The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

  So it was then, and as I was summoned into her study, a scholarship boy of eighteen years old, she was already set for recriminations, her back turned to the door through which I entered, a pair of hanging silver earrings bouncing beside the harsh line of her chin. She glanced at me in the mirror by which she adorned herself, before her eyes darted back to the examination of her ears and, without turning, she said, “Ah, Harry. Yes, I did want to see you, didn’t I?”

  It had been remarkably easy to move beyond the fact that, in my infant years, Constance had wanted to throw me back whence I came. To me, after all, these revelations were hundreds of years old, yet I had to recall that to her the impulse was only as old as my current physical body.

  She faffed with her earring a little longer, then turned sharply as if all interest was lost in this task, to stare at me hard down a pointed nose. Whatever unkind genetic pixie had gifted me with my face, it hadn’t spawned on her side of the family.

  “I hear you are for Cambridge,” she said at last. “Not quite as fashionable as Oxford, but I suppose for someone like you it must be a great thing.”

  “I’m very glad, ma’am.”

  “Glad? Is that what you are? Yes, I suppose you must be. They tell me that the college was so impressed that they are overlooking your background, is that correct? Your father can’t be having letters asking for financial assistance once you’re gone, that won’t do at all.”

  “The college have been very generous,” I replied, “and I have some other means.”

  Her eyebrows arched in disdain at this notion. “Do you? Do you indeed?”

  I bit back on my reply. “Yes, biological Grandmother. I know precisely who wins the Grand National every year from 1921 to 2004, as well as having an encyclopaedic knowledge of famous boxing matches, football championships and even the occasional dog race for the same time period, in case I am starved of choice.” Somehow it didn’t seem like an appropriate revelation for the moment.

  “Of course it’s very inconvenient of you to leave at this time,” she blurted against my more considered silence. “Your father is hardly as young as he was, and the grounds… Well, I needn’t tell you how much he’s valued his work for this family. I had rather expected you to do the same.”

  It was a conversation I’d had with Constance every time I’d left the nest for any employment other than national service. At first I thought it was sheer resentment at my potential success, but as the conversations rolled by I had begun to wonder if it were not a deeper anxiety–a desire, even now, to keep control of the boy who symbolised her son’s greatest mistake. I remembered Holy Island, my father dying in a room above a cottage, and felt a brief flush of unexpected shame at the things I had said to him.

  “… it’s actually rather ungrateful, I think, for a boy like you to just abandon his home like this.”

  The words brought me back to my grandmother’s study. I imagine there had been some preamble to this statement, but live as a servant long enough and you acquire an understanding of when sound is meaningless. “Ungrateful, ma’am?” I queried.

  “You’ve been a part of this household your whole life,” she replied, “practically a part of the estate! And now to just pick up and go, it’s really not what we were expecting from you, Harry, I must admit. We all thought rather better of you.”

  “Better… than getting a scholarship to Cambridge?” I suggested.

  “Yes, and the backhanded way in which you did that! No seeking permission, no extra studies, no tuition at all, from what I can see. It’s not how these things are done!”

  I stared at Constance and wondered if, in her way, she wasn’t quite, quite mad. Not a neurological madness, not a disease of the mind, but rather a cultural madness, an infection of expectations which corrupted her perception of what should be and what actually was. Under any other circumstances I would have been praised as a genius, an unmitigated hero and quite possibly a model for social reform in stodgy times; but to Constance all these things made me a rebel. I wondered what she would make of the twenty-first century, if she would have wept when the twin towers fell. Was it a world she would have been able to comprehend?

  “Are you asking me to stay?” I queried.

  “You’re a young man,” she retorted. “If you want to abandon your father and go off to a place where, I personally feel, you’ll be quite unsuited to the life, then of course that’s entirely your decision!”

  What would this conversation have been like, I wondered, if I was only eighteen years old? Now, in my eight hundred and forty-ninth year, it was almost funny.

  I informed her I would consider my position most carefully.

