SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (2 page)

'You really don't remember, do you? This one's worse than usual.' As they reached the end of the corridor, Alfred took him by the arm and led him quickly through a curtain and into an unlit room. At the end of that room was a door with only an ancient lift-up metal handle to close it. Alfred opened the door. It was dark outside.

'And remember,' Alfred said as Owen stepped out, 'bring me some news from the other kingdom.

*

'In amnesia, implicit memory is often left untouched. But I should say something here. We've come to understand that much of what used to be termed amnesia can be a lot more complicated than a single psychological slippage. Sometimes there's a neurophysiological event we call a screen occlusion. It's as though the mind decides to dispense with the whole enmeshed memory system as too much of a burden. It's like steam being released from a boiler. It voids the system of all the pressure that's built up. No mental faculties have been lost, only put into temporary suspension.'

'How temporary?' Sylvie asked, though she didn't really need to.

'No way of knowing. It varies from case to case. Often depends on the extent of the trauma. In most cases the period is relatively short, until at least some form of restoration of memory begins. Often, as I said, the implicit memory can remain pretty much unaffected. So that, for example, a musician would still remember his music, still play his instrument, but he wouldn't be able to find his way to the concert hall, or even remember the last meeting with his wife an hour ago. But he wouldn't get a note wrong in the
Hammerklavier Sonata,
if he'd been able to play it before the onset of the amnesia.

'It's a paradox, a riddle, this relationship between explicit and implicit memory. Implicit memory seems to be in some cases largely imperturbable. Certain motor functions, certain skills. Some things, certain structures of the mind, are not displaced by amnesia, even anterograde amnesia.

'
Claparède
's drawing-pin experiment established that. The patient knew that a concealed sharp point was going to hurt her. She remembered the pain the following day, even though she couldn't remember the visit.'

'So what's Owen's sharp point then?'

'Either what's closing him down or what will open him up again. Often they're both the same thing.'

'Pretty certain I know what it is, either way.' She looked at the young doctor in his white coat; steel-rimmed glasses, a professional smile. She wondered what his wife was like. What a clean life they must lead. Maybe not.

'Where is he?'

'St Clare's. The hostel where he always goes. Amnesia Hotel, I call it. I phoned up. Even arranged for them to put some money in his pocket so he doesn't have to steal. No point bringing him here again, I suppose?'

The doctor shook his head. 'The pattern seems so established by now, doesn't it? After a few weeks his memory will return in full like last time.' He was turning over his notes. 'Three years ago. Five years ago. Seven years ago. Unless the trauma was something notably worse. Wouldn't want to give him any drugs, in any case: he seems to have developed his own techniques for displacing the centre of his nervous system, as it is.'

As she was leaving he put his hand on her shoulder. Such a gentle touch, not like Owen's gripping urgency. Medical not marital.

'One thing I never got to the bottom of with him. Owen's mother. What was she, exactly?'

'A succubus.' She had turned to face him. She was smiling now; he wasn't. A tiny curl of brown hair beneath his right nostril registered a failure in shaving that morning. The tiniest wisp.

'Is she still with us?'

'Not physically, no.'

*

Owen walked along the canal and then up on the city walls. Now the water was beneath him, catching lights the city threw away. He looked up at the sky. There were gods up there, amongst the wreckage of their ancient implements. Ploughs, nets, tridents. He walked on beneath the glowing graveyard. Stepped into a pub. A mesh of smoke, words like trapped animals tangled inside it. Laughter sharpened into blades. Finally he was back at the hostel.

Alfred sat on the other bed counting out pills from a bottle into the palm of his hand. And Owen started to speak, without considering the words at all.

'Quite a number of people think that medicine must be nauseous and drastic if it is to do them any good. They take strong, violent, stomach-irritating purgatives when a small dose of Holloway's Pills would restore them to perfect health without the least inconvenience or distress. Holloway's Pills suit the most delicate stomach. They are easy and agreeable to take and they never cause any griping pain, but quickly and effectively eject all impurities from the system. That is why they will suit you if you suffer from indigestion, constipation, biliousness, flatulence, or any stomach, liver or kidney disorder. Try them today and get both immediate relief and a permanent cure. But where there is rheumatism, gout or any kindred complaint, Holloway's Ointment should be used in conjunction with the pills.'

'Where did that come from?' Alfred asked.

'I don't know.' Owen was sitting on the other bed, startled at his own little speech.

'Word for word,
I
should think. A sign in a pharmacist's window.
I
remember them.'

'What?'

'Holloway's Pills. When
I
was a boy. You don't though. Too young. Done a lot of reading,
I
think, Owen, in your time.

Probably too much. Should stick to this.' Alfred held up the leather-bound Bible. 'But then I seem to remember you've read that too, haven't you? Or bits of it anyway. Research, was it, different tattoos for different hides? You'd better get some sleep.'

*

The next day after breakfast Owen went out alone again. This time he let the ticket in his pocket guide him to Chester library. He found a Bible, Alfred's book, and hunted through it quickly in a flurry. God,
he thought, seems to be a much
unrequited lover, so angry at the faithlessness of his little darlings. And with every lethal shakedown another book gets added to his scripture. More deaths; more forgiveness. He keeps setting things up so they can love Him, obey His commandments, live in peace. And they keep killing one another. Always killing one another. Owen moved on. He felt a strange craving to open other books.

