Dawson hovers in the water, tracing with his finger a white, elastic tentacle until it disappears into a cleft in the rock. The cliff face is pitted with holes and crevices, each one host to a miniature garden of anemones and feather stars, shrimps, tube worms and weeds of every hue and texture.

The high, pure Hebdridean light defines the submarine terrain with immaculate fidelity. In these conditions, so rare in British waters, it is easy to outstay your welcome.

Dawson is disturbed by a tug on his fin. He turns to find his buddy stabbing at his air gauge in a state of agitation. His eyes are wide and fierce. Urgently, Dawson signals him to ascend and they fin together, too fast, for the surface. Dawson knows they’re risking a bend, but the choice is between decompression sickness and drowning.

They burst from the water in a glittering explosion of air and water. Dawson rotates in the water, searching for the boat. Then capable hands are lifting off his aqualung and hauling him aboard the big orange inflatable.

The coxswain guns the twin Yamahas and the boat surges away in a broad arc towards the haven of Tobermory. Dawson pulls himself up onto the tube. The sky is a pale and vacant blue, the sea a coruscating plain of white and silver-grey. The broad road of Loch Sunart meanders away astern, behind arm after arm of the impassive hills.

To Dawson, safe again, bound for dry land and the company of friends, the scene is supernaturally beautiful. He daydreams idly about the past, wondering that his first, clumsy flirtation with diving should have led him over twenty years to this wild confluence of rock and water.  He recalls the instructor on his first scuba course – an American who had persevered while he gasped and choked his way through basic training.

And then, with brutal suddenness, the image of this instructor appears before him with photographic exactitude. It is as if he has clicked on an icon and opened a file.  The strong white teeth, the eyes too pale for the tan. The elliptical football scar upon the left temple.

Bruce Bell. Ex-Navy Seal. Raised in California. Bruce S. Bell. A hundred bucks a cadaver. Age 27. Five foot nine. Came to the Red Sea to get warm after fetching up avalanche victims from a lake in Colorado. Had a girlfriend.

Open girlfriend file. Girlfriend Marianne. Age 25. Long hair, brown. A Case Of You. Marianne Moss. Marine biology. Sang Joni Mitchell. Blue album. Water skier.

Her image is up on screen, now, with a toby jug’s sinister clarity of detail. Dawson has a poor memory for names and faces at the best of times.  This is bizarre.

Before the boat has reached the harbour, the left-hand side of his vision has begun to fill up with mercury – a dancing, dazzling field that obliterates everything else. If he shuts his left eye, the mercury brims in the left-hand side of his right eye. So this isn’t local, it’s neurological. He’s frightened. It could be the precursor to a bend – a stroke, caused not by a blood clot but a bubble of nitrogen. 

He tries to keep the tremor out of his voice as he reports his symptoms to the diving officer and as a consequence sounds absurdly matter-of-fact.

‘We’d better get you over to Fort William. I’ll see if I can get you on a chopper.’

The rest of the weekend is a slow anticlimax. The symptoms subside. After two nights’ observation, they tell him he might have suffered a mild bend but they’re not sure. He is discharged.

Moira’s friends were like her flat – they had been interesting once. Journalists and used-looking forty-somethings from the dustier nooks of publishing, they had been professionally stable for long enough to be on first-name terms with the successful.

Dawson guessed he would spend the first hour feigning interest in the latest political convulsions at Macmillan, the second hour drinking at twice the ambient pace and the third trying to spot an opportunity for a graceful exit.

His knees ached as he clumped up the steep stairs to the rambling apartment in the Islington penumbra.  Moira greeted him with such obvious pleasure that he felt a twinge of guilt.

He kissed her on the lips in the way that old lovers can. “Am I late?”

She gave him her indulgent schoolteacher smile.  “Come and meet the gang.”

Candlelight had softened the room, transmuting its customary air of melancholy neglect into one of comfortable, academic disorder. Moira had pushed together two tables of slightly different heights. Dawson was installed next to Francesca, Moira’s oldest friend, a large and garrulous editor at a small and earnest publishing house specialising in women’s issues.

‘I’m just going to strangle the prawns,’ announced Moira. ‘Fran, look after Dawson.’

