The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Page 32
Jenny.
My Jenny.
Memory, moving too fast to process.
My Jenny, who I had loved and married, a surgeon in Glasgow at a time when women simply didn’t do that, especially not there. I had loved her and told her everything, and it had been too much. My Jenny, who I never once blamed for the fate that befell me, for Franklin Phearson and my death on the floor of his house, femoral artery slashed and a smile on my face. My Jenny, to whom in another life I had whispered, “Run away with me,” and she’d smiled and looked tempted, though she could probably not explain why.
My Jenny, and I had told Vincent about her. Back in Pietrok-112, a memory, a night playing cards, a little drunk on vodka, and he’d said…
“Damn it, Harry, I may not agree with the Cronus Club, but I do believe it’s only healthy for a man to indulge himself sometimes.”
Memory, fast.
I’d been looking at Anna, the laboratory technician whose calibrations were fine unto the sixth sig fig, who smiled at me from over the top of her glasses and didn’t realise that this was a cliché which just made it all the more delightful. Vincent slapping my shoulder, muttering, “Christ, Harry, whoever said genius had to be tortured? Go for it, I say.”
I’d hemmed and hummed, worried about the politics of it, about the things people would say, and we’d played cards that night and drunk vodka as Vincent derided my concerns as being barely worthy of a seventeen-year-old boy, let alone a man well into his twelfth, long life.
“You must have had some girls in your time, hey, Harry?”
“I’ve always been a little too preoccupied for true love–I’m sure you know how it is.”
“Nonsense,” he retorted, throwing his fist onto the table hard enough to make our cards bounce across the surface. “Even though I believe with the absolute conviction of my soul that this project, that the quantum mirror, is the greatest quest man can possibly undertake, to see the universe with the eyes of the creator, to answer the greatest questions posed by man; yet I also believe that single-minded dedication to just one thing, without rest, respite or distraction, is only conducive to migraines, not productivity. I have no doubt that the bureaucrats of this place had some statistic on it–a 15 per cent increase, say, in productivity if, every eight hours, a worker is allowed another half-hour for rest. Does the 15 per cent increase outweigh the loss of time spent away from the workplace? Absolutely.”
“You suggest… therapeutic sex?”
“I suggest therapeutic companionship. I suggest, as you yourself have so often pointed out, that even the greatest minds cannot spend every second analysing the mysteries of the universe, but must, indeed must also spend some time of every day wondering why the toilet is so cold, the shampoo so poor and canteen cabbage so lumpy. I do not expect my scientists to be monks, Harry, least of all you!”
“Do you have someone?” I asked. “I haven’t noticed…”
He dismissed the enquiry with a flick of the wrist. “I didn’t say that untoward, unpleasant relationships improve productivity–quite the opposite, in fact. I will not waste my time on pursuing some futile sexual object just because I feel like a little chemical stimulation! However, when I meet someone who I regard as…”
“The half-hour rest in your eight-hour day?”
“Quite so. You will be made aware of it.”
“Have you been married?” I asked. There was no great intent to my question, merely curiosity as I threw down my cards, a polite discussion of friendly history.
“Once or twice,” he admitted, “when there seemed to be a suitable candidate available. Once, in my very first life, there was a woman who I thought… But retrospect is a marvellous thing, and upon my death I discovered I could live perfectly well without her. Occasionally I acquire someone for companionship. Old age can be tedious without a little loyalty. What about yourself?”
“Something similar,” I admitted. “Like you, I find that being alone… Its drawbacks outweigh its benefits, particularly in later life. It seems that, even when aware of the futility of the lie, the hollowness of the relationship, if hollow is what it indeed is, the urge to be together, with someone… is ingrained deeper than I had possibly imagined.”
And, without knowing why, I had told him about Jenny.
Jenny.
Naïve to say love of my life.
Love of a life, perhaps.
Foolish to suppose affection could last so long.
A delusion, formed from so many years of lying, of deceit, of being apart from all things because there is no choice. Apart from the Cronus Club for fear of being exposed, apart from Vincent for fear he would deduce my truths, apart from those who lived and those who died and remembered nothing of the same, apart from my family, adopted and true, apart from a world whose passage I could already describe, apart from…
Everything.
This racing of my heart.
This stopping of my breath.
This flushing in my cheek.
It is not love.
It is delusion.
Jenny.
Holding Vincent’s hand.
With her other she reaches out and slips the glass from between his fingers, placing it on the black surface of the grand piano. This done, her fingers return again to the back of his neck, run through the thin hairs above his collar. She is almost the same height as him, but stands a little on tiptoe anyway, her weight pushing him back. She kisses him, and he kisses back, deep and long and passionate, and the room applauds and as they part his eyes flicker to me.
A second.
Just a second.
What did he see?
I applaud too.
Only later–much, much later–do I permit myself to crawl into the furthest reaches of the garden, sink on to my hands and knees in the damp soil, and weep.
Chapter 72
Vincent.
My enemy.
My friend.
Of us two I am the better liar.
