The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(6)

She punched me in the chest playfully and told me to stop being daft.

I said, “In a matter of weeks a scandal is going to break in the US which will topple President Nixon. Capital punishment will be abolished in England, and Black September terrorists will open fire in Athens airport.”

She said, “You should be on the news, you should.”

Three weeks later Watergate broke. It broke gently at first, aides sacked across the sea. By the time capital punishment had been abolished, President Nixon was in front of Congressional hearings, and when Black September terrorists gunned down travellers in Athens airport, it was obvious to all that Nixon was on the way out.

Jenny sat on the end of the bed, shoulders bowed and head low. I waited. It was an expectation that had been four lifetimes in the making. She had a bony back and a warm belly, hair cut deliberately short to challenge the conceptions of her surgeon colleagues, and a soft face that loved to laugh when no one was looking. She said, “How did you know–all of this–how did you know it would happen?”

“I told you,” I replied. “This is the fourth time I’ve lived it, and I have an excellent memory.”

“What does that mean, the fourth time? How is it possible, the fourth time?”

“I don’t know. I became a doctor to try and find out. I’ve run experiments on myself, studied my blood, my body, my brain, tried to see if there is something in me which… isn’t right. But I was wrong. It’s not a medical problem, or if it is, I don’t yet know how to find the answer. I would have left this job long ago, tried something new, but I met you. I have for ever, but I want you now.”

“How old are you?” she demanded.

“I’m fifty-four. I’m two hundred and six.”

“I can’t… I can’t believe what you’re saying. I can’t believe that you believe.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you a spy?”

“No.”

“Are you ill?”

“No. Not by any handbook definition.”

“Then why?”

“Why what?”

“Why would you say these things?”

“It’s the truth. I want to tell you the truth.”

She crawled on to the bed next to me, took my face into my hands, stared deeply into my eyes. “Harry,” she said, and there was fear in her voice, “I need you to tell me. Do you mean what you are saying?”

“Yes,” I replied, and the relief of it nearly burst me open from the inside out. “Yes, I do.”

She left me that night, pulling her coat on over her shift and slipping into a pair of wellington boots. She went to stay with her mother, who lived in Northferry, just beyond Dundee, and left me a note on the table saying she needed time. I gave her a day then called; her mother told me to stay away. I gave it another day and called again, begging Jenny to ring me. On the third day, when I rang the phone had been disconnected. Jenny had taken the car, so I caught the train to Dundee and a taxi the rest of the way. The weather was beautiful, the sea perfectly still against the shore, the sun low and pink and too interested in the moment to want to set. Jenny’s mother’s cottage was a little white thing with a child-sized front door set back from the edge of a charcoal cliff. When I knocked, her mother, a woman perfectly designed to fit through that implausibly low door, answered and held it open on the chain.

“She can’t see you,” she blurted. “I’m sorry, but you have to go away.”

“I need to see her,” I begged. “I need to see my wife.”

“You have to leave now, Dr August,” she exclaimed. “I’m sorry it’s this way, but you clearly need help.” She closed the door sharply, the latch clicking behind the creaking white wood. I stayed there and hammered on the door, then on the windows, pressing my face against the glass. They turned off the lights inside so I wouldn’t know where they were, or perhaps hoping I’d get bored and go away. The sun set and I sat on the porch and wept and called out for Jenny, begged her to speak to me, until finally her mother phoned the police and they did the talking instead. I was put in a cell with a man brought in for burglary. He laughed at me and I throttled him to within a few heartbeats from death. Then they put me in a solitary cell and left me there for a day, until at last a doctor came to see me and asked how I was feeling. He listened to my chest, which I pointed out in my calmest possible voice was hardly a rational approach to diagnosing mental illness.

“Do you consider yourself mentally ill?” he asked quickly.

“No,” I snapped. “I can just recognise a bad doctor.”

They must have rushed the paperwork through, because I was taken to the asylum the very next day. I laughed when I saw it. The name on the door was St Margot’s Asylum. Someone had scrubbed out “for Unfortunates”, leaving an ugly grammatical gap. It was the hospital I had thrown myself from in my second life, at the age of seven years old.





Chapter 7


Mental health professionals are, by the 1990s, expected to themselves seek regular counselling and observation for emotional and mental well-being. I tried being a psychologist once, but found the problems I had to diagnose either overwhelming or too subjective as to bear consideration, and the tools at my command either childish or overblown. In short, I did not have the temperament for it, and when I was committed to St Margot’s Asylum for the second time in my existence, albeit the first time in this life, I felt a mixture of fury and pride that my sanity, cultivated despite severe provocation, could be so misunderstood by the ignorant mortals around me.