The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (30 page)

Only later–much, much later–do I permit myself to crawl into the furthest reaches of the garden, sink on to my hands and knees in the damp soil, and weep.

Vincent.

My enemy.

My friend.

Of us two I am the better liar.

But you–you have always been a better judge of men.

Was it the final test? The ultimate proof? Could I look into the eyes of my wife as she kissed another man, and shake her hand, and smile, and say how happy I was for you both, receive her kiss on my cheek and hear her voice and know that she was yours, my enemy, my friend, without revealing all? Could I smile as she was led down the aisle, sing my way through the hymns in the church, take the photos as she cut the cake? For Harry, Harry is a journalist, Harry must be good at taking photos, no? Could I watch you whisper words into her ears, and see her laugh, and smell you on her skin, and not rise up in fury, because you took her, not for love, not for passion or companionship or even that therapeutic half-hour in the eight-hour shift. You took her because she was mine. Could I smile at this?

It would appear that I could.

I know now that there is something dead inside me though I cannot remember exactly when it died.

We near the end, you and I.

It occurs to me that in all this I have not told you much of my adopted father, Patrick August, or, more specifically, of how he dies. Harriet, kindly Harriet, dies between my sixth and eighth birthdays; Rory Hulne, as you know, dies poor, although not always in the same place. Patrick, silent Patrick, who sat across the fire from me in his grief at his wife’s departure, dies in the 1960s, dissatisfied with his lot. He has never remarried in all the lives I’ve known him, and often the slow decline of the Hulnes nets him in their web, and he finds himself poor, pension-less, alone. I send him money, and each time I do I receive a stiff letter in reply, almost the same word for word in every life.

Always, when I send him money he refuses to spend it for at least six months, but hoards it in a box under his bed. I suspect he keeps it to return to me some day, but poverty takes its toll and he is at last forced to spend it for his own survival. I tried once sending him enough for a new house, but he returned my cheque with a letter politely informing me that such wealth was best spent on the young, and he had enough to keep himself in health. I am careful not to visit him for at least two months after any donation, for fear he will mis-interpret my appearance as a demand for gratitude. Even to this day, after all these years, I am still not sure of the best way to make my father’s old age a happy one.

My father.

Throughout all this I have referred to Rory Hulne as “my father”, which in a strictly genetic sense he is. He has been present through my life, a constant in the shadows, inescapable, unavoidable; and having no better term to describe him than “my father” so he has been described. I could perhaps call him a soldier, a master, a lordling, a man consumed by jealousy, a creature of regret, a rapist, but as each statement would require some sort of conditional, I settle instead for what he is–my father.

And yet he is not half the father that I believe Patrick to have been. I do not deny Patrick’s flaws, for he was a cold man, distant in my youth, harsh after Harriet’s departure. He used the rod more than a kind man would, and left me to my own devices more than a loving man might, but not once, not in any life which I have lived, did he deploy the ultimate cruelty, and tell me the truth of myself. Not once did he claim to be anything but my father, even as my features evolved into the looks of the man who denied any link with me. A truer man, a man of his word, I have never met.

I went back to that place in my fourteenth life. I had just witnessed Jenny marry Vincent, and of course–but of course–I stayed around and played the part of the excellent friend, smiling and dissembling, laughing at their jokes, smiling at their fondness, indulging their affection, and only when six, seven months had gone by and my credit was assured did I sadly report that I must return briefly to England. Vincent offered to pay for my flight–
by now I was deep in his pocket and very much his man–but I politely refused, saying that this was a private affair. When I left London airport, two men shadowed me to the train. Losing a tail without making it apparent that you’re losing a tail can be a tricky business. I used a combination of errand-running, a guaranteed way to force any surveillance into an error, and well-planned spontaneous attendance at private, invitation-only functions to whittle down both the tenacity and morale of my shadowers. By the time I boarded a train for Berwick-upon-Tweed I was confident that I had lost them, without ever once having to break into a run.

