The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

by Claire North

  “There’s no joining fee,” she explained as if reading my thoughts, “but you are rather expected to chip in for the next generation, good form and all that. Only one rule set in stone–you can do whatever you like so long as you don’t bugger it up for the next lot. So no nuking New York, please, or shooting Roosevelt, even if for experimental purposes. We just can’t handle the hassle. I’m going to assume you’re interested,” she added to my silence, “in which case I really feel we should have another meeting.”

  She leaned across the table. I thought she was giving me a business card, but when her hand lifted there was instead a small penknife folded into a wooden handle. Her eyes glinted and her voice was low. “How would… 2 p.m., Trafalgar Square, July 1st 1940 work for you?”

  I looked from the knife, to her and back again. She understood and stood up, still smiling. “I personally favour the thigh,” she explained. “A bath helps, but one must make do, mustn’t one? Tra-la, Dr August, so long and all that!”

  So saying, she sauntered merrily away.

  I cut open my femoral artery that very same night, and bled out in under four minutes. Regrettably, there wasn’t an easily available bath to use at the time, but after the first sixty seconds I didn’t really notice the pain and rather savoured the mess.

  Chapter 21

  Death holds no fear for us.

  It is rebirth where the terror lies. Rebirth, and the lingering fear that no matter how much our bodies are renewed, our minds cannot be saved.

  I was in my third life when I realised my illegitimacy, standing above the coffin of Harriet August, staring into the face of my father–my biological father–on the other side of the soil.

  There was no outrage or indignation. I felt, perhaps out of grief as much as rational reasoning, gratitude to Harriet and Patrick for raising me, even as the revelation settled on my soul that I could not be blood of their blood. I studied my biological father coolly, as one might study any sample which one suspects of being a placebo rather than the cure. I wondered not why or how, but what. What if he was like me?

  I must admit, my scrutiny was hardly informative. With Harriet dead and my adopted father retreating ever deeper into his loneliness and grief, I increasingly took over his duties, forsaking school altogether to become the all-purpose boy of the estate. The Great Depression was coming upon us and the Hulne family had not been wise in its investments. My grandmother Constance had a level fiscal head on her shoulders, but also a great pride which resulted in a conflict of interests. She hoarded coin on fuel and repairs to the grounds, pinched at every penny and derided any and all expense, yet would every year throw a feast for all relatives and distant friends of the Hulnes to come and hunt on the lands, which single event would easily consume two times the expenditure she had saved. Of my aunts, Alexandra married a pleasant if essentially bland civil servant, and her sister Victoria continued in a lifestyle of excess and scandal which my grandmother simply refused to acknowledge. The frost between my biological father and his wife kept both of them from any great expense. She wasted most of her time in London, an activity permitted on the basis that it was her own money or the money of her family that she wasted; he spent most of his days in the countryside or dabbling, unwisely, in local politics, and when the two shared a house or a bed they did so with the same stiff efficiency and impassioned rigour of my grandmother’s yearly feast. In this way the family declined, first by vacancies in the household not being filled, and then by servants being laid off altogether. My adopted father was kept on as much for pity for his position as the services he rendered the family; also, I began to realise, for a certain debt owed by the Hulnes to the Augusts for a child raised without complaint.

  I earned my keep, as I had in my first life, and was in fact of rather more use now that I had so many years to draw upon. I knew the land almost better than my father, and had over the years also acquired skills such as fixing an engine, patching a pipe, tracing a faulty cable back to its home, which seemed at the time marvellously advanced technological skills, especially for a teenage boy. I went out of my way to ensure that I was everywhere and nowhere, indispensible and unseen, as much to avoid the monotony of my life as to observe what I now understood to be my biological family. My grandmother studied the art of ignoring me; Aunt Alexandra was rarely in the house to perceive me; Victoria ignored me without having to try; and my father Rory stared until he was caught staring, though whether it was curiosity or guilt which motivated his gaze I was at a loss to say.

  I looked at this man, stiffly dressed and stiffer born, a moustache sitting on his top lip like an old family pet, which he cared for secretly in a little green net, and I wondered if he was like me. When they fired the butler and I became a cheaper form of house servant, I would stand behind his chair at the head of the table and watch him cut his overcooked chicken into smaller and smaller pieces, never touching them until every last piece was square. I observed the one ritual kiss on the cheek he gave his wife when she arrived, and the one ritual kiss he gave her on the other cheek when she departed the day after, her wardrobe renewed for a trip back to town. I heard Aunt Victoria whisper when the weather was cold that she had just the thing for the pain in his hip, where in the war he’d been briefly grazed and which his mind had confounded to a greater thing, an injury I hardly begrudged for I too had fought in a war and knew the power of such things. Aunt Victoria knew a funny little man in Alnwick, who knew another excellent man in Leeds, who received regular shipments from Liverpool of a new-fangled thing, diacetylmorphine, just the stuff, just what he needed. I watched through the door the first time my father took it, and saw him shake and twitch and then grow still, the spit running down the side of his face from his open jaw and pooling just in front of his ear. Then my aunt caught me peeping and screamed that I was a foolish ignorant boy, and hit me with the back of her hand and slammed the door.

