Forget Yourself (4 page)

“Sure. I’ll boil some water. Back soon.” The bucket was full enough for three cups and I carried it over to the fire tap.

Each of the four corners came with their own fire tap, and as a result fire was more plentiful than water. There were no explanations there, nothing the book could tell us about them. Four fire one water. Our world was mysterious, set in place by a people to whom we had once belonged but no longer remembered. All we had was this: four fire taps and one water. They had always been here.

What did the world look like at the beginning? It was no secret—

“Here you go,” a nameless neighbour offered me the tap and kettle, accidentally sloshing some of his lukewarm water onto my knee as he left, noticing but remaining wordless.

I returned as Tanned and Burberry pulled apart from an embrace. Tanned turned to me and unleashed his news: Ketamine had a job. I offered them the two cups of hot water, whilst Burberry plopped the bags in, scanning my face for a reaction.

“You’d have found out if you’d been meeting people. You should get over to the courtyard more.” Tanned flashed his teeth at me, which gleamed white against dark skin, the one tooth a dirty brown-grey.

“Right.”

“Don’t you want to meet anyone?” He took a sip from the broken mug he clutched. “Anyone at all?”

“I don’t know.”

Tanned looked concerned. “You should get back on your feet, soon as possible.”

I hadn’t heard that before, but it sounded familiar. Tanned squinted his eyes in thought, trying to pull something from his mind. Burberry turned her intense gaze toward him.

“Do you remember—”

“Wait—”

“Do you remember something?” she ventured.

“I don’t know. It’ll come to me if it comes to me,” Tanned replied, turning attention back toward me. “The point is you can’t remain alone.”

“Pilsner does.” I wondered how he could be so relaxed about the possibility of a memory.

“Well, you know about him—”

“Oh, stop it.” I snapped, failing to hide my amusement. “You can’t talk about him like that.”

Tanned released a sharp, hard laugh. Burberry scrunched her face in discomfort, so Tanned pressed his lips to hers. She parted them, allowing entry to his tongue.

I couldn’t resist asking.

“What’s her job?”

“Huh?” Tanned mumbled into Burberry’s mouth.

“Ketamine’s job?”

“Oh.” He stopped. “She makes recipes now. She’ll write down what we can cook.”

“That’s a job?”

“Apparently so.”

“Right,” I murmured, unsure. A quick breeze stung my bare arms and more cloud threatened the sky, churning it into the threat of rain.

“Her crime is the same. She didn’t want it moved.”

“Why?” I asked, but Tanned didn’t need to answer, so he didn’t. The smell of pumpkin sliced through the air. Someone was cooking. Mine had started to mush. Perhaps I should find someone: food was better with a partner, after all. Another pause and more clouds gathered, hovering above us, intent on useless showers. Water always pooled at the foot of my bed, drips which would tickle my feet and make me giggle.

“Look, she’s gonna be hurt and looking for something to do. Maybe she remembered something, but it’ll be the shock,” Tanned offered.

Burberry stirred.

“It’s getting late, we should be going. Goodbye Blondee,” she called, elongating the syllables of my name. Blo-o-onde-e-e. Sing-song. Si-i-ing
so-o-ong. She shifted her thin frame up from the deckchair, slinging it over her arm. Tanned followed. Burberry kept her gaze on me as she left, so I smiled at her, willing friendliness. They’d taken their tea with them. I watched them vanish before returning to my hut.

The fabric was still soaking in the bucket. I pulled it out and went to pin it to the window frame. As the slanted window was also wall and roof I had to use eight pins to hold it up. I left one third of the window uncovered. The curtain would provide shade. Light shone orange, gold, and purple over my hut and I rested the changing colours on my skin, basking in the glory of light from wet fabric. I noticed there were two colourless circles cast, one on the resin box I used as a kitchen and the other on my pillow.

There was little else to do. I had no job, and all those anyone could remember were already taken—like Frederick the artist, and Rings who sewed things. I was unemployed, which meant little except boredom—I had no idea what I had enjoyed before this new life. Did I read books? What were they about? I thought of books on a shelf, an endless array of smart blue spines, gold lining without words. They all looked like our book, our one book. Perhaps I sang, but how did singing work, when it can’t be proven that tunes have words? Ketamine had been unemployed as well. We had enjoyed each other.

That evening I awoke, huddled under a collection of clothes and blankets: the night was cold. The noise drifted toward and away, a blunt thud thud thud, dim like blood pulsing through my ears. I lay on clammy foam, wondering if the dull clanging noise was real or not. The darkness was heavy. I had so much space. I didn’t want it. Promises of sleep seemed to slip away.

It was my time with the book tomorrow. Thud, thud, thud. Was that noise there? Through the window I could see the crisp moon. It drifted toward and away.

Then I saw it, as clearly as with my eyes.

A woman made of stone. A woman made of stone with an arrow in her hand and a dog at her feet. The stone woman’s lips were painted berry red, her cheeks flushed pink. She looked at me.

The stone woman.

The stone woman was poised in elegant action. Her arrow was raised above her head, a bow strapped to her back. She was hunting, hunting some unknown creature.

Behind her were dogs, a dozen of them, all racing, bounding, snarling forward; all hard, all immobile.

