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because we wouldn’t be able to remember our mistakes no matter how painful they were.
    Grief! We wouldn’t know the people we loved, either! We wouldn’t have any memory of them so we wouldn’t be able to think about them, or what it was like to be with them. We couldn’t love them because we wouldn’t be able to remember what we liked about them so much.
    And how could we trust anyone? We’d have nothing to go on, no past experience to tell us this person is honest and this other one tells lies. If we could remember nothing of our past could we be anything now? Except confused, I suppose. And frightened, because we wouldn’t know what was safe and what was dangerous. We couldn’t believe anything because we wouldn’t remember anything to believe in. Not that we’d know what belief meant anyway. We wouldn’t know what anything meant.
    I’ve never thought memory was quite as important as that! But I suppose it is.
    [ Deep breathing. ]
    I’m tired out. Time for another drug-scoffing session. I eat more drugs than I eat meals. Till the knockout pills arrive I’ll think of you, Nik, and the memory will keep the pain away. You, the first time we met. All that rain! You, the first time I took you to church. Disgracing yourself! You the night before . . .
    [ Snatched-at breaths. ]
    Sorry, have to stop . . . Nurse!  . . .
    [ Cries of pain. End of tape .]

MEETINGS
    NIK ’ S NOTEBOOK :   The vicar of St James is pathetic. St James was the son of Zebedee, brother of John the Beloved, called Boanerges. Boanerges means ‘son of thunder’. St James’s vicar is no son of thunder. Son of silence more like.
    Except when speaking of golf (said: goff). Waxes chatty then. Goff clubs are the first thing you meet inside his front door. Along with pong of mouldy wellies and decomposing dog. Dog a podgy black labrador with watery eyes, slavery mouth, and a limp in the left foreleg. Turns you off animal rights. Vic calls him Bugsy when not calling him Old Chum.
    Vic is a bachelor. Tall, balding, pink-faced, smelling vaguely of Old Spice and musty incense. Also large-bellied. Rumour says he’s oathed to celibacy. But what woman would have him? He came along the path from church in flapping black cassock, like a converted Dracula, Old Chum hobbling along behind.
    The vicarage is occupied by neglect. Cold even with sun shining in. Took me into what he called his study, a sort of religious knocking shop. Large gooky pic of Virgin Mary in fetchingly soulful pose staring from one wall. A fairly explicit full frontal crucifix made of carved wood hanging over the fireplace. A jumble of bookshelves crammed with heavy dull tomes, mostly holy manuals, tombs for dead words, covering most of the walls. A bulky desk big as a snooker table piled with controlled disaster of paper. (He should persuade the parish to stump up for a word processor, he’d save himself a lot of garbage, but maybe God wouldn’t approve? Is there a God in the machine? If there is in mine he-she-it only says what I tell him-her-it to say. That’s the sort of God I like.)
    He waved me into one of two exhausted armchairs beside the empty fireplace. The fplc mouth blocked by an old headstone, from the churchyard I guess, its inscription worn unreadable by weather. Made the room seem ominous. The room a tomb. Sitting with a memorial to your own death in the great reaper’s waiting room.
    Selah.
    Vic says, suspicious: Wanted to ask about God, did you say?
    Me, nervous: Wondered if you could explain belief.
    Vic’s left eyelid twitches: Belief! Tricky subject. What was it you wanted to know exactly?
    Old Chum collapses between us like a whale expiring on the beach. The way he lies, the headstone becomes his. Maybe it is, because I’m not sure he’s alive even when he’s limping about.
    Me: Not sure, exactly. What belief means, I suppose.
    Vic smiles. Ah!