The Memory Book (26 page)

That day, just after the photo was taken, Mum went off in search of ice cream and left us alone, Dad sitting uncomfortably in his rented chair, watching me aimlessly shift the sand around.

‘Shall we build something?’ he said. I paused and looked over my shoulder, uncertain whether he was talking to me – he rarely talked to me directly. ‘A sandcastle,’ he clarified. ‘We’ll need to dig down deeper, or go nearer to the water, to reach firmer sand.’

I stood up and followed him as he walked, shoes and socks still on, down towards the shoreline, me trailing after him in my swimming costume. He picked his way in and out of the holidaymakers, through a patchwork of brightly coloured towels occupied by people who seemed at ease with their near nakedness, whatever their size and shape. It was my father, a dark patch
of sweat flowering between his shoulder blades, who looked incongruous and out of place. When we were a few feet from the gentle rush of the tide, he kneeled down on the damp sand and began to dig. I watched him for a while, and then I began to dig too, copying him as – without a bucket – he built a trench, a moat, and then from the excavated sand began to mould an incredibly intricate building, so delicate, so carefully constructed, that after a while I stopped trying to join in and simply sat on my heels and watched while he worked. Every now and then he’d glance up, as though he’d remembered I was there, but we didn’t talk. Mum must have come back from her ice cream hunt and spotted us there, playing together at the water’s edge, and decided not to interrupt us, because I never did get that ice cream. We weren’t playing, either: nothing about the process of creating that castle, with its fanciful turrets and ramparts, was about play. It was about making the best possible sandcastle. And even then, even at six years old, I understood that: I understood my dad, and I wanted to be like him.

When it was done, he rubbed the palms of his hands together, and climbed to his feet. I stood up and took up my position next to him, feeling awfully privileged to be there in that moment.

‘The secret,’ he told me, taking my hand, ‘is to know when to stop. And now, I think, is the right time to stop.’ And as if he had commanded it, which when I was six years old I believed that he had, the sea rushed in, filling the moat with water. We stood, side by side, hand in hand, and watched the rushing water gradually rise over our toes and ankles, taking a little piece of the castle each
time it went back out, until finally the foundations were washed away and it crumbled into nothing.

And then, without another word, we walked back to where Mum was sitting, and nothing more was said about ice cream. Later that night, in our little B&B, when Dad tucked me into the camp bed that had been put up at the bottom of their bed, I pretended to be asleep so I could listen to them talking about me.

‘It looked like you really connected with her today,’ Mum said, using a word that my father would have disparagingly described as ‘Californian’. ‘She’s a great girl, you know, full of ideas and thoughts, so creative. You should get her to tell you a story sometimes. I don’t know where she gets that imagination from. I know it’s not me.’

‘She is a very nice child,’ my dad had said, climbing into bed and switching off the light, although it couldn’t have been later than nine. And then, a long time later (I can’t be sure whether it was hours or minutes), I heard him say – although I’ve never been sure if it was a dream or real, but I think I heard him say, ‘She gets her imagination from me.’

And when I think of that castle, with its asymmetrical spires and arches, doorways and steps, all created for just a few moments of beauty, I think perhaps I did.

Gran sounds strained on the other end of the phone. Mum went AWOL again for the second time in two days, and Gran is shaken, frightened. I need to go home. I try to insist on coming home right then, but Gran won’t let me.

‘What difference will it make if you come home now?’ she says. ‘I’ve got Greg and Esther, who is such a little ray of sunshine in the middle of all of this. And since the last “escapade” at the library, she’s been calmer, more peaceful. Happy to be at home.’

‘Maybe we could take her to the library, now and then,’ I say. ‘Remember how she used to take me there three or four times a week when I was a little girl? Remember that time we went after school, and she started reading
A Christmas Carol
out loud to me, doing all the voices, scaring the crap out of me? Other people started to listen, too. They all thought it was some sort of event. And then librarian threw us out for
being disruptive. It’s a special place for her, and maybe it will help if we take her there.’

‘Yes,’ Gran said. ‘Although I wouldn’t put it past her to give me the slip in True Crime. You know, part of me is glad she’s fighting everything around her, even me. If she wasn’t fighting until the bitter end, she wouldn’t be my Claire. And she’s been writing in the memory book a lot. Page after page, like she’s on a deadline.’

