4. A Broken Arm

REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN THINGS (4)

The rain stayed away as we set out from the Professor’s house. It was an odd experience for me because I’d hardly known anything of him until earlier when he’d rescued me from a heavy summer storm and introduced me to his unbelievably effective memory machine. And yet inside his house he’d revealed what must surely be a secret and almost certainly important piece of science to me, a stranger, a device I suspect is unknown by anyone else in the scientific community. Yet I felt comfortable in his company, and I soon found out why. Here’s what happened.

The walk to the cemetery was fairly short and the sun was shining, casting growing shadows behind us as the afternoon slowly drew to an end. It had been an odd day, starting bright and including in a sunshine sandwich a horrendous hail storm.

Once at the graveyard he took me immediately on a complex meandering route between gravestones marking the dead of ages until we came to one specific one: his old friend, Ricky’s. The inscription was simple: Here Lies Ricky Weston, 1944-2019 inside an Egyptian-looking but impressively simple cartouche-like symbol.

“This is Ricky, or where he’s resting,” sighed the professor, “though I’m not simple-minded and don’t really think he’s resting in the sleeping sense. But it comes to us all in the end, and he beat me to the great beyond, if it exists.”

“Friends are so important,” was all I could think of saying, and for a few moments he stood still, staring at the gravestone and the mound beneath which his friend was lying in death.

“It was before this that you came in,” he said, suddenly, out of the blue, words that at that moment didn’t mean much to me. I mean, how could I have entered his story even before Ricky did? I’d only known his for less than a day! Yet they’d been schoolboys, and young ones at that, and that had been decades ago, memories of which had been magically refreshed by his wonderful chair very recently.

“I came in?” I asked.

He nodded. “You don’t remember, do you?” he grinned suddenly. “Roger Pandrake … that is you, isn’t it?”

“Of course,” I said.

“I bet you forget the nursery you were taken to every day when you were three?” he asked, “the one at the end of Green Street where a rather angular and some said fierce lady teacher taught us little ones how to do simple jigsaw puzzles and count to five?”

I shook me head, but there was something there, the shadow of a completely forgotten time. It seemed odd to me that it should be there at all. Yet I knew, instinctively, that he was right and I had gone to a nursery that had been at the end of Green Street in a Victorian building on the very site where there now stood a huge supermarket. These days I wander there to do the little bit of shopping I need, being as I am on my own and never requiring very much, and never once thought as I made my way along to the gigantic superstore that the toddler me had walked that same patch of Earth in his early years.

“Green Street,” I murmured, “yes, I seem to remember something...”

“There was a little tacker with a broken arm,” he said, “do you remember?”

I shook my head. Maybe there was the least suggestion of a boy with his arm in plaster, but I wasn’t sure. Why, it had been above seventy years ago! The nursery had faded faded away with quite a lot, probably almost everything, from my infancy. My memory has its limitations.

“That was me,” he said, shyly, “I had an unfortunate accident that broke my little arm, and I still went to nursery with plaster on it. I was fond of the place, even of Mrs Platten who was in charge. Most of the kids thought she was a bit of an ogre, but I rather liked her. She set me on the course I’ve followed all my life, of being curious, needing to know anything that a child and then a man could know.”

“I forget,” I said ruefully.

“I thought you might have, but never mind. I had a memory of it trapped in my brain, probably because of the broken arm, a memory that I could rekindle in my chair. And I did, you know. It all came back in little wisps of detail until I could even see that Mrs Platten wore spectacle and a very pointy bra! And amongst those memories, a bit broken because of my tiny age, there was another boy. He was called Roger, Roger Pandrake, and for a while we were the best of friends.”

I frowned. I couldn’t for my life remember having a friend back then, yet the way he was telling me had within it an almost silent chord of truth, as if something so far away in time was hovering like the faintest of shadows in my mind.

“I can see you’ve forgotten, and maybe not even my chair will bring it back,” he said, “because you need a memory to start with for the circuitry to try to enhance it. But you, back then, were fascinated by my plaster! And before it was taken off you were allowed to take a coloured pencil, a red one, and make a pattern on it. You were only three, of course, and hadn’t learned the least thing about writing, but you did draw a pattern.”

I gazed at Ricky’s gravestone and frowned. I’d love to know whether this was all true, me at an infant’s nursery and a friend with a broken arm. The cartouche in which the inscription of his friend Ricky’s death was recorded was like a remnant of a past age and I wondered whether it was a genuine copy of an ancient piece of Egyptian calligraphy. I was beginning to think that Professor Dingle might have enough fascination with time to have such a thing inscribed on his friend’s gravestone. It seemed to fit in with him, the ancient and crumbling mixing with the simplicity of old age.

“You see the stone, don’t you,” he whispered. “And the cartouche?”

I nodded. “I’m sorry he’s dead, but I never knew him,” I told him.

“Almost, but not quite, true,” he smiled. “Ricky was at that nursery too and you must have seen him, maybe making a model out of plasticine or flipping through the pages of his drawing book. But neither of us took much notice of him then, I think he was a few months younger than us and at that age a few months is quite a lot!”

“Probably,” I admitted.

“Anyway, I saved the plaster cast when it was taken off my arm,” he smiled, “and I’ve still got it, seventy years or so after the hospital nurse cut it off.”

“That’s some feat!” I exclaimed.

“And I’ve got your drawing that you did on it, faded now of course but still just about visible, red pencil on what has become a rather grubby tube of plaster.”

“Really? And you’re sure it’s what I scrawled?” I asked, surprised.

“Of course, or I wouldn’t have said,” he said quietly, and looked up at me, tearing his eyes from the stone celebrating the life and death of his friend, “you see, I’ve got a clear memory now, of Roger Pandrake scribbling his pattern on my plaster. And I liked the pattern. It was a sort of connection to my past and you must have concluded by now that I’ve got a fascination bordering on an obsession with my personal past.”

“I have,” I admitted, “and it’s a credit to you.”

“You see, Roger, the past continues. Last year when I organised this gravestone I gave the stone mason a pattern to work from.”

“I like it,” I said.

“So you should,” he grinned, “because it’s an exact copy of a tracing I took from the faded plaster from my infant arm, only enlarged quite a bit. It’s your design. Your own work, aged three!”

I was shocked. I hadn’t expected that disclosure.

“It is?” I exclaimed, “are you sure?”

“I’ve got a very detailed memory of you drawing it, carefully for a toddler, in red pencil on my plaster. Yes, it was you all right. That’s why I used it: you were my first real friend, though you seem to have forgotten, and Ricky was my last. It’s a pattern I like, a circle of life that I heartily approve of! And, if you like, tomorrow and for as many tomorrows it takes you can call on me again, and if you want to, sit in my chair.”

© Peter Rogerson 11.06.20