Read The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August for Free Online Page A

me with Italian oils and told me in the loud voice reserved for children,
    “Your face is your fortune! Don’t spend it all at once!”
    Franklin Phearson had been a face on the edge of all this, by whose aloofness I could only assume he was in charge. He sat two tables away from me as I ate, was at the end of the corridor when I left the bathroom and was, I concluded, the man responsible for the two-way mirror in my bedroom, which provided constant monitoring of my room and was only revealed by the slow whirr of the surveillance camera lens as it adjusted its focus.
    Then one breakfast he sat with me, no longer apart, and said,
    “You’re looking much better.”
    I drank my tea carefully, as I drank all things carefully in that place, little sips to test for toxins, and replied, “I feel better. Thank you.”
    “It may please you to know that Dr Abel has been fired.”
    He said it so easily, newspaper folded on his lap, eyes half-running over the crossword clues, that I didn’t fully grasp his meaning at the first rendition. But the words had been spoken, so I said again, as a neutral child had once spoken to my father, “Thank you.”
    “I applaud his intentions,” went on Phearson, “but his methods were unsound. Would you like to see your wife?”
    I counted silently to ten before I dared give an answer. “Yes. Very much.”
    “She’s very distraught. She doesn’t know where you are, thinks you’ve run away. You can write to her. Put her mind at ease.”
    “I’d like that.”
    “There will be financial compensation for her. Maybe a trial for Dr Abel. Maybe a petition, who knows?”
    “I just want to see her again,” I replied.
    “Soon,” he replied. “We’ll aim to take up as little of your time as possible.”
    “Who are you?”
    He threw the newspaper aside at this with a sudden energy, as if he’d been pent up waiting for that question. “Franklin Phearson, sir,” he replied, thrusting out a flat pink hand. “An honour to make your acquaintance at last, Dr August.”
    I looked at the hand and didn’t shake it. He retreated it with a little flap, as if it had never been intended for shaking at all but was rather an exercise in muscle relaxation. The newspaper was retrieved from the tabletop and flicked open to the domestic news, which promised strike action yet to come. I ran my spoon over the surface of my cereal and watched the milk ripple beneath it.
    “So,” he said at last, “you know the future.”
    I put my spoon down carefully on the side of my bowl, wiped my lips, folded my hands and sat back in my chair.
    He wasn’t looking at me, eyes fixed on the newspaper.
    “No,” I replied. “It was a psychotic episode.”
    “Some break.”
    “I was ill. I need help.”
    “Yeap,” he sang out, snapping the pages of his newspaper taut with a merry flick of the wrist. “That’s bu-ll-shit.” He enjoyed the word so much it brought a quiver of a smile to the corners of his lips, and he seemed almost to consider saying it again, just to savour the experience.
    “Who are you?” I asked.
    “Franklin Phearson, sir. I said.”
    “Who do you represent?”
    “Why can’t I represent myself?”
    “But you don’t.”
    “I represent a number of interested agencies, organisations, nations, parties–whatever you want to call them. The good guys, basically. You want to help the good guys, don’t you?”
    “And how would I help, if I could?”
    “Like I said, Dr August, you know the future.”
    A silence brushed between us like a cobweb in a gloomy house. He no longer pretended to read his newspaper, and I unashamedly studied his face. At length I said, “There are some obvious questions I need to ask. I suspect I know the answers, but as we are being so frank with each other…”
    “Of course. This should be an honest relationship.”
    “If I was to attempt to leave, would I be allowed?”
    He grinned. “Well, that’s an interesting one. Permit me to answer with a question of