The Returned Dead. Rafe Kronos
noticed how his voice softened when he mentioned his wife.
“OK, I knew the bloody coma had destroyed my memories of everything that mattered: my childhood, my marriage to her, buying the estate in Scotland, starting to rebuild the house in Umbria, everything.” He paused. “But I still couldn’t see how it could explain why I’d reacted instinctively to the name Jack or why I was getting these images in my head. I began to wonder if maybe I’d been nicknamed Jack when I was a kid, when I was a kid as Baxendale I mean, and that was why I’d instinctively reacted to the name – but somehow it just didn’t fit, it didn’t feel right.”
It wasn’t the only thing that didn’t feel right, nothing about his story felt right. Still, it might earn me the money I needed to make the next payment. I wrenched my attention back to him.
“So, well, after that more and more bits of my life, my Rankin life, began to come back to me. I’ll tell you what it was like, Mr Dawson. You know when you see newsreel footage of an aircraft that’s crashed into the sea and little bits start to float up to the surface? Bits of the wing, tail plane, seats, luggage, all that sort of thing?”
And bodies, mutilated bodies, I thought, don’t forget the bodies. There’d been one body already: his wife Felicity, killed by a hit and run driver. Were more bodies going to come to the surface?
“It was like that; things were sort of floating up from deep down in my memory, but they were just scraps. Do you understand, just scraps?”
“I think so, yes,” I assured him.
“Right. I kept getting these pictures inside my head. I suppose they were like single frames that had been cut from a long strip of film. They kept popping into my mind at odd moments. For example, one picture, image, whatever you want to call them, was a car, a blue MG B, a soft top, and behind it a hedge, a hawthorn hedge, covered with white blossom. The following day I saw – call it remembered if you like -- a set of coffee cups on a table. Then I remembered being in a hotel dining room, looking at the menu. Another time I saw a tie, black with light blue dots, hanging over the back of a chair, and next day I recalled the inside of a café, one of those olde worlde tea-shoppe places. I still couldn’t understand what these things meant but I began to feel they must be things I’d actually experienced; they weren’t hallucinations they were actual memories – though I have to admit the possibility that they could be hallucinations worried the hell out of me.”
He looked at me to see if I sympathised with his situation so I nodded gravely and said, “Please go on.”
I was being careful not to call him Mr Baxendale or even Mr Rankin; at this point it seemed best not to make a commitment one way or another.
“Right, the basic problem was that they were just scraps, scraps unconnected with anything else; there was no thread joining them, nothing that linked them together. It was like I was being given single words or sentences torn out of a book but without being given the rest of the book there was no way I could understand how they all fitted together. It was as though I lacked the story that tied everything together. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
“Sure.” I thought he was expressing himself pretty well for someone who wasn’t a writer; that interested me.
I wondered about the recurrence of blue: Felicity’s dress, the MG, the dots on the tie. Was it significant? I could detect nothing blue about him now. Blue: another thing to ask about later if I got the chance.
“So how did you get from those images to remembering you were – are -- Jack Rankin?” I asked.
“One day my name -- Jack Rankin -- just came back to me. I was in the middle of eating breakfast. One second I didn’t know it, the next second I knew I was called Jack Rankin. In an instant I was quite certain about it; once the name was there, once it had popped into my mind, it just seemed completely obvious, incontestable. And after that, bit by bit, I began to remember lots of other things about my life as Jack Rankin. Not everything -- well, I don’t suppose any human can remember every single thing they ever did, can they? You only remember key things, the good and the bad, things that affect you most, don’t you?”
Oh yes, I thought, yes, that’s exactly what you do and often the memory of the bad things is far stronger than the memory of the good ones. Bad memories can overpower the good; they can cripple a person for ever.
“So after a bit I could recall my mother and father and growing up, school, working for my father in the holidays, being trained by Jimmy the foreman, marrying Fizzy,” he paused, “and her death, her death.” For a moment he looked deeply distressed.
I thought it would be interesting to find out more about her death but it would have to wait. I decided to track sideways. I indicated the press cutting lying on my desk, “So how did you get this?”
His face showed embarrassment, then defiance.
“I got it from the local library. By about eight days ago I’d managed to remember a lot about where I use to live, my old house, the address, the road, our business, all that.”
He paused and when he spoke again his voice was sombre. “Last week I decided to go back to my car dealership, our main premises, the place where my father started the business. Somebody else owns it now; our name’s gone from the front. It’s no longer Rankin Ford, it’s Beasley’s. I don’t know who the hell Beasley is.”
“Seeing that name really annoyed me. My father and I built up the business, now someone else is running it, benefiting from all our efforts. A lot of money and a lot of damned hard work went into growing our business: now someone else is getting the profits from it.” He sounded bitter.
“So you went in?”
For an instant he looked shifty. “No, somehow I couldn’t face it.” He looked away and then said, “If you must know, I was too scared to go in.”
I stared at him and in the silence he glanced back at me and then looked down, shamefaced.
After a long moment he spoke. “I was afraid, terrified actually. What if I was wrong? What if I went in, met some of the old staff and nobody recognised me? What if that proved I was going mad?”
He bit his lip. The front of his hair was dark with sweat, stuck down to his skull. “You must try and see it from my point of view. Please try to understand why I was so scared. I’d been very ill, I’d been in a coma for months and something had happened to my brain while I was unconscious. But I’d re-learned, been re-taught, my pre-coma life. I was Roddy Baxendale, I had everything I wanted. Right?”
I nodded.
“OK, that was the situation: me, Baxendale, happily married, beautiful wife, so rich I never need to work. OK? And then I start to think I am someone else. But how could I be two people at the same time? Perhaps my mind was giving way. Perhaps I was going mad. Perhaps I had a brain tumour and it was making me have these fantastic ideas. Perhaps the virus had messed up my brain far more than we knew. So when it came to the point, I was just too scared to get out of the car, walk into that place and try to get confirmation that I was Jack Rankin – or not. It was the possibility of the not that terrified me.”
It was plausible -- just. “So what did you do?”
He gave me an embarrassed look, “I took the easy way out. Instead of going in, having to meet people, facing them, finding out if they recognised me, I went back to check if our old house was the place I’d been seeing in my mind.”
“And?”
“And it was, it really was. Thank God, it was. It was just as I’d seen it when the image of it had floated into my mind. Even that bloody sycamore tree was there, bang in the middle of the front lawn. The place was exactly as I’d remembered it. That was when I knew that the ideas, images,