Francesca swivelled her great hips upon her chair.  ‘I’d given you up for dead. The last time I saw you was at that Bragg thing. The brain book. You were completely pissed.’

‘I was,’ Dawson agreed. ‘I remember thinking there was a sort of irony in celebrating the capacity of the human brain by destroying my own’

Like a piece of heavy ordnance she swivelled back to re-engage Chris Cunnane, news editor of a middle-brow daily, and Dawson was able to survey the company over his glass.

Diagonally opposite him at the far end of the table was the languid Piers, editor-in-perpetuity at the University Press. Next to Piers was Chris’ wife. What was her name again?

Directly opposite him, Denise, Moira’s assistant at Pan who had moved with her from Virago.

That left only the stranger at the far end of the table, framed by the bay window. About his own age, fit-looking, self-assured, dressed with impeccable carelessness, speaking quietly to Mrs Chris. A new boyfriend of Moira, perhaps - not Denise’s type.

And then, in place of the stranger in the bay window, sat Alistair Douglas.

Dawson’s surprise was so intense, he felt it as a physical blow.  ‘Douglas!’ he cried involuntarily, silencing the party. The other looked bewildered,  embarrassed.

Dawson charged on triuphantly. ‘Alistair Douglas! You played hockey for Acklam Seconds. Left wing. In the finals at St Dominic’s in Hartlepool. We beat you, two-one.  No, three-two. But then we were knocked out by St Bede’s in the semis. You watched us from the touch line.’ 

He was aware that everyone was staring intently at him. He said later that it was like discovering he could fly.  

‘You lived in Marske. Right on the sea front. It was the first time you’d played for the school and you were so nervous, you were sick on the way to the match.’

Silence. A candle guttered fitfully, throwing grotesque shadows on the Victorian screen that divided the room. Then Alistair Douglas’ laugh, short and brittle. There was hostility in his voice. ‘That was…ah…thirty years ago?  I must’ve made quite an impression.’

No, thought Dawson, you didn’t. That was the point.

He could have explained that he was staring at a photograph of a twelve year-old boy with protruding ears and a brutal haircut, wearing a rumpled navy and maroon sports strip.  He could have remarked how one of the boy’s socks sagged about his ankle, how the pad skewed drunkenly to the left, revealing a child’s leg, slender as a flamingo’s. He could have pointed out the tiny pit on the boy’s nose, a caution against the scratching of measles spots. But he didn’t.

The incident seemed to taint the party. The other guests behaved as if they had witnessed a family tiff and talked theatrically amongst themselves while trying to read one another’s watches upside down.

Only Francesca seemed more curious than embarrassed. ‘How in God’s name did you do that?’

He swigged back half a glass of Barolo.  ‘Dunno. I usually have trouble remembering my own phone number. It’s never happened…’ But then, of course, there was the episode in the boat. His skin pricked with apprehension. 

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ he replied, distracted. ‘I was going to say it was a one-off.  Perhaps it wasn’t.’

‘I’m going to send you down for a brain scan,’ said the Professor of Thoracic Medicine. ‘You have a PFO.’

“That sounds ominous.”

‘It isn’t. If we bothered to check, we’d probably find that half the population’s got one.’

“So why are you so interested in mine?”

The other switched off the monitor. ‘Because you’re a diver.’ He tugged a suction pad from Dawson’s chest. ‘There’s a little flap in your heart.  It’s open when you’re in the womb. When you start breathing, it shuts.  But sometimes it’s a poor fit and it leaks a bit.

‘Then every time you breathe, little bubbles escape into your blood. Normally, it wouldn’t affect your health at all. But when you dive, the bubbles can attract the nitrogen that’s coming out of solution in your blood and tissues, and seed much bigger, more dangerous bubbles.’

‘So you’re saying I’m more likely to get a bend than someone who hasn't got this thing?’

The physician shrugged. ‘Could be. Why? Have you had a bend?’

Dawson swung his legs off the couch. ‘Not sure. They returned an open verdict. Mind you, they were still saving up for a stethoscope.’

“When will you get the results?’ Kay wanted to know. 

“I didn’t ask.”

“Why not? Given that it was your idea to have the tests in the first place.’

“Actually it was yours. Can’t we just leave it?”

Kay regarded him quizzically, then put her arms around his neck. “Sure,” she murmured, and they kissed.

