The Power of Forgetting (20 page)

‘Early?’

‘In history.’
said Janey turning to me. She is still holding my hand. Suddenly, I
become intensely aware of her attention, if only when incidentally
focused on me. She seems wistful.

‘Janey?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you like
to walk a little way?’

Her brows draw
together in puzzlement; ‘Okay....’ she said after a moment.

We cross the
little area in front of the tent and follow the path back to the
area above the steep slope. She breaks her hand out of mine and
goes to inspect the big rock that I didn’t crunch into.

‘Good driving.’
She said.

‘Thanks.’ I
step closer to her. Her hair is shining by the light of a moon just
rising. She glances up and me and seems surprized by my
proximity.

‘What is it?’
she’s worried.

‘It’s alright.’
I say softly, reaching out and touching her cheek. She flinches for
and moment and blinks. She stares at me as if to work out what is
my intention. I’m wildly screaming somewhere inside my head; but
calm on the outside. Some fire. Some burning like the stars above.
Cold fire.

She steps back;
‘I think we should go in now.’ she said.

‘I’ll be here.’
I turn from her then. She can go back if she wants. I like the
stars and the burning light that boils the humanity of the cloud
fields into little fragments like cold glass. The whole forest has
a certain dark green smell to it. I was dissolving into the night
again. A night breeze brushes through the leaves and passes me
by.

‘Jared?’

‘Janey?’

‘I am still
here.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I want
to be…. I love you Jared.’

‘Don’t Janey….
please, don’t say that.’

‘Why? It’s
true. What do you mean?’

‘I can’t…. I
can’t bear it. Not right now.’ I find a rock and sit on it.

‘What is the
matter?’ she comes to sit with me, hesitant but curious.

‘I love you
too.’ I said in a flat tone.

‘Oh.’ She looks
out across the landscape. ‘Oh….’ She turns back to me.

‘I wish,’ I
said roughly, ‘I wish I wasn’t….’

‘What?’ Janey
squeezes my arm.

A suddenly turn
and grip both her arms firmly. She is so startled she doesn’t fight
me; ‘Don’t you see? You silly little girl! Don’t you understand? I
wish…. I wish I….’ I can’t speak. I am choked by this fate that
condemns me to the worst kind of love.

I let go of
her; ‘I’m sorry…. I’m so sorry,’ I am crying, for the first time in
front of Janey since that little boy I used to be. She hasn’t seen
me like this. I have been so cold. No wonder it twists out of
shape. I am a dark hole in her existence; the negative; to her
positive. She is daylight and I am night; Darkness.

‘Jared!’ Janey
hugs me tightly, ‘I am here. I won’t reject you…. I promise.’ She
sounded scared and desperate. I don’t want to hurt her. I realise I
am hurting her. It floods out of me. I want to be normal. I want to
be the sane sweet person that can be the twin brother of such a
sweet lovely girl. She is so much better than me. She is at least
expressive. You see her rant and rave, and then you can see her
concentrating and authoritative, bossy and forthright. She is best
when she is joyful; when her eyes sparkle and she walks with a
spring in her step.

‘Janey…. don’t
come near me.’ I can feel a stone weighting my chest as I speak,
‘keep your distance. We are bad for each other…. or rather; I am
bad for you.’

‘Jared….no…’

‘Go Janey. Go
back inside. You go to our friends. Say I’ll be in in ten
minutes.’

‘You are only
like this because you’re stressed.’ Her voice is soft, reasonable
and kind.

‘No. Go inside
Janey. Go inside.’

‘I’ll fetch
someone.’ She hands me a hanky.

‘Don’t do that.
Please.’

‘Okay…’ she
stands up but doesn’t move away.

There is a
silence like a knife scoring a line between us.

‘It’s time to
grow up, little sister.’ I said thickly, ‘we are not children
anymore. No more games…. please Janey. No more teasing. You don’t
remember anything now. But you will. Yes. You will. And this is the
truth of us. You knew, back then, and I had forgotten. But it is
always the way of it.’

‘I…. I am
trapped.’ She said, ‘You are too…. I think? It’s the same as
before… a little the same. Isn’t it? But it’s different. Do we
choose who forgets this time?’

