Crooked Vows by John Watt

anyone. As I see it, the world was a tiny bit worse off for what he did.’ Macpherson shakes his head, looking puzzled. ‘I’m not entirely sure why I’m talking about this. It’s not really part of my brief, not my business, you might think. And you’d possibly be right. But I think it might turn out in the end to be relevant. Relevant, perhaps, to a rather different problem from the immediate one of your missing memories. But apart from that, this story is alien, I mean unfamiliar territory, to me. I’m intrigued. In a philosophical way, if you like. The thinking behind it puzzles me.
    â€˜And vowing never to eat another apple. Why would anyone admire that? What’s the good of it? Who gets the benefit to set against his loss? If he’d vowed to grow apples to give to people who couldn’t afford to buy them, then I see the point. The virtue, if you want to be formal about it. The goodness. The world would be better off for what he was doing. And all that self-inflicted starvation and thirst. What’s the point there? Who benefits from it? He almost died of thirst. Is that supposed to be a good thing? Who was it good for?’
    The doctor sits back in his chair looking up at the ceiling for a few moments. When his gaze swivels down again to Thomas his voice has a more decisive tone.
    â€˜While I’m speaking I’m beginning to get a clearer notion of what it was that disturbed me about your book. The author seemed to write about this man’s suffering with an attitude of … I’m not sure how to describe his attitude. There’s admiration there, certainly, which I don’t understand at all, and something else. He seems to be fascinated by the man’s pain. He celebrates it. There’s none of the sympathetic human reaction that we were talking about earlier.’
    He shakes his head again, but his expression and his tone lighten. He smiles his slight, controlled smile. ‘Still, I think I worked out from the dates in the story that your saint lived well into his nineties. So it seems that all that self-inflicted torture didn’t do him too much harm. Physically, at least.’
    Thomas, still sitting back in the capacious leather chair, has been feeling the tension gradually building in the muscles of his shoulders and neck. Voices buzz in his head with words and phrases from a hundred sermons and homilies and readings. Self-denial. Mortification of the flesh. I chastise my body and bring it into subjection. He has never heard it questioned that this is saintly behaviour, pleasing to God. This questioning, it’s a voice from another world. There must be answers to all these questions. But among all the voices from his own world he can’t find a response that he feels able to give to this man. He opens his mouth to reply but no words come.
    Macpherson resumes, ‘Let’s spend the remaining few minutes trying a different approach. Dreams. I asked you last time to make a note of any dream that was vivid enough to make an impression on you. Have you had one over the week that you can describe to me?’
    Thomas relaxes back into his chair a little. He can’t see how this will help in the task of recovering his memories, but it doesn’t seem so challenging.
    â€˜Yes. I had one a few nights ago that I can tell you about. It’s a dream that I remember having before.’
    â€˜Very good. All the better probably, if it’s a recurrent dream.’ Macpherson sits back in his chair. ‘Go ahead. I’m ready to listen.’
    â€˜In my dream I’m swimming. Or floating, really. I’m not actually moving through the water, though. I have the feeling that I’m out near the seminary, the first seminary I mean, when I was fourteen or fifteen. But nothing in my dream looks like the real place.
    â€˜The river is on one side of the seminary property; you may have driven past it. But the water