  She sniffed some empty words in reply and dismissed me with a wave.

  I made it to the end of the corridor before I burst out laughing.

  Chapter 67

  Being an undergraduate again brought back memories.

  Memories of Vincent, mostly.

  Of better times.

  When World War Two broke out and I was called up, I managed to get myself assigned to military intelligence. By 1943 I was working on Allied deception plans, agonising about whether cardboard tanks needed to be fully three-dimensional scale models, or if a well painted cut-out, adjusted for the position of the sun, could do the job of confusing a reconnaissance pilot. By 1944 I was so involved with my work that my heart would genuinely skip a beat whenever I heard rumours of a scout plane which had made it over the Kent coast before we could fully deploy our models, or which had come a little too low over one of our fake camps. Vincent was briefly forgotten about until in April 1944 a group of visiting Americans, come to inspect one of our phoney landing strips, asked me entirely casually if I had any models of the new jet fighters ready to deploy.

  The question caught me so by surprise that it was one of the few moments when I actually doubted my own memory. A jet fighter this early? I knew the jet engine was under development, and tests were being conducted on the technology, but for actual deployment in battle? If such a thing had been even considered, it was in no record of the war I’d read, nor in no life during the war that I had lived, and I had dabbled in some senior positions with access to sensitive information in my time. I made some vague remarks and quickly took our visitors on to explain to them how our radio operators were working round the clock to generate as much radio traffic as possible in Kent between the large numbers of fictional units we’d stationed there, and how we’d be grateful if the US Army could issue us with a wider range of suitable call signs. The meeting done, the visitors adjourned, and I was left to ponder the great mystery of the throwaway question. In the guise of an eager official seeking to do a good job, I sounded out a few contacts in the American air force, looking for information on this new jet engine so that I might better deceive our enemy into thinking we had it, or didn’t have it, or whatever it was government policy dictated was the lie of the moment. A few replies drifted back from the ether. Yeah, it was a project some of the boffins were working on, wasn’t it? Sorry, Harry, not really my thing. Had I talked to any of the chaps down in Portsmouth? Maybe they’d have something more. Getting nowhere, I nearly let the matter drop altogether, until in December 1945, visiting a friend in hospital in Folkestone, he shook me warmly by the hand, exclaimed how pleased he was to see me and asked me if I’d heard about his new kidney. He even showed me the scar from the operation, which impressed me greatly not least as the first organ transplant operation wasn’t due to happen for another five years.

  Chapter 68

  The world was changing, and the source of the change was America.

  In another time such flagrant and obvious corruptions of the normal passage of things would have brought the Cronus Club tumbling down on their creator’s head like the walls of Babylon atop a heretical priest. But the Clubs were not only weakened, but in this life–the second since the massed Forgettings inflicted on its members–hundreds of members were coming into an awareness of who and what they were as though f
or the very first time. Previously the Clubs had had to process one new member each every century or so, but in this new world the survivors were swamped.

  “We could do with your help, Harry,” Akinleye said.

  Remarkable Akinleye, who had chosen to forget and who, through luck more than anything else, had managed to escape Vincent’s clutches when he came after us all, was taking charge. Aged sixteen years old, she was juggling duties in London, Paris, Naples and Algiers, marshalling survivors and caring for the newcomers only just beginning to learn what they were. “I’ve got kalachakra kids committing suicide; I’ve got kids in mental institutions, adults getting God, adults not understanding why they shouldn’t kill Hitler, and, Harry, I’ve only been doing this for four lives that I can remember myself. You’re one of the lucky few who hasn’t lost control. Help me.”

  Akinleye, the only kalachakra who knew the truth, knew that Vincent hadn’t wiped my memory. I didn’t dare tell anyone else.

  “I think the one who did this is still out there,” I replied. “If I can’t find him, he’ll only come after the Clubs again.”

  “There’s time for revenge later, isn’t there?”

  “Maybe. But maybe not. Time has always been our problem in the Cronus Clubs. Always had so much; never learned to appreciate it.”

