The Last Thing She Remembers

by J. S. Monroe

  As they had kissed goodbye in the early hours, away from her parents’ eyes, she held him long and tight. She gave no indication that she would not stay in touch, which had hurt in the months that had followed as he thought they had been in love. He must have written more than thirty airmail letters but never heard back. By the time he got married a few years later, he had almost forgotten Freya.

  Maybe he did know deep down that he was never going to see her again. Or perhaps the address he had written down had been wrong? He’s sure that it was in Ludhiana, which doesn’t help much.

  He searches for “Freya Lal” and “Ludhiana” again and scrolls through the familiar results. Then his eye is caught by a news story in the Hindustan Times: Ludhiana Man Kills Daughter and Her Paramour in Suspected Case of Honor Killing.

  He skim-reads it, shocked that women are still murdered for bringing “shame” on their families. Could Freya have been killed? He shifts in his seat. Many reasons for Freya’s silence have crossed his mind over the years, but not this one. It seems inconceivable in this modern day and age. Besides, her father would have come after him—her “paramour”—as well as Freya, wouldn’t he? It seems so unlikely. Her parents were sufficiently liberal to send Freya to a mixed British boarding school. Maybe they discovered she had a boyfriend, had a row and told her to sever all contacts with the school? No one else seems to have heard from her either in the thirty years since.

  And then he acknowledges another thought that he’s managed to ignore until now. What if she had been pregnant? Was that what she had been trying to tell him at the graduation ball? He glances at the door, trying to stop his mind from running away with itself. Freya doesn’t reply to his letters because she returns home to India pregnant. He assumes he was responsible. They had only had sex once, in the summer term on a weekend away in London. It was the first time for both of them, and it had been a fumbling, tearful tryst. Not entirely protected either. Her family permits her to keep the baby, but insists that she severs all ties with her school and Britain. Thirty years later, Freya’s daughter returns to the UK in search of her biological father.

  Or maybe she simply didn’t want to stay in touch.

  CHAPTER 27

  “You’re working late,” I say, standing in the doorway of the Seahorse Gallery & Café. Tony has his back to me and doesn’t turn around. He’s holding one of his large framed photographs in both hands, trying to secure it to a picture rail. I take a deep breath and step into the café.

  “These are sons of bitches to hang,” he says. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t come over earlier,” I say, glancing back onto the high street. A group of evening commuters is walking up from the train station. They look stunned after their day in London, their faces ashen with exhaustion.

  “No problem,” he says, still trying to attach the picture.

  I touch the tattoo beneath my shirt. “Do you want a hand with that?” I ask. I need to be fearless, like Fleur. Whatever happened to her, I know she was brave.

  “Thanks.”

  I walk over and hold the picture while Tony attaches clear plastic threads to a metal runner bar on the ceiling. I can’t bring myself to look at the image, which is inches from my face, and focus instead on a label on the wall. This picture is called Hippocampus denise.

  “Your hands are shaking,” he says.

  “It’s heavy,” I joke, but we both know it’s not. I try to change the subject. “Strange name for a seahorse.”

  “Denise Tackett was an inspirational underwater photographer. When she discovered this little critter in the Indo-Pacific region, they named it in her honor.”

  “Maybe they’ll name one after you.”

  He turns around to look at me. “Maybe.”

  “I had a sleep,” I say, still holding the picture, keen to fill the awkward silence. My hands are still shaking, despite my best efforts. We are close to one another, close enough for me to smell his citrus scent. Clean. Almost antiseptic.

  “There we go,” he says. The picture in place, Tony turns to walk back over to the food counter, leaving me in the gallery area.

  “Have you heard from Laura?” I ask, lingering in front of the pictures. I still can’t bring myself to look directly at them. “Is she okay?”

  He knocks out some old coffee grounds with a noise that startles me and begins to wipe down the machine, cleaning the steam nozzle again and again. “She doesn’t want to talk about it at the moment.”

  “About me?”

  “The whole thing. You turning up, my response.”

  “They’re beautiful,” I manage to say, finally forcing myself to look at the seahorses. I’m lying. I hate them with a passion. The bulging eyes, lizard-like tails, the strange shrunken proportions.

  “They do it for me,” he says. “Time will tell if they do it for anyone else. I don’t think this village could be farther from the sea. Feels kind of landlocked here, don’t you find?”

  “Why do you like them so much?” I ask, walking over to join Tony in the bar area, where he is now wiping down tables with almost obsessive pride. I can’t be in the presence of seahorses any longer.

  “Where to start? Because the male carries the offspring until term? Because they used to lead drowned sailors to the other side? Did you know that dried seahorses sell for up to $3,000 a kilo, more than the price of silver?”

  “Don’t they also have something to do with memory?” I ask.

  “I wasn’t going to mention that.” He stops wiping and looks up at me. “But you’re right—the part of our brain that encodes short-term memories into long-term is called the hippocampus because it’s shaped like a seahorse. Actually there are two of them, tucked into the inner surface of the temporal lobes, one either side of the brain. Particularly beautiful, intricate structures. Just like seahorses. They’re also the first region to be attacked by Alzheimer’s.”

