a rational man Read online

  a rational man

  j s hollis

  Copyright © 2018 J S Hollis

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

  9 Priory Business Park,

  Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

  Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

  Tel: 0116 279 2299

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  Twitter: @matadorbooks

  ISBN 978 1789012 033

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  for aj, who gave me time.

  Contents

  Found Published With Related Materials

  Motive Unexplained

  Jealousy

  Necessity

  Rationality

  FOUND

  PUBLISHED WITH

  RELATED MATERIALS

  final entry

  listen. this is my final communication. for the few of you out there still watching, i think finally i have something important to say. i dont mean to sound demanding or conceited or anything like that. you know i could scream at those people who use W for attention (especially those who pretend they dont). and i guess my voice is just one of 10 billion floating around W preaching its own significance. but for those of you who have honoured me by making my life part of your daily entertainment, please do me the favour of staying tuned a little longer.

  i think i have something important to say and its not about my mothers murder. ive spent enough time talking about that. perhaps too much. perhaps my newsfeed from the day of her murder said all there is to say.

  * * *

  Cecil Stanhope, who quit the Cabinet earlier today, has killed his wife at their home in Pentonville.

  Motive unknown.

  * * *

  i want to talk to you about memories. you have many, no doubt. memories of laughter so infectious that you curled into a ball to shut it out. of the time mr or mrs whoever recited your essay to the rest of the class. of your first kiss and of your last kiss (although for me theyre the same thing). of that embarrassing moment you realised you had mispronounced a word and no one thought to correct you. of a sense of happiness that washed over years and the moment it seeped away.

  cherish those memories. please dont be put off by the cliché – i know i am too young for wisdom. but i have spent a lot of time trying to make sense of my past. and yesterday i realised how much damage i have done while doing so.

  yesterday was nothing special. i was tackling some job applications at the little metal desk in my uncles spare room – the place my uncles used to call the darkroom because it was set up to develop photos during their brief fling with retro cameras. my cousins called it the dump room. they all call it sebastians room now.

  the room is filled with disused cameras and the remains of objects coughed up by my uncles 3d printer. i wasnt interested in the cameras until i started the job applications. since then, i have begun to fiddle around with them, grabbing the biggest lens and zooming in on something tiny, such as a brown hair littering the camp bed pillow. for a moment i admire the intricacy of things, how a hair grows, falls out, flies away, and i forget where i am. but then i think about how that brown hair is engulfed in billions of small objects that remain unseen. nanocameras looking straight back at me, at the lens they supplanted. like mocking humans surveying neanderthals. it is hard to imagine a time without cameras, without W, where each sniff and each smile isnt immediately recorded and available for all to see and hear. imagine a time when you actually went to a shop to get your photo taken. when you wanted to preserve a moment, instead of wishing that it could be erased.

  the job applications kept asking me to explain actions from my past. yesterdays application was no different. it wanted me to explain why i had acted in an “antisocial manner” by getting involved in the cashkills protests. (as you may recall i briefly subscribed to dads attacks on landed wealth.) i approached the question like i did all the others. i summoned my memory, watched my record on W and then checked my journal for any useful notes. but while i could see i had attended a protest, there was no explanation for why i had done so.

  i returned to the question. i couldnt say anything in response. the question blinked on my eyescreens but the rest of my mind was blank. i felt like i had woken up beneath the flashing neon sign of some old bar with no memory of how i got there. i racked my brain for a solid answer. i could have lied, but how would i know what was a lie without a vague idea of the truth? my mind was refusing to pretend to make sense. it was in revolt.

  it was my fault. i had blocked out my memories because they whispered too much. i had spent years dissecting the records of my life on W, first to find the truth behind mums murder and more recently to fill out these life sapping job applications. while i reviewed my past, my trust dissipated further. my memories were, at best, only based on true events. they skewed, misconstrued and conflated the past. and these charlatans remain in my mind spreading vicious rumours. they have left me with two pasts by refusing to melt away: the one i originally remembered (if i remember anything at all) and the memory of the recordings on W. there may be other pasts. who knows how many other pasts there have been?

  “you had a journal,” you will protest. “cant you trust that?”

  it is not as if i havent tried. but my journal entries are harder to piece together than the discarded negatives of a forgotten film. i anticipated their uselessness. thats why i never wrote in the first person before. sure, i didnt like writing “i” anyway. how it sounded like “eye”. and how it strutted about commanding trust with its single letter. but most of all i didnt trust myself.

  my error was not one of recording. it was of faith. i treated my memories like childhood fantasies. to be dismissed as a sign of maturity. and now my mind has given up on me. memories may be forgeries but they are the best forgeries you can get.

  you probably dont worry about such things. “does it matter if i am full of contradictions?” you ask. maybe it doesnt, particularly if youre the the kind of person who likes to embellish. but for someone like me, who worries about the truth, an incongruous mind is numbing.

