hunting and building railroads. It was all in keeping with what I knew of him.
When I grew up, and was thinking for myself, I knew that what I had been told was probably untrue, that Billy's disappearance was almost certainly explicable to the real world, but even so the glamorous image of him remained.
It was only after my father died, and I was having to go through his papers, that I came across the truth. I found a letter from the Governor of Durham Prison, saying that Uncle William had been admitted to the hospital wing; a second letter, dated a few weeks later, reported that he had died. I made some inquiries through the Home Office, and discovered that William had been serving a twelve-year sentence for armed robbery. The crime for which he had been convicted was committed within a few days of that crazy, thrilling afternoon in summer.
Even as I wrote about him, though, there was still a powerful part of my imagination that had Uncle Billy away in some exotic place, grappling with man-eaters or skiing down mountain-sides.
Both versions of him were true, but in different qualities of truth. One was sordid, disagreeable and final. The other had imaginative plausibility, in my personal terms, and furthermore had the distinctly attractive bonus that it allowed for Billy to return one day.
To discuss matters like this in my writing I had to be at a stage removed from myself. There was a duplication of myself involved, perhaps even a triplication.
There was I who was writing. There was I whom I could remember. And there was I of whom I wrote, the protagonist of the story.
The difference between factual truth and imaginative truth was constantly on my mind.
Memory was still fundamental, and I had daily reminders of its fallibility. I learnt, for instance, that memory itself did not present a narrative. Important events were remembered in a sequence ordered by the subconscious, and it was a constant effort to reassemble them into my story.
I broke my arm when I was a small child, and there were photographs to remind me in the albums Felicity had sent. But was this accident before or after I started school, before or after the death of my maternal grandmother?
All three events had had a profound effect on me at the time, all three had been early lessons in the unfriendly, random nature of the world. As I wrote, I tried to recall the order in which they had occurred, but this was not possible; memory failed me. I was forced to reinvent the incidents, working them into a continuous but false order so that I could convey why they had influenced me.
Even aids to memory were unreliable, and my broken arm was a surprising example of this.
It was my left arm that was fractured. This I know beyond doubt, as one does not misremember such things, and to this day I am slightly weaker in that arm than in the other. Such memory must he beyond question. And yet, the only objective record of the injury was in a short sequence of black-and-white photographs taken during a family holiday. There, in several pictures taken in sunlit countryside, was a mournful-looking infant whom I recognized as myself, his right arm carried in a white sling.
I came across these photographs at about the same time as I was writing about the incident, and the discovery came as something of a shock. For a few moments I was confused and confounded by the revelation, as it seemed to be, and I was forced to question every other assumption I had been making about memories. Of course, I soon realized what must have happened: the processor had apparently printed the entire spool of film from the wrong side of the negative. As soon as I examined the prints more closely--at first, all I had looked at was myself--I saw a number of background details which confirmed this: car registration numbers printed in reverse, traffic driving on the right, clothes buttoned the wrong way round, and so on.
It was all perfectly explicable, but it taught me two more things about myself: that I was becoming obsessed with checking and authenticating what hitherto I had taken for granted, and that I could rely on nothing from the past.
I came to a second pause in my work. Although I was satisfied with my new way of working, each new discovery was a setback. I was becoming aware of the deceptiveness of prose. Every sentence contained a lie.
I began a process of revision, going back through my completed pages and rewriting certain passages numerous times. Each successive version subtly improved on life. Every time I rewrote a _part_ of the truth I came nearer to a whole truth.
When I was at last able to continue where I had left off, I soon came across a new difficulty.
As my story progressed from childhood to adolescence, then to young adulthood, other people entered the narrative. These were not family, but outsiders, people who came into my life and who, in some cases, were still a part of it. In particular, there was a group of friends I had known since university, and a number of women with whom I had had affairs. One of these, a girl named Alice, was someone I had been engaged to for several months. We had seriously intended to marry, but in the end it went wrong and we parted. Alice was now married to someone else, had two children, but was still a good and trusted friend. Then there was Gracia, whose effect on my life in recent years had been profound.
If I was to serve my obsessive need for truth then I had to deal with these relationships in some way. Every new friendship marked a moving on from the immediate past, and every lover had changed my outlook for better or worse in some way. Even though there was very little chance anyone mentioned in my manuscript would ever read it, I nevertheless felt inhibited by the fact that I still knew them.
Some of what I intended to say would he unpalatable, and I wanted to he free to describe my sexual experiences in detail, if not in intimate detail.
The simplest method would have been to change names, and fudge around the details of time and place in an attempt to make the people unrecognizable.
But this was not the sort of truth I was seeking to tell. Nor could it be done by simply leaving them out; these experiences had been important to me.
I discovered the solution at last by use of indirection. I invented new friends and lovers, giving them fictitious backgrounds and identities. One or two of them I brought forward from childhood, so to speak, implying that they had been lifelong friends, whereas in my real life I had lost contact with the other children I had grown up with. It made the narrative more of a piece, with a greater consistency in the story. Everything seemed to have coherence and significance.
Virtually nothing was wasted; every described event or character had some form of correlative elsewhere in the story.
