Finding Davey Page 4

  “Disposable?” He hated disposable. He wanted permanent memory.

  “That’s it. After all, you don’t need to keep mentally recycling casual phone numbers. Railway timetables. So it’s use-and-ditch.”

  “Unimportant routine events get erased.”

  “Simple, isn’t it?” She was trying to encourage but it came out as failed humour, making her grimace with embarrassment. “Sorry, Mr Charleston. The other’s enduring memory. I call it the docked or housed memory.”

  “The cortex section in your book?”

  She was sombre now, and donned spectacles. Bray thought, so they too rely on gestures, like us mortals.

  “Well done. Persistent memory is what might help you. There are ten milliard cells in the cerebral cortex. A notable stimulus sets this kind of memory into action. It need not be sudden – a plane crash, or an explosion. It may be a joke, a mere childhood event.”

  Good, good. Getting somewhere. “Notable?”

  “Notable to the adult or child receiving that stimulus. It has a special effect, indeed an affect. The stimulus enters our cortical cells, and nerve cells there are sort of set alight. A blob of cells changes its function as the memory is retained. If the blob establishes links with other activated blobs, the memory is reinforced and retained.”

  “The more valencies, the more chance a child will remember?”

  She smiled at his use of the term.

  “Literature does it. Art does it. Love does it. Sights and sounds of home do it. So we humans have a particular vocabulary. We say a particular occurrence evokes, or suggests some memory. The greater the stimulus intensity to a child, the more likely a memory persists. We adults may not even notice, but to a child some seemingly insignificant event might be dazzlingly memorable for life.”

  “What does it?”

  “Do tell me if I go on too long. The hippocampus, a double-shaped part in the middle of the brain, gets the activation signal from the cortical cells. It ‘decides’. If the stimulus isn’t important, into the emptyable pouch it goes, and stays just long enough for you to find your comedy TV channel, or whatever, then is ditched for good. But the important events get handled differently. The hippocampus docks them, and these candidates for permanence get retained. A search instantly begins for linkages with other retainable memory-candidates. It’s as if our memories nudge each other, saying ‘Good heavens! I encountered that attractive person last year in this very town!’ A memory becomes more permanent when it is re-nudged into activity. You want the mechanism?”

  He was lost, but said, “Yes, please.”

  “We think a chemical called N-methyl D-aspartate’s got a lot to do with it.” She interwove her fingers. “Dendrites ramify from neurones, and have NMDA there. If this all coincides with some electrical prompt from its cell, then the message gets across. Calcium dithers about, encouraging the memory to endure – and reinforcement occurs. Calcium in fact might be the necessary nudge. Exercise stimulates some vital molecules. We know of one – it may actually be many types – we call brain derived nerve growth factor; BDNGF in our deplorable medical acronym. It is vital for neurone protection, and in memory’s longevity.”

  He tried to speak. She waited. Five goes later, it came out.

  “Can a permanent memory get lost?”

  “I’m afraid so, Mr Charleston. The absence of reminder nudges results in loss. The memory fades. Re-nudges, if they happen to occur, keep the memory alive.” She shrugged. “These are linked to related memories. Similar events, similar subjects. Kin-based memories link up and keep themselves going.”

  Bray said quietly, “What eliminates housed memory?”

  She sighed. “Sorry to say, a person over fifty, give or take, regularly loses one per cent of the brain cells. You can slow the memory loss, though. After all, we humans are trainable. What we call ‘experience’ is merely the art of being really cunning in cortical cell management. Illnesses, especially circulation or malnutrition, deplete memory. So older folk must exercise. Our journals are full of nerve-growth factors and brain-derived molecular structures. All they mean is eat the right foods and stay active.”

  “Can doctors take memories away?”

  This made her uncomfortable. “You’re thinking of a child? Yes. Some drug regimes abort memories. With behavioural psychotherapy it can be done fairly quickly.”

  “How fast?”