For her, as kisses go, it was a perfectly acceptable kiss, affectionate and tentative, that lingered slightly longer than it had intended and might even have beckoned them towards the bedroom.

For him, it was a kiss of terrible, sudden violence that blew down the doors of the vault of his memory, unchaining old ghosts, breathing wild, writhing life into the pale shades of his past until they clamoured howling about him, a riotous mob in a revolution of the dead.

As his lips touched Kay’s, he felt the shock of a thousand lips, his senses reeled in a torrent of perfumes, his fingertips tingled as they caressed a dizzy myriad of necks, stroked the sweep of as many waists and backs, hesitated upon slim hips beyond number.  Faces flashed by like pictures on the corners of a flickbook, almost too fast for him to focus: schoolgirls, girls at parties, college and office girls, club girls, seaside girls, girls he’d loved and girls who’d loved him. Every woman, in fact, who had ever touched her lips to his.

This assault upon his conscious mind by his unconscious immobilised him like a stroke: he crumpled under the onslaught and fell to the floor. 

Kay stood frozen in shock, her mind racing between interpretations of what had happened, all absurd. Was he joking? Was he dead? Was it a fit or a trick or a heart attack? She fell to her knees beside him then and grasped his hands in hers.  His mouth was slack, his eyes wide open.

She didn’t know it, but she was witnessing the beginning of the end of a man.

The merest breath of a breeze stirred the dark branches of a mountain ash, scraping its fingers lightly on the panes of the French windows. (…giant bamboo rattles on the cabin logs high in the rainforest the moon hangs in water between the sleeping dog of Saba and the low smoke of Virgin Gorda/elderberry sticks shiver in a chill northeaster heavy with sea fret, rattle on the tar felt wall, I lift the corner of the blue squirrel curtain and squint up at low cloud scudding across a narrow fissure of dawn between eave and vole hole bank…)

Dawson lay leepless, staring at the ceiling of his cell. Like the walls, it was rendered in a neutral grey, as devoid of stimulus as any physical environment could be. To avoid irregularities, the tiny bubbles of suggestion that can seed dangerous memories, each surface had been covered evenly with a spray gun. A single, bare bulb hung in the centre. Gentler uplighting had been removed at Dawson’s request – it made sunsets on the wall, forest fires and northern lights.

Soon would come the birdsong and he would be assaulted by a lifetime of dawn choruses (…Mary lies upon his arm, the carving on the clock tower sketched in the flat pencil of first light, a blackbird entangling the quadrangle with silver capillaries/ veterans of the dance now weary scattered statues on a hillside, a high lark invisible in an eggshell blue void …)

It was four months since he’d retreated to the clinic, ruined and shaking, in search of peace and a lost Present.  But even in these Spartan quarters from which every reference point had been ruthlessly erased, the spider in his mind was weaving sticky webs of an ever more fantastic complexity.

He refused to see Kay. Their very closeness made her presence an intolerable agony. But she visited the clinic often to discuss his progress with his neurologist. 

Sir William was a fat, sad man whose demeanour did little to reassure his patients or their relatives. Nevertheless, his expertise in the field of frontal lobe disorders was unmatched and his air of fatalistic gloom disguised a deep compassion for human frailty.

Kay was shown into his office as Dawson, exhausted by the torment of birdsong, finally slipped into the blessed stillness of sleep.

‘How is he?’

The neurologist always found these interviews difficult. How could one accurately describe the condition of a damaged mind? An oncologist can count the cancer cells and give you odds on your survival.  But his was the domain of ghosts and illusions, a no man’s land between perception and reality where everything and nothing was true. 

‘He’s still with us,” he replied eventually. ‘He knows where he is, and why.  He knows who I am. Most important, he still knows who he is. Even when he’s floundering in his memories, he still has a sense of identity. So far.’

For such a distinguished, elderly man, she thought, he looked like a child on the verge of tears. ‘Do you have any idea at all, yet, whether this thing is reversible?’

“The trouble is, we don’t know what this thing, as you call it, really is. Chemically, nothing untoward seems to be happening.

“In fact, were it not for the nature of the symptoms, I would discount a physiological cause altogether and look more towards the psychological. But the sheer speed at which his condition is – evolving - suggests something big is going on in there. We just can’t seem to get a handle on what it is.”

