Somewhere East of Life

Suddenly the pistol is gone from his hand. ‘Concealment weapon, see. That’s why it’s so little. KGB knew what it was about, right?’

Smiling weakly, Burnell says, ‘I have to sleep now, Larry.’ The toffee has gone.

A second later he is staring down the barrel of Larry’s semi-automatic, which Larry, kneeling up, cradles in a professional way under his right arm. It is a cold steely piece of goods he is aiming.

‘You try anything funny in the night, you get a dose of this. Get it?’ His little face withers. ‘This is my big baby.’

Reaction shot of Burnell, sitting up, alarmed. ‘No, no, I just want to sleep.’

Larry asks him challengingly if he’s a bloody lunatic, and Burnell says he thinks he must have banged his head.

Loud banging on the door. Larry swings the semi-automatic in that direction. Ma yells from the passage, ‘Go to sleep. You got to go to Swindon tomorrer.’ He makes shooting noises in his throat, raking her with imaginary gunfire before turning back to Burnell.

‘You try anything funny, you get a dose of this, right?’ Relenting slightly, he explains that this impressive weapon, his big baby, is an American .50 calibre Barrett M90, weighing only twenty-two pounds. He assures Burnell he could hold off an army with it.

‘I hope you aren’t expecting an army.’

‘Muslims, Blacks, Police – let ’em all come. See what they get.’ There is a tense silence. Burnell feels unwell.

‘What Muslims do you mean?’

‘My dad comes back here, he’s going to be in trouble.’ As he settles down, Larry says with a sob, ‘That bastard.’ He cradles the Barrett in his arms. He reaches out and switches off the light.

Sitting huddled nervously on the floor, Burnell hears an intermittent sob. Or perhaps Larry is just sniffing.

Longing to go to sleep but afraid to lie down, Burnell says in a small voice that he appreciates Larry’s kindness.

He half expects to have the muzzle of the Barrett back in his ear. Larry merely says, ‘I like helping people, Roy.’ Gentle as a dove.

Burnell is comforted. He murmurs those decent words to himself like a mantra; ‘I like helping people …’

He falls back in a troubled cataleptic sleep. Rats gnaw in the depths of the cathedral. He wakes to find it is the sound of Larry scratching his acned cheeks in his sleep. So the movie ends. But Burnell is for real and his troubles are becoming more real as dawn sneaks in to dozy Bishops Linctus.

Morning was hardly a spectacular affair: old and grey and broken, like an overworked carthorse out to grass, to find its way by accident into the back yards of the council houses.

Larry had left the room when Burnell emerged from the entanglements of his rug. What roused him from limbo was the sound of Ma shouting at her son. Encouragement and admonition, carrot and stick. He sat up, aching all over. His predicament rushed back and took him by the throat. But he was undeniably feeling a little better.

Leaning back against a distempered wall, he fished about in his brain for an identity.

Larry entered the room, carrying a mug with no handle. ‘Thought you’d like some char, mate, OK?’

The unrivalled powers of hot sweet tea served to clear Burnell’s head. He rose and sat on the side of the bed. From there, he stood up and went into the kitchen, where he sluiced his face under the cold tap. The debris of the take-away had gone. Instead, pairs of socks were soaking sludgily in the sink. He no longer felt so dissociated from himself, and smiled at Ma as he wiped his face on a grimy towel.

‘You’re a bit more perky this morning, I see,’ Ma said. ‘The washing machine’s gone on the blink again. Of course he’s not much use round the house. The black bloke next door will fix it for me. Have you said hello to Kevin?’

A yellow canary sat in a cage on top of the fridge. It cocked its head on one side, looking at Burnell while trying out a few notes.

Ma went over to the cage. She stuck a finger through the bars. The canary lifted one wing in a defensive gesture. ‘There’s a good boy. He likes you, don’t you, Kev? I think it’s a girl actually. One of the family, aren’t you, love? Keeps me company, any rate. Say hello to Kevin, Roy. I wash her under the hot tap every Saturday morning, don’t I, Kev? It likes that – sings her little heart out, bless her. You like a nice wash under the tap, don’t you? It’s one of the family, aren’t you? I’ll find her a bit of groundsel in a while. Who’s a good boy then?’

