Memory

This started as a 5k word limited story in a project about the possible side effects of medication, but it didn't feel right when I finished, so I rewrote and extended it. It's fiction, so... please, don't try anything in it.

A MEMORY

(The sweet, sweet, memories you gave to me

You can't beat the memories you gave to me...)

Memories are made of this...

Sung by Dean Martin.

It was true.

I hadn't believed a word of it when my nephew assured me he would be getting honours in his final year at Oxford, all due to two pills. After spending eighty per cent of his time there in the pub or some girl's bed, the randy pillock would need a mountain of drugs to get a first in astrophysics. And even then, only if he could sell that pill mountain for enough money to bribe someone into giving him a pass.

"Rubbish," I offered in my role as supportive uncle. "Cobblers! Pull the other leg; it's got bells on. Mind my bollocks when you do, though."

Sean laughed as he always did at my weird sayings. Then he smiled. "I knew that would be your reaction, Uncle Dee. That's why I brought a couple for you to try."

"Oh, please," I scoffed. My name was Daniel, but the nieces and nephew had shortened it. I liked it. "Salt and sugar pills are not magical."

"Then why not try them? The effects last just over two days, as far as I can tell, and Aunt Alice and mum will be away for the weekend. Perfect time to sample some actual brainpower."

I looked at him suspiciously. "Did you just call me stupid?"

He laughed again. "Hey, if the cap fits, wear it -- even if the cap has a big "D" on it. For Uncle Dee, of course."

"Sure it is. Now you call me a dunce. Your Christmas wishes are floating out the window, Sean. Wave them goodbye... goodbye... goodbye..."

He held his hand out. The pills on his palm were very ordinary. One looked like an aspirin substitute, and the other had a shiny yellow coating. It looked like a Pez.

"Sweets? You're trying to con me with sweets?"

"If they're just sweets, then take them."

I took them hesitantly. I knew it was a joke, but... "Sean, I hope you're not trying to get me high. I don't want to think I can fly or talk to mushrooms from Mars -- that crap you guys see when you take drugs. Why would you do that?"

"I don't do drugs, Uncle Dee. That would wipe me out of University so quickly."

He shrugged. "Look, I took these a couple of times and studied hard. You wouldn't believe how much you can take in... and retain. And that was important to me. If I took something that made me more brainy, that would be nice. However, I admit I haven't studied nearly enough to get the info, so that's why being able to improve my memory works out so well."

"More brainy? That's a low bar to set."

He gave me another of those wry grins and ignored the dig. "When someone whispered about it, I knew it was a remote chance, but it was all I had. And it worked. I will get that First and the trip to Japan. Dad is probably gonna be pissed about offering that to me as an incentive."

"Well, if you do it, I think Alan will be happy enough. A First from Manchester is nothing to sneeze at. He'll be unbearable, going around bragging and crowing non-stop if you do."

He hugged me. "Take them, uncle Dee. You'll thank me."

His words were utterly wrong and wholly right -- both at the same time.

When he left, I spent half an hour trying to match up the pills on the internet. In the end, one seemed to be a weight-loss concoction -- a shiny appetite suppressant tablet that had poor reviews from dieters. The other was a drug to suppress arthritis, which bothered me a little more. But there was only one, and Dad took five at a time every week for his bad knees. His were a different make, but they were the same strength, so one tablet didn't seem to be wildly dangerous.

Alice wouldn't be home for the weekend, so it was just me closing up the house for the night. As I got my customary glass of water, I spotted the pills on the kitchen counter and impulsively swept them up and popped them into my mouth.

Apart from waking up to a long, drawn-out burp followed closely by an enormous fart that left me feeling like a deflated balloon and forced me to open the window, I felt okay. So I went back to sleep.

In the morning, my first thought when I awoke was, "Well, I made it through the night."

That thought pops up now and again as fellows my age keel over with heart attacks and are put to bed with a shovel. I decided to take another online look at those pills' ingredients and side effects, just in case I had to call Poisons Control.

