The Amnesia Clinic (24 page)

And there you have ‘The
Real
Story of the Boy Who Said Nothing’.

‘So you see,’ said Fabián, waving a stick in the general direction of the bonfire, ‘that there is a difference between real pain and imagined pain. Some of yours may be genuine. But if there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s to tell when someone’s talking themselves up.’

He pointed at Sally. ‘So your husband used to knock you around. Big fucking deal. I killed my mother. Which would you rather live with?’

Before she had a chance to answer, the gloom beyond the fire had absorbed him as he stomped off towards the cabins.

I had hoped we might linger together by the fire for a while, but Sally went to bed shortly afterwards. She kissed me once on my forehead and muttered something about how we were still only kids and had a hell of a lot to learn. Then she
swept her legs from under me, so that my head dropped abruptly on to the sand.

‘Goodnight,’ she said. ‘Boy.’

Ray had gone too. I lay on the beach with my arms starfished around me and the memory of Sally Lightfoot’s kiss delicately evaporating on my forehead. I imagined that I could feel the curve of the earth beneath my hands, that gravity and the axis of the planet were tangible, fathomable qualities, and for a second, I almost believed myself. I’d drunk enough, but forced more beer down myself to justify staying away from Fabián for a bit longer.

When I got to the cabin, I thought I would knock on the door before going in, even though I didn’t have to since it belonged to both of us. But before I’d even raised my hand to knock, his voice punched out from inside.

‘Don’t even think of sleeping in here. Fuck off and sleep with that mutilated bitch if you’re such good friends.’

I decided to go back out and sleep by the fire. I could stoke it up for warmth, and was easily drunk enough to pass out there. But as I walked back towards the beach, I saw that her door was open and a candle flickered inside, casting a flighty sphere of light on the walls.

I lay down on the foam mattress next to her, as quietly as I could. Soundlessly, she threw her blanket sideways over me, and I ducked my head inside and curled up against her back, inhaling deeply the smells of wool, sweat and salt.

‘Swim?’ I said after breakfast, in a spirit of reconciliation.

We’d resolved disagreements in this way before. Any falling-out over a girl or a disputed version of events, however serious, could be swiftly drowned in the Sporting Club’s deep blue rooftop pool. It was one of a few locations (Suarez’s house being another) where we could slip into predetermined modes of behaviour, disregarding the tedium of details, and get back to the more fun, more abstract business of being kids. But reconciliation seemed to have become an increasingly complicated business since the earthquake on the day of the Easter parade – and not just because Fabián’s arm had been stopping him swimming.

‘No thanks,’ he said.

He sat at the bar, dabbing at his face and arms with alcohol-soaked cotton wool. The practice had become a habit whose prolonged effects would have horrified Eulalia: it no longer merely sluiced out grease from his pores, but had begun to remove layers of skin. The nooks on either
side of his nose had reddened brightly, and the surface of his right arm, shocked by sudden exposure to some unexpectedly harsh new elements, looked positively raw. It had added a new, haggard dimension to his face, giving him the air of a punch-drunk boxer or a malarial explorer.

‘Come on. What about a bit of negative buoyancy in the sea? You haven’t even been swimming properly since you took the cast off.’

Without meaning to, I had managed to adopt the tone of an irritatingly jovial parent, and I knew even as I spoke that I would be punished for it. Sure enough, he shot me his most withering look – eyebrows raised in condescension, the lids crumpled like paper round his glowing green eyes – the look he always gave me when I thought something was still cool but he had decided to grow out of it. I held my temper.

‘Why not? What else are you going to do?’ I asked.

‘You realise it’s Sunday today?’ he said. ‘If we’re not back by tomorrow then certain people are going to start freaking out. Or had you forgotten that?’

I’d lost track of the time we’d been away. But now it was I who wanted to stay put a little longer.

‘All the more reason to seize the day. Come swimming now and we’ll talk about it later. If we leave tonight, or tomorrow morning, then we can still get back by the time school ends tomorrow, and we’ll only get busted for missing one day.’

‘That will never work. Anyway, I don’t want to swim. My arm hurts. I don’t think the bone had a chance to set properly before I broke the cast off.’