‘What do you
mean?’ I look directly at her, my eyes still swimming. I blink
twice. She’s sort of in focus.

‘We choose….’
She said slowly, ‘who forgets…. Huh? Where did that come from?’

‘This is the
point where it crosses,’ I said, ‘This is the point….’ Suddenly I
know why what happened; did happen. Janey worked out how to beat
the system. She saw how we could jump the tracks on our reality.
We; Us; here are people with a connection that could not be erased.
The only way out was to die. But was it?

I look at her….
suddenly still; an eerie calm descends on me. What can I tell her?
But I find I don’t need to.’

‘What kind of
man are you Jared?’ she says.

Key. Trigger. I
hear it. And I know what they have done. What they have done to
Janey; and to Me. The subject must be compliant. The subject must
relax and take a deep breath…. The subject will listen to the
voice. The words. The same words. You know her voice. You know….
Her…. Voice.

I go slack and
slump on the rock. I look at her; the dominoes tumbling. There is
no way of stopping it. We can destroy the others. We can end the
experiment. We can win! No, no, no! I can hear my mind screaming on
and on. We are the ones…. a suggestion planted so deep; ….so deep;
so very deep. It was planted by the one person who you would never
suspect: Yourself.

It works like
this. They record all the things that you say. And words can be
carefully picked out of the track and edited together. Then you
have the perfect way to brainwash someone. And you wouldn’t even
know it was being done. Because there is nothing alien about one’s
own voice. But what if you tried the same thing on two siblings?
How would that work? What about siblings who had a special
connection. People who by their very nature make it very difficult
to resist anything that each other are saying. They have confounded
us and tricked us. Yet somehow we are still who we are, even deeper
down beyond the layers of meaning. There is a deeper magic that
makes our elegant solution to the problem of the conditioning; a
certain provocation to anyone else: If they knew. But they don’t.
We have returned one deception with another. It was the only way to
defeat the conditioning. You have to do something that is so
shocking that it literally derails the train of thought you are
on.

Janey sat cross
legged on the ground then; her hands over her face. I slide down of
the rock onto this little patch of still damp grass. A moonlit
scene that is stark and ominous.

‘We perhaps
could walk a little.’ she said.

‘Yes.’ I took
her hand and led her away from the tent, from the friends who we
both love so well. We are the traitors in our midst. And tomorrow
we will have forgotten completely. One of us will recall a
lingering trace of tonight and then we will carry on being strange
and awkward. Janey and My Bad Moods will take turns around the
central point of this experiment’s circle. We are dodging the
bullet of something that is morally irreducible; by means of
another thing that is not quite, but almost as wrong.

No one told me
that I would want to do the right thing so badly.... I'm in a
dream, and I'm running away. There is someone speaking and I want
to get away. I don't want to listen. This time I want to keep some
grasp on my reality. I’d rather know. "Forget; forget.... Those
voices blended tell me. But I remember this, a small thing, like
Cinderella’s shoe. It is a scent of something resinous. It is like
old orchestras and big halls. An old smell, aged into the dusty
corridors of the place they took us. The conditioning was so
complete I am blind to the place, wiped clean: what little I did
see. But this I cannot erase. I smell it in my dream and I'm
running through constructed corridors that my imagination joins to
the outside world. And that is a real place. Then I'm waiting in a
queue at a café to buy a drink and sit down. My mouth tastes
strange too, like.... Then I'm drinking the tea, and I see....

'Tea!
Jared!'

'Huh?' I crack
open an eye to see Oliver disappear from the sleeping pod. Steam
curls in the morning light that is penetrating our high-tech canvas
type material. For once I actually wish I was in one of the shared
sleeping pods. A bit of daft banter might help. But then again; I
hear a loud clatter and raucous laughter from the main area.
Somewhere out there people are happy. It's a bright morning. I
resolve to face the day cheerfully. So I slip from the cocoon and
start to dress myself.

Half an hour
later, I'm standing on a big flat topped boulder, with a pair of
binoculars. It's just over three days since the scary encounter
with the vertical road. I'm feeling a lot better. It really freaked
me out. Not at the time but the next day I felt all wobbly and
weird. That dissolved into what for us could be described as
"normal"; the rhythm of the days that balanced comfort with
strenuous activity. It is day seven; and we are about to enter a
narrow valley. There is another road, but it looks dangerous.
Oliver comes to join me on the boulder.

