I had experienced what they had not. If they knew in advance what the after-effects would be, it might help them to a speedier recovery. I wanted to urge them to use these last few days of individual consciousness to leave some record of themselves, some personal definition or memento by which they might rediscover themselves.
I moved in closer, peering in through the windows of the coach. A girl in an attractive, tailored uniform was checking names against a list, while the driver was stowing luggage in the hack. A middle-aged man sitting by a window was nearest to me, so I tapped on the glass. He turned, saw me there, then quite deliberately looked away.
The girl noticed me, and leaned through the door.
"What are you doing?" she called to me.
"I can help these people! Let me speak to them!"
The girl narrowed her eyes. "You're from the clinic, aren't you? Mr. . .
. Sinclair."
I said nothing, sensing that she knew my motives and would try to stop me. The driver came round from the back of the vehicle, shouldered past me and climbed up to the driving seat. The girl spoke briefly to him, and without further delay he started the engine and drove off. The coach moved slowly through the traffic, then turned into the narrow avenue that led up the hill towards the clinic.
I walked away, running my fingers over my newly regrown hair, realizing that it marked me out in the town. On the far side of the harbour, passengers from the ship were clustering around the elixir stalls.
I reached the quieter side streets and wandered slowly past the shop fronts. I was beginning to understand the mistake I had made with those people: anything I said to them now would of course he forgotten as soon as their treatment began. And their role as representatives of my past was a fallacy. Everyone else had the same undoctored quality: the passers-by in the street, the staff at the clinic, Seri.
I walked until I felt footsore, then made my way up the hill to the clinic.
Seri was waiting for me in the chalet. She had an untidy pile of papers on her knee, and was reading through them. It took me a few seconds to realize it was the manuscript.
"You've got it!" I said, and sat down beside her.
"Yes . . . but conditionally. Lareen says you're not to read it alone.
I'll go through it with you."
"I thought you agreed to let me read it by myself."
"I agreed only to get it back from Lareen. She thinks you've recovered well, and so long as I explain the manuscript to you she has no objection to you knowing what it's about."
"All right," I said. "Let's get started."
"This instant?"
"I've been waiting all day for this."
Seri flashed a look of anger at me, and threw her pencil on the floor.
She stood up, letting the pages slide into a curling heap by her feet.
"What's the matter?" I said.
"Nothing, Peter. Not a damned thing."
"Come on . . . what is it?"
"God, you're so selfish! You forget I have a life too! I've spent the last eight weeks in this place, worrying about you, thinking about you, talking to you, teaching you, being with you. Don't you think there might be other things I want to do? You never ask how I am, what I'm thinking, what I'd like to do . . . you just take it for granted I'm going to go on being here indefinitely. Sometimes, I couldn't give a damn about you and your wretched life!"
She turned away from me, staring out of the window.
"I'm sorry," I said. I was stunned by her vehemence.
"I'm going to leave soon. There are things I want to do."
"What sort of things?"
"I want to see a few islands." She turned back to me. "I've got my own life, you know. There are other people I can be with."
There was nothing I could say to this. I knew almost nothing about Seri or her life, and indeed had never asked about it. She was right: I took her for granted, and because it was so true I was speechless. My only defence, one I could not bring myself to summon at that moment, was that as far as I knew I had not asked her to be with me, that from the first days of my new consciousness she had always been there, and because I had not been taught to question it I never had.
I stared down at the untidy pile that was the manuscript, wondering if I should even know what secrets it contained.
We left the chalet, went for one of our curative walks through the grounds. Later, we ate supper in the refectory, and I encouraged Seri to talk about herself. It was not a token gesture prompted by her frustration: by losing her temper with me Seri had opened my mind to yet another area of my ignorance.
I was beginmng to appreciate the scale of the sacrifice Seri had made for me: for nearly two months she had done all the things she said, while I, petulant and child-like, rewarded her with affection and trust, seeking only myself.
Quite suddenly, because I had never thought of it before, I became scared she would abandon me.
Feeling chastened by this I walked back with her to the chalet and watched as she tidied up the scattered manuscript pages. She checked through them to make sure they were in correct order. We sat down next to each other on my bed, and Seri riffled the corners, counting.
"All night, these first few pages are not too important. They explain the circumstances in which you started writing. London is mentioned once or twice, and a few other places. A friend was helping you out after you had had some bad luck. It's not very interesting."
"Do you mind if I look?" I took the sheets from her. It was as she had said: the man who had written this was a stranger to me, and his self-justifications seemed elaborate and labouned. I put the pages to one side. "What's next?"
"We get into difficulties straight away," Seri said, holding the page for me to see and pointing with her pencil. "'I was born in 1947, the second child of Frederick and Catherine Sinclair'. I've never even heard of names like that!"
"Why have you changed them?" I said, seeing that pencil lines had been scored through the names. Above them she, or Lareen, had pencilled in the names I knew as being my parents' connect ones: Franfond and Cotheran Sinclair.
"We could check those. The Lotterie has them on file."
I frowned, appreciating the difficulties I had made for the two women.
In the same paragraph there were several more deletions or substitutions.
Kalia, my elder sister, had been named as "Felicity", a word which I had learned meant happiness or joy, but which I had never heard used as a name.
Later, I discovered that my father had been "wounded in the desert"--an extraordinary phrase--while my mother had been operating a switchboard in
"government offices" in somewhere called "Bletchley". After the "war with Hitler", my father had been among the first men to return home, and he and my mother had rented a house on the outskirts of "London". It was here that I had been born. Most of these obscure references had been crossed out by Seri, but
"London" had been changed to "Jethra", giving me a pleasant feeling of reassurance and familiarity.
Seri led me through a couple of dozen pages, explaining each separate difficulty she had found and telling me the reasons for the substitutions she had made. I agreed with them all, because they so obviously made sense.
The narrative continued in its mundane yet enigmatic way: this family had continued to live outside "London" for the first year of "my" life, and then they had moved to a northern city called "Manchester". (This too had been changed to Jethra.) Once in "Manchester" we reached descriptions of "my" first memories, and with this the confusions came thick and fast.