While this monologue was in progress, Burnell was keeping an eye on Larry. Larry was dressed in a padded military jacket without sleeves. He had wedged the front door open and was marching back and forth between his room and an old Land Rover standing in front of the house, loading boxes of ammunition into the back of the vehicle.

Seeing Burnell’s glance, Ma said, ‘He’s got to go into Swindon. There’s a job prospect. You better stay here with me – I don’t like the way he drives. Much too fast on them country roads. You and me’ll go down and see Dr Ramakrishna in the village. She’s – you know, what I call discreet. She was trained in London, she was telling me. She’ll help you. She told me once she liked helping lame dogs over stiles, she said.’

‘That’s me.’ He spoke vaguely. Something about Larry’s movements disturbed him. Larry had left the house by the front door, which remained open. He put up the tailgate of the Land Rover, locking it into place. His movements were performed in slow motion. Once he looked back into the house with abstracted gaze, as if he were inwardly composing a poem. Burnell raised a hand in greeting. He received no response.

Walking ponderously, head down, Larry went round to the cab of the Land Rover and climbed in. He sat in the driver’s seat. Nothing happened.

More curious than alarmed, Burnell, still nursing his tea mug, went forward into the small front room, from the window of which he had a clear view.

He could see the back of Larry’s head. It did not stir. It resembled a cannonball which had succumbed to a parasitic yellow grass. Larry was making no attempt to start his vehicle. He merely sat in the driver’s seat. Burnell was about to turn away when a movement up the road caught his eye.

The highway leading from this side of the village was an anonymous semi-rural stretch of road. A field opposite the houses awaited building permission. The curve of the road wound up a slight incline. The road surface remained damp from overnight mists. Behind and beyond the houses lay open agricultural land, at present looking pale and inert. The houses followed the curve of the road. Most of the vehicles which Burnell remembered to have been parked there last night were gone about their owners’ business, leaving the houses and front doors in plain view.

From the door of the furthest council house, two hundred yards distant, a man had emerged. He came out, went inside again, to re-emerge pulling a push-chair. He steered this object through the front gate and started down the slight hill towards the village.

In the push-chair sat a small child dressed in a blue overall. Burnell saw its arms waving, possibly in excitement. Perhaps it was two years old. The man could have been the child’s grandfather. He had grey hair and wore an old nondescript raincoat. It looked as if he was talking to the child. Possibly he was going to the village to shop. Possibly, thought Burnell, idly, his daughter, the child’s mother, was unwell.

Larry stirred in the driving-seat as the push-chair drew nearer. His window wound slowly down. A gun barrel protruded, pointing up the road. Burnell could see enough of the chevron-style muzzle brake to recognize the Barrett semi-automatic which Larry had shown him the previous evening. He took a deep breath to call out. As he did so, a shot sounded.

The man in the nondescript raincoat sank down on his knees in the road, still holding on to the handle of the push-chair.

Three more shots rang out. The push-chair blew apart. The man’s head and shoulders were covered in shreds of baby as he fell over on his side, to roll against the grass verge.

Larry’s Ma had seen at least something of this, or had heard the shots. She was drying a plate. This she dropped as she ran from the kitchen into the front hall.

‘No, no, Larry. Stop that at once, you idiot! What do you think you’re doing? Come in immediately.’

After firing the shots, Larry kicked open the Land Rover’s door and planted his boots on the gravel with a crunch, left then right. He was moving slowly with a sleepwalker’s lethargy. He carried his semi-automatic at the port, its muzzle at his left shoulder. As he turned to face the house, he brought the weapon expertly to his hip and fired a rapid burst.

His mother was blown from the porch back into the passage. Still moving, he fired more shots into the house. The back door splintered.

Burnell was also in motion, rushing from the front room as soon as the firing stopped. To his relief, he saw that Larry in his abstraction had left the key in the lock of his door. He turned the key and rushed into the room. Desperate as he was, he saw a blue metal gun barrel protruding from under a cushion on the bed. He flung himself under the bed, taking the Makarov with him. Fighting to thrust the bundles of magazines and cartridge boxes out of his way, he turned about so that he was concealed, facing the door. He was convinced that Larry was about to finish him off too.

He could hear Larry in the front hall, and the business-like click of a fresh magazine locking into place on his weapon.

