Making History

by Stephen Fry

  This was even better than I could have imagined. I hugged myself with pleasure. Providence can be very kind.

  All I had to do now was wait for sunlight.

  An hour passed before I heard the first stirrings in our trenches. The usual farting, grumbling and groaning, followed by the whistling of the batmen and boodle boys as they went around with coffee and shaving water for their masters. Soon someone would spot Schmidt’s body, and then they would see me and as­sume I had acted on the heroically loyal impulse to rescue the body of a Kamerad.

  I reckoned that so long as I kept flat enough I would be able to wriggle as far as the foxhole. My own side would surely have the wit to put up smoke. And then a dash back to the wire followed by a tearful, Wagnerian scene that would see me fending off all adulation and walking nobly away to commune with my grief.

  Even such a childishly obvious tactic as a smoke screen took them a long time to work out. I found out later that it was Hans Mend into whose dim mind the idea eventually penetrated. Good God, imagine my life being in the hands of such half-wits!

  But the smoke did come, which also had the advantage of aid­ing the production of tears quite marvelously in the final scene. Once I was sure of adequate—

  “An entertaining read, I trust?”

  The sudden shock of Rudi’s voice in the room caused Hans to drop the diary onto the desk and jump to his feet.

  Rudi Gloder was standing in the doorway, watching him with an amused smile on his face. “Don’t you know that it is impolite to read a man’s diary without asking permission first?”

  Hans found that his voice did not work. He tried to speak but no words came. Only tears. Tears and a ravenous hunger for revenge.

  POTTED HISTORY

  PJ’s famous pancakes

  “Hungry, Mike?”

  “Ravenous.”

  “I promised you PJ’s, so let’s go.”

  I followed Steve along the pavement, the sidewalk, the whatever, and looked around me.

  “This is Nassau,” said Steve, following my eyes. “Main Street, Princeton. Named for Prince William of Orange-Nassau, or so they tell me. Campus to the left, bars, coffee shops, bookstores and stuff to the right.”

  “It’s kind of cute,” I said.

  “Yeah, maybe too cute. Over there is Palmer Square and between here and Palmer Square, we find Witherspoon, home of the A and B.” He cocked his head toward me quizzically, expecting it seemed, some kind of a reaction.

  “Uh . . . the A and B?”

  “The Alchemist and Barrister. It’s a pub?” he added, with that ris­ing question intonation peculiar to Americans and Australians.

  “Pub? I didn’t think you used the word ‘pub’ in America.”

  “Sure we do. Sometimes. Specially in Princeton. And most spe­cially when it’s an Irish bar like the A and B. We were there last night, matter of fact, knocking back Sam Adams and Absoluts like they were going out of style.”

  “Sam Adams?”

  “It’s a beer, dark beer. Like an ale? We drank quarts of it, with plenty of straight vodka on the side.”

  “And we were in there, last night? You and me?”

  “You, me and some other guys.”

  I nodded slowly. “I remember hurling, that I do remember. That’s when I woke up. As it were.”

  “Yeah, that was in Palmer Square outside. You banged your head against the wall you were puking up all over. Doc Ballinger thinks that maybe that’s what did it. The bang on the head.”

  “Did what, Steve?” I asked, looking at him straight and trying to keep a plug on the panic that was forcing up inside me. “What do you think is wrong with me? Is this what happens with amnesia? People start talking in a British accent and thinking they live in ‘Cam­bridge, England’ instead of ‘Hertford, Connecticut’? That’s usual? What did that doctor say to you? You were with him for long enough. He must have a theory.”

  He avoided my eye. “Doc Ballinger said to take things easy, Mike. To try and get you to enjoy the ride, crazy as it sounds. Not to force anything. We’re just gonna go around town, around campus, doing all the normal stuff. It’ll all come back to you soon, you can bet on it. Then this afternoon we’ll go see this guy Taylor.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He’s a professor of some kind.”

  “A psychiatrist?”