Patrick was dead; so was Rory Hulne, and Constance and Alexandra, and all the faces of my youth. Hulne House had been bought by a man who had made his fortune importing heroin from the Golden Crescent and who fancied himself a country gentleman, keeping a dozen dogs and transforming the rear of the house into a giant white-tiled swimming pool for his wife and guests. Most of the grand old trees had been felled, and instead thick-leafed hedges, trimmed into grotesque figures of humans and animals, adorned the old paths and gardens. To prevent calamity, I knocked on the door of the house and asked if I could look around the grounds. I had worked here, I explained, as a serving boy, back in the day, and the drug dealer, delighted by the notion of tales of past glories and country living, gave me a personal tour, explaining all the things he’d done with the place, and how much better it was now that every room had a TV. I paid my way by telling stories of ancient indiscretions and broken promises, sly gossiping in the 1920s and the parties of the 1930s as the shadow of war drew over us, and after, when I had earned my keep, I slunk down to the old cottage where Patrick had lived, and found it overwhelmed with ivy. There was still some furniture inside, an old table, a mattress-less bed, but all things of value had been stripped away by thieves or nature. I sat between the brambles as the sun went down and imagined the conversation I would have with my silent father one day. He would sit one side of the fire, I the other, and, as was the way of it, neither of us would speak for a good long while until at last, I may say,

“I know you are not my father.”

I tried the words out loud, just to see how they felt.

“I know you are not my father, but you have been more a father to me than ever my biological father was. You took me when you did not need to, and kept me when you did not want to, and never once broke down and spoke the truth. You could have destroyed me, the child of your master, and you must have been tempted so many times, in ways which you cannot yourself remember, to end it all, to throw me back from where I came. But you never did. And for that, more than the food on my plate or the warmth of your fire, you have been my father.”

I think those are the words I would have said, if I had ever found the courage to break Patrick’s silence and say them. If there was any point in them being spoken out loud.

Perhaps in another life.

In 1983, as the first International Space Station fell burning to earth with the loss of all on board, a glorious attempt at brilliant new science gone tragically wrong as the nations of the earth scrambled to prove themselves better than their neighbours, tens of thousands died in the Maldives and Bangladesh in the worst summer floods of their history. As the seas heated around the polar ice caps, it was apparent even to the most conservative observers that the great technological surge, as Vincent’s tampering was increasingly known, was causing more harm to humanity than good. A journalist standing in a field in Wisconsin where five dancing tornadoes spun beneath a lightning-edged sky declared to camera, “Mankind has learned to carve with the tools of nature, but can’t yet see the sculpture it will create,” and as the first water wars erupted in the Middle East and central Asia, I began finally to see how Christa’s prophecy, delivered hundreds of years ago in a hospital room in Berlin, could come true.

The world is ending, as it always must. But the end of the world is getting faster.

Vincent was at the heart of it, but for all that I had passed his
ultimate test, stood before him and proved that I could not possibly have my memory, or else surely I would have gone mad, still he was not exposing me to the secrets of his research, the work that was killing the world. Perhaps, I reflected with a degree of irony, the presumed memory loss I was suffering led him to assume I could be of no use to him in its undertaking. Which, in fairness and by this logic, I could not.

He kept me close, however, having drawn me in with wealth and fine living. In time I left my job as a journalist and worked for him instead as an all-purpose dogsbody. Investigator, adviser, occasional social secretary, I was what anyone else would have dubbed an overgrown personal assistant; he called me “my Secretary of State”.

I flew out to meet people he was considering investing in, lobbied senators, buttered up scientists whose work he was interested in and even, on a few occasions, got him out of paying parking tickets incurred when he decided to stop on double red lines in the middle of city-centre streets. He appeared to respect both my work and my judgement, backing off from projects which I considered unwise and embracing those I regarded as interesting or useful. I must admit, I was occasionally even engaged by the work. By 1983, technologies which I hadn’t even seen in 2003 were starting to hit the markets, and I spent every spare minute I could digesting and analysing them, as I felt sure Vincent was, both of us striving to acquire a leading edge for our future lives. Jenny was a constant at all social gatherings. I hid my feelings, but I think she must have sensed something, for one day, when Vincent was in the kitchen finding another bottle of wine, she turned to me across the dining table and said, “Harry, I have to ask this. Do you like me?”

The question went to the base of my spine and sat there like a parasite, gnawing on the white nerves beneath the bone. “W-why do you ask?” I stammered.

“Please–just answer the question. Quickly, please.”

