The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(10)

I wondered if she’d like to have an affair with me.

She asked when I stopped being afraid of her, to get so lippy on the dance floor.

I said it was a lifetime ago, but she was still beautiful and I knew all her secrets.

“Did you not hear the part about my friends, colleagues, family, kids?”

Yes, I’d heard all of it, and all of it weighed with me when I spoke to her, cried out to walk away, leave her alone, for her life was complete and needed no more complexity. How much greater, I said, must the attraction I felt towards her be, that I could know all this and still whisper sweet allurements in her ear?

“Allurements? Is that what you call it?”

Run away with me, I said, just for a night. The world will turn, and all things will end, and people forget.

For a moment she looked tempted, and then her husband came along and took her hand, and he was loyal and loving and completely sane and what she wanted, and her temptation wasn’t so much about me, as about the adventure.

Would I have done things differently, had I known what was to befall Jenny Munroe?

Perhaps not.

Time, it transpires, is not so good at telling after all.





Chapter 10


Back in the insanity, back in the broken place.

Franklin Phearson, in my fourth life, came to me in the hospital to wean me off one set of drugs, not for my benefit, but for his. His was the voice which stood over me as I lay motionless in my hospital bed and proclaimed, “What have you been giving this man? You said he’d be lucid.”

His was the hand that steadied the stretcher as they pulled me out of the front door and into the waiting unmarked ambulance.

His were the hard soles on leather shoes which clacked on the marble steps of the grand hotel, empty for the season, the staff sent home, where eventually they deposited me in a bed of feathers and burgundy blankets, to dream and puke my way towards some kind of salvation.

Going cold turkey from any drug is unpleasant; from antipsychotics it is a mixed blessing. Certainly I desired death, and they strapped me down to prevent my achieving it. Certainly I knew that all was lost and I with it, that I was cursed and there was no escape, and I longed to lose my mind entirely and push out my eyes and live in madness. And certainly I do not, even now, even with my memory, recall the very worst of those times, but rather remember it all as if it happened to another man. And certainly I know I have the capacity within me to be all of that again, to feel all of that again, and know that, while the door may currently be locked, there is a black pit in the bottom of my soul that has no limit to its falling. They say that the mind cannot remember pain; I say it barely matters, for even if the physical sensation is lost, our recollection of the terror that surrounds it is perfect. I do not want to die at this present moment, though the circumstances of this present writing will dictate my course. I remember that I have wanted it, and it was real.

There was no moment of light, no waking from a darkness to find myself cured in that place. Rather there was a slow shuffling towards comprehension, a few hours of reconciliation followed by a sleep, followed by a waking which stayed awake a little longer. There was a slow restoration of human dignity: clean clothes, my hands freed at last, the scars around my wrists and ankles cleaned of crispy blood. I was permitted to feed myself, first under supervision in my bed, then under supervision by the window, then under supervision down the stairs, and at last on the patio that looked across a croquet lawn and towards a rolling green garden, where the supervision tried to pretend it was simply a friend. I was permitted to clean myself, all sharp objects removed from the bathroom and guards outside, but I barely cared and sat in the shower until my skin was a crinkled raisin and the boiler upstairs began to shudder with distress. A scraggly beard had been growing on my chin, and they brought in a barber who tutted and twitched and splattered me with Italian oils and told me in the loud voice reserved for children, “Your face is your fortune! Don’t spend it all at once!”

Franklin Phearson had been a face on the edge of all this, by whose aloofness I could only assume he was in charge. He sat two tables away from me as I ate, was at the end of the corridor when I left the bathroom and was, I concluded, the man responsible for the two-way mirror in my bedroom, which provided constant monitoring of my room and was only revealed by the slow whirr of the surveillance camera lens as it adjusted its focus.

Then one breakfast he sat with me, no longer apart, and said, “You’re looking much better.”

I drank my tea carefully, as I drank all things carefully in that place, little sips to test for toxins, and replied, “I feel better. Thank you.”

“It may please you to know that Dr Abel has been fired.”

He said it so easily, newspaper folded on his lap, eyes half-running over the crossword clues, that I didn’t fully grasp his meaning at the first rendition. But the words had been spoken, so I said again, as a neutral child had once spoken to my father, “Thank you.”

“I applaud his intentions,” went on Phearson, “but his methods were unsound. Would you like to see your wife?”

I counted silently to ten before I dared give an answer. “Yes. Very much.”

“She’s very distraught. She doesn’t know where you are, thinks you’ve run away. You can write to her. Put her mind at ease.”

“I’d like that.”

“There will be financial compensation for her. Maybe a trial for Dr Abel. Maybe a petition, who knows?”