  “Within months. A child grows. And loss of some memories is important for our sanity. I mean sometimes.” She spoke with quiet sorrow. “Just think, Mr Charleston, of all those news items, phone codes, car registration numbers you and I have seen over the years. How intolerable life would be, to keep them all rushing around in our brains! The sane mind keeps itself stable by simply deleting mental junk mail. It does this automatically, to help us cope with each new day.”

  Bray thought in silence, and came to with the clock having moved on. He gestured apology.

  “Do some events help?”

  She knew what he was asking. “A child’s memories can be reinforced later, but only sometimes. They can be ablated by drugs, by psychotherapies.”

  “Memory can be tricked?”

  “Of course.” She seemed surprised he had to even ask. “Deceptions are as common as stage tricks on music halls. We all suppress memory. For instance, we hate to recall that terrible time when we got told off at school, or missed some prize on which we’d set our heart. Forgetting helps us to carry on.

  “It’s a benevolence. Maybe we chose the wrong person to sleep with, went for the wrong job. We can rebel, or pretend we made the right choice. We can suppress truth.

  “It need not be a cataclysmic event, either. Like, a woman may simply select a terrible dress for a party and all her life remember how embarrassed she was. Or she can say to hell with it and laugh it off.”

  “Could she accept that it’s been a good thing, when it was bad?”

  “Certainly.”

  Dr Newton subjected him to a steady scrutiny. It unnerved him. He’d drilled himself, and now he was forced to speak first.

  “I’m frightened that my grandson will be made to forget. I’m assuming,” he said, uttering the lie quite well, “that he’ll remember home when he’s found. You see?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t fiddle with objects on her desk like a movie psychiatrist. “Do you mean how long do you have, Mr Charleston?”

  He reddened, caught out. “Yes.”

  “That age, a child’s memories can be changed in six months. One-fifth might linger a little longer.”

  So twenty per cent of Davey’s memories might still be there after half a year? So many ifs, squared, cubed.

  “There’s some intermediate stage?”

  She smiled, a bit wintry. “You’re giving me my own book’s terminology! Yes, but it has different segments. So memories —”

  “Are patchy?”

  “Well spotted.” She let him think a moment. “Some memories have remarkable persistence. Others in a child could well fade under a new regime.”

  “Deliberately taught, you mean,” Bray said dully.

  “Of course. Transference is a feature in all of us. We change lovers. We switch adherence from one employer to another. An allegiance alters as quickly as a woman changes her name on marriage, and sometimes for the same reasons. Transference can be a survival factor to a child. Belonging to a new team, say.”

  “Family, Dr Newton?”

  “Yes. There is no let-up for a child who joins a new family. New reinforcement is constant. His every mouthful, every stitch of clothing, is prescribed. His speech is controlled, his accent determined by those he speaks with.”

  “Thank you. Can I tell you what I think I’ve learned, Dr Newton?”

  Haltingly Bray summarised her interview. Twice he returned to the problem of time passing in the mind of a child abruptly living among strangers. Patiently she went over the same ground. Bray doggedly went back to selective memory.

  “Patchwork?” he ques
tioned her. “Like a quilt?”

  “A child may not understand whether they represent some actual event in his past, or something he dreamt.”

  “Like true or false?”

  “That’s so, Mr Charleston. Remember that we’re speaking of a child moved into a totally new world. All his old points of reference will vanish. New lamps for old, certainly, but he won’t detect which is which for absolute certain at first. It goes on normally in all of us, until old age where we can no longer detect the new. We then say we’re senile.”

  “Patchwork,” he repeated. It meant hope.

  “Here’s my number, Mr Charleston. Do call if I can help.”

  “One thing, please. Could you tell Dr Feering nothing of this, please, say I didn’t show up? My son and daughter-in-law, you see.”

  With some surprise she agreed, then asked, “What will you do, Mr Charleston?”

  “Try,” Bray said. “I’ll try.”

