The Art of Forgetting

by McLaren, Julie

  It was ages before I told him about Linda. We had talked about everything, shared our thoughts and dreams in such an open way, as if we were reunited twins filling in the gaps. And yet I didn’t tell him about that one thing, not a word, not even that I’d known her. I think I was afraid that he would hate me as much as I hated myself if I told him. But one day, when we were up in his room and we were lying naked in his tangled sheets, just looking at each other in that way you do when you’re a certain age and you’re basking in a post-coital glow and you think this is it, this really must be it, because surely it can’t get any better. That’s when I told him and he didn’t hate me at all. He said whatever happened was not my fault. How could it be? It was written in the stars and there was nothing I could do to change it now so why worry about it? I should stop torturing myself and let the rest of my life take its course. That was such a compelling philosophy that I embraced it, at least at the time.

  What was it that Paul said that time, his face all twisted? “You need to start thinking for yourself and stop behaving as if you’re going out with some fucking guru.” Something like that. I suppose there was an element of our relationship that was a bit idolatrous, on my side anyway. I’m not even sure Vic would have been aware of it, it was just the way we were, but somehow I came to depend on him for most of my views. Then when I lost him, I lost all that too, which only deepened the great, aching void in my life.

  Sometimes when everyone is talking, Robin on his high horse about something in the papers, Kelly disagreeing, Laura thinking it all through quietly then saying the one thing no-one else has thought of and Patrick … well, who knows what Patrick is thinking? At times like that, I remember what it was like after Vic died, when I took the plunge and left work, went to university and started trying to build a new life. I used to sit in those smoky rooms in the halls of residence, my eyes flitting around, following this person and that as they spoke, never knowing what to say. It was ridiculous. I was a good three years older than many of them, with a lot more experience, but my compass had gone and I had to make a new one, all on my own.

  So what’s happening now? I used to be able to argue with the best of them. Later, when the pain had softened and I could see a tall boy with long, brown, wavy hair across the campus without getting a momentary rush of relief – oh, there you are! – followed by the stab of realisation and the ache. When I began to understand that there were lots of boys who looked a bit like Vic from a distance but none of them would turn out to be him. Ever. When that had more or less stopped and I’d actually had a couple of brief flings with boys I didn’t really fancy because I thought I should, I slowly began to join in a bit more. Slowly, I found that some of the things I said were coming from somewhere in me, rather than from this other place, the ‘What would Vic have said?’ place that had been filtering my thoughts for so long.

  That isn’t the problem now. Vic seems to be on my mind a lot at the moment but he’s not slowing my thought processes down so that I lose the thread of the discussion by the time there’s a long enough pause for me to contribute. No, that’s something else, another secret I am keeping, or at least confining to the written word. I don’t know whether they have even realised and I wonder what will happen when they do?

  Anyway, none of that is relevant to Linda’s story, so I have to go back to when Vic and I had been going out for a while and it was coming up to a year since she had disappeared. First, there was a little paragraph in the local paper and now I think of it, that may have been what provoked me to tell Vic. Anyway, that isn’t important. The thing that really brought it all rushing back, unsettled me completely, was a slight change to my job. Mr Jones was apparently very pleased with me. He told me this at my review. He ticked a lot of boxes and told me why he was ticking them. I was punctual, I was conscientious, my work was of a high standard. There wasn’t a box to tick for being young and quite pretty, or for wearing skirts that barely covered your knickers, but he would have ticked those too if there had been.

  The upshot was, I was getting through my work so quickly that he wanted me to take on some from another department. These documents would be for established practices and equipment rather than research, but he was sure I could manage quite well. I would have to liaise with someone from the other department in order to let them know when I had capacity, so they could let me know when they had work they couldn’t cover. It wasn’t rocket science, but Mr Jones was old school civil service and liked everything to be orderly. He asked me to arrange for the person in charge to come over one afternoon, so he could meet her and we could discuss the work. Looking back, I suspect there was a degree of empire-building going on but I knew nothing about that at the time and agreed to make the call as soon as possible. My new contact’s name was Kristal Schneider and I thought she sounded both sophisticated and mysterious. Why couldn’t I have been called Kristal Schneider instead of Judy Bakewell?

  I spoke to Kristal three times on the phone before we met, and with each call my awe and expectation increased. She had a deep, almost husky voice which put me in mind of Marianne Faithful and she was at once friendly and aloof. This meant I could never be sure how to frame my responses. I worried about being too familiar, but then she would say something quite unexpected, and I would worry that I hadn’t been friendly enough. By the time the day of our meeting arrived, I had a perfectly fixed picture of her in my mind and I didn’t think for a moment that it might be wrong. She would be blonde, obviously – with a name like that she must be of Germanic origin – tall, willowy and stylish in a grown-up way. She would probably smoke some kind of exotic cigarettes; Gauloise or those little Black Russian ones, and maybe even use a cigarette holder. I was a little unsure on the last point, as that could be a bit too James Bond for a Civil Service Executive Officer – for that is what she was, a grade above me – but on everything else I was certain.

