The Other Lives

by Adrian J. Walker

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean how does my condition, this ability to perform telepathy, relate to having memories of other lives?’

  My father releases a loud laugh, a guffaw that makes Arthur’s ears prick up.

  ‘Telepathic? Good grief, it’s nothing like that.’ He looks me up and down. ‘Elliot, you weren’t imagining being those people at school. And this condition of yours — it’s not telepathy. You’re not reading people’s minds.’

  ‘Then what am I doing?’

  ‘You’re remembering them.’

  JUST A THEORY

  WE FIND A CHAIR for William, into which he curls and — after a few minutes of twitching, muttering and whimpering — finally sleeps.

  In diagonal shards of afternoon light, Zoe, Morag and I sit in the kitchen with my father. He shoots me nervous glances as he leans over the table to pour my tea. I can see the aged reflection of myself in him; the hairline, the carriage, the set of his jaw.

  ‘What made my mother think I was special?’ I say.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’

  ‘My episodes.’

  ‘Yes, but it started way before them. Even as a toddler you told us things you could not possibly know, people and places that we’d never heard of but which we found to exist when we checked. It was nothing concrete, but she knew there was something there. Then, when you started having your “episodes”, as you call them, she became hopeful; very hopeful indeed.’

  ‘Hopeful?’

  ‘Yes, that’s when your mother started putting up her photographs.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To help you remember, of course.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you just tell me?’

  He sighs.

  ‘I wanted to, God knows I did, but your mother made me promise. You had to find out for yourself, you see? In order to protect your gift.’ He frowns. ‘But you never did. Something happened, didn’t it? You never told us what.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  My father’s brow performs a series of awkward undulations.

  ‘Your mother was not like most people, Elliot. She saw the world differently.’

  ‘You told me she was ill.’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t. That’s what everybody else said. That’s what they all said in the town, what my family said. What her family said.’

  He fidgets and sniffs.

  ‘It’s what I thought in my darker moments, if you want to know the truth of it. But I was wrong.’

  He shoots Morag a look. Her face remains set in the same expression it has been in since we arrived — a quiet regard directed at my father in a way I can tell disturbs him immensely. Finally he looks back me.

  ‘Everyone was wrong. She had a theory, Elliot.’

  ‘What theory?’

  ‘You don’t know how long I’ve wanted to tell you. But she made me promise, do you understand? She knew you were special, but she was adamant that you must discover the truth for yourself.’

  ‘What truth?’

  He blinks at me, startled.

  ‘The truth that you now know. That you’ve lived before. Do you doubt it?’

  ‘No,’ I reply. ‘Not anymore.’

  He looks back at Morag.

  ‘So, tell me, why are you here?’

  Morag smiles, tilting her head.

  ‘We’re trying to help William,’ she replies. ‘He’s looking for something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We don’t know. Something he left behind.’

  ‘It’s not just that,’ I say.

  My father’s eyes linger suspiciously on Morag before turning to me. ‘Then what else?’

  ‘Zoe and Morag showed me a picture, one of Heathcliff’s…I mean, William’s.’

  ‘A trigger.’

  I pause.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Quite common. Visual stimulus is the most effective means of triggering a memory. That’s what your mother was trying to achieve with you. And you lost control, correct?’

  ‘Yes, how…?’

  ‘Again, happens a lot, typical Glean. And you two’ — he gestures to Morag and Zoe — ‘you lost control as well? Same picture?’

  ‘No,’ says Zoe, ‘because of William.’

  ‘Hmm.’ My father rubs his chin, enjoying the puzzle. ‘So, William himself was the trigger. Again, not uncommon, actually a perfectly good example of a Knot.’

  ‘What’s a knot?’ Zoe and I say, in unison.

  My father stops.

  ‘I’m getting ahead of myself. Like I say, there is much to explain.’

  He takes a deep breath and stands.

  ‘Make no mistake, Elliot: We have all lived before, some of us more than others. I’ve seen far too much to doubt it any longer.’

  ‘Then you remember other lives too?’ says Zoe. ‘You believe in reincarnation?’

  ‘No, unfortunately I don’t remember any other lives, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe they happened. And please, don’t use words like reincarnation. They are misleading. They have connotations.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘That we have a soul, for a start — some amorphous thing that flits between lives in the moments of birth and death. This idea that we exist as some kind of anti-physical wisp that somehow acts as both a moral compass and a vessel of memory and personality, that twists our minds like dough, driving us to behave in certain ways, making us good or evil…that’s not how it is at all.’ He glances at Morag. ‘Your mother taught me that.’

  He taps his fingertips on the table, turning back to me.

  ‘May I see it?’ he says.

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Your trigger.’

  I pull Stanley Mordant’s school photograph from my pocket and hand it to him. He turns it to the light and studies it, mimicking Stanley’s finger point.

  ‘Your mother would have liked this. Look.’

  He walks to a patch of wall above the range and lifts a picture from its hook.

  ‘This was another of her favourites.’

