Mary O’Brien sits in the shadows. Are you a good idea, Mary? I think. Then, to Callum in the seat opposite her. You, Callum, are you a good idea, or a bad one? I’m gripped by that same insane urge to laugh. I’m so afraid of obeying it that I have to turn away, scanning the crowd as the music fanfares, but all I can think as I look at them all is: Which ones of you are good ideas, and which ones are bad? And me, Elliot Childs, good idea? Bad idea?
I stand smiling, teeth bared, in the silence of the studio. I wonder if this is what madness feels like. The words I do not think of hang there, patiently, like the ones on the autocue.
A quick joke to the audience. Their obedient laughter sounds like it’s coming from a million rooms away.
The show starts and the words still hang there, waiting.
We’re halfway through a conversation about poverty, and Hunt is grilling O’Brien on her campaign, digging in. I can feel the crowd’s heckles rising. Hunt keeps looking at me, and I know he is expecting me to step up, to take a side and help him corner his prey. This is the part where I am supposed to help. The production room are waiting for my signal, ready to flick a switch that will show a series of incriminating slides against Mary O’Brien. It’s nothing substantial; like poor Sir George, just kindling for the flames.
I try to summon the will to say something, anything, but my mind is working. Dull cogs are turning. I am thinking, searching. Remembering.
I watch Mary O’Brien talking.
‘But if you look at the figures, Callum, this government has put more people in poverty than…’
I feel everything — the physicality of her body, the way she sits, the sweat on her neck and the slowing but still pounding heart. I feel her hope and rage knotted tight. I can sense four decades of memories sprawling behind me, ready and willing to be scanned if I so wished. I can feel the speed of her thoughts, the trace of her intelligence. I can feel the weight of her being.
I can remember.
Be kind…
Hunt retorts, slapping his clipboard.
‘Come on, Mary, do you not think people have a responsibility to look after their own welfare? I mean seriously, this liberal backwash that expects governments to mollycoddle the lazy and the criminal, that’s what’s caused our problems in the first place, am I right?’
A roar from the crowd. Puce faces and feverish eyes. Their minds pass through mine like water.
I’m searching, thinking.
Remembering.
There’s a woman in the front row. I can feel the slickness of her stockings and the brutal trembling of twenty-year-old female sexuality. My thoughts thin out and speed up.
An obese man a few rows back from her. It is like being buried in flesh, an airbag of fat exploding around me. I feel the labour in his breathing, the eyelids droop, the thoughts trundling along with the almost permanent sound of his buried heart thudding with everything it has.
Be kind…
Back again. I’m Elliot. Mary is speaking above the jeering crowd.
‘I don’t accept that, Callum, I really don’t. You’re pandering to a very common and understandable fear that’s been perpetuated to the masses by corporate-owned media, and it’s a fear that forgets what it is to be human, that forgets what…’
Back to the crowd. There’s an old lady whose mint-crusted mouth I have barely tasted before I drift back and onto the next, a muscled, white-shirted male whose only thought is of a football flying aimlessly and perpetually through empty sky.
Be kind, Elliot, because…
‘That’s a lot of big words and big ideas, Mary but we both know that’s not how things work in the real world.’
I feel different. Something is falling into place. The air in the room seems to have been replaced with a purer, stiller version of itself. Light itself seems to have slowed. Sound is like crystal.
‘…Really, Callum, these aren’t ideals at all; they’re the conclusions of a simple logical exercise…
I am thinking. Remembering.
‘…And when you think about it, when you take things to their logical conclusions…’
And that is when I think of the words.
You must always take things to their logical conclusions, Elliot.
I’m able to see almost everyone. I always have been. And if that’s just memory, then —
‘Elliot?’
Back. Me. Elliot. I’m a fool. How could I not have realised?
I turn to Callum. My muscles feel like lead.
‘What?’
Callum clears his throat and gives his clipboard an awkward look.
‘I was asking you, Elliot, what are your thoughts on Mary’s plans to increase subsidies to the food banks?’
‘I…’ I begin. ‘I don’t really know if…’
‘You’ve nothing to say?’
‘I apologise. I am not quite feeling myself.’
Callum’s shoulders fall. He seems to have reached a decision.
‘No. No, you’re not, are you? You’ve been on a little adventure, haven’t you? With a vagrant. And a murderer.’
Hushed gasps from the audience. I look out at their dumb, twinkling faces.
If I am remembering these people, then I was these people. All these people. And if I was these people, these other lives, if I was all these other lives….
‘It was research,’ I say.
‘Research for what?’
These bloodlines of souls. How many? Thousands? Hundreds? Ten?
Or just one?
‘The truth.’
Excited titters from the audience, as they realise they are witnessing a car crash.
‘What truth, Elliot?’
