The Amnesia Clinic (26 page)

He hasn’t got a chance
, I thought, almost smiling to myself at the thought of Sally Lightfoot and her light-footed departure. Automatically, I began following Ray out towards the road. Then I remembered Fabián and turned back to face the beach. His blue shirt travelled slowly but steadily across the rocks, filling with the breeze like a sail. Even at this distance I could see how close he was walking to the froth of incoming waves. I felt a concentrated fury swell inside me, all of it directed intensely at that retreating scrap of colour.

Fuck you
, I thought.
Fuck you, and your cave, and your stories, and your Amnesia Clinic
. I wavered for a moment, then turned away from the beach and began running in the direction of the road.

My resolve didn’t last much longer than ten paces. I changed direction without even slowing down and broke from a half-run into a sprint across the hard, wet sand, trying to convert both the anger and the fear that I felt into the energy I needed to get to him.

By the time I reached the rocks, the air in my lungs had already turned to pain, stabbing sharply with every pace. He knew this would happen. He was doing it to me deliberately. Wheezing heavily, I placed one foot on to the rocks and began picking my way across. The sandstone contours felt coarse under my thin soles. I looked ahead to Fabián. Already, sea-spray spouted between the two of us. I had to move fast. Apart from the physical advantage that Fabián had, he’d also covered this ground four times over the past two days and knew it far better than I did. My chest swelled up inside my ribcage. I fought rising panic as the pain increased, trying to kid my bucking lungs into relaxing and loosening themselves up. If I panicked, I would have a full-on
asthma attack – which was probably exactly what Fabián wanted.

I tried to breathe as slowly and deeply as I could, timing my paces from rock to rock with each breath. Simply moving forwards without slipping sideways into the sea or being blown around by the wind required so much concentration that I became absorbed by the process and, in this way, managed to calm myself down. I advanced for some minutes, fixing my gaze on the ground, and when I did look up, I saw that he wasn’t far ahead of me and that he had stopped. I slowed down even more so that I wouldn’t be a hacking mess when I finally got to him. Waves broke over the rocks beside me, splashing the bare, open tops of my feet with cold water. I glanced up at the red shrine on top of the cliff, which was close enough now that I could see the areas where its paint had peeled to reveal the grain of the wood, toughened by salt-breeze. I saw fresh flowers attached to the shrine and wondered again how the hell anybody had got up there.

‘Come back, you idiot,’ I shouted.

He stood firm and turned his head out to sea, as if to say that he wouldn’t speak to me until I reached him. But even as he did so, a powerful gush of water shot upwards like a geyser through a gap in the rocks to his left, and he stepped away in surprise. As I drew nearer, I saw that small waves were already snapping at his heels. We’d both have to climb to escape them. He must have had the same thought as me, because he placed his hands on the cliff face and began climbing it just as I arrived where he’d been standing.

‘Please stop. This is dangerous. You’ll kill yourself,’ I said. It didn’t necessarily have to be such a hazardous situation, but what did that matter to Fabián, who was such a danger to himself?

‘Scary out here, isn’t it?’ he shouted, laughing down at me.

Relinquishing his grip, he slid easily back down the slope and extended his arms as he landed, pretending to waver, with a mock-scared look in my direction. This had the desired effect of showing me precisely how good his balance really was.

Exhaustion flooded my legs, making them shake for real. Fabián grabbed a large piece of sandstone.

‘Fabián, just talk to me …’

‘Worried about me, are you? Eh?
Hijo de puta
.’

He put his hand down on the rock shelf in front of him and, keeping his eyes on me, he heaved the rock down on his arm at the point where it had broken.

His scream turned to laughter. ‘See what I can do to myself? What the fuck do you think you can do to me if I can do that to myself?’

He threw the rock against the wall. Chips of sandstone flew off to the sides.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please stop. Let’s go back and talk about this. I’ll do anything. Please.’

‘No. We stay here. Anyway, look – the tide’s already coming up. Where are you going to go?’

He was right. White spray detonated where only minutes before I had been walking. The angle of the horizon seemed to have changed as the tide leant forward into its momentum. We were marooned on the ever-decreasing sliver of yellow rock.

