That evening I awoke, huddled under a collection of clothes and blankets: the night was cold. The noise drifted toward and away, a blunt thud thud thud, dim like blood pulsing through my ears. I lay on clammy foam, wondering if the dull clanging noise was real or not. The darkness was heavy. I had so much space. I didn’t want it. Promises of sleep seemed to slip away.
It was my time with the book tomorrow. Thud, thud, thud. Was that noise there? Through the window I could see the crisp moon. It drifted toward and away.
Then I saw it, as clearly as with my eyes.
A woman made of stone. A woman made of stone with an arrow in her hand and a dog at her feet. The stone woman’s lips were painted berry red, her cheeks flushed pink. She looked at me.
The stone woman.
The stone woman was poised in elegant action. Her arrow was raised above her head, a bow strapped to her back. She was hunting, hunting some unknown creature.
Behind her were dogs, a dozen of them, all racing, bounding, snarling forward; all hard, all immobile.
The woman was looking back at them now, face frozen in wide-toothed grin, eyes fixed and alert. Two dogs were ahead of her, frozen, unmoving.
Her mouth was open. She unleashed a cry in silence. Her bow was in her hand.
Her bow was aimed high, the stone arrow tense, ready.
The arrow was gone.
She and her dogs were gone.
It was a memory and it was mine. I tried to hold onto her, to grasp at her, but her image faded and she’d come away in soft wet clumps between my fingers, fizzling away into the sweat-soaked air.
All that was left was me, the bed, the hut and the compound, thick arching walls to keep the world away. I had remembered something, however strange and wordless. I had remembered something.
The foam coiled around my skin, hugging my ears and hair, sticky and tickling my arms and my legs. It was too much. I carefully shifted myself from my bed, to my sheet-door and into the night air. The moon coyly hid itself behind rapid clouds, occasionally flashing me, spreading glimpses of naked light over the ground. Crunched sand and dry grass massaged my feet as I made my way past silent huts. With each step my eyes grew heavier, my limbs more leaden.
There was a whiff of fruit-filled stench, of decomposing, of decay and entropy.
Then it was gone. All I could trust were my heavy legs, carrying me toward—carrying me toward the courtyard. That’s what I wanted, to rinse my face in water. That’s what I wanted.
THE BOOK LAY PEACEFULLY BEFORE me, my fingertips gently pressed against the rough paper. Slices of sunlight worked their way into the magic of the book’s very own hut, worming their way around sheets of corrugated iron. In here it was always cool and dry. In here, far away from life and houses, it was quiet.
The book was serene.
It knew it could rest before me, that I would never have a chance to befoul its pages with ink-tainted memory. I had no pen. I wouldn’t be writing my memory of the stone woman. I was just going to read as always.
“You’re just going to read as always.”
That’s what Pilsner had told me. He’d found me in the courtyard, prone, slumped over the water tap. The sun had stabbed at my eyes with the hot anger of day. He’d been stood above me.
“Can I get to the tap?”
“Tap?” It was wrapped in my arms and pressed against my chin. My neck ached. “Oh, right. Sorry.”
“No problem,” his shadow moved toward me as I uncrossed my stiff arms and brought myself to my knees, eyes stuffed with sleep.
“So. Did you sleep here?” Pilsner asked.
“No.” Pause. “I suppose I did.”
I couldn’t tell if he was laughing or tutting in response. Either way it was better to keep my lips pressed shut. They were dry and kept sticking together.
“Have some of this,” he’d offered, thrusting a cup with a mouthful of water to me.
“Thank you,” I waited for him to ask what I had been doing there.
“It’s your turn with the book today.”
“Right, there’s actually something—”
“Why were you sleeping here, then?”
Words caught in my throat. I wasn’t sure I had an explanation. I just had the floating-fuzzed image of the woman, which perhaps I’d never even seen.
“I had a memory.”
“Really.”
“I did, I saw this—”
“Are you sure you had a memory?”
I examined him through narrow eyes.
“It’s just,” Pilsner spoke to me slowly, “well, she who lived with you only just had a memory herself and—”
“No, not—”
“If you’ll let me speak,” his still voice hardened. “It’s natural you would want a memory of your own. It doesn’t make it real.”
Real. The least decided what was real from our old lives, though why they’d have better memories or a better sense of judgement than anyone else was unclear.
Tiny scraps of dust danced around the book. Pilsner had searched me, making sure I had no hidden, secret pen, or pencil, or crayon. I knew he was there, outside the door, old ears straining for the sound of ink scratching paper.
I flipped each page over, delicately, as though they were made of crystal. I wanted to see if anything had changed since I had last been there. Ketamine’s memory would be in there, I just had to find it.
New words were written in red pen, squatting at the end of Love:
You should get back on your feet at soon as possible.
It was Tanned’s. Page 16. The letters were neat, carefully looped at the tips. He had taken his time. Underneath were bullet points, less neat, written by someone else. ‘Don’t mourn a break-up for too long’, ‘It shouldn’t take longer than the next ration’, ‘You leave your house the next day’. Next ration had come, next ration had gone. Fine, I told myself. I would smile and move my lips in sync with words on how everything was fine. Changes weren’t unusual. Eventually it would all be perfect. Eventually we would live as we had before.