Shakespeare: he looked into that large volume for more than an hour. It seemed that reality was elusive until it donned a mask; identity gained its energy by translating itself. So where had he been translated from, then? Could it really be true that a man must put an antic disposition on, so as to madden himself into action? Owen had been here before, hadn't he, just as he had been on the city walls before. Just as he'd walked beneath the shining emblems in the sky before. He went over to the other shelf.

Picked up a book called
Autobiography
by Charles Darwin. A sad man lost the most beloved member of his family, his daughter. He could no longer hear her beguiling speech. So he searched and searched through all the family archives until he arrived at ancestors with no speech at all. Then ones behind them with no souls. Beyond those were others who had no tongues. Then ones with no heads. Headless molluscs. What a melancholy genealogy. What kind of science could yearn for such amnesiac parents? Amnesiac. Now why was that word such a prompt to memory? Suddenly Owen had to be out in the air.

He stared across the square at a window filled with
ghost brides
, wrapped in white cotton, satin and silk. The Havisham Room: it filled him with dread, a dread he had no words for. What had he not done to those manikins? He walked across to the cathedral gate and before he even arrived he could hear it. The laughter, the cheering, the shouting, even though no one there was actually laughing or cheering or shouting, only leaving their traces back and forth in a mangle of space. Here was Alfred's other kingdom. Here's where the mysteries had all been played out.

A white plastic bag flipped and dawdled before catching the wind and trundling along once more: a transient ghost in its ill-fitting shroud.

And you could see them?' Alfred asked later. 'I could see them.'

'God and Lucifer.'

'Both.'

'Ranulph Higden.'

'Who?'

'Ranulph Higden, Monk of Chester. And the author of
Polychronicon.
He wrote them, so they say anyway. Even went to see the Pope to get permission for the performances. The Chester Mystery Plays. You could have seen the things you saw five hundred years ago every Whitsuntide. On the other hand, you could have seen them last year. You couldn't have seen them today, though. Most people forget the past, Owen, but you manage to forget the present. Your amnesia forms a little hole that lets the past come back to fill it, from however far away. But the present won't let you alone for long, you know. She always seems to come back to get you.'

The next day he left early, wandering in and out of the shops, a vagrant, a revenant of his own curiosity. Instruments, confections, garments: they were all slotting back in place now. The cupboard of invisible objects inside him was filling up again. The present's inventory. He stood before the antique jeweller's window: so many lives in those little gleaming emblems. Engagement rings, wedding rings pawned off after death or divorce. The ouroboros of love. What was that? He couldn't remember. A snake with its tail in its mouth? Was that what he was? Eating the endless circle of himself? There was even an eternity ring. He only hoped death had brought that one here. Otherwise eternity was so short it didn't even last for one lifetime. He went into the music shop. Watching, listening, observing once more the reality he seemed to have recently exited.

The shop assistant was silently observing an older man as he picked up one of the nastiest items in the whole shop: miniature bongos, a ten-pound piece of nonsense, constructed out of cheap plastics somewhere in the ill-paid depths of industrial China. The old man in the raincoat tapped at them tentatively, as though a couple of tiny mammals might still be locked inside. Dwarf marmosets, perhaps, thought Owen. Or Gobi rats.

'What's the skin on these?' the man enquired gravely. 'Mongolian warthog,' the assistant replied without missing a beat. 'Yak supplies have been pitiful this year. '

'How do they compare?'

'The warthog with the yak?'

'Yes.'

'Aficionados claim the skin softens quicker. You might need to re-tighten them every eighteen months. Easier on the old fingers though. For the more intimate numbers. Tito Puente wouldn't have anything else next to his palms, so I've heard.'

And he was good, was he?'

'The best.'

'I'll take them.'

'Big gig, is it?' the assistant asked as he rang up the till. 'Sorry?'

'I was wondering if Sir needed the miniature plastic Chinese bongos for a forthcoming musical event. Or is it merely a matter of private pleasure?'

'Oh, they're not for me. My grandson.'

'And how old is the little man?'

'Five. But I always try to get him something decent.'

'Yes, it's so important, isn't it?
Imagine how different life would have been if the youthful Miles Davis, asking the old man for something to blow, had been given a comb and a piece of toilet paper, instead of that beautiful trumpet.'
The assistant was looking straight at Owen, who was recovering another skill from time's abyss: he had finally remembered how to smile.

'Did he say Alpha and Omega?' Alfred asked him later at the hostel.

'The one called God did, yes.'

'He called himself Alpha and Omega?'

'And the other one called himself Lucifer. He talked about the light.'

'That's what his name means, Owen: Lucifer, bearer of light.

I think you might have known that once. Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.'

He was on the city walls again. He was part of a story, like every stone beneath his feet, but he didn't know the plot. He stared down. The bridge of sighs. Beneath that the dead men's room, hewn from rock, stinking, fetid, domicile of rats and prisoners awaiting execution, ultimate confinement before ultimate indignity. And Little Ease, a cell the size of a man, reducible even further by boards employed upon the unco
-
operative miscreant. Less than the size of a man now, but still with a man inside it. Pit and pendulum. An iron glove at hand for the coaxing. The drop. The hanging. The twitching exhibition. The crowd eating, jeering, perhaps even mourning sometimes. How did he know all this?