Lost in a Good Book

12. At Home with My Memories

Since I was still on official leave pending the outcome of the SO-1 hearing, I went home and let myself into my apartment, kicked off my shoes and poured some pistachios into Pickwick’s dish. I made some coffee and called Bowden for a long chat, trying to find out what else had changed since Landen’s eradication. As it turned out, not much. Anton had still been blamed for the Charge of the Light Armoured Brigade, I had still lived in London for ten years, still arrived back in Swindon at the same time, still been up at Uffington picnicking the day before. Dad had once said that the past has an astonishing resistance to change, he wasn’t kidding. I thanked Bowden, hung up and painted for a while, trying to relax. When that failed I went for a walk up at Uffington, joining the sightseers who had gathered to watch the smashed Hispano-Suiza being loaded on to a trailer. The Leviathan Airship Company had begun an inquiry and volunteered one of their directors to accept charges of corporate manslaughter. The hapless executive had begun his seven-year term already, thus hoping to avoid an expensive and damaging lawsuit for his company.

I returned home, fixed myself some supper and then flopped in front of the telly, switching to Toad News Network.

‘—the Czar’s chief negotiator has accepted the Foreign Minister’s offer of Tunbridge Wells as war reparations,’ intoned the anchorman gravely. ‘The small town and two-thousand-acre environs would become a Russian-owned enclave named Botchkamos Istochnik within England and all citizens of the new Russian colony would be offered dual nationality. On the spot for TNN is Lydia Startright. Lydia, how are things down there?’

The screen changed to Toad News Network’s pre-eminent reporter in the main street of Tunbridge Wells.

‘There is a mixture of disbelief and astonishment among the residents of this sleepy Kent town,’ responded Startright soberly, surrounded by an assortment of retired gentlefolk carrying shopping and looking vaguely bemused. ‘Panic warm-clothing-shopping has given way to anger that the Foreign Secretary could make such a decision without mentioning some sort of generous compensation package. I have with me retired cavalry officer Colonel Prongg. Tell me, Colonel, what is your reaction to the news that you might be Colonel Pronski this time next month?’

‘Well,’ said the colonel in an aggrieved tone, ‘I would like to say that I am disgusted and appalled at the decision. Appalled and disgusted in the strongest possible terms. I didn’t fight the Russkis for forty years only to become one in my retirement. Myself and Mrs Prongg will be moving, obviously!’

‘Since Imperial Russia is the second-wealthiest nation on the planet,’ replied Lydia, ‘Tunbridge Wells may find itself, like the island of Fetlar, to be an important offshore banking institution for Russia’s wealthy nobility.’

‘Obviously,’ replied the colonel, thinking hard, ‘I would have to wait to see how things went before coming to any final decision. But if the takeover means colder winters, we’ll move back to Brighton. Chilblains, y’know.’

‘There you have it, Carl. This is Lydia Startright reporting for Toad News Network, Tunbridge Wells.’

The scene switched back to the studio.

‘Trouble at Mole TV,’ continued the anchorman, ‘and a bitter blow for the producers of Surviving Cortes, the channel’s popular Aztec-conquering re-enactment series, when, instead of being simply voted out of the sealed set of Tenochtitlan, a contestant was sacrificed live to the Sun God. The show has been cancelled and an inquiry has been launched. Mole TV were said to be “sorry and dismayed about the incident”, but pointed out that the show was “the highest rated on TV, even after the blood sacrifice”. Brett?’

The other newsreader appeared on-screen.

‘Thank you, Carl. Henry, a two-and-a-half-ton male juvenile from the Kirkbride herd, was the first mammoth to reach the winter pastures of Redruth at 6.07 p.m. this evening. Clarence Oldspot was there. Clarence?’

The scene changed to a field in Cornwall where a bored-looking mammoth had almost vanished inside a scrum of TV news reporters and crowds of well-wishers. Clarence Oldspot was still wearing his flak jacket and looked bitterly disappointed that he was reporting on hairy, once extinct herbivores and not the Crimean front line.

‘Thank you, Brett. Well, the migration season is truly upon us and Henry, a two-hundred-to-one outsider, wrong-footed the bookies when—’

I flicked channels Name That Fruit!, the nauseating quiz show, appeared. I flicked again to a documentary about the Whig political party’s links to radical Baconian groups in the seventies. I switched through several other channels before returning to the Toad News Network.

The phone rang and I picked it up.

‘It’s Miles,’ said a voice that sounded like a hundred push-ups in under three minutes.

‘Who?’

‘Miles.’

‘Aaah!’ I said in shock. Miles. Miles Hawke, the owner of the boxer shorts and the tasteless sports jacket.