I closed the book and opened it to a random page.
Criminals go to prison. They’re told how long by a judge. Sometimes they’re put to death.
Page 137. One of the more informative passages, actually telling us something about the outside world, though the information was useless in ours, where no-one ever committed a crime other than what they started with. But these were popular, the ones that didn’t mean everyone had to change the way they did something. But what had we done that was so wrong we had to lose our minds? Our old lives, ourselves. If this was a prison it wasn’t like the flat image I had been left with.
I flicked through the next pages with less care, watching the cascade of coloured words crash about one another. Large blue letters called my attention. ‘Entertainment’. A few more pages and a smaller heading, again in blue. Songs.
Songs are a melody, with more than one instrument. Bands play together and make songs.
I always said songs were more than that: they had words. Another false memory. Really, really I thought they just didn’t want their notes sullied by voices. That was understandable.
More sections. ‘Bodies’, ‘Disputes’ and ‘Food’. Food. I flipped the pages more slowly.
Food is grown in farms, covered by plastic sheeting, lit by bright bulbs.
To be healthy you need protein.
MSG and large quantities of caffeine are illegal.
And there it was. I had never seen her handwriting before.
Recipes are invented by someone, who gives them to others.
It was ugly, twisted, angular, each letter built of broken joints. Page 111. There were no bullet points underneath. Instead the words sat above an ocean of black space.
I removed my jumper, which was thick and heavy. I carefully folded it and placed it on the bamboo floor. I lowered myself onto it, my eyes level with the hefty binding and dainty-thin pages of the book. I stared.
I stared until
my eyes lost focus.
The book held such a beauty, but it wasn’t in the words.
So many people here had poured so much into it. I saw tears hitting pages, hands trembling, shards of old lives crumbled onto paper.
Others would come and feel the soft, rough pages, wishing for memories of their own, to have something of themselves back. Everything that was our old lives was in there.
I stared until the edges were gone.
The book gently glowed.
LIFE HAD SETTLED, ALL BUT the brutal tic-tic-tic of forgotten water, seeping through the walls of the compound from outside. A small pool of it gathered beneath the bed, which I would swab and stab at with filthy cloth, sloshing stagnant liquid around. The bad smell returned, the smell of decomposing: I turned the hut inside out trying to find the source. I thought of Tie. Of course I thought of Tie.
Rain had been met by rain, and sand-strained mud gathered at my feet as I walked from hut to courtyard, or hut to fire tap.
The rations had been good this fortnight, they always seemed better when the weather was worse—as though those mysterious providers knew, as though they knew and were trying to compensate. I had crisp breads, and butter, I had curry and milkshake. I had fresh coconut milk and cream-noodles. I cradled the crumpled recipe-paper in my hand, covered in ugly spider lettering. I had Ketamine’s instructions, and had saved pasta shells and curry powder from last fortnight, in case I’d have the ingredients to cover one of the recipes. I now did, for the first time.
boil the pasta shells until soft then sprinkle five pinches of curry powder over the shells then mix them in mix a slosh of coconut milk and a handful of cocoa powder in a bowl until the milk is a rich brown then pour it over the pasta
It didn’t seem correct, but she was the one who would know. I traced my fingertips over the snapped-limb letters, letters which were unfamiliar and not at all like her. Right, it was time to cook, enough thinking. I gathered the ingredients into a clumsy bundle in my arms and made my way to the fire tap.
“Tanned.”
“Blondee.”
“Nice, look—you’re cooking the same thing I’m about to make.”
“Ah.”
“It looks almost ready,” I pointed out. “Are you not eating with Burberry?”
“She was tired. Rain makes her sleepy.”
“Right.”
For a moment there was silence. “Go on then,” I gestured at his food, “try it.”
The mud-brown pasta shells glistened as Tanned poured them into a bowl. He handed the pan to me, which spat and sizzled as I poured lukewarm water in. The air was damp and warm, as though it had itself been cooked. Tanned shovelled a mouthful of pasta into his mouth and swallowed quickly, his eyes resting first on me and then on the hard shells I was pouring into the pan.
“Are you not eating more?” I asked.
“It’d be rude. I’ll wait for you,” he smiled. The pasta boiled over the silence. I felt the paper in my pocket and remembered the book.
“Oh, I saw you wrote down a memory.” My voice bubbled with enthusiasm.
Tanned nodded.
“That’s a good thing, Tanned.”
Tanned shook his head. “It didn’t turn out quite how I wanted it. It doesn’t matter.”
Water still dripped somewhere, but aside from the blobs-and-hisses of cooking it was the only sound until my food was ready.
“Looks done,” Tanned offered. I poured it into my own bowl, clutched at my spoon and placed it into my mouth.
Sniggering and then laughter met sweet and sharp and gut-pulling taste, spread over my tongue and down my throat.
“Grogh,” I heaved.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Tanned laughed through wide teeth.
