WALLS. CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING. Amnesias.
There are ways over walls, through clouds, lights that will illumine the deepest amnesias, known to the skilled practitioner of the hypnotic arts. Not so much ways over or ways through, but ways rather of moving from one side to the other without having to traverse the intervening space.
I did not know what might lie beyond the wall of forgetting, so I carefully prepared Jessica with a string of post-hypnotic commands to pull her out of the trance and erase any memories of the session should the experience prove too intense.
Then together we abolished the distance between remembering and unknowing.
“There are vans parked against the river wall. The vans have canvas sides. Green canvas, I think. Men are jumping out of them. They have things like bandages wrapped around their shins. The bandages are green, like the canvas. We are watching from the window, but when we see the men Daddy makes us get down on the floor and hide under the table. Why does he do that? Are the men bad men? They’re shouting, the men; they have funny accents. Then we hear the shots. One of them comes through the window. Funny, it’s not the sound of the shot that makes me jump, it’s the crash of all the glass falling in. It makes quite a hole in the ceiling, too. It travels upward, you see.
“We hear them running about in the street, and there is the smell of paraffin everywhere. Mummy says, ‘Oh, dear God, what’s to become of us?’ and starts to cry quietly. We hear the voices again. They sound ugly, pleased with themselves. I think they have voices like dogs. Then … whoomph! Fire! Fire! At either end of the quay, they’ve set fire to the houses! They’ve set fire to the houses! We all go downstairs to get out. We open the front door and there’s a man in a black and brown uniform standing there. He’s got a rifle. He says, ‘Oh, no, not you, Paddy. You’re not going anywhere, old son,’ and he raises his rifle. We slam the door, run back up the stairs. There’s the sound of shots. I can see the back of the door go into long, white splinters. Don’t you see what they’re doing? They’re shooting at anyone who tries to run for it. They want us all to burn.
“The fire’s racing along the roofs. There’s melting lead dripping down into the gutters. Number three’s already gone, number four’s alight, number five’s just caught, and numbers six and seven are smouldering. There are shots and cries and screams and the sound of people running. The room is filling with smoke. I can’t see; I can’t breathe! Can’t breathe! It’s getting so hot. Where’s the Fire Brigade? Why don’t they come? What’s keeping them? Tans or no Tans, we’ve got to get out. We try for the front door, but the fire’s got there first. The hall is full of smoke and flames. We can’t get out. We can’t get out—we’re trapped!
“We’re at the window. It’s the only way out. There are people down in the street—our own people, not the Tans. They are getting back into their canvas-covered vans. The people are shouting, ‘Don’t jump. Don’t jump, hold on, here comes the Fire Brigade.’ They’ve come! They’ll rescue us. The firemen have silver helmets. The helmets look gold in the light of the flames. They’re getting sheet things. What do you call them?”
“Tarpaulins.”
“Those, and they’re unwinding their hoses. It’s the Fire Brigade; they’ve come to save us. They’re shouting for us to jump. I don’t know, it looks an awfully long way down. The people down there are like ants, not people at all. They’re looking at us. There’s no one looking at the Tans. Look at the Tans, they’re cutting the hoses, the firemen’s hoses! We’re going to have to jump now. But it’s a long, long way down, hold on to me. Mummy don’t let me slip.”
She screamed.
“The roof’s fallen in. The roof’s fallen in. Mummy … Daddy, I can’t see them. There’s fire everywhere … Mummy … Daddy … where are you? I can’t see them, I can see a beam’s fallen on them … I can see Daddy’s face and hands, they’re burning …”
“It’s all right Jessica. It’s all right. Look out the window. Don’t look back at the room. Look out the window. Tell me, what do you see?”
“The people, they’re shouting for me to jump, but I can’t jump, it’s too high. I can’t jump. I want Mummy, but she’s not there, she’s burning. There’s no one to help me now. I’m going to burn, too. No one to help me, except the Watchman and the Dreamspinner. I wish they were here to make everything all right, like the old woman said they would. She said they would watch over me and make sure no harm came to me.”
I paused Jessica in her trance. From here, each step would have to be carefully chosen. We might literally be walking on the edge of a precipice. I had never dreamed that such terrors could lie within her unremembering.
“Tell me about these people, Jessica—the Watchman and the Dreamspinner, and the old woman. Who are they?”
Her expression changed from terror to beatific nostalgia.
“The Watchman and the Dreamspinner look after me when I’m asleep. The Watchman has magic glasses that can see to the end of the earth and he can see all the things that might harm me while they’re still a long way off, and the Dreamspinner puts his hand in his sack where he keeps all the things that dreams are made of and he strings them together, like beads on a thread, and hangs them around my bed. The old woman told me about them—the man who sends the dreams and the man who watches over me when I sleep. I used to think I could see them, standing there in the shadows at the foot of my bed—two old men, one tall and thin, the other short and round, taking care of me.”
“Thank you, Jessica. Please, go back to the night of the fire.”
Amazing, how her expression reverted once again to the terror of a four-year-old trapped in the most appalling nightmare imaginable.
“I wanted them to come. I wanted them to help me, like the old woman said they would. She said they would take care of me, but where are they? Why don’t they come? Why won’t they help me?
“Fire … fire … Flames, everywhere. They’re leaping up around me, they’re reaching for me. Wherever I go, there are flames. There’s nothing left, just flames. I can feel my face burning. My nightie—the one with the flowers on it—there’s smoke coming from it. A flame touches the hem of my nightie. It’s burning, I’m burning. I try to beat the flames out, but they burn my hands. I’m burning, burning!”
My heart was hammering. I could barely find the words to bid her continue.
“And then: the hand! It’s a hand. It’s sprinkling something on the flames—on my nightie, on me, something like dust. And the flames go out! Wherever the dust falls, the flames go out. It’s them. They’ve come! At last! The old woman said they would look after me and not let me come to harm. One of them is picking me up—the tall one, the Watchman. He’s not quite how I thought he would be, but people are like that—they’re never just as you think they will be. The other one is the Dreamspinner. He goes in front sprinkling dream dust from his sack of dreams, and where the dream dust falls, the flames die down. They carry me out, set me down. There’re people all around me. When I look, I can’t see them. They’re gone. I wonder where they went.”
I sighed heavily. The emotional intensity had been overwhelming. There were moments in Jessica’s testimony when I felt I had been there in person.
“That’ll do for today, Jessica. Thank you, that was most illuminating. You can come back now.” I counted her up through the levels of hypnotic suggestibility to full consciousness. She shook her head.
“I’ve got a fuc … fierce headache. Did you get anything?”
I rummaged in my desk drawer for aspirin and requested a pot of Miss Fanshawe’s excellent tea.
“Quite a lot. Do you remember any of it?”
“Not a thing. Must have been someplace hot, though. I’m sweating like a pig. Oops, sorry. Is this the hell where people who tell lies and swear go?”
When Miss Fanshawe’s Orange Pekoe and two aspirin had done their work and Jessica was safely steered back into the Dublin traffic, I looked again at the session notes. Threatened in the extreme, her life in imminent danger, Jessica had called upon infant memories of mystic guardian figures and somehow, flesh and blood saviours, seemingly imbued with miraculous gifts, had come to her rescue.
And I reeled under an almost physical blow of déjà vu. It was as if a cloud of unknowing had covered my own understanding and suddenly dispersed in the heat of the sun. Connections were made between fragments of knowledge that had lain disused and forgotten, like museum pieces removed from public display: in a divine flash, I understood. By no means fully—not even one-tenth part, one hundredth part—but I began to understand. I saw.