The two-hour session I spent on the net was interesting. I started on the PC, then, when the paging seemed so slow -- despite the high-speed internet access I had for gaming -- I opened up the internet app on my phone. Finally, I fetched my wife's tablet as well, scanning all three screens almost simultaneously. My reading rate was incredible.

From my research on that subject, it turns out that reading speed is limited only by how quickly the brain can process an image. After all, when you see a page, everything is there in front of you as a picture -- every single word clear -- but you still move from word to word and read on only when your brain sends a signal that it has processed and stored the information. That's why speed readers sometimes go faster than their brains can manage and have to reread a section. It's also why we can get so completely lost in a story. When that happens, the brain works incredibly hard to interpret the information and send it to a mental image run by the imagination, which doesn't leave enough power to process peripheral distractions properly.

I read alternately from the PC, phone and tablet as if each glance was a frame in a movie reel. My fingers worked like I was sending morse code, and each frame froze in my mind. I went from reading about chemical compounds to researching how various compounds and molecules reacted with each other in different circumstances. When I stopped after an hour, I was exhausted and starving.

I worked out how the pills acted during a very substantial full English breakfast -- my appetite effectively demonstrating why the diet pill wasn't popular. The arthritis drug lowered autoimmunity slightly, as arthritis can be caused by an immune reaction to the body repairing itself. That opened the channel for the antidepressants in the diet pill to activate and stimulate the sections of the brain related to sight and processing images and memory.

Sean had been right. It was all true.

I took a nap for an hour, woke up fresh, and went back on the net, wandering as the will took me. I went from reading the history of my town to the geography of India, from local events to historical castles, basic economics to the rules of the stock market, and so much in between.

A massive lunch got me researching to understand my appetite, and I realised my brain was burning calories by the bucketful. However, food was relatively cheap, and with time available limited to two days, minutes were the real expense. I took several cuts out of the freezer to defrost.

Halfway through the afternoon, my phone pinged several times. I reluctantly checked it and found a couple of messages from Alice. She and Rhoda had pooled their money to buy an antique side-table they hoped to resell for a good profit but had wiped out their budget in the process, so they would be just wandering around window shopping until the following night's train home.

A picture was attached; a small, brown table with thin, overworked legs and a couple of drawers tucked away under the top. It looked antique. It also looked ugly as hell. It certainly looked out of place in the hotel room the two of them sharing, which appeared to be furnished with standard 'cheap-as-we-can-get' hotel furniture that looked worn and tatty. More interesting was the 19th-century town clock seen through the window and what looked like Morris dancers in the square in front of it.

Ah well, at least they would have some entertainment, although I doubted that Morris dancing -- men dressed as yokels with bells on their legs dancing in circles and seemingly threatening each other with sticks -- could be classed as entertainment. I snickered to myself.

As far as I could tell, they had yet to profit more than five per cent on anything they bought, but they really loved antiquing, and the two of them spent a weekend every couple of months buying tat and trying to resell it as treasure. I didn't mind, it gave me a weekend free of husband jobs, and the two of them were always excited and happy with the possibility that they might discover a lost Chippendale or Hepplewhite.

Shaking my head fondly at my wife's eternal hope, I researched her 'antique' table. I could flick through pages online in seconds and remember each one. I found a match and discovered it was likely worth around twenty pounds -- a 1970s knock-off of a cheap French style. An antique shop in another town was selling an identical one for thirty, including delivery costs. The sisters-in-law would be taking a significant loss on this one.

I sighed. The two of them loved their treasure hunting, but it seemed to cost way more than it brought in, and the trash they couldn't sell always ended up gracing our house. Then I brightened up. Making a mistake like that meant that Alice would soon try and make it up to me with plenty of loving, which was always a good thing. She'd be a little quiet and depressed for a while but then start to try and coax money out of me for their next weekend. Hell, I didn't mind too much. She could have taken up girl's nights out, and that I would have objected to, which would, in turn, have made for an unhappy wife. Antiquing with the sister-in-law was about as dangerous as a night at a Bingo hall.

