The Amnesia Clinic (7 page)

‘Spare me the emotional blackmail,’ said my mother, smiling. ‘You’ll enjoy it there.’

I was fast running out of options. I turned to my father, who had been holding back up to this point, and appealed for assistance.

‘Sorry, mate,’ he said, infuriatingly. ‘I think I’m going with your mother on this one.’

My position was bad enough. But now, as if someone were out to get me, my chest tightened in preparation for an asthma attack, and all my last-ditch appeals were undermined by a crippling wheezing fit.

Rarely for her, my mother lost her temper.

‘You can spare us the attack of consumption as well,’ she snapped. ‘You know perfectly well that the doctor said your asthma is ninety per cent psychosomatic, so don’t think you’ll get that much sympathy on that score. Besides, if it’s really that bad then getting back to the UK and away from this high altitude can only be a good thing.’ She took a sip of wine and looked me right in the eye. ‘Right?’

My father put a hand between my shoulder-blades and told me to take deep breaths. I nodded weakly.

‘It’s settled then,’ said my mother. ‘We’ll aim to get you out of here by the end of this summer.’

And after that I suspect there was an unedifying spell
of shouting and door-slamming that is best forgotten about.

There was an old knife-sharpener in Quito who did door-to-door calls in a pre-war pick-up truck. He used to announce his arrival by calling in the street outside, regardless of the neighbourhood he was in or the type of building. I had never before thought quite how ridiculous, and how glorious, he was – this relic, calling out to a whole apartment block, as if it were no different to him from a little hut in the mountains – until I watched him later that evening while smoking an angry, furtive cigarette out of my bedroom window.

I had been two years younger when we left the UK. What going back to school there would be like now I had no idea, but I was not optimistic. I had visions of atrocious food and sanctioned violence. There was every chance this initiative might not go anywhere. My mother blustered quite a lot, particularly when contradicted, and often it meant nothing. On the other hand, she seemed quite serious about this, and I couldn’t count on my father to help me out. Even if he didn’t agree with this outrageous proposal, which I wasn’t so sure about anyway, there was every chance that he would roll over and let it pass without a veto.

From our flat on the seventh floor, you could look down straight through the tops of the pine trees on to the street. I watched and listened as the knife-sharpener parked his truck and walked up and down with his canvas tool-bag, calling out lustily to entire blocks full of people who would never respond. In a gesture of solidarity, I shouted down at him and waved, but, as if he had never expected a response in the first place, he loaded his bag back in his truck and drove away without noticing me.

I had a premonition of two traces of future emotion: first,
the regret I would feel if I left this country without taking a proper look at it for myself; second, a terror of the sly, creeping approach of a more colourless world. As a result, I felt determined to make the present worthy of nostalgia while it lasted.

The following Friday, I went to stay with Fabián and Suarez as per usual. But a shrill note of self-pity was already playing in my head over every custom I took for granted, as I began in earnest to feel as sorry for myself as I could. It’s something I have always been pretty good at. In spite of this, I was desperate to keep reality at bay for as long as possible and had resolved to keep quiet about my proposed exile for the moment, however much I was seething within.

The three of us sat round the kitchen table, having dinner. Suarez was on the rum, and Fabián and I were drinking
naranjilla
juice. On any other day, I might have moaned about this, as I had never really got used to it and sometimes wondered why we couldn’t just have plain lemonade. But on this day, the juice – the fruit is a bizarre amalgam of orange and tomato – had become another familiar feature of the landscape that I was melodramatically preparing to miss, and I savoured every vivid, transient mouthful as a result. Such distinctive physical memories mean that my
youth is nicely compartmentalised. I drank a glass of
naranjilla
from some exotic juice bar years after leaving Ecuador and a whole series of neatly bookmarked memories fell open – although on that occasion, I didn’t enjoy the taste at all.

‘I hear that Fabián is a hero,’ I said.

‘Is that so?’ said Suarez. ‘I didn’t think it was customary for heroes to do their own public relations, but I suppose you may be right. What is he said to have done this time?’

I recounted the story about Fabián saving the girl in the earthquake, which had, over the course of the last few days, acquired several new and thrilling dimensions. One version had Fabián being tear-gassed by a rogue policeman during the rescue. In another, he’d had to hold off a rabid dog that was trying to steal the girl’s tripe sandwich.

