‘It’s very inconvenient,’ I told him.
He bowed again but would not give in. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Wilberforce. I’m so sorry, but there it is.’
It ended with me writing another cheque for one thousand pounds, and then Mr Rawle took it personally to the cashier and stood there while they counted out the fifties - in case they gave me one too many, I suppose. Then he ushered me to the door, and I went back out into the street feeling rather unsettled. There was a humming, like bees in my head again.
I had just arrived in Bogotá on the Avianca flight from Medellín. I had been there for several weeks in unsatisfactory discussions with representatives of FARC, the narco-terrorist group that had recently been taking European hostages in Colombia. The current list included three French tourists, two Brit backpackers, and two employees of BP Colombia. The latter were insured at Lloyd’s of London, which is why I was there. The idea was to do a deal on ransom, but for the last few days I had been feeling increasingly uneasy about the negotiations. I had no proof of life. The FARC representative wanted me to trust him. He wouldn’t, or couldn’t, offer any evidence that any of these people were still alive. That meant either that they had been killed, which I thought was unlikely because that would be a very uncommercial thing for FARC to do; or it might mean the little weasel-faced man who called himself an FARC representative had nothing to do with them at all. He might be from the cartels, or some other group wanting to make money from the situation.
I know that when he proposed a change of venue for our daily conversations, somewhere just outside of the city, I decided that it was likely he and his friends had decided I mightn’t be a bad bargaining counter myself. I thought they would probably set up a kidnap attempt of some sort the next day, so I rang London on the satellite phone to explain the position, and we agreed I should head back to Bogotá for a few days and get away from the front line.
There was something else that happened in Medellín, though - something very unsettling; but I couldn’t remember what it was. There was a smell, and there was a sense of something or someone always on the edge of my vision.
In the taxi from the airport we stopped at traffic lights; there was a rapping at the taxi window and I almost had heart failure. It was only one of the street children selling cartons of Pall Mall cigarettes, either fake or contraband. We drove up the hill away from the city centre towards the Bogotá Plaza Hotel: the pavements were slick with rain and the headlights of passing traffic made gleaming reflections in them.
Some instinct made me stop the taxi a few hundred metres before we got to the hotel. I wanted to walk; I wanted to see if any other taxi or car behind me stopped, or whether anyone would follow me. It was not far to the hotel; it was a relatively safe part of town and the streets were usually busy.
I got out and paid off the driver, picked up my bag from the back of the taxi, and started to walk up one of the streets that runs parallel to the main avenue, which brings you out in a small park at the back of the hotel.
In fact, the street was deserted, but as I walked along it I heard the hurrying echoes of other footsteps. Startled, I turned around. There was no one behind me. I walked on and then stopped again. In front of me, in the middle of the road, was a manhole cover. I was walking up the middle of the street, avoiding its shadowed edges, when the manhole cover started to rotate. A second later it tipped out of its seat and was pushed aside into the road. Two small and very grimy children, dressed in assorted rags, climbed out. More street children: there were thousands of them said to be living in the rain drains beneath the city. Every now and then the police went looking for them and culled a few, and they vanished into the foul drains, where no one would ever follow them. These two scrambled out into the street. They saw me, decided I was not dangerous and approached with outstretched hands, begging for money. They spoke a few words in a patois of Indian and Spanish that I could not follow, but the meaning was clear.
I was just getting out a banknote to give them when one of them looked behind me and said, ‘Quién viene detrás de ese hombre?’ and the other replied, ‘No me gusta la pinta que tiene. Vámanos.’
They both ran off into the dark, without taking the money I was offering. I smelled the smell of mould and rottenness, and I saw the flap of some dark garment in the corner of my eye. As I did so, the meaning of what they had just said arranged itself in my mind: ‘Who is that walking behind the man?’ ‘I don’t like the look of it. Let’s get out of here.’
I turned about in a hurry and walked straight into the arms of the person who was following me.
The person I had bumped into caught my elbow, and steadied me. ‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘Take it easy!’ It was Colin. He did not let go of my elbow, but steered me to the side of the road, and back to the pavement.