  It didn’t even occur to me that the thick-set young woman in a sensible skirt and patterned blouse could be Kristal. Her hair was dark and glossy and fell in a sort of Mary Quant bob, and she didn’t look remotely Germanic. I hardly looked up from my work as she walked across to talk to Mr Jones. It wasn’t until they approached my desk together, with that ‘just about to make introductions’ look on their faces, that the penny dropped and I had to hide my disappointment and embarrassment.

  In the event, it didn’t really matter. As soon as she spoke and I had reconfigured this new picture to match the voice, it was as if we had already met. Mr Jones only waited around for a couple of minutes before locating a chair and dragging it across so Kristal could sit beside me at my desk, before going off on his rounds. One of his many responsibilities was the provision of furniture throughout the building and he would use this as an excuse to wander from office to office, noting the number of chairs and desks in a little book. He took me with him more than once and I had to stand, trying to look interested, whilst he discussed cricket with every departmental manager and exchanged banter with the women. These days, he probably would have been disciplined for sexist remarks, but nobody thought twice about it then.

  It didn’t take long for Kristal and I to work out a system. I showed her what I was working on at the time, which seemed to impress her. We appeared to have covered everything when she suddenly struck her thigh with the heel of her hand.

  “I know who you are!” she said, as if it had been troubling her. “You’re Linda Lucaretti’s friend, aren’t you? I knew I’d heard the name before, as soon as you called, but I couldn’t work out where!”

  By then my response was practically automatic. Yes, we had been friendly for a bit and travelled together, but not by the time she went missing. Yes, terrible, isn’t it? Whatever could have happened to her? And so on. I never would have put Kristal down as a gossip, but it seems my assessment of character was just as poor as my ability to create an accurate mental image. She pulled her chair a little closer and lowered her head and her voice, although there was nobody close enough to hea
r anything she said.

  “She worked in the office on the floor below mine, you know. I didn’t know her well – she wasn’t in my team and her work, well, she was just a clerk really. Pretty routine stuff, so I didn’t have anything to do with her in that way, but my friend Dawn works in the same office and we used to sit together in the canteen from time to time. She’d come and join us – if she didn’t have a date, of course.”

  This last was said with a degree of emphasis that implied something, but I wasn’t sure what. I also wasn’t sure where this conversation was heading and was very doubtful about whether I wanted it to continue, but my lack of enthusiasm was no deterrent to Kristal.

  “Yes, I’m afraid we used to hear all about her lunch dates. It was as if she was doing us a favour being there at all. ‘Oh, I’m only here because my date had to go to a lecture. He’s a student, you know.’ Well of course we bloody knew, she’d told us enough times. You’d think she was going out with bloody Prince Charles to hear her talk, and honestly, the secrecy! She wouldn’t tell us his name – not that I cared much anyway – said it was something to do with his family who were something important and they’d stop paying his rent if they found out. She said it made it all the more exciting, called herself his ‘secret lover.’ She would sometimes sing that song, you know, Kathy Kirby was it? To be honest, it was all very tedious and if we saw her coming we’d start humming it too, under our breath. And then she’d look surprised and ask what we were laughing about, but she never thought it was her. Oh, no. She was far too full of herself for that.”

  I had to say something, after a speech that long and so full of obvious dislike, but I didn’t want to confirm Kristal’s assessment of Linda. OK, she was very confident, especially about her own attractiveness, but I guess I would be if I’d looked like that. And Kristal, well, she was even further removed from that ideal than me, so I was pretty sure that jealousy was a significant factor here, but I could hardly say that either.

  “She was quite nice to me, especially at first,” I ventured. I told Kristal about how Linda had taken me under her wing, exaggerating my own naivety and the role she had played in getting me through those first few weeks. But Kristal was not to be diverted from her mission. I doubt it would have made any difference if I’d told her Linda spent her weekends doing voluntary work with the sick and the needy.

  “Oh well, she would, wouldn’t she? Any opportunity to lord it over someone else. Anyway, the point is, she was obviously having a relationship with someone, and he obviously wanted to keep it quiet, and then – and this is what Dawn told me, so it comes from someone who saw her every weekday, right up to the day she disappeared – she thinks she was up the duff.”

  Kristal looked across at me, and obviously mistook my expression for confusion, rather than total shock, which it was.

  “You know, pregnant. A bun in the oven. She didn’t say anything, but you know what it’s like, when there are a bunch of girls together. They talk about periods and things like that and they get into a kind of cycle, when everyone comes on at the same time. I read about it in Cosmo. Anyway, that’s what happened and Dawn would always know when Linda was due, partly because they nearly always came on together, but also because Linda would be so pale and grumpy the day before and then she would have awful cramps and have to take painkillers – strong ones, not just aspirin. Sometimes she’d even have to go home.”

  I nodded. I knew this was all true, as Linda had told me about the pains that gripped her on the first day of her period and had apologised for being short with me, more than once. I hadn’t thought much about it, probably just congratulated myself for being lucky in that respect. Kristal wasn’t inventing any of this, however much I wished that to be the case.

  “Dawn reckons she had missed at least one period when she disappeared, possibly two. She was also looking pretty rough some mornings and although she put it down to having had a heavy night, it didn’t make much sense. Why would she suddenly start going out and getting drunk every night of the week when she had never done that before? Whatever else you might say about her, she wasn’t a slacker at work and it just doesn’t ring true. That’s what Dawn says anyway, and I believe her.”

