The Amnesiac Page 3

  Afterwards he wondered whether it truly had been the song that he had heard, but at the time he was in no doubt. It was his song. The ‘missing’ song. In any case, the bridge between verse and chorus was now echoing in his memory. Four chords and seven words:

  Part of my heart

  Will always beat . . .

  It was still only a fragment, but he felt so relieved. That song had been driving him mad. Singing it over and over to himself so that it wouldn’t slip his mind, James went straight home and figured out the chords on his guitar. Exhilarated, he wrote them down in his black notebook, then returned to De Stijl and told the barmaid the story of the song. He even sang it to her, but she only shrugged and continued washing glasses. It was nearly closing time: the barmaid couldn’t be bothered to flirt with customers any more. James got back to the apartment just as the sky was turning light.

  He awoke with a hangover. For a while he lay there, frowning at the bare wall, wondering why he felt so happy. Then, slowly, the memory of the previous night came back to him. It had a remote, unreal quality, but when he looked in the notebook, he found the chords and words written there. He put the notebook down and picked up his guitar, and spent a few minutes singing the words, trying to make the leap to the next line; but each time it ended in mid-sentence, in a pause between two chords.

  Part of my heart

  Will always beat . . .

  Ellipsis. Lacuna. And then . . . the chorus. Something big and obvious, he was sure. He was so close now; at the border of remembrance. But then, just as he was thinking this, James noticed a strange smell, and his concentration was broken. He sat for a while, trying to recall what the smell was. Finally it came to him: it was the smell of Ingrid. The scent she used. James put the guitar down.

  The rest of the day was spent staring at the pale rectangles on the walls and floor where Ingrid’s pictures and rugs had been. The bookshelves were empty but for balls of dust and one single book, which Frank must have missed. James picked it up and looked at it: the title was in Spanish and the writer’s name was Borges. But he felt too tired to read stories in a foreign language, so he spent the afternoon drinking tea and listening to The Go-Betweens, and went to bed before dark.

  After that, the days grew long and heavy. It was an odd thing with days, James thought, that an empty one was heavier than a full one. Slowly he drifted into a semi-nocturnal rhythm. By the middle of August he was spending hours each night wandering the streets on crutches. The man in the hot-dog kiosk outside the train station would say hello to him; prostitutes blew him kisses from behind windows as he swung past, his distorted reflection moving across their bare flesh.

  Where were all of James’s friends during this time? What happened to them? I suppose the truth is that most of them were Ingrid’s friends, not his. James didn’t know what she had said to them, but they made no great effort to stay in touch. One of them called, a few days after Ingrid left, but James did-n’t feel like talking to her, and after two or three minutes of one-way conversation she said goodbye and hung up. One evening he saw another friend, a man, while he was out walking. The man caught his eye and waved, but for a reason James couldn’t articulate, he felt embarrassed. He stared through the man as though he were invisible and continued swinging past on his crutches.

  Each night he ate and drank at Harry’s Bar, but he never spoke to anyone. The order, always the same, arrived without a word from James. His greeting to Harry was a silent wave; his thank you to the waiter a smile or a nod.

  With Ingrid no longer there, James began taking his black notebook to the table at Harry’s; instead of staring into space and thinking, he would stare into space and think and then write down his thoughts. His strongest memory of this period is of watching his biro leave its trail of strange black squiggles, of focusing so intently on the page - golden with evening sunlight and grey with the long shadows of his moving hand - and the words he was writing, and the things they described, that when he looked up, cross-eyed, at the surrounding scene, he could not make out any outlines or forms at all; the canal and the tourists and the glasses of beer and the red-and-white awning and the chained bicycles and the advertising posters and the waiter and the bricks of the apartment building were all merged into a single dazzling blur. Sometimes he had to close and open his eyes several times before he regained his perspective.

  James had kept a diary since he was fourteen; it was a ritual, and for a long time it had been little more than that. But now, as the flotsam of his life disappeared downriver, his notebook became a piece of driftwood; something to cling to. He wrote thousands of words each day. What he wrote was no longer a report of daily events, but a kind of fragmented autobiography. Try as he might, James could not bring any shape or definition to his thoughts. The sentences followed no logical order; they made sense, grammatically, but they were inconsequential; they led nowhere. His words were a labyrinth, full of wrong turnings, blind alleys. Sometimes he felt he was writing in a kind of spiral, though whether his words were spiralling out, towards calm, or in on themselves, towards a vortex, he could never tell. Or perhaps they were merely circling, endlessly. If only I could give the words some structure, some order, he thought, perhaps I would be able to break the spiral, to find my way out of the labyrinth.

  Often he thought about the boxes under the bed, and wondered if the time had come to open them.

  There were three boxes, all made of thick grey cardboard, with neatly fitting lids. James pulled them out, one by one, and wiped away the coating of dust. The boxes were heavy. On the first box, in black felt pen on a white label, it said, ‘88-91’; on the second, ‘95-99’; and on the third, ‘00- ’. There was a fourth, smaller box, further under the bed, but James didn’t see the point in removing that. It was late in the morning, a week after Ingrid’s departure.

