TWENTY

Lareen returned in the morning, and brought the welcome news that I was to be discharged from the clinic in five days’ time. I thanked her, but I was watching to see if she produced the typewritten manuscript. If she had it with her, it remained in her bag. Although I was restless, I settled down to a morning’s work with her and Seri. Now I knew that fallibility was a virtue, I used it to strategic effect. During lunch the two women spoke quietly together, and it seemed for a moment that Seri had put my request to her. Later, though, Lareen announced that she had work to do in the main building, and left us in the refectory.

“Why don’t you go for a swim this afternoon?” Seri said.

“Take your mind off all this.”

“Are you going to ask her?”

“I told you—leave it to me.”

So I left her alone and went to the swimming pool. Afterwards, I returned to the chalet but there was no sign of either of them. I felt useless and wasted, so I signed for a pass from one of the security guards and walked down to Collago Town. It was a warm afternoon, and the streets were crowded with people and traffic. I relished the noise and confusion, a bustling, discordant contrast with the solipsism and seclusion of my memories. Seri had told me that Collago was a small island, not densely populated and well off the main shipping routes, yet it seemed in my unpractised life to be the very hub of the world. If this was a sample of modern life, I could not wait to join the rest!

I wandered through the streets for a while, then walked down to the harbour. Here I noticed a number of temporary stalls and shops, erected in a position overlooking the water, where patent elixirs could be purchased. I walked slowly along the row, admiring the photographically enlarged letters of testimonial, the exciting claims, the pictures of successful purchasers. The profusion of bottles, pills and other preparations-herbal remedies, powders, salts for drinking water, isometric exercises, thermal garments, royal jelly, meditational tracts, and every other conceivable kind of patent remedy—was such as to make me think, for a moment or two at least, that I had undergone my ordeal unnecessarily. Business along the row was not brisk, yet curiously none of the vendors solicited my business.

On the far side of the harbour a large steamer was docking, and I assumed that it was this arrival that had caused the congestion in town. Passengers were disembarking and cargo was being unloaded. I walked as close as I could without crossing the barrier, and watched these people from the world beyond mine as they went through the routines of handing in their tickets and collecting their baggage. I wondered when the ship would be sailing again, and where it was next headed. Would it be to one of the islands Seri had named?

Later, when I was walking back to the town, I noticed a small passenger bus loading up by the quay. A sign on the side announced that it belonged to the Lotterie-Collago, and I looked with interest at the people sitting inside. They seemed apprehensive, staring silently through the windows at the activity around them. I wanted to talk to them. Because they came, so to speak, from a world of the mind that existed before the treatment, I saw them as an important link with my own past. Their perception of the world was undoctored, what they took for granted was all that I had lost. If this was consistent with what I had learned, then many of my doubts would be allayed. And for my part, there was much I could suggest to them.

I had experienced what they had not. If they knew in advance what the after-effects would be, it might help them to a speedier recovery. I wanted to urge them to use these last few days of individual consciousness to leave some record of themselves, some personal definition or memento by which they might rediscover themselves.

I moved in closer, peering in through the windows of the coach. A girl in an attractive, tailored uniform was checking names against a list, while the driver was stowing luggage in the back. A middle-aged man sitting by a window was nearest to me, so I tapped on the glass. He turned, saw me there, then quite deliberately looked away.

The girl noticed me, and leaned through the door.

“What are you doing?” she called to me.

“I can help these people! Let me speak to them!”

The girl narrowed her eyes. “You’re from the clinic, aren’t you? Mr… Sinclair.”

I said nothing, sensing that she knew my motives and would try to stop me. The driver came round from the back of the vehicle, shouldered past me and climbed up to the driving seat. The girl spoke briefly to him, and without further delay he started the engine and drove off. The coach moved slowly through the traffic, then turned into the narrow avenue that led up the hill towards the clinic.

I walked away, running my fingers over my newly regrown hair, realizing that it marked me out in the town. On the far side of the harbour, passengers from the ship were clustering around the elixir stalls.

I reached the quieter side streets and wandered slowly past the shop fronts. I was beginning to understand the mistake I had made with those people; anything I said to them now would of course be forgotten as soon as their treatment began. And their role as representatives of my past was a fallacy. Everyone else had the same undoctored quality: the passers-by in the street, the staff at the clinic, Seri.

I walked until I felt footsore, then made my way up the hill to the clinic.

Seri was waiting for me in the chalet. She had an untidy pile of papers on her knee, and was reading through them. It took me a few seconds to realize it was the manuscript.

“You’ve got it! “ 1 said, and sat down beside her.

“Yes… but conditionally. Lareen says you’re not to read it alone. I’ll go through it with you.”

“I thought you agreed to let me read it by myself.”

“I agreed only to get it back from Lareen. She thinks you’ve recovered well, and so long as I explain the manuscript to you she has no objection to you knowing what it’s about.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get started.”

“This instant?”

“I’ve been waiting all day for this.”

Seri flashed a look of anger at me, and threw her pencil on the floor. She stood up, letting the pages slide into a curling heap by her feet.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“Nothing, Peter. Not a damned thing.”