Steadying the pistol with both hands, Burnell levelled it at the door.

‘You come in here, I’ll blow your guts out through your arse,’ he muttered.

4

FOAM

In Ward One on the third floor of Swindon Hospital lay Roy Burnell. Of the four beds in the ward, only his was occupied. He felt no great inclination to get up.

Nevertheless, even the horizontal position could not stem a swirl of events around him. There were, first and foremost, the visits from the police, and in particular from an Inspector Chan, an Asian member of the Wiltshire anti-terrorist squad.

The police had discovered Burnell in a house with a dead woman. He had been armed, and surrounded by boxes of bullets and much literature of an incendiary nature, as the official phrase went. He had been disarmed, handcuffed, and taken none too gently to the police station in Swindon. There he had been interrogated for some hours. It was then that Inspector Chan had been called in. Burnell’s plea that he had somehow lost his memory had been taken as additional reason to suspect his motives.

Only slowly had Burnell, dazed by events, realized that the police had initially been frightened men. The presence of a psychotic killer in Bishops Linctus had been alarming enough; the possibility that there might be two of them, the second armed with an illegal KGB murder weapon, had driven them mad.

Forensic evidence supported Burnell’s statement. The bullets which had killed the dead woman, Mrs Beryl Foot, were fired from the Barrett. 50 calibre semi-automatic now in their possession. Not only did the Makarov PSM use 5.45mm rounds, but examination showed it had not been fired recently.

Released and installed in hospital, suffering from exposure, Burnell discovered that what was now known as the Bishops Linctus Massacre had attracted world-wide attention. The specialist in charge of his ward, a friendly Dr Rosemary Kepepwe, brought him newspapers, where he was able to see what had happened that terrible morning.

After shooting the old man, Stanley Burrows, 58, and his step-grandson, Charles Dilwara, 1½ and his own mother in rapid succession, Lawrence ‘Mad Dog’ Foot had walked armed into the village. There he shot dead the first three people he saw outside the Spar supermarket. Several other people had been wounded and a plate-glass window valued at £2,000 had been broken. ‘BISHOPS BLOODBATH’ screamed the tabloids.

Mrs Renée Ash, blonde, 22, had witnessed the events from the window of her hairdressing establishment. She had her photograph in the paper, sitting coyly on a low wall, legs crossed. ‘It was awful,’ she said. ‘There was blood all over the pavement. And on a Saturday morning, too.’

The shooting aroused more excitement than the war in the Crimea, in which British troops, the Cheshires, were involved. Everyone expected trouble in the Crimea, but in a quiet little spot like Bishops Linctus, in the peaceful British countryside … The Prime Minister himself was driven down to the scene of the crime to shake a few hands.

As for Larry ‘Mad Dog’ Foot – as his friends reportedly called him – armed police from Bishops Magnum and Salisbury had shot him down behind the Shell garage. Some papers carried photographs of his body covered by a blanket being taken away on a stretcher. Burnell thought of Larry saying gently, ‘I like helping people’. Perhaps his help had been refused once too often.

Burnell’s melancholy was deepened by a sense of having fallen off a wall. He felt no power on earth could put him together again. Pieces of the past floated in his mind like fish in a bowl, without destination.

He was sedated and slept for long periods. At one point he woke to find a doctor with a maternal bust encased in a white apron at his bedside. This was the comforting Dr Rosemary Kepepwe. She sat by his side and talked soothingly.

‘I’ve been in a coma, haven’t I?’

‘We think you have fallen victim to memory-thieves. It’s one of the mushroom industries of the modern world … Anything’s stealable nowadays,’ she said, smiling down at him. ‘Don’t worry. Did you hear of e-mnemonicvision?’

‘Was there some kind of crash?’

‘Don’t worry. We’ll do a few tests on you and soon you will feel better.’

He trailed about the hospital from room to room, comparing diagrams, playing with bricks, having blood samples and brain scans taken, helpless in expert hands. A neurosurgeon jokingly offered to lend him a copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

Dr Kepepwe came back to see him shortly after an orderly had delivered Burnell’s tea. ‘Now, don’t worry about anything. The Neurology Department is piecing together a map of your brain with indications of lesions there. They know that a section of your memory has been stolen from you.’