  Outside, he’d somehow expected gathering dusk, and here it was still broad day with London traffic chugging about.

  He knew a small caff near Charing Cross. He walked there and bought tea and some tomato thing. He ought to have brought sandwiches, for London floated on a sea of cholesterol and saturated fats. He vowed to watch this in the future.

  Future? Carefully he allowed in that dangerous notion. No sugar in tea from now on. No margarine, no soggy puddings. Health was vital. Correction: will be important, from now on. He listened to tourists arguing theatres, what was on, museums. He was exhausted by the morning’s ordeal, until the counter lady asked him with concern if he was all right.

  He told her yes, thank you, fine. Rising, he got himself into the onrush of pedestrians and allowed himself the thought he’d been saving until now.

  They were only two words, but he thought them with deliberate clarity, the outlines mentally burnished in bright luxuriant brilliant gold. It was still only early days, so he restricted himself to initials.

  He thought, KV. He’d got six months, in which a child’s memory might hang on, maybe a whole year at the very outside until there was nothing of Davey left.

  Hurrying, he caught the train and was at the library by four o’clock looking up local technical colleges.

  Chapter Eight

  Bray wanted a plus, any hint of a plus.

  Next door, Geoff and Shirley had gone to bed. Occasionally through the wall Bray would hear Shirley explode, shriek insanities at Geoff, as familiar as a church litany. “Why don’t you do something?” And cruelly the malicious, “Think yourself a man, lying there doing nothing when our son…?” It always ended in the shrillest denunciation of all: “You don’t care!” and a terminal wail, “Get on that phone! I want us to go back and search! They’re doing nothing!”

  Bray had heard every combination of screamed incoherences. Shirley saw Geoff’s reasoning as subversion, the words of an enemy.

  How much longer could Shirley go on? Bray guessed that she might crumple in less than another week. Would psychiatry in hospital be kinder for Geoff? Geoff, Bray saw, was dying within, actually shrinking physically, walking hunched, his features grey. And how was he faring at work?

  Eventually the din next door lessened. Bray turned the television on, the sound down. Buster dozed in his circular padded pit.

  The programme, Documentary Dispatches, was familiar, its technique interviews between video shots. Violence was its theme. No interviewers were shown, voice-overs lending portentous comment. It came on at one a.m.

  Bray made notes.

  Tonight’s programme concerned some place in the King’s Road, Chelsea. Suite 107, an address at PLAZA. Men’s names were spelled under their talking heads. Executive Outcomes was the name of one firm, Sandline International another. People looked respectable.

  They were involved with mercenary armies, complete with tanks, mortars. The mercenaries themselves were shown, streaky night shots, tracer fire, corpses twisted in undergrowth.

  If Bray understood the drift, they had fought in Angola, Sierra Leone, Papua New Guinea. They battled against rebel armies and did deals at international arms fairs in the Gulf. They even had an air force. Bray took down Capricorn Air’s number, N123W, not knowing its significance.

  He paid attention to the rewards Executive Outcomes expected, a million USA dollars a month in Sierra Leone. The sums grew. Diamond mining rights, tens of millions for mercenary wars. Companies were floated on Canadian stock exchanges, mining concessions wrested from African governments.

  Bray watched the credits roll after a mocked-up trial of a company administrator. They had failed in Papua New Guinea, yet somehow fortunes had changed hands.

  He switched off and tidied his scribbles, using an indexed notebook. The cover of another bore a single black question mark.

  The last task was to enter Mercenary Action in his Query notebook, and painstakingly delete it. He had considered that option. He carried the notebooks back to the shed, placed them in their new plastic case – purple, the first colour Davey had learned to name. Then he slid the case into the slot he had constructed over the shed door. He had built it the third day of horror.

  He went to bed, to the ritual of reading for an hour then pretending to sleep the night through.

