The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 64

I met Akinleye several times after her Forgetting. Once, in the life that immediately followed, I went to the school where she was studying, shook her hand and asked her how she was doing. She was a bright teenage girl, full of prospects. She was going to move to the city, she said, and become a secretary. It was the greatest ambition a young girl could have, a towering pinnacle of hope, and I wished her luck with it.

In the life after that I visited her again, this time when she was a child of seven. She’d come to the attention of the Accra Cronus Club–who in any case were keeping an eye out in that general area–as a child her parents called mad. They’d tried everything, from the shrieks of witch doctors to the chanting of imams, and still, they cried, Akinleye, their beautiful daughter, was mad. Already, the Accra Club proclaimed, Akinleye was a suicide threat.

I went to visit her before that could happen and found she had been given over to the care of a doctor who kept his patients shackled to their beds. Epileptics, schizophrenics, mothers who’d seen their children die, men with limbs hacked off, driven mad by infection and sadness, children in the last throes of cerebral malaria, their bodies twitching, were all kept together in the same ward, to be treated with one spoonful of syrup and one spoonful of lemon juice every half-hour. My fury at the doctor was so great that, on leaving the place, I requested the Accra Club to have it torn down.

“It’s like this all over the country, Harry,” they complained. “It’s just the times!”

I wouldn’t take no for an answer, and so, reluctantly, and to get rid of me, they had the building knocked down and a neat, square hospital put up in its place, where one fully trained psychiatrist cared for thirty patients, whose numbers swelled to nearly four hundred in the first three months.

Akinleye, undersized and underfed, stared at me wildly when I came to visit.

“Help me,” she sobbed. “God help me, I am possessed by a demon!”

A seven-year-old girl, rocking in despair, possessed by a demon.

“You’re not, Akinleye,” I replied. “You are whole; you are yourself.”

I took her with me back to Accra that very night, to the Cronus Club, whose members greeted her as the old friend she was and gave her the greatest meal of her lives so far, and showed her luxury, and told her she was sane and well, and welcome among them.

Many years later I met Akinleye in a clinic in Sierra Leone. She was tall and beautiful, trained as a doctor and wearing a bright purple headscarf in her hair. She recognised me from our meeting in Accra and asked me to join her on the terrace for lemonade and memories.

“They tell me that I chose to forget my life before,” she explained as we sat and watched the sun set over the shrieking forest. “They tell me that I had grown tired of who I was. It is odd knowing all these people have known me for hundreds of years, yet they are still strangers. But I tell myself it is not me they have known–it is the last me, the old me, the me that I have forgotten. Did you know that me, Harry?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I did.”

“Were we… close?”

I thought about it. “No,” I replied at last. “Not really.”

“But… from your perspective, knowing me as you did, do you think I–she–made the right decision? Was she right to choose to forget?”

I looked over at her, young and bright and full of hope, and recalled the old Akinleye dying alone, laughing as a maid danced out into the waters off the bay of Hong Kong. “Yes,” I said at last. “I think you were.”