I didn't mind subsidising her hobby to an extent and told her so from the start. But as she and Rhoda drove to-and-fro to the hundreds of tiny villages to see if they had any decent shops, I ended up with a massive fuel bill. When I objected, they worked out it would be cheaper for them to share a room at one of the inns in an area and use that as a base. One night became two every three months, and the pair of them were like happy hens with a clutch of chicks. Alan, my brother, was a bit of a tightwad and had moaned for a while, but Rhoda had seemingly made it worth it somehow, as he smiled a whole lot more and stopped grumbling about having to share costs. Of course, I couldn't guess how she made him that way. Right!

This gamble would cost the pair of them their weekend's four hundred pound budget for the dubious pleasure of window shopping and Morris dancing. I shook my head and laughed again.

I considered what to research next. If Sean was right, I had an evening and a day, and I didn't want to waste it. At the same time, my brain felt a little heavy, a little full. In the end, I grabbed my coat off the coat rack and went for a walk.

It was a cold, fresh day, and I was glad for the coat, repaying its warmth by distractedly throwing it back on the coat rack when I got home again. As always, it fell to the floor as soon as I let go. This always annoyed me because, as a coat rack, it made a fine brick. The hooks were too short, and coats always fell to the floor unless hung carefully.

I remembered seeing something very similar in my earlier search and wondered how much Alice could get for it if I put my foot down and insisted she get rid of it. Maybe she'd make a profit on this piece, which would be nice. Weirdly, when I got to the computer and started looking at more pictures of antiques, I couldn't really remember any details of the coat rack. I went back, stared at it for a while and then returned to my desk to try again.

Nothing.

I was devastated that the pills had worn off so quickly. I loved this self-education exercise, and the thought that I'd wasted so much of it by sleeping and eating left me disappointed.

I took a picture of the coat rack on my phone, deciding to prop it next to the monitor as a reference. But once I looked at the picture, I found that it was suddenly clear in my memory. Puzzled, I went and found a piece from their last weekend -- an oversized mug with a picture of the Royal Wedding on it. Like I said, low-quality tat. I turned my back and couldn't remember much detail apart from the faces. I used the phone camera, looked at the result, and that image also became crystal clear in my mind.

Interesting!

It seemed that pictures and scenes from real life were processed differently, or different brain parts handled the two. The medication hadn't prematurely worn off after all!

Back at the PC, I looked at images of coat racks, the pages flickering past to a tap on the mouse. There were three photos of the one in question from three different shops, so the chances of it being a rare antique were so far beyond low that shark shit would be sky-high.

My brain made a connection. One of the shops on the Google images page advertising the coat rack was the same one hawking Alice's side table. I shook my head; there's a sucker born every minute, and that shop obviously knew it. I looked at the picture of the mug.

This time the scroll wheel on the mouse almost heated up as I span it, the page of thumbnails continually flowing upwards. There was the cup. And lo, there was the name of a shop supplying it. Three things bought by the adventurous entrepreneurs were all available from the same shop: Taylor Antiques in Harlington.

Once is interesting, twice is a coincidence, thrice is worth investigating. If the women were visiting different areas each weekend away looking for rare and unique items, surely the chances of buying three things also available from one shop were pretty remote. And if their purchases were available everywhere, they must have recognised that they couldn't make a profit.

I went hunting through the house for other things my wife hadn't yet managed to palm off onto some other sucker. Within minutes, I photographed a jewellery box that played a tune while a ballerina rotated whenever the lid was lifted, a brass snuffbox with a decent pattern etched into the top, and a supposedly Victorian tailor's dummy that now graced our spare room.

The jewellery box turned out to be so common that I could have bought three within five kilometres of my house, while the other two were not quite so common. But all three were advertised on the website of... Taylor Antiques.

It was distinctly odd because the shop was in Harlington in Bedfordshire, and the hotel the women had booked was outside Ashford in Kent, where there was a plethora of antique shops. The two weren't that far apart -- a hundred miles or so -- but the whole of Greater London was between them.

Something was distinctly fishy.

I decided to let my brain mull over things in the background while thinking about something completely different. I closed the internet search and booted up WOW, to tank for a while. I wanted to see whether I could play better with these pills.

