The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (31 page)

He set it up in the kitchen. It seemed a very mundane place to erase a man’s mind. I sat on an uncomfortable metal chair as he pottered around me like a man trying to find a clean vacuum bag. I flinched as the first electrode was placed against the side of my skull, and he asked immediately, “Are you OK?”

“Fine,” I muttered. “Fine.”

“Would you like something to drink?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“OK.”

He eased the hair up from the back of my neck and pushed two more nodes into my skin just beneath the cerebellum. Clearly this was more advanced than the crude methods of Pietrok-112. The metal was cold as he pressed it into my temples, above my eyes, stopping every time I winced to check, are you all right, Harry, are you sure you want to do this?

“I’m sure,” I replied. “It’s fine.”

I couldn’t stop myself, couldn’t slow my own breathing; it grew faster and faster as the moment of truth approached. He pulled some duct tape out of a drawer and said, “I think it would be safer if we taped your hands down–are you OK with that?”

Sure, why not.

“You look very nervous.”

I don’t like medical things.

“It’ll be fine. This will be fine. You’ll be able to remember everything, very soon.”

Wasn’t that nice.

He taped my hands to the arms of the chair with thick layers of duct tape. I almost wished he’d spit in my eye, declare his loathing of me, at least then I would have an excuse to scream, to rage. He didn’t. He checked the positioning of the wires across my skull, across my face, then bent down so his head was entirely level with mine. “It’s for the best, Harry,” he explained. “I know that won’t matter to you, but really, this is how it has to be.”

I couldn’t answer. Knew I should, and couldn’t, couldn’t find words between the breath, between the effort of breathing. He stepped round behind me to adjust the leads and I squeezed my eyes tight shut, shaking all over, my toes shaking in their socks, knees turned to jelly, oh God, oh God, oh—

Darkness.

You cannot miss a thing you do not remember.

Perhaps Vincent was right. Perhaps he was being kind.

Vincent’s new device, his new toy for the Forgetting, had several disadvantages. I believe he hadn’t had a chance to test it properly for, at its application, it killed me stone dead.

My name is Harry August, born New Year’s Day 1919, Berwick-upon-Tweed station, and I remembered…

… everything.

Charity came to me when I was six years old, discreetly this time, quietly, slipping into my life sideways through the Hulnes, ready to debrief me, question me about my time with Vincent–no glamour, no shouting, no wealth, no Cronus Club. It took her six months to convince the Hulnes to let her “adopt” me, and as soon as I was out of the house I was whisked away to Leeds, where a new Mr and Mrs August were waiting to raise me in exchange for a heavy donation of cash and a sense of good deeds and charitable works. The paperwork was in place, the groundwork accomplished–Vincent knew where to find me now, if he wanted to look.

Charity said, “You know, Harry, you really don’t have to do this. There are other ways.”

Of course there are other ways. Let’s find Vincent again; let’s strap him down and hack off his feet, his hands, cut out his eyes, slice open his nose, carve our signatures in his skin; let’s make him swallow hot tar; let’s break every bone in his feet one at a time until…

… until he dies, having told us nothing. Nothing at all. Vincent Rankis is not Victor Hoeness. He knows perfectly well what he is doing, and he will die defending it. So much for torture.

“What if we make him forget?”

Akinleye, a child, stood by the seashore, face furrowed with hundreds of years of concern–how quickly the centuries had caught up with her, how heavy they weighed. Was it a consequence of being reborn so close to the attack on the Cronus Club? Had she been forced by these events to take responsibility? Or maybe we were simply the sum of our memories, and this new Akinleye was the sum of hers.

“I’m a mnemonic.” I had never spoken these words out loud. “I remember… everything. Simply… everything. Twice Vincent has tried the Forgetting on me, and twice he has failed. He is also a mnemonic. It will not work on him. Or worse–far worse. Like me he will feign having forgotten, and destroy us.”