I turn to Callum and I know what I will do. I fall through his being and let myself go completely. I remember him. I remember everything about him. I remember this moment in his life and how he felt fear and malice twisting together into a hateful stick aimed at Elliot Childs. And I go further, spinning past those terrible, icy thoughts, through memories I can hardly process. I let go of my lifeline and I go deeper than I have ever been. And when I have gone as far as I can go, I settle on a single memory of Callum as a child folding a paper aeroplane on a patterned carpet. And I can hardly tell apart this child from the one I used to be, or the one that everyone used to be — full of wonder and hope.
My chest stutters and I am back, looking at Callum in the studio. He stares back at me with dark eyes and a cynical smirk.
‘Enlighten us, please, Elliot.’
A hush fills the studio.
‘We’re all the same,’ I say.
The silence continues. Mary O’Brien smiles.
‘Yes, Elliot, that’s exactly right, we’re —’
‘We’re all the fucking same, Mary!’
There’s a gasp from the audience. Another titter.
‘Well, yes,’ says Mary, ‘I mean —’
I storm towards the audience, brandishing my clipboard and spluttering.
‘All the fucking same, every single fucking one of us, the same. Do you understand?’
‘Elliot,’ says Callum in a low and serious voice. ‘What on Earth has gotten into you?’
I turn and face him, my eyes glazed as I approach him.
‘We’re all connected,’ I say. ‘All our lives are simultaneous, and we live them like shards of light from a single source, broken like sunbeams through a forest canopy, but only for a short time, until we’re together again.’
There is a moment of silence. Then Callum Hunt roars with laughter, and the audience roars with him.
‘Shards of light?’ he repeats, shoulders rocking. ‘Broken sunbeams? Holy shit, Elliot, what are you on? And please, be a sport and pass it around would you? Because I want some!’
He turns to the audience — they’re his, now — and claps his hands.
‘I want some! We all want some, don’t we?’
The audience cheer in agreement. I watch them laughing along. Even Mary is stifling titters.
‘Yes,’ I go on, turning back to Callum. ‘We’re like the fleeting thoughts of a single mind — some good, some bad.’
The air screams with renewed laughter.
‘Oh, Christ!’ says Callum, helpless. ‘Fleeting thoughts! Please, no more, Elliot, I can’t take it.’
And with that, he throws back his head, and all at once I can see that Callum Hunt is a very bad idea.
I look down. My hands are shaking, sweating, clasped around the clipboard. The sharp edge of the metal clip glints in the studio light. Callum is still laughing, his head back, baring the lean flesh of his neck, and a pulsing jugular vein. In a flash, I blink and swipe.
There is a collective gasp from the audience, then a few seconds of silence, during which I watch Hunt’s eyes widen. His hand travels to his throat, where a thin red line has appeared. It bulges, and he makes a wet noise like a frog before his throat finally gushes with blood, great gulps of it emptying through his fingers. He struggles with both hands, as if trying to keep the precious fluid within the confines of his skin.
His eyes travel madly around, landing on me before he slips to the floor.
Chaos explodes. Screams of horror, roars from every corner, people rushing this way and that. But I am calm. I look to the crowd — now a mess of limbs and terrified faces — and I wonder again: How many are bad ideas?
A great many, as it turns out, and my clipboard is sharper than I had hoped. A mighty weapon, it is, and I charge in, swiping, neck after neck, sometimes only managing to catch a shoulder or an eye. Bad ideas fall all around me, gurgling and gasping in pools. And I hear a voice as I extinguish each one — a voice I know is my own but that feels as if it is coming from far away — a voice that says: The same, the same, the same, we’re all the same, we’re all the same, we’re all the fucking same.
EPILOGUE
Zoe
IT’S EASY TO WRITE somebody else’s story. You know other people better than you do yourself.
I know I do, anyway.
You see, I was wrong. I told Elliot I could not remember as many people as he could, but that turned out not to be true at all. Something happened on that beach. Even as I ran from him, I could feel more lives appearing, entire existences unravelling before me like tapestries, and by the time I had found a place to hide, it had happened again — I had lost control. I thought that was it, that I would be mad like poor William before I knew it, a ragged wraith wandering the land forever, lost in a million memories that weren’t mine.
But then, all of a sudden, it stopped. My mind cleared and I found that I was not mad at all. I was, in fact, enlightened.
I don’t know how many lives I remember, but they number more than most, and the life of Elliot Childs is one of them. So that is why, when I sat, perched on the end of my bedsit futon and watched him (along with the rest of the country) find his own form of enlightenment on live television that December evening, I knew exactly what was going to happen. I could remember it, right down to the feeling of that first swipe, the freedom in the silence that followed, and the faraway sound of his own screams as he was dragged from the studio.
I went to visit him the following year, once things had died down. The facility sat on a lonely cliff, and the only view through the high windows of the visitors’ room was murk and sea and grey sky.