‘When I get home, I’m going to get her novel out of the drawer and read it,’ I say. ‘Maybe it’s really good, Gran. Maybe we could get it published before she … Imagine how much she would love that!’

‘I don’t know, darling.’ Gran pauses. She only ever uses terms of endearment when she is about to say something sad. ‘If your mum had ever wanted it to be read, it would have been. The memory book, that’s the book that matters – that’s her life’s work.’

‘I’m glad it helps her,’ I say.

‘Her handwriting is unravelling, and it’s not always easy to tell what she is writing, but perhaps that doesn’t matter as long as she knows,’ Gran says.

‘And Greg, how is he?’ I ask.

‘Coping, working a lot, staying out of the house, because Claire is calmer when he’s not there.’

Before I spoke to Gran, I tried his mobile phone, but he didn’t answer. Sometimes I wish I had taken the trouble to make better friends with him, more quickly, so that now it
would be easier to talk to him. I thought I had all the time in the world – everyone always does. It’s a cliché, isn’t it, to suddenly become aware of your own mortality. I look out of the hotel window, and the life passing below me on the street. I feel very far away from home.

‘So, do you know what you are going to say?’ Gran asks me.

I haven’t told her about my failed first attempt, or about Zach from the bar sitting at my feet, apologising for something he has got nothing to do with. I’m embarrassed at how inept I am at this, even though this is a unique situation. All I can think about is that I am going to be a mother myself, and a really important big sister: a lynchpin. I have to go through with this, be that person, the person I need to be, whatever the outcome. Not some crappy girl who can’t string two sentences together. If I were my long-lost daughter, I’d tell myself to get lost.

‘You’ll be fine,’ Gran says, answering her own question when I don’t respond. ‘I bet the words will just come to you. Look at how clever you are.’

‘Gran, I’m an accidentally pregnant college dropout,’ I tell her.

‘Well, yes,’ she says. ‘Maybe, but an awfully clever one.’

When Gran has hung up, I finish breakfast in my room. I decided as soon as I arrived that I didn’t want to go down to breakfast and be the person sitting on her own in a corner of
the restaurant. I don’t want to go out at all, really – not back to the campus, or back to Paul Sumner. Today I know that he is taking tutorials in his office in the English Department. I’m not sure where his office is, but I am sure that I will more than likely be able to find it easily, and then it is just a matter of biding my time. I take care with how I look. After a shower, I dry my hair ever so slowly with the hotel dryer, so that it falls in smooth waves. Putting on just a little make-up, I leave my eyeliner untouched on the glass shelf in the bathroom. I look into my own eyes, for once bare of the outline I have painted on them for the last five years at least. I used to look in the mirror and wonder who I looked like – what mystery person made this face – but I see it now as clear as day. Her nose, her chin, her mouth. And even though her eyes are blue, and mine are almost black, I have her eyes too. It’s got nothing to do with the pigment, only what’s behind them. It’s thanks to her I know I can do what seems impossible.

I smile as the lift takes me down, imagining Mum breaking out and running away to the library. I know it’s been hard on Gran, what with Mum scaling fences and sneaking under tripwires and laser beams. But somehow it makes me feel invincible, too.

As the doors slide open I see Zach sitting opposite the lift, reading a paper. I press the ‘close doors’ button again several times, and the person who is standing outside waiting to go up in the lift repeatedly presses the ‘call lift’ button. As our
thumbs battle it out for maybe fifteen seconds, Zach looks up and sees me.

‘Caitlin!’ He calls out my name as though we are old friends. Short of going back upstairs with the man I have already annoyed, there is nothing I can do to avoid him.

Reluctantly, I concede defeat, stepping out of the lift as the victor barges past me, muttering under his breath. I stay where I am and let Zach, if that is even really his name, come to me, because there is a CCTV camera pointing right at the lift doors.

‘Are you stalking me?’ I ask him, although admittedly it does seem preposterous that a man wearing black-and-white-checked skinny jeans, a wine-coloured shirt and yet another waistcoat would try to stalk anyone, apart from maybe the person who told him those trousers were a good idea. All he’s missing is an ill-advised trilby.

