‘There were always rumours of a German airman found in the forest, but nobody ever knew for sure. He was never found or turned in, at any rate. That’s why William came back to us.’ He laughs. ‘Lucy recognised him instantly when he arrived at our door. “Billy!” she said. “You’re back!” Just like that. They worked together, Lucy and William, sorting through all the pictures and words we had found, linking them up.’ Befuddled, my father rubs his brow. ‘But I’m getting ahead of myself again.’
‘Lucy could never remember what had happened with Schmidt,’ says Morag, ‘but she could remember the man himself. He had planted a seed of truth in her — a truth that grew as she grew.’
‘What kind of truth?’
‘A simple one,’ says my father. ‘So simple that humanity was forever forgetting it. Something that binds us together. That was why she studied anthropology. Stories, myths, legends, religions, tribal ceremonies, even the modern-day rituals of Western capitalism — she studied them all. She believed there were patterns in them — reminders and memories — and she wanted to find these artefacts and curate them. She said that if she did, she might be able to untangle them, solve their riddle, and maybe the answer could save humanity.’
‘From what?’ I say.
‘From itself. She believed we would never truly succeed as a species until we had found the thing that bound us together.’ My father’s eyes glisten as his gaze drifts. ‘The “grand unifying myth”, she called it.’
‘Tell them about the trip, Harris,’ says Morag.
He turns and smiles at her, their eyes locked.
‘“Let’s start by walking out of the door,” she said. So that’s what we did. We just left.’
‘No direction,’ says Morag.
‘None at all.’
My father stands and walks to a collection of pictures on the wall by the back door. I get up from the table and join him. I sense a fierce closeness between us now, like two magnets that cannot decide whether to attract or repel. I want to pull him close, yet shove him away as hard as I can. Everything in this house — the density of the light, the smell of the wood and carpet, the sound of the wind outside, and these endless pictures mapped out around the walls — it all stirs up painful memories I had long ago let settle. They’re not of neglect or abuse or fear, just of loneliness — a feeling I now realise I grew so used to it became a totem I have carried through my entire life.
Here is the simple truth of it. When I was boy I realised I could see as other people, and it frightened me. I needed my parents. That’s all any child needs. But they were not there.
I study the photographs that have caught my father’s attention. ‘I always liked looking at these ones. I liked your beard in them.’
‘Yes, well, it was the 1970s. Those were taken in South America, about a year after we left. We had made our way clockwise around Europe, and by the time we hit Spain, we had fallen into a rhythm. We met people, she asked them questions, and I wrote down what they said.’
‘What kind of questions?’
‘Anything. About what they liked to do, go, eat, their interests, hopes, regrets. She took photographs of everyone she talked to, and I wrote everything down. Not just what they said, but how they said it; how their faces moved, what they did with their fingers when they spoke, where their eyes moved.’
‘Why? What were you hoping to achieve?’
He looks at me as if the question is not one he has ever considered.
‘I was spending time with the woman I loved in interesting places. What more was there to achieve? Every day was a new adventure. We met other backpackers on the hippie trail, youngsters looking for kicks and thrills — drugs and free love and what have you — but the only thrill your mother and I chased was the next person. It didn’t matter who it was — shopkeeper, vagabond, train driver, thief — we spent time with anyone who would let us, which was, to our delight, almost every single soul we came across.
‘We took a freight hauler across the Atlantic. It was cheap travel, and we had the entire crew to ourselves. They hated us at first, thought we were just another couple of hippies trying to save the world, but by the time we docked in New York they were our friends for life, and we had a stack of books and five rolls of film dedicated just to them.’
His face seems to cloud for a moment as his thoughts regroup.
‘New York. There isn’t an inch of that city that isn’t teeming with human experience. We got lost one day, hopelessly. We didn’t have a map, so we asked people. They were rude, at first, you know that way everyone expects in the Big Apple. But we kept going, and before long we had a crowd of New Yorkers gathered around us trying to give us advice. Hobos, businessmen, kids and road-workers, all arguing about the best way for us to go, all those voices shouting over one another, arms flying.’
