The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

by Claire North

  I think it was this soldier, more than the others, who encouraged me to travel. He told fantastical and, as it frequently turned out, entirely fictional tales of glorious lands beyond the Mediterranean Sea, of mysteries and answers waiting in the sands. When the war ended I found the first ship I could to these lands that so many Englishmen were leaving and, drunk on the times, stumbled through various misdeeds and adventures with a blind ignorance worthy of the youth I appeared to wear. In Egypt I became passionately convinced of the truth of Allah’s word, until one day I was cornered in an alley in Cairo and beaten senseless by three of my brothers from the mosque. They pulled my beard out and shaved my head with dull knives, spat in my face and tore at my ill-fitting white robes, which I had acquired with the zealousness of the convert, proclaiming that I was a Jewish spy–albeit a ginger one–an imperialist, a communist, a fascist, a Zionist and above all else, not one of them. I spent four days in hospital and on my discharge went to my mullah for comfort. He politely poured me tea in a glass tulip cup and asked me how I felt about my calling.

  I left the next day.

  In the newly founded state of Israel I toyed for a while with Judaism, but for all my war-wounded credentials in the cause of Hebrew espionage, I was clearly not about to belong, and my status as an ex-soldier of the hated British did me few enough services. I saw men and women with camp tattoos still blue on their skins, who fell to their knees beneath the Wailing Wall and wept with relief to see its sun-drenched stones, and knew that I was not a part of their universe.

  A Catholic priest on top of Mount Sinai greeted me when I climbed it in search of a god to answer my prayers. I knelt at his feet and kissed his hand and said his being there was a sign, a sign that there was a god who had a purpose for me, and I told him my story. Then he knelt at my feet and kissed my hand and said I was a sign, a sign from God that there was a purpose to his life after all, and that in me his faith was renewed, and he became so earnest in his declarations of my wonder that I began to doubt it myself. He said he would take me to Rome to meet the Pope, that I would have a life of meditation and prayer to fathom the mysteries of my existence, and three days later I woke to find him on the floor of my room, naked except for a string of beads, kneeling and kissing my hand as I slept. He said I was a messenger and apologised that he had ever harboured any doubts, and I sneaked out of the back window and down the garden wall just before sunrise.

  I headed to India, having heard tales of mysticism and philosophies which might perhaps succeed in explaining my situation where Western theology had failed. I arrived in 1953, securing a job easily as a mechanic for an endlessly failing succession of commercial airlines. Their failure rarely affected me; I could leave work on a Monday employed by one man only to come in for work on a Tuesday to find my old contract destroyed and a new, perfect copy waiting to be signed, all clauses exactly the same except for the date and name of employer. India was settling down from its partition and I was in the south, away from the worst of the bloodshed that had stained her independence. Nehru was prime minister and I found myself madly in love, first with an actress whose eyes seemed to look at me and only me from the silver screen, and then with a look-alike girl who sold fruit at the airport and hadn’t a word of any significance, who I idolised abjectly and courted disastrously. It has been observed among even the oldest of our kind that a certain biological incentive drives us, regardless of the ages of our mind. As a child I had felt only a biological incentive to grow and be intellectually despondent at the same. As a teenager I had fought depression with occupation and the conspiracies of the Hulne household. Now as a man in the prime of life, the urge was upon me more than ever before to go out into the world and challenge it like a bullfighter in the ring. I travelled in search of answers, argued with men who argued back, loved from the pit of my soul and was rejected to the bottom of my heart, and idolised Meena Kumari, Bollywood goddess, as a symbol of perfection though I spoke not a word of Hindi when first I saw her films.

  Answers failed to arise from either love or God. I spoke of resurrection and reincarnation with the Brahmins, and they told me that if I lived a good and pure life, I could return as something greater than myself.

  “And what about myself? Can I return as me?”

