The Memory Book (25 page)

I think he still loves me too, which is why he didn’t shout at me. I wish I knew who he was.

He knocked on my bedroom door, just as I was about to go to sleep. He opened it and stuck his head through the gap. ‘Claire, are you OK?’ he asked. I shrugged. ‘I just want you to know that I understand why you did what you did. You just wanted to take Esther to the park. I get that. It’s just that, next time, will you tell one of us? So we can remind you about it being wet or cold, or dark?’

I rolled over and turned my back on him, and I said, ‘This is hell. This is hell. This life, where I can’t even decide to take my daughter to the park for reasons that are entirely sensible, is hell on earth.’ I heard him close the door and walk away.

The first thing I did this morning was to pour the milk down the hole in the kitchen.

‘Do you want to sit in the trolley?’ Mum asks.

‘I don’t think I’ll fit,’ I say, which makes Esther laugh and Mum purse her lips.

She lectures us both before we enter the maze of food. ‘Stay with me. Don’t wander off, OK?’

Esther and I nod in unison, and Esther takes my hand, squeezing my fingers as if she already knows a secret. For a few minutes, we trail around after my mother, who loads up the trolley with milk and fruit that no one will eat, and I tell myself over and over again what I am doing, where I am going. What my secret plan is. I don’t know if now is any time near midday or past it, but I do know it will have to be now or never. I pick Esther up and, kissing her, slot her into the wheely thing seat. She protests for a little while, but only
until I take a packet of crisps off the shelf and hand it to her. I trail behind, studiously looking at labels that I cannot read any more, up and down the lines of food, and then up and down the next one until I am as near to where the outside door is as I can be. While Mum and Esther head up the next aisle, I continue down and out of the outside door, and into the world. I am becoming quite an expert at this.

The world is large, noisy and different from how I remember it. The town I’m walking through today is different from the one I remember. I don’t know which version it is I am remembering, whether it is one from last week, last year or last decade: I don’t know. But it’s different to this version I am walking in now. It’s rather like walking in a dream, where everything isn’t quite right. It could be frightening to be out here, but I am not frightened: I am free.

The library hasn’t changed, though. It’s a great big old building with spires and turrets, and looks like it should feature in a book of its own. I can see it, at least its tower with the time on it, over the roofs of the buildings in between, and so I just keep heading towards it, my eyes fixed constantly up, wondering what the time is. I am forced to divert, turn down streets I don’t remember being there, but I am not worried, because when I look up I can still see the tower, getting closer. I just think about getting to the library and nothing else, and it works. Eventually, I come into a part of the town that has no cars, like a square, and I have reached the library. I did it!

I look up at the stone steps that lead to a room full of
books, and to Ryan, and it occurs to me what I am doing. I’m throwing myself off a precipice from which there is no way back. I am a married woman, married to a man who could not have loved me more, and who does his best every day to try and show me that this hasn’t changed, even though I’m slowly ebbing away. I should take comfort in his steadfast love; it should make me feel better, but it doesn’t, because I do not know him. He is nothing to me, and all his words and kindness feel like lies, because I do not know him. Even his face is becoming a meaningless blur whenever I try to recall him. And as for the precipice, soon I will be falling from it, anyway. Maybe it’s better to jump rather than be pushed. I want to see this man, who wants to see me. That’s all. Not to have an affair or hurt anyone, or try to run away. I just want to see this man who wants to see me. Me and not the disease.

It’s cold and the inside of my neck hurts when I go from the cold air into the hot air of the library. He said he’d meet me in the reading room, and for a while I am afraid that I won’t know what he looks like now. But then he is there. He turns around when I come in and smiles. It’s the eyes I don’t forget – the eyes that are so full of words.

‘Hello,’ he says.

‘Hello,’ I say.

‘I’m so pleased to see you. I thought you might not come,’ he says all at once in a rush, as though there is more to say, but then no more words come.

‘I’m pleased to see you too,’ I say. ‘I have thought about nothing else but coming.’

We stand there looking at each other for a long time, and it’s not about who looks like what, I just know that. It’s not about the colour of eyes, or hair, or the angle of a chin or the set of a mouth. It’s just about looking, being there with another person who somehow knows you, and sees you. We just look at each other, and it’s the strangest feeling to look at a person I barely know and feel that somehow I’m looking at a reflection.

