Time's Mistress (19 page)

When he came in through the door he looked more than a day sicker. He had a bundle of magazines under his arm, glossies with those tear off perfume samples and bulimic models. He sank into the seat opposite me. The nuts and bolts holding his face in place had loosened another notch and folds of loose skin were wrinkling up like the chins of a Pekinese pooch.

“I thought I saw Veronica last night,” I said, offering it like bait.

“Veronica?” was all he said, but it was enough for me to know that whatever memories that had anchored Veronica to Federico were gone. It gave me somewhere to start. I picked up the first packet of photographs and thumbed through them until I saw a candid snap of Veronica and Nic K. slow dancing in the dining hall. I teased it out and lay it on the table between us. Federico studied both of the faces in the photograph without the tiniest flicker of recognition in his eyes.

“That’s Veronica,” I said. “Don’t you recognise her?”

He shook his head. “Pretty little thing,” I thought I saw a hint of a smile when he said that.

“We were all in school together,” I said softly and began to go through the photographs one at a time, feeding him with memories that should have been his own. The first one was of me on stage at the graduation ceremony. There was no real order to the pictures, I was working on a kind of hit and hope philosophy, throwing out event after event purely on the basis that the BIG things would break away bigger chunks of the amnesia or whatever it was and give Federico back bigger segments of his past. So after the graduation it was a picture of him leaning against the door of a blue two door ‘57 Volvo Coupe with a spectacular view of Stockholm filling the background. There was more to the picture than what was shown.

It had been a Friday night filled with mosquitoes and saxophones. We’d driven up to Vanity Hill with the top down, parked on the side of the road and laid our blanket out. He’d tried to teach me the names of some of the major constellations but I kept joking about seeing my uncle’s face in the clouds and that my dad had sent him to spy on us. It was difficult to get a fix on my Ursa Minor’s and Major’s with a rather cumulous member of the family breathing down my neck. I wasn’t used to drinking back then and the Chablis had gone straight to my head. I wasn’t drunk, but I was on the way and when we started to kiss things just started to happen and instead of slowing them down, stopping them, I started chasing them. It was a natural progression; soon we were exploring each other for the first time. It was the night we both lost our virginity and I could tell all that from a stupid photo of a beat up Volvo and Federico’s shit eating grin.

The next photograph was of this huge Cat in the Hat character called Simon, whose fingers were decked out in gold and diamante. Next to his smile and his pearly white teeth all that gold was as dull as daytime TV.

We went through five years that morning, with the waiter topping up our coffee cups frequently. Talked about things that I remembered and he didn’t. Had a quiz after two years, the highs and lows of a teenage life laid bare. Twenty questions. No points for wrong answers. No questions repeated. If you don’t know the answer go on to the next question. The usual quiz show stuff. Federico scored three points. It was a start.

O O O

Deuteronomy woke me by sitting on the left side of my face. The night was shadow boxing on the bedroom wall. Everything had the cold Stockholm touch to it, the oak floor kissed like a razor as I walked across it, drawn to the window.

I’d known she would be there, looking up at my window. There was something horribly inevitable about seeing her fifteen-year-old face tilted up to look at me. I rested my hands on the window ledge, my weight on my hands. The photograph album was still open on the side, a shot of Veronica in her pale floral dress caught in the sun. I looked at the girl in the street, back at the girl in the photo album. A shiver danced rung by rung down the ladder of my spine. It was her. The girl in the street was Veronica, the Veronica of twenty years ago, the Veronica I’d grown up with who had somehow stopped growing old, just like Peter Pan, and now here she was, on my doorstep the exact same week that Federico walked back into my life. Coincidence?

I read somewhere that there was no such thing as coincidence, fate, kismet, whatever you want to call it. But did that discount meaningful coincidence? A lover unheard from for twenty years and the sudden sighting of an ex-best friend from high school in the same week? Well, no. But … An ex-best that has somehow arrested the ageing process? Trapped herself in a bubble of 1979?

The rain didn’t seem to be touching her. It had to be a trick of perspective and bad light, but it had the cold hand of fear clutching at my stomach just the same. There she was, standing in the rain, bone dry.