As I took my seat, he smiled and patted a soft, round belly that had not been there a year ago. The change in his appearance was remarkable. Elliot Childs had once been svelte and handsome, but now his jowls sagged with rapid age. His beard was scraggy, his skin was pale.
I asked him how he was. He smiled and told me that his life was over, and whatever days he had left — and let’s face it, there might be an awful lot of them — were to be spent in a cell, showered with questions, dulled with drugs and fed watery soup and kidneys on paper plates, with flimsy cutlery.
But he was not alone, he said. He had a personal guard named Briggs, whom he knew to write secret, terrible love poems for his wayward wife, a woman named Lydia who would leave him in a couple of years for the mechanic she had been sixty-nining during Briggs’ night shifts. He told me that he didn’t have the heart to warn him of her dalliances, because he remembered how much he had enjoyed the years with her. It would have been a shame to rob him of at least some pleasure, he told me, however doomed his love would be.
I think, perhaps, Elliot was trying to be kind.
Briggs was, according to Elliot, a most attentive guard, who took great pains to follow him wherever he went, be that ward, lavatory or the glorious ‘recreation room’. It was in this room that he found his real company — the wrecks of men and women who had always inhabited such places through the ages, shrieking and gibbering and staring glumly at corners with spit-damp cardigans knotted in their fists. He often wondered, he told me, whether they were all simply Gleaners, like us.
Either way, Elliot’s fellow inmates, he explained, were an invaluable source of comfort. They reminded him that, whatever this thing was, this mysterious force that we both knew beyond all doubt bound us together — whatever Callum Hunt and that audience believed — it had no plan. It was fumbling in the dark, making mistakes, just like us.
So now, he told me, lighting another cigarette, he was just waiting for this particular life to play out. One day he would die, he laughed through the smoke, perhaps vomiting pill-froth, or swinging from a chain of socks, or just old and in a bed and wet with his own piss. Then…next.
I asked him who he thought that next would be. Fucked if he knew, he said. What did I think? I told him I had no idea, which, of course, was not true. I remember very well who Elliot Childs will be once he dies.
Which, incidentally, will be at eighty-seven, in a bed and wet with his own piss.
Schmidt, that’s who. A man named Schmidt who died in a forest surrounded by children and a man with a gun. I remember it as clear as day. After that? No idea. Perhaps a boy who knew him, and who lost his own brother that same day, but grew up to find him reincarnated in the body of a man who hated the world, and to whom he finally gave the letter his father had thought would give his children hope.
Or perhaps a girl so interested in humanity that she lost herself to it, and spent her days searching for paintings and photographs, trying to remind her son of a single truth.
Or perhaps it will be Hitler. Or Janis Joplin. Or a psychopath in Kansas, born on the day his father whipped his negro slave so badly you could see his kidneys. Or a girl who saved a species, or a man who walked on Jupiter, or Marie Curie, or Jesus, or Einstein. Or you.
You.
How is it, being you? Will he enjoy it? Or will he suffer? What are you searching for — escape? Solace? Hope?
I can’t give you hope, only the truth: We’re all the same, a single soul, doomed to live every life until it’s done. Every face you ever see belongs to someone you will be or have already been, and one day that smile you give them, or that tip of your hat, or that sneer or that fist-shake through the windscreen, or that curse or that spit or simply that utter disregard, will one day be impressed upon you as it was upon them.
Believe me, this thing you think is you is not you. The soul you cherish is a trick of the light.
We are all the same.
That’s why I do what I do. That’s why I’m keeping the shelters going. It’s not because I’m a good person, or because I want to go to heaven. Me? I’m just looking after number one.
So that face on the street, or in a newspaper, that person who gets in your way, who irritates you, who convinces you of the fact that you are so utterly different you cannot possibly find a common thread to join your two lives — think again before you cast them aside. And when you see them — when you see me — please be patient. Please be thoughtful.
And above all, be kind. You must always be kind.
THE END
From the Author
Thanks for reading The Other Lives, I really hope you enjoyed it. If you could spare the time, I’d be very gratefu
l if you could post a review on Amazon or Goodreads. And feel free to let me know what you think in person by dropping me an email at:
[email protected]
I’d be happy to hear from you.
You can also sign up for my newsletter here:
http://www.adrianjwalker.com/tol
I’ll send you news, deals, exclusive short stories, and you’ll find out the second a new book is published.
Thanks again for reading.
More by the author
From the Storm
The End of the World Running Club
The Last Dog on Earth
Colours (Earth Incorporated pt. 1)
Acknowledgements
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Thanks to my editors, Michael Rowley and Deanna Hoak, for their invaluable help in the creation of this book, to everyone at STORGY magazine for their support, and to my wife Debbie, for reading my countless drafts.
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Adrian J Walker
The right of Adrian J Walker to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.
The Other Lives Page 31