The Umbrella Man (Inspector Samuel Tay #2)

by Jake Needham

people had memories of things they didn’t really recall. He had come to believe everyone’s memories were more dream than remembrance. A few recollections of moments that were genuine connected by other moments that were entirely imaginary. He had memories like that himself. It was as if he had found pieces of discarded film lying around in the cutting room of his mind and then worked them up into a coherent narrative by sticking a few bits in between them. That was the thing about the past. You carried it with you as a jumble of remembrance and imagining. But once you knew that, and once you accepted that some of your memories weren’t real, how could you hope to understand your past? You might even tell yourself it doesn’t matter whether you understand your past because it is… well, past. Dead and buried. Why does it matter now how much of what we remember is true? Why does it matter whether we can separate the truth of our past from what we have merely imagined? It matters because the past is not really past. Just when you least expect it, the past returns for you. You can never bury the past. It is always there, just waiting for you to turn your back. And when you do, the fingers of the past rise up out of the ground right at your feet and wrap themselves around your ankle.

Men simply turned into fumbling jerks in front of beautiful women, didn’t they? Did women know that? Yes, of course they did. The beautiful ones used it against the men they met, and those that weren’t beautiful hated men for acting the way they did toward the ones that were.

If an afterlife existed, Tay had often thought, hell would not be a place of roaring fires and cackling demons. It would be a desk and a telephone and no one ever returning your calls for all eternity. In other words, it would be pretty much like the life Tay had now on earth.