Deuteronomy rubbed himself up against my leg, purring deep in his throat.

I dressed slowly, warmly, in jeans and a baggy blue sweatshirt. Then I took my time lacing my sneakers. I didn’t hurry because I knew she’d still be standing there not getting wet in the rain when I walked out of the door.

I took one last glance at the photographs; saw the photograph of Federico leaning against his blue Volvo that I had put back into the album a few hours before, and walked down the stairs and into the street, trying for the life of me to remember the name of the hill where we had made love that first time.

O O O

I ran out into the middle of the road like a mad woman. Three a.m., Stockholm, an in-between time, where the nightlife is giving way to the newspaper deliverers and the early morning smells of cinnamon hanging warmly in the air. The lights of the all night sandwich bar on the corner were on, a couple of star-crossed lovers eating pastrami on rye and supping cola, prolonging the night and angling towards a bed somewhere in the city, either together or alone.

I stopped walking two feet shy of the curb, close enough to see the lack of lines on Veronica’s sad face. She seemed to be staring right through me as if it was me that was the ghost, not her.

“Ronni?” I whispered, barely above a breath. “Is that you?”

Her eyes came down from looking at the angels and saw me for the first time in twenty years. It was her. I don’t know what I expected, that she would open her mouth to talk and there would be nothing, no words, nothing. That she would suddenly spill the secrets of immortality and young looking skin. That she would turn out to be someone else and this was all some huge paranoid joke I was playing out at my own expense.

“Caroline,” she said, dubiously, almost as if she didn’t recognise me. “You’re all grown up.”

I nearly laughed. It was such an innocuous thing to say, yet it summed everything up neatly. I was all grown up and somehow she was still fifteen and locked in eternal puberty.

It was the strangest sensation, being face to face with my own apparition, my own Ghost of Christmas past come to take me around the city by night. I don’t remember Scrooge being soaked to the skin in his story though. Maybe Dickens was a kinder God than mine, or maybe I was less of a character than old Ebenezer; less rounded, less unique, less worthy of creature comforts. So I cried tears of rain. I had no answer to Veronica’s almost accusation. It was a very simple truth; I was all grown up. That’s what twenty years do to a girl. They wrap her up in a silk cocoon like an ugly caterpillar and give birth to a woman, sometimes beautiful, sometimes plain. The trick is forgetting that first skin that was childhood and all of its growing pains and embracing the wings we need to fly through the rest of our lives.

Oh Jesus, I’m starting to sound like one of those damned self-help novels they sell in airports. You have to fall in love with yourself before you can fall in love with anyone else. Yeah, right. My mother hated every second of every day she spent with the abusive son of a bitch that helped hatch me, hated his kisses as much as she hated his kicks, yet I was surrounded by love while I grew up. How? Simple, there was no trick. All of the hatred he directed at her, she absorbed amplified and gave back to me as love. Overcompensated for the bastard who just happened, by biological defect, to be my daddy. But she believed everything he said about her; I could see it in her eyes. The haunted look of a woman who believes she is worthless. Even when she was dying all she could do was apologise.

“But she loved you,” Ronni said, as if she had found a way inside my head.

“What?”

“You’re mother, she loved you. You must know that. Every time he hit her, it was thinking about you that gave her the strength to get back up again … without you she would have given up a long time before, just laid down and died.”

So, I made it worse? I wanted to say it, but she reached out, placing her thumbs over both of my eyes like some faith healer trying to make me see again. “It is the same with Federico,” She whispered. “Your simply being there gives him the strength to go on.”

I tried to take some kind of comfort from what she said, but I couldn’t because if my simply being there had caused my mother so much more pain what was I doing to Federico?

“I was forty once, like you are now,” she said, suddenly. “And then he came back into my life. Said he’d forgotten nearly everything except me. Said some thief had stolen his past but it was a lie, he is the only thief, feeding himself off everything he never had the guts to experience. Now he is feeding off you … What have you given him? Tell me,” Ronni’s thumbs pressed into my eyes, hard enough to hurt.

