John John

the premature end of this novel-as-blog blog-as-novel

2008-02-20T23:55:00.000-08:00

My apologies to anyone who has been reading the novel here, but the writers' co-operative, Turner Maxwell (http://www.turnermaxwellbooks.com/), came and read a chapter and offered to publish the novel entire as a paperback. With their investment in the book I can hardly continue to blog here.
My thanks to Google, however, for having let me do so.
Sam

...even more of John John

2008-02-12T11:08:00.000-08:00

Every bed in the ward is now occupied. Many of the beds have their curtains pulled around them, nurses billowing in and out. There is no tea. On his way to the bathroom John John sees portly Mr Assan in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat earnestly consulting with the matron. Beside them one of the younger doctors holds a sheet of paper against a wall and writes.
There is no hot water.
"What's happening?" somebody asks. There are many instant explanations, but without the TV or radio to enlighten them all they have to go on are rumours. 'A nurse said...' 'A porter told me...’ 'I heard a doctor say...’ All the patients have stories to tell of being woken in the night by the comings and goings of porters, nurses and doctors.
Some men shave in cold water, others brush only their teeth, comb their hair. John John starts to shave. The lights go out.
"Apparently it's an electrical storm," the small pedant excitedly tells John John, "That's why all the beds are full — it's upsetting their pacemakers. Assan and Burton have been operating all night." The man sounds as if he has been involved in those operations. "They've had to take the pacemakers out and put them on sedatives instead. Some of them won’t last." In his agitation the man keeps flicking cold water off his razor over the twilit mirror and onto John John, "That's why there's no hot water. Because, although the boilers are gas-fired, they're electronically ignited. And all the valves are electronically controlled. Apparently it’s affecting everything electrical."
Breakfast is fruit juice and cold cereals. No tea, not even the offer of scrambled eggs. The nurses are preoccupied with the pacemaker intake, have no time for anyone else. Neither John John's blood pressure nor his pulse, nor his temperature are taken. He has come to accept their being taken as an inconvenience, as an interruption to his reading; now he feels neglected.
With relief he greets the arrival of the newspaperman; only to find that he has no newspapers, only old unsold magazines. The patients vent their curiosity on him. Standing by his steepsided trolley he turns from face to face saying,
"It's an electrical storm. It's knocking out everything electrical. Telly, phones, cars, buses, trains. Prints for newspapers are electrical. I had to come by bike today. Car wouldn't start. Should've seen the sky last night. There's nothing," his voice rises in his own petulant defence, "I can do about it."
Several of the day nurses don't arrive. Two or the night nurses don't go home. A sulking cleaner appears about noon with a wide bristle-splayed broom. The lights come on, go off again.
"If cars don't work, nor will the emergency generator," Osman Rustar tells John John, "Though my wife will come. She will walk. Not like these English women with their buses and their cars."
Lunch is salad.

Voice Off. Of all the three million species on Earth humanity is the only one which kills, not for food, those of its own species, which is prepared to die for the possession of a thing. Other territorial species skirmish, make a bullish display of power, lock horns or antlers in a ritual show of strength; and the loser accepts his or her humiliation and abandons all claims to the disputed territory. Not so humanity. Humanity has so de-formalised this territorial aggression that, as individuals and as groups, people are not prepared to accept defeat. Thus each of humanity's wars is a continuation of the last.
Human intelligence has come to overlook the original purpose of territorial aggression — that with the territory go exclusive breeding rights — the breeding rights being for the duration of that dominance, or solely for that breeding season. Humanity has thus forgotten that territorial aggression has to do primarily with the perpetuation of the species, not with the destruction of it.
Only when the car is stopped do the two women talk to him, to ask him how much longer. And when the car is not stuck in traffic it is stalled in the open road.

He asked for a WPC, but all are on traffic duty — Northampton’s traffic lights having become so unreliable that they have all been switched off. Not that there’s much traffic.
Only when not in the other’s presence have the two women mentioned the man; and then only to ask if his memory has returned, in order it seems that they can then cut short their visit and leave Northampton. Between themselves all they talk about is their erratic journeys here.
When finally they reach the hospital the lifts are inoperable and they have to take to the stairs. The fat one groans, the thin one hobbles on high heels. Neither seem intelligent enough to be the man’s wife. Maybe they were pretty once, DC Hawkins thinks, maybe once they were seen to contain a mystery other than their menstrual organs. Now, however, this hospital serves only to remind them of their operations, the servicing of their antique plumbing. Step, pause; step, pause; he matches his pace to theirs, the funereal shuffle in keeping with his misery.
An advocate of the new he has seen this day manual typewriters resurrected in the station; and, in a house full of electrical gadgets, on a brief visit home this morning, he had to boil a pan slowly on a camping gas ring to make himself one cup of tea.
The power cuts have also created a mini crime wave. The habitual order of their lives having been upset people are acting irrationally, are beating up their accusing wives, vandalising their disapproving neighbour's fences, robbing their superior friends. With the phones down people are coming to the station to report their grievances. He is needed there to take statements.
At last he parks the two women on a low wooden bench outside the ward, grabs the sister and explains the purpose of his visit.
"I’m up to here in faulty pacemakers. Use the telly room. I'll send a nurse to assist. In case," she says as she hurries away, "the shock proves too much."
The one available nurse is a tired auxiliary in grey and white stripes. DC Hawkins explains what he wants of her. They accompany a complaisant John John to the telly room.
"Dental records were negative," DC Hawkins tells him, "Doesn't mean you're not known though. Only in this country. I’ve been in touch with the Pakistan Embassy in London, given them all that we so far know about you. Now that the phones are down though..."
The phones being down have also put a stop to another line of enquiry. In case the choice of the name John John had any subconscious promptings, DC Hawkins checked the records for any missing John Johns. None. So he looked for any with the surname John or Johns registered as missing. There were eight, none of whose descriptions matches that of his man. He then started searching through the local phone directory, and the voting register, for any John Johns. He found forty five with the surnames John and Johns. He was about to start contacting them on the phone when the interference arrived.
Now he sends the auxiliary for the first wife and installs John John in a deep chair with his back to the telly room door. He stands opposite him. He is more interested in seeing John John's reactions than hers.
"They're just going to have a look at you," he reassures John John, "If they’re not certain then they'll talk to you."
The auxiliary brings in first the thin woman, Mrs Bofill. She comes around the chair and stands beside DC Hawkins. John John looks her over as curiously as she appraises him: specimens to each other.
"It's not him," she says. "Who are you?" she bluntly asks John John.
"I don't know," John John blushes. A natural enough reaction, DC Hawkins, decides, in the circumstances.
While the auxiliary goes to fetch the fat one DC Hawkins wonders at Mrs Bofill's certainty. After all what is the human face — shape of head, distance between the eyes, eyebrows, nose and mouth; variations on which just about make us recognisably different. How different though? Take this one, he thinks, he'll do, as good as anyone else, maybe an improvement on the one you lost.
The fat one sits wheezing opposite John John, squints at him.
"I dunno," she says, "Could be. It’s been so long..."
"Do you mind?" the auxiliary drops into a corner chair, pulls out a packet of cigarettes, "I haven't had a break since ten this morning."
"Do you recognise this woman?" DC Hawkins asks John John.
The fat woman simpers self-consciously while John John studies her.
"I’m afraid not," he says.
"Sounds like him," she says to DC Hawkins.
"Could you be," DC Hawkins glances to his notebook, "Colin Geoffery Knowles?"
DC Hawkins is used now to John John's self-examining silences. The fat woman isn't, seeks a sympathetic smile from the auxiliary.
"I could be I suppose," John John says, "But then I could he anybody."
DC Hawkins wonders, if Mrs Knowles was a younger and a slimmer woman, John John might now be more forthcoming. He himself wouldn't want to be claimed by this fat old boot; but then he has an aversion to fat women.
All policemen’s wives seem to have broad hips. He deliberately married a slim woman because he didn't want to be a typical policeman. Since the baby, though, his wife has put on weight and he now wishes that she wouldn't wear jeans in public.
"Tell him about himself," he orders Mrs Knowles.
The fat woman begins telling of her two daughters, of how the youngest has married since he left, the trouble she had with the wedding arrangements, being on her own...
"Tell him of what he knows," DC Hawkins interrupts her, "Your own wedding maybe."
The shining fat woman blushes, laughs,
"You had a hangover, remember? You and the best man, whatsisname, that friend you worked with. The pair of you were ill at the reception. My Dad was furious..."
The fat woman, bottom lip trembling, weeps. The auxiliary, exhaling twin streams of smoke from her nose, wearily stubs out her cigarette.
"It’s not him," the fat woman says into the tissue dragged from her sleeve, "To come all this way... Hide nor hair for three years..."
"I’m sorry," John John says, but not for anything he may have done, just for her.
"Go home!" she sputters at him, "You don't know what you're doing," John John looks in confusion to DC Hawkins and the auxiliary.
DC Hawkins signals the auxiliary to take the snuffling woman away.
"There were two more women supposed to have come," DC Hawkins tells John John when they are alone, "Surprised those two got here. Don't hold out much hope in that direction anyway. All of 'em reckon you’ve lived in this country all your life, and if that's the case we should have records of your three fillings. It’ll all take longer now anyway, with the phones down."
"What exactly is happening?"
"Electrical storm. Sky's lit up at night. Burglar alarms and bleepers going off everywhere. We got so much work we don't know where to start. I’ll be in touch."

Voice Off. Barbarous times make barbarians of all but the stubborn.

"Take my word for it, the universe is eighteen thousand million years old. So, should we all be wiped out tomorrow, even in terms of this galaxy, let alone this universe, the whole of humanity's one million years, from its evolution until right now, will hardly rate a mention."
The two security men are not accustomed to thinking of themselves as insignificant. To escape the fug of their inflated little minds Barry decides to walk to Herstmonceux.
"Why?" the senior security man plaintively asks, not wanting to have to walk that distance.
"Someone there might've left a message for me. Might be able to find out exactly what's happening. No need for you to come." Both security men grimace at his trusting naiveté.
With no phones, no electricity and no car, the two security men have spent their day in the house wondering anxiously what they should do. Their isolation worries them. For two hours or more they discussed whether or not one or them should try to somehow get to London, or if they should attempt to contact their small local office in Portsmouth. The situation has drastically changed: both know that their orders will also have been changed; but to learn of their new orders they will have to disobey their existing orders. A dilemma indeed for two self-made automatons.
Before he reaches the end of the street Barry hears his front door slam.
The sunset is orange, the back streets of Hastings deserted. No sound of traffic, no murmur of televisions behind closed windows, only the forlorn bleating of a rooftop seagull and the syncopated footsteps of the two security men. Barry Tappell smiles — at himself in one of life's occasional tableaux of pleasing and total absurdity.
The two security men are the same distance behind him when he reaches the road through the Pevsney marshes. The sunset has now faded and the aurora is twisting in the violet sky, like hand-held sparklers fizzing deep under dark blue water. Both security men are walking looking up at the rainbow aurora. Barry waits for them.
Away beyond the dry yellow grasses Sunday church bells peal their sonorous levity. White gulls, lit by the aurora, fly flickering inland to their roosts. No horizon glow or streetlights this evening.
"’Tis a long and lonely road," he greets the two security men, and falls into step with them.
"What’s it made of?" the junior security man asks him.
"Ionised particles."
The black blocks of the castle buildings establish themselves within the pale strip between the dark blue land and the dark blue sky. The nearby yellow grasses of the marsh are alive with the crepuscular rustlings of rat, vole and warty toad.
"Wish I’d brought a torch," the older security man says.
"Probably wouldn't've worked," the younger says, asks Barry, "Would it?"
"Might."
Across the sky the aurora ripples like a fat purple and golden caterpillar.
The observatory tower is cold and silent: a vertical tomb for extinct artefacts. Barry looks into his own and into the Director's office. With his lighter the junior security man searches the desk tops for messages. No-one has been here since yesterday.
"Marie bloody Celeste," the senior security man mutters.
"You can now consider your sensible selves to have joined us freaks in this freakish world. You two aren't normal," Barry grins at them. Beyond the office windows the aurora swirls like a team of flamenco formation dancers. "Here you two very normal people are in a Sussex marsh in a blacked out science zoo. Perceptive devices all intact, are they?"

Voice Off. Because of their brief lives human beings view every transaction as having an end, as having a definitive result; rather than as all actions being a part of, a link in, the continuous process of matter.

...and yet more of John John

2008-02-05T00:30:00.001-08:00

Awaking with a pain in his lower stomach he turns his body away from the pain. The pain follows him. He pushes himself up the bed.
The nurses have already opened the curtains. Has he woken late? No, other patients are just joining the morning rush to the bathroom.
The pain sits within the cradle of his pelvis. He raises his hips above the pain. It eases.
He considers telling a nurse of the pain, how to describe it. The nurses appear unusually busy this morning. Fresh beds are being prepared and the phone keeps ringing. No sooner has a nurse answered it and hurried back down the ward than it rings again; and with an exasperated sigh the nurse leaves the bed and the patient and to go striding back up the ward. The tea trolley is not yet in sight.
The pain grips him again, slicing up through his abdomen, abating. He finds himself gasping, is damp with sweat. Hearing voices in the bathroom he wonders if moving will help.
Cagey of rousing the pain he swings his legs out of bed and stands. The pain moves to one side, and decreases. Collecting up his shaving equipment he makes for the bathroom, where a croaky chorus of 'Morning John’ greets him. He forces a smile to his face, urinates. That alleviates the ache. Letting out his breath he shakily joins the queue at the basins. The pain has now changed character, has descended to deeper in his bowels.
A cistern flushes and a cubicle door opens. That’s it, he realises, and goes pushing past the tottering man coming out, bolts the door on the surprised laughter of some outside.
The cubicle stinks. Trying not to inhale the airborne bacteria he drops his pyjama bottoms and sits on the still warm lavatory seat. His anus instantly opens. As his turds go plunging into the water below he thinks Oh the horror of it, Oh the horror of it...
He stares at the plain wooden door before him. That he should have no memory of ever having done this before... That he should not be able to read such a mundane signal from his body... That, now that the pain has gone, is the horror. To have no memory even of this cloying stink.
He drops his head into his hands. To not know here, where the nurses' main preoccupation is with bowels and the composition and colour of shit...
Lifting his head from his hands he puzzles over a new sour smell. Sniffing over his fingers and wrists, he rubs his hair again. His scalp is excreting a sebaceous ordure. Distaste for his own body pulls up his lip. Calculating the correct use for the roll of white toilet paper he wipes his anus. It still feels unclean.
Emerging from the cubicle he re-examines the bathroom. One door is labelled ‘Shower’. He opens the door. It is a small room, tiled, pipes on the wall, a porcelain square in which to stand. The air steamy from its recent use.
He returns to his bed. The paper trolley has arrived, so too the morning’s cup of tea. He buys a Guardian, collects his shampoo and goes back to the bathroom. Hanging his pyjamas and towel behind the door he turns on both taps, tests the temperature of the spraying water and takes his nakedness under it. The wooden slats feel slimy underfoot. Turning carefully, he adjusts the temperature, increasing the hot, then reaches for the shampoo.
He finds that he has to step out of the spray to get up a lather. The bruise at the back of his head is still tender. Coming back under the spray he feels the suds sluicing down over his body, cleansing him. Taking up a square bar of yellow soap he sets about scouring himself from head to foot.
Finally he deems himself clean. Shaking the water from his body he steps out of the shower and towels himself dry, all the while examining the patterns of the hairs on his pink skin. He has no memories of this his body.
His pyjamas have a stale smell. As he buttons them over his clean skin he tells himself to ask the nurses for a clean pair.
Having shaved, feeling refreshed and not a little foolish, glad only that he didn't tell the nurses of his pain, he returns to his bed, drinks his tepid tea and glances through his paper. The day nurses and cleaners arrive. One of the women cleaners, a dumpy miserable person, complains that her floor polisher is on the blink. Whenever it stops she walks over and kicks its plug. Kicking the plug has no effect. The polisher's fickleness is more in tune with the flickering lights. The woman finally curses aloud and flinging about its lead she packs the polisher away.
When breakfast is brought John John recognises his hunger, has orange juice, porridge and a poached egg on toast. Then he sets about the crossword.
Two new patients are wheeled in on stretchers. Both men appear to know the nurses. The curtains are hurriedly drawn around their beds. There is much urgent coming and going and ringing of the telephone. Neither of the new patients is Assan's. All the nurses this day appear preoccupied, subdued. John John wonders at the change in them; or is it in his perception of them?
John John watches Osman Rustar wince as he turns in his bed, as he wincing moves again, the pain within not letting him settle. John John realises that he has screwed up his own face in sympathetic mimicry. He studies Osman Rustar: he is breathing open-mouthed now, looking up at the ceiling. Osman Rustar is a man collapsing inside himself, going ever deeper within himself to escape the pain.
John John has three clues of the crossword left to solve when the young doctor, who first examined him, stops by his bedside. He asks John John how he is feeling. He does not call him John John. John John tells him that he is feeling much better. That does not appear to cheer the doctor, who asks if his memory has returned. John John tells him not.
"Well," the doctor looks at the nurses busy with yet another new patient, "we can't release you until we discover what was wrong with you. Don't want you collapsing in the street again. And we can’t let you go until we know who exactly you are. Just have to be patient. Mr Assan will be seeing you tomorrow."
The doctor seems to be searching for other things to say to John John. John John realises that the doctor hasn't come to him with any particular purpose in mind, has just happened by.
"Could I have some clean pyjamas?" John John asks him.
The doctor expressionlessly studies John John for so long that John John becomes uncomfortable. Finally the doctor says,
"I'll have a word with sister," and he goes.
All three of the new patients are taken to surgery. John John asks Osman Rustar if he knows what is wrong with them. Osman Rustar doesn’t know, remarks though on the downcast faces of the nurses this day, says that whatever is happening it must be bad.
John John begins the second of his library books. He is reading when a man in black clothes kneels beside his bed. The man introduces himself as the hospital chaplain. He smells of sugar, as if he has scented his breath. His unscented breath therefore, John John deduces, must stink.
The chaplain, smiling, continues to breathe into John John's face. John John waits to find out what the man wants. Mr MacMaster's bed is still stripped. John John wonders if the chaplain has come especially to see him or if he has come to see everyone in the ward and his is the first occupied bed.
The idea of the unscented breath is making his own breathing difficult, and the chaplain's face being so close disconcerts him. It is a long face with large discoloured teeth. And why is he kneeling? He is a long limbed man, but so too is the spotty doctor and he used the chair. This is behaviour wholly at odds with what John John has so far witnessed in the ward. Even the most ebullient of visitors hasn't behaved like this. Even the fussing wives haven't stayed this close.
"I don't know what denomination you are," the chaplain speaks just as John John is about to turn away, "but here in the hospital chapel we hold en ecumenical service."
John John knows what the man is talking about: he can’t see, though, what connection it has with him.
"And should you not be of our persuasion," as before he gives John John an understanding look, an inference of forgiveness, "that will not stand in the way of my doing all that I can to help you. Is there anything that I can do for you?"
John John can think of nothing that this man might do for him. He shrugs into the face.
"Are you C of E?" the chaplain asks him.
"I don't know." John John says, recognising at last his prejudice against the man. The chaplain is false. He is trying to give the appearance of intimate concern and yet he hasn't bothered to find out anything about him.
"You were baptised?"
"I don't know."
"John's a biblical name. A doubly biblical name," the chaplain savours his own astute observation.
"John's the name they have given me here," John John tells him, "They don't know my real name. I’ve lost my memory."
For the first time the chaplain lowers his eyes from John John’s. The large chin is unshaven, the dog collar dirty.
"Surely though," the chaplain's eyes come slyly up, "no man can forget his God. Be it," he dismissively signifies Osman Rustar in the bed behind John John, "Allah or Jehovah."
"I think I may have forgotten him," John John says, "Though I do know what you're talking about."
"Do you know the bible?"
"I know what it is."
"Then you are a Christian."
John John searches for a rebuttal. He doesn't want this false man with the shabby theatricality of his dress and gestures and his television actor's grimacing to be right, recalls a conversation with Osman Rustar and his wife. She too said that no-one could forget their religion.
"Does to know or something make me a follower of it?" he asks the chaplain, "Because I also know of the Koran. Does that make me a Muslim? I also know what’s in these books," John John gestures to his four library books, "it doesn't mean that I am a follower of their philosophies."
The chaplain tilts his head to the book titles,
"These are novels. That's a biography."
"A life story. And parables. Ideas. What else is the bible?" The chaplain, wearing now an expression of sad resignation, ponderously nods his large head. "If your memory does return," he lays a heavy intimidating hand on John John's shoulder as he rises, "and you do find that, after all, you are a Christian, and that you do require my services, then don't hesitate to call me. God be with you."
John John watches the chaplain in his loose black suit stride past Osman Rustar's bed and kneel beside the next bed. The kneeling, John John sees, is an affectation, an advertisement of his calling, as if the black suit and the yellowing dog collar were not sufficient.
Osman Rustar is looking over the top of his Daily Mail.
"He doesn't call on you then?" John John asks in Urdu. Osman Rustar grunts, presses a hand to his stomach.
"Some holy man," he says, and burps. They smile at one another and return to their reading.
Between pages John John watches the chaplain progress from bed to bed, kneeling beside each, even clasping his hands in prayer beside one. Two of the patients call a nurse over to adjust their televisions. He hears her tell them that there is some interference that's affecting the phones as well. The chaplain, with grey dust on his trouser knees, leaves the ward. Lunch is served. Another new patient is brought in, is put in the isolation room. Nurses and doctors are busy.
Before afternoon visiting John John solves the last three clues and looks with satisfaction upon the completed crossword.
During visiting he takes his novel into the television room. A stiff-backed patient joins him there, tries to find a television channel without interference. On all are a crackle of black and white diamonds.
"Freak weather conditions," the man crisply informs John John, switches off the television and, picking up a magazine, he sits in one or the high caramel armchairs. He glances at the cover of the magazine, tosses it back onto the table. His fingers tap on the arm of the chair.
"Hate hospitals," he says, "This public sitting around. All this waiting. Hate it." John John makes a sympathetic face, and realises that he does not know what it is to be private.
The man abruptly leaves. John John notices someone's discarded Daily Mirror. Laying down his novel, he finds the quizword. His mind answers eight of the general knowledge clues. He wonders if his memory is returning. Or is he learning?