  “Yeah, something like that. But so what? I mean, you know, he’ll prolly just give you a knock behind the ear with one of those little reflex hammers and you’ll be yourself again.”

  “So you’re going to look after me? Show me where everything is. Remind me where everything is. Help jog some memories?”

  He shrugged. “Looks that way.”

  “Are we . . .” I swallowed. “Are we good friends then? You and me? I’m sorry, I know that sounds loopy, but you see I really can’t remember anything, anything. So I need to be told even the most trivial things . . . not that friendship is a trivial thing,” I added hastily. “I mean basic things . . . it’s just that I need to be told even the most basic things. I take it we are friends . . . buddies, is that the word?”

  I wittered on in this fashion because I noticed that Steve had started to blush and I wanted to give him time to recover. It was, after all, a ridiculous question to ask of anyone.

  “Yeah, I guess you could say that,” he managed to say. “I guess you could say we were buddies.”

  “Is that . . . forgive me, I know it sounds ridiculous, but is that as in ‘best buddies,’ or is there someone who knows me better?”

  “Well . . .”

  “I don’t mean,” I interrupted hastily, “I don’t mean I’m not pleased that you’re looking after me. And grateful. I just . . . you know . . . wondered . . . that’s all.”

  Poor Steve just didn’t know which way to look. I was sorry to embarrass him like this, but, Christ, I needed something to cling on to.

  “Heck, Mike. I don’t know what to say. I guess I know you as well as anybody, but . . .”

  “I’m a bit of a loner,” I suggested, helping him out. “I know that. Perhaps . . . do I have—” a picture of Jane leaning over me came sud­denly into my head, “—a girlfriend of some kind?”

  He slowed to a halt and his answer came out in an awkward, husky and barely audible tumble. “No girlfriend. Least . . . that is . . . none that I know of. So.”

  “Right, thanks.”

  Steve nodded, still unable to meet my eye, and then looking up, said in a more cheerful voice, welcoming the chance to change the subject, “Well, there it is!”

  He pointed to a double-fronted shop on the other side of the street. “PJ’s” was printed in fat, shadowed letters on a red-and-white striped awning above the door.

  “PJ’s!” explained Steve, unnecessarily, adding in a fanfaring kind of a voice, “Home of PJ’s fa-a-amous pancakes!”

  I must slow down, I said to myself, as we crossed the road. I am going to need this guy’s help to get myself back to rights and it won’t do to alienate or embarrass him. For all I know, he thinks I am a jerk, has never really been my friend and is just being polite because he was the one to put me to bed and to find me this morning. He proba­bly wants to be a million miles away.

  My firsthand knowledge of Americans being slight, or so I believed, it surprised me that Steve so plainly disliked my questioning him on the subject of best buddies and girlfriends. We British were forever castigating ourselves for our inability to talk about relation­ships and intimate feelings and forever castigating the Americans for their inability to talk about anything else. Perhaps we had got it wrong. I said to myself “we British” because, despite all testimonial, circumstantial and direct evidence to the contrary I still clung to the firm belief that I was English, brought up in Hampshire, and that some terrible mistake had been made or else someone was playing a sick joke on me.<
br />
  After all, Pup, I told myself, you could no more have made up your accent, your vocabulary, your faint memories of a girl called Jane and a place called St. Matthew’s than you could have faked that instinctive glance up the wrong side of the road as you were cross­ing . . . hey! Another thought came to me as I dodged an angry car.

  Pup! I had just called myself Pup. Where did that come from?

  We reached the other side of the street. “Tell me something Steve,” I said. “Am I ever called Pup? I mean as a nickname. Pup or Puppy?”

  His mouth spread into a broad grin as he held open the door of PJ’s for me. “Never heard you called that. Just Mike or Mikey. But Puppy works. Neat. Puppy! Yeah, I like that . . .”

  “That’s strange,” I said as I followed him in, “because I’ve a feel­ing that I don’t.”