“Come on… what is it?”

“God, you’re so selfish! You forget I have a life too! I’ve spent the last eight weeks in this place, worrying about you, thinking about you, talking to you, teaching you, being with you. Don’t you think there might be other things I want to do? You never ask how I am, what I’m thinking, what I’d like to do… you just take it for granted I’m going to go on being here indefinitely. Sometimes, I couldn’t give a damn about you and your wretched life! “

She turned away from me, staring out of the window.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I was stunned by her vehemence.

“I’m going to leave soon. There are things I want to do.”

“What sort of things?”

“I want to see a few islands.” She turned back to me. “I’ve got my own life, you know. There are other people I can be with.”

There was nothing I could say to this. I knew almost nothing about Seri or her life, and indeed had never asked about it. She was right: I took her for granted, and because it was so true I was speechless. My only defence, one I could not bring myself to summon at that moment, was that as far as I knew I had not asked her to be with me, that from the first days of my new consciousness she had always been there, and because I had not been taught to question it I never had.

I stared down at the untidy pile that was the manuscript, wondering if I should ever know what secrets it contained.

We left the chalet, went for one of our curative walks through the grounds. Later, we ate supper in the refectory, and I encouraged Seri to talk about herself. It was not a token gesture prompted by her frustration; by losing her temper with me Seri had opened my mind to yet another area of my ignorance.

I was beginning to appreciate the scale of the sacrifice Seri had made for me: for nearly two months she had done all the things she said, while I, petulant and child-like, rewarded her with affection and trust, seeking only myself.

Quite suddenly, because I had never thought of it before, I became scared she would abandon me.

Feeling chastened by this I walked back with her to the chalet and watched as she tidied up the scattered manuscript pages. She checked through them to make sure they were in correct order. We sat down next to each other on my bed, and Seri riffled the corners, counting.

“All right, these First few pages are not too important. They explain the circumstances in which you started writing. London is mentioned once or twice, and a few other places. A friend was helping you out after you had had some bad luck. It’s not very interesting.”

“Do you mind if I look?” I took the sheets from her. It was as she had said: the man who had written this was a stranger to me, and his self-justifications seemed elaborate and laboured. I put the pages to one side. “What’s next?”

“We get into difficulties straight away,” Seri said, holding the page for me to see and pointing with her pencil. “ ‘I was born in 1947, the second child of Frederick and Catherine Sinclair’. I’ve never even heard of names like that!”

“Why have you changed them?” I said, seeing that pencil lines had been scored through the names. Above them she, or Lareen, had pencilled in the names I knew as being my parents’ correct ones; Franford and Cotheran Sinclair.

“We could check those. The Lotterie has them on file.”

I frowned, appreciating the difficulties I had made for the two women. In the same paragraph there were several more deletions or substitutions. Kalia, my elder sister, had been named as “Felicity”, a word which I had learned meant happiness or joy, but which I had never heard used as a name. Later, I discovered that my father had been “wounded in the desert”—an extraordinary phrase—while my mother had been operating a switchboard in “government offices” in somewhere called “Bletchley”. After the “war with Hitler”, my father had been among the first men to return home, and he and my mother had rented a house on the outskirts of “London”. It was here that I had been born. Most of these obscure references had been crossed out by Seri, but “London” had been changed to “Jethra”, giving me a pleasant feeling of reassurance and familiarity.

Seri led me through a couple of dozen pages, explaining each separate difficulty she had found and telling me the reasons for the substitutions she had made. I agreed with them all, because they so obviously made sense.

The narrative continued in its mundane yet enigmatic way: this family had continued to live outside “London” for the first year of “my” life, and then they had moved to a northern city called “Manchester”. (This too had been changed to Jethra.) Once in “Manchester” we reached descriptions of “my” first memories, and with this the confusions came thick and fast.

“I had no idea,” I said. “How on earth did you manage to make sense of this?”

“I’m not sure we have. We’ve had to leave a lot of it out.

Lareen was extremely angry with you.”

“Why? It’s hardly my fault.”

“She wanted you to fill out her questionnaire, but you refused. You said that everything we needed to know about you was in this.”

I must have sincerely believed that at the time. At some stage of my life I had written this incomprehensible manuscript, devoutly believing that it described myself and my background. I tried to imagine the sort of mentality that could have held such a belief, against all reason. Yet my name was on the first page. Once, before the treatment, I had written this and I had known what I was doing.

I felt a poignant loneliness for myself. Behind me, as if beyond an unscalable wall, was an identity, purpose and intelligence that I had lost. I needed that mind to explain to me what had been written.

I glanced through the rest of the pages. Seri’s deletions and substitutions continued. What had I intended?

The question was more interesting to me than the details. In answering it I should gain an insight into myself, and thus into the world I had lost. Had it been these fictitious names and places —the Felicitys, the Manchesters, the Gracias—that had come to me in my delirium, haunting me afterwards? Those delirious images remained a part of my consciousness, were a fundamental if inexplicable part of what I had become. To ignore them would be to turn my back on understanding more.

