The Amnesiac Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I - THE PLASTERCAST

  CHAPTER 5

  II - THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

  CHAPTER 4

  III - THE WRITING IN THE WALL

  CHAPTER 1

  IV - THE TIME MACHINE

  CHAPTER 2

  V - AT THE CENTRE OF THE LABYRINTH

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  VI - THE BLACK BOX

  CHAPTER 6

  POSTSCRIPT

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE AMNESIAC

  Sam Taylor was born in 1970 and is the former pop culture correspondent for the Observer (UK). He lives in France with his young family.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Limited 2007

  Published in Penguin Books 2008

  Copyright © Sam Taylor, 2007

  All rights reserved

  Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. Yeah, right. What a stupid phrase that is. Actual persons are entirely coincidental! Life is entirely coincidental! What you want to know is: are you reading a work of fiction or a true story? Well, let’s put it this way. There is no such thing as a true story. These are, you might say, the memoirs of an amnesiac, but so are all memoirs. I could write my life story a thousand times and it would never be the same and it would never be “true to life.” Why? Because memory itself is a fiction: we are, second by second, in every moment of reflection, self-editing, reinventing, making ourselves up. On the other hand, if I write it, then it is by definition my story. It may not be wholly “true,” but it cannot be wholly false either. No work of fiction has yet been written which contains not a glimpse, a reflection (however distorted) of the author’s life and experiences. All novels are, to some extent, romans-à-clef; only, in most cases, the key does not quite fit the lock, or the door is double-bolted, or it opens on to a corridor full of other, locked doors. Or, to use a different metaphor, a fiction is not a web of lies, with the truth, still squirming and alive, at its center; in a fiction, truth and lies are spun together, inseparable, in the same slender thread of silk. What the web catches is a matter of chance.

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  for Odile

  A man’s memory is not a summation; it is a chaos of vague possibilities.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  But he forgot all this as he grew older.

  Philip Larkin

  For the briefest of instants, his mind was a blank. He knew the details of the present moment: he was climbing a dark, narrow staircase; the air was warm and close, sour-smelling; his right temple ached. But none of these facts gave him any clue to where or when this was happening, or even to his own identity.

  He stood still, breathing heavily, and a hundred vague staircases swam together in his memory. Had he been here before? It looked familiar, but then a staircase was a staircase. That smell reminded him of something, though. What was it? Rotten vegetables, he thought. Uncollected refuse. Human faeces. He listened closely and heard the faint hum of traffic; someone coughing from behind a door.

  Suddenly, unbidden, a series of quick, hazy images flashed through his mind. Seconds later, they had vanished, and he was left with no remembrance of them except for one: the vague, half-turned-away face of a dark-haired girl. As far as he could tell, she looked young and beautiful, but he had no idea who she was, or why she had entered his mind. He felt sure he had never seen her before. For some reason, however, the sight of her face filled him with a strange emotion. It was, he thought, an emotion without a name: whatever it is that exists on the border between hope and fear.

  For a moment he was breathless, suspended in time, and then a drop of sweat trickled down his forehead and into his eye. It stang. He blinked. And, in the second that it took for his eyes to close and reopen, it all came back to him.

  Reality. The present. His self.

  His name was James Purdew. He lived in Amsterdam, in an apartment he shared with his Dutch girlfriend, Ingrid. He had just come back from work to make himself a sandwich. It was lunchtime on Monday 7 July; the day before his thirtieth birthday.

  Relieved, he began climbing the stairs again. All in all, the blackout could not have lasted more than a few seconds. He had no idea what had brought it on - a momentary break in the supply of oxygen to his brain? - but he felt sure it was nothing to worry about.

  Halfway up the stairs, he heard a harsh, urgent, familiar sound. He started to run, taking the steps two at a time. Near the top of the third flight, he missed his footing, slipped, and felt a small crack. Still the sound continued, high-pitched and imperative. The pain was horrific, but he managed to climb the last few steps, unlock the door of the apartment and crawl towards the telephone. It had stopped ringing by then, of course. All he could hear was the recent memory of its ringing, like a disturbance in the air.

  Even now he remembers vividly the thirty-nine seconds he spent crawling across the sitting-room floor, though naturally it seemed to him to take much longer than that. He remembers sweat dripping from his forehead on to the smooth, pale floorboards, and resting there in perfect little pools. He remembers the sound of blood beating in the veins inside his eardrums. He remembers how strange and distant the ceiling appeared from his position on the floor. Or, at least, he remembers remembering these details; the pictures themselves quickly faded, as all such pictures do, and he is forced to reimagine them - to invent them anew - whenever he tries to bring to mind the events of that fateful day.