Voice Off. The idea of truth is a fiction.

The radio clock's red numerals are flashing 12:16. On losing power and being turned back on the clock resets itself to 12:00. The real time has to be late afternoon.
Barry looks to the yellow light flickering around the drawn bedroom curtains. How many times today, he wonders, has the power been cut? The last time it came back on was sixteen minutes ago, of that alone can he be certain.
Turning and stretching in bed he recalls the events of yesternight — the aurora, the Nimrod losing control, the drive home, his trying — to the security men's consternation — to phone both Steve Church and Brian Waters, the security men's relief when he was unable to reach either, their waiting for him to go to his dawn bed and out of earshot before they again phoned their masters and adjourned to their car.
The more he remembers the greater his interest in what has been happening while he has been asleep. Curiosity will not let him lie abed. Flinging off the duvet he tiptoes to the window and looks around the side or the curtain. The security men's white car hasn't moved. Both men are sat in it. One is looking up at him. And having seen Barry, out of habit, out of longstanding practise, he averts his face.
The duvet is folded over like a fat triangular sandwich, the thought of which activates Barry’s gastric juices. His watch says 19:08. Or is his watch slow too? No, the day has that feel to it — the angle of the sunlight, the lack of urgency in the noise of the traffic.
Dressed he flips aside the curtain, acknowledges the presence of the security men with a lift of his chin. Neither responds. Before leaving the bedroom he checks the radio. Crackle only. After the bathroom he tries the phone. Not even a dialling tone now.
The cooker still has gas. His mind though balks at cooking a meal. But, he tells himself, this might be his last hot meal for days; and, if the electricity is cut for any period, the contents of his freezer will ruin. So, out of the freezer, he wrenches a packet of lamb chops and a lump of peas. The chops and peas go into the microwave while he scrapes some potatoes. When they are in the pan he pops into the living room to check the television. Crackle only.
He eats his dinner on the living room's round table, pacing himself, having cooked too much but loath to waste it. As he eats he flips through various books, laying down both his knife and fork to make notes, calculations. By the time he finishes coffee his watch says 21:17. The day, though, is already darkening. He has not one mechanical clock or watch in the house. A few streetlights are showing beyond the houses out back. But that too means nothing; their timers will have been upset by the power cuts.
He is in no hurry to reach the observatory, knows that the scope will, in all likelihood, be out of action. But neither does he want to settle down here to some serious reading before he is certain that the observatory can be of no further use to him.
This time he doesn't wave to the security men, simply climbs into his red car and drives off. His car stalls at the first junction The white security car is behind his. His lights flicker as he restarts the engine.
He drives out through Hastings towards the marshes. A line of streetlights glow red as they come on, go abruptly off again. His engine stalls. In his mirror he sees the lights of the security car fade and die. His battery acts as if dead. Barry sits in his car and waits.
There are no lights in any of the houses in this street. Above the black roofs the golden aurora curls in the violet sky.
Barry looks again at the darkened windows. No lights, no telly. What are the people doing, he wonders. Rise in the birthrate probably. Will the television stations continue to transmit? Probably. Even if no-one's receiving them. While they have local power people will be able to catch up on their backlog of videos, play computer games. For a while longer. News addicts, though, must already be screaming without their regular supply.
Lights come on. He starts the engine, stalls twice more on the way to the castle. He notices too that his watch stops. Once he sees the security car stall, leaves them behind. When next he stalls the security car catches up, stalls behind him. The interference, Barry realises, cannot then be distributed evenly overall, but must lay in pockets or descend in swathes.
Not wanting to waste time turning when he comes out, especially if he's stalled then, Barry parks near the entrance to the carpark. The security men park alongside him. Both security men get out of their car.
"I doubt I'll be here long," Barry tells them, "Better come in with me."
The carpark is lit by the aurora, its organ pipes seeking a golden infinity. The light casts no shadows. Both security men regard it suspiciously.
There is no-one in the observatory nor in any of the offices. The lights go off, come on again while Barry and the security men walk the corridors.
From his office Barry collects two yearbook directories and three almanacs. In the observatory someone during the day has switched off the computers, has left the scope vertical. They must have been unable to close the roof: like two wayward leaves of the Sydney Opera House it is stuck partially open. A black plastic sheet has been tied over the scope.
"You’re witness to the end of an era," Barry tells the two security men, "From here on in it’s back to manual adjustments and chemical plates. So bye computers," he pats one, "Yours was a short but productive existence. Bye electronographics. Bye yon speckled interferometer. Bye photon counter. Bye satellites," he waves to the ceiling; and at that the lights go out again.
In the dark Barry says,
"I'm going home. You still with me?"
"Until further orders."
"They could be some time coming. This way," Barry guides them out of the tower, "When we get back you'd best come indoors and stay with me. One of you can have the sofa, and there's a spare bed." They are on the soft lawns now. "If this lot," Barry indicates the aurora like a festive Chinese dragon chasing its own tail, "should move on to the sun, there's bound to be a big flare. If it’s day here when that happens, this whole side of the planet might burn. If you're sat inside that car you'll roast in seconds for sure."
"What," they reach the cars, "if that, what d'you call it, flare goes on for twenty four hours?"
"The end of all our worries and trifling cares," Barry opens his car door, looks over to them, "If either of you have families..."
"We stay with you," the older security man tells him.

Voice Off. Human intelligence is preoccupied with limits. Higher than, further than, faster than, deeper than, smaller than... Humanity is incapable of viewing anything simply in relation to its direct cause and probable effect.

....more of John John

2008-01-30T00:32:00.000-08:00

Mullard’s voice, as Barry expected, is thirtyish. Mullard's voice is not, though, as Barry pictured him, small round and balding. Mullard's voice is sharp and muscular, probably a jogger, introduces himself as Fitz.
Fitz's fashionable clothes and immaculate haircut give him the look of a devoted philanderer. Barry has met the type before: Fitz will be energetically obsessed by his work; and the energetic seduction of women will be his obsessive hobby.
To a man like Fitz his job is everything. Women are a sideline, are incidental, and his apparent preoccupation with them is a veneer of frivolity with which to disguise what he believes is the unbecoming and boorish be-all of his existence — his unwavering interest in his work.
Barry is led away from the machines, is shown into a cluttered and dribble-stained coffee room, is handed a plastic beaker of machine coffee.
"Just had a call from the gate," Fitz is smiling, "You have an entourage."
"Suddenly," Barry gives a lopsided shrug, "I’m a very important person."
"They're going to have to wait there. They," Fitz says with relish, "weren't invited." And picking up the phone Fitz makes plans to leave by another gate for the airfield.
In coming to work for the Mullard zoo Fitz must have accepted security as an inevitable part of the job; Fitz, though, obviously has no liking for security, is enjoying duping the dolts in their grey suits. Fitz, Barry decides, is one of those men who are amused by authority's pomposity. Barry it angers. Barry wishes, for his own sake, that he was more like Fitz.
The car has a uniformed chauffeuse with fat ankles and a short neck. Undistracted Fitz and Barry talk of the characteristics of the 'line', with Fitz producing sheets of printout and explaining their significance. Barry occasionally has to ask for an interpretation of Fitz's working jargon. Fitz elaborates, digresses, sketches a diagram on the back of a sheet, returns to the 'line's' constituents,
"And here, see, we've got formaldehyde, formic acid and hydrogen cyanide. It’s got to be nebula."
At the airfield they have to don pressure suits. Fitz, zipping and unzipping all the pockets, wonders if the air crew will let him keep his. Posturing before a locker room mirror he adjusts his hair, then goes off to supervise the loading and installation of equipment into the belly of the bulbous nosed Nimrod. Barry tries not to get in the way. Above the field's lights the sky appears clear.
"Wouldn't be able to see it anyway," Fitz sees Barry looking up, "We are now wrapped in that net curtain."
Barry follows the pilots and the technicians on board, sits where he is told. Every cubbyhole on the plane has a machine of some sort wired into it. On takeoff Barry misses, as he never thought he would, the comforting presence of a cosmetically smiling hostess. Then Fitz is telling him of the Nimrod’s limitations for what he hopes to learn. A technician, overhearing him, disagrees with Fitz. A technical dispute follows, unresolved when the pilot sends for Fitz. They are now over the North Sea. Far below them, like a guttering nitelight, is the orange flare of an oil rig. They are still gaining height.
Fitz returns from the pilot.
"Our mission," he raises his eyes at the word, "is simply this. We know it's coming in, like the auroras, through the poles. What we now have to determine is its density, how deep it’s coming, and how far South. You can go forward and have a look if you want," he steps aside for Barry, crouches to his equipment, "Take your camera."
Barry picks his way along the fuselage. The two pilots are silhouetted before the aurora borealis, its golden drapes like the hanging corner folds of a yellow and orange tablecloth.
"Where are we?" Berry asks the co-pilot.
"Just coming level with Scarborough."
"Bloody hell!" Barry stares hard at the fluting mirage, in depth and density as deceptive as his Line, "It's August."
"Quite," the pilot says. The plane rocks. Both pilots scan their dials. The plane tilts again.
"Better get back and strap yourself in," the pilot tells Barry, depresses a switch and orders the crew to secure themselves and their equipment.
Barry manages to take just one photograph. In the fuselage he passes Fitz on his way to see the pilot. The plane rocks again before he has strapped himself in.
Among the technicians there is now a palpable air of concentration. Those few technicians Barry is able to see are frantically adjusting knobs. The plane drops, steadies. One technician glances behind him in perplexity, in confusion, looking for his long ago instructor.
Fitz hurriedly buckles himself in beside Barry.
"They don’t believe me yet," Fitz gestures impatiently forward, "but it’s all redundant."
"What?"
"This! With this equipment it's immeasurable." He has raised his voice for the benefit of the technician he earlier disagreed with, "A measuring device has to be objective, has to be apart from the object being measured. Yes? Well all this equipment is electronic, is to a greater or lesser degree magnetised." The plane's speakers crackle. "Here we go," Fitz grips his seat.
The plane drops. And drops. Technicians, Fitz and Barry hold on to their weightlessness and wait. For death? Is this it? Crash! Broken bodies? Floating wreckage? Finish? Kismet?
With a roar they stop, are pressed into their seats. Barry's head tries to burrow into his shoulders. He wants to shut his ears to the noise but cannot lift his hands. The plane is banking, noise tailing off. They are flying level again.
"We’re only a hundred feet up," a technician says, then, "Christ the rigs!" and he bends to his instruments.
Barry looks to Fitz, who, aware that he is being looked at, relaxes and releases his grip on the seat. Some of the technicians have given up on their machines.
"It's entering all our electronic systems," Fitz says, "Including the plane's. Hear the engines stop?"
"I heard them start again," Barry smiles feebly. Fitz shakes his head in wonderment,
"This is going to be far more drastic than anyone thought." He unstraps himself, goes over to one of the technicians, returns to Barry, "Radio's out."

Voice Off. That they choose to call their heroes brave, that they try always to credit their heroes with bravery, is symptomatic of humanity’s warring mentality. A peaceful mentality does not consider bravery at all, let alone as a virtue. Without war, away from the arena of war, bravery has no value.

Early in their police careers both security men got in the way of concealing their every thought, their every emotion; and soon, presenting a phlegmatic mask to the world, they ceased to own emotions. Now, so practised are both men in the concealment of their emotions and thoughts, they have become blank-faced soulless observers of the world. They display neither fear nor anger, apprehension nor irritation, love nor pride; and showing neither compassion nor sympathy they have come to feel neither. They simply watch.
They wait now in Mullard’s carpark. The only difference between the two expressionless men is that one is older and slightly shorter and, by the brevity of his few utterances, the senior.
"So they finally let you in," Barry laughing greets them. They make no response. Barry takes his car keys from his pocket. The younger security man snatches the keys from his hand.
"From now on," the older security man levelly tells Barry — their voices are as featureless as their faces — "we're sticking close."
Infected by Fitz’s example, Barry mentally steps back a pace from the hot inner flare of anger, unpeels a smile and cheerily says,
"In that case you can drive. I'm knackered."
The two security men engage in silent communion over the car roof. The senior security man takes the car keys and tells the smiling Barry to get in the car.
Smiling Barry waits for the passenger door to be opened. Smiling Barry clips on his seat belt,
"Back to my place please." The security man starts the car, finds the gear and reverses out of the parking space.
"You know that your invitation here was unauthorised?" he tells Barry.
"Probably." Barry maintains his smile: he can't see Fitz having bothered with the proper procedures. The other car follows them through the gate.
"Until this you were low priority," the security man is still trying to scare Barry, "Not anymore you aint."
They are silent. Barry thinks of Fitz and how, much to Fitz’s disappointment, the air crew did not let them keep the pressure suits. So Fitz tried to steal his, was good-naturedly prevented, and he good-naturedly handed it back. Barry wonders that, with matters of such moment, Fitz should bother his head with pretending to steal something as frivolous as a pressure suit. And he tries to reconcile Fitz's obvious commitment to his work with his lightness of touch.
After a quarter or an hour's driving he asks the security man,
"Why exactly were you following me?"
"You’ve been acting out or the ordinary. We take notice of anyone who starts acting out of the ordinary. Phone calls to Australian subversives, your own chequered history, now this little joyride... And you ask why we're watching you?"
Of course, Barry thinks, the age of the ordinary man. Mister Ordinary Man with his ordinary failings, ordinary vices, ordinary guilts and ordinary shames. A world where the one virtue is being ordinary, is being no better no worse than... Where being ordinary is of itself the virtue. The different are dangerous. And the rule or Mr and Mrs Ordinary is total. Even internationally. Because Barry can see little difference, physically or mentally, between the administrators of any political system. All are more alike than dissimilar. All their personal bodyguards look the same. All have led themselves into the same nuclear trap; and the reactions of all administrators to that trap have been identical. This is the age of mediocrity, where only the dissenters have an identity. Mr Conformity is in charge. Mr Orthodox. The rest of us are freaks.
"All that line has to do with me," Barry tells the security man, "is my name. You lot, though, don't see the obvious until it slaps you in the face. And it's going to do that soon enough."
"What're you talking about?"
"I think you’d better prepare your masters for a shock. Soon as you drop me I suggest you contact your superiors and tell them what I am now going to tell you."
"We’re not dropping you anywhere. From now on we're living with you."
"In that case you can use my phone. If it's still working. But I do devoutly suggest that, by whatever means possible, you contact those superiors or yours."
"Why?"
"Because life is never going to be the same again."
The man was at the observatory last night, heard the Director describe the known physical characteristics of the line, heard Barry’s own speculations later. No need to dwell on that.
"My line has now entered the Earth’s atmosphere through both poles. Satellite communication is already down. That Nimrod we went up in lost control. When we got down we tried phoning Iceland. No luck. We tried the Shetlands. No luck. We tried Inverness. No luck. Edinburgh answered, but the interference made it almost impossible to hear what was being said. What we did hear is that radio and television there are out, cars and buses are stalling. And it's heading South."
Barry notices that the driver, probably subconsciously, has accelerated.
"How long," he asks Barry, "before it reaches here?"
"No idea. Its effect might diminish as it spreads South. There's an awful lot of it though."
"So we're going to lose communication temporarily," the security man dismisses it as another scare story. He doesn't slow the car.
"How temporary," Barry asks him, "is temporary? A day? Three days? Three weeks? Ten years? And you’re going to lose far more than communications. Every single thing that depends on magnetised circuitry is going to be affected. Anything that comprises one single magnetic switch is now just so much junk. That means all computers, all internal combustion engines. Steam engines will still work. That's a thought... Overnight, literally, we're going to lose an era of technology. Look at your own profession of arms, and remember that everything dependent on electricity is obsolete. Like I said last night — your missiles are now redundant. I'll give you an update on that. Your most sophisticated weapon now is the rifle, and the artillery shell. And your most mobile troops are the cavalry."
"You'd like to believe that."
"Whatever... I recommend that you relay this seditious talk to your masters. For your own sake. I daresay they'll be more credulous than you."
The Dartford bridge is soon behind them. The security man is trying to think of things that won't be affected. To all — electricity, water, gas, sewage — Barry answers,
"Computerised circuits."
"It can’t be that easy," the security man refuses to accept it.
"Internationally we're down to landlines now. By tomorrow we’ll be back to pigeon post and heliograph."
"Still got fibre optics," the security man clutches at that straw.
"Need electronic processors to encode and decipher."
"You're enjoying this," the security man accuses Barry.
"One thing it will cure," Barry says as they enter Hastings, "unemployment. Automation is now a thing of the past."
The security man precedes Barry indoors. The younger security man follows once he has parked their car.
"Keep your eye on him," the newcomer is told, "I've got to make a call."
"Good boy," Barry tells him, "Tea anyone?"

Voice Off. The expectation of constancy is the greatest corrupter of all intelligence.

.....more of John John

2008-01-22T23:49:00.000-08:00

"Your bossman gave me your home number," the voice of Mullard says, "Hope I didn't wake you?"
"No," Barry sits down at the round table in the small living room, "I was just thinking what to cook myself for dinner. When do you sleep?"
"Whenever I get a chance. Which, these days, hasn't been often."
"So what's new?" Barry pushes books aside, reaches for a pen and pad.
"What is new is that at last I've got some sympathy for you lot. We've got a complete whiteout here. Blinder than deaf bats."
"It's in the ionosphere then?" Barry rearranges one of the tilting stacks of books on the table.
"And descending. Why I called you is... your forecast is unfavourable as well. And we've got this old Nimrod. Picked it up cheap you might say. Perfect for this kind or work. We're taking it up tonight. Over the North Sea. See what measurements we can take. Get some idea of its strength."
"Should be a pretty aurora."
"So bring your camera. Thought you might like to meet your line face to face."
"Where're you leaving from?" Barry has straightened.
"Meet us here."
Barry looks at his watch: five thirty.
"Take me at least two hours to get there. Dartford tunnel, rush hour."
"We won’t be leaving much before nine. Take your time."
"I'll be there. And," Barry takes a deep breath to tell the phone, "thank you very much."
"Can’t very well leave you out, now can we? Look forward to meeting you in the flesh."
Barry leaps from the phone up to the bedroom, ties his shoelaces, looks for his credit cards — in case he runs out of petrol — grabs up his jacket, checks for his car keys, finds his binoculars, camera, and slams the front door behind him.
His small red car is parked outside his small white terrace house. Chucking his binoculars, camera and jacket onto the passenger seat he fastens his seat belt, starts the engine and pulls out into the road.
From the opposite side of the road a white car swings out behind him. Barry sees it in his rear-view mirror.
"Hope you've got enough petrol," he says, and laughing loudly he turns left.

Voice Off. Humanity owns an inherent and acute sense of justice. Humanity also owns an innate desire to live in large groupings. The organisation and administration of such large and complex groupings leads inevitably to inequities. Those inequities affront some of its members' sense of natural justice. Human societies are therefore constantly in a state of flux; the repair of one inequity leading to the creation elsewhere of another.

Again the smoke unwinding from the visitors' cigarettes drives him from the telly room. In the ward visitors hunch around the beds. Once Mrs Rustar sees John John settled in his bed she sends her son over with a packet. The boy does not speak Urdu. He regards John John suspiciously. Folded inside the tissue paper are some small square cakes. John John thanks Mrs Rustar.
"Taste them! Taste!" she waves a be-ringed hand at John John.
With Mrs Rustar intently watching him, he nibbles at a corner of one sugary cake. The cake is excessively sweet and scented.
"Very good," he tells Mrs Rustar, thinking that is what she wants to hear.
"Any memories?" she asks him. So Mrs Rustar too is intrigued by his past. John John examines the taste, takes a bigger bite, eats the whole cake. A fiery indigestion seems to rise up his gullet to greet every mouthful. Small wonder Osman Rustar has ulcers, he thinks.
"Yes and no," he finally tells her, placing the sticky packet on his bedside locker, "The taste isn't unfamiliar. My tongue has memories of it, even if my mind hasn’t."
The children watch him talk in their parents' language. To rid himself of the cloying cakes John John offers the packet to them. Both look to their father.
"One for me too," he laughs. His wife chides him. The children politely help themselves. Osman, chuckling at Mrs Rustar’s nagging, accepts the necessity of his diet. He does, however, go on to talk of other Pakistani cakes; and, from there, smacking his lips, of other dishes. So Osman Rustar becomes nostalgic, talks of his home town Khanpur, breaking occasionally into English to explain to his children.
"Khanpur's on the railway," John John ventures.
"Yes," Mrs Rustar leaps on it, "You remember?"
"Just that it's on the railway."
"Maybe you passed through it. Coming from Lahore?"
"I don't know... Just the railway. Nothing else."
Then visiting time is over. John John watches the variously dressed visitors crowding out. He tells himself that he is disappointed because the detective didn't come with news from the odontologist and bearing like a prize his identity. His other identity. His previous identity.
Osman is still talking of food. John John smiles: Osman Rustar is a happier man in Urdu.
"Why did you come to this country?" John John asks him.
"Ah..." Osman Rustar sighs, "Because of the dust mostly. And the dirt. And the disease. In Khanpur I would not have been able to afford even this," he signifies the ward, "Nor my house. Nor my car. And here I can vote without getting shot."
"Why don't your children speak Urdu?"
"They are going to be British. Not live in a ghetto. A minority language is an intellectual ghetto."
"Yet you miss Khanpur?"
"Yes. My friends there. My past."
"Yes...." John John says; and they share an understanding greater than the language.