‘Thursday? You okay?’

‘Me? Fine. Fine. Completely fine. Couldn’t be finer. How are you?’

‘Do you want me to come round? You sound kinda odd.’

‘No!’ I answered a little too sharply. ‘I mean, no thanks—I mean we saw each other only, um—’

‘Two weeks ago?’

‘Yes. And I’m very busy. God, how busy I am. Never been busier. That’s me. Busy as a busy thing—’

‘I heard you went up against Flanker. I was concerned.’

‘Did you and I ever—’

I couldn’t say it but I needed to know.

‘Did you and I ever what?’

‘Did you and I—’

Think, think.

‘Did you and I ever… visit the mammoth migrations?’

Damn and blast!

‘The migrations? No. Should we have? Are you sure you’re okay?’

I started to panic—and that was daft, given the circumstances. When facing people like Hades I didn’t panic at all.

‘Yes—I mean no. Oops, there’s the doorbell. Must be my cab.’

‘A cab? What happened to your car?’

‘A pizza. A cab delivering a pizza. Got to go!’

And before he could protest I had put the phone down.

I slapped my forehead with the palm of my hand and muttered:

‘Idiot… idiot… idiot!’

I then ran around the flat like a lunatic, closing all the curtains and switching off the lights in case Miles decided to pop round to see me. I sat in the dark listening to Pickwick walking into the furniture for a bit before deciding I was being a twit and elected to go to bed with a copy of Robinson Crusoe.

I fetched a torch from the kitchen, undressed in the dark and climbed into bed, rolled around a bit on the unfamiliar mattress and then started to read the book, somehow hoping to repeat the sort of semi-success I had enjoyed with The Flopsy Bunnies. I read of Crusoe’s shipwreck, his arrival on the island, and skipped the dull religious philosophising. I stopped for a moment and looked around my bedroom to see whether anything was happening. It wasn’t, the only changes in the room were the lights of cars sweeping around my bedroom as they turned out of the road opposite. I heard Pickwick plock-plocking to herself, and returned to my book. I was more tired than I thought and, as I read, I lapsed into slumber.

I dreamt I was on an island somewhere, hot and dry, the palms languid in the slight breeze, the sky a deep blue, the sunlight pure and clear. I trod barefoot in the surf, the water cooling my feet as I walked. There was a wrecked ship, all broken masts and tangled rigging, resting on the reef a hundred yards from the shore. As I watched I could see a naked man climb aboard the ship, rummage on the deck, pull on a pair of trousers and disappear below. After waiting a moment or two, and not seeing him again, I walked farther along the beach, where I found Landen sitting under a palm tree gazing at me with a smile on his face.

‘What are you looking at?’ I asked him, returning his smile and raising my hand to shield my eyes from the sun.

‘I’d forgotten how beautiful you were.’

‘Oh, stop!’

‘I’m not kidding,’ he replied as he jumped to his feet and hugged me tightly. ‘I’m really missing you.’

‘I’m missing you, too,’ I told him, ‘but where are you?’

‘I’m not exactly sure,’ he replied with a confused look. ‘Strictly speaking I don’t think I’m anywhere—just here, alive in your memories.’

‘This is my memory? What’s it like?’

‘Well,’ replied Landen, ‘there are some really outstanding parts but some pretty dreadful ones too—in that respect it’s a little like Majorca. Would you care for some tea?’

I looked around for the tea but Landen simply smiled.

‘I’ve not been here long but I’ve learned a trick or two. Remember that place in Winchester where we had scones that were warm from the oven? You remember, on the second floor, when it was raining outside and the man with the umbrella—’

‘Darjeeling or Assam?’ asked the waitress

‘Darjeeling,’ I replied, ‘and two cream teas. Strawberry for me and quince for my friend.’

The island had gone. In its place was the tea room in Winchester. The waitress scribbled a note, smiled and departed. The rooms were packed with amiable-looking middle-aged couples dressed in tweed. It was, not surprisingly, just as I remembered it.

‘That was a neat trick!’ I exclaimed.

‘Naught to do with me!’ replied Landen, grinning. ‘This is all yours Every last bit of it. The smells, the sounds—everything.’

I looked around in silent wonderment.

‘I can remember all this?’

‘Not quite, Thurs. Look at our fellow tea-drinkers again.’

I turned in my chair and scanned the room. All the couples were more or less identical. Each was a middle-aged couple dressed in tweed and twittering in a Home Counties twang. They weren’t really eating or talking coherently; they were just moving and mumbling to give the impression of a packed tea room.

