The Man Who Forgot His Wife (16 page)

In his first year at Bangor, he met his future wife, Madeleine. (MORE HERE PLEASE) Maddy is hot, she is a MILF. Hands off! She’s my secret fantasy, not yours, you perv, even if she’s like 35 or something.

Vaughan and Maddy have two children: Jamie who is 13 and Dillie who is 11. In 2001 Mr Vaughan began teaching history at William Blake Secondary School in Wandsworth, which became Wandle Academy. Last year he got to go on the history field trip despite a superior application from another teacher who had actually achieved better results than him. His nickname is ‘Boggy Vaughan’ because he loves cleaning the bog. He is the Bogmeister General, Bogimus Maximus, the Boginator. Boggy! Boggy! Boggy! Oi! Oi! Oi!

Vaughan was a speaker at the ‘Lessons Worth Behaving For’ Conference at Kettering and was very boring. Like, dull, dull, dull. Not content to just drone on about a load of deadly dull data, he did a PowerPoint presentation where he had written up all the deadly dull data, and then at the end handed out a printout of all the same deadly dull data.
Boggy
Vaughan’s all right coz he didn’t tell the police when we nicked that llama from the City Farm.

Mr Vaughan’s home is four doors down from Mr Kenneth Oakes, one of Britain’s leading exponents of Close Magic, member of the Magic Circle and popular choice for corporate events and family parties; ‘a great traditional magic act’ says
The Stage
. Vaughan plays 5 a side football every Tuesday night and has all the grace and skill of a pissed ostrich. Vaughan lives in South London. His birthday is May 6th. Hello, Vaughan, long time no see, mate! Sorry to leave this message here, but Gary said something about you wanting everyone to write stuff about your life and shit – he was trying to make out you were off your nut or something which I knew must be one of his wind-ups! Anyway, tell us where you want people to write stuff and I’ll give it a shot! Cheers, mate! Karl

I went to bed that night telling myself that the past was past and there was nothing I could do to change it. Apart from deleting the bit about how boring I was at Kettering – I could change that bit. And quite so many references to how bad at football I was – it didn’t need all of those. Or even one reference really; it was not worth mentioning. Did the high level of sarcasm and mockery demonstrate affection and confidence in a shared sense of humour? And why did they call Maddy a ‘MILF’, whatever that was?

I later Googled the word on Linda’s computer. That left me with some explaining to do.

Chapter 12

IT IS THE
early 1990s, and Madeleine and I have been a couple for less than a year. Maddy has gone to Brussels with a friend. When she checks in at the hotel, the concierge says there is an urgent letter already waiting for her. She opens the envelope to find the battered postcard of the leprechaun still raising a pint of Guinness to her. I imagine her laughing, and maybe explaining the context to her bemused friend. But she never ever mentions it to me
.

Many months after that, I receive a huge mystery parcel in the post. I set about cutting through the excessive tape, only to find that inside is another, slightly smaller, cardboard box. Inside that is some packing material protecting a posh presentation case. I open this to find a gift-wrapped present. After a dozen layers, I finally get through to a small embossed envelope, and although by now I realize that someone is playing an elaborate joke on me, it still has not occurred to me that I am about to get back the ludicrous postcard that I was supposed to have sent to Great-auntie Brenda
.

And so the iconic symbol was passed back and forth down the years, with neither of us ever mentioning the game to the other. That had quickly become one of the unwritten rules. The
recipient
would never ring up and say, ‘Oh, you got me there!’ I would simply smile to myself at the ingenuity of my partner, hide the card away and then bide my time as I plotted an even more elaborate and surprising way of placing it back into Maddy’s custody. Receipt of the card meant that it was now that person’s responsibility to remember to post this bloody thing to Great-auntie Brenda, even though Great-auntie Brenda had long since died and the address on the card was now occupied by a family from Bangladesh – the task was still effectively the custodian’s responsibility unless it could be planted on the other person when they least expected it.