The Cronus Club in my fifteenth life was not the Club of my first eight hundred or so years. Its members were coming back, those who had survived Virginia’s purges. Those who had been forced to forget were now on their third lives, and the messages were slowly trickling back through the generations–the Club of the twentieth century is back, and we have dire warnings for all. Messages were received in carved stone from the 1800s, enquiring after us, asking what had happened to the Club to cause the twentieth century suddenly to go so quiet. The messages from the future were darker, passed down from child to pensioner, whispered back from the twenty-first century.

In our last lives, the voices said, the world was not the world we
knew. Technology had changed–
time
had changed–and many of us simply were not born. We haven’t heard from the twenty-second century at all. We have no idea what happened to them. Please leave your answers in stone.

So the effect of our calamity rippled forward, spreading its wave through time. I dared not give an answer to the future Clubs, not even a time capsule sealed for five hundred years’ time. The risk of it being discovered by Vincent in this time, of him learning how close we were to pursuing and punishing him, was too great. I would not risk the safety of everything I had sought simply out of compassion for a century I had not seen.

My contact with the Club was therefore strictly limited. In the early years it was with Akinleye alone–she alone did I trust with the secret of what I was doing. In later years, Charity too was admitted to the fold. Charity’s role was crucial, for she generated the paperwork relating to my fictional life that I needed, documents which confirmed the story I had told Vincent in my previous life: of being an orphan, of Mr and Mrs August in Leeds, everything which might be needed to prove to Vincent that I was who I claimed to be. Now, my memory wiped again, I had to live the life of an ordinary linear boy, become my cover story, and so I went to school every day in Leeds and did my best not to embarrass anyone or myself, performing with the aim of achieving an average B+ grade until the age of seventeen, when I was resolved to give myself some chance of going to university and studying something I hadn’t studied before. Law, perhaps. I could see myself becoming lost very easily in the dry but thick volumes of wisdom that subject contained.

As it turned out, obtaining B+ came more naturally than I had expected. Questions designed for a fourteen-year-old brain baffled me in my old age. Asked to write an essay on the Spanish Armada, I presented six thousand words charting its causes, course and consequences. I had tried very hard to stop myself, losing nearly three thousand words from the overall bulk before submission, but the more I looked at the question the more I could not conceive what the teacher desired. A blow-by-blow account of events? It seemed
the most obvious, and so I tried to give it but found myself utterly unable to avoid writing
why
Philip II chose to link up with the Duke of Parma or
why
the English fleet sent fireships into the Armada off Calais. The eventual grade for my essay was a grudging A–and a note in the margin requesting that I stick to the matter at hand. I chose from that point on to disregard my teacher entirely, and occupied my brain in his class by inventing first a shorthand derived from Sanskrit, then a longhand derived from Korean designed to ensure the minimum motion of the pen between each letter and the most logical calligraphical unity between letters of certain types. When I was finally caught doing this, I was dismissed as the world’s most idle doodler, given three lashes on the hand with a ruler and made to sit at the back of the class.

Two boys, a would-be alpha of the pack, supported by an omega too slow to realise that the top dog needed his minion’s adoration to assure himself of his superiority, attempted playground bullying after that incident. My name not rhyming with anything particularly obscene that their young minds could come up with, they settled instead for a little pushing, a little shoving, a little shouting, and when finally, bored with their discourse, I turned round, looked them in the eye and politely informed them that I would rip the ears off the next one who laid a finger on me, the omega burst out crying, and I once again received three smacks of the ruler to my left hand and also detention. To spite my teacher, my next week’s project was learning how to write ambidextrously, creating no end of confusion as to which of my hands was the one that could be most conveniently smashed about with a stick while leaving me best able to do my homework. My teacher finally realised that I was in fact able to write with either hand just as I was beginning to step up the quality of schoolwork in expectation of the slog through to university, when…

“Are you Harry?”

A child’s voice, young, interested, unbroken. I was sixteen; the boy looked about nine. He was wearing a grey cap, grey jacket,
white shirt, navy-blue striped tie and white socks, which he’d pulled up almost to his pink kneecaps. He held a satchel over one shoulder, and a bag of hard sweets, stuck together on the paper, in his other hand. Vincent Rankis’s face still had a lot of growing out to do, and it was immediately apparent that the years between ten and eighteen were not necessarily going to be kind in this regard. The already-thin hair sticking down from beneath his cap foretold its scarcity in later life, but his eyes glistened with the old, familiar intelligence.