‘Fascinating, isn’t it?’ said Landen excitedly. ‘Since you can’t actually remember anything about who was here, your mind has just filled in the room with an amalgam of who you might expect to see in a teashop in Winchester. Mnemonic wallpaper, so to speak. There is nothing in this room that won’t be familiar. The cutlery is your mother’s and the pictures on the walls are all odd mixes of the ones we had up in the house. The waitress is a compound of Lottie from your lunch with Bowden and the woman in the chip shop. Every blank space in your memory has been filled with something that you do remember—a sort of shuffling of facts to fill in the gaps.’

I looked back at our fellow tea-takers, who now seemed faceless.

I had a sudden—and worrying—thought.

‘Landen, you haven’t been around my late teenage years, have you?’

‘Of course not. That’s like opening private mail.’

I was glad of this. My wholly unlikely infatuation for a boy named Darren and my clumsy introduction to being a woman in the back of a stolen Morris 8 was not something I wanted Landen to witness in all its chilling glory. For once I was kind of wishing I had a bad memory—or that Uncle Mycroft had perfected his memory erasure device. Landen poured the tea and asked:

‘How are things in the real world?’

‘I have to figure out a way into books,’ I told him ‘I’m going to take the Gravitube to Osaka tomorrow and see if I can track down anyone who knew Mrs Nakajima—it’s a long shot, but who knows.’

‘Take care, won’t y—’

Landen stopped short as something over my shoulder caught his eye. I turned to see probably the last person I wanted to be there. I quickly stood up, knocked my chair over backward with a clatter and aimed my automatic at the tall figure who had just entered the tea room.

‘No call for that!’ Acheron Hades grinned ‘The way to kill me here is to forget about me, and there is about as much chance of your doing that as forgetting little hubbies here.’

I looked at Landen, who shrugged.

‘Sorry, Thurs. I meant to tell you about him. He’s quite alive here in your memories—but harmless, I assure you.’

Hades told the couple next to us to scram if they knew what was good for them and then sat down, tucking into their unfinished seed cake. He was exactly as I had last seen him on the roof at Thornfield—his clothes were even smoking slightly. I could smell the dry heat of the blaze at Rochester’s old house, almost hear the crackle of the fire and the unearthly scream of Bertha as Hades threw her to her death. He gave a supercilious grin. He was relatively safe in my memories and he knew it—the worst I could do was to wake up.

I reholstered my gun.

‘Hello, Hades,’ I said, sitting back down again. ‘Tea?’

‘Would you? Frightfully kind.’

I poured him a cup. He stirred in four sugars and observed Landen for a bit with an inquisitorial eye before asking:

‘So you’re Parke-Laine, eh?’

‘What’s left of him.’

‘And you and Next are in love?’

‘Yes.’

I took Landen’s hand as though to reinforce the statement.

‘I was in love once, you know,’ murmured Hades with a sad and distant smile. ‘I was quite besotted, in my own sort of way. We used to plan heinous deeds together, and for our first anniversary we set fire to a large public building. We then sat on a nearby hill together to watch the fire light up the sky, the screams of the terrified citizens a symphony to our ears.’

He sighed again, only this time more deeply.

‘But it didn’t work out. The course of true love rarely runs smooth. I had to kill her.’

‘You had to kill her?’

He sighed. ‘Yes. But I spared her any pain—and said I was sorry.’

‘That’s a very heart-warming story,’ murmured Landen.

‘You and I have something in common, Mr Parke-Laine.’

‘I sincerely hope not.’

‘We live only in Thursday’s memories. She’ll never be rid of me until she dies. The same goes for you—sort of ironic, isn’t it? The man she loves, the man she hates!’

‘He’ll be returning,’ I replied confidently, ‘when Jack Schitt is out of The Raven.’

Acheron laughed.

‘I think you overestimate Goliath’s commitment to their promises. Landen is as dead as I am, perhaps more so—at least I survived childhood.’

‘I beat you fair and square, Hades,’ I said, handing him a jam pot and a knife as he helped himself to a scone, ‘and I’ll take on Goliath and win, too.’

‘We’ll see,’ replied Acheron thoughtfully, ‘we’ll see.’

I thought of the Skyrail and the falling Hispano-Suiza.

‘Did you try and kill me the other day, Hades?’

‘If only!’ he answered, waving the jam spoon in our direction and laughing. ‘But then again I might have done—after all, I’m here only as your memory of me. I sincerely hope that I am, perhaps, not dead, and out there somewhere for real, plotting, plotting…!’

Landen stood up.

‘C’mon, Thurs. Let’s leave this clown to our scones. Do you remember when we first kissed?’