  The police arrested her little man in Alnwick three days later. They received an anonymous letter written in a brisk, unstately hand. They were only to receive one other letter in the same hand, from the same anonymous source, who warned that Mr Traynor, the bauxite man, liked to touch boys, and that enclosed was the testimony of Boy H confirming the same. Experts, had they been called, might have noted a marked similarity between the adult’s hand and the boy’s. As it was, the bite marks on the thumb of Mr Traynor when he was taken into questioning were confirmed as a child’s and, though no more notes were forthcoming, it was suggested that he move swiftly on.

  In my first life my biological father–even if he showed interest in me which I did not perceive–almost never went so far as to express it to me outright. In my second life I was too busy committing suicide to deal with any external affairs, but in my third there was enough deviation in my behaviour to induce a deviation in his. Unlikely as it is in light of my future careers, we found ourselves most united in our attendance at church. The Hulnes were Catholic, and their hereditary shame at the same had in recent years translated into a sort of decisive pride. A chapel had been built and maintained at their cost and for their benefit, which locals attended with very little interest in its denomination but for the advantages of proximity. The parson was a rather too irreverent man by the name of the Reverend Shaeffer, who had forgone his rigid Huguenot upbringing for the more spectacular joys of Catholicism and all its perks. This lent a certain glee to all his duties, as if, freed from the burden of habitually wearing black, he had resolved instead to always wear purple. Neither I nor my father went when we felt it was likely we would have to interact with him, which circumstance forced us instead to interact with each other.

  Our relationship was hardly a bloom in spring. Our first few encounters at the chapel were silent, glances of recognition and no more, not even a nod. If my father had cause to wonder what an eight-year-old boy was doing in this house of God, he presumably concluded it was grief, while I wondered if there was not an air of guilt which drove my father to such piety. For my part, I inc
reasingly found my father’s attendance at the chapel an annoying distraction, then a curiosity, for I was embarking on that most clichéd journey of the ignorant in an attempt to understand my situation, and attempting to commune in my soul with some form of deity.

  My reasoning was the standard line of all of us who kalachakra, those who journey through our own lives. I could find no explanation for my predicament, and having concluded that no one else I had ever encountered was experiencing this journey through their own days again and again, logic demanded that I consider myself either a scientific freak or in some way touched by a power beyond my comprehension. In my third life I had no scientific knowledge, save that shallow stuff acquired from reading glossy magazines printed in the 1970s with predictions of nuclear destruction, and could not imagine how my situation was scientifically possible. Why me? Why would all of nature have conspired to put me in this predicament, and was there not something unique, something special about the journey I was taking which implied a purpose, more than some random collision of sub-atomic events? This premise accepted, I turned towards the most popular supernatural explanation available, and sought answers from God. I read the Bible from cover to cover, but in its talk of resurrection I could find no explanation for my situation, unless I was either a prophet or damned, and thin enough evidence either way to make a decision on that front. I attempted to learn of other religions, but at that time and in that place data on alternative belief systems was hard to collate, especially for a child barely expected to be able to scratch his own name, and so, more out of default convenience than any particular leaning, I found myself turning to the Christian god as having not much else to go on. Thus you could find me in the chapel, still praying for an answer to a nameless question, when,

  “I see you come here often.”

  My father.

  I had wondered, could my situation be inherited? But if it were so, would my father not have said as much? Could any man be so shallow, so captured by his pride and the times, as not to speak to his son of a predicament so horrific as this? And then again, if my situation were inherited, why would there be such consistency of behaviour from my father, where surely knowledge would induce change?

  “Yes, sir.” An instinctive answer, instinctively rendered. I find as a child my default position is polite affirmation of the often unwise and frequently incorrect assumptions of my elders. On the few occasions I’ve tried rebellion I have either frustratingly been dismissed as opinionated and precocious or, on several occasions, my actions have been an excuse for the lash. What “Yes, sir” gains in neutrality, however, it lacks in social advancement, and so our conversation lagged.

  At last, “You pray to God?”

  I confess it took a while for the banality of this question to penetrate. Could this man, half of my own genetic material, muster nothing more? And yet to dazzle and confound the situation I replied with another round of, “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s good. You’ve been raised well.”

  He sounded satisfied at that, which perhaps in my enthusiasm I interpreted over-liberally as parental pleasure. Having achieved so much with our conversation it seemed as if he would leave, so I went in with, “What do you pray for, sir?”

  Coming from an adult, the question would have been blunt and intrusive. From a child, unable to understand the answers that might be given, I suppose it was almost sweet, and I played this part with what I had practised in front of the mirror as my most innocent face. Regrettably, being merely young has never guaranteed me an aura of naïveté.

  He considered for a long time, not so much his answer as his confession to a stranger, then smiled and chose the shallower option. “The same as all men. Fair weather, good food and the embrace of my family.”

