The Paperchase

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THE NEWS OF MY UNCLE Patrick’s death came as a shock, not because it was sudden, but because I had assumed he’d been dead for ages.

Patrick dead. Father was all the telegram said. My first reaction was: Patrick who? And then I remembered.

If I’d given him any thought over the preceding years I’m sure I would have realised he was still alive, albeit in a world that had ceased to bear any relation to mine. It’s just that I’d been doing my best to forget everything about my family, and though I got Christmas presents every year from Aunt Judith in Boston, I was succeeding pretty well at it.

Of course I remembered Patrick — he’d just been tucked away in a distant compartment of my mind like an odd sock: present but incomplete. After all, a person doesn’t slip out of the world like a blip off a radar screen. A life ends with a death. The telegram was conclusive: it completed him. Patrick dead.

And then a strange thing happened: the news of his death resurrected him in my imagination: the Patrick that was in me, the faint but indelible stamp of him that was me. Whole sections of my memory became active for the first time in years. It was like discovering a false bottom in a suitcase; or that my tiny flat in Clapham had grown an extra storey overnight. I thought about Patrick and his crazy old house on Ionia and, strangest of all, I began to miss him — a man I had not clapped eyes on for almost twenty years.

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