He starts gesticulating.
‘Getoutahere, Ninth’ll take ya east, y’wanna take Seventh! Yer wrong, buddy, yer wrong!’
He laughs, then catches my eye.
‘Yes, well, wasn’t ever much good at accents.’
He clears his throat and continues.
‘It was a beautiful thing. Your mother snatched her camera and started snapping. By the second roll she was crying for joy. We left New York even more convinced that we were doing something worthwhile. We took Greyhounds across the country. We travelled and slept beneath huge skies, dreaming even bigger possibilities. We met people with big hearts living hard lives in wide-open spaces. Her questions changed. She no longer asked just what people thought about life. She asked them about the things they could not explain, and what they thought about them. Ask people questions like that and they open up, you know? Almost everyone had experiences they could not give adequate explanations for. Feelings they couldn’t put into words, connections they couldn’t quite describe. So many told us they could remember other lives, and so many of them said that they could also somehow get a sense of others, their thoughts and memories, just by being near them. Your mother became convinced that the two things were one and the same.’
‘Memory,’ I say. ‘Gleaners.’
‘Exactly.’
EXTREMELY PLEASANT PEOPLE
‘THE MORE PEOPLE WE met, the more Lucy became convinced of the idea that human experiences were intertwined, ungoverned by temporal rules, and that consciousness, awareness, being was spread throughout time like one gigantic, rolling ocean.
‘Then somewhere in Arizona we met a woman who lived in a shack made of baked bean tins. She told us about a tribe in Peru that lived in perfect harmony. They had no government, no leaders, no laws, no crime. They lived by a profound mutual respect and acted only for the benefit of each other.’
My father stops and turns to face me. I sense a shift in his mood, and there’s a curious, baited look in his eye.
‘What?’ I say, unnerved.
‘Nothing. I just wonder what Elliot Childs would make of that. A tribe living in harmony, people looking after each other.’
He raises an eyebrow, challenging me, and I’m about to rise to it when Zoe interrupts.
‘Tell us what happened next.’
My father frowns and walks back to the table, leaving me standing, vexed, by the pictures.
‘We made it to Peru,’ he says, ‘just. It was not an easy journey. We were robbed by bandits on a bus, and your mother got dysentery in Ecuador. She was in hospital for two weeks, and I holed up in some grotty hotel around the corner. I admit I was getting cold feet by this point. After all, we’d been gone for almost a year, we had no money, we were spending time in dangerous, hot places and now she was sick. I thought we should about tail and head home.
‘But when I suggested this to her, she went mad at me. She told me I could go home if I wanted, but that she was going on, and she checked herself out of that roach-infested hospital there and then and made her way straight to the bus station. I followed her, trying to stop her — she still wasn’t well and she barely had her passport or a change of cl
othes, let alone any money. But she wouldn’t be deterred. In the end I had to get on the bus with her. Somehow, we made it through Peru to the hills where this tribe were supposed to live.
He shakes his head, holding his brow.
‘I mean, Christ, the word of a madwoman in a house made of baked bean cans. What reason was that to go hiking into the fucking jungle?’
He looks up at Morag, still standing by her chair, and heaves a deep sigh. His hands are shaking.
‘Things had changed between us,’ she says. ‘They do when you travel with someone for long enough. You might share the same roads, but your thoughts travel separately. They take different turns, and before you know it you’re two strangers trying to hack through rainforest in silence.’
‘You went into the jungle alone?’ I say.
‘No, we had a guide.’
‘It was about ten miles uphill,’ says my father, ‘and it took us a week. I got eaten alive by mosquitoes, picked up some virulent rash on my back and vomited every time I drank the water. One night I woke up with a spider the size of Bristol on my face, and that was it, I’d had enough. ‘I’m going back!’ I said. ‘You’re on your own, I can’t take it anymore.’