  He hands it to me. It’s colour, over-exposed, with the garish sheen of a 1960s instant. Three bare-chested soldiers, US Marines by the looks of them, are sitting by a tent. Two are playing cards, wearing easy smiles and smoking around a wooden box. The third is sat behind them. His face is turned down to the game, but the whites of his eyes show him looking away at something else. His arms are folded, and one finger is stretched a little too far in one direction to be comfortable.

  ‘This man wanted us to see something. Or rather, he wanted others like him to see it, in the hope that they might remember too. Really, all a trigger does is open up a chain of lives, usually leading to just one.’

  ‘For what purpose?’ says Zoe.

  ‘That’s not always clear. Sometimes it’s merely to provide enlightenment. I’m sure you’re aware, this gift you all share can be difficult to manage.’

  Stanley Mordant’s words repeat in my head.

  ‘Old souls make heavy burdens.’

  ‘Yes,’ says my father. ‘That’s as good a way of putting it as anything else. But there are other reasons too.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He ignores my question and nods at Stanley’s picture.

  ‘Do you have any idea what this young man was trying to show you?’

  ‘Yes, another photograph.’

  ‘Where?’

  He peers closer.

  ‘They were in a photography book together, side by side.’

  He looks up, mouth agape.

  ‘Really? Good grief! Well, that’s a first. You mean a collection? From after this was taken?’

  ‘William found it in a bookshop.’

  ‘Then he would have remembered far ahead of himself, no doubt. And behind, poor chap.’

  ‘What do you mean? How could he remember ahead of himself? How do you know all of this?’

  My father looks up, hesitating in the manner of one who has just realised they are walk
ing too far ahead of a child. He stands and walks to the wall behind Morag, stopping in front of a picture of my mother as a young woman, bright-eyed, head turned up to the lens. He takes several trembling breaths through his nose and turns, so that he stands directly behind Morag’s chair, looking down.

  ‘This idea of reincarnation; of souls weaving in and out of meat like thread through fabric — it’s not how it works. But if we must use such words, then think of it like this: reincarnation is a soul’s memory, and a soul is something that is not bound by time. It can exist in many places at once or far across the years. A soul can exist first in the future, and then in the past, an entire chain of lives spread throughout history with no respect for temporal affairs.’

  ‘How?’ says Morag, looking dead ahead.

  ‘I don’t know. It was just her theory. I am not a scientist, nor am I a philosopher. I’m a curator, and I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics of it any more than I understand relativity or quantum entanglement or….’

  ‘For crying out loud, Harris,’ says Morag, standing and turning to face him. ‘Why did you always have to make things so complicated?’

  He stammers, jaw wobbling, looking back, before finally slamming his fist upon the table.

  ‘Damnit, woman, I knew it was you! I fucking well knew it from the moment I fucking laid eyes on you, you, you infernal…’ His face burns puce, his cheeks trembling with rage as he searches for the words. ‘Wife! You infernal wife! How did you find me? How? And why…’ He falls back against the wall, tears appearing as Morag reaches for him and gathers him in her arms. ‘Why did you have to leave me in the first place? Why did you leave me?’

  She strokes his head, shushing him as he sobs into her shoulder.

  ‘I told you I’d come back one day, didn’t I?’

  I’m on my feet now too. Zoe steadies me.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  My father lifts his head from Morag’s shoulder. There’s a weary, worn-out look on his face.

  ‘So it is all true?’ he says.

  Morag nods, and turns to me.

  ‘What do you remember, Elliot?’

  Her voice is different, older somehow.

  ‘Who are you?’

  But I know the answer even as I ask the question, and I know now what that feeling is when I’m around her: that need to be noticed.

  ‘You know who. Now just tell me.’

  So I take a breath and tell her. I tell her of the boy named James, and his brother William, and the brother and sister named Rupert and Lucy, and a strange man named Schmidt, injured in the forest. When I am finished, she takes her seat, relieved.

  ‘You remember being Lucy?’ I say.

  She smiles, all the way to those cool, round eyes of hers.

  ‘That’s right, and Lucy was your mother. Now tell me the last thing you remember.’

  I look up at the window, through which shards of orange afternoon light break and scatter upon the walls and table.

  ‘I remember the beach, the Lasswick Crags, swimming with Rupert and William. Then Lucy. She was lost.’

  Zoe and Morag share a look.

  ‘That’s about where we got to as well,’ says Zoe.

  GONE

  Cornwall, 1940

  LUCY WATCHED HER BREATH freeze in clouds before her. Like dust she thought, smoke from Daddy’s pipe. The thought thrilled her, of being like her daddy, smoking — thrilled as she was already to be up before everyone else, even Poppy, and the first one to be walking through this wonderland that the night had left her. She took careful steps through the snow, watching each Wellington boot make perfect shapes in the crust and sink to the grass, feeling the crunch and the fall. The bag was heavy, but it would be all right.

  She felt light, electric, brand-new.

  There was no sound apart from her own frozen footsteps, the distant roar of the sea and, even farther than that, another roar — lower and quieter and somehow more powerful. The roar of the world.

