The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

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 fucking 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.

I wondered if she’d like to have an affair with me.

She asked when I stopped being afraid of her, to get so lippy on the dance floor.

I said it was a lifetime ago, but she was still beautiful and I knew all her secrets.

“Did you not hear the part about my friends, colleagues, family, kids?”

Yes, I’d heard all of it, and all of it weighed with me when I spoke to her, cried out to walk away, leave her alone, for her life was complete and needed no more complexity. How much greater, I said, must the attraction I felt towards her be, that I could know all this and still whisper sweet allurements in her ear?

“Allurements? Is that what you call it?”

Run away with me, I said, just for a night. The world will turn, and all things will end, and people forget.

For a moment she looked tempted, and then her husband came along and took her hand, and he was loyal and loving and completely sane and what she wanted, and her temptation wasn’t so much about me, as about the adventure.

Would I have done things differently, had I known what was to befall Jenny Munroe?

Perhaps not.

Time, it transpires, is not so good at telling after all.