  We sat down at a table next to the window, overlooking Nassau Street. Overlooking Nassau, I suppose I should say. On the table I saw a saltcellar, a pepper pot, a chrome napkin holder, a small chrome jug of milk, a bottle of Heinz ketchup, a jar of Gulden’s mus­tard and an ashtray.

  Steve’s first action on sitting down was to take out a packet of Strand cigarettes and shake one out at me.

  “You’re never alone with a Strand,” I said, declining.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know, that campaign on posters all over America? Bill­boards, as you call them. In the fifties I think. Saying ‘You’re never alone with a Strand.’ Famous advertising disaster. A picture of a man all on his own, smoking. Turned people off the brand in their mil­lions, they started associating it with sad losers.”

  “Yeah? I never heard about that. Sure you won’t have one?”

  “I’m sure.” Then I recalled that when I woke up that morning there had been a packet on my bedside table. I suddenly realized the implication. “My God,” I said. “Are you telling me that I smoke?”

  “Luckys. Well you did last night. Two packs. But if you don’t want one . . . hey, it’s a heck of an opportunity to quit.”

  “Funnily enough,” I said. “There is something that I want. There’s a kind of hole in the middle of me. I thought perhaps it was to do with my . . . you know, not being able to remember anything . . . maybe, what the hell . . . I’ll try one.”

  I took a cigarette. Steve lit it for me with a brass Zippo, steadying my hand as he lit the end.

  “Yoh,” I said, inhaling. “Oh yes. This is definitely what I wanted. God that’s good! Why did I never know? Well, obviously I did . . .” I looked around me, suddenly more cheerful, and noticed that a lot of people were smoking. “Amazing,” I said, “I thought smokers were virtually extinct in America.”

  Steve laughed and was about to reply when—

  “Hiya Mikey, hiya Steve,” a waitress appeared with two menus and two glasses of iced water.

  “Hello . . . Jo-Beth,” I said, reading the badge on her apron.

  “What can I get you two this morning?” she asked, giving us each a menu and plucking two napkins from the chromium holder. She had put the napkins on the table as coasters, placed a glass of water on each and whipped out her notepad before I had had a chance to look at the first item on what appeared to be an improbably huge and complex menu.

  “Er . . .” I said, nervously watching her pen hover over the pad. “Steve, you first.”

  “I guess I’ll have my usual, Jo-B, and Mikey here will have the same.”

  “Oh, you guys are so unadventurous . . .” She sighed with amused scorn as she plucked back the menus, squiggled on her pad and whisked herself off.

  “One day we’ll surprise you,” Steve called after her.

  “Um, obvious question, I know,” I whispered, leaning forward, “but what is my usual?”

  Steve twinkled. “You’ll just have to wait and see . . .”

  “You know,” I said, looking at the burning tip of my cigarette with affection. “Part of me is beginning to enjoy this. It’s so mad, it’s so confusing.”

  “Sure,” said Steve, “that’s just the way to look at it.”

  “It’s like a scene from that movie Total Recall.”

  “Total Recall? I never caught that one.”

  “No? Arnie, Sharon Stone . . . from the Philip K. Dick novel?”

  He shook his head. “Passed me by. So, this place familiar? Any­thing coming back? The smell of the pancakes, the steamy windows, the color of the walls?”

  I shook my head, but smilingly. “No-o-o. That is, not exactly. But this dinery sort of atmosphere, I’ve seen it in a thousand movies.”

  “Now that’s one thing that’s weird, Mike. This English accent of yours. It’s nearly perfect, you know? But you say things like ‘movies’ and ‘cute’ that limeys never say. English people say ‘films’ and ‘nice’ and ‘oh, I say’ and stuff like that.”

  “I always say ‘movies.’ A lot of English people do. And ‘cute’ as well. After all, it’s not as if we don’t get exposed to American culture all the time, is it? In fact Jane says that I talk like—” I broke off, frowning.

  “Jane? Who’s Jane?”

  I rubbed my nose, as smokers do. “I’m not sure. She wears a white coat and she left me. I know that. She took the Renault Clio.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s a make of car. A French car. Renault Clio.”