I felt dislocated in time and space. I couldn’t remember who I was, or where I had just been.
Colin spoke again, and the sound of his voice dispelled some of the confusion. ‘What were you thinking of?’ he asked, ‘- walking down the middle of the road? There were half a dozen taxis honking their horns behind you. I think they had just about decided to run you over. We had an appointment this afternoon, remember?’
I didn’t remember, but I followed Colin gratefully to my own front door in Half Moon Street. My heart was still thumping from the shock of bumping into him. I must have been daydreaming. He helped me find my keys and we let ourselves in. Coming in from the street I realised with a shock that the house smelt bad: stale air, wine lees, a smell of mould coming from somewhere. For the last few weeks I had done without a cleaner. In part it was to save money but also I had done something to upset the agency that sent the cleaners, possibly as a result of forgetting to pay them.
We went into the kitchen; I saw Colin wrinkle his nose and look at the stack of unwashed crockery and glasses beside the sink. ‘Don’t you ever tidy up?’ he asked. He pulled out one of the chairs at the kitchen table, flicked some dust from it with his handkerchief, and then sat down.
‘I’m going to have a glass of wine,’ I said. ‘Would you like one?’
‘I’ll join you, if it helps,’ said Colin. ‘Maybe a drink would do you good, for once. You were as white as a sheet when I bumped into you just now. Who did you think I was?’
‘Oh, just somebody I didn’t want to meet.’
I went to the wine rack and took a bottle of Château Cheval Blanc 1953 from it, opened it and poured a glass each. The wine tasted thin, spiritless. I sniffed it but could smell nothing and said to Colin, ‘I’m so sorry. I think this bottle might be corked.’
‘Tastes perfectly all right to me,’ remarked Colin.
Perfectly all right! The wine I served was never ‘all right’. The wines from my cellar were amongst the rarest wines, the finest vintages, that had ever been assembled under one roof. The Cheval Blanc 1953 was over fifty years old now, one of the few clarets of that age that could still be drunk, which had not yet oxidised. It was another wine of which I now had only one or two more bottles left. I took Colin’s glass from him and opened a bottle of Fitou. It was the only other red wine in the kitchen that would be close to room temperature - an oddity that I had found in the undercroft that must have been one of Francis’s more recent and whimsical additions to his collection. I poured both glasses and the rest of the bottle of Château Cheval Blanc down the sink. Then I refilled our glasses with the second wine. It tasted much the same to me, but I said nothing.
Colin sipped his wine and said, ‘Quite a jolly red wine. A bit more taste to it than the first one, though there was nothing much wrong with that.’
I bit my lip, said nothing and waited for Colin to tell me why he was here, because I could not remember.
‘I took your test results to a neurologist friend of mine. He’s had a look, and I’ve discussed some of your symptoms with him,’ said Colin.
‘What symptoms?’
‘You have quite acute ocular ataxia, and gaze-evoked nystagmus.’
‘Do you want to put that in English?’
‘You can’t control your eye movements, some of the time. You’re doing it now.’
‘No, I’m not,’ I said, but I could not withdraw my gaze from the ceiling when I spoke.
‘Another thing is: you seem to have these periods of mental confusion. I think I interrupted one when we bumped into each other outside, just now. Do you find that you have vivid memories of places you have never been, or people you have never met? Do you sometimes imagine yourself to be someone quite different, Wilberforce?’
‘No, I don’t,’ I said, but we both knew I wasn’t telling the truth. There was something on the edge of my memory all the time these days: a rain-slicked street at night that I didn’t want to go down, but found myself walking along despite myself. Where was that? It wasn’t Newcastle, or even London. It was somewhere warmer and, at the same time, somewhere with thinner air.
‘You talked a lot in your sleep about Colombia, when I came in to look at you the other day. Do you remember that?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Maybe I remember something - a dream I must have had.’
Colin sipped at his wine again. My glass was empty. Colin said, ‘Go on, pour yourself another drink. You can’t do yourself much more harm than you already have.’
