Chapter Eight
Everyone Has Forgotten
I woke on the sofa with the key in my fist and a stranger standing over me with a kettle.
It was Michael. For a moment I could not understand what was wrong. He stood in the grey light from the window in his shirtsleeves, with his long tired face unshaven and his hair on end, holding a black kettle in both hands like a man holding a weapon. His eyes were wide. They were bloodshot. And in them, as I opened mine, I saw a look that I had last seen in the face of a woman at the Registry of Births ten years ago, and that I had hoped never to see again.
It was careful.
"Good morning," I said. I sat up. The blanket slid off my knees. "I'm sorry. I must have slept. What time is it?"
"I think you'd better tell me who you are," said Michael.
I laughed. It was the kind of laugh that is mostly breath. I waited for him to join in.
He did not.
"Michael." I got to my feet. "It's me. Daniel. Daniel Carter. You came to my flat yesterday morning. You played me the tape. We sat up till two."
"I didn't."
"The reel-to-reel. The one with the call from Marrow Lane. You said it moved four inches a week."
"I'm sorry." He took a step back, and the kettle slopped. "I don't know what you're talking about. I've never seen you in my life. I came home last night, and I locked the door, and I went to bed. I don't have a reel-to-reel." He glanced at the table. "I don't have..."
He stopped.
There was a tape machine on the table. A big grey one, with a hinged lid. A shoebox of cassettes beside it, labelled in a flat, careful hand. Michael looked at them. I watched him look. I saw his lips part, and his brow knit, and his whole face tighten with the effort to remember where he had acquired them.
"I must have bought it," he said slowly. "At a, at a sale."
"They're yours. You took them from Dispatch."
"I've never worked at Dispatch." He said it automatically. And then, with a faint, frightened frown: "Have I?"
"Seven years."
He put down the kettle. He put it down on the floor, carefully, as though it might go off. He was breathing fast. "Please," said Michael. "I'd like you to go. I don't mean to be rude. But there's something wrong, and I don't think it's you, and I don't think I want to find out."
I looked at him. I looked at the key in my hand, and the notebook on the sofa, and the pale, fixed, polite face of a man who had stayed up half the night helping me and who now regarded me as a burglar.
"Have we met?" said Michael.
It was gentle. It was even apologetic. That was the worst part.
I said, "No." I said, "I'm sorry. I've made a mistake."
I put on my coat. I gathered up the notebook, and the envelopes, and the torch, and I went to the door, and with my hand on the latch, I turned and said, "You chew cardamom seeds."
He looked startled. "Do I?"
"You've got a paper bag. In the right-hand pocket of your coat."
He put his hand in the pocket. He drew out a small crumpled bag, and looked at it, and at me, and I saw something pass across his face, a long fine shudder, like a ripple on still water. For a second I thought he would say it. For a second I thought the name was there.
Then the ripple passed. And Michael said, politely, in the careful voice of a man talking to a stranger who has proved unexpectedly well informed, "I'd be grateful if you'd close the door behind you."
By ten o'clock it had reached the street.
I do not know how else to describe it. Veyra is a city where the pavements are crowded in the mornings, with clerks and school-children and women with baskets, and where every third person on Tannery Row nods to every other. I walked home through it in a kind of daze. And somewhere between Gasworks Road and the bridge, I became aware that the nodding had stopped.
It was not rudeness. People were not cold. They were simply, politely, blank. A woman on the corner, who had sold me the evening paper for three years, handed me my change and said, "Thank you, sir, have a nice day," in the bright, impersonal tone she used with tourists. The boy at the tram stop, who had always said Morning, Mr. Carter, looked through me as through a window.
I stopped at the umbrella shop.
It was shut. The blinds were down. But I could see, through the glass of the door, the proprietor, a stout bald man named Mr. Pettifer, at his workbench, with a spoke in one hand. I knocked. He glanced up. He frowned. He came to the door, and drew back the bolt, and opened it a few inches, with a security chain on.
"We're not open," said Mr. Pettifer.
"Mr. Pettifer. It's Daniel. From upstairs. Flat three."
"Flat three's empty." He peered at me through the gap. "Has been for years. Nobody's lived there since the Wilcoxes. I keep telling the landlord. Are you after a room? Because I'd try the notice-board at the church."
I looked at him. I looked past him, into the dim cluttered shop, with its racks of dripping black umbrellas and the smell of wet silk. I looked up the stairs behind him, narrow and bare, and a little way up them I saw the door of my flat.
It was painted white. It had been painted green.
"Thank you," I said. "I'm sorry to have troubled you."
I do not know where I went. I walked. It was a bright cold day, and everywhere I turned, the city was subtly, incrementally, wrong. I came to the junction at the bottom of the hill, where a signpost had stood for as long as I could remember. TANNERY ROW. MARROW LANE. LOW MARKET. It said TANNERY ROW. MARROW LANE. LOW MARKET. But the arm that pointed uphill had been repainted, and the lettering was slightly different, the R a little rounder. I stood and stared at it. I thought, I have never noticed that.