If Dawson had looked out of his window at the moment of his waking, he would have seen Kay’s Toyota disappearing down the long, cobbled driveway to the Chertsey road. But the grey roller blind imposed its bland quarantine upon the little room and he lay on his back, savouring the last whisps of oblivion before he was battered once again by an avalanche of recollections.

He was eventually disturbed by a discrete tap at his door. ‘You have a visitor, Mister Dawson.’ He sprang upright in bed, scrambled backwards until his back met the wall.  He waited, hands shaking, eyes fixed upon the door. It opened gently enough, to admit a tentative Chris Cunnane. He froze momentarily as he saw Dawson’s terror-stricken posture.

Dawson laughed almost hysterically. ‘I’m so sorry. I thought you were my girlfriend.’

‘Does she always have that effect on you?’ 

‘She does, lately. Listen, I’m so glad you came. You must be wondering what all this is about. ’

Chris held out a carrier bag. ‘I had no idea what to bring you. Here’s something to read.’

Dawson peered into the bag. ‘Just so long as it isn’t Remembrance of Things Past.’He didn’t tell Chris that all literature was so painful to him that he could hardly read a line before he was forced to flee from the magma stream of memories that erupted from even the most innocent sentence.

‘Would you like some coffee?  I haven’t touched it.’

‘Did I interrupt your breakfast?’

‘No.  I know it sounds stupid, but I can’t eat toast.  I tried to eat some yesterday, and suddenly I was back in the house I lived in as a kid. I was watching football on television with my father – it must’ve been thirty years ago. More. There was an open fire, a coal fire. My dad made me a sort of lattice tower of toast fingers. It was…’” Dawson felt again the tears of irreparable loss welling and he buried his head in his hands.

Chris reached out uncertainly to him.

Dawson mastered himself.  ‘I’m really sorry. The people we loved are meant to fade slowly away into a rose-coloured mist. They’re not supposed to pop up and rip open the stitches every time you eat a piece of bloody toast.’

In the ensuing silence, Chris glanced around for something to occupy his attention – in vain, for the room had been stripped of everything that might offer a distraction. Finally, he cleared his throat.  “So, what can I do to help?”

“Only what you do for a living. That’s if you’re prepared to help at all, once you hear what it is.’

‘Fire away.’

‘Something happened last week and I can’t get it out of my head. Look, it’s pretty dreadful being cooped up in here, twenty-four hours a day. The only worse thing is being out there. It’s as if the world has become too rich for me, too bright.   Nothing’s simply what it is any more. Every experience drags along with it every other similar experience I’ve ever had.”

“But isn’t that what lends experience its richness?”

“I suppose so, but this is different. These memories aren’t like ordinary recollections.  They’re perfect in every detail, bright and clear like diamonds. In fact, I’m finding it hard distinguishing the memories from what’s actually happening.

‘For instance, keeping this conversation going in one direction.  I know you, we’ve spoken before.  We could be at Moira’s dinner party – fuck it, I am at Moira’s dinner party, the moment I stop clinging on to Now.  You can’t imagine how exhausting that is.’

He gazed almost beseechingly at Chris. ‘But it’s worse than that. I can feel my sense of time slipping away from me.’

Chris was puzzled. ‘I don’t see…’

‘I think memory is one of the ways we calculate time. If something’s razor sharp and super-real, it’s happening Now. If it’s fuzzy around the edges, it happened Then. But if everything’s sharp, you can’t tell the difference any more. Everything’s Now.’ 

If what Dawson said was true, then memory was like the quartz crystal at the heart of a clock, anchoring consciousness in time. ‘That’s an amazing idea,’ he conceded. ‘I’ve never thought of it like that.’

He stood and lifted the corner of the blind and squinted at the bright, sunlit world outside. A pair of magpies quarrelled in the driveway. ‘You must feel like a prisoner. When was the last time you went out?’

‘Friday.  I made it as far as the TV room.’

‘And?’

‘I watched the news and I… I saw something.  Someone. That’s why I asked you to come.’ Chris felt momentarily guilty that his nose for a story should twitch at a time like this - rather like getting an erection at a funeral. He said, ‘I’d have thought that television would be about the worst thing…’

‘I know, that’s why I did it. I just wanted to be normalfor a while. I suppose I thought that if I practised exposing myself to ordinary life bit by bit, maybe I’d learn how to cope with it again - train myself up.’