I stared at this child, hundreds–maybe thousands–of years old, and remembered that I was just sixteen, an orphaned teenager from Leeds trying to be cool.

“Yeah,” I replied in my best local accent. “What’s it to you?”

“My dad sent me to find you,” he replied firmly. “You dropped this.”

He handed me, very carefully, a blue paper notebook. It was cheap and a little tatty, and bore inside some unfortunate child’s French homework, pages of the stuff declaring
je m’appelle, je suis, je voudrais
running down neat rulered margins. I flicked through, then looked up to say, “This isn’t…”

But the boy was gone.

I didn’t see Vincent again until 1941.

I did indeed study law, going to Edinburgh University to shiver away over great fat books whose pages crunched with the generations of microscopic paper-munching insects who had lived, bred and died between the judgments. Knowing I would be called up, I pre-empted the moment by enlisting in a Highland regiment, and spent three months being trained in the art of charging at dummies, shooting from behind the safety of a hill and shouting “Kill!” until my ears rang with it. I had a distant recollection that my unit would be largely useless until late into the conflict. We would spend a lot of time training, if memory served, in the art of winter warfare, in expectation of an assault on Norway which wouldn’t come, and finally be dispatched to Normandy several weeks after the beaches had been secured. The worst we’d have it would be in the Ardennes, and I fully intended to keep my head down when that moment came. This would be the seventh time I had fought in the Second World War.

I saw Vincent Rankis as if by chance, though there was no such thing, during one of our quieter times, waiting for orders in our barracks in Leith. Our days were spent studying maps of places we
wouldn’t attack, practising manoeuvres we wouldn’t perform and waiting for orders we didn’t want to receive. Then a sharp “Attention!” and we all snapped up for the arrival of the major and his minions. I was a grudging second lieutenant–grudging in that I didn’t especially relish my commission, and grudging in that it had been grudgingly given in light of my merits and capabilities, as compared to the usual requisites for the post. I had only held my commission for three weeks when my captain complained that I just didn’t talk properly, and rather than at once slip into the more RP accent that I knew was required, I turned up my northern gruff to the point where my reports frequently needed translating for the unfortunate man, much to the amusement of his highly Glaswegian sergeant.

It was the Glaswegian sergeant who had called us to attention that day, but the major who spoke. He was a decent man who didn’t deserve the death by howitzer that awaited him, but his decency was never of a kindly sort, merely the fixed determination that those who died on his watch did not die because of his inaction.

“All right, gentlemen,” he grumbled as if the weight of his facial hair prohibited anything but the bare parting of his lips. “We’re just having a look round. Lieutenant August, meet Lieutenant Rankis.”

I nearly laughed out loud when I saw Vincent dressed up in an officer’s uniform, complete with shiny buttons, cleaned hat, smart boots and a salute so sharp you could have roasted a rabbit on it. He was a boy–a sixteen-year-old boy–yet somehow a hint of beard around his chin and an extra pair of socks shoved down the calves of his trousers and across the back of his shirt had been enough to deceive the army into awarding him a commission. I was never more grateful for the poker face years of being a junior officer on the receiving end of ridiculous orders teaches a man, and earned for my pains a flash of brilliant smile from Vincent’s teeth and eyes.

“Lieutenant Rankis won’t be with us long,” went on the major, “so I want you all to impress him, please. If you need anything, Harry there is your man. Lieutenant!”

Another round of salutes. When dealing with senior ranks you had to get used to having a trigger elbow, as well as a trigger finger. I glanced over Vincent’s shoulder and saw the sergeant trying not to laugh. Had he too noticed the fresh face on our infant officer, and the slight bulge around his thighs where he’d padded his uniform to more butch and manly dimensions? I focused on my poker face and salute, and when the major was gone shook Vincent’s hand.

“Call me Harry,” I said.