- •I close my eyes. Even as my mind tries to reject this information I know, somewhere, that it is true. I hear myself start to cry again, and as I do so this
- •I follow him down. He shows me a living room – a brown sofa and matching chairs, a flat screen bolted to the wall which he tells me is a television –
- •I say yes, and we walk into the park. A path circles its edge, and there is a children’s playground nearby, next to a hut from which I see people
- •I smile, and look down, at my hands holding the hot drink, at the gold wedding band, at the short nails, at my legs, crossed politely. I don’t recognize
- •If that was what it took. I said I would explain to you why I wanted you to come and see me, and what I thought I could offer you.’
- •I don’t say anything. I take a sip of my drink and look around the café. It is almost empty. There are voices from a small kitchen at the back, the
- •I nod. ‘And the other?’
- •It difficult, but watching it now all I could see was my wrinkled fingers and the glint of the wedding ring on my left hand. When I had finished he seemed
- •I said yes. I wondered where he had got these photos, how much he knew of my life that I didn’t know myself.
- •In grease, an egg and some bread had been fried and sat on the side. As I ate he explained how I survive my life.
- •I look at my watch. If I write quickly I should have time.
- •I said nothing. The city sprawled before us under the low cloud. It seemed peaceful. And smaller than I imagined; I could see all the way across it to
- •I laughed. ‘Really?’ I couldn’t imagine myself as intimidating.
- •I tried to picture the scene, to remember the two of us, young, in a library, surrounded by soggy papers, laughing. I could not, and felt the hot stab of
- •I laugh. ‘ok. Whatever.’ I wander off, into the kitchen.
- •I thanked her and, for no reason I knew, and as if it explained what I had just done, told her my father was dead. ‘Fuck …’ she said, and, in what
- •I remembered all this. It exhausted me, this effort of will to search the void of my memory, trying to find any tiny detail that might trigger a
- •I nodded. Hearing him say it cemented it somehow, made it seem more real. It was almost as if the fact he was a doctor gave his words an
- •I don’t know what I expected him to do, or say. I suppose part of me wanted him to tell me how wrong I am, to try and convince me that my life is
- •I looked at the journals, stacked in haphazard piles on the shelves around the office. Is this how he intended to further his career, or make it more
- •I said goodbye, then came upstairs to write this.
- •In front of him. I felt awkward. Unsure how much to say.
- •It had felt true, though. I told myself that. Plus I could touch-type. Or I had written that I could …
- •I pull on my jeans. ‘No,’ I say, reaching for a t-shirt. ‘Get up. Please?’
- •I swallowed hard. What would they show me? Who? How bad could it be?
- •In my hand.
- •I nodded. An old friend. I knew that, of course – it was her name I so wanted.
- •I felt my mind begin to close down, to empty itself, to retreat into nothingness. ‘I never even knew him,’ I said.
- •I don’t know why, but as I read it my world seemed to collapse. Grief exploded in my chest like a grenade. I had been feeling calm – not happy, not
- •It doesn’t seem possible. My best friend, I had written, after remembering her on Parliament Hill, and I had felt the same sensation of closeness
- •I felt a sudden flush of love. Though I have barely remembered any of our time, our life, together – and tomorrow even that will have gone – I sensed
- •I looked at the boy. He had moved, was trying once again to push himself round, his legs barely reaching the ground from where he stood on the
- •I looked at him. He had said it with no sense of pain, or disappointment. For him it was a simple statement of fact. For a moment the roundabout
- •I tried to keep smiling, my voice cheery. ‘I bet she’s joking, though.’
- •It. ‘Thank God!’
- •I did this a memory was floating through me. I saw myself rolling on stockings, snapping home the fasteners on a suspender belt, hooking up a bra, but it
- •I heard his key in the lock, the door pushed open, feet being wiped on the mat. A whistle? Or was that the sound of my breathing, hard and heavy?