‘You would never have left,’ says Morag.
‘Of course I wouldn’t, but it was enough to melt her, just a little. She took my hand and said, “Just till we get there, then we’ll go home. We’ve come this far, let’s not stop now.”
‘It never took much for your mother to sway me. I plodded on. And the next day we were welcomed at the village.’
‘They were expecting you?’ says Zoe.
‘Nobody had told them of our intent to visit, not even our guide. But there they were, ready and waiting with a small feast prepared and two little beds in a hut.’
‘Then how did they know?’
My father frowns and gives a little shake of his head, as if my question is redundant.
‘They were extremely pleasant people, and not as you imagine these tribes to be — no headdresses, no tattoos or piercings, no face paint. They just wore simple cloth and let their hair grow out. They were clean and quiet and sang soft songs to their children around the fire in the evening. The women were treated well — in fact there didn’t seem to be any evidence of any sexual dominance whatsoever, be it patriarchy or matriarchy. All the dwellings were the same, oddly sophisticated and comfortable, not like the brittle mud huts in the other villages we had passed. In the mornings they fetched water and collected food. And they spent their days teaching, telling stories, playing a ball game which they taught us, and maintaining their camp.’
‘What about other tribes? Weren’t they ever threatened?’
‘They had found a place where no other tribes wanted to be. They hardly saw anyone else. We were the first people they’d seen in a year.’
I glance at the walls.
‘I don’t see any pictures of them.’
‘We took some, and I wrote my notes, but your mother stopped after the first week. She became detached.’
‘She’d lost interest?’
‘Quite the opposite. She became deeply entrenched in the tribe’s day-to-day activity. She would spend hours just watching them coming and going. At times I couldn’t even talk to her. I could say her name again and again, but she wouldn’t hear me. It was infuriating, losing her attention like that. We had been through an incredible experience together, and I genuinely believed, despite all the ups and downs, that it had strengthened us, created a bond that would be difficult to break. But now the meanderings of a small group of strangers had distracted her from me. Suddenly I felt like nothing more than support staff; a crew member for her mission. Eventually I snapped. One has one’s limits.’
‘You left,’ says Morag, finally taking her seat.
He nods sadly.
‘I found my way back to London and got a job in a publishing house. She promised me she would only be another month or so, and then she would be home. It was two years before she returned, by which time I had built a promising career.’
‘What was it like when you saw her?’ says Zoe.
‘Different. She was not quite as bright — not depressed, either, but touched somehow. Slowly we allowed ourselves to grow close again. We moved into a flat in Camden, and she talked of nothing but her tribe. I listened, of course. She took to spending periods alone, walking long distances with seemingly no direction. Once, when I was at work, I got a call from the police. She’d been found in Regent’s Park in the middle of December wearing nothing but a summer dress. She talked of things that had happened way, way in the past, to different people, things she couldn’t have known, things that made no sense. That’s when everyone started to say she was mad, of course, but she wasn’t. I knew she wasn’t. Call it love, but I believed her, and I think everyone deserves that, don’t they? Somebody who believes them?’
He gives Morag a look, centuries wide.
‘Well, I was her believer. And I believed that she had experienced something real and profound up in those mountains. We married in the spring and I asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted to come here, back to Cornwall, where she was born. So I packed in my publishing job, took the money I had saved and found this old place. It was cheap and falling down, so we spent the first summer of our marriage getting to know each other again and working on our home whilst I set up my bookshop in town. And that’s when we continued our search.’
‘You gave up your career for her dream,’ says Zoe.
My father shrugs and reaches for Morag’s hands.
‘Careers, mountains, planets. Anything for my Lucy.’
Morag’s shoulders loosen as if a cool breeze has woken her from a dream. It’s all too much for me.
‘She’s dead.’ The room is silent, all eyes on me. ‘Lucy, my mother, is dead, and yet you’re talking to her as if she’s alive.’
