Exchange Place

The Raleigh Bicycle

Before Kilpatrick knew it, Paul Gordon vanished. A dim light came on and Kilpatrick saw John Bourne for the first time in, what was it? ten, twenty, thirty years. He was seated in a high-backed armchair. He seemed scarcely aged. The grey Prince of Wales check suit he was wearing was one that Kilpatrick knew from before. Bourne was wearing a brown fedora hat with the brim pulled over his eyes and he wore a wry smile. Seeing is believing, is it not, said Bourne. You have been looking for me, and what do you see? Something that I always was, albeit that for some time I did not know that thing. And who are you? he said to Kilpatrick. I am John Kilpatrick, said Kilpatrick. That remains to be seen, said John Bourne. We come to everything in time, and what is time? As John Donne would have it, is it in ‘Meditation XIV’? If we consider time to be motion, then it has three stations, past, present and future; but the first and last of these is not, because one is not now and the other is not yet; and that which you call present, is not now the same that it was, when you began to call it so. So we flit eternally into the future, infinitesimal split second by second. In like manner a hierarchy of angels can dance upon a pinpoint. What are you then? said Kilpatrick. I am you, I am anybody, said Bourne. Before I lost my sight I was blind, and now I see. I see the legions that are each of us hovering about us as if watching over us, for all that they are blind to our existence. Only I have retrospection for them, and that enables me to see. But let me show you who you are. Bourne raised himself and gestured to a cheval mirror that stood beside him. What do you see? said Bourne. Kilpatrick walked over to the mirror and regarded himself. I see John Kilpatrick, he said, the man I am. Well and good, said Bourne, but what do you see behind you in the mirror? I see a door, said Kilpatrick. To see you we must go and open it, said Bourne.

They walked to the door which led them to a large bright chamber. Welcome to the Memory Palace, said Bourne. He gestured to the shelves and alcoves which lined the room, each of them filled with a miscellanea of objects. Third shelf, top right, you’ll see a tin toy submarine, a little rusted. That was Stanley, who thought himself someone else until he touched the toy, or it him. This alcove here on the left, a bookcase made out of an orange crate, you can still smell the oranges, that was Burgess, same story. He swept his arm around the room. Kilpatrick saw an old Clydesdale radio, a red and white enamel tricycle, a pottery owl, a cricket bat, a cast-iron mangle, a frayed blanket. There were hundreds of objects arrayed in no apparent order. I know where everything is, said Bourne. All the things you see here I see too, because I link them to the people, and their stories of who they were, and who they might have been. And I see the things too because I have touched them all, and they me, and I know their aura. For all of them were loved deeply in their day, and were alive to them that loved them. So let me show you who you were, because you are what you always were. Next room.

There you are. Raleigh tourer, 1959 model, Sturmey-Archer gears, said Bourne, I think you’ll find it all in order. Kilpatrick’s heart stopped for a second as he looked at the bicycle. He recognized it instantly in the deep blue enamel livery set off by the whitewall tires, and the proud worn leather of the seat, and the butterfly curve of the handlebars, everything about it that he so loved, and he was thirteen again. What do you see? said Bourne. I see a boy of thirteen, said Kilpatrick. It is a beautiful June morning with fair weather clouds scudding in the blue sky and I am riding my bicycle down a country lane. Suddenly I feel as if I have lived this moment before, in the same place, though I have never travelled this road before. An extraordinary feeling of stillness comes upon me. This summer afternoon has always existed. Everything is quivering and streaming upwards in a kind of ecstasy, my body is vibrating to everything around me, said Kilpatrick, and I am unbearably happy because in this endless moment I do not know who I am because I am everything around me.

So it is written in the book, said Bourne, the book of all our lives. What is your name? Kilpatrick hesitated. The bicycle, man, look at the bicycle, said Bourne. And then Kilpatrick knew who he was. He turned the bicycle round and there, in white paint on the seat tube in a boy’s careful schoolboy script, was written J. Kilfeather. So now you know, said Bourne, as I once got to know. You know what got me? No, not the cricket bat. I played that one well at the time. Top left shelf, seventh object along. Kilfeather found himself staring at pair of navy women’s court shoes, late 1940s style, stacked heel. My mother’s shoes, said Bourne, I wore them one Hallowe’en when I was what? four or five, and I clattered around in the dark in them and a long dress, seeing fireworks go off all around me. Funny the way things move you. You suffer from migraine in your teens? Kilfeather nodded. A lot of us did, said Bourne, with others it’s epilepsy. It’s all in the aura, don’t you see? It changes the world for you, or rather it changes you for the world, because the world is always what it is no matter what. When I realized that I really started to paint. The other thing was just something I did for the Other Side unbeknownst to myself, when they put the fugue on me, just like they did on you. The fugue? said Kilfeather. You know your classic fugue, said Bourne. Yes, said Kilfeather, from fugere, to flee. Yes, said Bourne, variant of temporary global amnesia, person thinks he’s someone else, often found in migraineurs, normally it only lasts a matter of months or weeks, but the Other Side found a way of inducing it to last for years. It was only when I was born again that I remembered the chair, the helmet with the electrodes, like one of those hair salon hairdryers. Not that it was unpleasant. Far from it, something like sinking into black velvet. I heard a voice in my head speaking of green fields. Then I was gone, and John Browne the printer woke up in another city as John Bourne the painter. The Other Side don’t like their alters to be too disjunctive. I kept the name Bourne, a bit more class to it, don’t you think? Though you may call me Browne. So there you are: you’re an alter too. But there’s a twist to the plot. The Other Side have planted another alter in Belfast, a John Kilfeather who is masquerading as you, unbeknownst to himself. Not to mention the fact that he’s introduced a character dangerously close to me, courtesy of the Other Side again, calls him John Harland. We must redress the balance, said John Browne, and Kilfeather knew he was speaking the truth. What must I do? he said.

First we must kit you out, said Browne. The suit is excellent, of course, what an operation though, overkill if you ask me, our people in Belfast had the neighbourhood closed down with a bomb scare for three days just to get into the house. You won’t need the book, we’ve already been through it with a fine-tooth comb. Interesting propositions if fanciful at times, doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. In any event it’s a copy, we needed the fake Kilfeather to have the original for continuity purposes, and of course you will have access to that when the time comes. The only thing you really need is the gun. The gun? said Kilfeather, and Browne handed him the Luger pistol.