I was still mentally receptive, still urging to learn.

After a while I said to Seri: “Can we go on?”

“It doesn’t become any clearer.”

“‘Yes, but I’d like to.”

She took a few pages from me. “Are you sure this means nothing to you?”

“Not yet.”

“Lareen was certain you would react wrongly to it.” She laughed, shortly. “It seems a bit silly now, when I think of all the trouble we went to.”

We read a few more pages together, but Seri had spent too long with the manuscript and she grew tired.

“I’ll go on by myself,” I said.

“All right. It’s not going to do any harm.”

She lay down on the other bed, reading a novel. I continued with the manuscript, working painstakingly through the inconsistencies, as once, several times, Seri must have done. Occasionally I asked for her help, and she told me what she had had in mind, but each new interpretation only made my curiosity greater. It confirmed what I knew of myself, but it also confirmed my doubts.

Later, Seri undressed and went to bed to sleep. I read on, the manuscript resting on my lap. In the warm evening I was shirtless and barefoot, and as I read I could feel the rush mat abrading pleasantly against the soles of my feet.

It struck me that if there was any truth at all in the manuscript, then it could only be the truth of anecdote. There seemed to be no deeper pattern, no sense of metaphor.

It was the anecdotes that Seri had most frequently deleted. One or two of them she had pointed out to me, explaining that she found them incomprehensible. So they were to me, but because I was making no headway against the shape of the story, I began to look more closely at the details.

One of the longest deleted passages, occupying several pages of the text, dealt with the sudden arrival in “my” childhood life of a certain “Uncle William”. He entered the story with all the bravado of a pirate, bringing a scent of the sea and a glimpse of foreign lands. He had captivated me because he was disgraceful and disapproved of, because he smoked a vile pipe and had warts on his hands, yet he also fascinated me while I read of him, because the passage was written with conviction and humour, a plausible-seeming account of an influential experience. I realized that Uncle William, or Billy, as I seemed to remember him, was as attractive a personality to me now as he had been when I was a child. He had really existed, he had really lived.

Yet Seri had deleted him. She knew nothing of him, so she had tried to destroy him.

So far as I was concerned it would take more than a few pencil strokes to remove him. There was a truth to Uncle William, a truth that was far higher than mere anecdote.

I remembered him; I remembered that day.

Suddenly, I knew how to remember the rest. It was not whether the material could be crossed out, or whether names could be substituted. What mattered was the text itself, its shapes and patterns, those meanings that were only alluded to, the metaphors that until then I had been incapable of seeing. The manuscript was full of memories.

I went to the beginning of the text, and started to read it through. Then of course I remembered the events that had taken me to my white room in Edwin’s cottage, and all that had gone before. As I remembered I became reassured, united with my real past, but then I became scared. In remembering myself, I discovered how profoundly lost I had become.

Outside the white-painted chalet the grounds of the clinic were quiet. The ripple of my awareness spread outwards: to Collago Town, to the rest of the island, to the Midway Sea and the innumerable islands, to Jethra. Yet where were they?

I read to the end, to the unfinished scene between Gracia and myself on the corner by Baker Street Station, and then I collected the typewritten sheets and shaped them into a tidy stack. I found my holdall beneath the bed and packed the manuscript at the bottom. Quietly, so as not to wake Seri, I packed my clothes and other possessions, checked that I had my money, then prepared to leave.

I looked back at Seri. She was sleeping on her stomach like a child, her head turned to one side. I wanted to kiss her, gently stroke her naked back, but I could not risk waking her. She would stop me if she knew I was leaving. I watched her for two or three silent minutes, wondering who she really was, and knowing that once I left I should never meet her again.

The door eased open quietly, outside was darkness, and the warm sea wind. I returned to my bed to collect my holdall, but as I did so I kicked something that lay on the floor by Seri’s shoulder bag, and it clinked against the metal leg of her bed. She stirred, then settled. I crouched down to pick up whatever it was I had kicked. It was a small bottle, made of dark green glass, hexagon shaped. The cork was missing and the label had been removed, but I knew instinctively what it must once have contained, and why Seri had bought it. I sniffed at the neck of the bottle and smelled camphor.

Then I nearly did not go. I stood beside the bed, looking sadly down at the sleeping girl, innocently tired, selfless to me, vulnerably naked, her hair folded untidily across her brow, her lips slightly parted.

At last I put down the empty elixir bottle where I had found it, collected my holdall, then left. In the dark I got through the gate and walked down the hill into Collago Town. Here I waited by the harbour until the town woke up, and as soon as the shipping office opened I inquired when the next steamer would be departing. One had left only the day before; the next would not be for another three days. Anxious to leave the island before Lareen or Seri found me, I took the First small ferry that came, crossing the narrow channel to the next island. Later that day, I moved again. When I was sure no one would find me—I was on the island of Hetta, in an isolated tavern—I bought some timetables and maps, and started to plan my return journey to London. I was haunted by the unfinished manuscript, the unresolved scene with Gracia.