‘Well, if that is what people are saying, then I suppose it must be the truth,’ said Suarez. ‘Congratulations, Fabi.’ He raised his glass in a toast.

‘It was nothing, Uncle. Just what any man would have done,’ said Fabián.

‘It was especially self-effacing of you not to reveal any of this to me on the day. No doubt the shock of the situation took it out of you, and you were unable to piece together what had happened until days after the event.’

‘No doubt, no doubt,’ said Fabián. ‘You’re the medical man.’

Suarez beamed. ‘Funny that I didn’t see any distressed children near you at the time. All I saw was a little
huahua
lying in the gutter, gazing up into the air, with all the stuffing knocked out of him. I must get my eyes tested.’

‘Maybe you should,’ said Fabián. ‘You’re getting on a bit, Uncle.’

There was no late-night storytelling session with Suarez that evening. He went out, leaving us alone in the library with a couple of beers and Jerry Lee Lewis.

I knew there must be more to the story of Fabián’s arm than what I had already heard. Or, more likely, that there must be less to it. In its current form, the portrayal of Fabián as hero was all very well, but I knew the truth would come out before long.

It will be apparent that ‘the truth’ was something with which Fabián and I were fairly free. The best story was usually the one we believed. It was what defined our friendship. But there was also an unspoken understanding – or at least there was as far as I was concerned – that we both knew when things had gone too far from the realm of the plausible.

He might be telling me all about a steamy clinch with Verena in a stationery cupboard, say, and I would go along with the story right up to the point where things started to stray too far. We had an accepted technique for establishing the truth without subtracting from the credibility of the storyteller, which went something like this:

‘So, there you are, with your hand up her skirt, and she’s begging you to go further,’ I would say, ‘and the teacher walks in. What a nightmare. No wonder she was looking so hot and agitated when she came back to the class.’

‘I know,’ Fabián might say. ‘I was pretty agitated myself, I can tell you.’

‘Terrible,’ I would say. ‘Well, maybe next time.’

‘Sure. One day.’

There would be a pause, and then I would say:

‘Anything could have happened in that cupboard, couldn’t it?’

‘You’re right,’ Fabián would say. ‘Anything could have happened. Anything from full penetrative sex through to a bit of harmless flirting followed by a kick in the balls.’

‘So, on that scale of possibility, what would a really unimaginative person say had happened to him in that cupboard?’

‘The unimaginative person would probably say that he
followed Verena into the cupboard hoping to cop a feel, but that she bashed him round the head with a foolscap folder before making him carry about three tons of paper back to the classroom for her. Something like that.’

‘How unimaginative.’

‘Quite. How disappointing,’ Fabián would say.

As we had already had one version of what had happened at the
Semana Santa
parade, I was expecting the true story to come out in a similar fashion. What I didn’t expect was that ‘the truth’ would far outgun the story.

‘Are you going to tell me what really happened with the arm?’ I said.

‘It’s not what really happened with the arm that’s the best bit,’ he said.

And he told me how he had seen a vision of his mother looking down on him from within the glass case of the Virgin during the Easter parade.

I didn’t have a clue how I was supposed to react. In all of our two years of banter, not once had the idea of a
religious
experience come up. And, as I said, we had never, even remotely, touched on the subject of his mother.

I stayed silent, trying to disguise my growing unease, while he went on talking, apparently rationally, about the reasons why he thought his mother had chosen to appear to him from within the glass case.

‘I’m not sure, but I
think
it means that she must be trapped somewhere,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’ He looked at me with a calm smile.

‘What do I think?’

‘Yeah.’

Putting my beer down on the table, I then said something very stupid:

‘Fabián. What would the unimaginative person say had happened here?’

His eyes jabbed in my direction.

‘I’m not fucking around, you know,’ he said. ‘I really did see my mother in that crowd.’

One of the pitfalls of being Fabián’s friend was the occasional moment of panic and uncertainty as, halfway through a game, he changed the rules without telling you. I was used to it. I’d done it to others myself alongside him. But at this moment, I felt more at sea in his company than ever before.

‘I thought—’

‘You thought what? This isn’t something I would go round telling at school. I’m speaking the truth.’