Voice Off. Human beings frequently show more interest in others than they do in themselves. Ignoring their own problems they diagnose the worries of others and put more effort into curing the worries of those others than they do into the solving of their own problems and worries. This is because many human beings are led, early in their lives, to believe that they themselves are not worthwhile human beings, that they do not matter, that they are expendable. To sacrifice oneself for one’s fellows is regarded as being commendable by all human societies. Such cannon fodder in the past ensured the survival of the tribe, even of the species. In post industrial societies, however, such social attitudes led to many complex neurosis, whose roots lay in the frustration of being unable to sacrifice oneself. Those neurosis made those selfless individuals harmful to those very societies that they wished to serve; and, being aware that they caused harm, made those individuals despise themselves even more and hate the societies which they were unable to serve.

....and more John John

2008-01-15T03:16:00.000-08:00

This day John John buys only a Guardian, avoids the grey scrambled eggs, has cereal, tea and toast for breakfast. The day shift greet him by his new name. He smiles; and again he has his temperature, pulse and blood pressure taken. Osman Rustar returns from the bathroom and grumbles to him, in Urdu, asking how can they expect him to get better when they wake him at such an early hour and then feed him such insubstantial victuals.
John John reads the paper. The news is much as yesterday's. All that he reads in full are two articles; one a woman’s opinion on how to treat male child molesters, the other a technical analysis of suspected nuclear weapon proliferation and current capability. He spends mere time comparing the solution to yesterday's two crosswords with yesterday's clues. He cannot understand the exact process whereby some of the solutions were derived from their clues, although those solutions were the same that he arrived at, if for no other reason than they could have been the only answers. Even so, though pleased that his answers were right, he would have liked to have known exactly how he did it. Sighing over his incomprehension, he deems the fault his own, and he lends his attention to today's crossword.
So the day passes, subject to the hospital routine and the procedures that Mr Assan and the detective have set in train. At ten thirty a porter comes to take him to Neurology. In the corridors the wheelchair overtakes women patients in dressing gowns carrying handbags. In Neurology he is laid on a raised bed and has pads stuck to his temples and a wired rubber hat fitted to his skull. He is told to relax. Fat chance. The white-coated operator, apart from gruffly informing John John that there are ten billion nerve cells in the human brain and so they have at best a billion to one chance of discovering why he has amnesia, is apparently preoccupied with weightier matters and is uncommunicative. The porter equally so. John John is returned to the ward little the wiser.
Osman Rustar has been taken somewhere for tests. John John concentrates on the crossword, has his blood pressure, pulse and temperature taken. He notices that, to distract from their ministrations, the nurses chat to the other patients about their families, their jobs, where they live. With him the nurses tell him of their own families, of where in town they live, of where their husbands, brothers, sisters and boyfriends work, asking him always, he thinks without ulterior motives, it he knows of the place.
A small Pakistani nurse from another ward, as slight and as slim as Osman Rustar is heavy and fat, stops by to test his Urdu. Her accent is different to Osman Rustar's. She says that her family comes from the Chagai mountains. John John doesn’t knew of the Chagai mountains; although he does, she tells him, speak better Urdu than many of the Pakistanis she knows here.
Osman Rustar is returned burping just before lunch. Osman Rustar complains about his lunch. Osman Rustar looks a profoundly tired man, a man weary of living, a man unable even to pretend to the tiniest appetite for life.
After lunch a young man in jeans comes to John John. He introduces himself as an odontologist, apologises for any deficiency in his bedside manner, says that he is more used to working with cadavers. Or bits of their jaws. Asking John John to open his mouth he picks pieces of John John's lunch out of his teeth, makes notes on a pad.
"Three fillings, one front upper crown," he tells John John, "Shouldn't be too difficult to trace."
During the afternoon lull in hospital activity other patients come up to John John with a smile, intrigued by his mystery, discuss him with Osman Rustar. Both John John’s English and his Urdu are pronounced impeccable. Many conclusions are reached concerning his possible identity, none verifiable. John John smiles, but greets each of these amateur sleuths with nervous unease, lest they trip him and he fall pell mell into his past. Yet the certain knowledge of a past would save him from being this object of such easy familiarity, such public curiosity.
He is saved from their speculations by being taken for a brain scan. Glad of the rest he lies passively on the metal bed, lets the metal tunnel move over him. By the time he is returned to the ward the other patients are quiet in their beds.
The library trolley appears during afternoon visiting. A passing nurse informs the bangled woman is charge of the trolley that John John is an amnesiac. Rising to the challenge, guided by his reading of The Guardian, the women selects three books for him — a biography, one detective mystery and science fiction. He is flipping through the books when the social worker arrives.
She laughs her squeaky laugh to see ‘John John' written on the bedhead; and setting her bulging case on the bed she tells him of the difficulties she has had in defining him for the DSS. No category exists for his precise circumstances. However they did agree to grant him a daily allowance, five days of which she has been given, but which are reclaimable on the return of his memory. She hands him the money in a small plastic bag,
"If you'll sign this receipt."
Again he holds the pen sketchily over a dotted line, then — with a beam of inspiration — he carefully writes 'John John'. The social worker studies the signature: the laboured handwriting is at odds with the reading matter on the bedside locker. But a signature is all that is required; and with a promise to bring his money again next week, telling him to contact her if his memory returns, in a rush she is gone.
He starts reading the biography of the opera singer, darling, understanding little of it, darling. When next his temperature and blood pressure are taken he asks the dark-haired nurse where he can buy some shaving soap and toothpaste. The nurse doubts that he will be allowed to go to the hospital shop on his own, tells him to make a list and she will go for him. Borrowing a sheet of paper from Osman Rustar he laboriously writes his list; shampoo, toothpaste, razors, shaving soap, deodorant and comb. Osman Rustar earnestly tries to dissuade him from buying anything in the hospital shop, says that if John John gives the list to his wife that evening she will buy them cheaper outside. John John thanks him, but says that he will need the things tomorrow morning.
The dark-haired nurse returns during afternoon visiting. John John gives her the plastic bag of money, tells her to take the pound, that Mr MacMaster gave him, for the nurses' fund. She is gone ten minutes, comes back with a white carrier bag and the price of each item written beside it on the list. As soon as she leaves Osman Rustar takes the list and shakes his head over the prices.
John John studies one by one his purchases, reading all of the print on all of the packages, before arranging them in his bedside locker. With each new possession he feels himself becoming more substantial, more here.
For the rest of the day he perseveres with the biography, darling.

Voice Off. Most human beings spend the greater part of their lives in a semiconscious state, being forced to evaluate their circumstances only in moments of crisis, of drastic change. These semiconscious lives are based on the fiction of non-change; thus change must always unsettle them, force them to address the frightening realities of their lives that, in their semiconscious state, they are avoiding.

more John John

2008-01-08T03:24:00.000-08:00

In the sightless dark he is aware only of his fear. Then something (a single snore?) reminds him of the hospital: he pictures to himself the lines of beds on either side of the ward. A deeper grumbling snore from a nearby body further reassures him. Relaxing he wonders what it was exactly that first told him where he was. After several minutes he pinpoints it — the distant breathy whisper of lift doors opening. Followed by the almost inaudible whirr of cables.
He is pleased with his discovery, is encouraged by that small exercise of memory: his mind is capable of making connections, conscious and unconscious. But still only of this life, this hospital life.
Nervously he tries to recall his precise state of mind on waking. He didn't know where he was. Did he imagine himself somewhere else? If so, where? But those black waking moments were filled only with the horror of his not knowing, a timeslip memory of his first fearful awakening.
First?
His unknown past frightens him. He fears what he might have been. Even if it was only someone mundane. Especially if it was only someone mundane. He does not want to be reclaimed by the owner of those clothes. The past is standing like a trap before him; one wrong step and the amnesiac will again be that equally anonymous man. Simultaneously, though, he longs to be more than this, than this joke-named hospital patient, than this object of easy curiosity.
Ignorance of himself is shaming. He wants to know, and fears the consequences of knowing. There will be no escaping him again.
The nurses are rousing themselves from the torpor of their uneventful nightshift. He fingers the covers free of his face. The slowlimbed night sister is packing up her papers at the table in the centre of the ward. He can hear the clink-chink of empty cups from the entrance to the ward. He knows the routine now. In a few minutes the nurses will begin opening the curtains, chiding patients from their sleep, sitting men up in their beds, remembering if and how many sugars they take.
The night sister reaches up to switch out the light above the table. Two patients from the end of the ward are making stealthily for the bathroom. John John hugs his stillness close to him, loath to move before he has to, reluctant to pre-empt the routine.
An unvarying routine, for a man with no past, is a comfort. Ensconced in a routine, with his mind employed only in the serene contemplation of what is coming next, the past cannot leap out and frighten him. That past, that huge past of all those years, is terrifying in his having forgotten it. That past, of all those people he supposedly knew, has nothing to do with who he is at present, is an alien being inside himself, the revival of whom will mean the obliteration of his present self. To have that unknown past suddenly entrap and possess him is a fearful prospect, will mean a death of sorts. He can shut off such fears behind the anaesthesia of hospital routine, can limit his whole existence to that predictable routine. Therefore, his instincts reason, better not to thwart the routine lest some wrong step start an avalanche of memory, bring his past smothering down upon him.
When the nurses finally abandon the susurrations and languor of the night, more patients struggle into armtwisting dressing gowns and, towels over their shoulders, slop towards the bathroom in loose slippers. John John now feels conspicuous being awake and still abed; and he doesn't want to attract unnecessary attention to himself. So he too slips out of bed, takes the hospital towel from the bottom bedrail and joins his bedsmelling brethren in the bathroom.
He is practised now at urinating; but not until he joins the three deep queue at the washbasins does he realise that he does not have a plastic toilet bag, nor its contents. Second in the queue he feels over the two day growth on his chin.
"Course," a large man says to him via the mirror, "you got no razor. I got a disposable you can have. Drop my soap back to me later."
'Thank you," John John says to the reflection, watches the large man scrape his pliant jowls.
The large man has drawn the bathroom’s attention to John John.
"Nurse says you can speak Urdu," a thin little man says from the queue beside him. His shoulders curve in around his sunken chest.
"Heard who?" the large man at the mirror says. Last evening the large man was jovial with his visitors.
"I heard one of the nurses say..." the small man begins. The other men groan at his humourlessness. The small man blinking shuts himself up: he is used to being disliked.
The other patients, having realised John John’s predicament, they too hasten to help. A man in the queue behind has two toothbrushes, blushing explains that when he first came in he bought a toothbrush in the hospital shop and then his wife brought his old toothbrush from home. The man in the queue before him offers a squeeze of his toothpaste, others offer the use of deodorants and shampoo. Nodding his gratitude to all, John John finds himself at a basin.
He recognises the face now as his own; and, though, made hasty by the lengthening queue behind he has time to realise that he has no memory of something so mundane as cleaning his own teeth: a thing he must have done every single day of his previous life. Even the minty tang of the pink toothpaste is unfamiliar. He knows what to do only from his five minute observation of the others at the washbasins. So too with shaving: if he hadn’t watched the other patients he would have had no idea what to do. So unpractised is he with the aerosol foam that he almost covers his eyes; and then he cuts the slack skin under his chin, the bright red blood spidering over the wet pink skin; and only then does he realise why the other men reached their heads back, and belatedly he does so.
When he re-enters the ward the curtains are all open and the tea trolley has made its rounds. Having returned, with more thanks, the tin of shaving soap to the large man further down the ward, he hurries to the normalcy of his bed and his waiting cup of tea. And, sat back in his familiar bed, cup of tea before him, the mound of Osman Rustar still clinging avariciously to sleep, he glances often and with pride to his new possessions, accoutrements of an ordinary man — a red toothbrush and a blue razor — and he pats his smarting cheeks and once more sinks comfortably back into routine, to await the appearance of the grumpy cleaners.
While waiting he recalls that first glimpse he had, through the curtains, of the old man opposite sat in his chair, as now, waiting. That’s all we do here is wait, he thinks; is that why we’re called patients? He grimaces at his mechanical attempt at humour. This waiting, though, does lay to rest the last of his bathroom agitation. And he knows that, after the cleaners have been, the newspaperman will come, then the nurses on day shift will drift in with breakfast. Nothing to alarm him there.

Voice Off. When a chimpanzee cannot make itself understood, in despair it throws itself onto its back. Au eighteen month old human child reacts in the same manner. An adult human when earnestly trying to put over an argument sits on the edge of its seat. When its interlocutor refuses to understand, the human adult throws itself back into the seat in despair.

more of John John

2008-01-02T00:36:00.000-08:00

Two ancient astronomers have ensconced themselves before the lecture room bar. A corner of Barry's mind notices a man in a grey suit sitting high up, like a suspended presence; but his concentration is directed elsewhere, his imagination out in space with his line. Returning to the observatory tower he taps up various observations from last night, stays to study them lengthily on the VDU.
The Director seeks Barry out in the tower to tell him that he is going home. A few other of the guests linger on, take to wandering glasses in hand between the tower and the lecture room, discussing private matters on their perambulations.
Each observation on the VDU Barry cancels with impatience. Insufficient data. And the more he tries to concentrate the more his inattentive mind sidetracks him. Seems all his life he has been governed by a lack. And how does one qualify and quantify a lack? How does one measure its importance? By the effect of its absence? But, it being an unknown, how do we know what its lack of effect is? And being creatures of balance we automatically compensate for any lack, so any effect is diminished. Barry's father left when he was six. Other boys had fathers at home, had bikes. Other boys had dinghies, had home computers. Some could play musical instruments. What effect did his not having those things have on his life? If he'd had a father, a bike, a dinghy, a home computer, a saxophone... what would he be now? And now, here tonight, how does he enter these known lacks into his calculations?
He returns to the lecture room for a drink. The student barman has left and so have most of the guests. One ancient astronomer sits at the bar and helps himself and Barry. The man in the grey suit sits drinkless in the tiered seats above.
At three thirty Barry has had enough of the astronomer's pompous reminiscences, of how time and again he was proven right. Barry phones Mullard. The line is still open.
"Where is it now?" he asks.
"Passing Neptune's orbit, heading for Uranus."
"At that rate..."
'Tomorrow night."
The ancient astronomer wheezes, smacks his old man’s slippery lips. This night's events hold no interest for him.
"If it’s as heavily magnetised as you say..." Barry falters, "You realise its effect?"
"All satellite communications cut," the Mullard man crisply responds, "Be back to land lines."
"If it enters our atmosphere in any quantity, I doubt if even land lines will work. It's the other implications which bother me. All telecommunications will he affected. Including radar. Who knows what governments have got what radar-primed missiles pointed at one another?"
"Yes?"
"Only needs one to go, no communications, no human agency involved, and it’ll escalate automatically. If bizarrely. Because most of those missiles are also radar-guided. Could end up nuking themselves into extinction and thinking it’s some other side doing it."
"You do realise what you're saying? That it would mean our government unilaterally disarming? You do realise just how dangerous this could be?"
"The danger lies in having the stupid bloody things in the first place."
The Mullard man makes no comment. Barry re-listens to the man’s words: they were an airing of received wisdom for the benefit of those possibly listening at the Mullard end. There was no heat in them. Barry too adopts a reasonable tone: he does not want to estrange this his only source of information.
"So what do we do?" he asks the man.
"I’ll get in touch with the relevant authorities, tell them what you think might happen."
Barry realises that the Mullard man led him into making those statements to enable himself to pass on these fears as Barry's and not as his own, and his tone says that he is grateful for having been given the opportunity.
"Oh, we get the spectroscopics back," he says, "As expected, no ice. Just dust and gas. We’ll be in touch." The line goes dead.
Barry becomes aware of the grey-suited man standing over him.
"Until that call I was here only as an observer," the man shows a plastic wallet to Barry. Barry reads ‘M’ something, Government Agency and an Army number. The bland photograph matches the bland face.
"And now?" Barry looks him over: grey suit buttoned, white shirt, green tie.
"Now you have suggested that we disarm ourselves. With your unstable past we were afraid of something of the sort. So, from this point on, you've got yourself a minder." The ancient astronomer unsteadily absents himself.
"I hope," Barry says to the man, "that whoever my suggestion goes to has more sense than you."
"We'll ensure that they're aware of your past."
The man is smiling down on Barry — with the perennial amusement which the powerful, these in the know, have for the pitiful dupes below them.
"The facts’ll speak for themselves," Barry dismisses him. To Barry this smirking man is a distractive intrusion, a needless interruption to the flow of his thoughts.
"Either way, from now on you're under 24 hour surveillance."
"Just keep your distance."

Voice Off. Certain human beings own a temperament which has to have enemies. With a rival, a competitor to measure their own performance against, they are able to comfortingly enclose their thoughts.

more John John

2007-12-19T00:29:00.000-08:00

The Met has forecast a warm front, intermittent cloud.
"Unfortunately," the Director smiles cock-eyed at his guests, "it seems to be more mittent than inter."
With the persistence of the cloud the Director has pressganged Barry into joining him in one of the lecture rooms. The steep-seated lecture room has been easily converted to a circus — copies of last night's printout pinned like grey bunting to the walls, the Director’s pate polished to a ringmaster's pink brilliance. Even a bar has been installed and a student dragooned to act as barkeep for the benefit of the Director's guests.
These guests are academic celebrities, old pale and local dignitaries, including even the Mayor of Hastings, complete with chain. They stand about the dais in chattering groups, glasses in hand as if at a cocktail party, the last watering hole of the night on a worthies' pub crawl. At least, Barry consoles himself, the media are conspicuous by their absence; and he contemptuously accepts the congratulations of another good citizen for 'his' line.
Barry Tappell's anger for this gathering of notables is founded on his empirical distrust of the type. He regards them all as busybodies, as parasites, as social climbers disloyal to their disowned past. They are people who contribute nothing, who will only claim later to have been here, to have known him. Fame by association, like a pop star's hairdresser; all are here to claim their part in his discovery. And these are the privileged, are the elite of his society, are the people let in on the news, are idle people. Barry doesn’t have time to go wandering around strange observatories on the off-chance of seeing something novel. These are people with power, with connections: a smug Home Office type has justified the absence of government grants by telling Barry that the good old-fashioned ways have proved themselves yet again. He hasn't repeated that since the cloud came over.
Outside all that can be seen is a high white ceiling of cirrus. Twice the Director has rung the Met Office. They won't commit themselves to an improvement this night. Aware of his guests' disappointment, at 11:35 the Director suggests that Barry phone Mullard.
For the benefit and entertainment of his guests the Director switches the phone to open line. The guests hush one another. On identifying himself Barry is almost immediately connected with the voice or that morning.
"Cloud?'" the technician says sympathetically.
"The stone age," Barry responds for the benefit of the Home Office.
"Console yourself: you'd have had a job finding it tonight anyway. Your line is now curving and attenuated. As for its speed... we're almost certain that it's started to enter the solar system. That's what, we think, is making it waver."
"Could be the bottom of the curtain," Barry says, explains his net curtain analogy.
"Possible," the voice at Mullard is doubtful of any analogy, "We favour it's being because it's entering the solar system. Being drawn out of line by the gravity of the planets. Our guess is it's between Earth and Pluto now." Barry makes a note,
"Speed?"
"Fast. Exactly how fast we don't even want to speculate. It's also giving off too much noise for us to accurately focus. And from horizon to horizon... well, there's just too much of it. Put the dishes onto auto and it's like a fairground here."
"Any ideas on its composition? Ice?"
"It's about a million K."
"Active."
"Not half. The dust, so far as we can make out, is silicon, graphite and calcium. And the gas is hydrogen mostly, with neon, nitrogen, sulphur, argon and some oxygen."
"Nebula then."
"Your first guess. It's only its speed that's out of character."
"Direction?"
"Who knows. The sun? Us?"
"The sun... Will it nova?"
"Depends on the quantity. Might. A flare'd be bad enough."
"Should we warn somebody? For all that they can do. Be certainly safer to stay indoors."
"It's done. But as yet no panic. The way it’s twisting about it's definitely attracted to the planets. That should dissipate a fair quantity of it."
"If it does come to us, it’ll he one helluva aurora borealis."
"Aurora australis too. Mustn't forget our southern cousins. And with that amount of magnetism in the atmosphere it’ll be more than a simple aurora. We'll be ringing you for information."
At that last remark the Home Office type has puffed himself up again. As Barry replaces the phone the other guests raise eyebrows to one another.
"Is it dangerous?" the Mayor asks the Director. The Director looks to Barry.
"Possibly," Barry shrugs. "Don’t know enough for certain. If the line has entered the solar system... then it’ll reach here before the sun. In that case Saturn and Uranus will attract and absorb much of its dust. What puzzles me is, if it has entered the solar system then, no matter what its volume or mass, it has to be travelling at almost the speed of light... Unless its volume is so great... Or if its mass is increasing..."
"What if the sun does nova?" the Director asks Barry for the benefit of his guests.
Barry recalls himself from his conjectures,
"Bye bye sun. Bye bye solar system."
"And if it's a flare?"
"Depends on the height and duration of the flare. If for 24 hours, bye bye cruel world. If for anything below 12 hours, bye bye that hemisphere. Either way it’ll make all your nuclear bombs look like the original fizzling squib."
All those present had lived their whole lives under threat of one kind or another, in fear of some calamity — car accidents, plane crashes, oil spillages, gas leaks, pesticide poisoning, nuclear destruction... Another such possible threat now doesn't unduly bother them. And, soon afterwards, the majority of the guests, their appetite for news and sensation satisfied, they drift off into the night.