One day when Maddy turned on her new computer, the screen was filled with a digital photo of the leprechaun, with instructions to check inside the printer tray. When Maddy suggested I ordered myself a pizza from my usual home-delivery service, I opened the big flat box to find that Madeleine had arranged with the local pizza company to deliver me Great-auntie Brenda’s card instead. When Maddy had put tasteful framed black-and-white photographs of the children up the stairs, she came home one day to notice that every single frame contained a colour photocopy of a grinning Guinness-drinking leprechaun saying ‘Top o’ the mornin’ to yers!!’ with the original in a huge clipframe of its own surrounded by flashing fairy lights.

The memory of all this came back to me in one split second, sitting in front of a computer terminal during my first day back at work. It was as if the search facility in my brain had finally located a certain file extension. I wanted to tell everyone seated around me, but the school admin team seemed uncomfortable enough with having one of the teachers suddenly parked in their office like this, without me drawing attention to my strange mental illness.

I wanted to contact Maddy right now to share all the memories of our running private joke, but I sensed that to do so would also kill it. Nor could I add the episodes to my online memoir. Instead,
despite
having been desperate to remember details just like this, I had to tell myself to try to forget about it for the time being, in order that I could actually get on with my life right now.

My first day in my new job felt empowering. I was making a contribution; I had a reason to get up in the morning. Being the temporary administrative assistant in an inner-city comprehensive came with more status and variety than all the other life experiences I could remember, such as lying in a hospital bed or watching repeats of
All-Star Mr & Mrs
. Now I was returning to school to undertake my own education, revising the complex syllabus of where I fitted in and what sort of school I worked at.

I had in front of me access to detailed information on a thousand pupils. I could click on any name and know their Key Stage 2 Sats, their GCSE or B.Tech targets, whether they were on free school meals or had English as an additional language. Yet access to data on Jamie and Dillie was still restricted; none of my records of my children’s lives could be summoned. My task for the day was supposed to be entering data on 540 Key Stage 3 pupils. But I couldn’t prevent my mind from returning to two children in particular whom I was going to be meeting that very evening.

I had agreed to go to the house at six o’clock to take my son and daughter out to the Christmas funfair on the Common, which seemed like an appropriate divorced-dad sort of thing to do. Then we would meet Maddy for a pizza, and by the end of the evening I would, I hoped, feel like a father again. They had been told about my neurological condition, though I was not confident they would understand the extent of my amnesia. But Maddy had been kind enough to tell me that they were looking forward to seeing me and her suggested arrangement was that I was to come to the house for a cup of tea and a chat and then take my children across to the Common on my own. ‘Make sure you get a good look at them before you go to the fair,’ warned Gary. ‘’Cos you’d feel a bit
stupid
at the Lost Children’s Tent, saying you had no idea what your kids looked like.’

I arrived at the house twenty minutes early. I walked up and down on the frosty pavement for a while until Madeleine opened the front door and shouted over to me.

‘So are you going to ring on the buzzer or what?’

‘Sorry – I was a bit early and didn’t want to … you know, like, inconvenience anyone.’

‘That’s okay – I think they’ve seen this particular episode of
Friends
a hundred and twelve times before.’

Without pausing, I put my hand over to pull back the catch on the gate the moment I pushed it open.

‘Hey – I just opened the gate!’

‘Well, yes …’

‘But without thinking about how to do it! It’s a subconscious memory!’ It made the place feel part of me. Madeleine was wearing a red spotty dress that had an almost humorous edge to it, but, standing at the open door, she folded her arms against the cold as I approached.

‘Kids!’ she called out. ‘Your dad’s here!’

An avalanche of enthusiasm came thundering down the stairs. The force of it hit me all at once, knocking me off balance as both children threw their arms around me and hugged me tightly.