Sadly, I couldn't. I knew the keys and buttons to press, knew where to move my character, even when and how the boss would be most vulnerable. But my fingers wouldn't cooperate.

Bugger. My newborn dreams of playing in the professional gaming leagues crisped and turned to ash. Ah, well. Back to the puzzle.

Google Maps was the next stop. Harlington wasn't big by any means, not really much more than a hamlet with grandiose visions of becoming a village. The pictures from that page showed a dreary little cluster of houses, pubs and shops, although the clock tower on the small village hall was unique. The picture didn't show it face on, but there was enough detail to identify it as the same one in the picture Alica and Rhoda had sent me. So why the hell would they be there?

There was something about the name of the village, a nagging something that my old, standard memory recognised but refused to detail. After trying various things to poke my old, slow brain, I finally checked the phone prefix online and found hundreds of pages of names listed within that phone area. With a sigh, I started clicking.

Luckily, it didn't take long to process them. When I reached it, I was almost sure I knew what was going on when one name suddenly seemed to jump out.

TALBOT, C. Mr... 1472 Sundon Road, Harlington. 809-476

Talbot... Chris Talbot; him or his brother Callum. The Talbot Twins, better known as the Tosspot Twins when we were still at school, were would-be hardcases. They were low-level, low-class shitbags who had bullied their way through life, even challenging my brother and me by trying to take our girlfriends in our penultimate year at school. They were two years older than Alan and three older than me but were a year behind me in school, having spent a couple of years in a reformatory.

Alan and I hadn't backed down, and the showdown had taken place behind the bike sheds. As always happened when a fight secretly took place at school, the area was packed with an overenthusiastic audience. The Tosspots were treating it like some sort of championship fight and seemed to be copying Rocky Balboa, shadow-boxing while running around in little circles.

Michael and I just watched them from the other end of the open area in the centre of the crowd. We'd worked out a plan, and acting like five-year-olds on a sugar rush wasn't part of it. The two girls at the heart of this mess were amongst a gaggle of girls to one side, in the neutral area between the two factions -- which was disappointing. It would have been a little more encouraging to know that they, at least, were supporting our side.

Now, the twins were big, with hard home-grown muscles pumped up by years of forced labour on their stepfather's farm. So, when they attacked, we wisely cheated and pulled out the cricket bats we'd hidden in a bush, and after we'd scored a few boundaries, they no longer wanted to fight.

I was no brainbox. I sold telecoms equipment, mainly to government departments who already knew precisely what they wanted. Effectively, all they really needed was someone to hold their hands while they signed the contracts after wining and dining them, which didn't take much brainpower.

No, I wasn't an intellectual. But I could take a good guess at what was going on here. The pattern was pretty straightforward.

I thought for a while and then phoned my brother.

After some discussion, Alan agreed with my conclusions. Our wives were cheating on us with the Talbots and had been for a couple of years. I didn't tell him about Sean's pills; he didn't need anything more to worry about. Besides, I was the cool uncle, and I was never going to shop my nephew for giving me something as cool as an eidetic memory -- the perfect recall of an image after seeing it for just a fraction of a second.

I snorted at that thought. I hadn't even known the word eidetic when I started my research that morning.

My older brother was livid. My feelings puzzled me, however. I was angry at Alice at her cheating, especially for regularly shacking up with the Tosspots who were so beneath her in class and quality, but I wasn't raging. I was hurt but not devastated. And I felt profound disappointment in her choices, but not despair. All of which I had presumed would be the raging emotions I'd feel if the situation ever occurred. Perhaps the magic medicine damped down emotions. In which case, maybe I needed to let things process in my brain once again.

I didn't feel like online gaming again, and the rain had stopped, so I wandered down to the shops and bought a pint of milk instead. I found myself staring at the shelves of beer and really wanted a litre or two of Newcastle's best brown ale. But I also didn't want to take any chances of mucking up the effect of the pills. Sadly, I went home to a cup of tea and a few chocolate digestives to dip in it, lost in my thoughts.