MEMORY

Harry couldn’t remember things. At least, that was what Mr Piper said. “If I’ve told you once, Harry, I’ve told you a thousand times, don’t talk when someone else is talking. And don’t shout out – put up your hand if you want to speak. Can’t you remember that?”

Well, apparently he couldn’t. Which was why he was standing out in the corridor. Because he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember to do his homework, either. Sometimes, he couldn’t even remember to write it down in his planner. Occasionally, he actually did it, but then he’d forget it at home, so he couldn’t hand it in, or if he did bring it in his bag, he couldn’t remember which section he’d put it in, and then he couldn’t find it, and because the teachers knew he hardly ever remembered to do it, they wouldn’t believe him when he said he had, and they wouldn’t give him long enough to find it. They just gave him a detention, and said that would teach him to remember properly next time.

But it didn’t. Often, he didn’t even remember he’d been given a detention, though his form-tutor reminded him. So he ended up with a Saturday morning detention and a letter home and his parents remembered for him.

Was his memory really that bad? Hard to say. Harry didn’t think so. He remembered the programmes he wanted to watch on TV. He remembered the details of football matches and cricket matches. He remembered the specifications of motorbikes and cars and aeroplanes that he was interested in. But things he wasn’t interested in just seemed to fall through the gaps between the floorboards at the bottom of his mind.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to remember. It wasn’t deliberate. He didn’t remember to forget. He just forgot to remember.

So, one way and another, and especially with Mr Piper, he spent a lot of time out of class, in the corridor. Actually, where he was standing now wasn’t strictly a corridor, though you did go through it to get to other places. It was a kind of lobby, a sort of porch, only the big double doors that led into it from the outside world were hardly ever used now, because the school had been turned round, and the back was more important than the front – that is to say, nearly thirty years ago (almost three times as long as Harry had been alive) the girls’ school and the much older boys’ school had been merged, and because the girls’ school had been bigger (having boarders), and been on the main road, it became the main part and the boys’ school became the lesser part, so that people walked down to it across the playing fields, and came in the back way.

The porch itself was tall and impressive, in a churchy kind of way, though a little bit squashed, and definitely a bit dim. It had to be high, because it contained these enormous boards which soared up into the shadows, where their once-gold writing got lost for lack of light to make it shine. At certain times of the day, and certain seasons of the year, though, sunbeams direct or reflected would pick it out and make it gleam. Not all the writing – just a name or two here and there. That’s what it was, mostly – lists of names, one after the other, with different things after them. Sometimes the same name appeared twice on different lists. Sometimes there were two or three names the same, but with different initials, quite close together.

Once Harry had asked Mr Piper what all the names were there for, and Mr Piper had said they were there in memory, and Harry had asked in memory of what, and Mr Piper had said in memory of the people whose names were there, which struck Harry as a bit tail-chasing, but he didn’t say so to Mr Piper, because he’d already been threatened with a detention for giving cheek, and he didn’t want to turn the threat into a certainty, just because he couldn’t remember to keep his mouth shut, and not ask stupid questions, which was something Mr Piper often wanted him to remember to do.

Anyway, there was Harry, gazing up at the names he could barely read, because there was nothing else to do and he’d had to leave his bag in the classroom, when he noticed someone else hanging around in the shadows on the far side of the lobby, or porch, or whatever you wanted to call it. He hadn’t come in through the big double doors, Harry was sure of that – but he hadn’t noticed him coming from the other direction, either.

Looking at the man, Harry found him quite hard to place. He was a little too old to be a member of the sixth form, and not smartly enough dressed to be a teacher – they were getting younger all the time, Harry thought (except for the really old ones, that is), but they all dressed smartly, and this man certainly wasn’t dressed like that. He had a cracked leather jacket on, lined with what might have been fur, or a sheep’s fleece, and big black leather boots, also cracked, and definitely not polished. He had what looked like goggles round his neck – in fact, if he’d been carrying a crash helmet, Harry would have assumed he’d been riding a motorcycle, and asked him about it, with all the detail he could muster. The man had that air of youth and speed and enthusiasm and oil and grease. In some ways, Harry thought, he didn’t belong in school at all, but in other ways he looked very much at home. In fact, all in all, Harry reckoned he looked pretty cool.

Then Harry remembered something. A couple of weeks ago they’d been warned in tutor time about strangers getting into school – “compromised site security” was what they’d called it – and told them what to do if they spotted anyone who didn’t look as though they ought to be there. (The teachers all had little identity badges with their photos on, but not all of them bothered to wear them, at least not where they could be seen easily. Maybe because they were lazy, or maybe because the photos looked really naff.)

“Can I help you at all, sir?” asked Harry, who could be polite when he remembered, but was really just following the suggested formula for challenging strangers without appearing to do so.

“Maybe you can,” said the stranger, “maybe you can. You see, I’ve just remembered something, and I need to do something about it.”

“Really, sir?” said Harry.

“Yes – you know how it is when you’re asleep, and you wake up with a start and can’t go back, because you’ve got that nagging feeling that there’s something you haven’t done, but you should have – only you can’t quite remember what?”

Harry nodded, but he didn’t mean it.

“It was something to do with Jimbo – something he said – and then something he did – and it was about my thoughts – sounds odd, doesn’t it?”

“Did he – did he offer you a penny for them, sir?” asked Harry – not because he ever said that kind of thing himself, but because it was a phrase that Mr Piper often used when he, Harry, was gawping out of the window, miles away, and he, Mr Piper, wanted to be sarcastic, and say that he doubted very much whether his, Harry’s, thoughts, were worth a penny of anybody’s money.

