The Kingdoms

there was no way to find out without surgery, and the mortality rate was so high it was more like a very expensive execution. The good news was that there had been no more amnesia bouts, so it probably wasn’t going to be fatal. The doctor delivered all this in the arch way of a person who didn’t believe for a minute that Joe had a problem at all. M. Saint-Marie lodged a formal complaint against the doctor for being a prick.
It didn’t matter as much as it could have, the not remembering. M. Saint-Marie was sweet and even more chickeny than Joe had thought at first. Alice he was never really sure of, but M. Saint-Marie said that was only to be expected. Alice was supposed to have married Joe’s brother, but Toby had been killed in action near Glasgow six months ago; and marrying Joe instead, it seemed, had been the only way to escape her horrible mistress and stay in the household of sedate, untroublesome M. Saint-Marie, who had only agreed to buy her on some kind of spousal licence Joe didn’t understand but which would have been void if she didn’t marry someone.
Joe turned that information over and over for a long time, but he still couldn’t remember a brother or the wedding.
He was glad of Alice and M. Saint-Marie. The outside world made him nervous. Joe knew Londres, and he didn’t. He could navigate well enough, and he knew where all the Métro stations were and how to buy tickets and all the boring necessary stuff – but he didn’t know street names or station names, and the first time M. Saint-Marie asked him to go up to the market for groceries, he had a nasty bolt of real fear. Saint-Marie saw it.
‘Oh, Joe,’ he said. ‘You’re not going by yourself; you couldn’t anyway, it’s illegal. You’re going with Henrique from across the road; you know, Mme Finault’s kitchen slave? You can look after each other.’
‘Oh, right,’ Joe managed, relieved. Henrique was an easily worried German and they chatted sometimes if they were putting out the washing at the same time, mainly about an ongoing fight Henrique’s mistress was having with someone else’s mistress about local council elections and whether or not it was going to escalate to the point that Henrique would have to find out how to get red wine out of silk.
M. Saint-Marie showed him an official-looking card, with spaces for stamps. Joe’s name was printed at the top, and a long slave’s registration number. ‘So, this is a Responsibility Card. What you do is, you show it to the newsagent – her stall is on the corner of the market, Henrique knows where – and she gives you a stamp to show you got there safely. If anything happens to a slave, you see, and they turn up lost, the gendarmes have a look at the Responsibility Card to see where they’ve been. And it’s got my name and address on it, so they’ll know where you belong.’
Joe nodded. ‘Like a passport.’
‘Exactly.’ M. Saint-Marie rubbed the small of Joe’s back. ‘We shan’t lose you again. And don’t worry about forgetting. You can’t buy anything until you show the stall-owners the stamp. And on the back here – that’s the official list of things you’re not allowed to buy. No alcohol and nothing sharp. I mean, not that there’s anything like that on your shopping list, but you know.’ Joe saw him scramble for a reason that was nothing to do with trying to escape. Saint-Marie had been contorting himself into knots to make sure Joe knew he didn’t think that was what had happened. ‘If kids ask you to get something for them, or something like that.’
‘Right.’
‘Good boy.’ He grasped Joe’s arms, his eyes watery. ‘Sure you’ll be all right with Henrique?’
Joe smiled. He could see why Alice hated it, but in the state of mind he was in lately, it was good to know that there would be plenty of people making sure he was in the right place and properly accounted for. ‘I will.’
‘Wonderful. Here’s the list. If you’re not back in an hour, I’ll call the gendarmes out to look for you. Give me a kiss, lovely boy.’
Joe did as he was told, though he wanted to duck away. Up close, Saint-Marie was like crêpe paper someone had scrunched up, ironed, and then left out in the sun too long. He smelled of old cologne, and it had a way of sticking to you a good while after you’d touched him. Idiotic to get on his wrong side, though. The gendarmes were never far away.
Henrique was unsympathetic. His mistress wanted unreasonable things all the time and he would have been very grateful, he said, if all she’d wanted was the odd peck on the cheek. He could swap if Joe wanted, but darkly, he opined that Joe would want Saint-Marie back on pain of death after he’d had a week trying to find where in God’s name you could buy hummingbird down for a doll’s-house cushion.
‘Mallard ducks have got feathers the same colour,’ Joe said, which surprised him. He was still getting to know himself, and he hadn’t realised he was that crafty.
Henrique told him that if he was too sharp he’d cut himself, but Joe caught him looking speculatively into the butcher’s window.
On the wall of the butcher’s shop, there was graffiti in English. It said,
WHERE IS EVERYONE??
Joe had a strange drop right in his stomach. He didn’t know what did the dropping, but some internal lift-shaft had just gone wrong. ‘What does that mean?’
Henrique only glanced at it. ‘Uh. Crackpots,’ he said crossly. ‘It’s election time. You know what happened to you, the epilepsy, and then the remembering things wrong? Happens to a lot of people. Except some of them are too stupid to understand what epilepsy is. They think they’re missing relatives and the government has drugged them and erased all the records.’
‘Could they have,