The tea room was suddenly gone and in its place was a warm night in the Crimea. We were back at Camp Aardvark watching the shelling of Sevastopol on the horizon, the finest fireworks show on the planet if only you could forget what it was doing. The sound of the barrage was softened almost into a lullaby by the distance. We were both in battledress and standing together but not touching—and by God, how much we wanted to.

‘Where’s this?’ asked Landen.

‘It’s where we kissed for the first time,’ I replied.

‘No!’ replied Landen. ‘I remember watching the shelling with you but we only talked that evening. I didn’t actually kiss you until the night you drove me out to forward CP and we got stuck in the minefield.’

I laughed out loud.

‘Men have such crap memories when it comes to things like this! We were standing apart like this and desperately wanting to just touch one another. You put your hand on my shoulder to pretend to point something out and I slid my hand into the small of your back like… so. We didn’t say anything but when we held each other it was like… like electricity!’

We did. It was. The shivers went all the way to my feet, bounced back, returned in a spiral up my body and exited my neck as a light sweat.

‘Well,’ replied Landen in a quiet voice a few minutes later, ‘I think I prefer your version. So if we kissed here then the night in the minefield was—’

‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘yes, yes, it was.’

And there we were, sitting outside an armoured personnel carrier in the dead of night two weeks later, marooned in the middle of probably the best-signposted minefield in the area.

‘People will think you did this on purpose,’ I told him as unseen bombers droned overhead, off on a mission to bomb someone to pulp.

‘I got away only with a reprimand as I recall,’ he replied. ‘And anyway, who’s to say that I didn’t?’

‘You drove deliberately into a minefield just for a leg-over?’ I asked, laughing.

‘Not any old leg-over,’ he replied. ‘Besides, there was no risk involved.’

He pulled a hastily drawn map out of his battledress pocket.

‘Captain Bird drew this for me.’

‘You scheming little shitbag!’ I told him, throwing an empty K-ration tin at him. ‘I was terrified!’

‘Ah!’ replied Landen with a grin. ‘So it was terror and not passion that drove you into my arms?’

I shrugged. ‘Well, maybe a bit of both.’

Landen leaned forward, but I had a thought and pressed a fingertip to his mouth.

‘But this wasn’t the best, was it?’

He stopped, smiled and whispered in my ear:

‘At the furniture store?’

‘In your dreams, Land. I’ll give you a clue. You still had a leg and we both had a week’s leave—by lucky coincidence at the same time.’

‘No coincidence,’ said Landen with a smile.

‘Captain Bird again?’

‘Two hundred bars of chocolate but worth every one.’

‘You’re a bit of a rake, y’know, Land—but in the nicest kind of way. Anyhow,’ I continued, ‘we elected to go cycling in the Republic of Wales.’

As I spoke the APC vanished, the night rolled back and we were walking hand in hand through a small wood by the side of a stream. It was summer and the water babbled excitedly among the rocks, the springy moss a warm carpet to our bare feet. The blue sky was devoid of clouds and the sunlight trickled in among the verdant foliage above our heads. We pushed aside low branches and followed the sound of a waterfall. We came across two bicycles leaning up against a tree, the panniers open and the tent half pegged out on the ground. My heart quickened as the memories of that particular summer’s day flooded back. We had started to put the tent up but stopped for a moment, the passion overcoming us both on the warm ground. I squeezed Landen’s hand and he put his arm round my waist. He smiled at me with his funny half-smile.

‘When I was alive I came to this memory a lot,’ he confided to me. ‘It’s one of my favourites, and amazingly your memory seems to have got most things correct.’

‘Is that a fact?’ I asked him as he kissed me gently on my neck. I shivered slightly and ran my fingers down his naked back.

‘Most—plock—definitely.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing—plock-plock—why?’

‘Oh, no! Not now of all times!’

‘What?’ asked Landen.

‘I think I’m about to—’

‘—wake up.’

But I was talking to myself. I was back in my bedroom in Swindon, my memory excursion annoyingly cut short by Pickwick, who was staring at me from the rug, leash in beak and making quiet plock-plock noises. I gave her a baleful stare.

‘Pickers, you are such a pest. Just when I was getting to the good bit.’

She stared at me, little comprehending what she had done.

‘I’m going to drop you round at Mum’s,’ I told her as I sat up and stretched. ‘I’m going to Osaka for a couple of days.’

She cocked her head on one side and stared at me curiously.

‘You and Junior will be in good hands, I promise.’

I got out of bed and trod on something hard and whiskery. I looked at the object and smiled. It was a good sign. Lying on the carpet was an old coconut husk—and better than that, there was still some sand stuck to my feet. My reading of Robinson Crusoe hadn’t been a total failure after all.