Or it has never been there.
There was a school on the corner of Gantry Street. It was break time, and a hundred children were in the yard, shrieking, skipping, chasing one another round the railings. I stopped at the fence. A teacher in a grey cardigan, a young woman with her hair in a knot, was standing near the gate with a clipboard. A small boy ran up to her, and tugged her sleeve, and said something. She bent down. I watched her listen. I watched her smile. And then I watched her turn her head and say, in a clear, pleasant, perfectly kind voice, to a little girl beside her, "Oh, I'm so sorry, dear. What was your name again?"
The little girl said something.
"Of course," said the teacher. "Of course it is." And wrote it down.
A man came out of the shop opposite me, a butcher in a bloody apron, and called across the road to a woman with a pram. She looked at him blankly. He called again, a name, something short. She shook her head. He laughed, an embarrassed, uncertain laugh, and wiped his hands, and went back in, and I saw him through the window pause with his hand on the cleaver and a look of baffled distress on his broad red face, like a man who has walked into a room and forgotten what he came for.
By midday, I had seen it eleven times.
A mother who did not know her son. A man on a bench who looked at his own wedding ring and could not think whose it was. A girl with a violin case, standing in the middle of the pavement, with tears running down her face, saying to no one, "I was going somewhere. I was going somewhere."
It is not only me, I thought.
And then, because I could not stop thinking it, the second thought, which I did not want:
It is because of me.
The more you remember her, the more it remembers you. David Miller had said it in his pale grey office, with the sun on his silver hair. I had heard it as a figure of speech. I had not understood that it was a law of exchange, that the memory must come from somewhere. That every inch of ground I gave to Anna would be taken from somebody else. That I had, for four days, shouted her name into the dark, and every time I did, a shop-keeper, a mother, a girl with a violin had lost a little more of what was theirs.
I sat down on a kerb, in the sun, outside a closed chemist, and took out my notebook.
I wrote everything.
I do not know how long it took. I wrote in a small, tight, upright hand, the one I use for customs entries, and I did not stop. I wrote the date. I wrote my name, and my address, and the date of my birth, and the name of my mother, and the name of my sister. I wrote the names of all the people who had known me: Michael Brown, James Wilson, Mr. Pettifer, the woman at the newspaper stall. I wrote, Michael Brown, former dispatcher, chews cardamom seeds. He kept the tapes. He believed me, and then he did not. I wrote down the call, the door, the room, the tunnel, the clocks. I wrote the five versions of the night. I wrote key.
I wrote until my hand cramped. And then, because I was afraid, I turned back to the first page and began to read it over, to check that it was all still there.
It was. All of it. Page after page, in my own tight hand, ink that had dried and set. I turned the leaves with relief. I turned them quickly, to the end, and then, because something in me required it, to the inside of the back cover, where I kept my train times.
There was writing on it.
I do not remember seeing it before. I would have. I had opened that cover a dozen times. It was blank. But now across the middle of the stiff brown board, in a hand so familiar that I could feel the grip of the pen in my fingers, in black ink, dry, a little faded, as though it had lain there for years, were seven words.
DO NOT TRUST THE MAN WHO REMEMBERS YOU.
I stared at it.
It was my handwriting. It was unmistakably my handwriting. The slant. The little hook on the R. The way I always crossed my Ts with a long flat bar, as if I were underlining. I had never made a mark on that cover. I had bought the notebook five days ago, from the stationer's on Low Market, with the money from my change, and the cover had been clean.
I do not remember writing it.
I sat on the kerb in the bright cold air and a boy on a bicycle went past, and a dog barked, and I held the notebook in both hands and read the line over and over until the words came apart.
The man who remembers you.
David Miller. Who had known my tea, and my name, and the colour of my father's shoes. Who had a drawer of photographs with my face in them, and who had stood beside me on a wet street that did not yet exist.
James Wilson. Who had copied out my sister's birth entry on a Sunday night with a torch, and kept it for ten years in a black ledger with a broken spine. Who had said, when he first saw me, Go home, Mr. Carter, though I had not told him my name.
Michael, I thought. But Michael had forgotten me. Michael was the one man in the city who could not.
And there was a third. I did not want to think of it. I thought of it all the same, with a long cold prickle across the back of my neck. Someone had stood in a dark tunnel and followed me step for step, and learned the drag of my foot. Someone had left prints in the dust that were exactly like mine. Someone had said my name in the voice of a girl, and a mother, and an unnamed mild reasonable stranger.
What remembers you better than you remember yourself?
I closed the notebook. My hands were not steady.
"Sit down," said James Wilson. "Please. And don't look at the door."
