The Memory Book (7 page)

You can see how he didn’t bother with my name. No ‘Dear Claire’. ‘I enjoyed our conversation on Saturday night,’ was his opening line. Our conversation. I thrilled at his turn of phrase. He’d sought me out at a party; I remember the moment exactly. I’d noticed him as soon as we’d walked in. He was taller than
most of the other boys, and he had this self-assurance, like he was at ease in his long, skinny body. There was nothing about him that a girl would instantly be attracted to – nothing except that he had that rare quality among young men: he looked like he knew what he was doing. We’d been there a couple of hours when I noticed him looking at me, and I remember glancing behind me, in case I was mistaken. When I checked again, he was still watching me. He smiled and held up a bottle of wine, summoning me to his side with a jerk of his head. Of course, I went. I didn’t think twice about it. He poured me red wine in a real wine glass, and questioned me extensively about my taste in art, literature and music. I lied about everything I could in the hope that it would impress him. He knew I was lying. I think he liked that about me. Everyone, including all of my friends, had left by the time the party finally wound down. I told him I’d better get back, and should call a mini cab home, to be on the safe side. I wasn’t even sure where the party was: we’d arrived in a miasma of cheap wine and a cadged lift, laughing and talking too much for any of us to take note of where we were going, only there on the say-so of a friend of a friend. It was then he revealed that this was
his
house, and asked me to stay the night. Not for sex or anything – he was very clear about that – just because it would be safer than taking a cab home alone. Hadn’t I heard about that girl who’d gotten into a local cab last week, then passed out and had woken up in the middle of nowhere with the driver masturbating over her?

Of course, for all I knew, I was exchanging one danger for
another, but I didn’t think about it that way. I thought he was chivalrous, protective, mature. In retrospect, I think he was trying reverse psychology on me, convinced that if he denied me access to his manhood, I’d be clawing off his boxers in desperation before dawn broke. Only I wasn’t that kind of girl. There had been a boy, one boy only, whom I’d had sex with before then. I hadn’t told him I was a virgin. It didn’t seem a very cool thing to confess, because I was eighteen, which seemed so old. It had been a one-time thing, awkward and embarrassing. I’d decided to pretend it hadn’t happened at all, except now at least I’d got ‘it’ out of the way, and knew what to expect the next time, which wasn’t very much.

For all the brash confidence I put on display, I was very inexperienced. I let him lead me upstairs to his room. He had a single bed. I lay down on it, and after a few minutes standing awkwardly in front of the electric bar heater, he lay down beside me, pressing my body against the length of the cold wall. We talked for a long time, lying side by side, fully clothed. We talked and laughed, and at some point he laced his fingers in mine. I can remember even now the quiet thrill his touch gave me – the promise, the anticipation. The sun was up when he kissed me. We kissed and talked for a few more hours after that, each kiss growing ever bolder on his part. I think he was surprised when I got up, exhausted and still lost, and said I had to go. I didn’t have to go, but I wanted to. I wanted the opportunity to miss him.

There were only two occasions in what was to be our relationship that I did the right thing, played the right move, and this was one of
them … a move made before I even guessed that we were involved in a game. I left before he wanted me to, and that made him want me more.

‘I haven’t stopped thinking about you.’ The second line of the letter. A standard line, I suppose, but one that made me swoon back on to my bed, collapsing into the pillow, clutching the piece of paper to my chest. He was so funny, so clever, so important in our little world, and he couldn’t stop thinking about me! ‘Something about the sun on the carpet this morning made me think about the smell of your hair.’ I had thought this line impossibly romantic and clever. Much later, I found out he’d used it more than once: it was a line from a love poem that he’d given to several girls during the term. ‘I would like to see you again. I will be in the Literature section of the library today, from midday until about six. Come and find me there if you want.’

I looked at my watch. He’d been there an hour already. If I’d been thinking straight, if I’d been older, wiser, more cynical and less in love with his handwriting, I’d have gone – but not until after five. But I wasn’t any of those things. I carefully folded his letter inside my copy of Eagleton and, after dressing hastily, I went to find him at once.