  I left her to struggle on, and flew to America in 1947, an expert in strategic deception, a scholar of Mediterranean corsairs in the 1720s, a press pass in my wallet for a minor British newspaper looking to expand its focus, and my eyes firmly set on Vincent Rankis, wherever he might be.

  Wherever he was, he was certainly busy. Colour TVs were already on sale, and scientists were wondering how long it would be before man walked on the moon. Clearly sooner, their enthusiasm seemed to imply, than I was used to. It was a country in boom, the fervour of those who’d lived through the war combining with an overwhelming sense that this time America hadn’t simply won, it was the victor, unstoppable, undefeatable, a country that had fought on two fronts and on both fronts had proved itself superior. The nuclear age was upon us and it seemed only a matter of time before everyone wore tight-fitting suits and flew to work with a rocket pack. The Soviet menace was a gathering storm on the horizon, but damn it, Good Americans would triumph over the tiny minority of Bad Americans who were swayed by this doctrine of evil, as Good Americans had triumphed so powerfully before. I had lived a long time in America, in lives gone by, but hadn’t before crossed the waters so soon after the Second World War. The civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate–these were all to come, and now I was somewhat overwhelmed by the warmth of my welcome, the hearty greetings and genuine praise I received even for such trivial achievements as walking into a drug store and buying a toothbrush (“An excellent choice of toothbrush, sir!”), and the many admonitions to buy household goods which should not–quite simply should not–have been. Watching the colour TV in my hotel room, I wondered if Senator McCarthy would do so well in this new world, now the vivid flushes of his skin could be seen in such glorious technicolour. Black and white, I concluded, lent a certain dignity to proceedings that the proceedings themselves probably lacked.

  As luck would have it, I was not the only one who had noticed America’s remarkable technological breakthroughs. Even linear journalists were printing headlines like AMERICA DOES IT AGAIN! praising some out-of-the-blue discovery. Magazines hailed the years 1945–50 as the “Epoch of Invention”, distressing both the ouroboran and pedant inside me, while Eisenhower went on TV to warn, not only against the burgeoning military-industrial complex, but the loss of American Values which this new era of steel, copper and wireless technology might bring. By 1953 street lighting was going halogen, Valium was the anti-depressant of choice and we were all being invited to trade in our clunky, unfashionable glasses for soft contact lenses guaranteed to bring the sparkle back into the corner of your eye. I watched, amazed by the cartoonish quality of it all, as the society of 1953 processed the technology of 1960 with both a ravenous hunger and a slight hesitation as if the generations who were set to rebel weren’t quite sure yet what it was they were meant to rebel against.

  The most infuriating part of all this was tracing the source of the outbreak. Inventions weren’t springing out of one company or one place, but from dozens of companies and campuses across the country, all of which then engaged in bitter patent rows with each other while the technology spread virus-like from mind to mind, unstoppable, uncontainable, out of control. I spent nearly two years trying to pin down where these remarkable ideas were springing from, growing ever more infuriated by the stonewalling and empty shrugs I received for my enquiries even as teams of scientists set to work taking the basic principles behind mundane devices and extrapolating them into something entirely new, entirely their own work, and far, far too advanced for the time of their invention. Perhaps more alarming, for every new device the Americans came up with, the Soviets would send more agents to steal it, and push their own people harder to find the answers for themselves, and so the technology race accelerated.

  It took a doctor of chemistry at MIT, one Adam Schofield, to finally give me the answer I needed. We’d met at a talk on “Innovation, Experimentation and the New Age”. We had a drink afterwards in a hotel bar and talked about bad cars, good books, disappointing sportsmen and the upcoming presidential race, before finally getting on to the subject of the day’s latest developments in biomass energy.

  “You know what, Harry?” he explained, leaning in close over the embarrassingly empty bottle of port we’d been sharing. “I feel like such a liar when I take credit for that.”

  Indeed, but why, Dr Schofield?

