Chapter 15
Documented Telephone Conversation #2
Documented Memory Project #2: Tape
Documented Telephone Conversation #3
I remember, a note, she passed… Documented Memory Project #4
‘Dee. Dah dah dah dee dah, dah dah, dee dah…’
It was a year of miracles. The year I learned how to walk and talk again, the year I met Emre Bartu and the year the girls went missing.
But first came December.
The weekend before my first week as a Police Community Support Officer began. The last week in which my brain’s valleys, ridges, streets and avenues remained in perfect working order.
Back when I thought a lot differently. Before I became ‘Better Than Normal’ as Ryans says. He says that because in some ways I definitely am. Better than you, I mean. No offence.
It’s a Christmas gift that will lie under my brain stem, wrapped in the folds of my cerebellum, romantically lit by my angular and supramarginal gyrus, for the rest of my grateful life.
So let’s go back to the last week when the inside of my skull was anatomically ‘correct’ and aesthetically as it had been since the day I was born.
When my brain functioned as it does for the ‘normals’. The others. The ones devoid of irregularity or uniqueness. No offence.
Before the fractures. Before the accident.
If it was an accident.
‘So it’s you
The one I thought I knew, I knew,
No matter what we put the other through
It’s always you’
The truth about Gary Canning is revealed to me by Anita herself. Like most things, I don’t see it coming.
I imagine Gary as a P.E. teacher, displaying his sporting prowess and gym-earned physique to the kids of Tower Hamlets as he coaxes the unwilling into exertions like rugby, basketball or maybe even worse. But in actuality, Gary is a Geography teacher with a fair to middling beard. It has pretty good coverage but is patchy in a way that suggests inconstancy of character, a fatal lack of conviction in his genes, or a rather flawed grooming technique. I know this because I find his picture on social media. That’s when I first see the face of Gary Canning.
Gary Canning blogs about food and travel and seems to have ambition beyond the school system. Photos find him caught candidly by the camera lens in clearly orchestrated scenarios, curated to paint him as a soulful character; playing a banjo with his eyes closed, or blowing bubbles with some sort of child, or larking in a European villa while holding a float to his head like it’s an antenna, in a move that will soon be lauded by his fawning friends as ‘classic Gary bants’.
He lists his favourite world cities as Tangier, Iquitos and Bobo-Dioulasso. Only half of one of which I’ve ever heard of. But I guess it isn’t surprising Gary Canning has been to places I’ve never even heard spoken aloud. Given that I’ve never even been to Paris. I thought about taking Anita once but then I forgot to book the tickets and my life