He was not surprised to see me. He smiled, but it was restrained.

‘I got your letter,’ I whispered, sitting down next to him.

‘Evidently,’ he replied.

‘What shall we do?’ I asked him, preparing to be whisked away on a romantic whirlwind.

‘I’ve got about another hour to spend on this essay, then the
pub?’ he said, waiting for my nod of approval before he turned back to his books. Slowly, I pulled my own books from my bag, and made a show of beginning to read them. But I didn’t see the words; I just sat there, trying hard to look clever, fascinating and beautiful, waiting for him to be ready. I should have got up; I should have left. I should have kissed him on the cheek and said, ‘Ciao.’ But I didn’t, and from that moment on, I was his, right up until the moment that I wasn’t any more. And that was the second thing I did right in our relationship.

I’ve known about the Alzheimer’s, or the AD as we in the know call it – a nifty little nickname for those of us in the special club – for a long time. I think I’ve secretly known about it for years. There was this nagging little suspicion nibbling away at my edges. Words would drift away just out of reach when I called for them; promises that I made to do something were broken because I simply forgot them. I put it down to my lifestyle, which had become so very full in the last few years, what with Greg and Esther and my promotion at work. I told myself that it was because my head was so very full of thinking and feeling that I frequently felt like I’d sprung a leak, like parts of me were seeping away. At the back of my mind, though, I’d always have that last image of my dad, so old and empty and utterly lost to me. I worried and wondered, but I’d tell myself I was too young, and that just because it happened to him, it didn’t mean it would happen to
me. After all, it hadn’t happened to his sister, my aunt Hattie. She’d died of a heart attack, with all her marbles intact. So I told myself not to be so melodramatic, and to stop worrying. And I felt like that for years before, one day, I really knew that I couldn’t hide from it any more.

It was the day I forgot which shoe belonged to which foot, had two breakfasts and forgot my daughter’s name.

I came downstairs carrying my shoes, and went into the kitchen for breakfast. Caitlin was already home from uni, looking tired and thinner. Wrung out from living life, I supposed, although her habitual black outfits and black-rimmed eyes didn’t do a lot to flatter her obvious exhaustion. I asked her once why she liked dressing like a Goth so much, and she grabbed a handful of her mass of jet-black hair and said, really, what other choice did she have? School hadn’t broken up, and she was taking Esther out for the day – because the childminder was sick – which was good of her. She looked like she really just wanted to stay in bed all day, and part of me wanted to put her there – tuck her up, like I used to when she was little, brush the hair off her forehead and bring her soup.

They were already up when I came into the kitchen. Esther had dragged her big sister out of bed and down the stairs, and was ensconced on her lap talking babble and demanding to be fed like a baby. I walked into the kitchen, still carrying my shoes, and I looked at them, my two daughters, seventeen years between them, and I felt this little bubble of happiness
that even with all of the life I had lived between giving birth to each of them, they still were so close and so bonded. I’d gone to call Esther over for cuddle when it happened. There was just this wall of grey, this dense fog between me and her name. No, no, it wasn’t even a wall: it was … a void. A vacuum where something had been before, perhaps just moments before, and now it was obliterated. I panicked, and the harder I tried to think, the thicker the fog became. And this wasn’t a meeting at work I’d forgotten to attend, or that woman from the book club I went to about three times and sometimes have to avoid in supermarkets because I can’t remember her name. This wasn’t ‘someone off the telly, who used to be in that thing’. This was my little girl, the apple of my eye. My treasure, my delight, my sweetheart. The child I’d named.

I knew it then, in that instant, that the same thing that had come to claim my father had come for me, too. I knew it, even as I tried with all my heart and head combined not to know it. You are stressed and tired, I told myself. Just relax, take a breath and it will come.

I filled a bowl with muesli, which tasted like cardboard in my mouth, and afterwards I went to brush my teeth. Keep the routine, do what you know, and it will come. I came back and filled a bowl with muesli, and Caitlin asked me if I was extra hungry, and I realised that actually I wasn’t hungry at all. Then I noticed my first empty bowl, still sitting on the table, and realised why. But still, I told her I was, and forced
down a few more mouthfuls, making a joke about starting the diet tomorrow instead. Caitlin just rolled her eyes, in that way she had perfected over the years. ‘Oh, Mum.’