  “Like Cleopatra?”

  “No, C-L-I-O.”

  “Whig-Clio!” Steve struck the table in excitement.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Whig-Clio, they’re two buildings on campus. Hundreds of years old. We went there last night, to the Cliosophical Society.”

  “The Cliosophical Society?”

  “Sure, don’t you see? There was a debate about political relations between America and Europe. It was real boring, so we left early. So, what I’m saying, maybe what happened is that you had this bump on the head, you fell asleep drunk as a skunk and then you had a dream! A dream so intense that you still haven’t truly woken up from it. Right? You dreamed you were in England and you made up this car, this French Clio, because that was the stuff in your mind! That’s it! I’ll bet that’s it.”

  I stared at him, wanting to believe, but inwardly dubious. “It’s possible I suppose . . .”

  “It’s definite!”

  “What exactly is a Cliosophical Society?”

  “Oh, you know, they do debates. It was named for Clio, the Muse of History or some such deal.”

  “History! Of course . . . history.” Little rivulets of memory started to trickle into my mind. “I read history, don’t I?”

  “Gosh, you read all kinds of stuff. I don’t know.”

  “I mean I study history. I . . . what’s the word, I major in history?”

  He studied me carefully for a moment to make sure I wasn’t joking.

  “Get real, Mike. Philosophy. Your major is philosophy.”

  I stared. “Philosophy? Did you say philosophy? Ow!”

  Steve took the cigarette that had fallen from my fingers and pressed it into the ashtray.

  “Hey, careful there, buddy.”

  “But I don’t know the first thing about philosophy!”

  “Fact one. Carelessly smoked cigarettes can burn flesh. Fact two. Burning flesh causes pain. Pain is bad. Conclusion. Do not smoke carelessly.”

  Jo-Beth arrived. “Two breakfast specials. Enjoy, guys.”

  I looked with disbelief at the tower of pancakes being set down before me. A lump of white butter was sliding around on the top of the stack. Arranged below, on the ground floor of the plate as it were, thin strips of crispy bacon coiled themselves around two fried eggs. I sucked the hot blister on the side of my finger and gazed in amaze­ment at this alien still life heaped up in front of me.

  “I’m supposed to eat all this?”

  “That’
s the idea,” said Steve, squaring his elbows.

  “And these?” I inquired, holding up four sachets of maple syrup. “What are these for?”

  In reply, he tore open two of his own sachets and drizzled the con­tents over his bacon.

  “Bacon and maple syrup?” I said. “Now I know I’m dreaming.”

  And yet, once I had forced myself to try, there was something fine about that breakfast. Something ineluctably right, as if my body had expected nothing less.

  “I cannot believe,” I said when I had finished, lighting another cigarette and welcoming in the dark hit of smoke, “I cannot believe that I could have eaten all that.”

  “Maybe it’s just what you needed,” said Steve, pouring me coffee from a jug that Jo-Beth had deftly dropped in passing, on our table.

  “And I eat this kind of breakfast regularly?”

  “Sure you do. Most every morning.”

  “Then how come I’m not fifteen stone?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know, why aren’t I . . .” I looked up at the ceiling and tried to calculate. “Why aren’t I two hundred pounds or whatever? Why aren’t I fat?”

  Steve grinned. “Better ask Coach Heywood.”

  My stomach dropped. “Oh God,” I said. “Oh God, no. You are going to tell me that I do sports of some kind, aren’t you? I know it.”

  “Get outta here. Mikey’s slider from hell?”

  “Slider?”

  “C’mon. Give me seven bucks and we’ll split.”

  I took the wallet from the hip pocket of my shorts and pulled out some money.

  “Seven bucks?” I said, spreading the notes out in front of me. “They’re all the same size.”

  “Right,” said Steve, grabbing some. “How ’bout that?”

  Back out in Nassau Street, the Disneyland Gothic of the university facing us, Steve announced that we would go on a walk all round campus.