The Amnesia Clinic (9 page)

Then my mother noticed some kids fooling around near our car and asked me just to go over and make sure it was locked. There were a lot of drunk people around.

I looked up at her.

‘He’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Just go and check the car quickly. He’ll be out in a second, and imagine how angry he’ll be if someone’s broken into it. Don’t worry, Fabi. Look at him – he’s doing great.’ She gave me a kiss on my forehead.

I’d gone maybe ten or twelve paces towards where the car was parked when a massive cheer went up, followed by a shocked gasp, and then the sound of a woman screaming. By the time I’d turned and was sprinting back as hard as I could towards the paddock, the crowd had fallen silent.

I couldn’t see what had happened at first, because it had got so dark, and because there were so many people crowding round the fence.

Papi had been lifted right off the ground and tossed about like a rag doll on one of the bull’s horns, which had penetrated his ribcage and punctured a lung. There was blood coming out of the hole in his chest in time with his breathing. It sounded like he was drowning – which he was.

Pass the bottle. Aren’t you having another one?

Suit yourself.

Well, after that, things got pretty out of control. My mother was going crazy. She was screaming at the Indian
guy who’d been arguing with my dad at the same time as trying to talk to him and hold his chest to keep the blood in and hollering at people to call an ambulance. The bull had gone even more crazy and had smashed up a part of the fence around the paddock. They had to get a load of gauchos on horses to come and shepherd it back into the pen so nobody else got hurt. I even remember one guy running around panicking ’cause his car was red and he thought the bull would go for it if it got out.

Me?

Hang on a minute. Sorry. I’ll be all right soon.

Must have gone down the wrong way.

That’s better.

I got into the paddock, went over to where my mother was and knelt down to help her hold him together. I put my hands on his chest. He smiled at me, and winked. He said, ‘Fabi, did you see how scared that bull was? Can you see I’m not scared? I’m gonna be fine.’

Then he coughed, in this bubbly way, and said, ‘I need a drink of water.’ You know when we used to go swimming, and hold our breaths, and then shout as loud as we could at each other under the surface? It sounded like that. His voice was all liquidy and gurgling.

‘Fabi, go find some water,’ said my mother.

I didn’t move.

She screamed.

‘Fabi, go! You aren’t helping. Go get some water from somewhere then come back here. Has ANYONE called this ambulance?’

I ran off without looking back, away from the field, away from the car, towards the church and the cottages. I ran so fast, I almost forgot why I was running at all.

Of course, all the houses were shut up. Why had I come over here? It was stupid. Everyone was over at the fiesta.
The street by the little whitewashed chapel, with its simple wooden cross on top, was dark and silent. All the huts where the workers lived were shut up and bolted. There was nothing alive over there but a tethered llama, and a dog lying behind a cactus eating a bit of pork fat he’d scored at the party. I looked back and saw people running around in between all the golds and reds of the fiesta.

I heard the noise of cars revving off down the mountainside.

I think I went into the chapel because I thought I might be able to bring him some holy water. If he didn’t want to drink it he could put it on his chest, and then he’d be okay, I thought.

The door slammed shut behind me and I could hardly see anything, apart from a couple of fold-up wooden chairs, and metal shining in the dark where the altar must have been. My breathing was loud, and echoing. The air was wet and dusty.

I heard a massive bang, and the windows came to life. There were streaks of red and yellow lightning in the sky outside, and the walls of the chapel lit up like a flash bulb. My eyes weren’t ready for it and it seemed incredibly bright.

The light illuminated a pair of eyes inches from my own. I gasped, and stepped backwards in shock, then saw a painted tear on a cheek and realised that I’d been standing right in front of a wooden statue of the Virgin. Red light sparkled on her silver crown.

There was another flash. I knew what was happening now. Some asshole had started letting off fireworks outside, even though my dad was lying there wounded.

This time I saw something else. A man and a woman standing holding each other in a corner. The guy had a long black ponytail, and wore a wide-brimmed hat. I glimpsed the girl’s scared face behind his shoulder. His bare arse in
the red light. Her arms in their frilly white blouse across his back.