‘Don’t worry your little head. All we have to do is get up to the cave. The tide does fill it up a bit, but it goes far enough back into the rock that we’ll be safe.’

I stood, breathing heavily, looking at him.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘I don’t think it’s safe.’

‘So you don’t believe me.’

‘Yes. Yes, I believe you.’

‘Come on then. You never know,’ he said, turning his back on me as he faced the rock to look for his handhold. ‘When we get up there, you never know what we might find. I told you, this cave goes right back into the rock. There’s still a chance we could get up there. There’s still a chance we could find it.’

He crouched down, ready to spring upwards at the rock face to climb away from the water level and towards the cave mouth. Lightly, I touched him on the elbow, conscious of how I could hurt him if I wanted by touching his bad arm.

‘Find what?’ I said.

He didn’t turn round. ‘You know damn well what. The Amnesia Clinic.’

‘I thought we agreed not to—’

‘Fuck you and your agreements. I’m going up there to find it. You never know. That clinic might be up there. My mother might be up there. We have to at least try. Wouldn’t you rather know for sure?’

‘I DO know for sure,’ I shouted. ‘And so do you.’ This time I grabbed the bad arm. He spun round quickly with the pain.

‘And why is that?’ he said. The hatred in his eyes shocked me.

I took a breath before speaking. But I had to say it.

‘Because I made it up,’ I said. ‘I faked that newspaper article to make you feel better. I made the whole idea of the clinic up, and you know that I did. And you
know
it isn’t real, don’t you?’

He said nothing. His face contorted again into that expression of disgust, as if I had said something in bad taste, and his voice quavered as if he were trying to shake away my words.

‘Shut up. Shut up.’

‘You know that,’ I repeated.

‘Of
course
I know!’ he screamed, eyeballing me and pushing at my chest. ‘Idiot.’

He was crying again and he shook me once more as he spoke, more quietly this time: ‘But that doesn’t mean it won’t be there.’

‘What do you mean?’

He sighed. ‘You never understood it at all, did you?’

‘Obviously not,’ I said.

He grabbed me by the front again and my lungs clenched inside me. He drilled each word into me, calmly, methodically, channelling his fury: ‘It’s good. I should be happy that you made me tell the truth. Are you happy now? You cunt. You fed me a bad lie. That’s what you did, bringing me here. You told me something you could never back up. Fucking clinics. Dr Menosmal. You’re a fucking bad liar.’

I was panicking, and I spoke quickly. ‘Don’t tell me you believed it. Don’t you tell me you believed it, because I know you’re not that stupid. It was only meant to help you. To show you that I believed you.’

‘This never had anything to do with me at all. You pretended we were coming here to make me feel better, but it was only ever for you. Some fucking sightseeing tour before you go home to your new school. You make me sick. You’re nothing but a fucking tourist.’ He spat at me, and it flew over my shoulder and down towards the rising, slopping sea. I reasoned that I had to find some way of calming him down. I decided that I ought to be the one who stopped us going to the cave once and for all. Somebody had to end this Amnesia Clinic stuff, and I was the one who had started it. So, quite placidly, I stepped forward and slapped him in the face.

Some sounds travel well through time. Some barely make it through intact at all. I remember the feel of the slap as if
it were five minutes ago – the soft stubble of his cheek on my palm surprised me – but I have no memory of the sound. Other sounds from that day – the crack of skull on submerged rock, for example – are much clearer.

‘You’re going to regret that, you little shit.’

I realised that he was making me very angry. ‘What did you do to Sol?’ I said, screaming now myself. ‘Did you touch her? Is that what this is about?’ And then there were no more words, and there was no more composure. He grabbed me and tried to throw me backwards against the rocks, but I managed to escape his grip and I leapt away from him, scrambling upwards and around the headland towards the cave mouth.

My palms slipped on rocks dampened by the sea-spray as I climbed. I told myself to concentrate on getting away, to move as quickly as I could, upwards, to reach the cave. At that moment, I felt his hand round my ankle, cold, like a steel manacle, and I began to slip on the rocks.

‘Let go!’ I shouted. ‘You’ll kill us both.’