  The boxes contained his diaries. These were his most valuable possessions, not because they held any astonishing secrets, but because without them he feared he would cease to be the same person. James did not trust his memory. He relied on the diaries to do the remembering for him. They were the ropes that moored him to his self.

  He opened the first box and took out all four books. They were vinyl-bound A4 diaries in different colours: black, blue, red and green. He hadn’t looked at them for a long time. Nervously he opened the 1988 diary - the blue one - and began to read.

  James was astonished at what he found. References to Jung and Kafka and The Communist Manifesto; to poems and songs he had written himself; to the political situation in Nicaragua and the Middle East. How serious he had been! Now, foreign news and politics meant nothing to him, all he ever wrote was his own diary, and he couldn’t even remember the last novel he had read; probably some airport thriller on a beach in Spain the previous summer. What struck him was how strange he had become to himself. That fourteen-year-old James was someone he hardly recognised. If that was me, he thought, then who am I?

  Over the following days, he read through the whole of 1989, 1990 and 1991. The final three months of this last diary were blank. That brought him to the end of the first box. The second box began in 1995. He opened the first page of the diary for that year and began reading. It was all strangely bland and unrevealing, written in the present tense and studded with the names and initials of people he hardly knew. At the foot of each page was what looked like a mathematical equation. After flicking through the first few weeks, James realised it was a running account of money spent and earned.

  He put the ’91 and ’95 diaries side by side and studied them. The handwriting was the same, more or less; the later entries were less neat, due to lack of time, but the basic calligraphy was unchanged. In terms of content, however, a casual reader probably wouldn’t have guessed that they were written by the same person. The circumstances of his life had altered dramatically, of course: he had left the womblike world of full-time education and entered the harsh world of work, with all its chaos and insecurity. Even so, James found it hard to und
erstand what had happened to him.

  People change, he thought - it’s a truism - but how? Our life is confined to days, after all: Sunday to Monday, dawn to dusk. What great alterations can take place in someone between breakfast and lunch? Is it possible to wake up as one person and fall asleep as another?

  James had no idea. All he knew was that when he traced the arc of his existence from child to man, he found, each time, a massive blip in the graph. From earliest memories to the end of adolescence, the line ran more or less smoothly. There were fluctuations and reversals, but nothing unaccountable. Then came a moment of missing data and, when the line resumed, it was somewhere else completely. How did that child become this man? Which of them was the impostor?

  There was only one way to find the answers to these questions. Unable to sleep, James went out on his crutches at two in the morning and by the time he came back he had made his decision. He crawled under the bed and pulled out the fourth box.

  Like the first three boxes, it was cardboard, with a lid. But the fourth box was smaller and heavier than the others, and it was not labelled. He removed the lid. Inside the box was another box; or, to be more precise, a safe, made not of cardboard, but of black metal. Inside this box, James knew, were three diaries. They covered the period October 1991 to October 1994, when he had been at university in the city of H.

  James didn’t know where or when or how he had lost the key that opened this box. He had no idea at all. In fact - and he felt a kind of choking shame and panic as he remembered this - that whole era was a blank. Three years of his life, and . . . nothing.

  Well, that was not quite true. He could picture places, sometimes quite vividly: his room in the house on Lough Street, for example, and the lounge of a pub called The Polar Bear. But events, people, emotions, any sort of chronology . . . he was clueless.

  And his diaries - the only written record of this time - were locked in a safe.

  And he had lost the key.

  Staring at the little black box, James felt physically sick. Was this the dark something he had been trying not to think about? At that moment, it seemed far more hideous, more unbearable, than the knowledge of his mortality. He considered throwing the box out of the window. Perhaps it would smash open on the pavement, revealing his secrets? But just then he remembered the salesman’s guarantee: only an explosive could break that lock. And if he exploded the safe . . . the past really would go up in smoke.

  James stared and stared at the black box. The more he thought about it, the angrier he got. Part of me is locked in there, he thought: three years of my life.

  Something had happened to him in that time; he felt sure of it. Something important had happened. Afterwards he had no longer been the same person.

  With trembling hands, James put the lid back on the cardboard box and slid it under the bed. Then he got undressed and lay down in the darkness. It took him a long time to fall asleep.

  James decided to write the story of his life. He doesn’t remember exactly how or why he came to this decision, but he remembers the relief and euphoria he felt after the decision had been made.

  He had spent the day in bed: sleeping, thinking, remembering, and failing to remember. For more than fifteen hours his body did not move at all, but his mind wandered all over. Afterwards he could not retrace the train of thought that led to his epiphany, but the first inkling came with a half-remembered quotation from Thomas de Quincey about the idea of the human mind as a palimpsest. After half an hour of searching in the store cupboard, where James had long ago piled all his old books, he had found the sentence in his copy of De Quincey’s Writings, the page marked and the words underlined:

  What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? . . . Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished. All-powerful memory is able to exhume any impression, no matter how momentary it might have been, if given sufficient stimulus.

