The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(25)

“Yes, sir.” An instinctive answer, instinctively rendered. I find as a child my default position is polite affirmation of the often unwise and frequently incorrect assumptions of my elders. On the few occasions I’ve tried rebellion I have either frustratingly been dismissed as opinionated and precocious or, on several occasions, my actions have been an excuse for the lash. What “Yes, sir” gains in neutrality, however, it lacks in social advancement, and so our conversation lagged.

At last, “You pray to God?”

I confess it took a while for the banality of this question to penetrate. Could this man, half of my own genetic material, muster nothing more? And yet to dazzle and confound the situation I replied with another round of, “Yes, sir.”

“That’s good. You’ve been raised well.”

He sounded satisfied at that, which perhaps in my enthusiasm I interpreted over-liberally as parental pleasure. Having achieved so much with our conversation it seemed as if he would leave, so I went in with, “What do you pray for, sir?”

Coming from an adult, the question would have been blunt and intrusive. From a child, unable to understand the answers that might be given, I suppose it was almost sweet, and I played this part with what I had practised in front of the mirror as my most innocent face. Regrettably, being merely young has never guaranteed me an aura of na?veté.

He considered for a long time, not so much his answer as his confession to a stranger, then smiled and chose the shallower option. “The same as all men. Fair weather, good food and the embrace of my family.”

I suspect my incredulity at these sentiments was visible on my face, for his own twitched in an uncomfortable recognition of failure and, to compensate for the same, he proceeded to ruffle my hair, awkwardly, briskly, a gesture curtailed as quickly as it had begun.

It was my first meaningful conversation with my biological father, and it was hardly an omen of good things to come.





Chapter 22


The Cronus Club is power.

Make no mistake, for that is what it is.

Laziness, apathy and a lack of interest: these are what restrain the exercise of its resources. Fear too, perhaps. Fear of what has been and what will come. It is not entirely true to say that we who are kalachakra can live our life free of consequence.

I killed myself in in my fourth life to escape Phearson and his tape machine, and in my fifth I did indeed seek the counselling that Virginia had suggested. I do not regain consciousness all at once; there is no one flash of memory being restored, but rather it is a gradual recollection that begins at my third birthday and is complete by my fourth. Harriet said I cried a lot in the early years of my fifth life. She said she had never seen such a sad infant. I realise now that, in a way, the process of recalling my previous death was almost a natural working-through of it, a reliving step by step, as my mind integrated it into who I was.

I sought counselling, as I said. Virginia was correct that the medical services would hardly do, and our chaplain, as established, was of very little use. By the time I remembered what I was, and where I had come from, I could see the beginning of Harriet’s decline, and read the gaunt recognition in Patrick’s face as his wife began to wither before his eyes. Cancer is a process on which the healthy cannot impose. I was a child and could not express myself to these two people who, in my own, slow way, I had come to love. I needed the help of a stranger, needed the means to express myself to someone else.

I wrote to my father.

He may seem an unlikely choice, an unusual confidant. Needless to say I could not tell him all–there would be no reference to my true nature, no telling of the future past or mention of my age. Rather, I penned my letters in a stiff adult’s hand, signing myself Private Harry Brookes, late of my father’s division. I wrote it as an apology, as a confession, told him that he would not remember me but that I remembered him, hoping for his understanding, his attentive ear. I told him of being captured by the enemy in the First World War, making up the details of my arrest from the books I had read and tales I had heard. I told him of being interrogated, and here I wrote it out in full: the beatings and the pain, the humiliations and the loss, the delirium and the drugs and the moment I tried to make it end. Over several months and many letters, I told him everything, adapting only the names and times to suit my confessional, and transforming my successful suicide attempt into merely suicide attempted.

“Forgive me,” I wrote at the bottom. “I did not think I would break.”

He didn’t reply for a very long time. I had given him an entirely fictional address to send his response to, knowing full well that I would be the boy sent with the mail to the post office. Private Harry Brookes poured his heart out to a distant stranger who made no reply, but I knew that what I needed was not so much the comfort of return, but to speak of what I had been. The telling was all, the reply merely a courtesy.

Yet I longed for it with a childish passion that I could not fully attribute to my hormones and physical biology. I began to grow angry in my father’s presence, knowing that he had received the letters of Private Brookes and read them, and marvelling that he did not weep and could maintain such a carapace of stone in the face of my genuine anguish. My fury must have been visible briefly on my face, for my grandmother spoke to Harriet and exclaimed,

“That boy of yours is a vile little wretch! He gives us such terrible looks!”