The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(9)

Naturally, by this point I’d lost track of time, and thus the diagnostic purpose of the exercise was rather left behind.





Chapter 8


Jenny visited.

They tied me to the bed and shot me through with a sedative when she came.

I tried to speak, to tell her what they were doing, but I couldn’t.

She wept.

She washed my face, and held my hand, and wept.

She was still wearing her wedding ring.

At the door she spoke with Dr Abel and he said he was concerned about my deterioration and was considering a new kind of drug.

I called out for her and made no sound.

She kept her back turned to me when they locked the door.


Then Dr Abel was sitting too close to me, the tip of his pen resting on his lower lip, and he said, “Tell it to me again, Harry?”

There was an urgency in his voice, more than just the fascination with his own treatments.

“End of the oil embargo,” I heard someone reply. “Carnation revolution in Portugal, government overthrown. Discovery of the terracotta army. India gets the nuclear bomb. West Germany wins the World Cup.”


Ugly Bill was sitting in an orange haze. He said, “Not so smart now not so smart are you so smart so smart you think you’re so smart but you’re not so smart here you’re not so smart smart is nothing smart is shit I’m smart I’m smart I’m the smart one here…”

He leaned in close to dribble on my face. I bit his nose hard enough to hear the cartilage crack and found it very, very funny.


Then there was a voice, a stranger’s voice, cultured and mildly American.

“Oh no no no no no,” it said. “This won’t do at all.”





Chapter 9


Jenny.

She has a Glaswegian accent that her mother tried to educate out of her and failed. Her mother believed in getting on, her father believed in staying behind, and as a result they both remained exactly where they’d always been until the day after Jenny’s eighteenth birthday, when they finally separated, never to see each other again.

I met her again, in my seventh life.

It was at a research conference in Edinburgh. My badge proclaimed, “Professor H. August, University College London” and hers, “Dr J. Munroe, Surgeon”. I sat three rows behind her through an incredibly tedious lecture on the interaction of calcium ions in the periphery nervous system and watched the back of her neck, fascinated. I hadn’t seen her face and couldn’t be sure, but I knew. In the evening there were drinks and a meal of overcooked chicken and mashed potatoes with soggy peas. There was a band playing medium misses of the 1950s. I waited until the two men she was with grew drunk enough to dance, leaving her alone with the unclean plates and ruffled tablecloth. I sat down next to her and held out my hand.

“Harry,” I explained.

“Professor August?” she corrected, reading my badge.

“Dr Munroe,” I replied. “We’ve met before.”

“Have we? I can’t quite…”

“You studied medicine at Edinburgh University, and lived for the first year of your time in a small house in Stockbridge with four boys who were all frightened of you. You babysat for your next-door neighbour’s twins to make a few more pennies, and decided that you had to be a surgeon after seeing a still-beating heart working away on the operating table.”

“That’s right,” she murmured, turning her body a little further in the chair to look at me. “But I’m sorry, I still don’t remember who you are.”

“That’s OK,” I replied. “I was another one of the boys too scared to talk to you. Will you dance?”

“What?”

“Will you dance with me?”

“I… Oh God, are you trying a line with me? Is that what this is?”

“I am a happily married man,” I lied, “with family in London and no ill intentions towards you. I admire your work and dislike seeing a woman left alone. If it will make you happier, as we dance we can discuss the latest developments in imaging technology and whether genetic predisposition or developmental sensory stimuli are more important in the growth of neuron pathways during childhood and pre-teens. Dance with me?”

She hesitated. Her fingers rolled the wedding ring round and round her finger, three diamonds on gold, gaudier than what I’d bought her in another life, a life that had died a long time ago. She looked towards the dance floor, saw safety in numbers and heard the band begin another tune designed to maintain strict social boundaries.

“All right,” she said and took my hand. “I hope you’ve got your biochemical credentials polished.”


We danced.

I asked if it was hard, being the first woman in her department.

She laughed and said that only idiots judged her for being a woman–and she judged them for being idiots. “The benefit being,” she explained, “that I can be both a woman and a f*cking brilliant surgeon, but they’ll always only be idiots.”

I asked if she was lonely.

“No,” she said after a moment. She was not. She had peers she liked, colleagues she respected, family, friends.

She had two children.

Jenny had always wanted children.