- •I stood up then, and went over to him. ‘Kiss me,’ I said, and, though I hadn’t exactly planned it, it felt like the right thing to do, and so I put my arms
- •I realized I do not have ambition. I cannot. All I want is to feel normal. To live like everybody else, with experience building on experience, each day
- •I looked there first. I pulled out the top drawer slowly, quietly. It was full of papers, in files labelled Home, Work, Finance. I flicked past the binders.
- •I looked away. My eyes rested on the photograph of the two of us that sat on the sideboard. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I know I wasn’t always like this.
- •I didn’t have to go. Dr Nash didn’t force me to agree to the trip. But, though I can’t remember doing so – can’t remember much at all, in fact – I must have
- •I thought of the picture I’d seen. The image was burned into me. Who did that to me? Why? I remembered the memory I’d had of the hotel room. It
- •I read my journal. They feel real. I remember Claire. Adam. My mother. But they’re like threads I can’t keep hold of. Balloons that float into the sky before I
- •It is there that memory fails me again. Though I remember looking at his face, I cannot remember what I saw. It is featureless, a blank. As if unable
- •I looked down at my hands, folded in my lap.
- •I realized it could not have been him. He would barely have been born.
- •I wrote that an hour ago, but now I am not so sure. I think about Adam. I have read about the photographs in the metal box, yet still there are no pictures of
- •I found myself closing my eyes as he spoke. Images floated through me – images of Adam, and me, and Ben – but I couldn’t say whether they were
- •It was there. At the bottom of the box, inside an envelope. A photocopy of a news article, folded, its edges crisp. I knew what it was, almost before I
- •I began to tidy the papers away. I should have trusted him, I thought. All along. I should have believed that he was keeping things from me only
- •I must have sounded upset, because she said, ‘Chrissy darling, whatever’s wrong?’
- •I felt relieved. I had had the idea that our talk might limp to a halt, end with a polite goodbye and a vague promise to speak again in the future, and
- •I wondered what she meant, but didn’t ask her. It can wait, I thought. There were more important things I needed to know.
- •I told her it was. It would have to be. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. She told me which buses I would need and I wrote the details on a slip of paper. Then, after
- •I had been looking for it.
- •I stood up and turned to face her. I didn’t know if I would have preferred to turn and run myself, so vast was the chasm between us, but then she held
- •I said nothing. Instead I tried to imagine what it must have been like, to have seen my child every day, back when the phrase every day had some
- •I tried to picture myself, arguing with Ben, looking after a baby, trying to write. I imagined bottles of milk, or Adam at my breast. Dirty nappies.
- •I interrupted. ‘I was seeing someone.’
- •I was sobbing now, my body heaving, gasping for breath. Crying for all the years that I had lost, and for all those that I would continue to lose
- •I wondered what had been so special about the man in the café. Claire had said that I’d told her he was nice. Attractive. Was that all it was? Was I
- •I felt a surge of love for my husband. Real. Unforced. Despite everything, he had taken me in. Looked after me.
- •I could see it all. The hand on the shoulder, then the hug. The mouths that find each other through the tears, the moment when guilt and the certainty
- •I looked at her. I still didn’t feel angry. I couldn’t. Perhaps if she had told me that they were still sleeping together I might have felt differently. What
- •I think that’s when things started to get difficult. You loved Adam so much. It shone out of your eyes when we arrived, and he would run
- •I have been wrong. I have made a mistake. Again and again and again I have made it; who knows how many times? My husband is my protector,
- •I go downstairs and make myself a drink. Boiling water, a teabag. Don’t let it stew too long, and don’t compress the bag with the back of the spoon
- •I want to trust him now. No more lies.
- •I look at him. I can see that he doesn’t want to tell me. The man who wrote the letter, the man who believed in me and cared for me, and who, in the
- •I close the book.
- •I close my eyes. I think back to what I read about our son this afternoon and an image explodes in front of me – Adam as a toddler pushing the blue
- •I am silent. I can think of nothing to say. We both know how senseless it would be for me to try to defend myself, to tell him that he is wrong. We both
- •I tried to remember. Had I written about our first conversation?