  This question caused quite a stir among the wise men of Hinduism to whom I put it. I like to think that I introduced the first inklings of relativistic physics into their discourse, as academics sat up earnestly debating the question of whether resurrection needed to be temporarily linear in nature. Finally the answer came back from one wise man with a big belly and very neat eating habits who proclaimed,

  “Don’t be ridiculous, English! You get better or you get worse, but all things change!”

  This answer gave me little satisfaction and, with my savings from ten years repairing the same jet with a weekly different name, I moved on. China was hardly welcoming, and my timing was poor in terms of visiting Tibet, so I headed south, dodging around Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar and Nepal, judging my moves on the basis of where the Americans would not be invading, or a civil war was not imminently going to break out. I shaved my head and ate only vegetables, learned to pray out loud with impossible words and asked every permutation of every Buddha, from the one Gautama to his ten thousand aspects, why I was what I was, and whether this death would be my last. I acquired something of a reputation, the Englishman who knew the discourse of all faiths, who could argue with any monk or imam, padre or priest on any philosophical topic they could raise as long as it pertained to the immortal soul. In 1969 I was visited by a cheerful man with round glasses who sat cross-legged from me in my hut and proclaimed, “Good evening, revered sir. My name is Shen. I am with a concerned institution, and I am here to ask you what your intentions are.”

  I was living in Bangkok at the time, having discovered that no amount of purity of prayer could alleviate the misery of tropical moulds growing in the folds of your skin during a wet jungle life. The newspapers carried stories of the government’s greatness in big, bold letters, and whispers of communist guerrillas in the hills in far smaller letters of sombre black. I did not know if I believed that the eightfold path would bring me enlightenment, but I knew that I was getting too old to believe anything else so divided my time between fixing cars in my orange robes and meditating on what I would do if I could not die.

  Mr Shen, face like a polished conker and blue shirt sticky with sweat down the back and beneath his arms, pushed his glasses a little higher up his face and added, “Are you here to engage in counter-revolutionary activities?”

  I had gone through a phase of cultivating wise mystic answers, but frankly one gets too old for such things, so blurted, “Are you with the Chinese security services?”

  “Of course, revered sir,” he intoned, bowing from his seated pose, hands together, in the custom that is respectful for Thais addressing a teacher. “We have very little interest in this country, but it has been suggested by some that you are in fact a Western imperialist agent intending to ally with such counter-revolutionary forces as bourgeois separatist the Dalai Lama, and that your temple is a hub of capitalist subversion created to strike at the heart of our glorious people.”

  He spoke all this so pleasantly that I was forced to ask, “Isn’t that bad?”

  “Of course it’s bad, revered sir! It would be the kind of subversive activity that would prompt retaliation from my government, though of course,” a flash of bright, cheerful smile, “you would naturally be protected by your imperialist allies, and there would doubtless be repercussions.”

  “Oh!” I exclaimed, realisation dawning. “You’re threatening to kill me?”

  “I would hate to go so far, revered sir, not least as I personally believe that you are merely an eccentric Englishman looking for an easy time.”

  “How would you kill me?” I asked. “Would it be quick?”

  “I would hope so, yes! Unlike your propaganda, we are not barbarians.”

  “Wo
uld I have to know about it? If you were to, say, kill me painlessly in my sleep, would that be an option?”

  A look of consternation flashed across Shen’s face as he considered this. “I imagine it would be politic for everyone involved if we could make your death seem both painless and natural. Your being awake would doubtless lead to a struggle and signs of self-defence, which would be unacceptable in a monk, even an imperialist pig monk. You’re… not an imperialist pig, are you?”

  “I am English,” I pointed out.

  “There are good English communists.”

  “I’m not communist.”

  Shen chewed his lower lip uncertainly, eyes darting round the edge of the room as if he half expected to find a crack in the bamboo walls through which a rifle might appear. Then, in a rather more hushed voice, “I am hoping you aren’t an imperialist agent, revered sir,” he murmured. “I was asked to compile the case file against you and I couldn’t find any evidence that you were more or less than a harmless madman with old-fashioned beliefs. It would be a poor reflection on my paperwork if you were to turn out to be a spy.”