‘Now then
Chief,’ he says gruffly, ‘what is it to be?’

Not sure yet,’
I shield my eyes and pass the binoculars to him, ‘I don’t know how
wide that pass is. We could be heading for a dead end….and there is
no place to turn round and come back.’

‘Any sign of
our visitor?’ Oliver’s accent is more pronounced when he says this.
As if he expects me to turn and say something strange and
vexing.

‘I didn’t see
who ever it was.’ I reply, ‘what about you?’

‘She’s an Angel
and no mistake.’ He glances sideways at me for a moment and then
continues to scan the further peak; ‘To heaven no quicker route.’
He adds.

‘What?’

‘You are
getting to be almost one of the boys.’ Oliver stops squinting
through the glass and turns to me blinking in the sunlight.

‘I’m being
demoted then?’ I hope that he is in the mood for my daft side, so
rarely aired.

‘Looking
reasonably scruffy again.’ he says

‘No razor; no
problem!’ I rub my chin and laugh. It’s ten days since I scraped it
all off. There’s enough there to look like me again. Oliver is
undecided on that front and always looks like he’s got a “five
o’clock shadow”. He shaves when he remembers. I think it has to do
with being a school teacher…. six weeks holidays just lets more
important things be taken care of. I have wondered why he does the
job. But then he’s a natural with kids. They like this gentle
giant…. but Oliver is more than just a big Teddy Bear of a Man.
Some special Ops thing that he did was what left that mark. He is
serious, and quiet. Just listening; Waiting. I swear that he knows
how to talk to sheep; or squirrels. It’s like he can listen to the
dawn chorus and know what the day ahead holds.

‘Marcia asked
me will we be stopping, or do we need flasks making up?’

‘Oh!’ I’m
surprized…. not at the question; but Oliver being sent to ask
me.

‘I suppose we
better decide what to do about the route.’ Oliver awaits my
thoughts on this. I know we could go the higher road. The
appearance from this distance makes it look a lot narrower than it
in fact is. So we go back to the tent and get out the sheet we’ve
plotted. This is the rough copy and I mark it with a pencil.

‘It’s a guess
if it’s anything.’ I looked at Oliver, ‘we must get off the edge
before it goes dark.’

‘It’s very
early now.’ He said, ‘but it could take until eleven to get to the
start of the hill road.’

‘Oliver, get
the weather list.’

‘Yeah sure.’ He
goes to find the sheet.

I look at our
rough down map. Notes and elevation points. But we’re in a rush, so
it can’t be as accurate as it should be. George would be
unimpressed.

‘James!’ I
yell, ‘Have you got the radio signal this morning?’

‘Yep!’ comes a
voice form the kitchen area, ‘Just now Chief.’ He sticks his head
through the flap, ‘What shall we send?’

‘Just the call
in. we’ll get a message later. Find Marcia, and call the rest of
them will you.’

‘Yes Boss!’
James sounds upbeat, and disappears on his errand.

I chew the back
of the pencil and ponder the either/or question. I have to put it
to the group.

Ten minutes
later everyone is there except Janey. Marcia is in the kitchen
making tea: psychological buffer. I know immediately what Davey
will say. He has a fear of heights that makes him the wrong person
to ask for an objective opinion of the situation. But on the other
hand it’s his neck too. To whatever anyone has to contribute will
have a bearing on the decision we make.

‘Tea!’ shouts
Marcia cheerfully.

‘Has anyone
seen Janey?’ I ask.

‘Shall I go and
see?’ offers Adam.

‘No. that’s
alright.’ I sense something is up; so I go to the back of the tent
and out the other doorway. There she is, leaning against the bonnet
of the transport; her journal in her hand. The sun is in her eyes
so she doesn’t see that’s it me until I get quite close.

‘Now then
Janey?’ I say casually.

She glares at
me. Perhaps I’m breaking in on some train of thought that she has
been following.

‘Oh! It’s you.’
She has a nasty edge in her voice. I ignore it, and wait for her to
smile. She scowls at me instead.