Somewhere East of Life. Brian Aldiss
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heading from the West towards the eastern stars. Burnell kept an arm protectively round the cat in case it was scared.
When he returned to his ward, to his nest in the glacier, the cat followed. In clear light, the animal was seen to be a bundle of long black fur. From its forward extremity, like glowworms in a thicket, the odd eye or two winked out now and again. Burnell stroked its more accessible parts, and it spent that night on his bed. He slept badly, harassed by thoughts of Larry and his mother.
In a fit of loneliness in the small hours, he held the warm body of the cat to his chest, comforted by it. He consoled himself by telling himself that the days would pass.
And so they did. And they brought Stephanie to him.
5
Some Expensive Bullets
By the time Stephanie arrived, Burnell was acclimatized to hospital routine. He exercised early in the morning before visiting the psychotherapist and underwent tests in the afternoon. In the evenings he read. To awaken and find the stray cat had gone was the least of Burnell’s worries. Yet the animal’s absence reinforced a sense of emptiness. The humble creature, unable to bear his company, he supposed, had disappeared into the warren of the building.
After much hesitation, he phoned his father in Norfolk. It was Laura, his stepmother, who answered the call.
‘Your father is somewhere in the garden, dear, talking to the gardener, showing him what’s what. He had to sack the last man. They’re so unreliable. The new man seems rather promising. He comes with wide experience, although he’s lame. I suppose that doesn’t matter. I’ve spoken to his wife.
‘The garden’s not at its best, though the iris bed looks splendid. Irises don’t mind the drought so much. We need rain badly.’
He listened to that precise theatrical voice. It conjured up the distant world of Diddisham Abbey, and the life lived by his father and Laura. When he had the chance, he explained to Laura what had happened to him.
‘Oh dear!’ she exclaimed. ‘What pickles people do get into. To have one’s memory stolen. Well, you’ll just have to try and get it back, dear. Do you want me to come over and visit you? I suppose I could do that. I suppose I should. You know your father isn’t able to come.’
‘That’s all right, Laura, thanks. I’ll manage.’
‘You do sound terribly depressed. I don’t wonder. Poor soul. Look, ring me again soon, is that a promise?’
The visits to Dr Rebecca Rosebottom were no more comforting. To maintain his morale, Burnell woke early and exercised in the empty gym for an hour. He showered, shaved, and breakfasted, to present himself in the Rosebottom clinic on the second floor at nine-thirty.
Burnell sat on one side of her cold hearth, Rosebottom on the other, in not particularly uncomfortable chairs.
Rebecca Rosebottom reeked of ancient wisdom and more recent things. She dressed, she mentioned in an aside, in astrological fashion. Old portions of embroidered curtain material were draped across her body in contradictory directions, presumably to indicate this in the ascendant and that in the descendant, and the other undecided over the bosom. She could have been in her fifties or sixties, her head being spare of flesh and of an apple-and-thyme jelly colour, above which rose a wreath of matted grey hair. Her disinclination for movement reinforced a mummified appearance.
She told Burnell on the second morning that she knew he was a Buddhist.
‘I don’t think so, Rebecca.’
She encouraged him to talk. Burnell had always regarded himself as a listener. His architectural pursuits had not been an encouragement to conversation. After his mother had died, he had never been able to get close to his father. He had thought his father always involved with international business affairs. Unexpectedly, he now found himself pouring out the troubles of those adolescent years: how his brother had been classified as schizophrenic, how his father had married again, how confused he was about the new wife.
‘You felt it was natural that you should feel antagonistic to Laura.’
He plunged into his complicated feeling for the beautiful actress his father had brought home unannounced. Laura was kind and amusing; yet to accept a replacement for his mother was disloyal. Then came his father’s accident in Rome, when he had broken his spine in a car crash and lost the use of both legs.
He had considered himself haunted by bad luck. He had tried to commit suicide. In some strange way, he felt an identification with Larry Foot, the killer of Bishops Linctus. He could only wonder if he had committed any crimes during the years for which memory was missing. He was sure Stephanie would know.
‘You’re dependent on her and what she says.’
‘How should I know?’
Through questioning, they established that it was an entire ten years which had been stolen. Rosebottom ventured the thought that the theft had taken place abroad, since EMV was strictly regulated in Britain.
‘From what you say, I gather you are sorry that your marriage has been wiped from memory.’
He became impatient. It was not the marriage alone. He did not know what kind of man he had been, how his professional reputation stood, or how much money he earned. Her mummified presence and occasional comments served merely to make him more aware of his predicament, while resolving nothing. It was bad enough facing life; facing Rebecca Rosebottom was worse.
Before going to the second floor for his third session, he found the little black cat again. He cradled it in his arms and took it into the clinic with him.
Once more, Larry Foot forced his way into the confessions. Rosebottom remarked on it.
‘I’ve suffered two traumatic shocks, Rebecca. Unconnected, but one after the other. I probably need proper counselling on both. Though counselling is not going to get my memory back.’ He looked hopelessly out of the window as silence fell between them. A convoy of three military vehicles was entering the car park, billowing out a blue haze of pollution as they lined themselves up.
Turning his attention back to the fine immobile Egyptian head, he said that he was troubled by a contradiction he could not resolve. Of course he understood the terrible nature of Larry’s crime, for which he had paid with his life; but there was also the factor of Larry’s innocence. Larry had said he liked to help people. He seemed not to have understood that even his mother was real. Burnell elaborated on this for some while without making himself clearer, only half aware that what had puzzled him was the nature of cruelty and of pain, the titbit that followed cruelty.
When Rosebottom indicated that Larry was just an incidental misfortune, with nothing to do with Burnell’s personal predicament, Burnell disagreed. Privately, he thought that whoever had stolen part of his memory was also no better than a murderer; the cruelty factor had operated.
All he brought himself to say was, ‘I was threatened with death, Rebecca. I was shit-scared.’
‘I sympathize, believe me. You can keep on telling me if it makes you happier. I’m no ordinary shrink. EMV cases always have attitudes.’
As often happened, silence fell between them. He felt he had never known such a conversation stopper as this lady who was supposed to promote the flow of talk.
And, as so often happened, he then began talking in an unpremeditated way, telling her that, as he had said, he had suffered two traumatic shocks. He woke in the middle of the night after a nightmare, wondering if he had become schizophrenic.
Rosebottom invited him to tell her what he meant by schizophrenic.
He said, ‘That’s what my brother’s got. I have a brother called Adrian. At present he’s under medication in Leeds.’
After a protracted silence, in which Rosebottom maintained an attitude almost beyond stillness, Burnell said he did not want to talk about it.
Her smile stretched her lips sideways