Voice Off. Those human beings who feel that they are the victims of their society so loathe that unjust society that they are prepared to take a grim satisfaction in seeing their whole world destroyed in the knowledge that it will mean the absolute destruction of that cruel and corrupt society.

more of John John....

2007-12-11T23:46:00.000-08:00

Trailing a reek of mutton fat and overcooked cabbage the steel-sided trolley rumbles along the waxed corridor. Overtaking it he turns brusquely into Ward 11, and meets the blonde nurse. She has a gravy-smeared plate in her hand, tells him that the man's memory has still not returned, but that otherwise he is much better.
The men is sat in bed, table over his knees. On the table is a cup of coffee and a folded open newspaper. On the bedrail above his head, beside the name Assan, someone has written the name ‘John John’ in green felt tip.
"That your real name?" DC Hawkins points accusingly to the new name in its plastic sheath.
The man looks up, recognises him and instantly smiles. He tells of the porter who took him for an X-ray, of how the social worker wanted a name for her forms, of one of the younger nurses putting that name up as a joke....
As the man is telling the story another of the patients passes and greets him by name. The man’s smile in acknowledging the greeting is as broad as his blush is deep. DC Hawkins sees what is happening — the man, not liking to be regarded as abnormal, at the same time enjoying being singled out for attention, is proud of his new name, pleased at being a ward celebrity. DC Hawkins recalls the blonde nurse's smile when he asked after the amnesiac. Seems both patients and staff are relieved he's got a name.
All these smiles... DC Hawkins decides not to find the name amusing. Pulling up a chair he swivels the table aside and takes charge.
"You don't seem very worried by your amnesia today." It is an allegation.
"Maybe I’m getting used to the idea."
The man is wearing now a comfortable smile. Or, DC Hawkins thinks, you’re becoming confident that your little hoax will succeed.
DC Hawkins has yet to overcome the novice's shock of realising that all criminals are remarkable principally for their ordinariness. Criminals do not look like the smudged photographs of people wanted in connection with... Nor do they in the least resemble those sinister face-on videofits. Criminals own the three-dimensional faces of people in the street. Often he supposes all the people he passes on the pavements to be criminals, to be crimes waiting to be committed.
"No-one in Northamptons," he opens his briefcase, "has yet reported you missing. We might well be getting there though." He removes several sheets of printout from his briefcase, "That is if anyone at all has registered you as a missing person. Have you been circumcised?"
The man frowns. The word is new to him this life. But he finds it in his vocabulary, lifts the covers and peers below.
"No."
"That's that one out then," DC Hawkins draws a line across the top sheet of printout, scans the next, "Any freckles on your chest?"
The man, chin doubled, tries to examine his own chest.
"You tell me," holding his pyjama top open he turns to the detective. The detective studies the white skin under the black hairs.
"Two or three," he says, looks to the man's face. None there. "I think she may have meant more than that. Think you could have worn glasses for reading?" There are no indentations on the man's nose. "Any difficulties reading the paper?"
"No."
"We'll keep this as a possible. The name Richard Bofill ring any bells?"
"Richard Bofill?" the man looks inside himself, "Sorry."
"Dick Bofill?"
"No..."
The questioning has brought the man back to his reality, to the absence of himself, to the anxiety of his real namelessness.
DC Hawkins takes up the next sheet of printout, frowns over his own writing in one corner of it.
"Have you a small scar beside your left nipple?"
The man unbuttons his pyjama top, pulls his dark nipple about, shows it to the detective, who draws a line through that printout. A missing front tooth eliminates the next. The other two printouts list no peculiarities.
"The name Antony Bekel?"
"Sorry."
"James Otto?" The man tastes the name, ruefully shakes his head,
"Sorry."
DC Hawkins slips the printouts back into his briefcase, takes up his notepad, studies the man. What class? The accent is unaffectedly neutral. Nor does he have a built-in resentment or a fear of the police. The occasional arbitrary sharpness DC Hawkins has injected into his tone has caused the man merely to regard him with a brief puzzlement. Upper middle? With those clothes?
"Is there anything you’ve remembered since yesterday that might help me?"
"No," The man shrugs, "No," he says again.
"Right." DC Hawkins closes his notebook and briefcase, "I'll tell you what's going to happen now. Tomorrow, or the day after, a dentist will visit you. Dental charts are like fingerprints. No two alike. Unlike fingerprints, though, everyone has a dental chart. I'll also be reporting back to these four women. If any of them think that you might be their missing man I'll get them here to identify you. A photograph, a physical description is one thing, the flesh another. Don't you worry, one way or another we'll find out who you are." He tries to make those words as much a threat as a reassurance.

Voice Off. Humanity's arrogant intelligence has got into the way or thinking that, because the planet has always survived — from the cataclysmic wars and corrosive pollutants inflicted upon it by humanity — then the planet will always survive. Humanity is wrong.

Except for three of the clues, whose solution depends on a general knowledge he no longer possesses, the small Guardian crossword is simply a matter of finding synonyms. Even the Guardian's large cryptic crossword he finds easier than the Mirror's quizword. He enjoys picking apart the cryptic clues, finding the key word, doodling with Mr MacMaster's pen in the blank space provided.
The only clues in the cryptic crossword that John John is unable to solve are two which omit a word from a quotation. There, like the test of general knowledge in the quizword, his memory is blocked. Though, from its context, he does finally manage to deduce one of the omitted words.
Looking around the ward he becomes uncomfortably aware that he alone has no visitors. He takes himself off to the television room. One other patient is there, watching a quiz show. John John sits in a caramel coloured armchair. The plastic of the chair squeaks.
The quiz show, the adverts, are familiar in that they do not surprise him. The other patient, a ponderous lubberly man, asking John John if he minds, changes channels to a film. John John watches the film with interest, but for only a few moments: it is the same actors pulling the same anguished faces as before.
Before?
Again he looks curiously into himself, this time studying his emotions. He knows that fear, although no longer on the surface, still lurks large within him, ready to overcome him at the least unexpected turn of events. That fear, though, seems to have been a part of him for a long time now. Other of today’s emotions are new to him; like the gratitude he felt, still feels, towards Mr MacMaster; like the compassion he felt for the patient who suddenly paled and tottered back to his bed; like his sympathetic reaction to anyone who approaches him with sympathy... All these feelings are new to him; and if they are new what kind of life did he live before?
A stout perfumed woman and two shiny-faced men come into the television room to visit the lubberly patient. Their voices are loud. All of them light cigarettes, including Mr Ponderous, even though he has audible difficulty in breathing. Their conversation is a forced cheeriness. That, added to the artificiality of the film and the eye-smarting sting of the cigarette smoke, drives John John back to bed, where he again takes up the crossword. The one remaining quotation, however, like his previous identity, continues to elude him.
He has been half listening to the conversation in the next bed when, with a start, he realises all at once that he can understand what they are saying and that they are speaking Urdu. How, he asks himself, do I know that it is Urdu? No matter, he does.
The man and his wife have been arguing about her brother, who is the man’s business partner. The brother is taking advantage of the man's being in hospital to make certain alterations to their premises. The man halts his anger to burp painfully; then, wincing he complains to his wife of the diet the doctors have given him. The wife, glad of the change of subject, tells him that it is for his own good. She has a wrinkled forehead. From their conversation John John gathers that the doctors suspect him of having an ulcer and not heart problems.
Or, John John asks himself, is he imagining it? Is he assuming that their Pakistani accents are another language? He has to test it.
"Excuse me," he says in Urdu, "Are you speaking Urdu?"
Man and wife look over to John John, startled by his interruption. The two children also stare brown-eyed at him, look to their Father as he shifts heavily in bed.
"You speak Urdu?" he asks John John in Urdu.
"I can understand what you were saying. About your wife's brother."
The wife straightens her back, about to take offence at this tactless eavesdropper. The man explains that John John has lost his memory. She reassesses him.
"You’ve been to Pakistan," she asks/tells him.
"I don't know."
"Maybe you have a Pakistani wife?" The puzzle of him has excited her. John John shrugs.
"We haven’t introduced ourselves," the man says, "I am Osman Rustar," and he proceeds to name his wife and two children. "They have called him John John," Osman Rustar tells his family.
The wife questions John John, in Urdu, about his possible family. Osman Rustar mentions places in Pakistan — Lahore, Raul Pindi, Karachi... Names on a map, cities, buildings. John John has no clearer image of them than he does of the unseen buildings immediately beyond the hospital.
"Do I speak Urdu well?" he asks Osman Rustar.
"Like a native born," Osman Rustar tells him.
"Do you think I could be Pakistani?"
Osman Rustar, his wife and two children doubtfully appraise him.
"It's possible," Osman Rustar says. His wife asks about his religion, if he knows the Q'oran.
"I know what it is," John John uncertainly replies.
"Maybe he has a Pakistani wife," she says to her husband, "Or a Bengali."
"No," Osman Rustar tells her, "his Urdu is too good."
"Excuse me," John John finds the piece of paper bearing the detective's telephone number, "I think I'd better let the detective know about this. He’s trying to find out who I am. Thank you for your help."
The blonde nurse is in one of the little wooden rooms at the ward’s entrance.
"I've round out something about myself," John John tells her, "that I think the detective ought to know."
"Nothing terrible I hope," the nurse lays aside a ledger.
"I can speak Urdu," he says with awe.
"Go back to bed: I’ll have the phone brought to you."
He has seen other patients using that grey-scarred telephone on its tall trolley.
"I'm not sure I know how to use it."
The sister notes his discomfiture.
"Use this phone," she gestures to the black telephone on the desk, holds out her hand for his piece of paper, "Come round here. I'll show you how to dial."
The sister has red hands, white forearms. She taps the numbers, asks the police switchboard for an extension number, which she points out to John John.
"Ward 11 here," she says, "The amnesiac. He has something he wants to tell you." She hands the phone to John John.
"You've remembered who you are?" John John recognises the detective's faintly sarcastic voice. The telephone itself is unfamiliar: he finds himself wanting to look into the earpiece.
"No," he says carefully into the mouthpiece, "But I can speak Urdu."
"Urdu? How do you know?"
"The man in the bed next to me, Osman Rustar, he was talking to his wife and I realised that I could understand what he was saying. So I talked to him."
"In Urdu?'
"Yes."
"Are you fluent?"
"Like a native born, he said."
"Stirred any memories?"
"Only of the language. Nothing else. I just thought that you should know. That it might help you."
The detective is silent.
"It’s two years since any of these women last saw you. If it is you. And if you’ve got an aptitude for languages you could easily have picked it up since leaving them. Might help though. One more clue. Thanks for letting me know. Oh, I’ve managed to trace Antony Bekel. You're definitely not him. He’s dead. Now... you'll be seeing the dentist sometime tomorrow. And I’ll be seeing you as soon as I've got some results. Bye."

Voice Off. Morality is learnt. Morality is therefore taught. Morality is power. Propaganda is power. Morality is propaganda.

sorry this eleventh[?] John John is late

2007-12-06T23:55:00.000-08:00

Where the stories in the two newspapers are duplicated The Guardian gives more details. One story, of an inquest into the death of a four year old Birmingham boy, is reported only in The Guardian. The Mirror contains not even a simplified version.
The Guardian's two columns of print, on page three, tell how, after the failure of her second marriage, the mother raised the boy on her own. She and the boy lived in a block of flats. Because she wasn’t able to go out to work and to also look after the child, she was dependant on state benefits. Because the flat was cold and damp she used more electricity than she was able to pay for. She and the boy had nowhere else warm to go. She got deeper into debt. Finally, taking all of her savings — money that was to have paid off some of her outstanding bills — the mother gave the boy a day out at a wildlife park. That night, after he had gone to sleep, she hit him with a heavy metal ashtray. The boy awoke. She comforted him back to sleep, then stabbed him with a pair of scissors. She herself took an overdose of pills. A bailiff broke into the house and found the two bodies the following morning. The mother was saved. The boy died.
The man lays aside The Guardian, checks once more through the smaller pages of the Mirror. But nowhere in the Mirror is the inquest mentioned. And The Guardian is satisfied with simply reporting it, makes no reference to it elsewhere. How was he able, the man wonders, to live in a world where such despair is seen as unremarkable? He reads on.
He is on page five when the dark-haired nurse adroitly removes the paper from his hands. The curtains have been drawn around Mr MacMaster's bed. In the centre of the ward four doctors are stood around a light table.
Three of the doctors are wearing white coats. The fourth is a small dark man, his straight black hair precisely combed, a dark suit adding angles to his round body. His square shoes are shined. The three younger and taller doctors defer to him.
The spotty doctor, who yesterday examined him, diffidently reads off his notes. Suited Assan points to an X-ray, speaks. The three respectfully nod, solemnly listen. The group then advances to the bed, Assan at their head. Behind them a young nurse hurriedly switches off the light table.
With a courteous good-morning Assan leans forward to look into the man's eyes,
"Any luck with the old memory yet?"
"Not who I am. Nor where I'm from."
Assan smells slightly of antiseptic scent.
"The police not found out for you?"
"I haven't heard from them today; and they said I would if I was a known criminal."
"Not often," Assan smiles, "I meet a proven innocent."
The three white-coated doctors glance to one another, and dutifully chuckle.
"The police may yet turn up trumps," Assan addresses himself to the man, "By which time, though, your mind will probably have solved the puzzle for itself. Actually you're a bit of a puzzle all around. We do not know quite what’s ailing you. You do have a mild concussion, but no skull fractures. Your heart is sound. Which is only as it should be: you're neither fat nor yet forty. And your kidneys are sound. You can't remember collapsing?"
"No."
"Any aches or pains?"
'No, none."
"Dizziness?"
"When I was weighed."
"So nurse told me. Possibly," Assan, raising his voice, partly turns to the attendant doctors, "the blood samples will enlighten us. We certainly know what you're not. You're not diabetic, nor do you have any heart disorders. Nor are you a criminal. And you do now appear to be on the mend. By the time we find out what ailed you, it will all probably be academic anyway. The mild bump you sustained on the head was not enough to damage any part of the brain. So, whatever the cause of this amnesia, it is more likely to have been an emotional shock of some kind. And to speculate on the causes of that would be simply pointless. Could be anything from redundancy to adultery. Actually your physical condition reminds me very much or shell-shock cases I have seen. Haven't been in any wars lately?"
Again the three doctors chuckle. The question does not require an answer from the man. Chin in hand Assan studies him. At the far end of the ward a similar group of doctors are gathered around the bed of another patient.
"If that were the case," yesterday's spotty doctor speaks, "wouldn't his reflexes be impaired? Wouldn't there be temporary paralysis?"
"Good point doctor," Assan beams beneficently up at him, "What’s amnesia, though, but a temporary paralysis of the mind?" He steps away from the bed, "Might be a good idea to do a brain scan as well as an encelograph. An EEC will eliminate epilepsy for certain. And," he turns back to the man, "I think we'll let you get up and about now. We won't know if your vertigo is cured unless you're occasionally vertical. Don't overtax yourself though. Be cautious. And movement of itself might be stimulus enough to jog that recalcitrant memory of yours." And with the aplomb of power Assan moves down the ward to his next patient, the three white coats trailing behind him.
The curtains are drawn back from around Mr MacMaster's bed. A nurse in a white tunic asks Mr MacMaster if he has everything. Mr MacMaster pats a small green-checked valise lying on the bed. He has on a brown cardigan, fawn trousers and suede shoes. He looks cheerily around the ward.
"Bye then," he says loudly.
The patients, sitting primly in their beds for the doctor's rounds, smile weakly in reply. Those tepid smiles do not satisfy Mr MacMaster.
"Don't you worry," he winks largely at the man, "it'll all come back. Maybe then you'll wish it hadn't." And he laughs. Wearing clothes seems to have made Mr MacMaster louder.
"Thank you for the papers."
"Don't worry about it," Mr MacMaster picks up his green-checked valise, "Gotta go now. My daughter's waiting."
Mr MacMaster leaves for his life outside the ward. He seems larger too in his clothes. With a sigh the man opens the paper to page five, finds his place.
"Good morning," a woman looks over the top of the paper.
She is wearing civilian clothes, is broad and plump and freckled. Lowering his paper he calmly waits for her to tell him her function.
"I'm the hospital social worker," she says, "I tried to get to you earlier, but..." she indicates her bulging briefcase, sits in the red chair, "I’m told you can't remember who you are." She sets the briefcase on the floor, extricates a pink form, finds a black pen. "This isn't going to be easy. Still don't remember?"
"No," the man says.
"Name..." she studies the form, "Can hardly call you Bed 2 Ward 11. What's it the Americans call them? John Doe. Got to call you something. Have you any money?'"
"Mr MacMaster, who was there," two nurses are stripping the bed down to its plastic floral mattress, "leant me a pound to buy some papers."
"Nothing else?"
"My pockets were all empty."
"And no memory of any family?"
"No."
"Shall I put down John Doe?"
"The porter called me John."
"Does he know you?"
"No. He said he comes from London. That they call everyone John there."
"Forename then is definitely John," she beams at him, "Surname?"
"Isn't a doe a female deer? And a female rabbit?"
"Actually I think it stands for ‘Dead On Entry’. Or something along those lines. What name do you fancy?"
"John..." he begins. She misunderstands,
"John John? Right," she laughs, a high squeaky laugh, "John John you are. Date of birth etcetera we'll omit. And you have no money apart from this?" she taps the change on the bedside locker. "In that case, until we find out who you are, I'll get them to give you a weekly allowance."
"Who?"
"DSS. Can't remember exactly how much it'll be. But you'll not need much in here anyway. Be enough for a daily paper. Soon as I get it I'll bring it along. Don't run up too much credit in the meantime. Just in case."
Interview finished she slots the form back into her briefcase, goes to rise.
"What's it like?" she asks, sees that he doesn't understand the question, "Not being able to remember?" And she blushes, aware that her curiosity has taken her beyond the bounds of professionalism.
"I've nothing to compare it with..." Since the pink nurse displayed a similar curiosity the previous day he has been thinking how to answer should anyone else ask, not wanting to disappoint them as he did the pink nurse. "It's frightening," he says, "And it's not frightening. Because I don't know what to be frightened of. I'm incomplete. I know things. But not where or when I learnt them. I can rationalise," he gestures to The Mirror's unfinished quizword, "but I don't know where I learnt to do it. Nothing has any value. All is meaningless. Everything is only what it is. And I feel it should be more. That it should have memories attached to it. Everything is a question. Why do I know what I do know and not know what I don't know? And," as he looks up she avoids his eyes, "I'm not so sure that I want to find out who I am. Because, if I've so easily forgotten, then it couldn't have been worth knowing. Could it?"
The woman uncomfortably shrugs, sorry to have evoked this outpouring. She lays her hand by way of apology, of hope, on his arm.
"See you later John John," she smiles, and is gratified by his answering smile.
He hears her talking with some of the nurses on her way out, her squeaky laugh, and then the silence there saying that she has gone. The two troupes of doctors are also leaving. He reaches for the paper, but it holds no interest. He thinks back over what he said to the social worker, what Assan said to him; and he decides to go for a walk as Assan suggested, seek stimulus, uncover this disquieting someone else within him.
Walking down the ward he watches his bare pink feet swinging along of their own accord below him. He knows how to walk, can't though remember having walked anywhere before. He looks up from his feet, and, in passing, he answers the timid half smiles of those patients in their beds.
The bathroom has stainless steel urinals under a green mesh window, with opposite a row of three white porcelain basins. Down one side are three doors labelled WC. On other doors are labels saying Bathroom and Shower Room. A patient is stood, baggy pyjama legs apart, at the urinal. The man watches him cross to the basins.
Following the patient's example the man goes to the urinal, takes out his penis. He pees. No memories of this either.
At the basins he soaps his hands, rinses them, dries them on a green paper towel. Above the basins are a line of mirrors. He recognises his reflection only as the man in last night’s photograph. Soggy green paper towel in his hand he studies this unknown visage.
"John John," he says, and smiling, and studying his smile, he feels foolishly grateful to that semi-articulate porter for releasing him from his namelessness.

Voice Off. All intelligence must first discover what it is to perceive from whence it views the universe.

latest John John - tenth?