‘Shall we walk?’ he says, and he takes my fingers and leads me deep into the walls of books. I breathe in the scent of dusty paper and, as I follow him, the pulse in the tips of my fingers ticks against the palm of his hand. For a moment, I am a little girl, a very little girl following my father to the romance section, where he secretly picks out romantic novels to read. I had forgotten that, until this very moment. My dad used to love to read romance. Sitting on a Sunday morning in the sunshine in the living room, he’d read a book cover to cover. I gasp in a quiet breath of warm air and close my eyes. For a second it feels like he is here with me again, and I am choosing books for him based on how pretty the lady on the cover is.

We stop in the darkest corner of the walls of books, our backs against a mosaic of spines.

‘How are you?’ he asks me in a whisper, even though there is no one else here and we are far from the front desk.

‘I am complicated,’ I say out loud, because I don’t know how to lie to him or how to whisper.

‘Was it hard to get away?’ he asks, smiling at me as if I am very marvellous. I like the idea that he thinks I am very marvellous.

‘No, I hatched a brilliant escape plan,’ I tell him, and he laughs. When he looks at me, there is this light in his eyes: it is pure joy. I never expected to give anyone that intensity of happiness ever again. I can’t resist it.

‘I’ve been thinking about you a lot,’ he says. ‘The whole time, wondering how I could see you again.’

‘Why?’ I ask him. ‘Why have you been thinking about me?’

‘Who knows why?’ His fingers trace along the ledge towards mine. Our hands touch, fingertip to fingertip. ‘Does it matter why? Isn’t it enough just that I do think about you? All the time. Do you think about me?’

‘When I remember to,’ I say.

I look at him, and try to make sense of what I see in his face, but it overwhelms me. I put my palm against his cheek to still us both.

‘I’m married,’ I tell him. ‘And I have two daughters, and one is having a baby. I’m going to be a grandmother.’ I say the last few words in a tone of wonder, because the information has just come back to me in that second.

‘And I’m married too.’ He covers my hand with his, keeping it in place. ‘I’m still very much in love with my wife. I really am.’

‘So we can’t … This can’t be an affair,’ I say. ‘I can’t run away with you. We aren’t the sort of people who would do that, are we?’

I wonder if I should tell him about the nature of my illness, but I can’t. I’m perfect to him at the moment. I want to be perfect to him, for as many moments as I can be.

‘No,’ he says. ‘You don’t have to run away with me. You just have to be here with me now. That’s all I want. I just want now. Nothing else has to happen.’

It’s not until he says the words that I realise that is all I want too. I just want now. I am not sure which of us draws closer to the other, or when I know that we are going to kiss, here in the library amongst the racks of sedate hardbacks, but it happens effortlessly, beautifully. All I want is now, this warmth, the closeness, his smell, his lips, his touch, all I want is now, until it is not now any more. This kiss isn’t about sex, desire, or passion, or anything other than just knowing each other, just being close to each other: it’s a kiss made only of love.

There’s a cough from the other side of the wall of books, and we break apart. I lean my face against his, and we stand cheek to cheek, our heads slightly bowed, breathing each other in, the toes of our feet interlocked.

‘I have to go,’ I say. ‘Mum must be tired of losing me by now.’

‘Don’t go yet,’ he says. ‘Stay here a little longer.’

‘My mum will kill me,’ I say, and that makes him laugh, too loudly.

‘Excuse me.’ A voice comes from behind the book wall. ‘If you want to talk, go outside.’

There’s a noise, a loud screeching, and I think it might be a fire alarm, but then I realise it’s the thing in my pocket that my mother gave me. I take it out and look at it. He takes it from me and finds a way to make it quiet, so that it just chirrups silently in my hand. It doesn’t stop, though.

‘Quick, answer it!’ he says, stifling a giggle, as the person on the other side of the books marches off, probably to get reinforcements.

‘I don’t know how to,’ I say, shrugging. ‘It’s new.’

He takes it, presses something and hands it back to me. I hear a tiny, tinny voice repeating my name over and over again. Slowly, uncertainly, I bring the thing to my ear as if it is a sea shell. I hear Mum’s voice.

‘Where are you?’

‘The library,’ I say.

‘Why?’ is all she says.

