The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 59

My thirteenth life began…

…exactly as it always had.

Berwick-upon-Tweed, the ladies’ washroom. After all the drama I’d been half wondering if I’d wake up the son of a king. If there was any form of divine justice in this universe, it was clearly taking its time in getting round to the affairs of the kalachakra.

The usual process. Passed over to Patrick and Harriet, raised as their own. I began to reclaim memory by the age of three and was, I am informed, a remarkably quiet child of very little note. Aged four I was on the verge of full faculties, and by my sixth birthday I was ready to go out into the world and declare to all members of the Cronus Club the simple truth of Vincent’s plans and the things he would do to achieve them.

I wrote to London, to Charity Hazelmere and the Cronus Club, telling them everything. Vincent Rankis, the quantum mirror, Russia–everything. I felt that there was no time to bother with the whole rigmarole of removing me kindly from my family, so informed Charity that I would be stealing the necessary money and writing myself a suitably adult-sounding letter, and making my own way to Newcastle to explain everything to her in person. All she needed to do was wait for my telegram and meet me at the station. This haste and urgency, I later realised, probably saved my life.

I received no reply, nor expected one. Charity was always reliable in matters of infant kalachakra. I stole some shillings from Rory Hulne’s desk, wrote myself a very fluent and eloquent letter informing any readers that the bearer of this note was heading to school in London and should be assisted by any willing adults in his path, and, armed with my best–and indeed, only–pair of boots and a sack of stolen fruit, I set off for Newcastle. Getting transport from the local village was impossible–far too easy to confirm with my parents whether they had given me permission for my adventure–but by walking through the night I reached, of all places, Hoxley, where once I had fled from Franklin Phearson and his interest in the future, hundreds of years ago. By presenting my letter and earnestly informing the postmistress that I was an orphan bound for London, I was given not only a ride on the back of her rattling truck, along with two yews and a lazy Labrador, but also some hot bread and lard to see me through.

At Newcastle I went straight to the telegram office. Getting my telegram sent was difficult, mostly because the desk was too high for me to reach, but a kindly lawyer waiting in the queue lifted me up to perch on the counter’s edge as I explained firmly in my piping voice what my mission was, presented my letter and announced I was to wait for my aunt. After some hesitation, my message was sent, and the stationmaster asked me if I had a place to stay for the night. When I said no, he tutted and said it wasn’t right for a boy so young to travel alone, and he was thinking of calling the police, but his wife commanded him to leave me alone and, at her behest, I was given a blanket and a pot of soup and told I could stay as long as I wanted in the office behind the ticket counter, and she’d keep an eye out for my aunty. I thanked her, not least because having to deal with adults’ endless interest in a lone six-year-old boy travelling to London would have been tedious.

I waited.

The longest Charity had ever taken between receiving my telegram and reaching Newcastle was eleven hours, and on that occasion heavy snow had disrupted her journey. After eight hours the stationmaster’s wife asked me if I had anywhere else to go, or if I knew anyone, and the stationmaster tutted again and said he was definitely going to call the police, because it wasn’t right at all, not at all this sort of funny business. I asked to go to the toilet and crawled out the back window while they stood outside.

I stood guard the next day on the hill overlooking the railway bridge within easy running distance of the station. With every train that crawled in from the south, I slunk down to the platform’s edge to look for Charity.

Charity did not come.

I admit I was at a loss. In all my time with the Cronus Club Charity had been a trusty staple of my youth, or if she had not, someone else had come in her stead. And now… I was completely bewildered. A reliable support had been pulled out from beneath me, a crutch on which I hobbled through the hardest part of my life. Should I write again?

Caution instantly advised against it. There were too many questions unanswered, too many dangers still lurking. Vincent had wanted to know my point of origin, but as I was his elder the implication was clear–he must have a colleague, someone older than either him or me, who was capable of killing kalachakra in the womb. The realisation that this must be so suddenly made the preservation of my greatest and only secret essential–under no circumstances must Vincent or his potential, unseen associates learn where I came from. My mind raced. Had I revealed too much in my letters to Charity? My intent hadn’t been to disguise my origins; it was merely the case that she and I were so practised in the art of lifting me out of my childhood I hadn’t felt any great need to expound further on the theme. What about past lives? I had given addresses–never my true address, merely locations near enough to the hall for me to monitor the mail–for previous letters to extract me from my childhood. Could they reveal my location? Certainly they would narrow the search down uncomfortably. It wouldn’t take a great deal of research to find boys of an appropriate age and quality in such an isolated area.