“Yes,” I blurted. “I like you. I… I have always liked you, Jenny.”

“All right then,” she said calmly. “That’s all right, then.”

And that, it seemed, was all there was to say.

In 1985 I began to experience pain, heaviness in my legs, and after a few weeks of ignoring it, decided to trot off to the doctor for my usual diagnosis of multiple myeloma. The doctor earned my respect for the skill with which she gave the information to me, unfolding it in several careful diagnostic stages, first with abnormalities which
might be
, then with masses which
appeared to be
, and finally, having primed the patient for receipt of the dire news through rounds one and two, with the calm statement that it was, and I should be prepared for a difficult fight. I was so touched by the manner in which she handled this last, crucial phase that at the end of it I stood up and shook her by the hand, complimenting her on her grace and skill. She flushed and mumbled me out of the door with far less verbal poise than that with which she’d informed me I was dying.

Vincent, when he received the news, was outraged. “We must do something! What do you need, Harry? How can I help? I’ll make a call to Johns Hopkins at once–I’m sure I’ve bought them a ward or something recently…”

“No, thank you.”

“Nonsense, I insist.”

He insisted.

Wearily, I went through the motions.

As I lay in a white hospital gown designed to institutionalise any free-spirited individual as quickly as possible, listening to electromagnets power up around my body, I considered my next step. Certainly I had made progress in this life–I had observed the way Vincent worked, studied his contacts, his methods, his people, and, most important of all, I had convinced him that I was utterly harmless. From a man he’d had killed only a few lives ago, I was now his trusted assistant, confidant and friend.

I was not, however, yet privy to the vital information that I truly required to bring Vincent down and stop the quantum mirror being manufactured, and I either had to endure many long years
of questionable medical procedures while trying to find out, or I would die and an opportunity would be missed.

This being so, I resolved to gamble, the most dangerous gamble of my lives.

“I’m not taking the chemo.”

1986. We were on the balcony of one of Vincent’s many New York apartments, Central Park to the south, the lights of Manhattan beyond, a sky flecked with grey-brown clouds. The air at street level in New York was getting difficult to breathe, as it had become in most big cities. Too many bright ideas had happened too fast–too many cars, too many air conditioners, too many freezers, too many mobile phones, too many TVs, too many microwaves–and not enough time to consider the consequences. Now New York belched brown sludge into the skies and green slime into the waters around the island, and so it was with the rest of the earth.

The world is ending.

We cannot stop it.

“I’m not taking the chemo,” I repeated a little louder, as Vincent stirred lemon peel at the bottom of a glass.

“Don’t be ridiculous Harry,” he blurted. “Of course you’ve got to do the chemo, of course!”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not.”

He sat down on the recliner next to mine, setting the two glasses–one for him, one for me–on the low metal table between us. He looked up at the sky and, taking his time, said, “Why?”

“Chemotherapy is a prison sentence. It is six months of house arrest, of nausea without being able to vomit, of a heady heat without being able to find a deep enough cold, of pain with no remedy, of isolation and discomfort, and at the end of it I will still be here, and I will still be dying.”

“You can’t know that!”

“I can,” I replied firmly. “I do. I will.”

“But Harry—”

“I know it,” I repeated. “I give you my word–I know it.”

Silence a while. He was waiting perhaps. I took a deep breath and got it out of the way. I had told so few people my secret–no one since the attack on the Cronus Club–the fear and nervousness I experienced were genuine and probably only helped.

“What would you say if I told you that this is not the first time I have had this disease?”

“I’d say what the hell do you mean, old thing?”

“I’ve been through this once before,” I replied. “I had chemotherapy, radiotherapy, drugs–everything–but developed metastases in my brain.”

“Jesus, Harry! What happened to you?”

“It’s simple,” I replied. “I died.”

Silence.

The traffic grumbled below; the clouds scudded above. I sat and could almost hear Vincent’s brain considering where to go. I let him do his own thinking. It would be informative to see where he came down.

“Harry,” he said at last, “do you know of a thing called the Cronus Club?”

“No. Listen. What I’m trying to tell you—”

“You’re telling me that you have lived this life before,” he said, voice deep and weary. “You were born an orphan and you lived and you died, and when you were born again, you were still you, precisely where you started. That is what you are saying, isn’t it?”

