The Amnesia Clinic (27 page)

‘Is that right?’ I said.

‘Take this poor boy.’ He gestured towards the bed adjacent to mine with his pen. Looking over, I saw that the boy in question was Fabián. His broken arm, which was still streaked with fragments of his own dead skin, flapped as he waved at me, and I noticed that blood continued to trickle from the sides of his lips and nose as he smiled. He wore a green backless surgical gown. ‘He washed up here yesterday, remembering nothing,’ said the doctor. ‘Nothing at all. Didn’t even know his own name. And now, he and this other woman have suddenly decided that they’re mother and son.’

Fabián had been joined by a slender, dark-haired woman in her mid-forties. She had the same striking green eyes as Fabián, and when she got up and walked over to the bed to shake my hand, she smelled of fresh peaches.

‘Of course, it’s ridiculous,’ said the doctor in a low voice when she had left my bed and returned to sit at the foot of Fabián’s. ‘She’s one of my oldest patients. Been here almost since I started up. She’s never said anything about a son to me before. It’s just what she wants to believe.’

Straining my eyes to look at the bed to my right, I saw
that the woman had now begun stroking Fabián’s hair with one hand and swabbing his face with alcohol-soaked cotton wool with the other. He was smiling up at her.

‘I must admit, however,’ said Menosmal, ‘that it is a delusion that both patients share. One of the more powerful I’ve seen. She is also quite convinced that she is his mother.’ At this, Fabián and his putative mother both waved in my direction as if they were posing for a cheesy holiday snap, then tilted their heads at each other, smiling continuously. ‘Still, if it makes them happy, I suppose they might as well believe it until the real truth comes along.’

‘You’re an unconventional doctor, aren’t you?’ I said.

‘You’re an unconventional patient,’ said Menosmal. ‘I’ve treated some extraordinary cases in my time, but nobody has ever claimed to have
invented
me before now. That’s really something.’

We both laughed.

‘Can you explain something to me?’ I asked.

‘I’ll try.’

‘Why am I unable to move? It’s because I’m still asleep, isn’t it?’

He looked around, nervous all of a sudden.

‘Admit it,’ I said.

Briskly, he slotted his pen back in his top pocket and began whistling. ‘Must be going,’ he said.

‘Ha,’ I said. ‘Got you. I knew I’d made you up.’

‘Clever boy,’ said Menosmal, snapping his fingers and turning into a blue-footed booby.

I closed my eyes.

When I opened them tentatively some time later, an intense yellow light burst in, so I closed them again straight away, electing to concentrate this time on potentially relevant sounds. I could hear the near-silent hum of efficient air-conditioning,
the faint rustle of newspaper pages, a peppering of high heels on hard floor. I shifted on cold, clean, cotton sheets, and found that, although the rest of my body was now fine, I still could not move my right arm. I felt the residue of terrible pain in my elbow and the promise of more to come.

‘He’s awake. Did you see? He moved.’ The voice came from the direction of the heels. My mother.

The newspaper was lowered with a scrunch.

‘Make sure you don’t wake him up.’ My father.

‘He’s been out for two days. We need to get to the bottom of this.’

Two days? What had I been doing for two days? Perhaps events had been repeating themselves in my head. I kept my eyes closed to try and fix what had happened with more clarity, knowing that when I opened them there would be no time to think. Confused memories began to seep back, and I felt the beginnings of a kind of mischievous happiness at what we had dared to do. I wanted to see Fabián as soon as possible, to make my peace with him and to begin the exquisite process of preparing a version of our adventures worthy of public dissemination. But before the pride, there would have to be contrition: I must avert my eyes sorrowfully, mutter profound apologies, offer reparation. However much I might want to feign sleep until my parents went away, they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. So I took a deep breath, ready for the onslaught of questions (
What did you think you were doing? How could you lie to us? What were you and Fabián fighting about
?) and opened my eyes.