I felt fear inside me. Colin wasn’t lecturing me any more. He was preparing me for some news I wasn’t going to like.
‘Wilberforce,’ said Colin gently, as I poured myself a second glass of Fitou, ‘we think you have a condition called Wernicke’s encephalopathy.’
‘Werner’s what?’
‘Not Werner’s - Wernicke’s. It is a by-product of excessive alcohol intake. It causes a failure of thiamine production in your liver.’ Colin folded his arms and looked at me, as if to say: You see what you’ve done?
‘Oh dear,’ I said, because I seemed expected to say something. ‘What does that do?’ I didn’t really want to know, but I knew Colin would not leave until he had told me.
‘Your liver produces thiamine, which is converted into a chemical called thiamine pyrophosphate. It’s a crucial component in nerve-impulse transmission. If you have Wernicke’s encephalopathy, which we think you have in a well-developed form, your liver stops producing thiamine. You may develop some quite distressing symptoms.’ He paused, but I said nothing.
‘You will experience sensations of hypothermia. Your taste and sense of smell will be impaired. You’ll start to lose control of eye movement. Those are the early stages, and well developed in your case. The later stages include mental confusion, retrograde amnesia, and a strange side effect called Korsakoff’s psychosis. In Korsakoff’s psychosis, the patient starts to suffer from severe confabulation: the confusion of invented memory with real memory. Eventually, he loses any ability to distinguish his real-life experiences from his invented ones. In the final stages, just before coma and death, he may slip entirely into the delusional world he has constructed.’ Colin stopped speaking.
‘What delusional world?’
‘It might be constructed around a film you once saw, a magazine article you read a dozen years ago, a chance remark someone once made to you. Stuff that the brain has dumped, and is sitting in some remote archive of your memory, suddenly fires through into your consciousness. Your brain is losing its ability to distinguish those false memories from real ones.’
I sat at the kitchen table, poured myself a last glass of wine and regarded Colin with horror. Supposing I forgot the real world, forgot about my wine, forgot about Francis, or even forgot about Catherine. Then I would cease to exist. I might go on living, but I would no longer have an existence.
What would happen to all the wine?
‘Is it treatable?’ I asked Colin.
‘In most cases, it’s treatable if caught early enough. But it gets harder to reverse the changes in body chemistry in its later stages, though not impossible. The odds in your case are not as good as I would like.’
Would they sell the wine when I died? Would it simply be forgotten about, or would the undercroft be broken into by vandals once it became known I was no longer returning to Caerlyon. I had a dark vision of bottles of Château Margaux being traded on street corners on Tyneside, in exchange for drugs.
‘How is it treated?’ I asked again.
‘The treatment involves an intensive course of intramuscular injections of thiamine. But there’s no point even starting with all that unless you stop drinking.’
‘And if I don’t stop?’
Colin tipped the last drop of wine down his throat, and stood up. ‘I must go,’ he said. ‘Think about it, and I’ll come and see you at the same time on Monday. I’m away for the weekend in Hampshire.’ He pulled his wallet from his coat pocket and extracted a card, then underlined a number with his pen. ‘That’s my number in the country. Call me there if you have an emergency.’
What sort of emergency? I wondered. I repeated my earlier question. ‘And if I don’t stop drinking?’
‘If you don’t stop drinking, the confabulation gets stronger. The false memories take over your life. You slip more frequently into coma; while you are in coma your body temperature will drop and in one of those episodes you’ll simply die. Think about what you want to do, Wilberforce, and we’ll talk again on Monday.’
I sat staring at the table. In some ways it didn’t sound a bad way to go. But what would happen to my wine?
Four
I awoke the next morning feeling cold. I got out of bed and checked to see if the central heating was on. There was a faint warmth coming from the radiator; perhaps it wasn’t working properly. Or perhaps I wasn’t. I went downstairs. There was a brown envelope on the doormat, which I opened and read. It was from the electricity company and announced that, as my direct-debit payment had been refused by the bank, supplies would be interrupted unless immediate payment of the outstanding amount could be made.