2007-11-28T01:35:00.000-08:00

Barry knows that, before the Director agrees to an unscheduled meeting, he will check on what has been happening overnight in the observatory.
The Director is suspicious of his staff; he also likes to say 'I know' and 'I’m fully aware of that'. Authority, The Director believes, has to appear omniscient.
While he waits to be summoned, Barry puts his feet up on his own desk and, hands clasped in his groin, chin on his chest, he dozes; nods awake to note the passage of ten minutes, to stare at the printout pinned to the wall, and dozes.
Nine o'clock comes and goes with a queasy flutter of apprehension: the Director has arrived on the premises. He dozes. Ten o'clock moves forever into the past. He dozes. When the phone does finally ring it has him scrambling out of his chair and confusedly grappling the receiver upside down to his ear.
The hamstrings of both legs numbed by his peculiar sleeping position, Barry hobbles through the corridors to the Director's office carrying his printout and a sense of deja vu; seems like all his life he has been hurrying to confrontations.
Dumping his printout on the Director's desk, Barry drops into the chair opposite him. The Director raises one hairy eyebrow towards the naked expanse of his pink bald head.
"So..." he deliberately doesn’t look at the printout, instead leans away from it into his chair, "Convince me we haven't wasted a night's work."
Barry studies this ex-man of science become an administrator. Why is it, he wonders, that with every promotion these men, who enjoy authority, acquire another layer of subcutaneous fat? The physiognomy of administrators? Lifting his own thin hand he lays it, like a zealot bearing witness, upon the pile of printout, and he begins a reiteration of what he wrote in the log, explaining why the line could not have been a machine fault.
"Why should it not be an elaborate, entirely subjective, wish-fulfillment?"
"Wow!" Barry site back grinning, "Entirely subjective wish-fulfillment?"
Those in authority are suspicious of all humour. Humour is variously called insubordination, impertinence, mockery. The paranoia of petty power sees in every smile a threat. And, having been openly scoffed at, the Director now bridles, his ego puffing up, his pate flushing. Before he can let loose his indignation, though, Barry pats the printout,
"Wish-fulfillment might just explain my interpretation of the machine. It does not explain my viewing the line through binoculars."
"Only you saw it."
"Wrong."
"There was someone else here?"
The Director is springing a trap: no-one other than Barry was authorised to enter the observatory last night, and there'd been a fuss about his being allowed to be on his own.
"Not here. I checked with a friend in Teignmouth, as you must have read in the log. He saw it."
"After you told him what to look for. Autosuggestion?"
"And there's none so blind as those that won't see," Barry exposes his teeth in an attempt at an easy smile, "When I got off I phoned Woomera. Until my call they thought they'd had a fault in their optics. When they'd eliminated that, they thought it a freak heat distortion. When I phoned, they cursed; and they called their night's troubles the Tappell Line."
The Director’s expression has changed in a blink from narrow-eyed scepticism to eye-dancing speculation.
"I also phoned California," Barry says, to bring the Director now to earth, "They had no idea what I was talking about, hadn't seen anything, couldn’t be persuaded to even look in the right direction."
The Director brushes that aside — that someone hasn't seen something does not mean that it does not exist. Suddenly he is again the scientist, the discoverer, a pioneer prepared to lay his reputation on the line. On Tappell’s Line.
"What d'you think's causing it? Atmospheric phenomena?"
"Far too high. To be visible from here and from Australia, and to appear continuously more or less in the same place, it has to be way out. Way beyond the solar system."
"Then what is it?"
"Conjecture only. And a first guess at that. I'd say it's a galactic veil."
"Galactic veil?"
"Glue of the galaxies."
"They been known to move before?"
"Not out of station. Not so far as I’m aware. But, so far as science goes, we haven't known about them for that long. This sort of thing needs to be studied over centuries."
"Yes. But..." the Director runs a hand over his mouth, "Surely this has none of the characteristics normally associated with a galactic veil? What makes you suppose that it might be?"
The first intelligent question having been asked of him, Barry leans forward, the game behind him, earnest now.
"Simplistically it's this. Every view we’ve had so far of a galactic veil has been face on. Suppose you were to look along its side though. Like a curtain. A net curtain. Face on, flat on, a net curtain lets light through; and, if you focus beyond it, then it's as good as transparent. But if you stand to the side of the net curtain and look along its undulations, then it must appear as a solid straight line. Yes?"
"Yes..." the Director wiggles his bottom lip dubiously between thumb and forefinger.
"And that would also explain," Barry says, "Why we didn't see it coming. We were probably looking at it flat on; and looking right through it. And being comparatively close, it was, of course, easier to look through. Like a net curtain. The further away it is the denser it appears, the more visible it is. Chances are that if it hadn't turned end on we might never have noticed it. We need much more evidence of course. From various sources. Only then can we be sure."
"Do you," the Director portentously holds Barry's eyes, 'have any objections to going public with this? Though," the smile is paternal, "you might win more friends by having a shave first."
Barry knows that the Director requires the publicity to justify his claims for increased funding from their sole stingy patron; and increased funding will mean better facilities for Barry. And Barry has no objection to publicly advertising his discovery — but in scientific journals. What the Director wants, however, is to astound and to astonish the general public, make the line a news item. Barry is loath to be let out of his closed zoo, doesn't want to become yet another of the pursued freaks in the all-channels global freak show.
"I’d prefer further corroboration first. From a disinterested third party."
"Such as?"
"Mullard. They might also be able to enlighten us with regard to its constituents. And its distance."
The Mullard zoo receives a large government subsidy, in order that the government can lay rapid claim to anything of military benefit that Mullard might come up with. This makes the Mullard people, perversely, less secretive than those like Barry and the Director who are keenly aware of their zoomaster's egotistical motives. Such zoo owners, being already rich, they crave more than mere wealth: they want to lay claim to immortality in a star or a discovery being named after them. Such jealous vanity demands a watchful loyalty.
Barry’s suggestion makes safe sense to the Director: he no more wants to look a fool over a possible computer error than does Barry. Opening a desk drawer he removes a thick address book. When he is connected, he asks for an extension number. After the inevitable smalltalk; first name terms, the Director broaches the subject of last night's sighting, says that they are seeking corroboration.
The Director is asked to explain the nature of the sighting and does so, adding that he wants to go public with it.
"They haven't said yet," the Director holds his hand over the mouthpiece while the voice at the Mullard end consults with colleagues, "but they saw it. Only remains to find out when."
They wait. Eventually the Director says Hello, is handed to someone else, tells the newcomer once more of the sighting. Questions are asked.
"Hold on," the Director says, "I'll put us onto conference. My colleague here will be better able to answer your questions."
A button is pressed on the phone and the Director opens his palm to Barry.
"Good morning," Barry says sitting forward.
"I'm told you saw a line?" The voice says that it doesn’t want its time wasted.
Barry describes the line's position, how it moved throughout the night; and, lest they try to dismiss it as a machine fault, he tells them that he has already received independent confirmation from both Teignmouth and Woomera.
"I see," the voice says.
Barry realises that he is talking to his opposite number, the technician from last night.
"Did you see it?" Barry asks. Though ‘see’ is the wrong word: Mullard’s are radio scans.
"We saw something." The Mullard technician is also in the presence of his superior.
"Any idea to its composition?"
"What do you reckon?" the technician cagily throws the question back at him.
"A theory, and a theory only," Barry realises that he is trembling, "I think it’s a galactic veil viewed edge on."
"Yea. Or something along those lines. What distance did you make it?"
"I need more data. A reliable parallax. It's certainly way outside the solar system."
"It's between us and Sirius." The first direct confirmation, the first information.
"That close," Barry frowns.
"And closing."
Barry ponders that news. The Mullard technician gives him time.
"Is this from satellite. Or ground scans?"
"Both."
"What did you make of it?" Barry asks.
"Your galactic veil could well be right, So far as we can make out, at the moment, it's comprised of an unbroken band of heavily ionised gas and dust particles. Small particles."
"No ice?"
"Could be. That'll have to wait on spectroscopic. And then, the way it’s bending light, it'll probably be meaningless. Those small particles en masse are creating one helluva magnetic field. You said it was obscuring stars. It's not. It’s magnetism is so strong it's bending their light. And, as far as we can calculate, it's travelling at almost the speed of light."
"Is its mass changing?"
"No way of telling. It’s playing hell with all our instruments. We’re having to refocus on it all the time, and we can't get an objective measurement. Apart from anything else there are just too many lateral fluctuations. If it was a single solid body..."
The Director is tapping his watch.
"What time did you first see it?" Barry asks.
"Started giving us gyp all yesterday evening. 02:58 when we first focused on it."
"I've got it logged at 11:O5."
"So," the technician’s smile is audible, "it's yours."
"Woomera," Barry blushes, "calls it the Tappell Line."
"Good a name as any," the technician grunts, "At least now we know what to curse."
"Any objections to us going public with it?" the Director asks.
Mullard is silent.
"For the moment," the Director’s plummy opposite number replies, "we'd rather you didn't. Until we can be absolutely sure of its nature. And that it poses no threat. If you could hold fire for a couple of days? Until after the weekend? We will, of course, seeing as it's yours, keep you fully informed of all developments this end."
"Thank you," Barry says, before the Director can argue. Farewells are made.
Despite being thwarted at the last fence the Director sits back smugly,
"Now let them call this the polytech of astronomy." With an avuncular smile he studies Barry, "you'd better go home and get some sleep. I've got some urgent rescheduling to do. Angry voices to placate. From now on the Tappell/Schultz Line is The priority. See you tonight."

Voice Off. In human affairs novelty always takes precedence.

Eight

2007-11-21T00:11:00.001-08:00

The dark-haired nurse of yesterday takes his temperature, pulse and pressure. She inevitably asks if his memory has returned, pulls a sympathetic face when he tells her not. He resumes his reading of the newspaper.
A white-coated woman with a large chest brings a red chair attached to some scales into the ward. She has ginger hair and a deep mocking voice.
The dark-haired nurse asks him to leave the bed to be weighed and measured. The other day nurses, he realises, are avoiding him. His lack of a name confuses them, upsets their cultivated cheeriness.
The dark-haired nurse holds onto his arm as he crosses to the weighing chair. He leans slightly towards her, feels his feet spreading out upon the cold floor, tests the weight of his body on his legs, notes the movement of his vertebrae as he straightens to be measured, ponders over the placement of his limbs as he lowers himself into the weighing chair... He cannot breathe, cannot swallow, looks down in tilting surprise at the sweat prickling from the backs of his hands. The nurse and the white-coated woman tell him to let go of the chair, and they help him back to bed. The white-coated woman is red and puffing.
Movement has freed his airways. He signifies that he is no longer dependent on their support. They make him lie down. He asks the worried white-coated woman if he might have a copy of his precise statistics — to give to the detective who is trying to find out who he is. The woman writes them on the back of a form. The dark-haired nurse takes his temperature, pulse and pressure.
"Wonder what that was all about?" she lays her cool fingers lightly upon his forehead.
He studies his statistics, watches the white-coated woman push the weighing chair along to the patient who arrived after him yesterday. The patient looks ill, has wrinkled skin the same colour as his teeth, his thin limbs dithering. Under the bedclothes the man flexes his leg muscles, feels their firmness, decides that — compared to the other patients, and despite his momentary faintness — there can be little wrong with him.
He next has to lay aside his newspaper when two nurses come to make his bed. They help him into the red chair beside Mr MacMaster.
"Try doing the quizword," Mr MacMaster tells him, "Be a good test. See if you can remember other things."
Mr MacMaster shows him where the quizword is in the paper. Because of his close scrutiny of every news item he had not yet reached that page.
When the two nurses — unnecessarily, he thinks — help him back into bed, he frowns pensively over the quizword.
When next he has his temperature, pulse and pressure taken, he has only managed to solve those clues which asked him to make a word using a letter, or letters, from four other words. Borrowing a blue biro from Mr MacMaster, he prints, with effort, those solutions
in the squares. He knows the answers to no other clues, abandons the quizword to read the rest of the paper.
He is trying to make sense of the mathematics on the sports page when another white-coated woman parks her trolley beside his bed. This women is skinny with frizzy hair and freckles. On the trolley are bottles and syringes in plastic bags. Obligingly, glad to know what is expected of him, he rolls up his pyjama sleeve, allows the woman to take a blood sample.
Watching her fill out the inevitable form he realises that this day no-one is asking him his name. He hears the woman greet the other new patient by name and, discomfited by the idea of people being kind to him, he returns to puzzling over the day's racing programme.
He is about to start on the front page of The Guardian when a small man in a baggy white suit stops at the end of his bed. He has difficulty putting the brake on a wheelchair.
"X-ray for you old son," he comes around the bed, "Need a hand?"
Unassisted the man climbs out of the bed and walks to the wheelchair. The porter arranges a coffee-coloured cellular blanket around his legs, another blanket around his shoulders. Then, letting off the brake, the small porter begins pushing the wheelchair out of the ward. The dark-haired nurse, in passing, smiles down on him.
They pass the nurses' rooms — a polished desk and black phone in one room, in others large chrome machines, metal cabinets, a steel sink and taps, a tray of upside down white cups...
They enter a long waxed corridor. The porter grunts.
"I don’t think," the man looks up and around at the porter, "there's any need for you to push me. I'm sure I'm quite strong enough to walk."
"Listen John," the porter says, "if nurse says you gotta go in a wheelchair in a wheelchair you gotta go. Right?"
The porter's unsmiling demeanour intimidates him. Wishing he had a more sympathetic companion for this excursion into new territory, he looks into the double doors they pass on either side of the corridor. The wards within are replicas of his own. Women in frilly nighties in one ward, children with bandaged limbs in another.
The wheelchair stops between two sets of grey lift doors. The porter presses a white button. Opposite the lift doors are blue plastic seats, a trough of potted plants and two cylindrical ashtrays. Fixed to the wall is a tall list of ward numbers, arrows beside them. A windowsill is too high to be seen over from the wheelchair: again he beholds a blue sky with today some comma-like wisps of clouds.
The porter jabs impatiently at the lift button.
"Why did you call me John?" the man asks him, "Do you know me?"
"Nah!" the porter laughs. His teeth are yellow and crooked. "Call everyone John. Dunno why. I come from London. Call everyone John down there." He jabs at the button, "Only been here a month."
The wheelchair is pushed into the lift between two white-coated doctors and a young blushing nurse. They all leave at the next floor down; one of the doctors laughing as they round a corner.
The sign outside the lift says the groundfloor. The porter, heaving at the handles of the wheelchair, follows arrowed signs to the X-ray department. Other signs, of initials and abbreviations, point into doors or further on.
The man is aware of the porter labouring behind the wheelchair, occasionally feels his hot moist breath on the back of his neck. They pass a blood bank and a steamy clanging canteen.
On entering the double doors of the X-ray department the porter parks him behind two other wheelchairs. In one is a bald old woman, in the other a long-haired youth with his left leg in plaster.
"You wait here John," the porter says, "They’ll see to you. I'll be back for you later."
On a long settee sit three people in civilian clothes — two youths with walking sticks and a thin woman in fawn skirt and jacket. The two women who appear to be in charge are also in everyday clothes Both are wearing dark blue skirts, one a pale blue cardigan, the other a white blouse. They come and go carrying large cardboard files. The man realises that he is made nervous by civilian clothes: because he doesn't immediately know the wearer's function?
The two wheelchairs before his are pushed through thick doors. The bald woman is dribbling. A few minutes after the doors closed a red light comes on above the doors. A notice says that it is dangerous to enter when the red light is showing. A telephone rings in an office beyond the long settee. All listen to a woman angrily explaining why something wasn't done.
When the youth in plaster and the dribbling woman are wheeled out, their wheelchairs are parked facing the double doors. Large cardboard files are slotted into the backs of the wheelchairs.
One of the walking-stick youths from the settee is escorted into the nearest X-ray room by the woman in the blue cardigan. The woman in the white blouse wheels the man past the thick door. He recognises none of the equipment.
"Can you stand?" the woman stamps on the wheelchair's brake.
"Yes." Trying to appear competent the man divests himself of the two blankets.
The woman leads him over to a metal stand.
"I want you to rest your chin on here," she adjusts a cushioned pad, brings it up to his chin, pushes a metal plate against the back or his head, asks him if it is comfortable, "In a minute I'll ask you to take a deep breath and keep perfectly still." She crosses the tiled room, goes behind a screen.
"Ever had your X-ray taken before?" she asks as she brings the equipment into alignment. She too knows that he has lost his memory.
"Not that I can recall," he says.
"Deep breath now," she tells him. A machine buzzes.
The woman emerges from behind the grey screen to turn his head first to one side, then to the other. Close to she gives off a scent sweetly sour and not unpleasant. She X-rays his chest next from the front, then from the back.
When he is again sat in the wheelchair he hears her shuffling what sounds like metal plates. He thinks of white sliced apples. She slots one of the large cardboard files into the back of his wheelchair, tucks the two light blankets around him and pushes him into the waiting room.
The youth and the bald woman have gone. He recognises yesterday's pale admission to his ward gripping onto the arms of his wheelchair.
"All done John?" the porter emerges from behind the office door, "Back we go."
In the groundfloor corridors are large women with shiny blue aprons, other wheelchairs, a stretcher with a transparent bag suspended above it, walking patients in wraparound dressing gowns.
This time they have the lift to themselves.
"Sister said," the small porter stands to one side to look down at him, "you lost your memory. That right?"
"That’s right." He doesn't like this porter: he talks too close to his face.
"Can't remember nothing?"
"I'm not sure.." The porter's salacious leer is making him nervous.
"Knew this bloke," the lift doors slide apart, "said he drank to forget. If he could've seen you now, he'd have had to come up with somethin' else.."
His bed has been made in his absence. Unassisted he climbs back in, picks up The Guardian from his bedside locker. He is on page two when the dark-haired nurse comes to take his temperature, pulse and blood pressure.

Voice Off. Chance is the one universal law which cannot be formulated.

Seven

2007-11-14T00:56:00.000-08:00

Detective Constable Derek Hawkins sits at a desk and watches the clock. No call has come from the hospital. He has already gone an hour over his shift. The day shift has come and gone. Time enough now for the rest of the population to have got out of their beds.
He reaches for the phone and dials the first London number.
"Mrs Bofill? Sorry to trouble you so early. Detective Constable Hawkins of the Northampton Constabulary here. You reported your husband missing?"
"Four years ago," the women flatly says. She has a discernible London accent.
"I have his description before me. It fits a man we have who says he’s lost his memory. It’s probably not your husband. Could you add anything to your earlier description of your husband?"
The woman, hesitantly, having to stretch her memory back over four years, repeats the description already on record.
"I was hoping for something not on his file. An unusual mole... a small scar maybe? Something that would help us to either definitely identify him as your husband; or that would enable us to eliminate your husband altogether from our enquiries."
"What's he done?"
"Nothing, so far as we are aware. Just lost his memory."
"He had freckles on his chest," the woman says, "Not on his face, just on his chest."
DC Hawkins writes.
"Anything else? Did he have an accent, speech impediment, wear glasses occasionally, false teeth?"
"He wore glasses for reading."
"Did he smoke?"
"Yes. Not much though."
"So he could have easily given up?"
"He used to."
"That’s it? Nothing else?"
"It is four years ago."
"I understand. Now I’m afraid I won't be able to let you know one way or another until late this evening. We have several more lines of enquiry to pursue. But, if by this evening we can’t decide who he is, would you be prepared to come to Northampton to identify him?"
The woman is silent. He can hear traffic passing beyond her windows. Four years is time enough to have built several more lives. What does she owe a man who walked out on her four years ago? Who she could legally have divorced after two years?
"Yes," she says.
"Thank you."
Replacing the phone he reaches for the next sheet of paper, dials.
"Mrs Bekel?" Mrs Bekel has an eight year old daughter. Three years of her growing up the absent father has missed. Yet still Mrs Bekel wants to find him. To ask why? If DC Hawkins was to walk out on his wife, would she be distraught? Would she continue to seek him year after year? Were he to die would she grieve? Yes, she would grieve. But only according to convention; and he wants something beyond convention. These deserted women are beyond convention.
Of the five others he calls the Bolton woman has moved, has left no forwarding address. Her missing husband is one whose blood-group is not included in the description. Two of the others, along with Mrs Bekel's, have verifiable scars; and the Welsh woman’s seven year missing man has a pronounced Welsh accent.

Voice Off. Non-thought in humans is caused by their innate idleness. Thought for some human beings must always precede action — to think of something is to imagine doing it — and action inspires change, and change will lead to the unknown. The known, for human beings, no matter how miserable their lives, is always preferable to the unknown.

At 04:46 the scope completes its traverse of the line. At 05:11 Barry runs off a copy of the night's observations. At 05:26 he makes his last entry in the log and leaves the brick tower, staggers under the stacks of printout across the institution lawns to his office. There he makes his first cup of coffee since 11:15 the previous evening and he begins to study the printout. By 07:30 he is once more full of doubts. (The new is disconcerting, especially in a science as ancient as astronomy.) He craves further confirmation. No point, though, in calling Las Palmas: be only technicians there working on the scope, and none of then will have been looking at the sky.
At 07:38 Berry phones Brian Waters at Palomar. Barry Tappell and Brian Waters were undergraduates together. Brian Waters was lured by vast amounts of dollars and warm winters to join a Californian space zoo. Though, not being of that high an intellectual calibre, Brian Waters was relegated to Palomar, which pleased the convalescent Barry when he heard. Palomar, however, still has facilities above and beyond Herstmonceux.
Whenever Barry pictures Brian Waters he sees a lumpy dullard. Even his phone manner is stolidly slow; and, when finally Barry does succeed in identifying himself, Brian Waters displays not even polite pleasure.
"Yes?" It is late evening at Palomar.
"'I'm at Herstmonceux, and we've got a slight problem. Are you going to be looking anywhere in the direction of Lyrae tonight?"
"Not so far as I’m aware. No... I think I can tell you..." He would be security-minded, Barry thinks. "Yes... We've been concentrating on Sagittarius lately." Centre of the galaxy: needles and haystacks.
"I see. Well... I’m seeking confirmation of what I believe to be a new phenomena. Could you have a look to the East tonight? Let me know what you find there?"
"I'm not sure..." Brian Waters begins his slow cogitations, "It would take a much higher priority to interrupt our present scheduling."
"Nothing so official. Just a personal observation. Binoculars'll do. If you wouldn't mind?"
"If you could tell us what we’re supposed to be looking for?"
"I’d rather not. Don't want to prejudice your observations. If you could just look to the East..."
Returning the phone to its nest of buttons he snarls at it; then he sits back and tells himself to think. Sitting forward he pulls out a desk drawer, finds a phone pad and dials an Australian number. After two attempts he gets through to New South Wales, asks for Steve Church. While waiting he decides that it is lucky the Herstmonceux switchboard hasn't come on to query all these international calls.
"Yea?" a distinctly irate voice snaps in his ear.
"I don't know if you remember me, Barry Tappell? We met at that seminar in Paris last year." And, a pair of angry kindred spirits, they got paralytic together.
"You in Australia?"
"No. England."
"What can I do for you?"
"I was wondering if you were looking anywhere in the region of Pegasus last night. It's now about six in the afternoon there? Isn't it?"
"The answer to both questions is yes. Why d’you ask?"
"Did you notice anything peculiar?"
"Peculiar's putting it mildly. I’ve been up all bloody day trying to sort it out."
"Was it," Barry takes a deep breath, "because of a North-South line?"
"Yea. About 2 hours before dawn. Right across Scheat. Which spelt differently about sums up my mood. Why did... You mean to say you had it there too?"
"Through Vega at first."
"Shit! First of all I thought it was optics. Been checking all our bloody mirrors. Though I didn’t see how it could be. I was just about to put it down to a freak heat distortion."
"I got it logged at 11:05 GMT."
"So I've got the Tappell bloody line to thank for today."
Barry grins,
"Looks like." The Tappell Line.
"Any idea what's causing it?" Steve Church asks.
"Tentatively," Barry smirks, "I'll let you know."
Sitting back, Barry drums his feet on the floor, gives a whoop of delight. The Tappell Line.

