To some extent, at least, it worked. Unleashed, my mind threw out great streams of images like a slide show running on fast forward, and gradually I learned the knack of reaching out to catch one as they flew past, holding it lightly and watching as it unfurled in my hands. Our parents bringing us into town to shop for First Communion clothes; Peter and I, natty in our dark suits, doubled over howling with unfeeling laughter when Jamie-after a long, whispered battle with her mother-came out of the girls' dressing room wearing a meringue and a look of horrified loathing. Mad Mick, the local nutter, who wore overcoats and fingerless gloves all year round and whispered to himself in an endless stream of small, bitter curses-Peter said Mick was crazy because when he was young he had done rude things with a girl and she was going to have a baby, so she hanged herself in the wood and her face went black. One day Mick started screaming, outside Lowry's shop. The cops took him away in a police car, and we never saw him again. My desk in school, old deep-grained wood with an obsolete hole in the top for an inkwell, worn shiny and inlaid with years of doodles: a hurley stick, a heart with the initials inside scribbled over, DES PEARSE WAS HERE 12/10/67. Nothing special, I know, nothing that helped with the case; barely worth mentioning. But remember, I was used to taking it for granted that the first twelve years of my life were more or less gone for good. To me every salvaged scrap seemed tremendously potent and magical, a fragment of Rosetta stone carved with just one tantalizing character.
And on occasion I did manage to remember something that, if not useful, could at least be called relevant.
A hot summer day, sun on the back of my neck and the taste of Fanta in my mouth. The girl called Sandra was lying on her back in the clearing in a patch of flattened grass, with Metallica half on top of her. Her shirt was coming off her shoulder so her bra strap showed black and lacy. Her hands were in Metallica's hair and they were kissing with their mouths wide open. "Ewww, you could catch germs that way," Jamie whispered, by my ear.
I pressed myself closer against the ground, feeling grass print crisscross patterns on my stomach where my T-shirt had twisted up. We breathed through our mouths, to be quieter.
Peter made a long kissing noise, just soft enough that they couldn't hear him, and we clamped our hands over our mouths, shaking with giggles, elbowing to make each other be quiet. Shades and the tall girl with five earrings were on the other side of the clearing. Anthrax mostly stayed at the edge of the wood, kicking the wall and smoking and throwing stones at beer cans. Peter held up a pebble, grinning; he flicked it, and it rattled into the grass only inches from Sandra's shoulder. Metallica, breathing hard, didn't even look up, and we had to duck our faces down into the long grass till we could stop laughing.
Then Sandra turned her head and she was looking at me; straight at me, through the long grass stalks and the chicory. Metallica was kissing her neck and she didn't move. Somewhere near my hand a grasshopper was ticking. I looked back at her and felt my heart banging slowly against the ground.
"Come on," Peter whispered urgently, "Adam, come
There were other memories, ones I still find it difficult to think about. I remembered, for example, going down the stairs of our house without touching them. I can recall this in perfect detail: the ribbed texture of the wallpaper with its fading bouquets of roses, the way a shaft of light came through the bathroom door and down the stairwell, catching on dust-motes, to glow a deep auburn in the polish of the banister; the deft, accustomed flick of my hand with which I pushed off the rail to float serenely downstairs, my feet swimming slowly three or four inches above the carpet.