‘I don’t think all this alcohol-rubbing can be helping,’ I said. ‘Your
skin
’s coming off.’

‘Stop worrying about me. I’m fine. I’m sorry about last night. But at least now you know the truth.’ His hand shook as he drank from a glass of water. I noticed fibres of cotton
wool clinging to his arm, smoothed in the direction he’d been swabbing, with the grain of his thin dark hairs. ‘Now you know why it bothers me so much.’

‘Yes. Now I know.’ I sat down beside him. ‘Why haven’t you told me about it properly before? What really happened, I mean.’

‘If you want the truth, it’s because I’ve never really thought about it. If you stop to think about what happened, the problem is that there really isn’t anything to think about. We know nothing other than that the car went off the road. What else is there? Where do you direct your “if only”? Who do you get angry with? The government, for not building safer roads? Nature, for causing landslides? The car company, for not making something that sticks better to a mountain?’

He went over to the fridge behind the bar and hoisted out a Pilsener. He’d barely swallowed his breakfast, but I held my tongue.

‘No … The only person I could find to blame was me. And I couldn’t even tell anyone. I had no brother or sister to confide in. And Suarez would fuck anything with a heartbeat, so I doubt it would have enraged him much to know that Papi was cheating on his sister with the maid. He’d have expected it, almost.’

He poured beer into a tall glass, took a mouthful of froth and wiped his mouth. He smiled. ‘What’s more, you don’t exactly
want
to remember the fact that one of the last times you ever saw your father alive he was buried to the hilt in another woman with your mother asleep in the next room. See what I mean?’

I nodded.

‘And then a really strange thing started happening. My imagination began filling in the gaps left by what I didn’t know, or couldn’t remember. I found myself thinking,
well
,
why were they driving so recklessly? Was it to get away from something? Or to get somewhere? To a hospital, maybe
? Suarez had taken me to this bullfight, and told me how dangerous it was if anyone got hurt up in the highlands because of the distance to the nearest hospital.’

He lit a Lark and rotated it slowly with his fingertips. The filter made a soft crunching noise as the nook of charcoal granules in its centre collapsed.

‘… I mean, we know nothing about what went on up there. We never will. Anything at all could have happened. And I’m fucked if I’m going to stick to the obvious explanation.

‘So I told myself other versions. And it helped. I found myself avoiding thinking about what had happened before they went. If I avoided the fact that I knew he was fucking Anita, then that made it better. What if I had told my mother he was fucking the maid? Well, that’s one thing. But better still, what if he hadn’t been fucking the maid at all? What if Mami and Papi had been a happy couple in love? What if he’d even been dying, and she’d been rushing to save him? And because we never found her body – because of that, especially – what if she was still alive somewhere? You can see how it happened. The possibilities spread around me like a creeper, and soon they took over everything. I see that bullfight far more clearly than I see what really happened. Just as I see the Amnesia Clinic.’

He exhaled a thin line of smoke and looked me in the eye for the first time.

‘I see every single detail.’

‘Doesn’t it feel good to have finally told someone the truth?’ I said. ‘Think about what Sally said about cutting away a part of yourself to become stronger.’

‘Oh yes. Good old Sally. Let me tell you something: if coming here has helped, which I think it has, and forced me
to live in the real world a little more, which it might have done, then it has nothing whatever to do with your whale-woman, okay?’

‘Okay, okay,’ I said.

‘If anyone is to be thanked it’s Sol. She’s shown me how to have fun again. When I’m playing those stupid, childish games with her, I don’t feel it any more.’

‘But you can’t play those games for ever,’ I said.

‘You’re quite right. You can’t. Just look at this arm.’ He had taken out his bottle of cane alcohol again. ‘I’ve got rid of all the dead skin on the surface, and now I’m getting down to the bloody insides. It may hurt, but it’s real. It’s fucking
real
, man. And that is why today, I am going to go to that cave with torches and find the tunnel that goes through the rock up to the dome. No more uncertainty. No more speculation.’

‘Why not come over and at least see the last bit of the whale being cut up before you go?’

