The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 21

Death holds no fear for us.

It is rebirth where the terror lies. Rebirth, and the lingering fear that no matter how much our bodies are renewed, our minds cannot be saved.

I was in my third life when I realised my illegitimacy, standing above the coffin of Harriet August, staring into the face of my father–my biological father–on the other side of the soil.

There was no outrage or indignation. I felt, perhaps out of grief as much as rational reasoning, gratitude to Harriet and Patrick for raising me, even as the revelation settled on my soul that I could not be blood of their blood. I studied my biological father coolly, as one might study any sample which one suspects of being a placebo rather than the cure. I wondered not why or how, but what. What if he was like me?

I must admit, my scrutiny was hardly informative. With Harriet dead and my adopted father retreating ever deeper into his loneliness and grief, I increasingly took over his duties, forsaking school altogether to become the all-purpose boy of the estate. The Great Depression was coming upon us and the Hulne family had not been wise in its investments. My grandmother Constance had a level fiscal head on her shoulders, but also a great pride which resulted in a conflict of interests. She hoarded coin on fuel and repairs to the grounds, pinched at every penny and derided any and all expense, yet would every year throw a feast for all relatives and distant friends of the Hulnes to come and hunt on the lands, which single event would easily consume two times the expenditure she had saved. Of my aunts, Alexandra married a pleasant if essentially bland civil servant, and her sister Victoria continued in a lifestyle of excess and scandal which my grandmother simply refused to acknowledge. The frost between my biological father and his wife kept both of them from any great expense. She wasted most of her time in London, an activity permitted on the basis that it was her own money or the money of her family that she wasted; he spent most of his days in the countryside or dabbling, unwisely, in local politics, and when the two shared a house or a bed they did so with the same stiff efficiency and impassioned rigour of my grandmother’s yearly feast. In this way the family declined, first by vacancies in the household not being filled, and then by servants being laid off altogether. My adopted father was kept on as much for pity for his position as the services he rendered the family; also, I began to realise, for a certain debt owed by the Hulnes to the Augusts for a child raised without complaint.

I earned my keep, as I had in my first life, and was in fact of rather more use now that I had so many years to draw upon. I knew the land almost better than my father, and had over the years also acquired skills such as fixing an engine, patching a pipe, tracing a faulty cable back to its home, which seemed at the time marvellously advanced technological skills, especially for a teenage boy. I went out of my way to ensure that I was everywhere and nowhere, indispensible and unseen, as much to avoid the monotony of my life as to observe what I now understood to be my biological family. My grandmother studied the art of ignoring me; Aunt Alexandra was rarely in the house to perceive me; Victoria ignored me without having to try; and my father Rory stared until he was caught staring, though whether it was curiosity or guilt which motivated his gaze I was at a loss to say.

I looked at this man, stiffly dressed and stiffer born, a moustache sitting on his top lip like an old family pet, which he cared for secretly in a little green net, and I wondered if he was like me. When they fired the butler and I became a cheaper form of house servant, I would stand behind his chair at the head of the table and watch him cut his overcooked chicken into smaller and smaller pieces, never touching them until every last piece was square. I observed the one ritual kiss on the cheek he gave his wife when she arrived, and the one ritual kiss he gave her on the other cheek when she departed the day after, her wardrobe renewed for a trip back to town. I heard Aunt Victoria whisper when the weather was cold that she had just the thing for the pain in his hip, where in the war he’d been briefly grazed and which his mind had confounded to a greater thing, an injury I hardly begrudged for I too had fought in a war and knew the power of such things. Aunt Victoria knew a funny little man in Alnwick, who knew another excellent man in Leeds, who received regular shipments from Liverpool of a new-fangled thing, diacetylmorphine, just the stuff, just what he needed. I watched through the door the first time my father took it, and saw him shake and twitch and then grow still, the spit running down the side of his face from his open jaw and pooling just in front of his ear. Then my aunt caught me peeping and screamed that I was a foolish ignorant boy, and hit me with the back of her hand and slammed the door.

The police arrested her little man in Alnwick three days later. They received an anonymous letter written in a brisk, unstately hand. They were only to receive one other letter in the same hand, from the same anonymous source, who warned that Mr Traynor, the bauxite man, liked to touch boys, and that enclosed was the testimony of Boy H confirming the same. Experts, had they been called, might have noted a marked similarity between the adult’s hand and the boy’s. As it was, the bite marks on the thumb of Mr Traynor when he was taken into questioning were confirmed as a child’s and, though no more notes were forthcoming, it was suggested that he move swiftly on.

In my first life my biological father–even if he showed interest in me which I did not perceive–almost never went so far as to express it to me outright. In my second life I was too busy committing suicide to deal with any external affairs, but in my third there was enough deviation in my behaviour to induce a deviation in his. Unlikely as it is in light of my future careers, we found ourselves most united in our attendance at church. The Hulnes were Catholic, and their hereditary shame at the same had in recent years translated into a sort of decisive pride. A chapel had been built and maintained at their cost and for their benefit, which locals attended with very little interest in its denomination but for the advantages of proximity. The parson was a rather too irreverent man by the name of the Reverend Shaeffer, who had forgone his rigid Huguenot upbringing for the more spectacular joys of Catholicism and all its perks. This lent a certain glee to all his duties, as if, freed from the burden of habitually wearing black, he had resolved instead to always wear purple. Neither I nor my father went when we felt it was likely we would have to interact with him, which circumstance forced us instead to interact with each other.

Our relationship was hardly a bloom in spring. Our first few encounters at the chapel were silent, glances of recognition and no more, not even a nod. If my father had cause to wonder what an eight-year-old boy was doing in this house of God, he presumably concluded it was grief, while I wondered if there was not an air of guilt which drove my father to such piety. For my part, I increasingly found my father’s attendance at the chapel an annoying distraction, then a curiosity, for I was embarking on that most clichéd journey of the ignorant in an attempt to understand my situation, and attempting to commune in my soul with some form of deity.

My reasoning was the standard line of all of us who kalachakra, those who journey through our own lives. I could find no explanation for my predicament, and having concluded that no one else I had ever encountered was experiencing this journey through their own days again and again, logic demanded that I consider myself either a scientific freak or in some way touched by a power beyond my comprehension. In my third life I had no scientific knowledge, save that shallow stuff acquired from reading glossy magazines printed in the 1970s with predictions of nuclear destruction, and could not imagine how my situation was scientifically possible. Why me? Why would all of nature have conspired to put me in this predicament, and was there not something unique, something special about the journey I was taking which implied a purpose, more than some random collision of sub-atomic events? This premise accepted, I turned towards the most popular supernatural explanation available, and sought answers from God. I read the Bible from cover to cover, but in its talk of resurrection I could find no explanation for my situation, unless I was either a prophet or damned, and thin enough evidence either way to make a decision on that front. I attempted to learn of other religions, but at that time and in that place data on alternative belief systems was hard to collate, especially for a child barely expected to be able to scratch his own name, and so, more out of default convenience than any particular leaning, I found myself turning to the Christian god as having not much else to go on. Thus you could find me in the chapel, still praying for an answer to a nameless question, when,

“I see you come here often.”

My father.

I had wondered, could my situation be inherited? But if it were so, would my father not have said as much? Could any man be so shallow, so captured by his pride and the times, as not to speak to his son of a predicament so horrific as this? And then again, if my situation were inherited, why would there be such consistency of behaviour from my father, where surely knowledge would induce change?

“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 naïveté.

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.