The idea of a real Clio Aames – her actual skin, voice, ideas, eyes, past, hates, loves, hopes, priorities, blood, fingernails and shoes and periods and tears and nightmares, teeth and spit and laugh, her actual fingerprints on glass – the thought of her with this kind of solid factual history, this had-once-been, was too too much for me (another reason I didn’t open the locked door). No, the ghosts I called up in those late nights and long drives and snooker afternoons were all painted on the walls of my empty head with my own two hands. And that was as close as I wanted to be to anyone or anything.
Almost sixteen weeks after I’d woken up on the bedroom floor, the light bulb box arrived.
The dark shape glides up into the flow of conversations and stories, swims through the word-hum of packed Saturday night bars, circles the loops and edges of exchanged mobile numbers.
A telephone call is misdialled and, miles away, my unconscious self shifts in sleep, disturbed by a ringing bell.
From four degrees of separation, the shadow under the water catches the scent. A curved, rising signifier, a black idea fin of momentum and intent cuts through the distance between us in a spray of memes.
I opened my eyes. I was in the living room, lying on the sofa. The phone was ringing. Except for the one time Dr Randle had called to move an appointment, the phone never rang.
I shuffled out into the hallway all dream-fuddled and struggling through sleep sand but as I reached the hallstand table the ringing stopped. An empty sound-break of after-echoes bounced off the walls around me. I dialled 1471. A noise came down the line like the hiss of a seashell; that close-to-the-ear sound of almost-waves breaking far far away. I pressed down the little black bails on the phone cradle a couple of times and tried again. This time I got the clunky voice of the computerised telephone woman: “You were called at … Twenty … Twenty-six … Hours … The caller withheld their number.”
I’d hung up and was on my way back into the living room when – bang bang bang bang bang – a flat palm on the front door made me jump and prickle with shock. I opened the door a little way and a wet bluster of rainy evening air rumbled and tumbled in through the gap. There was an old man standing outside. He was wiry, big-nosed and big-chinned. He had a thinning comb-over and it collected and ran rainwater crystal earrings off the bottoms of his long-lobed ears. He hugged his raincoat around himself and blinked because of the raindrops.
“Yes?” I said.
“You want to take that inside. It’ll be nicked. If it isn’t already ruined.”
I followed his eyes down to the doorstep. There was a soggy wet box at my feet.
“Oh.” I said. “Right.”
He lifted his chin in a silent tut then turned and hobbled off, still hugging himself, down the rainy streetlamp-yellow street without another word.
The box on the doorstep was big, like the ones you get from Tesco when you’re moving house. It was wrapped up in brown paper and it was soaked. It was also really heavy. I turned awkwardly on the doorstep, trying not to bruise and crush its soggy cardboard edges against the doorframe. I managed this eventually, took a careful step into the hallway and reached my foot out behind me to kick the front door shut. In perfect timing with the slam, the bottom of the package gave way and sluiced its contents out all over the floor.
Letters. A damp heap of letters on the hallway carpet. I hung the gutted box on the back of the hallstand table and knelt down to take a closer look. Simian Keslev, 90 Sheffield Road. Harrison Brodie, 102 St Mary’s Road. Steven Hall, 3 York Street. Bob Fenton, 60 Charlestown Road. None of these letters were addressed to me. As I sifted my way down through the heap, I found an odd assortment of other things buried inside. A videotape wrapped up tight in clingfilm. A plastic wallet containing two battered exercise books. A much smaller cardboard box also wrapped up tight in clingfilm with – when I picked it up for a closer look – broken glass or smashed crockery noises coming from inside. I knelt over this strange little nest of things and knew that what I should probably do was stuff everything back into the box and put it away in the kitchen with everything else, try to forget all about it. If the items had been more obscure, maybe I would have done just that. But I didn’t. Books and a videotape? That was too easy. Not even the clockwork person I’d become could blankly tick-tock his way past something like this.
Leaving the heap of letters where they’d fallen, I gathered up the tape, the package of books and the box with the broken glass noises and headed back into the living room.
•
The videotape contained almost an hour’s camcorder footage of a light bulb flashing on and off in a darkened room.
Just that.
I fast-forwarded and rewound the whole way through a couple of times just to make sure, but there was nothing but a bare bulb blinking on and off and on and off in silence. Next, I shook the contents of the little box out onto some newspaper – glass shards, coily wire and the bayonet socket of a smashed light bulb. I guessed I might be looking at the star of the odd little home movie still playing on the TV. I placed the broken pieces carefully to one side, so I could inspect them later for – for God knows what – and turned my attention to the books.
The first of the two exercise books was almost impenetrable, pages of formulae and tables, paragraphs circled in red pen, whole pages scribbled out. I flicked through it quickly before swapping it for the second. This book was in better condition and had a title on the cover – The Light Bulb Fragment. I opened it up and the first word stopped me shock-still. I flicked over the page, scanned forward and then back until I was sure about what I was holding.
I closed the book and took a breath. I thought about how a moment in history could be pressed flat and preserved like a flower is pressed flat and preserved between the pages of an encyclopaedia. Memory pressed flat into text. The Light Bulb Fragment was some sort of journal or transcript, a written window into my missing past.
Shaking, I opened the book again.
The Light Bulb Fragment (Part One)
Clio’s masked and snorkelled head broke the surface and she waved. It was a big, slow wave; all the way left, then all the way right, in and out of the water, like the ones people used to do at eighties rock concerts. It made me smile. Sitting up on my sun lounger in the shade of the huge parasol, I was careful to make sure my return wave, when I did it, looked just a little too much like a Nazi salute. I also made sure I held it long enough to get the sideways attention of the old couple with the beach plot next to ours and to make Clio, who was now waist-deep and arms out balancing in the breakers, stop dead, horrified for half a second before looking for an escape route back into the sea.
I’ve always been better at the long-range stuff.
“Clio!” I shouted, much too loud. The old couple and a handful of other beach people turned to look straight at me and then out to her. “Clio!” I shouted again and waved a big exaggerated wave. I cupped my hands around my mouth, even though she wasn’t actually that far away and waited for an all-important three count; “Clio Aames!” Then, I did the other, dodgier wave again. “Clio, I love you!” I shouted, still doing it.
She had a small audience by the time she kicked her way up through the surf, pulling off the mask and snorkel with one hand and smoothing her hair back into a wet unfastened ponytail with the other. She was