The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(116)

“Of course. Always.”

The next day the nausea began for him. He hid it well, sneaking out of the room to puke up in the toilet, but I hardly needed nine hundred years of experience to see. In the night the pain began to take him too, and this time I staggered out of the bed to hold him, as he puked and retched into a bucket on the floor.

“I’m fine,” he gasped between shudders. “I’ll be fine.”

“See?” I murmured. “Told you you’re a liar.”

“Harry,” his voice was acid-eaten, ragged between breaths, “there’s something I wanted to say to you.”

“Was it ‘Sorry for being a damn liar’?”

“Yes.” I didn’t know if he sobbed or laughed the word. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s OK.” I sighed. “I know why you did it.”

The lesions, as they broke on my skin, didn’t hurt so much as itch. They were a slow splitting, a gentle peeling away of flesh. Vincent was still going through nausea, but as my body began to break down, the pain grew intense again, and I screamed out for comfort and morphine. They dosed us both, perhaps considering it rude to only fill up one patient, least of all the one who wasn’t paying for this extensive medical care. That evening a box arrived for Vincent. He crawled out of bed and unlocked the padlock on the front, pulling from the inside of the box a crown of wires and electrodes. With shaking hands, he held it out towards me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It… it will make you f-forget,” he stammered, laying it down on the end of my bed as if it was a little too heavy for his tastes. “It will… it will take away everything. Everything you are, everything you… It will take away this memory. Do you understand?”

“What about me?” I asked. “Will it take away me?”

“Yes.”

“Bloody stupid then, isn’t it?”

“I… I’m so sorry. If you knew… if you knew some of the things…”

“Vincent, I’m not in a confessional mood. Whatever it is, I forgive you, and let’s leave it at that.”

He left it at that, but the box with its crown of wires stayed in the room. He would have to use it on me, I concluded, before I died, and before he grew too weak to operate it.

In the night we were both in pain.

“It’s OK,” I told him. “It’s OK. We were trying to make something better.”

He was shaking, at the limits of his pain meds, and still in pain.

Tell me a story, I said, to distract in this hour of need. Here, I’ll begin. An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scot walk into a bar…

For God’s sake, Harry, he said, don’t make me laugh.

Then I’ll tell you a story–a true story–and you tell me one in reply.

Fair enough, he answered, and so I did.

I told him of growing up in Leeds, of the bullies at the school, of B+ grades and the tedium of studying law.

He told me of his wealthy father, a good man, a kind man, entirely under his son’s thumb.

I spoke of trips on to the moor, of flowers in spring and the heather by the side of the railway lines which caught fire in summer and burned down to a black crisp as far as the eye could see.

He spoke of a garden with rhododendron bushes in it, and the whooping of the whistles from the trains on the other side of the hill.

Was this southern England?

Yes, just outside London.

I told him about my adopted parents, and how they were more to me than my biological father, wherever he was, whoever he was. How I wished I had the courage to say, You are everything, and he is nothing, and it was not the food on my plate, nor the roof over my head, but that you never let me down which makes you my father, my mother.

He said, “Harry?”

His voice was choking with pain.

“Yes?”

“I… I want to tell you something.”

“All right.”

“My name… my name is Vincent Benton. The gardener’s name is Rankis. I hid my true name because… I am twenty-five years old. I am seven hundred and ninety-four. My father is Howard Benton, my mother is Ursula. I never knew my mother. She dies when I am just a child. I am born at home, on 3 October 1925. Apparently the nanny fainted when I popped out. I’ve never told anyone this in my entire life. No one.”

“I am who I am,” I replied. “That’s all.”

“No,” he answered, levering himself out of bed. “You’re not.”

So saying, he unlocked the box with its crown of wires and eased it on to my head.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I cannot accept this life,” he replied. “I cannot accept it. I cannot. I just wanted someone to understand.”

“Vincent…”

I tried to struggle but had no strength and little inclination. He patted my hands away, pressed the electrodes into my skull. “I’m sorry, Harry.” He was weeping. “If you knew what I have done to you, if you could only understand… I’ll find you, do you understand? I’ll find you and keep you safe, no matter what happens.” The whirr of a machine charging, the fizzle of electricity.

“Vincent, wait, I’m not—”