The buttery yellow light blazed though Venetian blinds on to a grey linoleum floor and off-white walls. A battered TV clung on to a metal arm that dipped out from a corner opposite the bed. My father sat beneath it on an aluminium chair, his jacket crumpled, the newspaper open in his lap.
My mother stood on the opposite side of the room in a powder-blue suit, staring distractedly through a reinforced glass porthole in the wooden door. She spun expertly on a stiletto as my movements registered.

‘Anti,’ she said, and stepped towards the bed. ‘Anti.’

‘Where am I?’

‘You’re in hospital in Guayaquil,’ said Dad. ‘Don’t you remember? You were talking nineteen to the dozen when we arrived – though not much of it made sense. Who’s Sally?’

‘Slow down,’ said my mother. ‘We can get to that.’

I lifted myself further up the pillows with some difficulty.

‘You’re a lucky guy, you know,’ said my father, folding his newspaper and standing up. ‘You weren’t that far from the war zone. It’s flared up again down in the
Cordillera del Cóndor
. Fifteen killed this week. Some of the wounded have even been brought to this hospital.’ He pointed at the paper in his hand for my benefit. ‘Though not over here in the expensive side, obviously,’ he chuckled.

‘For God’s sake.’ My mother pushed him to one side. ‘Anti, how are you feeling?’

My father adopted a more concerned expression and took up a different position on the opposite side of the bed from my mother.

‘Listen, before you both start,’ I said, alternating between the two of them, ‘let me just say that I’m sorry. I’m sure you’re both terribly angry, but if you just let me explain
why
we did it, then …’

‘We’re not angry,’ said my mother, in a soft tone. She swept back the hair from my forehead with a fragrant hand. Something was wrong. ‘We’re not angry, Anti. But there’s some very bad news.’

This, then, was not another dream.

* * *

His body was flung repeatedly against the base of the cliff as the tide came in and eventually found face down in the water, his foot snagging on the rocks directly beneath the red memorial hut to the unfortunate surfer. Not the sort of detail I was meant to discover, I’m sure, but somehow I did. I have since imagined that there might be another little shrine up there now for Fabián, and that whoever it was leaving out fresh flowers and lit candles for the surfer might now do the same for him. I hope I’m right.

I left the country without even attending his funeral, so I never got to experience the pomp of an Ecuadorian send-off, but I had no difficulty imagining it. Fabián had furnished me on many occasions with such detailed and lurid descriptions of funerals that I felt I knew what it would have been like without having to go: women in black caught up in epic weeping fits; solemn processions; possibly even the traditional white coffin afforded to those who are considered to be too young in the eyes of the church to have committed any sin. All I have is my imagined version. I never got to stand there amid the incense smoke and the incensed relatives and look up at all the “plundered Inca gold”, as he’d called it, or see him buried, or cremated, or whatever it was they did to him. It wasn’t … required of me.

But, as I have found, the more abruptly someone disappears from your life, the more vividly they live on in your head. It turned out that I didn’t really need to say goodbye, because Fabián has been within me ever since, tempered and channelled by regret, but living there still and showing little inclination to leave.

I tell myself to try to let him go, that many people form intense friendships in adolescence that end abruptly and are never resumed, that this one just ended more definitively. And that only makes it worse, because one of the most difficult
things to live with is the knowledge that we probably wouldn’t have remained friends, had he lived. We were heading in different directions: me to school and life in England, Fabián to whatever Suarez and he came up with out there – most likely involving college in the States and some lucrative profession or other. We’d have corresponded for a few years, maybe seen each other once or twice, but it would have gone no further than that. Our friendship would have dried up into dusty static images, and that would have been fine, because he wouldn’t be here now, in my head, had he lived. He’d be out there telling someone improbable stories, had he lived. I would barely remember him, had he lived. But I do remember him. His smile is fixed perfectly in my memory, like the grin of a new recruit in a sepia photograph. And I am left with three words that will tap away at my skull for ever, like a toffee hammer: had he lived.

I hate him for that.