My turn to be silent.

My turn to think.

I let it stretch and stretch and stretch between us. Then, “How? Tell me how. Please?”

He sighed again and stretched, his legs creaking as he moved. He wasn’t so young now, was Vincent Rankis–this was the oldest I’d ever seen him. “Come with me, Harry,” he said. “There’s something I need to show you.”

He stood up and headed into the apartment. I followed, our drinks left abandoned on the table. He padded through into his
bedroom, opened the wardrobe and reached through a collection of coats and shirts. For a moment I thought he was getting a gun, for I had naturally searched this place while he was out and found two guns–one kept in a drawer by the bed, one at the back of the linen cupboard. He didn’t. Instead, a square metal box was pulled out, a padlock on the front. The box was new–at least new since the last time I’d searched the place–and at my expression of curiosity he smiled reassurance and took it through to the dining room. He had a long glass table, surrounded by eight uncomfortable glass chairs, and he gestured me to sit in one while he unlocked the box and pulled out its contents.

My stomach curled up in my belly, breath caught on the edge of my lips. At the sound, his eyes flickered to me, curious, and I had to disguise my indiscretion with, “You haven’t said how you know.”

He half-shook his head and put the contents of the box on the table.

It was a crown of wire and electrodes. Leads trailed down from the back, and connectors criss-crossed its surface like hairs on Medusa’s head. The technology was advanced–more advanced than I had ever seen–but the purpose was easy enough to deduce. It was a cortical trigger, a mental bomb–a very advanced device for the Forgetting.

“What is it?” I asked.

He carefully laid it down in front of me so I could look. “Do you trust me?” he asked.

“Yes, absolutely.”

A Forgetting–would he really do this? Would he dare?

“Harry,” he explained softly, “you asked me how I know about your… predicament. How I know about your past life, why I believe you when you say that you have died once before.”

“Tell me.”

“What if… what if,” he murmured, “you and I have met before? What if I knew, even when I first met you, that this was not your first life, that you are… special? What if I told you that we have been friends, not for ten, twenty or thirty years, but for
centuries. What if I told you that I have been trying to protect you for a very, very long time. Would you believe me?”

“I… don’t know. I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“You trust me?” he repeated urgently.

“I… yes. Yes, I do, but listen, all this…”

“I need you to put this on.” His hand pressed gently against the crown of wires. “There is so much more to you, Harry, than you know, so much more. You think this is… your second? Maybe your second life? But it’s not. You’ve lived for hundreds of years. You have… so much experience, so much to offer. This will help you remember.”

What a look of doe-eyed sincerity, what an expression of passionate concern.

I looked from Vincent to the crown and back again.

Clearly it was not to help me remember.

Clearly he intended that I should forget.

All that time, all those years–and worse, a more troubling question. In 1966, using the technologies of the time, Vincent had forced me to go through the Forgetting, and I had remembered. But this–this technology was at least fifty years ahead of that and I had no idea, no idea at all, whether my consciousness could survive this process intact.

“You trust me, Harry?”

“This is a lot to take in.”

“If you need time to think…”

“What you’re saying…”

“I can explain everything, but this way you can remember it for yourself.”

Pride.

How dare he think I’m so stupid?

Rage.

How dare he do this to me again?

Terror.

Will I survive?

Can I remember?

Do I want to remember?

The world is ending.

Now it’s up to you.

Vengeance.

I am Harry August, born New Year’s Day 1919.

I am sixty-eight years old.

I am eight hundred and ninety-nine.

I have directly killed seventy-nine men, of whom fifty-three died in war of one kind or another, and indirectly murdered through my actions at least four hundred and seventy-one people who I know of. I have witnessed four suicides, one hundred and twelve arrests, three executions, one Forgetting. I have seen the Berlin Wall rise and fall, rise and fall, seen the twin towers collapse in flames and dust, talked with men who scrambled in the mud of the Somme, listened to tales of the Crimean War, heard whispers of the future, seen the tanks roll into Tiananmen Square, walked the course of the Long March, tasted madness in Nuremberg, watched Kennedy die and seen the flash of nuclear fire bursting apart across the ocean.

None of which now matters to me half as much as this.

“I trust you,” I said. “Show me how this thing works.”