Voice Off. Despite the emphasis placed by various human societies upon individuality, humanity’s is a collective intelligence: a thing is perceived as real only if it is a shared perception.

Six

2007-11-06T07:14:00.000-08:00

Voice Off. Human society so orders itself according to the lowest common denominator or to the greatest good. The powerful in that society decide what is the greatest good.

He awakes curled on his side. A brown fibreglass chair is between his bed and the Asian's. He has recognised the ward. How do I know the chair is fibreglass, he asks himself, looks inside his mind. He has no memory or anything before yesterday. Sighing he straightens his body, pushes his head further up the pillow.
The nurses are chattering in their quarters. He hears the clink of the white cups. A dim grey light glows through the green and white flower-patterned curtains. A small tufty-haired old man is nervously collecting his towel and toilet bag. The old man's own haste appears to be confusing him. He has to lay down his toilet bag and towel to put on his dressing gown. He cannot then find his slippers, goes jerkily onto his hands and knees to look under the bed. Then, having got them on, the old man drops his toilet bag, breaking something glass within. Clutching his toilet bag and towel to his stomach the old man makes jaw wobbling for the bathroom.
The thought of water running brings to mind the man's own bladder. Reaching an arm out from under the bedclothes he takes the flask, removes the wad of paper from its neck and slides it down the bed.
Having returned the hot flask to the bedside locker he looks to the two beds on either side of him. The Scotsman and the Asian still sleep. Across the ward the feeble patient, who yesterday smiled at him, raises a thin white hand in salutation. The two night nurses come bursting into the ward pulling curtains apart and letting the thin blue light of day into the long ward. Some patients grunt angrily at this sudden disruption of their dreams, and they dig back into sleep. Others weakly stir and are helped to sit up by the two nurses.
The waking of men precedes the two chirruping nurses down the ward. Patients grab towels and dressing gowns and make for the bathroom. Despite their urgency none of the patients moves quickly. Some walk on stealthy tiptoe, cagey of arousing the slumbering pain within; others try to deceive their pain with flatfooted slothfulness; while the convalescent move with unbelieving caution, unable yet to credit the complete absence of pain.
The nurses pause to minister to those fully awake and confined to bed. The man watches this activity and examines himself. He is calmer than yesterday, cooler. The heartbeat is no longer hammering away at him. Maybe because he now has a past, if only of half a day? Did he dream last night? No, he was awake, then asleep, then awake again. All was here. Now he feels rested, refreshed.
The blonde nurse reaches him, opens the window curtains between his and the Asian’s bed. The large mound of the Asian, after a mumble acknowledging that it is day, presses itself back into sleep.
"Sleep well?" the nurse asks the man.
'Thank you," he struggles up the bed. She pulls pillows off a chair, piles them behind him.
"Sleep of the exhausted by the look of it." The other nurse has joined them, helps the blonde nurse to straighten the bed around him.
"Be back in a minute to take your temperature," she trots off with his flask of yellow urine.
"Home today Mr MacMaster?" the blonde nurse greets the Scotsman, "Sorry to be leaving us?"
"Not a bit," he grins, "My daughter's collecting me at twelve." The phone rings.
'Take care," the nurse hurries off.
"Morning," Mr MacMaster says to the man.
"Morning," the man responds.
While he is having his temperature, pulse and blood pressure taken, two cleaners in long blue coats come into the ward, plug in a suction cleaner and a circular floor polisher. The man has seen neither done before. He watches fascinated the pattern of glistening arcs the polisher makes. The cleaners answer with long faces the patients' greetings.
"Sleep seems to have done you good," the blonde nurse makes her crosses on his chart. "Any luck with the..?" she taps her temple.
"Just yesterday," he tells her.
"Be a cup of tea along in a minute," she leaves to take the temperature of the sullen Asian.
The walking patients are now emerging freshly shaven from the bathroom. One has white soap bubbles in his fluffy ears. Some have wet hair. On reaching their beds they either loop their towels through the rails on their bedside lockers, or they drape them over the bottom of their beds. Rearranging their few possessions some take up books, some sit on or beside their beds, some walk over to talk with other patients; and two take packets of cigarettes into the telly room.
A new nurse brings round the tea. The man is pleased to be able to tell her that he takes no sugar. His fear is not so great this day; he has a yesterday to build upon. The ritual of the tea gives him satisfaction and he dislikes the Asian for again grumbling about the quality of the tea.
A small bent man comes pushing a tent-sided trolley into the ward. The tent's sides are wooden racks into which are slotted newspapers and magazines. Newspapers are also stacked on the low flat base. Patients ask for certain of the papers: money rapidly changes hands. The man has no memory of this civilian transaction. The grubby newspaperman stops his squeaking trolley at the end of the bed, sees to the vacant old man opposite. Nervousness at this novelty rises within the man.
"Paper?" the newspaperman addresses him. He has a quick and furtive manner.
"I haven't any money," the man says, relieved to have so easily warded off this complication.
"That’s alright," Mr MacMaster says: he has just returned from the bathroom, "I’ll get it. What d'you want?"
The man looks fearfully at him,
"I don't know."
"Tell you what," Mr MacMaster takes a brown wallet from his locker, "I'll lend you a quid, you get a couple of papers, see which you like. How about the Mirror and the Guardian? Or d’you reckon..." But the impatient newspaperman has already taken the two papers off his trolley.
"Yea, that'll do," Mr MacMaster hands the coin to the newspaperman, who from a heavy pocket counts the change onto the newspapers on the bed. Mr MacMaster buys a Mirror for himself.
"Friend of mine," Mr MacMaster says, puffing around his words and getting into bed, "lost his memory once. Car crash. Didn't know his own wife when he came round. Been married twenty years. Had three teenage kids. But it all came back. Yours will too. Wait and see. When you get some money, pay that quid to the nurses. They got a fund here. You give it them."
"Thank you."
Mr MacMaster brusquely waves away the thanks, opens his paper.
The man pulls the smooth newspapers up the bed. Scooping up the change he examines the size, shape and colour of the coins. None are familiar. He unfolds the smaller of the two newspapers, reads its front page, studies the large photograph of a man said to be arriving at Heathrow yesterday.
"Ring any bells?" Mr MacMaster has been watching him.
"Vaguely," the man opens the paper, glances over the heavy print within, more big headlines, more photographs, "Nothing specific though."
"If you use words like specific," Mr MacMaster laughs," better try the Guardian. If that's no use, get the Sun and Telegraph tomorrow."
"Sun and Telegraph," the man soberly nods, returns to his reading. He reads every item, even the advertisements and the cartoon strips. All in the newspapers is new, and yet it is also familiar in that not one item surprises him. The hysterical headlines, the stories of hostages, of bombs, murders, crashes, famines... All is as before. Before? He becomes aware that the day nurses have arrived, lays aside the newspaper when his breakfast is placed in front of him. And that too is familiarly new. He samples and enjoys the cereal and the yellow fruit juice, but a wet yellow-grey lump called scrambled egg he discovers to be, in texture and taste, both unpalatable and indigestible.

Voice Off. The greater the unlikelihood of something happening the more significant will be its effect.

Five

2007-10-31T00:59:00.000-07:00

Voice Off. The more complex a human society, the more an individual wants to do right, the more divided will that individual's loyalties be.

DC Derek Hawkins sits before the terminal. He has faxed the prints, is awaiting a response from Central Records. It comes — Unknown.’
Records wants a name to attach to these new prints. ‘Unknown’, DC Hawkins tells them; and under 'Description' he types ‘Amnesiac, Ward 11, Bed 2, Northampton General. Giving his own rank and number as the reporting officer, he closes the enquiry.
Before calling up Missing Persons he glances back through his notes. Why didn't the uniforms interview the man? Hs calls up the day's log. 14:15 a call reporting a collapsed man in Harborough Road. Two mobile officers directed with ambulance to scene. 14:17 those two officers redirected to a crash and fire in Sheep Street. No further entries then until 15:48, when a call from Emergency said the man was being transferred to Ward 11, General. No action taken. The uniforms were busy. Two more pileups, a street fight, three burglaries, a shoplifter. 17:03 a call from Ward 11 telling of their amnesiac, referred to plainclothes. Had it not been for that one call, the uniforms would have picked up the case in the morning. Now it is his.
Faxing the polaroid he calls up Missing Persons, types in the man's statistics, including the man's blood group — 0 positive -which the ward sister gave him. He waits. Missing Persons tell him that they have nine possibles. He asks for printouts, crosses to the printer, scans each as it is printed, tears off the nine sheets.
Separating the sheets he studies each one, places it in the man's file. None are from Northampton. Two have records. He discards those. Of the remaining seven, two come from London, one from Birmingham, one from Swansea, one from a Yorkshire village, one from Bolton and one from Liverpool. Sighing he flips the file closed, reaches for another. He has work to do.

Voice Off. All life, all reproduction on the planet, from the simplest to the most complex of organisms, depends to a major extent upon chance. Yet, save where it applies to statistical probability, human intelligence has made no concerted attempt to understand the mechanics and consequences of chance.

This program is new. No-one else has reported a fault in it. That, though, does not mean that the program is faultless. Barry decides to employ its tried and trusted predecessor.
By the time he has found the old program two more printouts have shown the line to be deepening. He loses three printouts setting up the old program. At 00:24 the first printout from the old programme shows the line to be even deeper, obscuring Sheliak altogether. At which point Barry flings himself out of his chair and marches furiously back and forth across the cluttered room.
At 00:32 he leans on the printer staring at the darkening line. Hardware failure. Has to be. That's what comes from working in a near museum. And the on-call Engineer lives in Tunbridge Wells. He will shut down the computer when he arrives. By the time the computer is up again it will be daylight. Tomorrow night the scope is not his.
The line is also on the VDU. Possibly, hope reasons, the fault lies somewhere in the region of the program just prior to its being displayed on the VDU and printout. Possibly the images being stored on disc will be satisfactory and when the fault has been cured he can retrieve them from there.
He rubs his fingers nervously over his lips. The line has now deepened over both Sheliak and Vega. The multiple E, the binary and the Ring Nebula are also obscured, with the line now encroaching on Y Lyre.. What if, the thought further dismays him, the line isn't a computer fault but an optics failure? In that case he should call the scope engineers immediately, so that the failure can be quickly rectified and tomorrow night's viewing rescued.
If it is an optics failure, though, a hairline crack in a mirror or a lens, then the line would have remained central to the image and not be shifting from right to left in this manner.
Flicking over the printout he tears it off, lays it on the floor and crawls its length. The line has definitely widened out from Vega. On the last printout Vega's luminosity was just visible on the line's edge.
At the clatter of the printer Barry rushes over, tears off the new image. Vega is wholly visible again.
Taking up his calculator Berry estimates the drift of the line. At the line's present rate of drift, Sheliak will he fully visible again in 46 minutes. The night’s work is not wholly lost.
The following two printouts confirm his estimate. What then, he squats by the long ribbon of paper, is causing the fault? On the scope's present co-ordinates the line will be off his printout altogether by dawn. In which case he will have nothing to show the engineers but the printout; and to be able to cure a fault one has to be able to recreate that fault.
What, the thought takes shape as he examines the next few printouts, if the line is external? Is atmospheric? A freakish vapour trail maybe? A vapour trail would drift in the westerly air flow. It would also widen. But would a vapour trail cause that much refraction? Picking up a pair of binoculars from the console he trudges up to the scope.
Through the partly open roof the milky way spangles the night sky from East to West. He seeks out Lyrae. No line is visible to the naked eye. He looks at Lyrae through the binoculars. The line is visible.
As far as he can see through the binoculars, from the lilac glow of the Hastings streetlights to the orange haze of the Northern horizon, the line cuts like a cheesewire across the sky, bisecting the Cygnus and Pegasus constellations. And the line is beyond Lyrae now; and far far too high to be a vapour trail. Not of the atmosphere, nor of the solar system. To register on the reflector, at its focus, it has to be in the order of parsecs distant.
As he traces and retraces the line with the binoculars his anxiety and uncertainty, piece by piece, give way to the excitement and elation of discovery. Never before has he seen or heard of anything resembling this line.
Slamming back into the tower he scrambles down the steps, tears off the last three printouts. The line is now far to the left of Lyrae. He draws his lips back in indecision, drumrolls his fists gently on the printer's perspex cover. This is too good to miss. Sod the night's schedule: he'll record the line from horizon to horizon.
The time is now 02:27. Two hours viewing left. Ripping off the last sheet of printout he hurries over to the console. Cancelling the Sheliak program he feeds in the present co-ordinates of the line, calculates how many frames he'll need to record the whole of it, and he types in the declinations to give him an horizon to horizon scan.
He sets the program running, hears the scope grinding on its mountings above him as it takes up the new sighting. His whole being is atremble, yet calm, like the first confident look over an exam paper. The scope pauses, photographs. He listens to it move, pause, photograph. The printer rattles. The line is centre of the page.
Imagining the scope up there beginning its slow tilt out of the vertical, he thinks there’ll be hell to pay if this turns out to be a common phenomena. The thought makes him chuckle: he has acted, too late now for second thoughts.
The scope moves, pauses. He hears the roof opening wider. A whole good night wasted if it is a common phenomena. He squeezes up his face in concentration: he cannot recall mention of any such phenomena elsewhere.
If you’re going to make a fool of yourself, Barry tells himself, go the whole hog and log it. Sitting at the console he takes up his biro, opens the ledger. Flicking the biro between thumb and forefinger he composes his opening sentence. '11:05', he writes, 'a line discovered...' Discovered! The word dances like a luminous ping pong around inside of him. Quieting his agitation he gives the line’s co-ordinates, describes its Easterly drift up to its present position.
The scope, following its new instructions, is way out of the vertical. He checks the printout. The line is still there, obliterating Sadr in Cygnus. And the line is still maintaining its Easterly drift. When he moves the scope to the Northern sky he will have to allow for that drift. In the meantime some independent corroboration wouldn't go amiss. He might also gain some idea of its distance. But who? Las Palmas? Not much point if they're out of action. And better to go outside: he can make a fool of himself within the zoo later.
He smiles and picks up the phone, from memory taps out a Teignmouth number. Like electronic footsteps the connection bleeps into place.
On an old school desk, in the corner of a creosoted shed with a hinged roof in a Teignmouth garden, he hears the black phone give two double rings.
"Duncan? Barry here. Didn't think you'd miss a night like this."
Duncan Blythe is now 72, has been an amateur astronomer man and boy. He it was who passed his astral enthusiasms onto Barry. Many nights they spent together in that unhinged shed, long winter nights in mittens with thermos and sandwiches, to the detriment of his appetite and schoolwork the following day.
Barry outgrew that shed when he was fourteen. At nearly six foot then, six three now, he decided against amateurism and an interesting hobby in favour of a profession and hard work. Foregoing his universal nights he had bowed over earthly revision.
"Barry?" Duncan says without recognition. Barry realises that he hasn't see Duncan now for over ten years. Duncan doesn’t know about Barry's breakdown.
"Barry Tappell. I'm at Herstmonceux."
"Lucky you."
"I'm calling for corroboration. Didn't know who else to ring."
"Herstmonceux calling me for corroboration. I'm flattered."
"Can you have a look at Cygnus? Tell me what you see?"
Barry listens to the old man carefully laying down the phone and turning to his skeletal six inch reflector. All movements in that small shed have to be slow and deliberate. Barry hears a boy's voice. Laughter as Duncan laconically replies. Another young acolyte whose mother is also probably worried by his spending nights in a roofless shed with a peculiar old man.
The printer rattles. Barry listens to Duncan conferring with the acolyte.
"The Filamentary Nebula's gone," Duncan says into the phone, "Like the universe's been zipped up."
"That's it!" Barry laughs, "Exactly like a zip. Thanks Duncan. It was Lyrae when I spotted it. Any ideas?'
"Not a one."
Returning the phone, with a grateful and affectionate pat, to its cradle, Barry crosses to the printer. The frame has moved off Cygnus. A thought has Barry grabbing up the binoculars and charging up to the scope. The Filamentary Nebula is obscured.
The line is some distance then, is certainly no vapour trail if it is visible from both Hastings and Teignmouth. What, though, can it be?
Descending slowly back into the tower Barry loses himself in speculation. ‘Insufficient data’, he cautions himself, records the observations, and takes pleasure in entering Duncan Blythe’s name, and the precise details of his Teignmouth reflector, in the Herstmonceux log. As he is writing he hears the scope grinding back up to the perpendicular. Before it can start plotting the other half of the sky Barry checks the line on the last frame, moves the co-ordinates further East.
The scope begins its whirr, pause, photograph. Barry takes up his biro. Mid-sentence, he stops. If it is so high as to appear stationery from observation points 200 miles apart, and yet its rate of movement is such that, in five hours, it has moved from Lyrae to the other side of Cygnus, what then is its speed..?
He looks up at the star charts. Saturn is in Aquarius. He studies his printout, rips more off the printer, lays it on the floor. And there is Saturn, between Pegasus and Cygnus, and not obscured by the line. The line then is definitely outside the solar system. Grinning he returns to the console to record that observation in the official log.

Four

2007-10-24T03:55:00.000-07:00

Voice Off. Certain human societies inculcate in their young a belief in innate human goodness. To police those same societies a belief in universal human culpability has also to be impressed upon their police officers. Such counter expectations create a fluctuating imbalance in both those individuals and those societies.

When the last of the visitors leave, with nothing else to attract his attention, the man once more looks inside himself, mulls over — in light of what he has learnt from the detective — his ignorance of himself. Northampton? Mid-thirties? Criminal?
The other patients exchange the news their visitors brought them, drink their coffee, or watch their small televisions. He listens to the television nearest him, remarks on its familiarity, its filling the airwaves with chatter and jingles. Will the radio be new?
Following the example of another patient he unhooks the headphones from the wall behind the bed. The moment he hears it — a DJ cheerily warbling — he knows that it is what he expected.
Two of the nurses push a wooden-sided drugs trolley around the ward. His buttocks have gone numb from sitting up in bed. He shifts onto his side. The blonde nurse tells him that no medication has been prescribed, but if he can't sleep to let her know and she will ask the duty doctor for something.
The drugs trolley completes its rounds. He pees in his flask. Some of the patients switch on their angled bedlamps to read, some settle to sleep. The nurses switch off the ward televisions, then the ward's ceiling lights. One low bulb remains on in the centre or the ward, above a table. Two patients are still in the television room. The blonde nurse sees him still sitting awkwardly up in bed, rearranges his pillows for him, helps him down the bed. She tells him that he'll probably awake in the morning remembering everything.
Looking up at the dim squared ceiling, the idea of becoming unconscious again frightens him. He listens to the single separate sounds of the ward, a bed creaking, a man's choked cough. Northampton? Every answer begs more questions, his ignorance of himself seeming to endlessly increase. Does he have a family? Disconcerting to think of a group of people he doesn't know intimately concerned for him. He tries to imagine, from what he has seen of the other patients' visitors, what his own family of different-sized strangers will look like. That they should know more about him than he does makes their situation unfair, unnatural, makes him afraid of meeting them.
A nurse's shoes stick and unstick from the polished floor as she passes the end of his bed. A whispered conversation: nurse soothing an anxious patient. He hears a bedside light click off further down the ward. He listens. He sleeps.

Voice Off. Identity depends on the type of human society to which one belongs. In a small structured tribal society identity depends only on whose son or daughter one happens to be, and to which sub-grouping of the tribe one's family belongs. In a loose largely unstructured society identity depends on other peculiarities such as one's given name, one’s income, one's possessions, one’s education, one's accent and one's aspirations within that society. In such a society one's status is mostly self-imagined, is influenced by the other people one has chosen to know and one’s remembered experience of that society. With so much more to remember, amnesia in such a society is far more traumatic.