  The first thing he did when he reached the telephone was to check the answer machine. One message. He played it: nothing but a staticky hiss followed by a long beep. He listened to the message again, searching for clues, then he dialled 9293, but the caller had suppressed their number. With an odd feeling of guilt, he erased the message.

  Only then did he call for an ambulance.

  I

  THE PLASTERCAST

  The doctor said James had broken a small bone in his right ankle and would have to spend six weeks in plaster. This was the summer of the great heatwave. It was so hot during the da
y that the tomatoes in the windowbox were already cooked when he picked them from the vine. James kept the blinds closed and the windows open, but he could feel the furnace heat breathing against the thin strips of grey metal. Whenever a rare gust of wind moved the blinds, it was like staring into the mouth of hell.

  He didn’t wear clothes during those six weeks: there was no point. Most of the time he was naked except for a pair of boxer shorts and the plastercast. His girlfriend was working, so he spent the hottest part of each day alone. He sat in the leather reclining chair, which he covered with a towel to soak up his sweat. On the left arm of the chair he kept the remote control for the television; on the right the remote for the stereo. The telephone was on the table next to the chair. It rang so seldom that he kept checking the wires at the back, thinking they must have come loose.

  He also kept a collection of flyswatters to hand. They were doubly useful. With the head of one he would murder insects; with the handle of another he would scratch at the dead, flaking skin inside his cast.

  Ingrid kept the fridge stocked with fresh fruit, chocolate, beer and mineral water, and the freezer full of ice-cubes and ice-cream. Every hour or so James would hobble over to put something cold in his mouth or on his forehead. Other than that, he barely moved at all.

  There were plenty of books in the apartment, but he found he couldn’t read. His head was too full of noise; a kind of formless buzzing. And the greater the silence in the flat, the louder his head buzzed. For this reason, he usually kept something ‘on’: TV, CD, DVD. And the electric fan, of course. He was lucky there were no blackouts that summer. Without electricity, he would have gone crazy.

  This was a nightmarish time for James, but it had some interesting side-effects. He felt so trapped, helpless, bored, so suffocatingly alone, that he started doing something he hadn’t done for a long time.

  He started thinking.

  In the evenings, when it cooled and the streets were shaded by the tall apartment blocks, James would cautiously hop downstairs, clinging to the banister. During the first two weeks Ingrid would help, carrying his crutches with one hand and supporting his body with the other. Once she’d gone, he had to do it alone.

  Coming from the stale apartment, the city air, for all its toxins, smelled like a mountain breeze to James. He would walk as far and as fast as he could. To start with, even going to the next canal and back would leave him sweating and in pain. But as the days passed he became used to swinging himself forward with the crutches, always straight ahead, letting the other pedestrians move out of his way.

  After the walk, he went to Harry’s Bar, at the end of the block. The waiter saved his table, overlooking the canal, and brought out a tall beer, a ham sandwich, a green salad, a plate of chips and a dish of homemade mayonnaise. Harry would wave from the bar, and James would wave back. He would eat and drink and watch the tourists, the sky, the canal. From where he sat the water glimmered pink, orange, silver, gold, black . . . it flickered like fire in the slowly gathering darkness.

  Even when Ingrid and James were together, the two of them didn’t talk much. Ingrid had said all she had to say, and she knew James had a lot on his mind. After the first drink she would kiss him goodbye and go off to do whatever she felt like doing: cinema, yoga, Spanish nightclass. Then, around midnight, she would come and collect him, and help him up the stairs to her apartment. During the final four weeks, James had to manage this on his own. He was usually quite drunk by then, which made it both easier and more dangerous.

  Even with the windows open, even with the fan on full speed, the air in the apartment would still be warm and thick. Ingrid, exhausted by work, usually fell asleep quickly, but James never did. Sometimes he sat out on the balcony and watched the drunks and nightwalkers in Liebestraat. Sometimes he listened to music on headphones. Sometimes he watched a blue movie on television.

  James and Ingrid had sex together only twice after he broke his ankle, and both times occurred the very next morning, on his birthday. Their celibacy, I should add, was nothing to do with the plastercast. It was to do with the thoughts in his head.

  On the morning of James’s birthday, Ingrid woke him early and they made love before the sun came up. Afterwards he opened his presents: a shirt, a power-drill, and a CD. He was happy with all his presents: the shirt was orange and silk, expensively made but not too flashy; and the drill was a ten-speed Mikomi, a more versatile and powerful model than his old Fürcht. But it was the CD that excited him most. It was 16 Lovers Lane by The Go-Betweens.