  James’s own memory felt anything but all-powerful - he couldn’t even recall having underlined this passage before - but he was comforted by the idea that the truth must be in there somewhere; that it had not vanished, but was only hidden, at the centre of some tortuous labyrinth.

  He sat up and stared into the darkness. An image came to his mind: of the curving, sloping tunnel with eyeholes, through which he walked every night in his dreams.

  That must be it, James thought. I am trapped inside a labyrinth, and I have lost hold of the thread that once guided me through it. The only way to rediscover the thread is to start again at the beginning.

  The story of his life. It would be a detective story: in search of lost time. He would write from memory. Perhaps, James thought, if I close my eyes and really concentrate, it will all come back. Perhaps I will find the key to open that little black box.

  As soon as he had made the decision, James got dressed and went out to the shops to buy a new notebook. He chose a 150-page notebook, bound in white vinyl. It was half-past seven by the time he got back from the shops, so he went to Harry’s Bar with his new purchase and had begun writing before the first glass of beer arrived.

  First of all he signed his name on the inside cover. He was going to write his address and telephone number until it occurred to him that these were temporary - in three weeks’ time he would be living somewhere else - so instead of that he tried to think of a title. He wrote and crossed out half a dozen before settling on the one he liked best. It was a weak joke, perhaps, but it made him smile. The title was Memoirs of an Amnesiac.

  At the top of the next page James wrote ‘Chapter 1’ and then he tried to think of an opening line.

  ‘My name is . . .’

  ‘I was born on . . .’

  ‘My earliest memory is . . .’

  It was no good. James’s earliest memory eluded him, and the other options seemed too obvious, too banal. He stared at the blank page until his chips arrived. Then he sat back in the metal chair, frowning at the canal and trying to recall his childhood. But the images in his head were as ungraspable, as indescribable as the water that flowed past in the twilight: changing its colour, appearing and disappearing at every second, and yet, in its essence, only and always water. What changes, he thought, is not the colour of the canal, but the perspective of the person who looks at it.

  That struck him as quite a profound metaphor, so he wrote it down. He read it twice and smiled. He had a first line! Happy and tired after this exertion, James drank a long, cold draught of beer and then ate the chips, dipping them, two or three at a time, into the thick, firm mayonnaise. They were delicious. He looked around at the laughing, smiling people, and breathed deeply. Life was good. He leaned back with his eyes closed. Childhood . . . what could he remember?

  The first image that came to his mind was of walking up Commercial Drive, the road on which his parents’ house had been located, to the playgroup at the top; of entering the playgroup and kicking down a tower of building bricks constructed by his friend Philip Bates. Yet the more James thought about this, the less sure he became that it was, truly, a memory. The walk up Commercial Drive he could recall in great detail, but that was because he had lived there, and walked that road every day, for fifteen years. Perhaps he only thought he remembered the first part of the memory because he knew, from later experience, the geography of the playgroup? He decided to eliminate the walk up Commercial Drive; that left the second part of the memory, when he had entered the playgroup and kicked down Philip Bates’s tower. But the more he tried to concentrate on this memory, the hazier it grew. Had it really been Philip Bates’s tower that he had kicked down, or some other child’s? Was there truly a picture in his mind of the interior of the playgroup, or was he confusing it with the infant school? Did James actually remember anything at all or did he just imagine he remembered it?

  On reflection he decided not to include this memory in his memo
irs. And yet, wasn’t this omission a form of lying? And what if all his other childhood memories turned out like this one? What if none of them were reliable or significant? Where would that leave him? Disillusioned, James finished his glass of beer and stared at the single sentence that he had written.

  What changes is not the colour of the canal, but the perspective of the person who looks at it.

  Whatever I write afterwards, he told himself, will have to reflect and give meaning to that sentence. Yet the more he thought about it, the more it seemed simply an expression of the impossibility of ever writing a book of memoirs. The past was deep water, constantly refreshing itself, always in motion, yet all he saw was its surface, reflecting whatever light there was at that moment.

  He closed the notebook and looked again at the water in the canal; it was purplish-black now, with streaks and splashes of yellow where the streetlamps were mirrored. ‘Water under the bridge,’ people said, about something they wished to forget; but what if they wished to remember? If only James could halt the water’s flow, or reverse it. If only he could re-enter his past . . . dive in and swim through it. If only he could taste it on his tongue and swallow it. But the past was not a canal; that was just a metaphor. The past did not exist, beyond the confines of his mind. And how could he dive into his own mind?

  James’s toes were going numb so he put his cast up on the metal chair facing him - the chair in which, until a week ago, Ingrid had always sat - and suddenly her absence hit him. Ingrid was gone. A chapter of his life was ending. For a moment James felt merely sad, but then he had an idea.

  My childhood, he thought, is too distant. I was someone else then. That is the reason I am struggling to write the beginning of my story: because I am starting in the wrong place. I should begin with the recent past. I should begin with Ingrid. I should write my life story backwards.