The Art of Forgetting

by McLaren, Julie

  Laura has just been round and I had to hide this under the papers, but I got it straight out again when she left in case I couldn’t find it. I have to put things in the same place now or I spend all my time looking for them. She brought food round and it was all, oh, I’ve just been to Sainsbury’s so I picked up a few things for you, and then she insisted on putting the chilled things in the fridge. I don’t know why there were so many bowls and containers in there, I must have thought they’d be useful. And her face, when she took them out.

  “Mum, this one’s mouldy, and this one’s got something disgusting growing on it. You’ll give yourself food poisoning, if you go on like this!”

  I know she’s right, that I’m not entirely on top of the food, the cooking and all that. But it made me angry, her telling me off as if she were the parent and I were the child. I didn’t mean to shout at her, and I apologised afterwards, but she looked shaken and she didn’t stay long afterwards. I made myself a note, and now I’ve taped it to the front of the fridge. CHECK FOR MOULDY FOOD it says. I think it will help, as well as showing her that I do listen. If I’m going to be cooking for people I have to get organised, so maybe I’m spending too much time writing. That could very well be part of the problem.

  This morning, I had to look up the recipe for shortbread. I knew what I needed, and I knew the method, but I couldn’t remember the amounts. Was it half the fat to flour or a quarter? It turned out OK, although I think it maybe had a few minutes too long in the oven, but I’ve forgotten again already. I’ve made shortbread hundreds of times, maybe even thousands over the years, and I could rustle it up without even thinking about it, but not now. That means this thing is eating away at my long-term memory as well and that is awful, terrible. I cried and cried, but then Jip started barking for his walk so I put on my coat and went out. The wind dried my tears, but that woman from the house on the corner looked at me strangely, so maybe it showed in my face.

  Laura was very pleased with the shortbread, although I had to persuade her to take it, at first. She said she’d been shopping and they had plenty of biscuits, but she’d obviously forgotten that I always bake for her on a Tuesday, and when she remembered she was all flustered and I’m sure there were tears in her eyes. Seems I’m not the only one to forget things! But anyway it will keep her going for a while and I told her not to let the others eat it all.

  Now that’s over, I can spend a few minutes on my story, but I don’t know what to write. The thing is that my life continued and I got older, had more experiences, developed in many ways, but the Linda thing didn’t change. It was suspended, frozen in time, so pretty soon I was the same age as she had been when she disappeared. I was really doing quite well at work and Vic and I were steady, steady as a rock. We had a social life that was contented without being boring and everything at home was fine, so just how much time could I spend thinking about something that was receding further and further into the past? I know a year isn’t very long, or eighteen months, but it seemed a long time then. That Judy who had decided to say nothing, that Judy who had lied to the police, to her parents, to Linda’s mother – she seemed like a different version of myself. She was young; she was silly. She had done those things then but she couldn’t undo them, as she didn’t really exist any more. This doesn’t make a lot of sense when I read it back, but it was as if I had divorced myself from those events in the past in order to allow myself happiness in the present. I don’t know if that’s what happened, but that is what it looks like now.

  Maybe if Vic hadn’t died so young, everything would have been different. I never would have found out anything else and I may have forgotten all about Linda by now. Maybe he’d be alive still and he’d look after me. But then everything else would be different, and I’d never have had Robin and Laura and Kelly and I’d never have met Barry. Poor Barry, he knew he was second best but he never complained and maybe he believed me in the end, that I did truly love him. When we found out, or at least when it became clear what was going to happen, I made a promise, a silent promise. I promised myself that I would make every last minute we had together as special as it could be, so he would know that it had all been worth it. There were times when I wanted to tell him about Andy, but actually that would have been selfish. That would have been me getting it off my conscience, not doing it for him, so I never did. He died thinking his only rival had been snuffed out before we met, even if his memory had lingered for a long time afterwards, and I’m sure that was for the best. Andy wasn’t a rival anyway, he was a little bit of the past who popped up in the present, but he was never going to stay.

  So, as far as I was concerned, nothing much happened for a while. I’m sure that wasn’t the case for Linda’s poor mother, but she never came back to see me again and I guess she ran out of leads to follow. But then it happened. I can remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday and that is nothing to do with my condition. Those minutes, those days, are engraved, branded on my memory and rarely have more than a few weeks passed without them coming back to me in some way or another, for all these years. Or maybe it was months, as time went by, but never long enough for it to fade. Whatever happens to my brain in the future, however much I forget, I know I will never forget this.

  I was at home when I got the call. I was actually a bit irritated, as he had said he’d probably be back in time to pop down to the pub and I had got changed. It was one of our routines, to meet up with Sally and Bob, Maggie and Den, anyone else who might be there. It was different to Saturdays, when we tended to do something less laid back, more organised, but it was like washing away the week at work. The weekend starts here, somebody used to say, and that was right. So, I was sitting in the lounge not watching whatever was on the TV. I hadn’t spent ages getting ready, but I had changed into jeans and repaired my make-up and I was in ‘going out mode’, so when 8 o’clock came and went, then half past, I was silently muttering to myself. It would have been better not to have said we’d go out, especially as it was so wet. Then I would have known I was staying in and it wouldn’t matter. Something like that.

