The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(16)

“You’re making your decisions based on crimes which haven’t been committed yet!”

He threw his arms wide in a great gesture of frustration. “Humanity is evolving, Harry!” he exclaimed. “The world is changing! In the last two hundred years humanity has changed in ways more radical than it achieved in the last two thousand! The rate of evolution is accelerating, as a species and as a civilisation. It’s our job, the job of good men, good men and good women, to oversee this process, to guide it so that we don’t have any more f*ck-ups and disasters! You want another Second World War? Another Holocaust? We can change things, make them better.”

“You regard yourself as fit to oversee the future?”

“Goddamn it, yes!” he roared. “Because I’m a f*cking defender of democracy! Because I’m a f*cking liberal-minded believer in freedom, because I’m a f*cking good guy with a good heart and damn it because someone has to!”

I sat back in my chair. The rain was slicing in sideways, pounding against the glass. There were fresh flowers on the table, cold coffee in my cup. “I’m sorry, Mr Phearson,” I said at last. “I don’t know what it is you want me to tell you.”

He shuffled round quickly on to a chair, pulled it closer to me, dropping his voice to an almost conspiratorial level, hands pressed down in a might-be apology. “Why don’t we win in Vietnam? What are we doing wrong?”

I groaned, pressing my palms against my skull. “You’re not wanted! The Vietnamese don’t want you, the Chinese don’t want you, your own people don’t want you in Vietnam! There’s no winning a war no one wants to fight!”

“What if we dropped the bomb? One bomb, Hanoi, a clean sweep?”

“I don’t know because it never happened, and it never happened because it’s obscene!” I shouted. “You don’t want knowledge, you want affirmation, and I…” I stood suddenly, as surprised to find myself standing as anyone else in the room. “… I can’t give you that,” I concluded. “I’m sorry. I thought when I agreed to this that you were… that you wanted something else. I think I was wrong. I need… to think.”

Silence between us.

In Chinese, asthma is described as the panting of an animal, its breath heavy with illness. Phearson’s body was statue-still, his hands carved to civilised containment, his suit straight, his face empty, but his breath was all animal bursting up from within his chest. “What is the point of you?” he asked, and the words were shaped by years of polite upbringing, careful self-control, and the breath that drove it wanted to rip my throat out with bare teeth and swallow blood. “You think this doesn’t matter, Dr August? You think you die and that’s it? The world resets, bang!” A slam of his hand into the table, hard enough to make china cups bounce in porcelain saucers. “Us little men with little lives are dead and gone, and all this–” he didn’t need to move, didn’t need to do more than flick his eyes around the room “–was just a dream. Are you God, Dr August? Are you the only living creature that matters? Do you think, because you remember it, that your pain is bigger and more important? Do you think, because you experience it, that your life is the only life that gets counted? Do you?”

He didn’t shout, didn’t raise his voice, but the animal breath came fast even as his fingers tightened against their own instinct to tear. I found I had nothing. No words, no ideas, no justification, no rebuke. He stood suddenly, sharply, a breaking of a sort, though of what I didn’t dare say, the vein on his temple writhing busily beneath his skin. “OK.” He panted the word out. “OK, Dr August. OK. We’ve both got a little tired, a little frustrated… Maybe we need a break. Why don’t we take the rest of the day off and you can think about it, OK? OK,” he decided before I could answer. “That’s a plan. Great. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

So saying, he strode from the room without another word and without looking back.





Chapter 14


I had to leave.

The feeling had been growing upon me for a while, and now it reached its ultimate proof. I could see no good outcome of remaining and had to go. It would not be as simple as walking out of the front door, but then sometimes the best escape plans are the simplest.

Why, in all my years in the east, had I not bothered to learn even a little kung fu?

The question seemed ridiculous now as I sat in my room and waited for dusk. There were guards–not dressed as guards clearly, but in my time I had learned enough of the rhythms of that place to recognise no fewer than five men on duty at any given moment, loitering quietly in the background waiting for a command. At seven every evening they swapped shifts, and the new team was usually still digesting its evening meal. That made them sloppy, slower and a little too relaxed. The land beyond my window was a mix of gorse and heather, and the milkman when he made his delivery had the thick accent of the North. I didn’t need much more than that. I had been a groundsman raised in these parts; I had lived and died by this soil in my first life and knew how to survive on a moor. Phearson, for all his resources and his men, struck me as a city boy not used to the wild hunt. All I needed was to get beyond the walls.

As the land began to turn to a faded grey and 7 p.m. approached, I gathered up what resources I could. A kitchen knife I had stolen from dinner, a metal cup and a small metal plate purloined from the kitchen, a box of matches, bar of soap, toothbrush, toothpaste and a couple of candles. Phearson had been careful: there was little else readily available to an eager thief. He had given me paper to write down my recollections; on it I wrote two letters ready for my departing. I wrapped everything in my blanket and tied it to my back with strips of the sheet from my bed. At five minutes past seven, as the last light began to fade across the moor, I eased open my bedroom door, feeling every bit a ridiculous child, and headed downstairs.