  Ingrid put it on the stereo and moved the leather chair to the balcony. James sat with his cast balanced on the railing, drinking black coffee and watching the suited workers scurry both ways across the bridge over the canal. He thought they looked like ants, frantic and pointless, and he smiled, happy in the knowledge that he had so far escaped their fate; that he was thirty years old and still free.

  The music was breezily romantic and the air had not yet lost its morning freshness. James breathed deep and, the next time Ingrid came past, he grabbed her round the waist and pulled her on to his lap. She was wearing only a thin cotton nightshirt. ‘Again?’ she said, mock-weary, her smile giving her away.

  Ingrid left for work at nine, closing all the blinds before she went. James’s parents rang to wish him happy birthday, and the manager of the construction agency called to ask how his leg was. James explained he would be out of action for a couple of months.

  He went back to bed and dozed in the darkness, listening to The Go-Betweens. It wasn’t the first time he had heard the album. He’d owned it on vinyl when he was younger, but somewhere along the way he had lost his copy. It probably belonged to an ex-girlfriend now, he thought, or had been sold for a few pounds to a second-hand store. It reminded him of the room he’d had during his first year at university, in a big house on Lough Street. There had been subsidence in the area, so the floor of his room sloped down towards the street. In James’s memories it was always grey and raining outside and he was lying on the narrow bed, hungover, drinking tea, listening to ‘Love Is A Sign’, and feeling happy-sad.

  Listening to it now, in Ingrid’s double bed, he felt pretty much the same way. Happy-sad. Bittersweet. He thought about that lost record, all the lost girlfriends who might have ended up with it, all the time lost since that first year at university. He had been eighteen then and now he was thirty. ‘You Can’t Say No Forever’ came on. He wondered what it all meant. All that past, all those memories.

  This was, he decided, why he liked The Go-Betweens so much. That feeling: of happiness, of being young and alive and in the moment, and yet with an undercurrent of melancholy, regret, some unnameable fear. Like the way the canal made him feel when he watched it change colour in the twilight.

  James spent a lot of time that morning thinking about his new age. Thirty. At the beginning of his thirty-first year. He counted the years off, one by one, trying to remember what had happened to him in each of them. He could have looked in the boxes under the bed, of course, but it seemed too big a step to take; they had been there so long, untouched, that he felt afraid to disturb them.

  The counting of the years was not too difficult between the ages of four and eighteen (the first three years, though he had no memory of them, were undoubtedly momentous: emerged from the womb; learned to walk; learned to talk), but after that he had trouble distinguishing between one year and another. In his twenty-first year he had graduated from university. In his twenty-fifth he had met Ingrid. Otherwise the time seemed to have passed so quickly, so glibly, that he was at a loss to recall anything significant at all. In retrospect, it seemed to James that he had been willing the time to pass quickly. As though, second by second and year by year, his only ambition had been to distract himself from something . . . something he was afraid to think about.

  Lying on Ingrid’s bed, these thoughts seemed to swarm around him. In the darkness he couldn’t see them, but he could hear them buzzing, and the sound made him feel sick. H
e closed his eyes, but sleep would not come. James remembered a poem he had once studied at school: ‘Aubade’ by Philip Larkin. It was about Larkin’s fear of death, which always reared up most strongly in the early morning, in the dark hours before dawn. James couldn’t remember the words of the poem, but he remembered its mood, and how it had made him feel, sitting in that grey classroom.

  He sat up, his heart pounding, and tried to see. The only source of light in the room came from the holes in the blinds, but they illuminated nothing. Indeed, they were so bright that they made everything else look even darker. Suddenly James became aware that he could not see his own body. Even with his hand in front of his eyes, it was invisible. Was that it? James wondered. Was that the thing he had been afraid to think about? His death. His mortality. He considered this for quite some time, breathing slowly and deliberately. But no, on reflection, he didn’t believe that was it. The thing he had been afraid to think about, the buzzing sound; that came not from his future, but from somewhere in his past . . .

  He must have fallen asleep because the next thing he knew he was covered in sweat and he felt hungry. He hobbled over to the fridge and filled a plate with a Caesar salad that Ingrid had made the day before. He put the TV on and ate the salad, watching the Tour de France. The riders were in the Pyrenees. The pine trees were dark green; the sun was shining; he could see snow on some of the higher peaks. It looked so light and cool, so solid. James wished he could have been there, instead of where he was.