I turned away to the door. I fell forwards through it and left it open, running back towards the paddock, slipping around in the mud as I went. I was frightened, but more about not having found any water for my dad than anything else.

I got back to the paddock and climbed over the fence. I ran towards the crowd of people and pushed through them to get to the middle.

They weren’t there.

I started shouting: where are they? Where are my parents?

Some Indian woman came over and said they went. They looked for you. Your Papi is hurt, so your Mami drove off to meet the ambulance halfway up the mountain. It’s a winding road. She’s going to meet the ambulance as it comes up, put your Papi in it, then come back up here to get you. Then you’re gonna go back down with her and see your Papi, and it’ll all be okay. Stay with me,
cariño
. We’ll wait for them to come back. Won’t be a minute. Won’t be any time at all.

She had a kind face, all beaten up with the wind like the older Indians. She put a cold hand on my cheek.

Pour me another.

So we waited.

I sat in the old woman’s front room in her little cottage. She showed me how her loom worked. We sat there for hours. She made me tea, and put
MacGyver
on the TV for me. Funny. Why do I remember that?

They never came.

Never came.

Car flew off the road, and pheeeeeeuuuuuuw … Poof.

Burnt right on up. Lucky they’d called an ambulance,
huh? Lucky one was already on its way. Not much they could do about it though. All gone.

Just like that shot of tequila.

They found the car at the bottom of a steep valley, all burnt out, upside down. My father was inside it. But they never found my mother. She wasn’t in there.

And everyone says she’s dead but me.

Sorry.

I’ve never told anybody this before. Oh, fuck. Shit.

This isn’t going to happen. I never cry, man.

I
never
cry.

’Nother tequila’s what I need.

Fuck you. I can take it. Shit on you, you mother-pricking English asshole fuck.

Suarez is a bastard. He says there’s no way she could’ve survived. But anything could’ve happened to her. She could’ve been kidnapped by
guerrilleros
. Anything. Could be anywhere.

Anti, I’m gonna throw up now.

Well, looky what we have here.

Talk of the devil.

Here comes Suarez now.

Shi—

Fabián leant sideways as pale vomit leapt out of him like a jaguar. The headlights of Byron’s car lit up the walls as brightly as any firework flashes inside a hacienda chapel. Any second now, the key would be in the lock. But Fabián wasn’t moving, and there was nothing to be done.

When Suarez ambled in, he seemed momentarily delighted to see us enjoying ourselves. He started to say something like why didn’t we have any music. Then he must have smelt the metallic edge to the air, seen the bottle on the table, noticed Fabián slumped in his seat. He stopped in mid-sentence and slowly brought up the house lighting on what was a pretty ghastly scene.

There was a horrible pause. The disco lights were still stuck in their meandering cycle. Suarez turned them off before speaking.

‘You should never leave two male dogs on their own. They always have to go out looking for trouble,’ he said.
‘Dog and a bitch, fine; bitch and a bitch, no problem; but never two dogs.’

He walked over and peered at Fabián, who was pretending to be out cold.

‘You are a pair of dogs,’ he said, in conclusion. ‘Well, I won’t be asking Eulalia to clean up all this glass and puke, so you can do it yourselves in the morning. I think I will, however, ask Byron to carry this degenerate up to his bed. Wait here, Anti.’

Suarez left the library.

I sat staring at a slick coating of drool on Fabián’s cheek, which shone in the unfamiliar light of the room. He mumbled, and a pendulum of slobber waggled beneath his chin in time to its movements.

Suarez reappeared in the doorway. Byron’s massive face loomed behind him, wearing a broad grin of anticipation. He was going to love this.

Byron walked across the library and spread himself on his haunches in front of the sprawled Fabián. With one arm under his thighs and the other holding the scruff of his neck, he heaved Fabián over his shoulders. His plaster cast knocking lightly against Byron’s back, Fabián was surprised into conversation.

‘What? Jesus,’ he said. ‘Oh hello, Byron, you big bastard. Don’t shoot me.’

I could hear Byron talking to himself as he ferried his burden up the stairs. ‘This one’s always been a puker,’ he said, chuckling with every step. ‘Always puking.’

Suarez and I were alone.