  I suspect my incredulity at these sentiments was visible on my face, for his own twitched in an uncomfortable recognition of failure and, to compensate for the same, he proceeded to ruffle my hair, awkwardly, briskly, a gesture curtailed as quickly as it had begun.

  It was my first meaningful conversation with my biological father, and it was hardly an omen of good things to come.

  Chapter 22

  The Cronus Club is power.

  Make no mistake, for that is what it is.

  Laziness, apathy and a lack of interest: these are what restrain the exercise of its resources. Fear too, perhaps. Fear of what has been and what will come. It is not entirely true to say that we who are kalachakra can live our life free of consequence.

  I killed myself in in my fourth life to escape Phearson and his tape machine, and in my fifth I did indeed seek the counselling that Virginia had suggested. I do not regain consciousness all at once; there is no one flash of memory being restored, but rather it is a gradual recollection that begins at my third birthday and is complete by my fourth. Harriet said I cried a lot in the early years of my fifth life. She said she had never seen such a sad infant. I realise now that, in a way, the process of recalling my previous death was almost a natural working-through of it, a reliving step by step, as my mind integrated it into who I was.

  I sought counselling, as I said. Virginia was correct that the medical services would hardly do, and our chaplain, as established, was of very little use. By the time I remembered what I was, and where I had come from, I could see the beginning of Harriet’s decline, and read the gaunt recognition in Patrick’s face as his wife began to wither before his eyes. Cancer is a process on which the healthy cannot impose. I was a child and could not express myself to these two people who, in my own, slow way, I had come to love. I needed the help of a stranger, needed the means to express myself to someone else.

  I wrote to my father.

  He may seem an unlikely choice, an unusual confidant. Needless to say I could not tell him all–there would be no reference to my true nature, no telling of the future past or mention of my age. Rather, I penned my letters in a stiff adult’s hand, signing myself Private Harry Brookes, late of my father’s division. I wrote it as an apology, as a confession, told him that he would not remember me but that I remembered him, hoping for his understanding, his attentive ear. I told him of being captured by the enemy in the First World War, making up the details of my arrest from the books I had read and tales I had heard. I told him of being interrogated, and here I wrote it out in full: the beatings and the pain, the humiliations and the loss, the delirium and the drugs and the moment I tried to make it end. Over several months and many letters, I told him everything, adapting only the names and times to suit my confessional, and transforming my successful suicide attempt into merely suicide attempted.

  “Forgive me,” I wrote at the bottom. “I did not think I would break.”

  He didn’t reply for a very long time. I had given him an entirely fictional address to send his response to, knowing full well that I would be the boy sent with the mail to the post office. Private Harry Brookes poured his heart out to a distant stranger who made no reply, but I knew that what I needed was not so much the comfort of return, but to speak of what I had been. The telling was all, the reply merely a courtesy.

  Yet I longed for it with a childish passion that I could not fully attribute to my hormones and physical biology. I began to grow angry in my father’s presence, knowing that he had received the letters of Private Brookes and read them, and marvelling that he did not weep and could maintain such a carapace of stone in the face of my genuine anguish. My fury must have been visible briefly on my face, for my grandmother spoke to Harriet and exclaimed,

  “That boy of yours is a vile little wretch! He gives us such terrible looks!”

  Harriet chided me, but she, more than any other, I think, could sense the thing beneath the surface which I was trying to express and dared not say out loud. Even Patrick, not averse to the willow wand, seemed to beat me less in that life for my transgressions, and my cousin Clement, usually the bully of the household, hid from me in the house.

  Then at last my father replied.

  I stole the lette
r off its silver plate by the door before any in the household could see and ran to the woods to read it. His handwriting, infuriatingly, was a lot like mine. How insufferable, I concluded, to have inherited so many genetic traits from this overindulged man. Then I read, and my anger diminished.

  Dear Private H. Brookes,

  I have received and read your letters with interest, and cordially thank you for your courage and fortitude in both enduring what you have endured, and expressing the truth of it to your superiors. Please know that I bear you no ill will for anything you may have expressed to the enemy, for no one could have suffered what you suffered and been less the man. I commend you, sir, and I salute you.

  We have seen things that men cannot name. We have learned, you and I, to speak a language of bloodshed and violence; words do not reach deep enough, music is no more than hollow sound, the smiles of strangers grow false. We must speak, and dare not, cannot, unless it is in mud and the screams of men. We have no kin but each other, for our loves to our mothers and our wives demand that we protect them from what we know. Ours is the fellowship of strangers who know a secret that we cannot express. We are both of us broken, shattered, hollow and alone. Only for the ones we love do we remain, painted dolls in the playhouse of this life. In them we must find our meaning. In them we must hold to hope. I trust you find the one who gives you this meaning, and remain always,

  Your sincere friend,

  Major R. E. Hulne

  I burned the letter after reading it, and scattered its ashes beneath the trees. Private Harry Brookes did not write to my father again.