As my parents and I left the hospital, we had to pass through the main casualty ward, the corridors of which were lined with soldiers wounded in a jungle ambush by the Peruvians, laid out, awaiting treatment. I met and returned the patience in their eyes. I walked stoically between them, looking calmly at each one in turn as if I were their Field-Marshal, inspecting the bandages around their various flesh wounds that were filling slowly with thick, arterial blood and even bestowing on one or two of them an approving or reassuring smile. My parents walked ahead of me, anxious to leave the building as quickly as possible, but I took my time. One of the soldiers, who could only have been a few years older than me, shot me a wink, then held his wounded hand up to his face. The bullet that had struck him had gone straight through his palm, and through a little
red tunnel in the flesh I saw the glistening pupil of his eye, heavily dilated from painkillers, on the other side.

I remember the bright sunshine of the car park outside the hospital and the breathtaking heat of the car as I sat in it for the first time. I remember the silence as we pulled on to the blinding highway. For the early part of the journey, I tried to keep my eyes open and watch the scenery outside. But this didn’t last: in the eye of every roadside mule or bored bus passenger, even in the expression of a nun speeding along in a beaten-up old Cadillac, I saw him – as if, by the power of guilt, Fabián had insinuated himself into every living thing in my path.

I remember next to nothing about the rest of the journey north. I know that under no circumstances could it ever have been as exciting as Fabián’s and my journey south had been. My parents were possessed of an efficiency in the world, a mastery of adult tools that came into its own at times of crisis. In their hands, the great voyage upon which we had embarked a few days earlier was reduced to nothing more than a few hours in an air-conditioned people-carrier. I kept my eyes shut for as much of the rest of the journey as I could, in order to preserve the version in my head, and avoid all of those recriminatory eyes.

Within a week, I had left the country, never to return. At my mother’s instruction, I was removed from the country as promptly as possible, like an airlifted hostage. The decision that I would not attend Fabián’s funeral was also made for me. In view of what had happened, I was to be left out of the decision-making business for a while. And that suited me just fine. I wanted decisions to be made on my behalf for the rest of my life.

According to my parents, it was likely that the authorities would record a verdict of accidental death. But in spite of this, one more thing was to be asked of me when we got
back to Quito. At his own personal request, and in the company of my mother and father, I was required to go to his house and explain to Suarez how his nephew had died.

A meeting between Suarez and my parents, with Suarez’s house as the venue: it would have been a surreal clash of cultures even without the colossal fact of Fabián’s death. With it, dangling away above us all like a puppeteer’s hand, the visit was unbearable. From the moment the security gates parted to admit the three of us in my father’s people-carrier, I felt a rising sense of panic, a sense that wrong things were being allowed to happen. This wasn’t the way it was meant to be: these gates were a portal to pleasure, through which one was ferried, crying with laughter, in the back of a bullet-proof Mercedes. That day, it felt more like being led to an execution. My unease continued to build even with the appearance of a friendly face: Eulalia opened the door clad in black mourning dress, and gave only a muted greeting before she showed us into the library. No cooking smells enticed from the kitchen. No music blasted from the jukebox. No dogs cascaded down the stairs to greet us. The accumulated effects were that even before Suarez set foot in the
room, I felt hot and uncomfortable, as if the guilt were somehow scalding me, and that by the time he came in, I was positively poaching in it.

As we waited, my parents attempted with false nonchalance to familiarise themselves with Suarez’s habitat. My mother stalked up and down the bookshelves with an affectedly knitted brow; my father stood over the jukebox with his hands on his hips. I felt affronted on Suarez’s behalf by their presence, and in particular by their crude appraisal of a place so familiar to, and treasured by, me. I fought an urge to run from the library, through Byron’s exotic flowerbeds and away down the Pan-Americana, kicking the red mud from my shoes as I sprinted away to the south.

‘What an awful encyclopaedia,’ said my mother to no one in particular, pulling a volume from the shelf. ‘It looks as if it were written for a child.’

‘It is my experience that the books we prize as children can be our most formative influences,’ said a voice from the doorway.

The authority and confidence carried by that familiar accent provoked in me an automatic surge of anticipation, an incongruous burst of joy and excitement. In spite of the circumstances, and in the certain knowledge that no great story could possibly be on its way, my imagination salivated at the prospect all the same, like an idiotic Pavlovian dog.