  “I’m definitely not a spy,” I assured him.

  He looked relieved. “Thank you, sir,” he exclaimed, wiping his forehead with his sleeve and then hastily bobbing an apology for this act of sweaty disrespect. “It did seem very unlikely, but you have to be thorough, times being as they are.”

  “May I interest you in tea?” I suggested.

  “No, thank you. I can’t be seen fraternising unnecessarily with the enemy.”

  “I thought you said I wasn’t the enemy.”

  “You’re ideologically corrupt,” he corrected, “but harmless.”

  So saying, and still bowing profusely, he made to leave.

  “Mr Shen,” I called after him. He paused in the door, his face with the strained expression of a man who sincerely hopes that his desk is not about to become busier. “I cannot die,” I explained politely. “I am born, and I live, and I die, and I live again, but it is the same life. Has your government got any information on this which may be of use to me?”

  He smiled, genuine relief flooding his features. “No, revered sir. Thank you for your cooperation.” Then, an afterthought, “Good luck with all that.”

  He let himself out.

  He was the first spy I have ever met, and Franklin Phearson was the second. Of the two, I think I preferred Shen.

  Chapter 13

  Some seventy or so years later, Phearson sat across the table from me in that manor house in Northumbria and grew angry as I said, “Complexity should be your excuse for inaction. The complexity of events, the complexity of time–what good is this knowledge to you?”

  It was raining outside, a hard, relentless downpour that had come after two days of stifling heat, an unclenching from the sky. Phearson had gone to London; on his return, he had brought more questions and a less yielding attitude.

  “You’re holding back!” he belted. “You say all these things will happen, but you don’t say how. You talk of computers and telephones and the goddamn end of the Cold War but you don’t give us shit on how any of it works. We’re the good guys–we’re here to make things better, do you see? A better world!”

  When angry a blue vein like a writhing snake stood out on his left temple, and his face, rather than growing red, grew greyish pale. I considered his accusations and felt a not inconsiderable part of them to be baseless. I was no historian; the events of the future had unfolded as actions in the present with little time for retrospective analysis or contemplation, but rather as news stories told on the TV in sixty-second chunks. I could no further explain the functioning of the home computer than I could balance a kipper on the end of my nose.

  And yes, I was holding back–not on all things, but on some. I had read about the Cronus Club, and the primary lesson I had learned was that it was a place of silence. If its members were like me, if they knew the future, at least as it pertained to their personal lifelines, then they had the power to affect it outright. Yet they chose not to do so. And why?

  “Complexity,” I repeated firmly. “You and I are merely individuals. We cannot control massive socio-economic events. You may try to tamper, but to alter even one event, even in the smallest possible way, will invalidate every other event that I have ever described. I can tell you that the trade unions will suffer under Thatcher, but in truth I cannot pin down the economic forces behind this phenomenon, or explain in a glib few words why society permits its industries to be destroyed. I can’t tell you what is in the minds of the people who dance at the fall of the Berlin Wall, or exactly who will stand up in Afghanistan and say, ‘Today is a good day for jihad.’ And what good is my information to you, if acting on a single piece of it destroys the whole?”

  “Names, places!” he exclaimed. “Give me names, give me places!”

  “Why?” I asked. “Will you assassinate Yasser Arafat? Will you execute children for crimes they haven’t committed yet, arm the Taliban in advance?”

  “That’s a policy decision, these are all policy decisions…”

  “You’re making your decisions based on crimes which haven’t been committed yet!”

  He threw his arms wide in a great gesture of frustration. “Humanity is evolving, Harry!” he exclaimed. “The world is changing! In the last two hundred years humanity has changed in ways more radical than it achieved in the last two thousand! The rate of evolution is accelerating, as a species and as a civilisation. It’s our job, the job of good men, good men and good women, to oversee this process, to guide it so that we don’t have any more fuck-ups and disasters! You want another Second World War? Another Holocaust? We can change things, make them better.”