The woman was looking back at them now, face frozen in wide-toothed grin, eyes fixed and alert. Two dogs were ahead of her, frozen, unmoving.

Her mouth was open. She unleashed a cry in silence. Her bow was in her hand.

Her bow was aimed high, the stone arrow tense, ready.

The arrow was gone.

She and her dogs were gone.

It was a memory and it was mine. I tried to hold onto her, to grasp at her, but her image faded and she’d come away in soft wet clumps between my fingers, fizzling away into the sweat-soaked air.

All that was left was me, the bed, the hut and the compound, thick arching walls to keep the world away. I had remembered something, however strange and wordless. I had remembered something.

The foam coiled around my skin, hugging my ears and hair, sticky and tickling my arms and my legs. It was too much. I carefully shifted myself from my bed, to my sheet-door and into the night air. The moon coyly hid itself behind rapid clouds, occasionally flashing me, spreading glimpses of naked light over the ground. Crunched sand and dry grass massaged my feet as I made my way past silent huts. With each step my eyes grew heavier, my limbs more leaden.

There was a whiff of fruit-filled stench, of decomposing, of decay and entropy.

Then it was gone. All I could trust were my heavy legs, carrying me toward—carrying me toward the courtyard. That’s what I wanted, to rinse my face in water. That’s what I wanted.

THE BOOK LAY PEACEFULLY BEFORE
me, my fingertips gently pressed against the rough paper. Slices of sunlight worked their way into the magic of the book’s very own hut, worming their way around sheets of corrugated iron. In here it was always cool and dry. In here, far away from life and houses, it was quiet.

The book was serene.

It knew it could rest before me, that I would never have a chance to befoul its pages with ink-tainted memory. I had no pen. I wouldn’t be writing my memory of the stone woman. I was just going to read as always.

“You’re just going to read as always.”

That’s what Pilsner had told me. He’d found me in the courtyard, prone, slumped over the water tap. The sun had stabbed at my eyes with the hot anger of day. He’d been stood above me.

“Can I get to the tap?”

“Tap?” It was wrapped in my arms and pressed against my chin. My neck ached. “Oh, right. Sorry.”

“No problem,” his shadow moved toward me as I uncrossed my stiff arms and brought myself to my knees, eyes stuffed with sleep.

“So. Did you sleep here?” Pilsner asked.

“No.” Pause. “I suppose I did.”

I couldn’t tell if he was laughing or tutting in response. Either way it was better to keep my lips pressed shut. They were dry and kept sticking together.

“Have some of this,” he’d offered, thrusting a cup with a mouthful of water to me.

“Thank you,” I waited for him to ask what I had been doing there.

“It’s your turn with the book today.”

“Right, there’s actually something—”

“Why were you sleeping here, then?”

Words caught in my throat. I wasn’t sure I had an explanation. I just had the floating-fuzzed image of the woman, which perhaps I’d never even seen.

“I had a memory.”

“Really.”

“I did, I saw this—”

“Are you sure you had a memory?”

I examined him through narrow eyes.

“It’s just,” Pilsner spoke to me slowly, “well, she who lived with you only just had a memory herself and—”

“No, not—”

“If you’ll let me speak,” his still voice hardened. “It’s natural you would want a memory of your own. It doesn’t make it real.”

Real. The least decided what was real from our old lives, though why they’d have better memories or a better sense of judgement than anyone else was unclear.

Tiny scraps of dust danced around the book. Pilsner had searched me, making sure I had no hidden, secret pen, or pencil, or crayon. I knew he was there, outside the door, old ears straining for the sound of ink scratching paper.

I flipped each page over, delicately, as though they were made of crystal. I wanted to see if anything had changed since I had last been there. Ketamine’s memory would be in there, I just had to find it.

New words were written in red pen, squatting at the end of Love:

You should get back on your feet at soon as possible.

It was Tanned’s. Page 16. The letters were neat, carefully looped at the tips. He had taken his time. Underneath were bullet points, less neat, written by someone else. ‘Don’t mourn a break-up for too long’, ‘It shouldn’t take longer than the next ration’, ‘You leave your house the next day’. Next ration had come, next ration had gone. Fine, I told myself. I would smile and move my lips in sync with words on how everything was fine. Changes weren’t unusual. Eventually it would all be perfect. Eventually we would live as we had before.

I closed the book and opened it to a random page.

Criminals go to prison. They’re told how long by a judge. Sometimes they’re put to death.

Page 137. One of the more informative passages, actually telling us something about the outside world, though the information was useless in ours, where no-one ever committed a crime other than what they started with. But these were popular, the ones that didn’t mean everyone had to change the way they did something. But what had we done that was so wrong we had to lose our minds? Our old lives, ourselves. If this was a prison it wasn’t like the flat image I had been left with.

I flicked through the next pages with less care, watching the cascade of coloured words crash about one another. Large blue letters called my attention. ‘Entertainment’. A few more pages and a smaller heading, again in blue. Songs.

Songs are a melody, with more than one instrument. Bands play together and make songs.

I always said songs were more than that: they had words. Another false memory. Really, really I thought they just didn’t want their notes sullied by voices. That was understandable.

More sections. ‘Bodies’, ‘Disputes’ and ‘Food’. Food. I flipped the pages more slowly.

Food is grown in farms, covered by plastic sheeting, lit by bright bulbs.