The observatory is a brick tower. Surrounding the tower, beyond oblong lawns, are squat blocks of brick and glass offices. On the flat top of the tower is the telescope. The scope's protective coverings are hinged open making the tower look like a nestling stretching its stringy neck up out of a cubist nest, gaping beak open to the stars.
Within that tower, below the scope, are rooms full of arcane equipment. Barry Tappell curses that equipment.
Las Palmas being down — a recurrent fault there resulting in a 24 hour shutdown for a complete overhaul — he had a whole free night on the scope here to catch up on and fill in the gaps in his research. A perfect night for dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Even if a short summer's night. An anticyclone stationary over Northern France, no moon, the evening mist blown offshore by a light breeze... and technology has failed him.
And what primitive technology. Computer enhanced images from a 98 inch reflector. Prehistoric! Like mounting a radar on a horse and cart. So dependent on the day/night rotation of the planet Earth; and, of course, the English weather. He can't, though, blame the weather tonight.
His object of study is Sheliak, an eclipsing variable in the Lyre constellation. A constant does not excite the human curiosity. Variables are also more scientifically attractive in that they are amenable to qualification and quantification.
The eclipse is now in the sixth day of its 13 day cycle, its magnitude 5.71. All is an earthbound astronomer's dream. And technology has failed him.
Had Barry Tappell been unquestionably ordinary then Barry Tappell is convinced that he'd now be using satellite reflectors, be a 24 hour a day astronomer, be in the van of apace exploration. But oh no, mediocrity rules the day, no-one is allowed to act that differently. And all he did was to fall worshipfully in love. She fell worriedly pregnant. She didn't want the baby, nor him. He fell into despair.
He had believed in singleminded women like his mother, women prepared to subjugate themselves for another life, for the new life. He had believed in women who fiercely made their children their cause, who believed in themselves. The woman he loved negated her sex and aborted his seed.
Wanting to understand, and be loved again; wanting to do the right thing, and unable to find out what it was, he first questioned the worth of his own existence, then of all existence.
"What worth a human life?" he asked of shoppers passing by. Then he withdrew into a depression so deep that he lost two years of study. Such human fallibility consigned him to this second-rate zoo.
Were Barry to go to even a second-rate American zoo he'd more than treble his wages. But, because he has had to do battle with establishments to prove his suitability to continue with his education, he is effectively barred from any brain drain.
What true scientist, though, has ever placed pecuniary reward high on their list of requirements; the facilities are ultimately what matter. And the Americans, just to rub salt in the career wound, have the facilities as well as the wages.
At times of frustration like these Barry feels as tainted by his youthful idealism as a failed revolutionary; and he is as angered that the establishment won't forgive or forget. The injustice irks him. One youthful aberration and he is marked as unstable for the rest of his tedious life...
For all his reflection and self-justification, the inescapable present is that he is stuck here in a castle in a steaming marsh, like a mad scientist in a gothic nightmare. Except that those marsh-bound and sinister scientists usually had machines that worked.
Barry's doesn't. This zoo's egotistical benefactor's pursuit of posterity is a penny-pinching affair.
The prestige projects which attract the bigger egos and the bigger money now all belong to the Mullard zoo and the Royal Observatory on Mount Ichea, Hawaii. As if Hawaii didn't already have the weather. Here in this Sussex bog Barry has to make do with obsolete leftovers, hand-me-downs, technological crumbs.
Every five minutes this night this particular technological crumb gives a facsimile printout. The first printout came at 10:30, clarified as the night deepened. At 11:25 he noticed a faint line to the right of Sheliak, down through Vega. The line went from top to bottom of the page, almost like an overlap, bringing Vega too close to Sheliak. Neither the printer's ribbon nor the paper feed was at fault.
Checking back he found that the line first appeared at 11:05, its distorting effect increasing with every five minute printout. He enters the fault in the log, loses two printouts clearing the computer, reloading the program and giving it his co-ordinates. At 11:36 the line is darker still. At 11:41 it has centred on Sheliak If it stays there the night's work is ruined.

Three

2007-10-16T07:21:00.000-07:00

Voice Off. It hurts a human being to be born. It recovers. As toddlers human beings suffer bumps and illnesses. Most recover. So do most human beings, in their brief and painfilled lives, soon come to expect to be hurt and to expect to recover. They also, early in their lives, accept death's inevitability. Thus do most unwell human beings await cure or death with equal passivity.

Detective Constable Derek Hawkins has an aptitude for paperwork and court appearances. Nursing a swollen bladder in a cold parked car has never struck him as glamorous: he is happier by far sitting in the office or waiting on a court bench. Fortunately his superiors appreciate his inclinations and talents, and they like to have him in court — he has a stolid unflappable court persona. And, with him in court, his superiors can concentrate their other officers on what they regard as ‘real’ police work — the garnering of evidence Albeit that the presentation or that evidence in the courtroom is what leads to convictions.
For all of next week DC Hawkins has at least two court appearances per day. This week, the week of his obligatory nightshift, he has been looking forward to catching up on his outstanding paperwork. 'The suspect was seen to...' 'The suspect, when approached, admitted to...’
His superiors’ derisory attitude to the courtroom often amuses DC Hawkins, occasionally it dismays him. He was not unduly surprised, therefore, when, on coming on shift, his paperwork was dismissed as secondary; and dogsbody DC Hawkins was sent to investigate an alleged amnesiac.
Making his disgruntled way to the hospital DC Hawkins considers amnesia, loses himself in a daydream wherein he realises how pleasant it would be to escape his own past, to throw off his imprisoning identity and to start afresh. At twenty three he believes that already he's done everything, seen everything. Never again in his life will he know such intensity of experience: his lot now is dulling repetition, is paler variations of the same. Life for him, he believes, is effectively finished; mistakes been made, opportunities missed, his future decreed, nothing more for this identity to do in the next sixty years but to act out his self-formed fate.
His past, he knows, indelibly shapes his future. At school his friends used his solemn round face as a front for them, to persuade parents and teachers how safe and sensible was their every madcap escapade. Authority seemed reassured by his guileless features, always found, despite his protestations of culpability, extenuating circumstances for his part in any prank. And so it was that authority, in the embodiment of the police, chose him rather than he the police as a career.
How tempting, he thinks, to slip now out of this constraining identity, to greet life with debonair laughter. And, even before meeting him, he resents this man who claims to have done so, and in so doing has interrupted his paperwork.
He has trouble parking, is misdirected to the wrong wing, and when, finally, he introduces himself to a blonde ward sister, she is at her paperwork.
"Somebody here says they've lost their memory." Hers is a small afterthought of an office.
"Yes," she bridles at his overt scepticism.
"Where is he?"
"Go easy on him," she admonishes him as she squeezes around the desk, "He's very unstable at the moment."
"What... mentally?"
"No. Physically worried. As you'd be if you'd lost your memory. This way."
The bed is second along on the right. The man sitting up in that bed is in his mid-thirties.
"A visitor for you," the ward sister tells the man.
The man looks up startled. DC Hawkins watches the man seeking to recognise him, seeking to place him in his own life.
"Detective Constable Hawkins," he introduces himself, letting the man off the hook, says, "Thank you," to the sister who has fetched him a chair.
He pulls the chair closer to the man, putting as much distance as he can between himself and the family of Indians around the next bed. He lays his black briefcase on the bed, flicks the silver catches,
"I'm told you've lost your memory."
"Well..." the man visibly sweats, "Yes and no. I can remember lots of things. But not who I am. He smiles apologetically — ingratiatingly? — at DC Hawkins.
As he extracts a notebook from his briefcase DC Hawkins studies the man. A life's doubts and surprises are registered in the creases of the brow, a lifetime’s wrinkles around the grey eyes. No-one can simply forget what has formed him. His own 23 year old face is smooth, bland; even so he is his past. His mother and father, brothers... there is so much of it, even at twenty three, to forget, to casually mislay.
"Before we go any further," he opens his notebook, "I warn you that should you, for whatever reason, not be telling the truth, and, as a consequence I have to go looking up all sorts of records, you will be charged with wasting police time. And if it turns out that you’ve known all along who you are, then you most certainly will be charged. Is that understood?"
"I'm sorry..." the man has a tremor in his voice, "I honestly don’t know who I am."
The man’s obvious agitation does not persuade DC Hawkins to the truth of what he is saying. The man may be trembling because he is simply frightened, and he may be frightened simply because he is not telling the truth.
"Now," DC Hawkins presses the button on his pen, "I’ve never actually had to deal with a case like this before. So let's begin by seeing what we do know. First a physical description. Starting at the top. Colour of hair," he stretches up to look at the man’s head, "Dark brown going grey. Eyes — grey/green. Face — squarish. Any scars?"
"I haven't seen any."
"Height?" The man shrugs. DC Hawkins runs his eye up the man’s bed length, "Five ten, eleven," he writes. "Weight?" He purses his lips, "Say eleven, eleven and a half stone." The man does not react: has he forgotten vanity too?
"Now your personal statistics. Date of birth?"
The man doesn't know. Nor his place of birth, nor the names of his parents, of his wife, nor of his children. Surely no man can forget his children, DC Hawkins thinks. Or do I think that simply because I don't want my parents to forget me? Maybe children, though, are the easiest of all to forget. He often has to remind himself that he too is now a father. That little pink bundle of smells, however, seems to have little to do with him. He makes fatherly noises; but it is a going through the motions. And easy enough to forget his wife, because he can't now grasp her existence. Why, he often asks himself, did he marry a woman who, as soon as she was married, thought of herself as a wife, whose sole raison d'être became the catering to his creature comforts? And she now thinks of herself as a wife and a mother, and she tries to reconcile the two. Yet, for all her busyness, there is a vacancy behind her self-imposed labels.
Before his marriage DC Hawkins had thought there was something elusive about his wife. He had married her to capture that elusiveness. Only, in domesticity, to realise that there was nothing there, that his imagination had endowed her with a mystery that she did not, does not, possess, nor aspire to. A vacancy is all there has ever been. And, here before him, is a man with a contracting density and no labels.
Who can he be?
You're the detective, he tells himself, detect.
"You carne in here what time today?"
"This afternoon. I don't know what time. The nurses wear their watches upside down. But I was taken to Emergency first." After all his negative answers the man is excessively pleased to be able to give information.
"What happened?"
"I... don't know," the man sinks back against the pillows, "The nurse, she's gone off now, said I collapsed in Harborough Road."
"Why did you collapse?"
"I don't know. I've got a bruise on my head."
"Do they know what's wrong with you?"
"They haven’t said."
DC Hawkins pauses,
"I'll see the doctor later. Now... I take it you weren’t wearing pyjamas when you collapsed?'
"My clothes are in there," the man eagerly points to the bedside locker.
Moving his briefcase to the end of the bed, DC Hawkins spreads the clothes out upon it. His search is more thorough than the nurse's. Not only does he turn out every pocket he also feels along the seams, knocks on the rubber heels of the shoes, examines the insteps for dirt. There is none.
Taking up his notepad, aware that he is being watched by the family of Indians, DC Hawkins lists each item of clothing, make, material and colour. He notes the shoe size.
"All very ordinary this. Nothing to help us here. Except what isn’t here. No money, no wallet, no keys. Not even a bus ticket. Think you could’ve been mugged?"
The man wonderingly touches the bruise on the back of his head.
"The doctor said I probably banged my head on the ground when I collapsed. Do you think I could’ve been mugged?"
"In Harborough Road? Unlikely. And we’ve got another puzzle here," he reaches over and picks up the blue quilted anorak, "Why this? It was a hot day today. What I saw of it. You’d have been boiling in this."
The man frowns. Eventually he limply lifts his hand, lets it fall. DC Hawkins folds and returns the clothes to the bedside locker. Profession? he fingers the shirt and trousers. Semiskilled. The clothes aren’t up to much, could do with a decent clean. Nor are they anywhere near sharp enough for a salesman. Hands aren’t callused.
"Can you drive?" he asks as he rises from the locker.
"I don’t know." Too neat and clean for a derelict. Probably a diffident office-wallah. Or self-effacing long term unemployed.
DC Hawkins sits back on the chair. The man takes sips of water. He’s right-handed. Pity. The water shakes in the scratched beaker. I know who I am, DC Hawkins thinks, I cannot escape who I am. Which must mean, my thinking it, that I must want to. And I envy him because he’s magicked away his past. Watching the water dance in the shivering beaker he thinks — and yes, freedom is frightening.
"You said you can remember some things. What?"
"Well... I can remember how to speak. I know what things are. The names for them. And some things I almost take for granted. Like being able to read... Other things I have to think about. Like using a knife and fork. You see, although I can remember how to use a knife and fork, I don’t remember ever having used them before."
DC Hawkins has been listening to his accent. No habitual affectations. Straightforward Southern Standard English.
"What were you doing in Harborough Road?"
"I don't know," the man shakes his head, "I don’t even know what it looks like. Sometimes I think it has trees in it. Sometimes I just see houses. One of the nurses said it has garages in it. But all I see is a road. It's a name, a word. Like if I think of dog, I just see all different breeds of dog. Not any one dog in particular."
"Why should you think or dog? Did you have a dog?"
"I don't know," he looks directly at DC Hawkins, "Why does no-one believe me?"
Because it's too bloody easy, DC Hawkins thinks, to cancel the past. He should be so lucky. Wipe out all the shames, run away from all the mistakes. His wife had thought his main virtue safety, and he’d been flattered, so he had married her; when the inside him had felt insulted, but being used to it he had bowed his head and donkeylike had done his duty. To negate all the chances missed. The old schoolfriend who had invited him into his electronics firm and he had been truly tempted, but the family voices of common sense had prevailed, a high risk venture, shit or bust; and here he is a detective constable in Northampton and his friend is a dollar billionaire in California. I hate myself. Envy and resent him. No wonder no-one wants to believe you.
"What do the doctors say?"
"I’ve only seen one. He said my memory'll come back of its own accord."
"When?"
"He didn't say. Just told me to relax."
DC Hawkins grimacing sighs,
"I've got to assume it won't. Dc you have any objections to giving me your fingerprints?"
"No," the man frowns, "Why should I?"
"I don't know. Don't know why anyone has come to that. But if you do have a criminal record, then with your prints I’ll be able to find out in a couple of hours who you are."
"That soon?"
The man gratefully accepts the least information. Maybe he is telling the truth.
"What if I haven’t?"
"It'll take longer. We’ll see. If your memory does come back it’ll all be academic anyway. If it doesn’t, and you don’t have a record, we’ve still got a few more strings to our bow. Then there’s your family. Though it will be 24 hours before they can officially register you as missing. If they’ve missed you already, and if you’re from Northampton, then we should know who you are almost straightaway. If you’re from somewhere else it will take longer of course. But all of that depends on your having a family who’ll register you as a missing person. No memories at all of a family?"
He looks a family man, as if he belongs to someone. A taken for granted household fixture. A drab wife buying drab clothes for him. Husband of... Father of... a man who no longer exists in his own right, who probably spends his weekends digging the garden and getting shouted at. He definitely has the anxious look of the family man about him. Or is he simply an anxious man? If his memory has gone he certainly has good cause to be anxious.
"No..." the man is shaking his head, "I see snapshots. Family groups. But none of the same family. Is this Northampton?"
"You didn't know that?"
"No."
"Where would you have expected to be?"
"I don’t know."
"Do you know where Northampton is?"
"I think so... Pictures of maps. About sixty miles north of London. Between Coventry and Oxford?"
"More or less. And exactly sixty miles from London. Think you come from London?"
"No idea."
"Then again you could know the distance from a signpost here. Remember any signposts?"
"Not specifically. Blue and white. No, all I can see is a vague map."
"So you were travelling, and probably on the motorway. They have white on blue signs. You do know this is Britain?"
"I suppose so. I hadn't thought about it. Northampton is in Britain. It follows."
"Not necessarily. There's a Northampton in Australia. Several in America."
"But this is Britain?"
"Yes."
DC Hawkins decides to believe that the man is telling the truth.
"Let's take these prints." He smiles as he pulls the card and ink pad from the briefcase, "Never know I might be arresting you tomorrow."
The man watches his prints being transferred from the ink pad to the card.
"Ever had this done before?" DC Hawkins asks.
'This is new," the man fervently declares.
Two more prints are taken.
"You’re a man or absences," DC Hawkins tells him, "Absence of indentations on your fingers — where a ring may have been. Absence of a sun tan line — where you might have worn a watch. Let's see if having your photograph taken stirs any memories."
Returning the ink pad and card to the briefcase DC Hawkins takes out a polaroid. He stands self-consciously at the foot of the bed, camera before his red face.
"Look straight at me." The man blinks in the flash. Other patients and visitors look to them, turn away.
DC Hawkins sits again beside the bed,
"I can't promise any quick results. In fact I can't promise any results at all. Over 7,000 people go missing every year. Within that same year 2,000 of them will turn up again. But the other 5,000..? Who knows? Maybe you're one of those who've never been heard of again... If you haven't heard from me by first thing tomorrow morning it'll mean you haven't got a record. So you can breathe a sigh of relief on that score. To be quite honest it'd probably be much easier for us to trace you if you were dead. Forensic could then take you to bits, find out where the pieces used to fit. But alive... what you tell us, what we think you tell us, what you appear to know... all of it can mislead us. For me, now, it'll mean my having to go through all the missing persons files, see if I can find a near enough fit. I'll also try to get the local paper interested. If, in the meantime, your memory does come back, can you get one of the nurses to let me know? Here's my number. Save me a lot of work."
"Yes. Certainly," the man takes the piece of paper, studies the numbers.
"Now let's have a look at this," DC Hawkins presses a button on the camera, removes the photograph, waves it dry, "That a good likeness?"
The man pales as he looks at the photograph of the man with red-centred eyes in the hospital bed. He bites on his lip,
"I don't know."

Two

2007-10-09T08:36:00.000-07:00

Voice off. Human beings possess no intrinsic self-criticism. Only through other human beings does an individual human being know of itself.

The old man opposite is still sat in the padded red chair, a washed out green blanket folded over his knees.
The man holds the old man’s gaze a disinterested moment, then lets his sight and mind drift elsewhere.
The ceiling of the long ward has been lowered, slopes up to the tops of the high windows. The two ranks of supine beds do not keep pace with the tall windows: less windows than beds. The lower panes of the windows are of frosted glass. Through the upper panes is a view only of small rounded white clouds in a blue sky.
Behind each bed is an assortment of wires and tubes. Beside a few of the beds are upright iron cylinders. Across each bed is a narrow cantilevered table. Between each bed, apart from the folded back curtains, is a locker and a chair. Some of the locker tops are crammed with bottles of different coloured drinks, upright angled cards, bowls of fruit, boxes of tissues, vases of flowers, books, magazines and papers. A few patients have spread their occupancy to adjoining windowsills; others keep tidily to themselves. Yet other lockers, like his, have only a transparent jug and a beaker of water.
The dark green floor of the ward gleams with semicircular smears of polish. At the far end of the ward is a large table and two stacks of brown plastic chairs. Taped to the square pillars in the centre of the ward are hand-printed notices telling visitors that not more than two chairs are allowed beside each bed.
At this end of the ward, on either side of the unseen entrance, wooden partitions enclose small rooms. His bed is one bed away from a glass-walled isolation room. Vacant.
Half way down the ward is a gap between the beds where, on either side are double doors. Patients have been shuffling in and out of those doors. From the opening doors on the opposite side he hears the blare of a television, shuttered by the bumping door. A patient emerges from the open doors this side with damp hair and a white towel over his arm.
Groups of people, in variously coloured street clothes, sit around two of the distant beds. Strained laughter comes from one group, respectful murmurs from the other. The two patients, sitting up in bed, are being politely attentive.
A few of the beds are empty, some temporarily vacated, others smooth and untenanted. Two patients lay asleep. Most are sitting up in bed or are curled on their sides reading. One patient is sat beside another’s bed watching, with him, a small white television.
A sparse-haired man, three beds down on the opposite side, smiles and lifts a white hand in a flaccid wave. The man returns the smile, feels muscles move over his face.
He examines the other patients. None are young. All have an unhealthy pallor, even the fat black man further down the ward and the overweight Asian in the bed beside him. All look grey, their abundant flesh dragged down, as if their excess fat has given up the fight against gravity and they have collapsed inside themselves. Surreptitiously he feels around his own body. Flesh to spare, but not fat.
Nor is it just their being fat. A black nurse chiding a patient is small and round and plump. But there is a solidity, a sheen, a vitality in her flesh, a brightness to her eyes that these drooping men don't own. A lustre even to her hair. She is wearing a grey and white striped uniform.
Names are clipped to the bedrails. The printed names — Assan and Burton — are the doctors’. The patients' names are all hand-written. He turns in his bed. ‘Assan’ only is attached to the bedrail above his head.
He turns back to the ward. Some of what he has seen is new to him; much, though, is familiar. Has he been in hospital before? The unaccountably familiar disconcerts as much as the apparently new. Anxiety, like a prickling gaseous bubble, rotates within his gut.
A woman in a blue overall has been slowly pushing a tea trolley around the ward. At each bed she has glanced to the charts at the bottom of the bed before asking the patient what he wants.
Curtains have been drawn around one bed. Two nurses and the doctor move behind that curtain, exchange crisp remarks. The nurses are not those who attended him. One nurse has a dark blue uniform trimmed with white lace. The telephone rings occasionally in the nurses' rooms near the entrance.
The woman with the trolley arrives at the Asian's bed. The overweight Asian takes his tea without milk or sugar. The Asian grunts his thanks.
"And how do you like your tea?" the woman stands by her trolley and smiles at the man, the newcomer. She didn't smile at the Asian. The men searches inside himself for a response. Sucking on a deep breath, he shrugs.
"Milk? Sugar?" She stands waiting. She has neatly curled hair.
"Try him milk without sugar," the dark nurse appears, "Don't want to start you in any bad habits." She smiles at the man and adjusts the bedside table. The cup of tea in its green saucer is placed before him.
"I'm going off in a minute. I just came to tell you that we've called the police and they're sending someone around to see you. No luck yet?"
"No."
"Don’t worry," she pats his arm, "Drink your tea."
Obediently, gratefully, he swallows a mouthful of tea. All he can taste is its hotness. The Asian, belching, makes a disparaging remark to him about the tea. Three nurses come walking into the ward, start picking up charts from the bottom of beds, saying hello to the patients.
"Home tomorrow?" a nurse in a white uniform asks the patient in the bed the other side of him.
"Tomorrow morning. Eleven o'clock," the patient makes a show of rubbing his hands together. He has grey hair swept back. The man wonders how he knows the patient has a Scottish accent, and yet he doesn’t know if he takes sugar in his own tea. Again the gaseous bubble rotates trembling within.
Both sets of visitors, with a clatter of street shoes, hurry up the centre of the ward and out. A nurse in a blue uniform, blue belt, with short blonde hair has unhooked the charts from the bottom of his bed.
"Says here we've got to keep an eye on you," she brings the charts around the other side of the bed, "Better start as we mean to go on."
Her manner is easy, relaxed. Taking a thermometer out of a cup fixed to the wall she flicks it. Glad to know what is expected of him, he opens his mouth, puckers his lips around the cold tube of the thermometer. Holding the watch pinned upside down to her tunic, she takes his wrist.
"Fresh in today?" she asks. He nods.
"And what have you been up to?"
"I don't know," he says around the thermometer, and feels himself grow hot.
The blonde nurse frowns, concentrates on her watch, glances up to the single name on the bedrail. He reads her reactions: now she has recognised him. Before he was just a patient, this day's intake: he imagines her only half-listening to the nurses as they chattering went off-duty.
Releasing his wrist she makes a note, removes and reads the thermometer.
"Blood pressure as well I'm afraid," she says as he thirstily reaches for his tea.
Removing the dark-spotted cottonwool from the crook of his arm, she pumps up the black strap, watches the mercury fall. A shiny blue and red dressing gown is draped over the end of a bed across from him. The inside red stitches of the dressing gown are like Arabic writing. How do I know, he asks himself, what Arabic writing looks like?
The nurse packs the tubing and strap away into its long box.
"I also require," she pauses significantly, "a urine sample."
With an apologetic smile she hands him a long-necked white plastic flask,
"Want the curtains drawn?"
"No thanks."
Urine is yellow and comes out the penis. The feeble patient who waved to him took a flask off another nurse. Like him the man slides the flask down under the bedclothes, fishes inside his pyjamas for his penis and places it in the downsloping neck of the cold flask. Telling him to put the flask on his bedside locker when he has finished, the nurse disappears up to the ward offices. To consult with others on him, he guesses. And he feels and hears his hot urine trickling into the flask. And he wonders that he knows what to do but cannot remember ever having done it before. Something so functional, so ordinary, so everyday... and yet he has no other days but this one.
Following the other patient’s example, he twists in bed to place the flask on the bedside locker, then pulls the narrow table with his tea on it back to him. The other nurses have worked their way down the ward, taking temperatures, bestowing headslanted smiles. The blonde nurse reappears, takes his urine sample, gives him a clean white flask.
"Remember anything yet?" she says. He smiles, his guess correct,
"No. If anything it seems to get worse. More confusing. Realising how much I don't know."
"Well... Take it easy," she squeezes his shoulder.
Lying back against his pillows he watches the influx of new nurses establish the order of their shift, notes the care with which they treat him, the precise omission of his name, the cheerful unconscious use of the other patients names; and he looks inside himself and he wonders where, whoever he was, he has gone.
He watches nurses bringing newly delivered flowers to patients, listens to nurses passing on phone messages from relatives, and with wonder he picks up his knife and fork when dinner is wheeled around, and he watches himself eat and he wonders that he cannot recall ever having eaten before yet he knows how to do it. He also knows, approximately, what the potatoes and the greens will taste like before they enter his mouth. The cubes of grained meat he leaves around the outside of the white plate. And twice more his temperature, blood pressure and pulse are taken; and he glimpses their uneven progress across his chart. That much he knows about himself.