But you–you have always been a better judge of men.
Was it the final test? The ultimate proof? Could I look into the eyes of my wife as she kissed another man, and shake her hand, and smile, and say how happy I was for you both, receive her kiss on my cheek and hear her voice and know that she was yours, my enemy, my friend, without revealing all? Could I smile as she was led down the aisle, sing my way through the hymns in the church, take the photos as she cut the cake? For Harry, Harry is a journalist, Harry must be good at taking photos, no? Could I watch you whisper words into her ears, and see her laugh, and smell you on her skin, and not rise up in fury, because you took her, not for love, not for passion or companionship or even that therapeutic half-hour in the eight-hour shift. You took her because she was mine. Could I smile at this?
It would appear that I could.
I know now that there is something dead inside me though I cannot remember exactly when it died.
Chapter 73
We near the end, you and I.
It occurs to me that in all this I have not told you much of my adopted father, Patrick August, or, more specifically, of how he dies. Harriet, kindly Harriet, dies between my sixth and eighth birthdays; Rory Hulne, as you know, dies poor, although not always in the same place. Patrick, silent Patrick, who sat across the fire from me in his grief at his wife’s departure, dies in the 1960s, dissatisfied with his lot. He has never remarried in all the lives I’ve known him, and often the slow decline of the Hulnes nets him in their web, and he finds himself poor, pension-less, alone. I send him money, and each time I do I receive a stiff letter in reply, almost the same word for word in every life.
Dear Harry,
I have received your money. I hope you do not inconvenience yourself by sending it. I need little for I have what I require, and the efforts of the old must turn towards the future of the young. I walk a lot and keep myself in good health. I trust you do the same. My best wishes to you,
Yours,
Patrick
&n
bsp; Always, when I send him money he refuses to spend it for at least six months, but hoards it in a box under his bed. I suspect he keeps it to return to me some day, but poverty takes its toll and he is at last forced to spend it for his own survival. I tried once sending him enough for a new house, but he returned my cheque with a letter politely informing me that such wealth was best spent on the young, and he had enough to keep himself in health. I am careful not to visit him for at least two months after any donation, for fear he will mis-interpret my appearance as a demand for gratitude. Even to this day, after all these years, I am still not sure of the best way to make my father’s old age a happy one.
My father.
Throughout all this I have referred to Rory Hulne as “my father”, which in a strictly genetic sense he is. He has been present through my life, a constant in the shadows, inescapable, unavoidable; and having no better term to describe him than “my father” so he has been described. I could perhaps call him a soldier, a master, a lordling, a man consumed by jealousy, a creature of regret, a rapist, but as each statement would require some sort of conditional, I settle instead for what he is–my father.
And yet he is not half the father that I believe Patrick to have been. I do not deny Patrick’s flaws, for he was a cold man, distant in my youth, harsh after Harriet’s departure. He used the rod more than a kind man would, and left me to my own devices more than a loving man might, but not once, not in any life which I have lived, did he deploy the ultimate cruelty, and tell me the truth of myself. Not once did he claim to be anything but my father, even as my features evolved into the looks of the man who denied any link with me. A truer man, a man of his word, I have never met.
I went back to that place in my fourteenth life. I had just witnessed Jenny marry Vincent, and of course–but of course–I stayed around and played the part of the excellent friend, smiling and dissembling, laughing at their jokes, smiling at their fondness, indulging their affection, and only when six, seven months had gone by and my credit was assured did I sadly report that I must return briefly to England. Vincent offered to pay for my flight–by now I was deep in his pocket and very much his man–but I politely refused, saying that this was a private affair. When I left London airport, two men shadowed me to the train. Losing a tail without making it apparent that you’re losing a tail can be a tricky business. I used a combination of errand-running, a guaranteed way to force any surveillance into an error, and well-planned spontaneous attendance at private, invitation-only functions to whittle down both the tenacity and morale of my shadowers. By the time I boarded a train for Berwick-upon-Tweed I was confident that I had lost them, without ever once having to break into a run.
Patrick was dead; so was Rory Hulne, and Constance and Alexandra, and all the faces of my youth. Hulne House had been bought by a man who had made his fortune importing heroin from the Golden Crescent and who fancied himself a country gentleman, keeping a dozen dogs and transforming the rear of the house into a giant white-tiled swimming pool for his wife and guests. Most of the grand old trees had been felled, and instead thick-leafed hedges, trimmed into grotesque figures of humans and animals, adorned the old paths and gardens. To prevent calamity, I knocked on the door of the house and asked if I could look around the grounds. I had worked here, I explained, as a serving boy, back in the day, and the drug dealer, delighted by the notion of tales of past glories and country living, gave me a personal tour, explaining all the things he’d done with the place, and how much better it was now that every room had a TV. I paid my way by telling stories of ancient indiscretions and broken promises, sly gossiping in the 1920s and the parties of the 1930s as the shadow of war drew over us, and after, when I had earned my keep, I slunk down to the old cottage where Patrick had lived, and found it overwhelmed with ivy. There was still some furniture inside, an old table, a mattress-less bed, but all things of value had been stripped away by thieves or nature. I sat between the brambles as the sun went down and imagined the conversation I would have with my silent father one day. He would sit one side of the fire, I the other, and, as was the way of it, neither of us would speak for a good long while until at last, I may say,
“I know you are not my father.”