It was three in the afternoon. I had come to the archive because I had nowhere else, and because I had needed, more than I had needed anything in my life, to see a face that knew me. The great doors stood open to the afternoon. The hall was empty. James was at the foot of the stairs, with a ring of keys in his hand, and when he saw me come in, he shut his eyes, and said, in a voice that cracked, "Oh, thank God."
"You know who I am."
"Of course I know who you are." He opened them. They were wet. "I thought you'd gone. I walked into the kitchen this morning, and there was nobody there, and I couldn't think what I'd put on the kettle for. I've been going round the building for six hours saying your name aloud." He sat down heavily on the bottom stair. "It's a good name. It's a very good name. I don't want to lose it."
I told him. I told him all of it, sitting beside him on the cold stone step, in the empty hall, with the sun lying across the floor in a long bar and the dust turning in it. He listened without interrupting. When I got to the note in the cover of the notebook, he put out his hand, and I gave it to him, and he held it for a long time, looking at the black words with his big grey face quite still.
"That's your hand," he said.
"I know."
"It's older than the notebook."
I stared at him.
"The ink," said James. "It's old. It's iron-gall. You'd not buy that in a shop. It's what we used in the Corrections, before the war." He turned the cover to the light. "Whoever wrote this did it a long time ago. And on something else. And it was copied, I'd say, onto the inside of this board by a hand that's had a good deal of practice."
"By me."
"By someone who writes like you." He lowered the notebook. "Daniel. I'm going to tell you something. I've had it in my mind since the first day, since the moment you came in, and I haven't been able to find the courage. I'd like you to forgive me."
"What?"
"You've been here before."
The hall was very still.
"Four years ago," said James. "In March. No. Six. It was six." He rubbed his eyes. "It was two years before your mother died. The twentieth of March. Six in the morning. I opened the doors, and there was a boy standing on the steps. He was twenty. He was soaked to the skin. He had no coat. He had blood on his hands, though not, I think, his own, and he was shaking so hard that he couldn't hold a pen." The big face worked. "He said, Mr. Wilson, you keep the Corrections. I said I did. He said, I need you to remember something for me."
"I don't..."
"I know you don't." James took a breath. "He said that a man was going to come for him, within the week. A kind man. A polite one. That the man was going to take four years out of his head, and he wanted me to keep them. Not the years. The fact of them. He said, I want you to hold on to what's true. And when I come back asking for her, I want you to tell me."
"For her."
"Anna." James said the name very softly. "He said it over and over. He kept saying it, in the doorway, in the rain. Anna, Anna. And then he said, and give me this, when I come."
He reached into the breast pocket of his cardigan. It was a thick, hard-wearing, hand-knitted cardigan, with leather elbow patches and a button missing, and from the pocket, with great care, he drew out a small, flat, folded sheet of paper.
It was creased from long carrying. It was very thin, almost transparent at the folds. On the outside, in ink, in a hand that I would have known on any page in the world, was written a single word.
Daniel.
"I've kept it on me," said James. "Six years. I didn't read it. I swore I wouldn't." He held it out. "I've been waiting a very long time to give you this."
I took it. It weighed nothing at all.
I unfolded it.
It was a single sheet, written on both sides in close, fierce, hurried script. The first lines were crossed out. The ink had blotted. At the top, underlined twice, were the words:
If you are reading this, you have been to the door.
And beneath them, in the same dark hand, running across the crease:
Whatever they tell you about that night, ask who gains by it. Do not trust the man who remembers you. He loves you, and he is lying, and I do not know which of those is worse.
Bring the key.
She will tell you the truth. But remember: she has been down there a long time, and she may not be only Anna.
I read it three times. I turned it over. On the back, at the bottom, in letters so small that I had to hold it close, there was a last line that had been written in a different pen, slowly, as though the writer's hand had begun to shake:
I am sorry. I am so sorry. I had to.
I looked up. James was watching me. His face, in the slanting afternoon light, was grey and heavy and unutterably sad.
"Which man?" I said. "Who remembers me? Is it David Miller?"
"I don't know."
"Is it you?"
He did not answer for a moment. I saw him consider it. I will say that I have never respected a man more than I did then, for the fact that he did not say no.
"I remember you," said James Wilson. "I won't pretend I don't. I remember you very well. I'd like to think I'd never lie to you." He folded his hands on his knee. "But I'd also like you to know that the boy on the steps said it to me. He said it to my face. Do not trust the man who remembers you. And I was the only man in the city who did."
The sun had begun to slide down the wall. In the long mild light, the dust hung over the empty hall like a net.
"What time is it?" I said.
James looked at the clock. It said ten past four.
"There's a photograph in my pocket," I said, "dated today. It shows me and David Miller on a street at night, looking at a tunnel."
"Then you'd better have your supper," said James, "and you'd better have it early."
He rose slowly, with a creak of knees. He held out his hand to pull me up, and when I took it, it was cold and large and trembling.
"I'm coming with you," he said.