Novel as blog, blog as novel

2007-10-03T07:38:00.000-07:00

I have so many novels backed up and waiting to be published, and as I'm getting on in years, and can't see when I'd be likely to even get around to approaching a publisher with this one, I thought I'd try an experiment and publish chapters from it at the rate of one a week in a blog.

The novel is called John John and here it begins.............

One

The mind roots itself in a body, anchors itself in a head, looks out through a pair of pink lids.
Blue-green curtains hang from a grey squared ceiling. White sheets are cold on hot body. A rocking motion.
A woman, dark curly hair, rises from beside the bed. White cap, blue tunic, pale blue belt, olive skin.
A gasping sucking breath; trying to hold the thin air in the inextensible lungs.
Another nurse rises from the opposite side or the bed. Short fair hair, pink skin, white uniform, white belt.
The rocking stops. The two nurses have been making the bed. The dark-haired nurse smiles,
"So you're back with us again?"
Another deep trembling breath pulled into the strained lungs.
Again?
The bed sways. The squared ceiling recedes. Arms move to counterbalance. Arms trapped under tight white sheets. Panic.
“Steady,” the dark-haired nurse reaches out a hand. The nails are pink against the brown skin.
Jaws clenched, neck arching, another breath is pulled into the body. Sweat cools on the hot exposed skin. The pink nurse looks on through grey eyes. Curtain and ceiling move away.
"Take deep regular breaths through your mouth," the dark-haired nurse instructs him. Opening wide the jaws the lungs are ventilated.
The pounding within diminishes. The belaboured breathing becomes superfluous. Tension leaves arms, legs, shoulders.
"That's a good boy," the dark-haired nurse bestows a rewarding smile.
Boy. Male. Child.
He studies the smile. Why should a showing of white teeth have a calming effect?
With a friendly double pat the dark-haired nurse removes her hand from his chest.
The curtain around the bed billows out. Soft rapid footsteps on the other side. The pink nurse listens to two low female voices. The sheet again presses down on him. He tugs his arms free. The pink nurse lays her fingers on his forehead, smiling tells him to lie still. Each of her fingers feels cold. He decides he doesn't like her. Why doesn't he like her?
The dark nurse has collected a clipboard from the bottom of the bed. A red chair beside the bed is pushed back against the curtain, alters its folds. She lays the clipboard upon the red chair seat.
"You've had us quite worried..." the pink nurse says from the other side of the bed. She has put laughter into her voice. Her words though... He puzzles on the remembered sound of them. The smooth pink face doesn't look worried.
A woman laughs somewhere within the building, a startled laugh, trailing quickly off. He searches for words of his own, composes them, studies them, rearranges them, practises them with closed mouth.
"Where am I?" he asks the dark nurse.
"Would you believe,” taking his wrist she grins at him, "in hospital?"
Hospital...
He looks at the green and white striped pyjamas on his arm, at his inert brown-pink hand beyond the probing fingers of the nurse.
He has a large crooked thumb, four bent fingers, a criss-crossing of lines on his plump palm. Not a child's hand. More words to be shaped and practised.
"How’d I get here?"
"Don't you remember?" her brown eyes flick up from the watch pinned to the breast of her tunic. He looks inside himself. A vacancy.
"No," he says without having practised the word.
"You collapsed in the street," the pink nurse tells him, “Early this afternoon. You recovered consciousness in Emergency. You remember that?"
Again he looks inside himself. Nothing.
"No," he tastes the movement of his tongue, "This isn't Emergency?"
"This is the heart ward," the dark nurse releases his wrist and busily writes on the clipboard. "You have a very erratic pulse. I need a name on this. Surname?"
Both nurses have name tags clipped to their tunics. His name? Surname? He has no memory of a name tag. He searches for other memories. But this is all he knows of himself: his being here.
"I don't know," he tells the dark nurse, “How did I get to this ward?"
"A porter brought you," the pink nurse smiling tells him, "No beds in ITU. So you were brought here.”
The dark nurse has inclined her head. The pink nurse stares a second at her, then parts the curtains and leaves.
"We can take your temperature anyway," the dark nurse flicks a thermometer, reads it. "Open your mouth." The glass thermometer scrapes over his lower teeth, is cold under his tongue. "Close your mouth. And while that's cooking I’ll take your blood pressure."
Breathing noisily through his nose he watches the nurse unclip the lid of a rectangular box and extract a black armband and tubing. Pushing up his pyjama sleeve she straps the armband around his biceps. Putting the two curved pieces of a stethoscope in her ears, she pumps up the inflatable armband, then watches the mercury fall in the tube on the inside of the lid. She writes more figures an the clipboard.
While she is doing this he wonders how it is that he knows what a stethoscope is, knows that she is taking his blood pressure, that these things are familiar to him. Has he been in hospital before? Looking about him he realises that he also knows what a curtain is, and a bed, and that this is a hospital ward; and yet he doesn't know his own name.
"Don't worry about it," the dark nurse has taken his blood pressure again, "It’ll come.”
Can she read his thoughts? He examines his thoughts. His sole thought is himself examining his thoughts. Curtains, bed, pillow, sheets, blanket, chair, bedside locker... he names all the things about him.
Turning his free hand over he examines the freckles on the back of his hand, the wrinkled knuckles, the short black hairs on the white wrist. A hand. He doesn't recognise it as his own. A hand, nothing more.
The nurse removes the thermometer, reads it and makes a cross on the chart.
"Still high," her smile says that it is nothing to worry about, "Any luck yet?"
He knows to what she refers, gives a slight shake of the head.
"What street did I collapse in?" he asks her, listens to himself speaking, wonders where he first learnt to form words.
"I'll find out later for you," she pushes herself up from the chair.
A doctor in a white coat steps through the curtain, is followed by the pink nurse. The man wonders why he isn’t pleased to see her. Because she feigned concern?
The doctor is young. How old am I, the man wonders, feels the hammering up a tempo within him and breathes deep to quieten it.
The doctor has looked to the bottom of the bed for the charts, sees the clipboard on the red chair. The dark nurse steps out of his path. The doctor glances over the clipboard, takes the man's left wrist.
"I'll need an ECG," he says. Both nurses exit through the curtain.
The man listens to the doctor's slow breaths. The doctor has a pallid complexion, red spots on his cheeks. The man wonders how he knows he himself is a man, recalls the dark nurse calling him a good boy. He is beginning to learn. That thought pleases him.
The doctor looks tired, the eyes dull and blurred. His pale hair is cut short at the sides, long on the top. Straight hair it stands up at odd angles, looks unclean. With his free hand the man feels over the top of his own head. The hair is clipped short. It is damp at the roots from his sweating. What colour is it? He doesn't know.
Releasing his wrist the doctor makes a note on a pad.
"Name?" he says, waits with yellow pen poised. The man doesn’t answer: the question has struck no chord in him. When the doctor looks over to him, the man gives a shrug. The doctor makes a one line stroke on the pad.
"Address?" The man knows what the word means, pictures an envelope. The word, though, has no meaning for him.
“I don't even know where I am now," he gives a weak apologetic smile, wants the doctor to smile back at him as the dark-haired nurse did. The doctor doesn't.
"Date of birth?" The question is meaningless. Days, months, years...?
He doesn't know what figures apply to him. What year is this? Age? He again examines his hand. He is not young. Is he old?
The doctor is watching the sweat form on the man's brow and nose.
"Amnesia is very rarely total or permanent," the doctor tells him, "Relax now." The words hold no kindness, are a professional observation touched with impatience for the man's unnecessary fears. "Do you think you can sit up?"
The man thinks about it — thinks about pushing his body up the bed with his legs, raising himself on his elbows and forearms. He wishes that the two nurses would return to help him.
“Yes,” he hears himself say, and begins to move his limbs, the muscles on the tops of his legs contracting to raise his knees.
The doctor lays his pad on the bedside locker and helps pull him up out of the bedclothes. The hands of the doctor are thin and smooth.
Once upright, the man sits forward, flat hands pressing down on the bed, the smooth covers seeming to float away from below him. The doctor’s voice is telling him to take deep breaths through his mouth. A man beyond the curtain calls pipingly to a nurse.
“Better?" There is no concern in the doctor's voice, simply a question that requires a yes or a no answer to establish a fact. The man, concentrating on taking deep breaths, nods. The giddiness has gone.
Going behind the man the doctor manipulates the metal bed and piles up pillows.
"Lie back now."
The man, exhaling, obeys. The doctor scrutinises his eyes, his pallor. From a blue cardboard wallet he extracts a form, hands the man the yellow ballpoint. The man takes it in his right hand, holds it between his fingers.
"Can you sign this? It’s a form of consent for any treatment we may consider necessary."
The man studies the cross beside the line on which he is to write his signature. He weighs the pen in his fingers. He is sure he knows how to write, doesn't know, though, what to write. The dizziness returns. He moves the pen sketchily about above the paper.
Nothing. No response from within telling him what to write.
"I’m sorry," he lets out a breath, glances up to the doctor, "Nothing." The doctor's expression doesn't change,
"Next of kin?" The man looks sharply inside himself, hoping to catch himself off-guard. Wife? Sons? Daughters? Mother? Father? Family snapshots; but of no particular family. Brother? Sister? The doctor removes the pen from the man's fingers.
"Do you know what day it is?" It is day. He shakes his head.
"Do you know the days of the week?"
"Monday. Tuesday," he hears himself reciting, listens to learn, "Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Saturday. Sunday."
"Know what month this is?" Month?
"Do you know the months of the year?”
"January. February..."
Again he listens to himself to learn. The doctor studies him, says as he writes on the form, "Wednesday 6th of August." A Wednesday in August.
The pink nurse comes through the curtains pulling a machine on a trolley. Through the momentary gap in the curtains the man glimpses a white bedside locker, part of a railed bed and a grey-haired man sat in a red chair beside the bed. The old man has a blue dressing gown on over pale green pyjamas.
Out of lacklustre eyes the old man looks directly back at him. Behind the flat grey head is a brown vase of orange flowers.
The doctor ignores the pink nurse's attentive presence.
"Unbutton your pyjama top," he tells the man; and from his white coat pocket he pulls a silver and black stethoscope.
Again, as with the pen, the man's right hand does as it is bid.
Plugging the stethoscope into his ears, the doctor presses the cold diaphragm against the man's chest. He listens, makes notes, moves the stethoscope, tells the man to breathe deeply, to hold his breath. He makes notes. The man passively watches him, awaits instructions.
The doctor is an untidy man, has violet biro stains on the breast pocket of his white coat, and both the collar of his brown check shirt and tightly knotted green tie are askew. His fingernails are bitten down. The man looks to his own nails. They are uniform.
Telling the man to sit up, the doctor gestures to the nurse to help the man take off his pyjama jacket. Once the man is sitting forward the doctor moves the stethoscope over the ribbed back, makes notes, then goes over the bare back tapping upon his own fingers.
"Lie back," the doctor tells him, adds to his notes. The pink nurse uninterestedly looks on.
The stethoscope is crammed back into the doctor's white coat pocket and a pointed stick, with a disc of white rubber on its end, is brought forth. The doctor tells the pink nurse to pull back the bedclothes, asks the man to slide down the bed. The pink nurse hovers helpfully while the man eases himself down.
He now hopes that she won't help him: the moving about is making him feel better. He flinches as the doctor runs the pointed stick across his stomach. The surprise makes him smile. The pink nurse nervously answers his smile. The man wishes that the doctor too would smile at him. He curiously examines this wish.
The man’s arms are folded back on themselves, are straightened. Unbuttoning the man's pyjama trousers the doctor feels around the abdomen, presses his fingers into the soft flesh, asks the man if it hurts.
"Do you have pain anywhere?" Pain? The man searches through his body,
“No. I was just finding it hard to breathe. And I felt dizzy."
The doctor nods, lifts the man's leg and hits his knee with the rubber end of the stick.
"No chest pains? Stomach pains?'
"No." The man awaits the blow on his other knee.
"Relax," the doctor curtly orders him. The man lets out a breath. His knee jerks.
Having run the pointed end of the stick up his curved soles, the doctor tells him to sit up and to put his pyjama jacket back on. He gestures to the pink nurse to remake the bed.
While the man and the nurse co-operate the doctor sits on the bedside chair and adds to his notes.
"Have you ever suffered from a heart ailment?” he asks the man.
"Not that I know of," the man says. The doctor grimaces, apparently disapproving of the man's consistent ignorance. Why should he be disbelieved, the man wonders. Why should he lie?
“Do you remember collapsing in the street?" the doctor testily asks him. The man holds the word street in his mind, sees rows of houses facing one another. It doesn't seem to be any particular street.
"No." More notes are made.
Laying aside the notes the doctor stands and takes a heavy silver cylinder from his pocket. At its top is a black cone. Through this cone the doctor peers into the man's ears, then into his eyes. Inside the cone is a small yellow light. Staring, as instructed, into that light, the man tries to avert his face to avoid inhaling the doctor's stale breath. More notes are made. The man is told to follow with his eyes the yellow pen the doctor moves from right to left before his face.
The pen is used to make more notes. The doctor feels under the man's chin and down the sides of his neck. The man is told to open his mouth. The doctor presses the man’s tongue flat to look down his throat. He frowns, reaches down and picks up the man's hands. He turns them over, examines both sides.
"One thing we do know about you," the doctor belabours a dramatic pause, "you don't smoke." The pink nurse dutifully smiles.
The doctor is feeling the man’s armpits when the dark-haired nurse returns. She smiles at the man. He finds himself happy to see her. Watched by the two nurses the doctor searches up over the back of the man's head.
"How did you get this bruise?" Bruise?
"No idea.”
Grunting his scepticism, or his exasperation, the doctor makes more notes. With a flicker of her eyes the dark nurse indicates that she wishes to talk to the doctor. The man has seen the exchange.
"Prepare him for an ECG," the doctor tells the pink nurse, and goes outside the curtain with the dark nurse.
The pink nurse asks the man to undo his pyjama jacket, folds down the bedclothes.
"Don't you remember anything?" she asks as she helps him slide back down the bed. Her watch, hanging from her tunic above him, is upside down. Glancing to her face he sees that her interest is genuine.
"Nothing that means anything,” he tells her, "Not as far as I can make out."
"Don’t worry," she says, unlooping wires from the trolley, returning to her concept of confident professionalism, “it'll all come back.”
Spreading white cream from a tube onto suction pads, she presses the cold pads onto his bare chest, explains to him the function of the machine.
“Electrocardiograph,” he says almost to himself.
"You know that then?" the nurse regards him curiously.
“Yes,” the man looks inside himself for what triggered the recognition, "But I know language," he says to himself and the nurse, "I haven't forgotten that. Trouble is," he voices the thought as it forms, "I can't know what it is that I've forgotten.”
The doctor and the dark nurse return. The pink nurse makes way for the doctor, joins the dark nurse at the bottom of the bed. The doctor checks over the machine, sets it running.
"He knows what an ECG is," the pink nurse blushes. The doctor looks from her to the man, nods without expression. He studies the printout from the machine, moves one of the suction pads, watches the new printout.
The two nurses are listening to a conversation between a nurse and a male patient beyond the curtain. Both smile at something the nurse sharply says. The doctor tears off the printout. Nudged by the dark nurse the pink nurse hurries to remove the suction pads from the man. The doctor slips the ECG printout into the cardboard file. The dark nurse helps the man to sit up, pulls the covers back over him, stands on the opposite side of the bed to the doctor. The pink nurse is relooping the ECG wires. The man is no longer dizzy.
"Now I require a blood sample," the doctor says.
Taking a syringe from a clear plastic bag, he finds a fat blue vein on the inside of the man's arm, pushes the needle into it and withdraws some maroon blood. He injects the blood into several small tubes with different colour tops. The dark nurse tells the man to take deep breaths through his mouth. The man smiles at her. The doctor presses a piece of white cottonwool onto the dark hole in the vein, folds the arm onto it, tells the man to keep it there.
The man and the nurses wait while the doctor reads back through his notes. With a tired sigh the doctor clips the notes into the file, for the first time looks at the man full face on.
"All I can safely say is that you appear to have had a shock of some kind. Any idea what it might have been?" The man shakes his head. "You also have a slight concussion. Now, whether the bang on your head caused you to collapse, or you banged your head when you collapsed, I don't know. At a guess I’d say that you banged your head when you collapsed. Does the word ‘epilepsy’ mean anything to you?"
“I think I know what it is."
"Are you an epileptic?"
"I don't know. I don't think I have fits. I know what the word means, that’s all."
The doctor, who has been carefully studying his reaction, now looks aside.
"Sister says,” his eyes come back to the man, “you collapsed in Harborough Road. Do you remember that?"
"You said I collapsed in the street before," he tells the pink nurse.
"No. Harborough Road," the doctor says. Street/road, road/street, the man turns the two words over: he sees again rows of houses facing one another, but this time houses painted different colours and with large trees outside their garden gates and cars parked beside a pavement.
"Are there trees in Harborough Road?" he asks. The doctor glances to the two nurses.
"Garages and things," the pink nurse is uncertain, "I don't think there're any trees."
The man pictures the open forecourt of a garage, petrol pumps, glass paybooth. The oily interior of a repairshop, a car up on an hydraulic ramp. Neither picture seems connected with him.
"Do you have any objection to Sister looking through your clothes?" the doctor asks. Why should he object? Could he object? What clothes? He wants now, as much as they, to know who he is.
"No," he says, "No objection."
The dark nurse kneels to the bedside locker and removes a pile of neatly folded clothes. Setting them on the bed beside his legs, she shakes out a dark blue nylon anorak, feels inside its pockets.
"Nothing,” she reports.
"Recognise it?" the doctor asks the man.
“It’s an anorak."
"Do you recognise it as yours?”
The anorak is well worn, has grease patches on the creased cuffs; an anorak owned by someone. By someone he doesn't know.
"No," he ruefully shakes his head.
The nurse finds nothing in the pockets of the grey trousers, nor does the man recognise the red underpants, the blue shirt, grey socks or faun suede shoes. All are well worn.
"Do you remember shaving this morning?" the doctor asks. The man feels his chin, watches the nurse fold his clothes.
"No.”
"What’s the Prime minister called?" After a moment's reflection, the man shakes his head.
"What am I called?" the doctor holds his hand over his badge.
“I don’t,” the man hesitates, “seem to be able to remember names."
"What else," the doctor smiles crookedly, "can't you remember?"
"I don't know," the man gladly answers his smile, "until you ask me."
The doctor slots the cardboard wallet under his arm, prepares to leave. The two nurses stand aside.
"What I can tell you," the doctor says to the man, "is that, for some reason, you’re in shock. Apart from that, I can't find anything wrong with you. Now I want you to rest, stay in bed. The police will have to be notified. Possibly they will be able to shed some light on your identity. Does that bother you?"
"What?"
"The police being notified."
As for every other direct question the man has to analyse his own reactions.
"No," he says.
"We’ll have to do some more tests. And tomorrow morning you'll see Mr Assan. For the moment, however," the doctor edges between the curtains, "relax."
The dark nurse asks if he wants to lie down. The man, though, is watching the pink nurse as she raises her hand to a seam of the curtain.

to be continued.....