‘Daddy!’ exclaimed little Dillie, and I stood there uncertain as to what I should do, ending up patting them a little self-consciously on the back. They smelt of washing powder and hair conditioner – my children were all fresh and new. The dog, circling this melee, barked in enthusiasm. My heart definitely remembered what my head had forgotten: I felt like I had regained a couple of limbs that I had not realized had been amputated. I would have to learn how they operated, I would need months of practice to be able to love them really properly, but it was still a miracle – Maddy and I had made these beautiful human beings
together,
these two separate individuals; it was the wonder of new life that struck me most powerfully.

I resolved to follow their lead and just be as natural as possible. I asked them what they’d been up to, and listened to funny stories from school, and I could sense Maddy watching me interact with them and noticed her smile a couple of times as I found the confidence to joke with them both. For all my worry in advance of this meeting, they just made it incredibly easy. They were confident and chatty – when Dillie was excited she talked faster than I had imagined was humanly possible, segueing wildly from one subject to the next in mid-sentence, and I had not yet learned that it was not even worth trying to keep up. ‘Oh-my-God-it-was-so-funny-Miss-Kerrins-told-Nadim-in-science-not-to-bring-in-his-rat-yeah-cos-like-it-always-gets-out-and-freaks-out-Jordan’s-slow-worm-oh-I-like-your-suit-is-that-new-anyway-he-put-it-in-her-handbag-on-her-desk-we-had-curry-for-lunch-today-yum-and-you-could-see-it-moving-around-in-the-bag-oh-I-got-an-A-in-Maths-by-the-way-so-he-got-sent-to-the-referral-but-he-left-his-rat-behind-with-Jordan-who-put-it-on-his-head-and-she-is-like-totally-phobic-about-rats-so-she-screamed-and-ran-out-of-the-classroom-and-it-was-so-funny-can-we-record-
Friends
-on-Comedy-Central-before-we-go?’

Perhaps this was why her brother spoke so little; there just weren’t enough gaps. Although it seemed he had developed the skill to extricate the important points.

‘Yeah, why are you wearing a suit, Dad?’

‘Yeah, why did you shave your beard off? Are you having a mid-life crisis?’

‘Oh, I thought I should make a bit of an effort. Fresh start and all that. Is it too much?’

‘No,’ said Maddy. ‘It looks very nice.’

I wanted to thank her, but couldn’t quite find the words.

‘Dad, you’re blushing. Why are you blushing?’

The four of us sat around the kitchen table as I drank sugary
tea
. The dog completed the perfect family scene, gazing longingly at us all casually eating biscuits, his head hanging in shame at the guilty thoughts going through his mind. ‘Oh, God, I feel so weak and worthless, but I cannot fight these dark desires inside me for those sweet-scented HobNobs. Oh no, now my mouth is salivating, I am disgusting, I’m sorry, I despise my own base obsession …’

‘No, Woody, stop scrounging,’ said Jamie.

‘Ah, poor Woody. Don’t tell him off in a cross voice,’ said Dillie.

I used up one of my prepared questions and asked them what they were hoping to get for Christmas. Dillie’s wish-list seem to go on for about twenty-five minutes and might have carried on indefinitely through all the different brands of make-up and trinkets from Accessorize if I hadn’t eventually cut her off and said, ‘What about you, Jamie?’

‘Dunno.’ He shrugged. ‘Money?’

‘Last year we gave a goat to an African villager,’ recalled Maddy. ‘We thought this year they might just prefer a Nintendo Wii instead.’

‘Good idea,’ I concurred. ‘Or an iPad maybe?’

‘Oh, can I have an iPad?’ suggested Dillie. ‘And a goat?’

‘No, you can’t have a goat,’ I decided unilaterally. ‘Because you might take it into school and scare Miss Kerrins—’

‘What?’ said Jamie and Maddy in unison.

‘Was I the only one listening to Dillie just then?’

‘Yes,’ they both said nonchalantly.

The kids were impatient to go to the Winter Wonderland funfair but, standing in the hallway by the scorching radiator, they insisted that it wasn’t cold enough to require woolly hats and gloves. I deftly headed off an argument by suggesting I carried all their sensible insulation until they’d been outside for a few minutes, by which time they’d be begging for extra layers.