‘Did it work?’

Dawson had sat on the edge of a beige, institutional chair, staring up at a television. A reporter was interviewing a high-ranking police officer in a busy shopping street.

Cautiously, he’d focused on the shopfronts behind the policeman.  For a moment, he’d seen them for what they were, clear of interference from the past.

But then, triggered by the cartoon image of a baker on a green striped awning, the dam of his concentration had begun to crack.  A cluster of pictures broke free from his childhood, invaded his awareness: his mother leaving him outside a shop, staring up from the pram, birds darting black in the blue sky, vanishing behind the awning; the raw smell of the butcher’s slab, brown hats on moon faces smiling down; two thin trees waving in the wind.

He’d dragged himself back to street scene, his hands gripping the arms of the chair until his nails turned white.

The policeman smiled professionally and nodded. Behind him, a gaggle of kids waved and pulled faces at the camera. Then, pushing brusquely across the screen from right to left, strode the Pale Man.

Dawson had waited breathlessly until a memory from the shadow archives of his childhood had crashed into his consciousness.

The Pale Man had glanced at the camera, pink translucent eyes behind pink lenses, skin like skimmed milk.

(The Pale Man was so white, you couldn’t tell where his face ended and his hair began. His eyes were all sore so he covered them over with his hand which was white and floppy like paper.  Really he wasn’t white though, he just wasn’t a colour, like a ghost you can touch. He looked funny, not funny laughing, funny queer. I think he was not-right like the woman who the laundry woman looks after. When he took his hand out of his pocket there was blood on it. He had a knife-and-fork. I was crying because there was blood and because the Pale Man put his finger on his lips and looked at me. I told Colin and Peter’s mum but she was busy just now so I forgot it.)

Chris stared incredulously at Dawson. ‘So, you saw someone on TV –someone who just happened to walk by during an interview – and you recognized him as the monster from some…some childhood nightmare?’

‘Not the same man. It can’t be.  The Pale Man would be in his sixties, now, at least.  But he was albino, that’s the point.  He was close enough to trigger my memory. And I remembered this albino who scared me when I was a kid, and now I realise he must’ve done something terrible. Murder, I think.’

Then Chris knew why he was here.  ‘And you want me to dig out all the killings committed by mad Middlesbrough albinos in 1960.’

‘I need to know whether it really is a memory, or just a dream or some kind of delusion. Because I can just about come to terms with having a memory like a super-computer. But if I’m remembering stuff that didn’t even happen, then I’m insane.’

The past, they’re always saying, is another country. But in the editorial office of the Evening Gazette, 1960 was more like an overgrown suburban garden.

Cunnane hacked his way through a jungle of yellowing foliage: a well-rotted compost of disappointments and disappearances, Pyrrhic victories and forgotten scandals – all recounted with the semi-professional indifference of the local reporter, one eye fixed on a job at the Beeb or a national red-top. He recognized the style. It was once his own.

The office junior contemplated him with suspicion while he worked. One of the lad’s remote ancestors had created a filing system that for sheer opacity was the equal of Linear B.

For all the gardening, he failed to produce any fruit. There were no references to any unlawful killings in the Teesside area during 1960 or ’61. These were the days before heroin and crack cocaine.

Later, as he bullied down a pint of fizzy beer in the empty hotel bar, he tried to decide whether to be relieved or disappointed.

Dawson, he knew, would deduce the worst. From his point of view, a ballooning memory had to be better than a descent into insanity. On the other hand, his proliferating memories would drive him mad eventually – and surely a run-of-the-mill delusion would be easier to treat than a completely new and perplexing condition?

Cunnane abandoned his beer and retired to his room. Before he fell asleep, he resolved to try once more – this time, with the aid of a national database. As a reliable historical source, the Evening Gazette archives hardly inspired confidence. 

It was only a week since he last saw Dawson, but he was startled by the deterioration. There was a convulsive quality to his movements and raw desperation in his eyes.

‘How’s it going?’ he asked neutrally.

Dawson couldn’t seem to look him in the eyes. ‘I know. I look like shit. I can’t sleep, that’s all.’

‘Is that all?’