  “why should i care?”

  maybe you shouldnt. there is probably nothing you can do except watch yourself be reduced to a series of recordings. and it could be worse. you could be starving or persecuted or alone. but it seems important to preserve something about what it is to be human. to be an individual. most of us will never be anything but specks on a lens. but dont we need to believe there is a chance that we can be more than a speck, even if it is a dream? im not saying we need to believe we are going to change the world like churchill or mullangi. but dont we need a little story for ourselves? about how we led a good life or made people happy or had one original idea. how can we create these little stories if we cant remember what is true and what is not?

  i remember playing hide and seek. the adults cast us out of the house into a sun dappled day and the breeze raised goosebumps on my you
ng arms as it rustled through the suburbs. the sound of lawnmowers came from somewhere, but the grass in the rathbones garden consumed my naked feet. the four of us breathed in the country air so that our lungs were filled with it.

  the rathbones garden was eden for hide and seek. i remember a sprawling oak, or some other big tree, whose forked trunk formed a bloated and mangled wooded skirt. next to the tree, the rathbones had a slide in the shape of an elephant. the elephant slide was my favourite place in the garden, perhaps the world. often we would climb inside its voluminous belly and play for hours in echoing secrecy. but not when the sun was shining directly on it. then its stomach became an oven.

  on the afternoon we played hide and seek, the elephants stomach was blazing. i remember walking up the garden path shaking my head. my search had started off well. i had found george and ariadne, the rathbone children, within minutes. but richie was still missing. i had never failed before and i was considering a third circuit of the garden but my pure cream skin (as mum described it) had started turning sherbet pink. “i give up,” i shouted out.

  “i win,” richie called back. he emerged from the conservatory doors and george and ariadne clapped enthusiastically.

  “the house is off limits,” i muttered.

  “is it?”

  i had hit other children before but i always got caught. so i turned round and climbed up the rope ladder into the bamboo tree house. the tree house was hq while the elephant was off limits due to heat. when i peeked out of the window, the others had hardly moved. richie was entertaining ariadne and george with his vision of us crawling through the bushes looking for him. the three of them could have been triplets with their aurora eyes and olive skin. but richies rounder cheeks belied a slight difference in taste between his parents and the rathbones. when the three of them finally climbed through the trap door, i asked to be the finder again.

  “you were the finder last time.”

  “yeh but i like it and i dont like waiting. its boring.”

  “im finder this time,” george said. with two years on the rest of us, his decision was final. “house is out of bounds by the way.”

  “ok. no peeking, no W,” we reminded him.

  “i know, i know. one, two, three …”

  we climbed down the rope ladder and ran. i didnt choose the elephants stomach or the branches of the oak. they were obvious choices. ariadne headed towards the sea snake fountain and richie ran past me towards the wendy house. i was aiming for the shed but, as i ran, i saw the barbecue, which had a large cupboard beneath the grill. i ran up to it and slid open the door. there were some tools on one side but nothing on the other. so i crammed myself in and slid the door closed and waited.

  i heard george shout “one hundred” and my heartbeat accelerated. i hoped i could get him to give up before he found me. nobody had hidden in the barbecue before. george was some way off.

  “i can smell you,” he shouted. “whose footprints are these?”

  a slight splash came from the pond.

  “found you!”

  “you peeked!”

  “i did not.”

  some minutes later. george shouted again, “found you!”

  “how did you find me?” richie asked.

  “i looked.”

  “he is cheating,” ariadne added.

  “i am not!”

  only i was left.

  i was conscious of each breath. desperate to confound the others, revel in the glory of emerging from the cupboard and seeing their faces startled with wonder. it wasnt simply a matter of being good at hiding. it was an attempt at disappearing like a great magician. it was about the suspense of waiting for them to give up, to ask “where could he be?” and, just when they stopped looking, “ta daa”, i would appear. at least thats how i remember it.

  and then i heard richie say, “what about the barbecue?”

  before george had a chance to open the cupboard, i had slid out and brought my face up to richies. his persistent smile finally dropped. i grabbed his podgy cheek with my right hand. our eyes locked. george and ariadne disappeared from my vision.

  “you cheat.”

  “but …”

  “you cheat, just because i am better than you at hiding, you cheated.”

  i removed my hand from richies face and pointed my index finger at him.