‘I wanted to come to the library,’ I say, looking at him, smiling. ‘So I did.’

Then the sound of my mother sighing, crying, growling … or something.

‘Claire, will you wait there until Esther and I come to get you?’

‘Yes.’ My smile falters when I hear the sadness in her voice, and so does his as he watches my face. ‘I’ll wait here.’

‘Promise me,’ she says. ‘Wait on the steps. Don’t go
anywhere. Remember it, Claire. Pin it down. Wait on the front steps.’

‘I’ll wait,’ I say. There is quiet and I don’t know what to do with the thing so I put it back in my pocket.

‘Excuse me.’ A cross-looking woman is marching towards us. ‘We’ve had complaints.’

Ryan takes my hand and we walk quickly through the books, our footsteps echoing off them, right into the hall to the great big giants’ door. Cold air gushes in and out as people come and go.

‘I have to wait on the steps to meet my mum,’ I say, and then, ‘You must think I am very stupid to have to wait to be collected by my mum, but she’s old, she’s very needy.’

‘Not at all.’ We stand for a moment longer. It’s like the lengths of our bodies are bonded together by some kind of magnetic force: we are simply drawn to each other, as though we’re meant to be connected. ‘It’s nice.’

‘I wonder how I will see you again,’ I say, knowing that the second I step outside, this moment will be over for ever, and that in any one of the seconds that follow, I might forget him.

‘There will be a time,’ he says. ‘I know it.’

‘I have to wait on the steps,’ I say.

‘I’ll wait here. I’ll watch you until she comes.’

‘Will you?’ I ask him. He squeezes my fingers one last time, and I walk out into the cold and stand on the steps, and breathe in the colour and the life, and the rush of the traffic, and the smell of the air, full of dirt. I like now.

‘Mummy!’ Esther hops up the steps, two at a time. ‘Is it story time?’

‘You can’t go out any more,’ Mum says. She takes my arm and tries to drag me away.

‘Get off me!’ I shout, and people turn and look. ‘Get off me!’

Mum lets go. Her face is white, and her eyes are red and swollen. She’s been crying, and suddenly I feel her pain, like a hammer blow in the centre of my chest. I shouldn’t have done this.

‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ I say.

‘You can’t go anywhere any more,’ she says, standing there quaking, shaking, on the library steps. ‘I can’t do it. I thought I could, but I can’t. I can’t take care of you any more. I’ve let you down.’

Mum is crying, her whole body trembling, the tears running and running. I put my arms around her, and Esther too, and I hold her while she cries. We stand like that for a long time, while the people of the town walk up and down the library steps around us. And then Mum breaks the embrace and wipes her face with a hanky.

‘If we don’t get the freezer stuff packed away soon it will defrost.’

This is a photo of my dad and me on the beach in St Ives, Cornwall. It was blazing hot, but Dad still has full-length trousers on, and his shirtsleeves buttoned at his wrists. He’s sitting awkwardly in the deck chair, as though it were the enemy, with me at his feet. I remember Mum squinting through the camera lens, her feet buried in the sand, the wind coming off the water, blowing her cotton skirt up around her knees, while I kneeled at Dad’s feet, my hands buried in the hot, dry sand. I’m scowling in the photo, wishing she’d hurry up and get on with it, because I didn’t want to be still for a moment longer. I look at it now, and I see that my dad and I have exactly the same scowl.

Dad hated being on holiday; he hated leisure time, I think. He was a man who always liked to have a purpose. Nothing he did was ever just to pass the time, or designed to be recreational, except for reading his books, and even then he only allowed himself that pleasure when there was absolutely nothing else that could be
done with that time. How my mother got him to accompany us on this, our one and only family holiday, I do not know. I imagine a conversation about being part of the family, building a relationship with his daughter, taking part in life. My mum, with her bare feet and long hair, the freckles on her nose, and nails that were never painted, and my dad, standing in the heat of the day in a suit and tie, eying her as if she were a creature from another planet, not merely another generation, arguing about going on holiday. I wonder, sometimes, how they fell in love. I tried to ask Mum once, a few years ago, just as I was getting together with Greg. But she turned my question away with a simple shake of her head, and I never asked again. She did love him, though. I don’t doubt that. I don’t doubt that he loved her too – the way he used to watch her, as though she were miraculous.