Some Kind of Fairy Tale (17 page)

Genevieve tried to protest. “Really, I don’t—”

“Over there and not a peep. Now, let’s get started.”

T
he case of TM is one of the most interesting examples of
confabulation
I have encountered in my career, so I have decided to write up my brief office notes with a view to retirement publishing. Confabulations, notoriously difficult to distinguish from delusions and chronic cases of lying, are rarely found not to have an organic foundation, though I don’t rule it out in this case.

TM was brought to me by her brother when she had returned to the family fold after an unexplained absence of about twenty years. I was surprised when the brother, a burly alpha male of middle years, led in his sister, a slightly built thirty-six year-old woman who looked pathologically young for her age. At first glance one
would have taken her for a teenager or someone in her early twenties. I’ve learned not to jump to conclusions but I instantly suspected a hormonal disturbance, or anorexia nervosa, or both.

TM appeared wearing dark glasses, which she was always reluctant to remove, claiming to be extremely sensitive to light. I asked her if she had seen an optometrist, and she had not. Her medical records showed no history of eye problems and an appointment I subsequently made for her with an optometrist reported no abnormalities. Her supposed light sensitivity was part of her elaborate confabulation.

Significantly, when offered a variety of seats in my study she chose the window chairs.

Outwardly confident, she maintains steady eye contact and presents normally: no nervous fidgeting, no twitching nor tics, and very little physical leakage apart from occasionally winding her finger in her hair. Tells her story with alarming candor. Eye movement to upper left suggests remembering, not inventing on the spot, but she could have told her story many times and therefore be remembering previous inventions.

TM appears to be suffering from a profound amnesia spanning some twenty years, though she is neither retrograde nor antero-grade in the sense that she has perfect, one might say advanced, recollection of all events before her disappearance and of all events since her return. The memory gap of twenty years, however, is complete. That in itself leads me to suspect that the cause of the amnesia was a trauma experienced twenty years ago, and possibly but not necessarily even a second releasing trauma more recently.

There is no doubt in my mind that the patient believes her narrative to be true and that her case conforms to Berlyne’s definition of a falsification of memory occurring in clear consciousness. Berlyne defined two types of confabulator, the provoked and the spontaneous. The provoked confabulator invents in response to probing, offering piecemeal, fleeting fantasies often combined with real-time memories. The spontaneous confabulator maintains a consistent though often bizarre outpouring maintained with fierce conviction. TM is certainly in the latter camp.

Recent discoveries about the nature of memory have changed our thinking. An outmoded view of the human brain is that it
is like a computer, storing files that can be retrieved or sometimes lost. Now we know that memory is reconstructive, and that we remake our memories each time we visit them, more or less according to our values and experiences, which may of course have changed since the date of the events we memorize. But there exists beyond this reconfiguration an executive control of this function, presumably stopping us from too fanciful a reconstruction of every memory.

The confabulator is someone who has lost executive control.

The most common cause of this loss of executive control is a rupture in a tiny blood vessel in the brain, temporarily cutting off the flow of oxygenated blood to areas of the brain essential for the recall of memory.

Note to self: it is as well to remember that healthy people confabulate, too.

I have arranged for the patient to undergo CT scanning in due course, to look for signs of trauma or arterial damage in the brain. In the meantime, it is important to reassure the Martin family—a skeptical lot, in a healthy sense—that TM is not deliberately attempting to deceive them. I’m convinced she believes every word of what she says.

What is fascinating is that the confabulation posits no apparent threat to the integrity of her hold on current reality. Indeed, it is presented as memory, past and completed. The ending has been written into the confabulation. Clearly the narrative has been constructed to make sense of some overwhelming experience—but at the moment we have no clues as to what that experience might have been. Until we are able to locate any organic foundation for the amnesia and confabulation we will proceed with a psychological investigation underpinned by an understanding of the needs of the confabulator.

Herstein said that confabulation is a knowledge problem. That is to say, if the knowledge isn’t there, the mind tells stories to fill in the gap. Our consciousness is interpreting reality rather than driving it. Thus we might find the origin of the gap by looking more closely at the story.

I
n some ways, that first night at his house, the house where I came to live for the next six months, was the most extraordinary evening of all of them. He had told me that you couldn’t argue with the charts, that it would be six months before I could go back again, six months before I could see my mother and father, and my brother, and Richie, and anyone else.

And naturally I didn’t believe it.

At first I became upset. But my distress was his distress. He came to me and he held me and he promised me that there was nothing to be done. Then he tried to explain the charts, the columns of figures and the positions of the moon and stars, but all I could see were beautiful illustrations and meaningless tables of numbers.

My instincts were that I should flee, just get away from that house, away from the lake that shone with an eerie blue light. But there was no question of finding my way back at night. My instincts for self-preservation were already telling me to play along with what I was being told, to feign acceptance, to pretend to give in to exhaustion. It occurred to me now that he had brought me there to be his prisoner. But I could see by the hurt in his eyes he harbored no ill intention toward me. No, I knew I could wait out
the night and then slip away. I told myself that by first light I would get myself out of there, maybe steal his horse. I would just wait until the moment was ripe.

He asked me if I was hungry, but I couldn’t even think about eating. He asked me—and I say
he
because at that time he still hadn’t told me his name—if I was thirsty and I said yes, I would take a drink. He went away and came back with two tiny glasses. Absurdly tiny, of bubbled green glass and smaller than egg cups, but in each of which was a spit of yellow liquid. I took the thimble-sized glass and almost laughed. But he touched glasses.