- •I felt his hands grip tight, his fingers and nails digging into my skin even through the cotton of my blouse.
- •Images entered my head, of Adam as he might be now, fragments of scenes I may have missed, but none would hold. Each image
- •I fell silent. Nothing made sense. Yet she was right. I have only been keeping my journal for a couple of weeks. Before that, anything
- •I focus on the picture. Images come to me; the two of us, a sunny afternoon. We’d hired a boat somewhere. I don’t know where.
- •Image came to me. A man with narrow, dark-rimmed glasses and black hair. Ben. I say his name again, as if to lock the image in my mind. ‘Ben.’
- •I shift further back, sliding on my haunches. I hit something solid and feel the warm, sticky radiator behind me. I realize I am under the window at the
- •It for a while, at least since I first told him about it a week ago. ‘How long have you been reading my journal?’
- •I wanted to kiss you, there and then, but I couldn’t, and because I didn’t want you to think that I’d run across the road just to help you I went into the café too,
- •I shake my head. I have decided to let him speak. I want to find out everything he has to say.
- •I am incredulous. ‘You want me to remember?’
- •I still don’t know what he wants from me.
- •I cough, a dry, heaving retch, swallowed by the sock balled in my throat. I am beginning to choke. I think of my son. I will never see him now, though
- •I am lying down. I have been asleep, but not for long. I can remember who I am, where I have been. I can hear noise, the roar of traffic, a siren that is
- •I don’t want to think about where I’d be.
- •I think of this man discovering my journal, reading it every day. Why didn’t he destroy it?
- •I lay back. I felt tired. Exhausted. I wanted only to sleep, but was frightened to. Frightened of what I might forget.
- •I shook my head. ‘He burned it. That’s what caused the fire.’
- •I look at my sleeping husband, silhouetted in the dim room. I remember us meeting, that night of the party, the night I watched the fireworks with
I pull on my jeans. ‘No,’ I say, reaching for a t-shirt. ‘Get up. Please?’
He looks disappointed. I didn’t think this would happen – which doesn’t mean I didn’t want it to – and now I would like to be alone. It is not about him
at all.
‘OK,’ he says, standing up. His body looks pale and skinny, his penis almost absurd. I look away as he dresses, out of the window. My world has
changed, I think. I have crossed a line, and I cannot go back. ‘Bye, then,’ he says, but I don’t speak. I don’t look back until he has left.
A voice in my ear brought me back to the present. ‘Good. More pictures now, Christine,’ said Dr Paxton. ‘Just look at each one and tell yourself what, or
who, it is. OK? Ready?’
I swallowed hard. What would they show me? Who? How bad could it be?
Yes, I thought to myself, and we began.
The first photograph was black and white. A child – a girl, four, five years old – in the arms of a woman. The girl was pointing to something, and they were
both laughing, and in the background, slightly out of focus, was a fence with a tiger resting on the other side of it. A mother, I thought to myself. A daughter.
At a zoo. And then with a shock of recognition I looked at the child’s face and realized that the little girl was me, the mother my own. Breath caught in my
throat. I couldn’t remember ever going to a zoo, yet here we were, here was evidence that we had. Me, I said silently, remembering what I had been told.
Mother. I stared at the screen, trying to burn her image into my memory, but the picture faded and was replaced by another, also of my mother, now older,
yet not seeming old enough to need the walking stick on which she is leaning. She was smiling but looked exhausted, her eyes sunk deep in her thin face.
My mother, I thought again, and other words came, unbidden: in pain. I closed my eyes involuntarily, had to force them open again. I began to grip the bulb
In my hand.
The images came quickly then, and I recognized only a few. One was of the friend I had seen in my memory, and with a thrill I recognized her almost
straight away. She looked as I had imagined her, dressed in old blue jeans and a T-shirt, smoking, her red hair loose and untidy. Another picture showed
her with her hair cut short and dyed black, and a pair of sunglasses pushed high on her head. It was followed by a photograph of my father – the way he
looked when I was a little girl, smiling, happy, reading a newspaper in our front room – and then one of me and Ben, standing with another couple I didn’t
recognize.