  As Monday afternoon drew to a close Bray made sure his work was well finished by five o’clock. He told Harry Diggins, the oldest labourer, he would stay and close up. Only when he was sure everyone had called goodnights and gone did he walk to the end of the workshop. He switched on the display lights over his prize possession.

  Bray truly admired the Garvan Craftsman, sometimes called the Garvan Carver. Bray actually owned this piece personally, and was certain it was created by that wonderful ancient expert. It was his personal property, bought as a relic quarter of a century previously, and painstakingly restored in the lantern hours. Now, it was of stunning excellence. It stood encased in the workshop for all to admire.

  Philadelphia, in the years before their Independence, had a handful of genius furniture makers. Hercules Courtenay was one, Nicholas Bernard another. Closest to Bray’s heart was the Garvan Man, called after one Mabel Brady Garvan at Yale who had a furniture collection. The unknown Craftsman from those long-ago times had made furniture of genius level. Nobody carved leaves or vines on card tables, on desks, like the Garvan Carver.

  Bray had given almost a year’s salary for the derelict turret-topped card table. He had restored it with love. For years it had stood in a security case on the workshop floor, as example and tribute. Mr Winsarls often showed visitors the special piece, laughingly refusing offers. “It’s not ours,” he told people. “It’s on loan.”

  Mr Winsarls had pointed out to Bray that he could make a giddy sum by selling it at Sotheby’s, who specialised in 1759 Philadelphia furniture. Bray always smiled and shook his head.

  Now, though, he stood appraising it. It glowed, positively glowed, the lovely turrets, the wonderful carvings of vines, the slender feet each clasping a ball. He shook himself for feeling fanciful emotions, and spoke aloud.

  He said softly, “Time to earn your keep, Craftsman. All right with you?”

  He locked up, set the usual alarms, and caught the train. On the way, he bought the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. The manuscript woman, looking tired tonight, glimpsed it and raised her eyebrows, almost as if to say something. He moved elsewhere, and read it in silence all the way home.

  Chapter Nine

  The boy could see strange trees, and people playing tennis in a park.

  Doctor was nice. The nurses said so. One nurse told him the sea was over there. The sun never stopped shining. The nurse was nice.

  This time he asked Doctor a question. Doctor was pleased that he asked a question, straight out without thinking for the words.

  “Can I go and see the sea?”

  “You sure can, Clint! We’ve got your old surfboard here! Sure!”

  The nurse brightly put in, “And Clint likes football, Doctor!”


  Doctor laughed. “Clint’s going to be a hotshot quarter back!”

  “He changes TV channels on his own now.”

  “Great!” Doctor exclaimed. “Now, Clint, no more accidents, right?”

  “Right.”

  “This clinic’s the best for accidents. Pop and Mom already knew that.”

  Alone, Clint clicked the remote control. On came a show, much laughter and clapping. He liked these shows. He didn’t know any answers, because he’d had an accident.

  He dozed, was woken later for medication by another nurse. For an instant he imagined he’d heard a child cry out, but he must have been wrong because here was nice. They wouldn’t let anybody cry.

  This nurse wasn’t fat like the morning nurse. She showed him pictures of her children. The children’s daddy was a pilot on a plane. The children went to school. One was in second grade, just like he’d been before his accident.

  Doctor interrogated the nurse near the secluded room.

  “How did he respond to the photographs?”

  “I showed him Number Forty-One M and Sixty-Two N,” she said quietly. “I gave him school grading information and my supposed husband’s career. Clint responded as you predicted, Doctor. Acceptance plus.”

  “What TV does he select?”

  “Comedy, cartoons.”

  Doctor harrumphed. “That travel programme was careless. Delete it.”

  “Right away, Doctor.”

  “Take no chances with this one.”

  The nurse hesitated. “Should we worry, Doctor?”

  “This kid’s buyer is a real operator. Know what I’m saying?”

  In the room the sleeping boy didn’t stir. Vapour trails crossed as blue sky darkened to indigo.