  She knew the world was roaring. Somewhere beyond that sea there were things happening that she did not understand. She knew that it involved things called Germans, which she thought might mean something to do with coughs and sneezes and not washing your hands, and that these particular Germans were angry about something and were shouting, and had things called guns, which were like her daddy’s gun, only more so and in greater number. They were baddies, these Germans. That’s what Rupert had said. But she and Rupert — and her daddy, her mummy and Poppy, and everyone else around her — were on the good side, and had to stop them.

  And so it seemed strange to her that this man in the forest, Schmidt — which she thought sounded like one of Poppy’s sneezes when she got fluff up her nose — did not seem to be remotely bad at all. In fact he seemed quite nice and friendly, and wanted just the same things as everyone else. Something to keep him warm, and something to drink and something nice to eat. She wished she had something nice to eat in her bag, but unfortunately all she had been able to find was the tops of some carrots, some old cabbage and a mouldy turnip that was going out to the pigs. She felt bad about this, but she knew she could not help it. They weren’t allowed as many nice things anymore — this was to do with the roar of the world too, and something called rationing that made everyone more hungry than they would like.

  Still, carrot tops and cabbages tasted all right in soup. Maybe the man could use them for that.

  She knew that Rupert did not want to help Schmidt anymore because of her daddy. She knew Daddy would be angry if he found out, and she knew that what she was doing was, for some reason, wrong. She knew that women should not be concerned with things outside of the house, like Germans. But she was not yet a woman. And she would be back before anybody woke up. Even Poppy, for whom she might save a carrot top to make up for all the leftovers she had stolen from her.

  She walked on, happy with this plan and the way her day was going. At the bank she stopped, hardly believing her eyes. She felt foolish not to have realised before that, below the crunch of her feet and the roar of the sea and the world beyond — there had been no sound of rushing water. The river was frozen solid, with snow heaping at the banks.

  She watched it for a while, enjoying the patterns made by the different depths of ice whilst simultaneously trying to decide how she was going to get across. She picked up a stone from the bank and threw it. It bounced on the ice, making a rubbery, springy sound that shot up and down the stretch of water, before spinning off into a clump of weed. She threw another just for fun — a bigger one this time that made a white, crumbly dent in the ice. Satisfied, she edged down the bank and placed a foot upon the ice.

  THE GRAND UNIFYING MYTH

  Lasswick, Present Day

  NOBODY SPEAKS WHILE MY father makes fresh tea. By mid afternoon the sun rolls into descent, its slow crash against the horizon casting fresh hues around the kitchen with every passing minute. The silence seems to amplify the sense of time moving—that great, iron clock of the world ticking one second off after the next.

  ‘If you already knew all this before you found me in London,’ I say at last, ‘then why didn’t you just tell me?’

  ‘Because you wouldn’t have believed us. Just telling you wouldn’t have triggered the memories; that’s not how it works. You have to reach the truth through your own memories.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because I remember being your mother, and your mother knew all about this.’

  ‘Wait, how old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  ‘My mother died twenty years ago, when you were already alive. How can you be her reincarnation? And if you are, then isn’t that just a tiny bit of a coincidence? I mean, a woman gives birth to a boy who just happens to be the reincarnation of somebody she knew as a child?’

  My father sets a fresh pot of tea upon the table.

  ‘If what I suspect is true, then no, it’s not a coincidence. And as for your mother and Morag being alive at the
same time, well, if what your mother suspected was true, then neither is that impossible.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He reaches over and pours tea for Morag.

  ‘Your mother had some ideas about human existence,’ he says, smiling.

  ‘She did,’ says Morag.

  ‘Tell us,’ says Zoe.

  Morag stirs her tea.

  ‘Lucy’s idea was that we’re more than just as a tree of bloodlines. We’re each a member of a different family too — families that share the same soul, if you want to use that word — not just the ones of our birth, but the ones of our incarnation. Time is irrelevant. We exist across lifetimes, across centuries and millennia, not just within the physical process bordered by birth and death. We all churn together in tides.’

  ‘So, a soul can exist in two bodies at the same time?’ says Zoe. ‘It can meet itself?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it,’ says my father, taking his seat. ‘It’s a crude way of putting it, but it can, and it almost certainly will. Two different bodies, two separate identities moulded by the genetics and social experiences of its host. You see, personality, morality, temper — those are not the domain of the soul. In fact, if a soul is anything at all then it is anything but the idiosyncrasies of human character. There is no such thing as a good or bad soul. It is merely the awareness — the life behind the life — and two individuals that share this awareness are just as likely to hate each other as to love each other, to be kindred spirits or exact opposites. Their meeting might result in marriage or murder; it all depends on the background and chemical makeup of the individuals in question.’

  My father takes a loud slurp of tea and blusters on, clearly enjoying himself.

  ‘Of course, most of the time, nobody is aware of all this. Nobody remembers. But occasionally’ —he prods his spectacles at us — ‘ they do.’

  Zoe turns to Morag.

  ‘Where did Lucy get all these ideas?’

  ‘Because of what happened on the farm,’ says Morag. ‘Schmidt.’

  My father nods gravely.