told him that we’d been alone all day, screwing under a beautiful waterfall. It was nonsense, of course, but I wanted to get him back for what he’d done to me. He was in a vulnerable state and I knew he’d believe me. That’s what got him so angry. That’s how it started.

  ‘We said a lot of stupid things to each other, but I think it was mainly to do with what we had done, running away: it was beginning to catch up with us. It didn’t seem like a game any more. It … it involved talking about the Amnesia Clinic, too, and him screaming at me that I’d never meant to help him when I made the newspaper cutting. That our journey had all been for my benefit, not his. Then he ran off round the cliff base to try and get up to the dome.

  ‘He’d been to the cave before, so he knew there wasn’t a danger of getting caught by the tide if you got there in time, but I didn’t know that, so I followed him, because I thought he might get into trouble.

  ‘When I reached him, I was almost having an asthma attack – I just wanted to stop, get my breath back and talk. But he was very angry. We ended up having a fight out there, on the rocks, pushing each other around and screaming. Somehow, we both ended up in the water and hit our heads. I managed to get out and climb up to the cave. But I couldn’t see him anywhere. Then I must have passed out.

  ‘You wanted the truth. Well, there it is.’

  My father dropped his olive stone in the dish with a clink. My mother gazed down at the floor with a grim expression.

  Suarez stared at me, then exhaled slowly. I tried to get some signal from him, some indication that he was still on my side. But the twinkle in his eye had been snuffed out once and for all.

  ‘So,’ he said, eventually. ‘Just so we’re clear about this: you took it upon yourself to wind Fabián up, who was in a fragile enough state as things stood, so you could get him back for some harmless boyish story.’

  ‘I have to agree, Anti,’ said my mother, quietly. ‘It sounds like very irresponsible behaviour to me. Even malicious.’

  ‘But it shows you – it proves to you – that it wasn’t because he believed the article. The Amnesia Clinic had nothing to do with it. He was just crazy as hell anyway!’

  ‘Thanks to you,’ Suarez said coldly, ‘we will never know the truth of that. One thing is certain: I will never forgive myself for not discussing the matter of Fabián and his parents more with him. Look where it has got me.’ He shook his head. ‘Félix Morales screwing the maid. I should have known that pissy little mountain boy couldn’t keep his hands off his own kind.’

  My mother didn’t like the sound of this. ‘Hang on. There’s no excuse for—’

  ‘And what do you know?’ he snapped. There was a new edge to Suarez’s voice. An unfamiliar spite that made me feel sick.

  ‘Plenty, as it happens,’ said my mother, ‘when it comes to intolerance in this country. But, under the circumstances, I will bite my tongue.’

  Suarez laughed in a particularly scornful, dirty way. ‘Please, Señora, don’t hold back your views on my account. I think you’ll find I am strong enough to take them.’

  I told my mother to shut up and let me handle it. The last thing we needed was for the conversation to degenerate into one of her social crusades. Then I turned back to Suarez.

  I talked for a while. It involved any excuse – conflicting excuses: I didn’t think Fabián would take it so seriously. It was to make him feel better. You said real life can be disappointing. You said that sometimes it doesn’t hurt to let people believe what they want to believe. You said grief asks different questions of us all. You, and your stupid, pithy aphorisms for everything. It’s you. It’s your fault, not mine.

  Heroically, my mother leapt to my defence. ‘Quite right. Whose influence was it that made the two boys decide to run away in the first place?’ she demanded. ‘From what I can gather, you not only encouraged but positively fuelled the “heads
trong” nature of your nephew, as you described it, and I don’t imagine that my son would ever have made the decision to play truant and travel halfway across the country without your encouragement.’

  ‘Even a man who stands accused of having “an elastic view of the truth” can see that this is bullshit,’ said Suarez. ‘This has nothing to do with me, or with Fabián. This is to do with your son.’

  The malicious energy that lit his eyes combined with his gaunt appearance to transform his expression. He turned on me like a snarling, slobbering pit-bull.

  ‘You are parasitic. A cuckoo.’

  I started.

  He pointed at me, marking each word with sickening precision. ‘And like the cuckoo, laying its eggs in a weaker bird’s nest, you are nothing more than a vandal.’

  ‘Weaker? How could Fabián be the weaker one?’ I pleaded.

  ‘You are perpetually scared. You are a coward. That makes you capable of anything. As far as I am concerned, you as good as killed him.’

  ‘Enough.’ I had never heard my father’s voice so firm. I thought someone new had walked into the room. ‘He’s only a boy.’

  ‘He’s man enough,’ Suarez snapped.

  Suarez stood up. He strode to the doorway and then, with almost absurd melodrama, he spat on the floor.

  ‘Leave,’ he said. ‘You’re no fucking storyteller.’

  The three of us sat dumbly, shocked into paralysis.

  ‘Leave,’ he repeated, shaking with rage. ‘Before I set Byron on all three of you.’

  ‘Suarez. Please.’ I was determined not to cry, but it was too late. My cheeks were streaked already, and I could feel the tears trickling into the back of my mouth. I tried to find more words but I had no breath left to speak. All I could do was wheeze.

  My mother strode smartly out of the room without giving Suarez another look, while my father helped me up. At the door, Suarez said, ‘One more thing before you go, Anti. I wouldn’t be so sure Fabián was lying about that brothel, if I were you. There is something of a predilection for whoring in my family. As, indeed, there is for storytelling.’ His inability to control himself was heart-rending. ‘Fabián’s world was fantastic because it needed to be. What’s your excuse?’