“That’s right – that’s exactly what he did! How on earth did you guess that? You are a bright young lad! And he threw the penny at me – I remember now – and it landed – somewhere over here – and bounced under the radiator…”

The stranger was down on his knees now, and then over on his back, stretching his arm round behind the bronzed grille that covered a prehistoric dinosaur of a radiator that looked as though it must have been there since the school was first built.

“Damn and blast!” said the stranger, and Harry thought that was cool, too. “Look, my hands are too big – do you think you could reach it?”

To his own surprise, Harry didn’t hesitate. His hands and wrists were small for his age, but his arms were long, so he could reach to the back of the space, and there was a coin there – only it felt much bigger than a penny. He closed his fingers round it, and dragged it out, together with great clumps of fluff that no broom had ever been able to reach.

The stranger was holding his hand out, but Harry felt strangely reluctant to be parted from his newly acquired treasure. He inspected it as closely as he could in the dim light.

“This isn’t a penny,” he said.

“Of course it is!” said the stranger. “Don’t be such a fathead! King’s head on one side, Britannia on the other, what else do you think it is?”

“Pennies,” said Harry, unconsciously adopting Mr Piper’s talking-to-idiots manner, “have the Queen’s head on one side and a portcullis on the other.”

“Don’t talk rot!” said the stranger. “We haven’t had a queen since 1901! Geo V or VI, D.G. Rex Brit. Omn. Fid. Def. Ind. Imp.”

Harry listened to the syllables as if they were a foreign language, or, more likely, the random ravings of a madman. The stranger must have noticed the look in Harry’s eyes, because he added, with an attempt at sounding rational, “Must be a George, can’t be Edward VIII, because only six of those were ever minted – Jimbo’d never throw anything that valuable at me. And Victoria and Edward VII aren’t that common any more.”

“It’s too big to be a penny,” said Harry, dropping the “sir” now he saw what he had to deal with, “and why do you want it anyway?”

“Good question. Good question,” said the stranger thoughtfully, sitting down on one of the row of chairs under the boards. He looked very tired, and his head sank on his chest, as if he were falling asleep.

“Are you all right?” asked Harry, concerned.

“Yes – just trying to remember – always a strain.”

“Yes, it is,” said Harry, being genuine rather than polite.

The stranger’s head rose. “I think it was the last thing Jimbo ever gave to me,” he said, “and that must mean…”

“That it’s very important to you, and you ought to have it,” said Harry, suppressing what he wanted to say: even if it isn’t a penny. And he stood up, walked across and dropped it into the stranger’s hand.

“Thank you,” said the stranger, “thank you – er – what’s your name?”

“Harry,” said Harry, “Harry Tomkins.”

“I’m Stringfellow,” said the stranger, “Stringfellow J.D., as opposed to Stringfellow W.R., who was my brother – is my brother – was my brother – sorry, I’m just feeling a little confused.”

“Open Scholarship, Christchurch, Oxford, 1938,” said Harry, quite automatically, surprising himself, unsettling himself. Where had that come from? The name had seemed familiar, and then those words, which he didn’t understand, had just come into his mind and leapt out of his mouth.

“Yes,” said the stranger, “that’s right, that’s me – my brother was a mathematician so of course he went to the Other Place. Only got an Exhibition, too. But how do you know?”

“I read it,” said Harry, and he nodded upwards, because of course that was where he had read it – that name, and so many other names, which didn’t make any sense, but which he remembered because he had read them so many times when he was out here with nothing else to read and nothing else to do – and he’d never connected the names with people, never thought that young men had gone round wearing them, and answered to them, and had them sewn as nametapes into their sports kit, or written them on their exercise books.

“Gosh,” said the stranger, looking up, craning his neck further and further back, to see to the very top of the lists, where they disappeared into the darkness of the ceiling. “There I am! Funny, I’d never thought about that – my name up there with all the rest of them…” and he kept on looking round, because there were a lot more boards beyond the one with his name on, and Harry noticed that the expression on the stranger’s face was changing as he looked at them.

He was staring at quite a different board now. Harry followed his gaze. The first one, the one with his name on, had said Academic Honours, but this one didn’t really have a title, just a lot of names in alphabetical order, and a simple sentence at the top. On its own, it didn’t really make sense. Harry thought that maybe you had to read all the sentences together. There were four boards that seemed to make up a set, and the names starting with S were on the last one. “They shall not grow old,” it said on the first one, and on the second one it said, “as we that are left grow old,” while the third one said, “Age shall not weary them,” and the fourth, “Nor the years condemn.”

The stranger was still staring at the fourth. “Sheridan J.M.,” he said, “poor old Jimbo!” His eyes moved downwards. “Stringfellow, J.D.,” he said, and paused. “Now I remember,” he said, “now I remember.”

Harry was staring and staring at the board, trying to see what it was about the stranger’s name as it was written there that had made him remember, wondering what it was that he had remembered. He felt he had to ask him – but when he turned to do so, the stranger simply wasn’t there any more. There had been no sound of movement, no opening of a door, no breath of wind from the outside world. Harry looked back at the board. The list of names did not reach to the bottom. Instead, there was a space, and then the words “We shall remember them.”

Not knowing what else to do, Harry just stood staring at them until, a few moments later, the rest of his class barged noisily past him, and he was aware of Mr Piper at his shoulder.

“Well, Harry,” said Mr Piper, “will you remember in future?”

And Harry said, “Yes, sir.”

12^th October 2003 9.30-10.30 pm, 13^th October 2003 10.20-11.40 pm