  “You’re really worried about that, aren’t you?” I say tentatively. Laura said he didn’t like to talk about it. I sit down at a table and glance at a copy of the Evening Standard, left by a returning commuter. The front page story is on NHS cuts to mental health care.

  “Laura thinks so,” he says. “I’ve just turned forty. Cognitive deterioration can begin at forty-five. Noxious brain changes in someone who goes on to develop Alzheimer’s may have started as early as thirty. My dad was dead at forty-one.”

  I thought I was strong enough to talk to him about memory when I came into the gallery, but I’m not. Not yet.

  “Are you coming?” he asks, moving to the door and flicking off the lights. “You can bring the paper.”

  I fold it up and follow Tony out of the gallery, watching as he pulls down the metal shutter and padlocks it.

  “Can I cook you dinner?” he asks, as we set off down the high street. “Or are you going Afghan again?”

  “Dinner would be nice,” I say, but my palms are sweating.

  I can’t remember my name.

  CHAPTER 28

  The one catch about the writing room is the memories. This is where Luke used to come with Chloe, ostensibly to talk about page layouts but mainly to flirt. It was a whole year before they came clean with colleagues, twelve exciting months of cryptic emails and stolen glances across the open-plan office. People must have known, as no one was surprised when they made an announcement, which makes him feel foolish now. Luke gets up from the computer and walks over to the window. Below him people are cycling and walking home across Clapham Common, enjoying the evening sunshine. A lot of joggers too. He used to go running with Chloe.

  He turns away and sits down at the desk again to resume his search. Think, think. What did Freya’s parents do? It wasn’t the sort of question people asked each other at school. And then he remembers Freya giving a beautiful burnt-amber pashmina scarf to another girl, at the beginning of th
e Christmas term. He had secretly looked up the word pashmina in the library and went around explaining to anyone who would listen that it was fine wool taken from the underbelly of a Himalayan goat, hoping to impress Freya. Maybe her father worked in fabrics. In Ludhiana.

  For the next two hours, when he should have been writing next month’s “letter from the editor,” Luke scours LinkedIn for Lals working in fabrics in Ludhiana, cross-referencing to Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter and Google Plus. He interrogates his old classmates on email, at least those who bothered to reply to his original inquiry, and confirms that Freya had once spoken about a family firm in Ludhiana. He scours every Punjabi newspaper site he can find, exceeds his free search quota on Indian People Directory and uses the Wayback Machine to look up archived pages of Friends Reunited.

  For a long time it feels like a lost cause, and he’s haunted by the thought that she might have been a victim of honor killing. And then, just as he’s thinking of chucking it in for the day, a glimmer of hope: a wealthy Lal family based in Ludhiana who export pashminas to the UK and seem to have family connections here. Another breakthrough follows, via the school alumni office, which finally replies to an email he fired off earlier. It has no record of Freya’s current whereabouts or contact details, but it does reveal that her family once made a donation to the arts department, where Freya had studied textiles. It was a long time ago, while Freya was a pupil at the school, but the lead takes him to a new website for benefactors and donors. And it’s there that he finds a record of the donation, thirty-one years ago, and the name of the Lal family export business through which the donation was made (in return for an engraved brick in the arts building).

  Thirty minutes later, as the office cleaner arrives, Luke is staring at a Mr. Lal on LinkedIn who works for the same pashmina export business. He follows him onto Facebook, searches his friends and discovers a woman called Freya. Her surname is different, but she is listed as his niece. Bingo. Except that the account is private and annoyingly there is no picture of her, just a photo of a flower. He sits up and clicks on the image. A lotus flower—like the one he saw tattooed on Jemma’s wrist in the pub.

  Could it be Freya? There’s only one way to find out. Fingers trembling, he begins to compose a long message request, praying that she is still alive. Why’s he telling her his entire life story? He deletes it in favor of something more simple. Hi, long time no see. Luke Lascelles here—is this really you?! It would be great to catch up. Please accept this request—I need to ask you something important. Maybe I can call you? Tomorrow?

  He rereads the message—just the right blend of casual and a call to action—and presses send, tears coming. At times like this, he realizes how much he misses his old journalist life. And then his phone buzzes. It’s Sean, up in town and in need of a pint.

  One of Luke’s legs buckles as he stands to leave the writing room. He’s not sure if it’s cramp or nerves. He thinks again of Jemma, the woman who has turned up in his village yesterday, her tattoo. Could she really be Freya’s daughter? His daughter?

  CHAPTER 29

  “I was convinced you were trying to sell us something when you were standing here yesterday,” Tony says, as we hover outside his house on School Road in the evening sun. “Almost told you to go to hell.”

  “I don’t remember,” I say, glancing at the door knocker. The sight of it makes me feel dizzy again.

  “So you don’t recall me saying how beautiful you were?” he adds, laughing.