‘I know, but I thought … Your mother’s dead, isn’t she?’

Fabián took a slurp of his beer and stared over at the bookshelves on the other side of Suarez’s desk. The jukebox switched records clumsily, from ‘Great Balls of Fire’ to ‘Roll Over Beethoven’.

He seemed about to say something, and then turned his head back to the beer. He finished it in a few gutsy gulps and, with his good arm, chucked the bottle at the wall. He wasn’t left-handed, but it was a powerful throw. The bottle shattered right on the beat, in time to Chuck Berry, sending shards skittering across the chequerboard floor and leaving a round, foaming blotch beside the jukebox.

‘Just believe me, will you?’ he said.

‘Okay. I believe you,’ I said.

‘If I’m going to tell you about my parents, I’m going to need to get a lot more drunk than this.’

‘Fine by me,’ I said.

A Fabián I didn’t know was dangerously near the surface. While the voyeur in me wanted to expose that person once and for all, I was conscious nonetheless of the need to tread carefully.

‘What about getting out Suarez’s shrunken head?’ said
Fabián, getting up and swaggering over towards the safe. ‘I wouldn’t mind having another look at that. Do you believe all that stuff about the curse, and the lover’s finger?’

Okay
, I thought.
Okay, we’ll leave it for the moment. I can play this game
.

‘I don’t know. I suppose so. I know he builds things up sometimes to make his stories better. But do you think he’d lie to us?’

‘Of course he would. He probably just bought that
tsantza
himself from a junk shop. Stupid old bastard. He thinks we’re still kids. He thinks he can tell us anything he likes. I looked it up, you know – there’s a massive black-market trade in fake shrunken heads, just made out of pigskin and stuff, sold to tourists. The Shuar even make fake ones for themselves to perform their rituals, because they aren’t allowed to cut people’s heads off any more. There’s hardly any cocking chance it’s the real thing. The book I looked at even said how the real ones are made – they shrink the skin over a fire, then fill it up with pebbles so they can remould the face with their fingers. It’s got dick-all to do with shrinking it in the sun around a stone.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose you just have to ask yourself whether it felt real at the time; I mean—’

‘I asked him whether if I went travelling with my mother’s finger I would feel better about her not being here,’ said Fabián, perusing the bookshelves. ‘Unfair of me, probably, given that he’s her brother. He said it was up to me. He just came out with that same stupid line he always says: “Grief asks different questions of us all.” He’s an idiot.’

‘Hadn’t we better clean up that glass?’ I said.

‘No, leave it. Come over here. Look at the
size
of this encyclopaedia. Look at all the stuff there is out there. We have to go and see some of it. Otherwise we might as well
be beaten to death up a mountain like poor fucking Juanita. I want to get away from Suarez and his fake shrunken head. I want to find my
own
shrunken heads.’

‘What about finding something else to drink?’ I suggested.

‘A noble suggestion!’ said Fabián, turning away from the encyclopaedia and pointing his finger at me. ‘First sensible thing you’ve said. You stay here and watch the driveway for Suarez. I think I know where he keeps a bottle of tequila. Otherwise, I’m going to break into Byron’s house and steal from him. Let him try and shoot me if he dares.’

Forgetting that Byron was driving Suarez, so wouldn’t be there to shoot Fabián even if he had wanted him to, Fabián left the library. I moved over to where he had been standing, near the bookshelves, from where I’d be able to see the lights of Byron’s car if he and Suarez came back.

Let’s get a few things clear here:

The set of encyclopaedias was not made of ancient cracked leather, or trimmed in gold leaf.

The binding of the volume did not billow out centuries-old dust as I opened it.

I did not find myself gazing in fascination at descriptions of a forgotten continent.

The twenty-two-volume family edition of the
Encylopaedia Ecuatoriana
was backed in leather-effect brown plastic, illustrated with faded 1970s colour photographs and printed on cheap, almost translucent, paper. It sat in Suarez’s library, between his imposing medical textbooks and a collection of old-style, red-spined Everyman Classics. You could have gone into any other middle-class home and found the same publication. In a belated effort to follow my mother’s suggestion, I pulled down the S–T volume and opened it at ‘Stonehenge’.