I jerked away, trying to break her hold on me but her thumbs kept pressing as if they were trying to squeeze the truth out of me. “Please, you’re hurting me,” I said, holding her wrists and trying to pull my head back. “I haven’t given him anything. We’ve just talked a few times. He hasn’t asked me for anything.” It was a lie, and I knew it as soon as it came off my tongue. A big fat lie that had come to life all by itself. Of course he had asked me for something, he’d asked me to give him his past back, his memories. What had I given him? Nothing really. A few images. The photograph of the blue two door Volvo ’57 Coupe taken on … on … I couldn’t remember the name of the hill, the place where we had made love for the first time, where I had lost my virginity to Freddie … “Oh, Sweet God in heaven,” I whispered, realising it was gone. That there was a little black spot where it had been.

“What have you given him?” Ronni hissed again. “Tell me.”

“I told him how we made love the first time … and now … I can’t remember … it’s gone … like it never happened. I can see the car, it was a blue car …with red leather seats … but I can’t remember the place … I can’t remember where he laid me down … oh God, oh God, help me … help me …”

“Take your time, think about it, try to build the picture … try to remember. Panic is the enemy. Fear will steal more of yourself than you’ve already lost. Just try to relax, let the memories wash over you like water.”

I swallowed a breath, tried to imagine I was a pebble in the river of my dreams, tried to picture memories like swift flowing water, to let them wash over me, roll over me, sweep me away, and they did for a while, from childhood days into school days, faces, people, places, memories, all of them like icy water running through my veins, until the torrent formed a whirlpool around one face, Federico’s face. It was like a dam, the thoughts stopped flowing and instead began to churn and fold in on themselves, frothing up white water and black spots. Things I should have known, had known … had told Freddie over the table in Cafe Muren but couldn’t remember now.

“It’s gone,” I said softly, giving in.

“Try,” she hissed. “Try.”

“It’s no good,” I said pathetically. “It’s gone.”

“Then I pity you,” Veronica Andersson whispered, her eyes full of the sadness of knowing, understanding. “Because you’ll never get it back, and now he has his hooks in you, you’re just going to lose more and more of yourself, until you’re a child like me, reduced to haunting doorways at night for fear someone from your past might recognise you and soon enough you’ll find yourself wishing for Childhood’s End, not that it can ever come. You’re Peter Pan’s plaything now …”

O O O

The perfect sky was torn by a fork of dry lightning.

I looked at the woman reflected in the window of Cafe Muren. I wasn’t sure if I was trying to convince myself that there were any visible changes in the face that looked back or not. Not that the glass offered any details, no wrinkles or laughter lines just the wide sweep of features that made up my face. And it was my face, the one I had grown up with, the one I had been wearing a few days before when I’d met Federico tearing out his collection of advertisements and stacking them neatly—or near as damn it the same, a little voice niggled. I had stopped paying attention to the details a long time ago so I couldn’t swear that everything was exactly the same as it had always been. It looked the same to me, maybe a little more haunted around the eyes.

Every journey begins with a single step, right? It doesn’t matter how far you are going, there is always one step at the beginning that sets the whole thing off. I pushed open the Cafe door and took that long step over the threshold into Federico’s world.

He was sitting at what I was already beginning to think of as his table, thumbing through a copy of yesterdays’ Dagens Nyheter, his fingers black with newsprint. An oversized cup of black iced coffee and a wedge of Alabama fudge were off to the side, both untouched. He was waiting for me yet he didn’t look up as I eased myself into the seat opposite his.

“I saw Ronni last night,” I said when he didn’t look up. I wanted to shock him into some kind of reaction. He looked up slowly to the sound of tearing paper, his sky blue eyes overcast, filled with rain.

“No you didn’t,” he said simply. “You saw what
she
wanted you to see but you didn’t see Veronica.”

“How do you know I didn’t see her?” I asked, trying unsuccessfully to keep the edge out of my voice. “Were you there?” When he didn’t answer I nodded to myself, satisfied. “No, you weren’t were you.”

“I didn’t need to be there this time. I was with her when she died. I held her hand in a cold hospital ward while her husband was off somewhere feeling sorry for himself. Her hand was in mine when the life finally left her eyes. Do you understand now? You couldn’t have seen her because she died five years ago. You saw something, I don’t doubt that, but it wasn’t Veronica.”