Other photos were of strangers. A black woman in a nurse’s uniform, another woman dressed in a suit, sitting in front of a bookcase, peering over
the top of her half-moon glasses with a grave expression. A man with ginger hair and a round face, another with a beard. A child, six or seven, a boy
eating an ice cream and then, later, the same boy, sitting at a desk, drawing. A group of people, arranged loosely, looking at the camera. A man,
attractive, his hair black and slightly longish, with a pair of dark-rimmed glasses framing narrowed eyes and a scar running down the side of his face. They
went on and on, these photographs, and as they did so I looked at them all, and tried to place them, to remember how – or even whether – they were
woven into the tapestry of my life. I did as I had been asked. I was good, and yet I felt myself begin to panic. The whirr of the machine seemed to rise in
pitch and volume until it became an alarm, a warning, and my stomach clenched. I could not breathe, and I closed my eyes, and the weight of the blanket
began to press down on me, heavy as a marble slab, so that it felt like I was drowning.
I squeezed my right hand, but it balled itself into a fist, closing on nothing. Nails bit into flesh; I had dropped the bulb. I called out, a wordless cry.
‘Christine,’ came a voice in my ear. ‘Christine.’
I couldn’t tell who it was, or what they wanted me to do, and I cried out again, and began kicking the blanket off my body.
‘Christine!’
Louder now, and then the siren noise whirred to a halt, a door crashed open, and there were voices in the room, and hands on me, on my arms and
legs, and across my chest, and I opened my eyes.
‘It’s OK,’ said Dr Nash in my ear. ‘You’re OK. I’m here.’
Once they’d calmed me down with reassurances that everything was fine – and given me back my handbag, my earrings and my wedding ring – Dr Nash
and I went to a coffee bar. It was along the corridor, small, with orange plastic chairs and yellowing Formica-topped tables. Trays of tired pastries and
sandwiches sat wilting in the harsh light. I had no money in my purse, but I let Dr Nash buy me a cup of coffee and a piece of carrot cake and then
selected a seat by the window while he paid. Outside was sunny, the shadows long in the courtyard of grass. Purple flowers dotted the lawn.
Dr Nash scraped his chair under the table. He seemed much more relaxed, now that the two of us were alone together. ‘There you go,’ he said,
setting the tray in front of me. ‘Hope that’s OK.’
I saw that he had selected tea for himself; the bag still floated in the syrupy liquid as he added sugar from the bowl in the centre of the table. I took a
sip of my drink, and grimaced. It was bitter, and too hot.
‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, after a moment. At first I thought he was talking about the coffee. ‘I had no idea that you would find it so distressing in there.’
‘It’s claustrophobic,’ I said. ‘And noisy.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I dropped the emergency button.’
He said nothing, but instead stirred his drink. He fished the teabag out and deposited it on the tray. He took a sip.
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘Difficult to say. You panicked. It’s not that uncommon. It isn’t comfortable in there, as you said.’
I looked down at my slice of cake. Untouched. Dry. ‘The photographs. Who were they? Where did you get them?’
‘They were a mixture. Some of them I got from your medical files. Ben had donated them, years ago. I asked you to bring a couple from home for
the purposes of this exercise – you said they’d been arranged around your mirror. Some I provided – of people you’ve never met. What we call controls.
We mixed them all up together. Some of the images were people you knew at a very young age, people you should, or might, remember. Family. Friends
from school. The rest were people from the era of your life that you definitely can’t remember. Dr Paxton and I are trying to find out whether there’s a
difference in the way you attempt to access memories from these different periods. The strongest reaction was to your husband, of course, but you
reacted to others. Even though you don’t remember the people from your past, the patterns of neural excitation are definitely there.’
‘Who was the woman with red hair?’ I said.
He smiled. ‘An old friend, perhaps?’
‘Do you know her name?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t. The photos were in your file. They weren’t labelled.’