We both resumed eating. Food couldn’t be wasted. It was easier with each mouthful. We had almost finished when Burberry arrived to collect Tanned, muttering and murmuring to him and keeping her eyes off me. She had pulled her dreaded hair back and tied it with plastic-twine. Wet little balls of sweat rolled down from hair to chin. Her skin shone and beads rested on her pouted lips. Once or twice I leaned over gently, trying to gaze down her lightly-woven top without her noticing.
Tanned interrupted my thoughts. He jabbed his finger at his near-empty bowl.
“Either we’re just broken and really not meant for the old world, or this,” Tanned hesitated, “isn’t how people would eat.”
“It’s how people would eat, really I’m sure of it,” I replied.
“Ketamine might be wrong.”
“It’s how people would eat.”
It’s how I ate, for the next handful of days. The air did its usual trick of switching violently from hot to light to heavy or cold. Rain and sun battered our world at random. Again my hut was cool and my stomach full—once more I ate one of Ketamine’s recipes, which would have to pass quickly over the tongue but which settled satisfyingly on the stomach. Thick. The food always seemed thick.
She was inside me. I told myself that, over and over. Of course that wasn’t strictly true, but it was penance. She’d been scared. I couldn’t have been angry or scared or betrayed. I’m too old to experience such youthful emotions. Strays of grey light delicately landed on my skin from the window. Colour collapsed to my sides.
The world darkened. She would leave my body again, she would leave my body and once more I would have nothing. From next door floated the familiar ambience of perfume and chatter and music-notes. I leant against the hard concrete edge of the world and closed my eyes until voices and perfume and lights were gone.
The woman with the dogs was racing, still as stone. The dogs were ahead, front legs suspended in mid-leap, back legs poised. She was behind, charging onwards; fury in her face, her crystal eyes, her blood-red lips.
The world was black. I could hear an even thud, a thudding from the distance, rhythmic and angry. Thud-thud-thud, pounding through my skull, thud thud thud. I threw off my tattered blankets and charged after it.
The compound was still but my body pulsed, limbs phantom-racing from the dream. The smell of rotting—rotting meat?—was back, and the damp ground had hardened into swirls of frozen mud. I pushed my thoughts down into my feet, paying attention to the contours of the ground against my toes. My soles met patches of slicked-down grass and grit, then the smooth flagstones of the courtyard, where I raised my head and looked around. The moon lazily lit the air as everyone slept.
I followed the thudding. It was coming from the unknown place.
I had never been to the moderate area before—it wasn’t even visible from the courtyard. To get there I would have to wander up the embankment which hid their lives from us. Over there they were burdened with privacy.
The embankment was easy enough to climb, the earth crumbling beneath me. At the top I stood and looked around. I could also see some moderate huts now, tattered and misshapen and crude.
I was surprised, though not really sure why: of course they would be inglorious—they had to wait until after us to gather rations. Their food boxes, if they had any, would be crammed with mashed fruit and mouldy-at-the-edge cheese, and potatoes growing insect-like fingers and milkshake from near the bottom of the drum where it was curdled. Perhaps they didn’t even have beds, not even crude beds.
I had to see.
The thudding was everywhere, coming from the ground, bouncing through my bones, pounding in my chest.
I half-walked half-slid down the other side of the bank and staggered to the nearest hut. It was darker here than I had ever seen. I trod lightly, my nerves inflamed by mischief. The hut was mostly made of cloth, a few poles holding the fabric up. Was this where Ketamine lived now? I had to see inside. If I was caught it would prove my crime had been more severe than they thought. I would live here, with the moderates, eating mouldy-mushed vegetables.
I ran my fingertips over the cloth. It was damp and rough. I pressed my nose into it, filling my nostrils with earthy smell. There was no stopping. I ran my fingers over it
until I found a join, a sort of doorway, and raised it millimetre by millimetre, before peering inside. It was dark, really dark, but I could see furniture silhouettes. Nothing was taller than knee-height. No bed as I could see.
A snort. A snort and heavy breathing and I let go of the fabric, stepping backwards. I turned and made my way back over the mound of earth, over and to the courtyard, back into a lighter world. The sun was coming up and not a single person had seen me. No-one had seen me.
JAY WAS PLAYING A GAME.
It had seven dice, made of blue-tack.
The rations were spread before us in a barrage of colours. I’d had too much to drink. It had been so long since I’d been drinking. I might have never had a drink before in my life.
Chance and memory had met.
For the first time the rations had included alcohol—that was the chance. Bacardi, Bacardi, Bacardi. Everyone had gathered, gathered and chattered, chattered about what to do. What to do.
A moderate had stepped forward. I’d never seen him before. He said his name was Jay, and that he’d had a memory.
More gathering, more chattering and whispers into ear-hair.
“Let me tell you more about my memory.”
“A moment Jay, you must be patient.”
“Let me tell you more about my memory.”
“A moment Jay, and you can write it in the book.”
People go to casinos, where they play games for money. Alcohol is served.
Page … page? It was new and written in blue ink.
Forget Yourself Page 3