  “You regard yourself as fit to oversee the future?”

  “Goddamn it, yes!” he roared. “Because I’m a fucking defender of democracy! Because I’m a fucking liberal-minded believer in freedom, because I’m a fucking good guy with a good heart and damn it because someone has to!”

  I sat back in my chair. The rain was slicing in sideways, pounding against the glass. There were fresh flowers on the table, cold coffee in my cup. “I’m sorry, Mr Phearson,” I said at last. “I don’t know what it is you want me to tell you.”

  He shuffled round quickly on to a chair, pulled it closer to me, dropping his voice to an almost conspiratorial level, hands pressed down in a might-be apology. “Why don’t we win in Vietnam? What are we doing wrong?”

  I groaned, pressing my palms against my skull. “You’re not wanted! The Vietnamese don’t want you, the Chinese don’t want you, your own people don’t want you in Vietnam! There’s no winning a war no one wants to fight!”

  “What if we dropped the bomb? One bomb, Hanoi, a clean sweep?”

  “I don’t know because it never happened, and it never happened because it’s obscene!” I shouted. “You don’t want knowledge, you want affirmation, and I…” I stood suddenly, as surprised to find myself standing as anyone else in the room. “… I can’t give you that,” I concluded. “I’m sorry. I thought when I agreed to this that you were… that you wanted something else. I think I was wrong. I need… to think.”

  Silence between us.

  In Chinese, asthma is described as the panting of an animal, its breath heavy with illness. Phearson’s body was statue-still, his hands carved to civilised containment, his suit straight, his face empty, but his breath was all animal bursting up from within his chest. “What is the point of you?” he asked, and the words were shaped by years of polite upbringing, careful self-control, and the breath that drove it wanted to rip my throat out with bare teeth and swallow blood. “You think this doesn’t matter, Dr August? You think you die and that’s it? The world resets, bang!” A slam of his hand into the table, hard enough to make china cups bounce in porcelain saucers. “Us little men with little lives are dead and gone, and all this–” he didn’t need to move, didn’t need to do more than flick his eyes around the room “–was just a dream. Are
you God, Dr August? Are you the only living creature that matters? Do you think, because you remember it, that your pain is bigger and more important? Do you think, because you experience it, that your life is the only life that gets counted? Do you?”

  He didn’t shout, didn’t raise his voice, but the animal breath came fast even as his fingers tightened against their own instinct to tear. I found I had nothing. No words, no ideas, no justification, no rebuke. He stood suddenly, sharply, a breaking of a sort, though of what I didn’t dare say, the vein on his temple writhing busily beneath his skin. “OK.” He panted the word out. “OK, Dr August. OK. We’ve both got a little tired, a little frustrated… Maybe we need a break. Why don’t we take the rest of the day off and you can think about it, OK? OK,” he decided before I could answer. “That’s a plan. Great. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  So saying, he strode from the room without another word and without looking back.

  Chapter 14

  I had to leave.

  The feeling had been growing upon me for a while, and now it reached its ultimate proof. I could see no good outcome of remaining and had to go. It would not be as simple as walking out of the front door, but then sometimes the best escape plans are the simplest.

  Why, in all my years in the east, had I not bothered to learn even a little kung fu?

  The question seemed ridiculous now as I sat in my room and waited for dusk. There were guards–not dressed as guards clearly, but in my time I had learned enough of the rhythms of that place to recognise no fewer than five men on duty at any given moment, loitering quietly in the background waiting for a command. At seven every evening they swapped shifts, and the new team was usually still digesting its evening meal. That made them sloppy, slower and a little too relaxed. The land beyond my window was a mix of gorse and heather, and the milkman when he made his delivery had the thick accent of the North. I didn’t need much more than that. I had been a groundsman raised in these parts; I had lived and died by this soil in my first life and knew how to survive on a moor. Phearson, for all his resources and his men, struck me as a city boy not used to the wild hunt. All I needed was to get beyond the walls.