  I wondered how many other people Kristal had regaled with this story, and whether it had got back to her mother or the police, but I didn’t ask those questions. Time was getting on and Kristal had to get back. We ran through the new work procedure one more time and she left, obviously quite satisfied with her afternoon’s work and the unexpected opportunity for gossip and character assassination.

  Mr Jones returned shortly afterwards, so then I had to explain the procedure to him. “Put it in a document, my dear,” he said, shaking his head sadly that I hadn’t somehow done this already. “If we don’t write it down, how are we going to remember what we said?”

  Although those words have more than a little resonance now, at that time I was perfectly capable of remembering what had been agreed. But I complied, obviously. I can imagine Kelly or Laura questioning a decision like that, but it would not have occurred to me. If Mr Jones had asked me to type the same thing out dozens of times and paper the office walls with it, I probably would have done so, however stupid it may have seemed. Maybe that’s why I was so passive when it came to the Linda issue. Here was information that could have been material to the case, but I didn’t do anything other than tell Vic and he said to keep out of it.

  “If she’s told you, she’s probably told loads of other people already, to say nothing of this Dawn. It’s probably just gossip, but even if it’s true I’m sure the police already know. It might look odd, you getting involved after such a long time. Stop worrying, none of this is your fault, and you can’t bring her back, really you can’t.”

  It was one of the things Vic was more and more certain about at the time, and so I was too. Sometimes it still seems that way to me now. He said that there was no such thing as free will, that every action we took, even every thought we had, was determined by the actions and thoughts of people who had gone before us. Our futures were all laid out. There was nothing we could do to change them, things would happen if they were going to and even if we knew the future and tried to alter it, it wouldn’t work. Whatever was going to happen would happen because we had tried to stop it happening, that was all part of the train of events. So if Linda was supposed to be found, she would be found and if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t be. It was as simple as that.

  He kissed me and stroked my hair, gently, like he always did. I cut it all off when he died. It was like no-one else should ever be able to do that. Although I’d been proud of my hair, the way it fell in long waves down my back, it was for him and him only. I’ve never thought about that before, why I always kept it short, but I’m sure that’s why. In fact, it was a long time before I paid any attention to my appearance at all. What was the point? I didn’t want another boyfriend, so why bother looking nice? We didn’t think about things like self-esteem and all that in those days; it was absolutely clear why we dressed the way we did, why we worried about our skin, our weight, our split ends. If you didn’t have a boyfriend you needed to get one, and if you had a boyfriend you needed to keep him. All this was inextricably bound up with how you looked.

  I must remember to ask Laura and Kelly when I see them. Was it the same for them, really, when you strip it all away, or did all that women’s lib stuff actually change things? Did they honestly spend hours up in their rooms getting ready to please themselves, or was it the same old drives behind it all? I remember the first time after Vic died that I found myself wondering what someone might think as I got ready to go out. I can remember that room, the one in Franklin Road. I can’t remember where I was going, but I can remember standing in front of that funny old dressing table, with its three mirrors so you could see what you looked like from any angle, and thinking about Barry and the way he had looked at me in the bar. I knew that look and I wanted him to look at me like that again. And then I had this ter
rible wave of guilt as I thought of Vic and how he used to look at me. I got a tissue and scrubbed all the make-up off again, the tears smudging everything until I looked a mess, my face blotchy and black rings around my eyes.

  It took several attempts before I let myself feel any normal emotions, but I suppose it helped that Barry was so different. If he’d been long-haired and arty, or if he’d been into philosophy or poetry, he would never have been anything but a pale imitation of Vic and it would never have got off the ground. But he was a fairly straight northern lad, not given to saying more words than were absolutely necessary to make a point, and his hair was short by the standards of the time, hardly below his collar. He had different colour eyes, a different shaped face and was broader and more muscular than Vic had been. So, when we finally kissed, it was nothing remotely like holding onto a ghost as it had been with the others. Barry was solid and real. What you saw was what you got, as they say. He was kind and patient with me, pulling back if I got scared but always there to pick up the strings again. Dear Barry, he was just what I needed and, as I couldn’t have Vic, he became what I wanted too.

  Paul never liked Vic. Once, I came into the room and it was obvious they’d been arguing as their faces were red and the tension crackled in the air like static, but they stopped when they saw me. I asked Vic about it later, but he brushed it off.

  “Oh, nothing. Your brother’s a bit of an idiot, but I expect you knew that!” he said, with a little laugh. Well, I didn’t, not really. Paul had been my hero as I grew up and, with that one exception when he was ill, he had remained so. My big brother. The girls at school used to go on about him no end, how good looking he was and was he going out with anyone? How fantastic, to have an older brother, bringing all his friends round, a constant supply of potential dates. But it was never really like that. Paul’s social life was always conducted strictly away from the house. We never really knew what he was getting up to or who his friends were. My parents gave up asking, it caused so many rows, and as long as he came back at a reasonable time and wasn’t obviously drunk there wasn’t much they could say.