By this drink I promise to return you, if you should want me to, at the earliest time; and I promise to keep you from all harm; and if I fail in either of these two promises may I lie down dead. And then he tipped back the tiny liquid and looked at me, blinking. Then he burped. Now you have to drink.

I went to drink, but he stopped me.

Wait! Where’s your oath? he almost shouted at me.

Oath?

Of course. You don’t drink this stuff without an oath.

I didn’t really know what an oath was, though I supposed he meant some kind of promise.

I promise, I said, to be more careful.

He looked surprised at that, but I tipped back the liquid. It wasn’t even an eyeful, but it was sweet like honey and spicy like peppermint, and no sooner did it go down than I felt a mighty burp rip free of me. I felt stupid, but he seemed to think nothing of it. And instantly I felt calmed and refreshed, and even had he offered me more of this drink I had no need of any more.

I felt peaceful, and inside me I felt the calm of the lake and the moonlight pulsing on the water. The light was sinister and beautiful at the same time. It was how I imagined an Arctic midnight. But it was velvety and the night sky through the window was a comforting cloth of stars. It was a balm to the eyes. I stopped fretting, and I thought, Well, if I’m here for the night I may as well make the best of it because the evening out there seems beautiful.

Can we go and sit by the water? I asked him.

Nothing could be sweeter.

So we went outside again and we walked on the sand. He took
off his shoes and said I might do the same. He said he preferred to feel the earth sing through his feet, and that shoes stopped you from hearing the song of the earth; and I thought, Well, that’s very poetic, so I took off my shoes and we walked on the fine gray night-sparkling sand that formed a beach around the lake. The sand was warm and gritty and yet soft at the same time and though I didn’t hear the earth singing through my feet I did enjoy the feel of the sand between my toes, which was like the stroking of gentle fingers.

He looked at my toes and said what pretty toes I had, and that he would make a ring for my toe if I wanted. I looked at him, and with the moon rippling on the water like the presence of a ghost, but sweet, and the whisper of the sand under our feet, and the eerie evening light reflected in his eyes, I knew with absolute certainty that this man was falling in love with me.

Of course I am
, he said.

What?

I didn’t speak, he said. It’s the murmur of the lake.

We sat down. He was very careful not to crowd me. In fact, I told him he could sit a little nearer. Then he explained that because I was still only fifteen and not yet of age that he couldn’t touch me. He said when he’d first spied me in the bluebell wood that he’d taken me for someone older. But it didn’t matter, he said, because he would happily wait for me.

Wait for what?

Wait for you to say when you are ready and if you are ready. It’s for you to say if the gate is open or closed.

And I thought,
What gate
? Occasionally he spoke in riddles like this; and at other times I didn’t know if he had spoken or if I had just heard his voice inside my head; or if there had, after all, been something in that drink he’d given to me; or if, as he said, it was just the murmur of the lake.

We talked at length and he asked if he could hold my hand, and because I trusted him not to press things further, I let him. He wanted to know everything about me. He wanted to know what music I liked and what books I’d read. I told him, and he listened. He said he knew the books I’d mentioned but was a bit out of
touch with the latest songs and so would make a point of listening to the titles I’d reeled off for him.

I had no more fear by now. I felt at ease with him. In fact, by now I wanted to get nearer to him; I wanted him to hold me, but I didn’t dare to say this because I felt he might take it the wrong way when all I wanted was to be held. So instead I asked him his name again. And this time he told me.

I’m not about to tell you his name. That’s between him and me, and there’s a good reason for that. But because you’re curious and I can’t keep referring to him as he, I’m going to give you one of his lesser names, of which he had more than a hundred. We’ll call him
Hiero
, which he pronounced “Yarrow.”

He asked me if he could whisper me to sleep. I had no idea what he meant. But I blinked my eyes and the next thing I knew, he was holding me in his arms. In one blink he was holding my hand and in another blink I was lying in his arms, and he was whispering to me in a strange and beguiling language. I knew I was going under—going to sleep, that is—but I had no interest in stopping it. I no longer had any need to pretend I was exhausted because I wanted sleep to take over me. I recall his whispering in my ear and the whispering became the same sound as the murmuring of the lake.

T
HEN A KNOCKING AWOKE
me, a sound like that of a large bird tapping its beak on a window. I looked round and I saw that I was lying on one of the scruffy mattresses placed against the floor in the living room of the house. There were no curtains at the window and the sun was coming up and streaming bright through the dusty glass, illuminating all the huge cobwebs of the house. Hiero was asleep almost beside me. I guessed he must have carried me back from the lake. He had pulled up another mattress beside mine and was deep asleep.

But the tapping continued. It had a certain noisy rhythm and it seemed like it was coming from the kitchen. I was still fully dressed. I ran a hand through my knotted and tangled hair and I sat up. I got to my feet and stepped over the deep-sleeping form of
Hiero. The door to the kitchen stood ajar and I went across to see what was making the tapping sound.

When I got to the door I gasped.

Fully illuminated by the brilliant sunlight streaming through the window was, stretched across the wooden kitchen table, a naked man. He was lying on his back. Sitting astride him and with her back to me was a naked woman. Her golden skin shimmered with an oyster shell–like sheen of perspiration. She had lustrous long hair, blond hair streaked with nut-brown and platinum, all part-braided and tied back, and her hair stuck to the glowing sweat of her back. She was riding the man beneath her, and the thrust of her pelvis was clacking the uneven table leg on the kitchen floor.