He gripped my ankle even more firmly and I felt my chest begin to tighten again. I struggled against it, trying to climb higher, but he had both strength and gravity on his side, even with one wounded arm.

In my panic, I raised my foot and drove my heel downwards. Both of us lost our footing and slipped as one towards the water. My arms flailed around me, looking for a new handhold, and my legs bicycled in the air around his head. I managed to place my foot again but, as I looked down, I saw his hands reaching once more for my legs. This time, however, his broken arm was so weakened that he couldn’t grip me with any force. My kick must have scored a direct hit.

I know now that when he reached for me the second time it was for support, and not to drag me down, but in that
instant I thought differently: I assumed he was trying to grab me, to do me harm. So I kicked out again, at his head this time.

The last I saw of his face was a disbelieving look as his arms reached out around him for something to hold on to. There was a vivid flash of blue as he fell backwards and his shirt caught the wind. I heard a dense, sickening whack as his head struck the rocks beneath us, so loud as to be audible even over the suck and wash of the sea. Then, losing my handhold again, I slid down the cliff face. I tried to find a footing where we had been standing before, but my feet were quickly swept from under me by the pawing of chilling waves. I fell sideways, and a fist of salt water punched down my throat.

I remember a lurch of nausea and a feeling of desperate, breathless panic as I thought about the need to escape the water, to get Fabián out, at all costs.

And then there is nothing but darkness.

My mind had hijacked the scene of the dream from a newspaper article I once read. It was about some poor soul who, attempting to kill himself at a station, ended up stuck between the train and the platform with his legs twisted round and round like a corkscrew beneath the trunk of his body. His wife and children were brought to the platform edge to say their goodbyes in the certain knowledge that he would be dead the moment anybody tried to move the train. The image had always affected me: a person so damaged that the movement of any component part of his environment would spell death, in a situation where remaining static was out of the question. In my dream, I found myself pinned to the platform of a high-altitude railway station in the same way, except that it was not a train that kept me there but a vast, dead whale, its barnacled skin ripping into mine as I struggled to get out. When I looked down, I noticed that the platform had changed into a giant version of Sally Lightfoot’s back, as, with great whale-sized
snores, and facing away from me, she slept.

I woke to find myself lying in a metal-framed bed in a green hospital ward. Trying to sit up, I found that I could not move, as if I were strapped in, and yet I could see no restraints. My tongue felt furry and was coated in the metallic taste of blood. Ancient plumbing bubbled and clanked, and the overwhelming smell was of formaldehyde.

Looking ahead, I saw neon signs flashing on the wall at the end of my bed.
Your name is Anti. You were found in a cave in Pedrascada. You killed your best friend
. I could not turn my head but swivelled my eyes to another wall, where a new sign flashed up that read:
Only joking. Everything’s fine really. Ha ha ha
. Returning my eyes to the front, I found a man standing at the foot of my bed. He wore a white boiler-suit and small, round glasses with thick rims and had a moustache so tiny it might have been pencilled on. He carried a stainless-steel clipboard.

‘My name is Menosmal,’ he said in a clipped, precise tone. ‘I believe you have been looking for me. Although,’ he added hopefully, ‘you may not remember.’

‘You look like someone I know,’ I said.

‘It must be your imagination,’ said Menosmal. ‘You don’t know anybody, so far as I’m aware. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’ But even as he said it I became aware that with a slightly thicker moustache, and without the glasses, he would have looked, in the face at least, just like Suarez. I tried again to sit up, but my body would still not respond.

‘I know you can’t be Dr Menosmal,’ I said, ‘because he doesn’t exist. I made him up.’

Menosmal made a tick on his clipboard. ‘Interesting. You are seeing things you have invented. This is perfectly
consistent with the behaviour of my amnesiacs. And it means that you are in exactly the right place. Now, I think you should rest awhile and see if anything comes to you. In some cases, my patients remember after only a few hours. Although I fear,’ he went on, ‘that this has become increasingly rare lately, as our amenities have improved. It’s almost as if some patients decide upon arrival that they rather like to be here, liberated of their memories …’ He winked. ‘More and more frequently, I find myself having to address delusions about their pasts that I know my patients have concocted within hours of being admitted here at the clinic.’