He grappled feebly with the idea. Visions of scalpels and silver handsaws rose to his mind.

The doctor said firmly, ‘Memory has no one location in the brain. It’s not a department. The thieves in your case have covered the hippocampus and regions of the cortex. We’ll know more precisely soon. It’s a delicate operation.’

He groaned. ‘You mean they’ve cut me up, destroyed my brain?’

She wagged a finger, smiling. ‘It’s an electronic method, well established these last five years. I don’t want to hear too many complaints from you, sir! You’re lucky that your period of memory was evidently stolen by an expert, not just some cowboy. First look at your brain suggests that you are pretty OK otherwise. You might easily be in PVS.’

For some reason he could not make out, he longed to hold her hand. Gazing up at her, he said, ‘I’d be less inclined to complain if I knew what PVS was.’

‘When they started doing e-mnemonicvision operations on the human brain, accidents occurred. That’s where EMV has got its bad name, why it’s still limited. Some volunteers became cases of PVS – which stands for Persistent Vegetative State. PVS. Of course you are experiencing a terrible loss, but you seem otherwise fully functional. You talk OK, for instance.’

‘Hope so,’ he muttered.

‘What about sexual functions, then? Do you still have erections?’

‘Hadn’t you better research that area yourself, Doctor?’

When she laughed, most of her body shook. ‘You’re a naughty boy, that I can see. We shall return to that subject later. Drink your tea and don’t worry about things.’

‘Do you want a raspberry jam sandwich, Doctor? I’ve lost my appetite as well as my memory. Will my memory return? You’re sure I wasn’t in an accident – a car crash or something?’

She shook her head. ‘Everything’s as I tell you. We’ll soon find out more about you. That will help. You’re going to counselling every morning, starting tomorrow, and that will help too. We can find out how many years of memory you’ve lost.’

‘Years? Shit!’ He said he could recall that there was an opera he had seen in which a man had his reflection stolen. This was worse, like a kind of evil magic.

‘You see, you remember some things, like the opera. Now don’t worry. Rest today. You’re still in shock. Eat up that sandwich.’

He obliged the doctor by taking a bite before asking her what EMV was.

‘You don’t even recall that? It’s a scourge of modern life, like video shockers only a few years back. You know that tumours can be removed from the brain without old-fashioned surgery, and now it’s possible to remove selected memories. Those memories can be stored electronically and so reproduced any number of times.

‘Oh, it’s a huge industry.’ While he munched at the limp sandwich, she explained how EMV was a sport for amateurs, just as television had been invaded by amateur videos. Anyone with a striking memory or experience could sell it to the EMV companies, ‘the way poor people used to sell a kidney for a bit of money’. Of course they would lose that memory for ever but, if it was valuable to them, it could be reinserted once it was recorded.

‘So I could get my memory back if I could find the thieves?’

‘You can’t catch these people.’ She went on to say that for EMV-viewers, the memories projected into their heads were as transient as dreams although, projected at greater power, they could become as permanent and ‘real’ as genuine memories. A vogue for the permanent insertion of seemingly life-enhancing memory implants was yielding up a new generation of mental cases whose assumed memories did not fit their own personality patterns.

Burnell was sunk in introspection. His gaze fixed itself on a malevolent square of cherry fruit cake lying on the white plate before him. He became convinced that he could read its mind: and somewhere in the warped mental processes of the fruit was an ambition to eat him, rather than vice versa. Only with an effort did he manage to look away and stare into the friendly black face by the bedside.

‘I can’t remember where I was before I found myself running on Salisbury Plain.’

This time, she put her hand reassuringly over his. ‘We shall find out all about you. Don’t worry. Tomorrow, our psychotherapist, Rebecca Rosebottom, will see you. And she is an absolute guru.’

Smiling, she rose to go.

‘Would you take this piece of fruit cake away with you?’ he bleated.

Searching about in his head proved to be a strange process. He could recall his early life easily. The death of his mother was vivid. It was possible to trace the chain of events until he was in his mid-twenties, when he had grown a small moustache to impress a girlfriend. That would mean the memory was probably ten years old. After that, nothing.

The last thing he could remember clearly was standing in a building in a foreign city waiting for a lift. He was in the foyer of an ornate hotel, all white and gilt and potted cheese plants. The lift cage descended from an upper floor. He walked into it and pressed a button to go up. After that – nothing. The dreaded white-out, the feared abyss. The thieves had got the rest.