‘Suarez, I’m so sorry …’ I began.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I know it wasn’t your fault. It’s my fault for being so liberal with my alcohol.’

He sat down, taking Fabián’s place at the table. The storyteller’s chair.

‘Have you had enough to drink, Anti?’ he said, inspecting the bottle.

I said nothing. Suarez picked up a shot glass, messy with Fabián’s drunken fingerprints, and poured himself a tot of tequila.

I was about to launch into another apology, but Suarez seemed more sad than angry.

I waited for him to speak first. He sat, curling his lower lip, gazing at the spray of vomit on the floor, evaluating the problem.

‘Fabián is quite unhappy at the moment, isn’t he?’ he said, finally.

I paused, then said, ‘Yes, he is.’

I was too drunk to think of anything but the truth.

‘It’s difficult for me sometimes to tell when he’s going through a bad patch. I do try to let him have time with his own thoughts. I don’t believe in smothering people – especially given that I am his uncle and not his father.’

‘We were talking about his parents tonight. That’s why he drank so much.’

‘Tell me what he told you,’ said Suarez, sitting up straight. ‘It’s been too long since I talked about it with him properly.’

I paused. This was an uncomfortable enough conversation already, and the smell of vomit had begun to dominate the room.

‘He thinks that you don’t care what happened to his mother. He thinks she has disappeared, or been kidnapped, or is wandering in the mountains with amnesia,’ I blurted out.

Why I added that last possibility, I don’t know. It was an explanation that had popped into my head while Fabián was talking, not something that he’d ever suggested.

‘Sorry,’ I added, uselessly.

‘Believe me, Anti, there is nothing that would bring me greater joy than to see my beautiful little sister again,’ said Suarez. ‘It quite destroyed my life when she died.’

I felt awkward hearing this degree of honesty from an adult, and particularly from Suarez, who was normally so in control.

‘But have no doubts,’ he said, looking directly at me. ‘She is quite definitely dead.’

I swallowed uncomfortably. Suarez went on talking.

‘If I thought even for a second that she was alive, then believe me, I would be ripping up the Andes from their roots, spending every penny I had, in order to find her. But guerrillas don’t just kidnap people without asking for a ransom. She isn’t some
desaparecida
, you know. She isn’t like your Lord Lucan.’ First Lord Byron, now this. Suarez seemed to have a thing about English lords. ‘My sister is dead. That is a fact. I wish it wasn’t as much as poor Fabián does, but it is the case. He just doesn’t like to believe it because they never found a body.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘I thought he told you. His parents’ car went off the edge of a cliff in the mountains, and they both died. There is no way that his mother could have survived. He thinks she is missing because her body was never recovered from the wreckage. But these things do happen. The car turns itself over so many times that a body is thrown from it on the way down, into the undergrowth, and …’ He cleared his throat and looked away.

‘I’m sorry, Suarez. I’m really sorry,’ I said, feeling young, embarrassed, inadequate.

‘It’s fine, Anti. Really. You can see why he wants to think otherwise, but there is no other possible explanation. There were eyewitnesses who saw the car go off the road. It was only a dirt track, and the rain had eroded the edge of it.
The police think the passenger door wasn’t properly closed when they went over the edge, and that is why my sister fell out. They scoured the mountainside for her, but the car had fallen a long way and the hill was thickly covered with vegetation. That’s the only reason. But you can see that there is no chance that she survived.’

He drained his glass of tequila, took out a wide, red and gold packet of Dunhill International and lit one. Then he pushed the packet across the table towards me, a cigarette extended from it. I took one.

‘Just for tonight,’ he said. ‘I doubt your mother would be pleased if she knew I was offering smokes to her asthmatic son. Starting from tomorrow, I’m starting a new regime with you boys.’ He winked at me before continuing. ‘No, Anti, my sister has not been kidnapped. She has not lost her memory. She won’t be coming back. I prefer to see it that she decided halfway down the mountainside not to continue with the car, but to fly off on her own to someplace new. And I think that she’s still flying around there, very happy indeed. That is why we haven’t found her. That’s how I like to see it.’

He sat, apparently gazing at his flying sister amid the dance of cigarette smoke above the table, relishing the vision.