Dawson tried to suppress the jiggling of his knee. ‘No. The thing is, I don’t know if I can sleep or not. Dreams – this, now – memories.  There’s no longer any quality to differentiate them.

‘It’s an aspect of my condition. Everything’s so multi-layered. I don’t know if this conversation is really happening now, or whether it’s a memory occasioned by something that happened thirty seconds ago.

‘Everything I experience has the same intensity. My reality is like an onion. Memories triggered by memories triggered by memories.

‘I tell myself there’s a kernel somewhere – a hard bit that you and I can agree upon and establish as a fact. The Pale Man, for instance. But suppose there isn’t? Suppose it’s just an infinitely regressing series of sensations? Then, even if you and I were to agree on a fact, that too could be an illusion. It could be a memory, or a dream.

‘I’ve fallen off a cliff and I might keep falling forever. I would give anything to hit the ground, even though I know it will kill me.  I just need the certainty.’

He lowered his face into his hands.  

‘The Pale Man,’ Cunnane said softly.

‘He doesn’t exist?’

‘Yes. And no.’

Dawson’s head jerked up. He laughed harshly: ‘Fuck, that should be my epitaph!’

Cunnane swallowed. ‘The thing is, I found your albino.  A child killer.’

Dawson was gazing at him now, beseechingly. Tears welled in his eyes. ‘Really?’

‘Yes. Absolutely. Abducted a toddler from its pushchair while the mother was shopping. There were some distressing details. The case provoked a national furore.’

Dawson’s excitement triggered a frenzy of convulsions. Only his face was still, illuminated by a triumph that was almost cruel. ‘There! So this thing is real! Well, as real as you are, anyway. Christ knows. But it feels real. There’s a proper connection – things connecting across whole days. God, it must be real!’

Cunnane srose and walked to the window. He shifted the blind a little so that he could see out but Dawson couldn’t. He half expected to see a desert or a rolling ocean.

‘The thing is, Dawson, the whole business seems to have been  incredibly close to the way you described it. Except…’

‘What?’

‘Well, just that it didn’t happen in Middlesbrough.’

Dawson was suddenly scared. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What I say. It happened in Southampton. You couldn’t possibly have witnessed it.’

 
Kay got the call at 3am. She drove to the clinic, dry-eyed in blinding rain. She’d lost him months ago, she knew. He’d drowned in a tidal wave of memory, been crushed by an earthquake that had torn up the strata of his experience.

The Director of the clinic had made her a copy of his letter: the original would be required at the inquest.

She knew what it must have cost him. He had once compared the effort of composing his thoughts in writing to crawling through barbed wire.

‘My Darling,

This note is to thank you for all the loving kindness you have shown me since this awful thing began. I have no idea how long you’ve had to endure it. I lost my sense of time when my past became my present.

It’s ironic that while I now possess a better memory than anyone else on the planet, ever, I can’t remember how it was before.

I think this only reveals the sad inadequacy of language when we ask it to convey anything beyond the narrow avenue of our shared experience. We’re such small-minded parochial creatures, really. Even the poets and the visionaries. We run on rails. And it’s just as well, because when we go off the rails, the results are so appalling.

I have always despised suicide as the last selfish gesture of the self-obsessed, but lately I have softened my position. A crime requires a victim. How can I be accused of killing myself when there is no I?  

Luis Bunuel watched a dementia patient disintegrate before his eyes and concluded that we are the sum of our memories.

You could say I have Alzheimer’s Disease in reverse, but it’s equally terrible. Once, I was just able to endure the agony of a memory that has become practically perfect. But now I have begun to recollect the memories of others. I can’t imagine a good end to this.

I think that what has happened to me so far is like the first nano-second after Creation. My memory is expanding like a universe. It will soon be infinite. In Bunuel’s terms, what will this make me? Omniscient and omnipresent, certainly.

I am the reluctant perpetrator of the ultimate blasphemy. I am turning into God. Except in one regard: I am not omnipotent. My mind manifestly cannot contain all this power and this glory.    

So I have concluded that what potency I possess must be turned to putting a stop to all this. Which is what I am about to do.

I cannot begin to tell you how much I have missed you and yearned for the warmth of your company. I only hope that God in his infinity is not as lonely as I am.

Goodbye my love.

Michael