The following morning, Dr Kepepwe entered Ward One with a broad smile on her face and her hands behind her broad back.

Burnell was propped up in bed, having just finished breakfast. She came and contemplated him for a moment before speaking.

‘You are Dr Roy Edward Burnell, AIBA. Those are letters after your name. You have been a university lecturer. You are a specialist in the architecture of religious structures such as cathedrals. You are currently an Area Supervisor for the World Antiquities and Cultural Heritage organization in Frankfurt in Germany. You have responsibility for threatened buildings of architectural and religious merit over a wide area.

‘And how do I know all this? Because you have also published a learned book, in which you contrast human aspirations with human-designed structures. The book is called Architrave and Archetype and –’ she brought her hands from behind her – ‘here’s a copy, just tracked down!’

He took the book from her. It carried his photograph on the inner flap of the dust-jacket. He stared at it as if the title were written in letters of fire. In the photograph he had no moustache, praise be.

‘We’re getting somewhere,’ Dr Kepepwe said proudly. ‘We hope to contact your wife next.’

He smote his forehead. ‘My God, don’t say I’m married.’

She laughed. ‘Well, you certainly were. Current marital status unknown.’

He closed his eyes, trying to think. No memory came through, only the tears under the eyelids. Whoever his wife might be, she constituted a vital part of the vault the memory-thieves had robbed. It was lonely, knowing nothing about her. Leafing through the copy of the book Dr Kepepwe had brought, he found her name. There it stood, alone on the printed page, the dedication page:

For

STEPHANIE

‘Nothing is superlative that has its like’

Michel de Montaigne

Tears came again. He had a wife. Stephanie Burnell. The line from Montaigne, if it was more than mere courtesy, suggested love and admiration. How was it he was unable, with his memory of her gone, to feel no love and admiration?

‘We can’t have you moping,’ said Dr Kepepwe, bustling in, to find him staring into space. ‘Are you well enough for a game of tennis? There’s a good indoor court on the top floor. I’m a demon. I’ll play you when I’m off duty at five-thirty.’

To kill the afternoon, he wandered about the great white memorial to human sickness. The few staff he encountered were Asiatics. He found his way into what the hospital called its library, where ping pong was played. The room was deserted; but the whole hospital was strangely deserted, as if the world’s sick had miraculously healed themselves. The library shelves, like the shelves of a derelict pantry, held nothing by way of sustenance. Almost no non-fiction, books on dieting excluded, no travel worth a second look. Fiction of the poorest quality, all formula stuff – romances chiefly, thrillers, also fantasy: The Dragon at Rainbow Bridge and similar titles, featuring pictures of brave men, women, and gnomes in funny armour.

In a neglected corner where ping pong balls could not reach lay a clutch of Penguin Classics. Zola, Carpentier, Balzac, Ibsen, Dostoevsky. He remembered the names. Also the Essays of Montaigne.

Burnell picked up the volume almost with a sense of destiny, having so recently come across Montaigne’s name in his own book. Carrying it over to a bench, he read undisturbed while the best part of an hour stole away, drowsy and silent. He believed he had heard the cadences of Montaigne’s prose before. Nostalgia rose in him, to think he might once have read it in the company of the unknown Stephanie. They must have enjoyed the way the sixteenth-century Frenchman spoke directly to his reader:

I admire the assurance and confidence that everyone has in himself, while there is hardly anything that I am sure of knowing, or that I dare answer to myself that I can do. I never have my means marshalled and at my service, and am aware of them only after the event … For in my studies, the subject of which is man, I find an extreme variety of opinions, an intricate labyrinth of difficulties, one on top of another, and a very great uncertainty and diversity in the school of wisdom itself …

Perhaps that is how I was, Burnell thought. Uncertain. Perhaps it was my nature – and not despicable in Montaigne’s eyes. In which case, my dilemma at present is but a special instance of a more general one. He turned the word ‘certain’ over in his mind, as if it were a curious stone found on a seashore. The great conquerors of history had all been certain. Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Shi Huang Di, the First Emperor of China. He wasn’t sure but he thought he had never been built in that mould. His father’s tyranny had been enough.