Then again, was I in any formal records? My illegitimacy, for so much of my life a curse, was suddenly a great blessing, for it occurred to me that there could well be no formal indication of my existence. My biological father would not acknowledge me, and my foster-father despised paperwork nearly as much as he raged whenever candles burned down needlessly, which was to say, disproportionately. Would anyone have even made any effort to prove I existed?

I had memories of my first life, when such things had mattered to me–memories of trying to draw my pension, of having to pay National Insurance for the very first time, bureaucracies confused by my existence. Even the name I gave myself was not true. I was no more Harry August than I was Harry Hulne; by the strict letter of the law I was the son of Lisa Leadmill, died 1919, who gave me no name more than a few syllables whispered on a bathroom floor.

But the simple fact was, I was not dead.

I had not been terminated before I was born.

If Vincent was making efforts to find me in this life, if he was sending out an ally–maybe several–who were older than himself, then clearly they had not succeeded in determining my true point of origin, and I did not think I had given enough information to Charity for them to do so.

And what of Charity?

What of her fate? Why did she not come?

This last matter, more than any other, prompted me to my course of action. I sneaked back into Newcastle station and boarded the first train to London.

I didn’t buy a ticket.

No one prosecutes a six-year-old for fare-jumping.

Back to London.

London in 1925 was a city on the verge of change. In Stoke Newington the day I arrived the mayor installed a new horse trough for passing beasts to drink at, and within a few hours of its ceremonial opening it was struck by a car that lost control on the corner. Everyone knew that change was coming, but as no one quite knew what shape that change would be, society seemed to wobble, balancing on a precipice, the old clinging on with one hand as the new pushed and shoved with the other. Costermongers fought with grocers, Labour with Liberal, while the Tories stayed aloof, reluctantly resigned to the reforms that were inevitable but tactfully hoping their rivals would push through the most controversial measures. Universal suffrage was the banner of the moment, as women who’d fought for political equality now turned their attention to social equality–the right to smoke, drink and party like any man about town. It was everything that my grandmother Constance would not have approved of, but then she had never really approved of anything since the 1870s.

It was easy for a boy to pass through these streets. Packs of infant thieves still abounded in the alleys and outside the brothels around King’s Cross, and Holborn, for all its aspirant imperial grandeur, was as yet all façade and no belly. I moved with confidence, eyed up by the coppers but not stopped, heading deeper into the city, in search of the Cronus Club. The coal-soaked air turned white stone black; even the newer buildings were already scrawled with initials and messages scraped into the dirt. But there was the passage where the Cronus Club had been, where I had first met Virginia that warm summer’s day at the height of the Blitz, and we had talked of time and protocol, and lounged between the dust sheets. There the door, and there no sign. Not a brass plaque. Nothing at all.

I knocked anyway.

A maid in a stiff white apron and hat that was three parts frill to one part headpiece answered.

“Yeah?” she demanded. “What you want?”

I lied instinctively. “Do you buy oranges?” I asked.

“What? No! Push off!”

“Please, ma’am,” I blurted. “Finest Cronus oranges.”

“Piss off, you little tyke,” she retorted and, for good measure, gave me a half-hearted prod with her foot as she slammed the door shut in my face.

I stood, stunned, in the street, staring at nothing.

The Cronus Club was gone. I looked frantically for signs, for clues, messages left in iron, in stone, hints in any form as to where it could be–nothing. Turning wildly in the street I looked up for a notch in a gutter, for any smear of a suggestion, and saw a curtain twitch overhead.

My heart froze.

But of course.

Stupid stupid stupid.

Of course, even if you’d destroyed it, you’d leave watchers on the Cronus Club to see who came out of the woodwork.

Well, I’d come out of the woodwork all right, with the intelligence of the idiot child I appeared to be.

I didn’t try to fight, didn’t try to see who was looking at me from behind the grubby brown curtain overhead. I simply put my head down and ran.