‘But don’t you see, Elliot,’ says my father, ‘she’s not, not really. Before she died, Lucy promised that if what we had discovered was true then she would come back and find me. And she did, she’s here, now, in front of me.’
‘That’s not Lucy’ — I stab a finger in Morag’s direction — ‘that’s Morag.’
Morag, regaining something of herself, gently removes her hand from my father’s grip.
‘Elliot’s right, Harris,’ she says, with a kind of flat pity. ‘I’m not your Lucy, I’m Morag.’
‘But you remember.’
I stand. I’m losing it again. I don’t know whether it’s the sickening looks my father is giving Morag, the latent rage left by his recent provocation, or this spurned child that keeps bawling somewhere deep inside of me, that’s always been bawling, if you want to know the truth of it — there, I’ve said it. But whatever it is, I’m losing my grip. On all of this.
‘Exactly, she remembers. They’re just memories. You said it yourself: Whatever it is that moves between bodies, the soul or —’
‘It doesn’t move, it’s shared, it churns, it —’
‘Whatever the fuck it does, it’s not the person. It’s not the thing you knew, the woman you fell in love with.’
My father looks back at me, wide-eyed and slack-mouthed.
‘You’re treating her more like your wife than you treat me like your son. And I’m still alive.’
‘Elliot…’
‘I’m still alive.’
I look around the table. A few days ago I was beaming into a crowd of strangers, bathing in their appreciative roar and the rush of another successful takedown. Now I am staring at three faces — two of whom I had never seen before last week and one of whom I have not seen for five years, and each of them has, in its own way, turned my life upside down in ways that I despise. The gravity of it all appals me. I lock eyes with my father.
‘And you want to know what I think? You want to know what Elliot Childs thinks about his mother’s “big ideas”, about your little tribe in Peru living in perfect harmony, kissing and cuddling and su
cking each other off in the rainforest? Eh?’
A stormy look takes hold of my father.
‘Elliot, do not…’
‘I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you what I think. It’s a fucking fantasy, that’s what it is. Impractical. Unrealistic. People just aren’t like that with each other, not for long anyway. Whatever you and my lunatic mother were chasing, it was a waste of time.’
‘Elliot, please,’ says Morag.
‘A fucking hippie holiday with nothing to show for at the end of it. And this’ — I slap my head on each side with both hands — ‘this thing we can do, this ability to remember things that happened to someone else, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just another absurd by-product of being human, like the appendix or the coccyx — a useless, dangling relic that serves no purpose. That is, assuming we’re all not just as mad as my mother.’
At this my father gets to his feet and slams his hands on the table.
‘She would have hated what you have become.’
‘Really?’ I say with a sneer. ‘And what is that, exactly?’
‘I watch your show, my boy, oh yes, I watch it. Every bloody episode. I don’t want to, but I have to, because it’s the only way I get to see my son, damn it.’
He stamps his foot and the floorboards shudder. We face each other for a moment. I’m stunned by this new experience — my father exhibiting emotion.
‘You could have seen me any time you wanted, you ignorant old prick.’
He takes several deep, fuming breaths.
‘It’s terrible, what you say on that show. It’s just not the truth.’
‘The truth? And what is that exactly?’ I grit my teeth. ‘I don’t know, you see, because I never had any fucking parents to —’
A chair leg scrapes briskly on the stone floor.
‘Sit down, both of you,’ orders Morag, standing. We both jump in fright. ‘Harris, you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Lucy would never have hated Elliot, and I know what he’s gone through because I’ve been through it myself. All those minds he’s fallen into over the years, all those memories. It wears you down, Harris, understanding what it’s like to be other people, those other lives with all their flaws and failures and selfish tics. You should be glad you never had to endure them, because they wear you down, just like they wore poor William down, and Lucy too. It gets so hard to see the good in people, when every time you look at someone, you’re swamped with all the rest too.’
The Other Lives Page 24