  “what did i do?” richie asked through bowing lips before bursting into tears and running off down the garden.

  george and ariadne took richies absence as an opportunity to congratulate me on my hiding place and on teaching richie a lesson.

  “its nothing,” i said. “i just dont like cheats.”

  i used to cherish this memory with its background of perfect summers day and its distinct image of the essential me. passionate in the face of injustice. it allowed me to hate richie, and for a reason that didnt hinge on envy of his popularity or his acting talent. ariadne and i laughed about it a few months ago. “i still cannot believe how angry you got,” she said.

  i was surprised when i couldnt find this memory on W. while i am suspicious of childhood memories that are too coherent, and i admit that i have connected the dots to provide you with this account of hide and seek, i would have expected my version of events to have been essentially true.

  but W tells a different story. i played hide and seek many times at the rathbones. one time, richie flouted the rules and i served up my revenge immediately by tripping him up. on another day richie helped identify my location when it wasnt his turn, but he was only guessing. i got angry. i spluttered some loud words and ran off crying. richie looked surprised and, i hate to admit it, rather sad about my reaction. still, i can remember my version of events, with richie in the wrong and me telling him what was what.

  i remember the food kitchen. i remember it as a day, or perhaps the day, of revelation. it was christmas 2054.

  until then christmas had taken on a traditional format, which went as follows: i would wake up and wake my parents, who would then prepare breakfast. all christmas classics: mushrooms on rye, soy yogurt with pomegranate seeds, green and red juice. once the rest of the family had arrived, the gift announcements began in the lounge. unlike most of my friends, we didnt celebrate surprise day on 11 december. my family believed that the real joy was finding out about the gift rather than receiving it. i didnt mind, as my gifts could normally be printed the same day. and traditions have a way of always seeming right, dont they?

  after lunch we normally watched what other people were doing across the world. even dad watched. he would say something to justify the procrastination like “gaining an understanding of other cultures is exactly what W is good for.” one time he insisted that we watch a family as they sat separately and their eyes coned into their own W feeds. dad shook his head. “weve given them nothing to live for,” he said, “only existence.” but normally dad let me flick through W until we found something juicy like an argument or a protest or a life saving operation.

  the traditional christmases merge into one recollection. the walk sandwiched between breakfast and lunch when dad carried me on his shoulders because the water on the road was inches deep. the time i got my own eyescreens and earaids and declared “im an adult, im an adult” to my laughing relations. i still dont know why they laughed. finally i could see the world as they saw it. it is familiar to all of us now, but do you remember the first time you put your eyescreens on? all the ugliness and irregularity concealed behind vivid colours, adverts and evolving designs. there was constant motion. news flashes came down from the ceiling. my health data scrolled above the couch. my friends faces appeared in a feed by the door as they enjoyed their christmas mornings. i could see how information flowed from each object and person, giving meaning to everything.

  and amid the haze of memories, i can remember my grandma donatella telling me a story before announcing her gifts. i
will recount it for you, as it is one of the few things i remember almost word for word, alongside parrys jerusalem (repeated at school) and the theme tune to vfootball: endgame.

  she told me about a young jeweller called peter, who lived long, long ago, in the germanic town of hanau. peter was famous, very famous, for making the most beautiful jewellery in the principality. he was the descendant of a walloon family, who had mastered jewellery making over many centuries. peter was horrifically disfigured. his whole upper body slanted from right to left. his right shoulder was above his head, his right eye above his left eyebrow and his left arm nearly touched the ground. the locals said that his mother must have slept on a slanted bed. some said she had a thing for the sideways samba (at the time i thought this was a type of dance).

  peter had a second misfortune. he fell in love with the most beautiful girl in hanau, beatrice. her eyes were as blue as sapphires and her hair was golden and long. an aryan goddess. peter knew he was no beauty. so he sought a way to her heart through his jewellery. he began to send her, anonymously, the most intricate and charming rings, necklaces and bracelets. beatrice, the poor daughter of the blacksmith, let her imagination run as far as her locks.

  a handsome prince must be wooing me, she thought. who else could afford to send such gifts?

  she began to send love notes with the boy who delivered the jewellery, asking to see her hidden lover. one day, peter agreed. he had a haircut, shaved and put on his smartest clothes, which were embroidered with golden lace. but he was nervous and when he saw beatrice waiting in the square for him, he couldnt face the risk of rejection. so he went to the tavern and drank until the sun was rising. this happened time and time again. but on the thirteenth occasion, he approached beatrice and introduced himself. beatrice did her best not to flinch. she simply said “oh” and then, to avoid embarrassment, told poor peter that she had come to say that she could “never love anyone so unreliable”.