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 topless too, although that was neither here nor there in terms of our ‘ha ha, everyone’s looking at you’ game. Clio isn’t body-conscious; it’s just me she finds embarrassing. It had been almost a week since we gave up Greek island archaeology for beaching and she’d done a day with bikini top on, ten minutes with bikini top off but with beer bottle tops over nipples ‘acclimatising’ and the next four and a half days ‘continentally tits out’.
Actually, here’s something important about Clio; when she says ‘tits’ she sounds smart and sexy and 21st-century – ‘There’s no point fucking around with these things, Eric’ – the way that some women, and I suppose, some guys effortlessly can. When I say ‘tits’, though, I sound like a sleazy tabloid journalist. I’ve tried and tried and there’s no way around it. I used to say ‘boobs’, although I try not to now because Clio laughs and says I sound even worse, like a sex pest in denial. Recently, I’ve resorted to the painfully meek ‘You look great without your top on,’ which sometimes earns me an ‘awww’ and a kiss on the head. She says cunt too.
By the time Clio made it back to the sun loungers, the audience had more or less lost interest. She hung up the mask and snorkel in the spokes of our big shady parasol and took the towel that had been keeping the sneaking-its-way-round sun off my feet. She had a disapproving look that was just a little exaggerated; if you look carefully at that look, you can spot a smile that hangs around its edges and usually draw it out.
“Repeat after me,” she said. “There’s nothing funny about saluting like Hitler.”
“There’s nothing funny about saluting like Hitler,” I said, taking my sunglasses off and squinting up at her. “Everyone thought it was funny when Peter Sellers did it.”
“Yeah,” she said, rubbing her hair. “Except he was funny, wasn’t he?”
“Oh yeah,” I grinned. “I forgot.”
“So,” she said. “What are you going to do?”
“Not salute like Hitler.”
“And?”