I tried the words out loud, just to see how they felt.
“I know you are not my father, but you have been more a father to me than ever my biological father was. You took me when you did not need to, and kept me when you did not want to, and never once broke down and spoke the truth. You could have destroyed me, the child of your master, and you must have been tempted so many times, in ways which you cannot yourself remember, to end it all, to throw me back from where I came. But you never did. And for that, more than the food on my plate or the warmth of your fire, you have been my father.”
I think those are the words I would have said, if I had ever found the courage to break Patrick’s silence and say them. If there was any point in them being spoken out loud.
Perhaps in another life.
Chapter 74
In 1983, as the first International Space Station fell burning to earth with the loss of all on board, a glorious attempt at brilliant new science gone tragically wrong as the nations of the earth scrambled to prove themselves better than their neighbours, tens of thousands died in the Maldives and Bangladesh in the worst summer floods of their history. As the seas heated around the polar ice caps, it was apparent even to the most conservative observers that the great technological surge, as Vincent’s tampering was increasingly known, was causing more harm to humanity than good. A journalist standing in a field in Wisconsin where five dancing tornadoes spun beneath a lightning-edged sky declared to camera, “Mankind has learned to carve with the tools of nature, but can’t yet see the sculpture it will create,” and as the first water wars erupted in the Middle East and central Asia, I began finally to see how Christa’s prophecy, delivered hundreds of years ago in a hospital room in Berlin, could come true.
The world is ending, as it always must. But the end of the world is getting faster.
Vincent was at the heart of it, but for all that I had passed his ultimate test, stood before him and proved that I could not possibly have my memory, or else surely I would have gone mad, still he was not exposing me to the secrets of his research, the work that was killing the world. Perhaps, I reflected with a degree of irony, the presumed memory loss I was suffering led him to assume I could be of no use to him in its undertaking. Which, in fairness and by this logic, I could not.
He kept me close, however, having drawn me in with wealth and fine living. In time I left my job as a journalist and worked for him instead as an all-purpose dogsbody. Investigator, adviser, occasional social secretary, I was what anyone else would have dubbed an overgrown personal assistant; he called me “my Secretary of State”.
I flew out to meet people he was considering investing in, lobbied senators, buttered up scientists whose work he was interested in and even, on a few occasions, got him out of paying parking tickets incurred when he decided to stop on double red lines in the middle of city-centre streets. He appeared to respect both my work and my judgement, backing off from projects which I considered unwise and embracing those I regarded as interesting or useful. I must admit, I was occasionally even engaged by the work. By 1983, technologies which I hadn’t even seen in 2003 were starting to hit the markets, and I spent every spare minute I could digesting and analysing them, as I felt sure Vincent was, both of us striving to acquire a leading edge for our future lives. Jenny was a constant at all social gatherings. I hid my feelings, but I think she must have sensed something, for one day, when Vincent was in the kitchen finding another bottle of wine, she turned to me across the dining table and said, “Harry, I have to ask this. Do you like me?”
The question went to the base of my spine and sat there like a parasite, gnawing on the white nerves beneath the bone. “W-why do you ask?” I stammered.
“Please–just answer the question. Quickly, please.”
“All right then,” she said calmly. “That’s all right, then.”
And that, it seemed, was all there was to say.
In 1985 I began to experience pain, heaviness in my legs, and after a few weeks of ignoring it, decided to trot off to the doctor for my usual diagnosis of multiple myeloma. The doctor earned my respect for the skill with which she gave the information to me, unfolding it in several careful diagnostic stages, first with abnormalities which might be, then with masses which appeared to be, and finally, having primed the patient for receipt of the dire news through rounds one and two, with the calm statement that it was, and I should be prepared for a difficult fight. I was so touched by the manner in which she handled this last, crucial phase that at the end of it I stood up and shook her by the hand, complimenting her on her grace and skill. She flushed and mumbled me out of the door with far less verbal poise than that with which she’d informed me I was dying.
Vincent, when he received the news, was outraged. “We must do something! What do you need, Harry? How can I help? I’ll make a call to Johns Hopkins at once–I’m sure I’ve bought them a ward or something recently…”
“No, thank you.”
“Nonsense, I insist.”
He insisted.
Wearily, I went through the motions.
As I lay in a white hospital gown designed to institutionalise any free-spirited individual as quickly as possible, listening to electromagnets power up around my body, I considered my next step. Certainly I had made progress in this life–I had observed the way Vincent worked, studied his contacts, his methods, his people, and, most important of all, I had convinced him that I was utterly harmless. From a man he’d had killed only a few lives ago, I was now his trusted assistant, confidant and friend.