‘What is it with you and that whale? No. I’m going to stay here and get unspeakably stoned. Then Sol and I are going back to the cave. You go.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes. Go. You have your fun. Whatever floats your boat. Good luck to you.’ He stared into the beer glass as cigarette smoke clouded round his words:

‘If you don’t go right now, I’ll hurt you.’

I got up and left the bar.

She let me help her this time. But I experienced no feeling of triumph at finally removing the last fragment of bone from the body of the dead whale. Although the two of us worked hard at it so as to beat the tide, and although the carcass was now so far south that it would certainly not wash back up at Pedrascada the following day, only Sally
Lightfoot was genuinely elated by finishing. I cast repeated glances back at the bar, and across at the north end rocks, for any sign of Fabián and his ‘little sister’.

The whale’s remains lay like a great grey sock on the beach, fully exposed now to the mercies of the vultures. Sally took her bucket of bones and dragged the end of the tail away with her.

‘This bit’s more difficult,’ she said. ‘Lots of small bones and cartilage. I think I might just keep it for now and go and boil it up somewhere later to get at all the insides. Well done.’ She ruffled my hair with fishy wet hands. ‘Thanks for being my assistant. I think we should celebrate.’

When she’d dumped the final pieces of whale in the back of her truck, she met me back in the bar, where Ray was at work reassembling some of the furniture that had been broken by recent events.

‘Where can a girl take a bath round here?’ said Sally.

‘Only got the shower back there, sorry,’ said Ray through a mouthful of nails.

‘I’m not standing under that crappy trickle of brown water,’ said Sally. ‘I’ve finished my work and I want a proper bath.’

‘You want some real fresh water, I’d recommend the waterfall,’ said Ray. ‘Listen. Hear that? That’s the underground stream. On the other side of the road it flows over ground. All you have to do is follow the stream through the plantation on the other side of the road, past the leafless trees. You’ll find a waterfall back there. It’s not much, but it’s fresh.’

The fairy-tale instructions were too tempting for me not to accompany her.

We walked out of the roadside entrance to the cabins and back on to the road. A chaotic bus rattled past, a burst of salsa music escaping from its windows. I thought how it
might have been the same one that had dropped us off three days and a million years before. Presently, we were making our way across a scrubby field behind the road. Crickets droned and bunches of cactus thrived, but I could see no fresh water.

‘Stream’s probably still underground here,’ she said, striding on ahead.

She was right. We soon came upon a stream of water passing into a concrete irrigation pipe in the ground and began following it, away from the beach, along a narrow dirt path. The vegetation beside the water grew more lush and green as we followed it. Threads of green weed waved in the current, like hair. Pink water-hyacinth accessories bloomed.

‘Please don’t take Fabián too seriously,’ I said between wheezing breaths, trotting along behind her and wishing we’d brought some water to drink on the walk. ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt you last night. He mostly only ever shouts at himself.’

‘Don’t worry. It takes more than a little shouting to upset me,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘I’m not going to bear him a grudge.’

This struck me as odd, because it hadn’t occurred to me that she might bear him a grudge.

It wasn’t a large waterfall – not much more than a clatter of flimsy spray on to some rocks – but the pool that had collected beneath it was deep, and easily wide enough for swimming. Gingerly, I put a foot in and felt proper cold for the first time in days. The darkness of the water was shot through with silvery fish which flashed intermittently against the greens and greys of moss and stone beneath. Sally stepped out of her shorts, shrugged off her T-shirt and stepped in, shivering with pleasure. I watched a wave of goose-bumps ripple across the pale skin of her mole-peppered back, which
drew my eye to other features of her body: a patch of red skin under a twisted bra strap; her tiny waist encircled by the water; her thighs beneath the surface, falling away into the dark. She jumped forward into a breast-stroke, nodded her head under and scrubbed at her hair manically, whooping as her head resurfaced.

‘What are you waiting for?’ On her back now, kicking away from me across the small pool. I unbuttoned my shirt slowly, slipped off my shoes and stepped forward. Tendrils of weed embraced my right foot. A second step took my left into sucking grey mud. I trod carefully, my arms waving beside me in a balancing motion. The cold soaked into my shorts as I moved in deeper. Fish brushed against my legs, almost at waist height. I flinched involuntarily.