  “I understand it; I can explain it; we can do fucking amazing things with it–amazing things, Harry, I mean, paradigm-shift-amazing–but the actual idea? I tell people it ‘came to me in my sleep’. Can you believe that crap? What a load of bull.”

  Oh, but no, Dr Schofield, surely not, Dr Schofield, but then where did your ideas come from?

  “Some letter in the post! Five sides of fucking science like you would not believe, like you’ve never fucking seen. Took me four days before I got it, and I was sat looking at it, and, Harry, this letter, this guy, whoever sent it–it was the mother lode.”

  Did he know who he was?

  No, he did not, but…

  “Do you still have this letter?”

  “Sure! Kept in a drawer. I’ve always been open about this to anyone who asked, because I sure as hell don’t wanna get sued if this guy ever comes after me or something, but the faculty, they wanted it done real quiet.”

  So here it was, here was the big moment…

  “Can I see it?”

  He had, as promised, kept it in a drawer, in an envelope marked “Dr A. Schofield”. His office was an attempt at wood-panelled antiquity that the building could not sustain. The light on the desk was low, covered with a green shade. I sat and read through the five pieces of double-sided thick yellowish paper on which were scrawled a series of diagrams, numbers and equations which would be in first-year chemistry classes across universities everywhere–in 1991. We kalachakra can change a lot about ourselves, but oddly enough we rarely consider changing our handwriting, and Vincent’s headlong scrawl was recognisable anywhere.

  I examined the paper, looked for a watermark, found none. Examined the ink, the envelope, for anything–anything at all–which might suggest a point of origin. Nothing. I was many, many years too late. I tried to work out how old Vincent would be now–mid-twenties, at a pinch. Able to blend into any campus in any college in the US. Then again, if this was his method of accelerating technological development, by stimulating the minds of those at its present-day forefront, perhaps he’d struck again elsewhere?

  Harvard, Berkeley, Caltech. It took persuasion and on more than one occasion copious amounts of rather pricey alcohol, but there they were, letters on yellow paper several years old. In one or two faculties the professors who received the documents had ignored them, tr
eated them as pranks. Now, as they watched their rivals forge ahead in the field, they kicked themselves and drank a little deeper of their academic sorrows.

  But Vincent’s method was still only a means to an end. He wished to accelerate modern technology to reach a point where he could recommence his work, find his answers and build his quantum mirror, presumably using technology from some time in the early twenty-first century. I knew now how he was going to achieve this, but I was far too late to the chase to be able to prevent the dissemination of technology which he had begun. Now I needed to discover where the next step was happening, for there Vincent would be. And all the while, as I searched, the technology moved on with frightening speed. In 1959 the first personal computer–rather optimistically dubbed the Future Machine by an inventor so dazzled with his own brilliance he couldn’t think of anything better–was on sale. It was the size of a small wardrobe and had a life of approximately four months before the internal parts melted under the strain, but it was nevertheless a sign of things to come. If I’d been less preoccupied with finding Vincent, I might have appreciated the role technology was playing in politics a little further. I’d never noticed Israel invade Syria and Jordan before, although I was hardly surprised when furious local resistance drove even the technologically superior IDF back to more defensible borders. The declaration of holy war in the Middle East toppled the Iranian shah several years earlier than average, but secular strongmen seemed to be the power of the moment, leaping into the vacuum left behind with a new generation of military equipment that put the 1980s to shame. Armies tend to exploit science faster than civilians, if only because their need tends to be more urgent.

  By 1964 the Soviets were winding up the Warsaw Pact, and the US declared another great triumph for capitalism, consumerism and commerce, and still technology surged and surged ahead. I’d got myself a position as science editor on a magazine based in Washington DC, in which capacity I also quietly reported to the FBI on the developing crimes of the age, including telephone fraud and the world’s first ever computer hack, dated 1965. Had my editor ever learned of my duplicity, I would probably have been sacked on principle, and re-hired for the quality of my scoops and the quirky range of my contacts.