Trying to press the panic down, I looked under the table and stared and stared at my shoes. Low, black, kitten heels with a long pointed toe that I loved. I wore them because they didn’t hurt, even after a long day teaching, and they looked purposeful and just sexy enough to get away with. But that morning, the more I looked at them, the more of a mystery they became to me. I simply couldn’t decipher which shoe went on which foot. The angle of the toe; the buckle on the side – none of it made sense to me any more.

I left the shoes under the kitchen table, and went and pulled on my boots. That day, the whole day at work, simply went by: I remembered which classes to go to, what I was teaching, characters and quotes from the books we were studying … they were all there. But not my daughter’s name. I waited and I waited for Esther’s name to come back to me. But it was gone, along with which shoe was left, and which was right. And it only returned that evening when Greg called Esther by her name. I was relieved and so frightened at the same time that I cried. I had to tell Greg: there was no hiding any more. The next day I went to see my GP, and the testing began – test after test, all aiming to try and tell with as much certainty as possible what I already knew.

And now I live with Mum again, and increasingly my husband feels like a man I barely know; and even though
Esther’s name hasn’t slipped out of my tightly clenched grip ever since, other things do, every day. I open my eyes each morning and tell myself who I am, who my children are, and what is wrong with me. And I live with my mum again, even though no one ever asked me if that was what I wanted.

And there’s something else, something important I have to say to Caitlin before she goes back to uni. But whatever it is, it’s standing just out of reach behind the fog.

‘Do you want to set the table?’ Mum asks me, holding a bouquet of shiny metal in her fist. She is eyeing me sceptically, as though I might somehow do her in with a blunt butter knife. What she is wondering is: am I capable of remembering which implement is which, and what it is for? And what really pisses me off is that I am wondering the same thing. At this exact second, I know precisely everything I need to know about setting the table, and I will do right up until the moment she hands me the objects that require placing in a particular order. And then … will the fog roll in, and will that piece of information be gone? Not knowing what I don’t know stops me from wanting to do anything. Everything I attempt is fraught with the possibility of failure. And yet I am still
me
, at the moment. My mind is still me. When will the day come that I am not me any more?

‘No,’ I say, like a sullen teenager. I am decorating my memory book. I keep finding little things, little items that aren’t quite whole memories, that wouldn’t fill a page or even a line in the book, but which make up parts of a life, my life,
like pieces of a mosaic. And so I decided to cover the book with the things I find. I tape on a fifty-cent piece, a remnant from my trip to New York, next to a ticket to a Queen concert that I ran away from home to watch when I was only twelve. I’m trying to think of a way to attach a hedgehog charm that my dad gave me for my birthday before he became sick; I’m wondering if I can somehow sew it on to the thick cover of the book. It’s small work, in a small world, in a place I know, and it absorbs and comforts me in the way that Diane the counsellor said it would. But that’s not why I don’t set the table: I don’t set the table because I don’t want to not remember how to set the table.

‘Did you show Caitlin the letter?’ Mum takes a seat opposite me, reaching across the table to lay out the objects that make a frame for a plate to sit within. ‘Did you talk to her?’

For several long moments, I turn the small silver hedgehog over and over in the palm of my hand, rubbing it with the tip of my finger. I remember how delighted I was with it, how even when it was attached to my bracelet I played with it, making it walk over the carpet and hibernate under cushions. I lost it once for a full day, and didn’t stop crying until Mum had found it secreted at the bottom of a box of tissues: I’d forgotten where I’d put it to bed. I can remember all of that in perfect, crystal-clear detail.

‘I don’t know,’ I tell her, embarrassed, ashamed. ‘I think I said something. I’m not sure what I’ve said.’

‘She’s upset,’ Mum tells me. ‘When she came in, she’d been
crying. Her face was red; her eyes were swollen. You should show her the letter.’