‘No! Well, a bit.’ He offers me a small folded-up square of paper. ‘I found this. You left it on the bar. I’m sorry, but I read it.’

I take the piece of paper. I don’t need to look at it to know that it is my list.

‘So, now you know a little more about a complete stranger who means nothing to you, so what?’ I say. ‘You just turn up at my hotel, in a textbook example of extreme weirdness?’

‘I wanted to make sure you are OK,’ Zach says. ‘I mean,
yesterday, it must have been hard for you, to see your father that way, without him knowing about you. Especially … you know, in … um …’

‘In my condition? Why is it that men just can’t say the word “pregnant”?’ I raise an eyebrow. I cannot work him out. What is he doing here? What on earth is in it for him? ‘Look, are you some sort of religious nutter?’ I ask him. ‘Is this about getting me into a cult, or something? Because I’ve read about it, how they get good-looking people to go and flirt with the vulnerable, and the next thing you know you’re living in the middle of Kansas married to a man with a beard and sixteen sister-wives.’

‘So, you think I’m good-looking, then?’ Zach grins and I blush at once, which infuriates me, because despite the fact that he dresses like a popstar who shops at Topman, he is undeniably attractive – which makes me even more cross, because I am quite obviously not in any position to be finding boys attractive, especially strange boys who turn up announced, for no apparent reason.

‘Oh, my God, what are you doing here?’ I ask him again, exasperated with myself as much as him. ‘What business of yours can it possibly be?’

‘It’s not, I suppose,’ Zach says. He looks awkward and embarrassed. ‘I thought … you know, you’re far away from home and pregnant, and you’ve never met your dad. I just thought that … you maybe could use a friend.’

‘You’re a pervert,’ I say. ‘You are one of those perverts that
fancies pregnant women. You’re a cult-joining, pregnant-woman-fancying pervert.’

‘You don’t meet a lot of nice people, do you?’ Zach frowns and smiles at the same time.

‘Don’t feel sorry for me!’ I order him, with one outstretched finger, raising my voice so that the people on the front desk look up.

‘Look, why don’t we have a coffee, in there.’ He nods towards the bar. ‘And, as an ice-breaker, you can tell me your other theories on my psychosis, and maybe neither of us will get arrested or thrown out for causing a commotion, and you’ll see I’m just a bloke who is, oddly, pretty decent.’

He seems so easy, so happy in his own skin, as though turning up unannounced at the hotel of a person you have only met fleetingly, with some unasked-for offer of solidarity, is the most normal thing in the whole wide world. I can’t make sense of his being here, apparently just for me.

‘You don’t understand it, do you?’ he says, thinking for a moment. ‘Look, I’m not from a cult, I’m not a pervert who’s only into pregnant women – although I would say that finding pregnant women attractive isn’t necessarily intrinsically wrong. But my mum brought me up to be really, really nice. She had this crazy obsession with turning me into a decent sort of person, one who gives a damn about the world and the people in it. I went through a rebellious phase when I was fifteen, and for about four years did exactly the opposite of everything she’d taught me to, and lost a lot of people who
cared about me, did some stuff I shouldn’t have, and then I realised that life was miserable – that it sucked. I finally got that my mum was right. The world is a nicer place when you care about people. Which is kind of sappy, but there you go. I’m a sappy bloke.’

‘Is your mum Mother Teresa?’ I ask him.

‘No.’ He smiles. ‘She died, actually. When I was fifteen. Lung Cancer. She never smoked, but she worked in pubs most of her life, so …’

‘My mum is dying,’ I say. ‘Well, not dying, exactly. She has early-onset familial Alzheimer’s, and there’s a fifty per cent chance that one day I might get it too.’

There’s silence – just a beat when nothing happens, except the chatter in the hotel lobby and the dim rush of traffic outside the building.

‘You’re having a really stressful time,’ he says. And it’s not a question, or a platitude: it’s just a statement of fact and, for some reason, hearing someone else say the words out loud is quite calming. Yes, it helps: to acknowledge that I am having a really stressful time. I feel better.

‘So, do you want a coffee?’ I ask him. ‘You can help me plan how I introduce myself to my dad.’