  I don’t remember. There’s more straw in the street, from the thatcher on the corner. Fleur was the beautiful one.

  “Actually, that’s a lie,” he says, opening the front door. “It was Laura.”

  “How long will she be away for?” I ask, as we walk into the sitting room. Tony doesn’t answer. I hope Laura’s okay.

  The house smells of cooking and homeliness, but I can’t relax. Each time I walk through this door, I feel like I am intruding. This is Laura’s home, another woman’s place, and I shouldn’t be here. And yet I know I have come to this house for a reason. A purpose.

  In my notes, I described how I sat on the sofa and drank sweet mint tea, brought to me by Laura in a mug with a yoga cat on it. The same mug, or a similar one, is on the low sitting-room table now, next to a printout of a news article from the internet. I manage to read the headline—Woman Who Slit Best Friend’s Throat Found Guilty of Manslaughter—before Tony snatches it up, like a teenager hiding porn.

  “I already made dinner,” he says, walking through to the kitchen. “Some clam chowder, except I couldn’t get any clams, so we’re having scallops instead. Hand-dived from Devon. Hope that’s okay.”

  “But you didn’t know I was coming.” I stay in the sitting room and perch on the sofa, trying to compose myself. My hands are still shaking, and I’ve got no excuse now.

  “I took a reckless gamble, based on the state of your prison cell at the pub and the Afghan food on your floor.”

  I don’t like him being rude about Abdul. “The curry was delicious.”

  “I’m sure it was.”

  “Can I use your bathroom?” I ask, joining him in the kitchen.

  “Go right ahead,” he says, starting to lay up the table.

  After locking the door, I sink down on the closed loo seat and shut my eyes. It was a mistake to come back here on my own. I’m not ready. And it’s not fair on Laura. I should have stopped her when she was walking to the train, talked to her, but it would have been impossible. She’s not listening, has a head full of her own theories. I look around the room and notice a small, framed photograph of a seahorse behind me. I breathe in deeply and walk out into the kitchen.

  CHAPTER 30

  “You did what?” Luke says, gesturing to the barman for another drink.

  “I flushed her out,” Sean says.

  They are in the Windsor Castle in Westminster, one of Luke’s favorite London drinking holes. He loves its wooden paneling, the hand-etched glass partitions and a dumbwaiter behind the bar that brings pies and chips up from the kitchen. The pub’s also close to the flat in Pimlico where he’s staying tonight, owned by friends of his parents. They are seated in a small partitioned-off area, away from the throng of office drinkers in the main bar area, and Sean is trying once again to convince Luke that Jemma is a Russian sleeper.

  “It stopped her dead in her tracks,” Sean says.

  “What did?”

  “When I spoke to Jemma in Russian. In the graveyard.”

  “She must have been rather surprised.” Poor woman. She’s got enough on her plate right now without mad Irish locals talking to her in Russian.

  “She didn’t know it was me,” he continues, spinning his beer mat. Sean’s body is as restless as his mind.

  “How come?”

  “I was hiding. Behind a yew tree. That’s how these things are done.”

  “You’re losing me, Sean.” Luke looks up at the door. Two confused tourists have just entered, clutching guidebooks. The pub used to be called the Cardinal, a nod to nearby Westminster Cathedral. When he worked in Victoria, he spent his time directing tourists to the Coach Station.

  “Covert exchanges in the field,” Sean continues. “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, chalk marks in the park? I asked her if she was missing Moscow. In Russian. If she knew where her loyalties lay.”

  “And she said?” Luke is agog, trying to picture the scene. He’s in a good mood tonight, buoyed by his earlier online sleuthing.

  “She didn’t. That’s the point. She was found out.”

  “The world must be such an exciting place seen through your eyes, Sean. And full of disappointment.”

  Luke pays for two more pints of Guinness, served by a polite Polish barman, and turns to face his friend.

  “I need you to understand something, Sean,” he says, trying to inject some gravitas into the proceedings. “Jemma�
��s not Russian, never was, never will be.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Leave it, Sean. Please?”

  They sit in silence for a few moments, unusual for them, and then Sean heads off to the loos in the basement. Luke knows that when he comes back he must get his friend onside about Freya Lal. He can’t be certain that he’s messaged the right person, but he’s feeling optimistic. Providing she’s still alive. No way would her father have killed her, even if she had been pregnant. And he’s got no evidence that she was.

  “Actually, there’s something important I need to tell you,” Luke says when Sean comes back.

  “I’m all ears.” Sean glances around him as he sips the top off his Guinness. “And so is Moscow, for sure.”

  Luke can’t help looking around the pub too, notices the selection of vodkas behind the bar. Maybe this place is on the Russians’ radar.

  “The reason I’m interested in Jemma is...” Luke falters, struggling to say the words out loud. “If she is the daughter of my old girlfriend, Freya Lal, then...”

  “What?” Sean asks. He’s not making this easy. Luke needs Sean’s ebullient mind to quieten, just for a few seconds.