  My mum got up to answer the phone, so I never got to talk to Vic’s dad then. I don’t know when I spoke to him at all after that, to be honest, apart from maybe at the funeral and that is all a blur. He was a funny old stick, from a different generation and class to my own parents. I’d never got to know him, even though I was round at their house much more than Vic was at ours. He had a very formal way of talking to me and although Vic assured me that he liked me – they both did, he said – I had no direct evidence of that.

  Anyway, the phone rang, my mum got up and went out to the hall, closing the lounge door after her so as not to disturb my dad’s enjoyment of what he was watching, I suppose. I didn’t think anything about it. Her sister often called at weekends, or it might be Paul, especially if he wanted something. So, when the door opened again and my mum’s face was as white as a sheet and she had the knuckles of one hand clenched against her mouth and her eyes were brimming with tears, well, I knew something was wrong but I thought it would be a different something. My stomach lurched, but it wasn’t for Vic. It would be Paul who was ill again, or someone in the family had died. That’s what I thought.

  I suppose that’s why I didn’t really register what she was saying at first and it didn’t help that it was so difficult for her to say. How do you tell your daughter that her boyfriend, the boyfriend she loves with every bone, every cell of her body, has been killed outright in a road accident? That a lorry had veered into his path and skidded, rammed his little Morris with such force that it was thrown off the road altogether, that it was half its original size when they retrieved it and that it took an hour to cut him out. Actually, I’m sure she didn’t tell me all that at the time and I don’t suppose his father told her, or even that he knew all that himself. We found out more later, at the inquest and the trial. It was supposed to be a comfort to me that it had been quick, that he would have known little about it, but I can’t
say that it was. I can’t say that I found any comfort in anything, anything at all, for a very long time.

  Funerals are strange events. People seem to go into some kind of automatic mode and I’m no different. When Barry’s coffin was sitting there I felt as if I should be wailing, throwing myself on it and beseeching him to come back to me. You see it in other cultures, on the news; everyone in raptures of grief, throwing up their hands and beating their breasts. But I couldn’t do that, however sad I felt. I couldn’t really believe that Barry was inside that box, even though I had chosen it for him. Although I cried a bit, especially when Laura read out that poem she’d written, I wasn’t beside myself. Or maybe I was. Maybe that expression shouldn’t be used for when people are unable to control their feelings, but for when they do, because that is much closer to what happened then. I was there, but I was about a foot away from my body, observing how it conducted itself with such dignity, such reserve. It’s a good job I don’t believe in life after death or I might have worried about Barry, looking down on me so apparently calm and thinking to himself, ‘There, I was right after all. She doesn’t seem all that bothered to me.’

  Everyone said what a lovely service it was. How nice it was to see so many people there. It showed, didn’t it, how many friends he had, how popular he was. But I didn’t care who had turned up and I cared nothing for his friends, our friends and what they might be thinking. It didn’t matter that so many people wanted to say something, or that somebody played ‘Fire and Rain’ by James Taylor, all on his own with an acoustic guitar, his voice clear and steady right until almost the end and practically everyone was in tears. It didn’t matter that his sisters were in bits, supported by their grim-faced husbands, or even that one of his nieces stood up at the front and bravely read out a letter she had written to him, just as if he had gone away for a bit and would be back in a while. None of this mattered, as my grief was bigger than all of theirs and I simply couldn’t bear it. He was only twenty-three. People don’t die at that age, they die when they are old and it wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right and it wasn’t even true. It couldn’t be. It could not be my Vic in that box covered with flowers, motionless at the front. But it was.

  Later, when I began to be able to think, when the tablets ran out and the doctor wouldn’t give me any more, I agonised over the events leading up to the crash. Was Vic right, was it inevitable that he would be on that stretch of road at that time? That it would be raining hard, that the lorry driver would be tired and driving too fast? Was it really true that his life had been skidding out of control towards that moment from the minute he was born? No, even before that, from the split-second of his conception?

  What if I had done something differently the day before? What if I had told him not to worry about getting back from his sister’s house? What if I hadn’t sounded disappointed when he said he might stay over and drive back on the Saturday morning? But then I heard him saying that those things were all fixed too. That I had to say those things because of what had happened yesterday and the day before that and the day before that, right back to when I was conceived, so it wasn’t my fault. It really wasn’t; it was just one of those things.

  Just one of those things. You can’t live your life like that, I found. I had to leave Vic’s philosophy behind in order to get angry enough to cope. So then I could hate the lorry driver and I sat in court with my hatred in my pocket and I directed it to him like a death beam, but it didn’t work. He didn’t drop dead as I wished him to and sometimes Vic popped up to tell me that he wouldn’t, obviously, not unless that was all part of the plan. It was the same with the verdict; it would be what it would be.

  There were times when I even hated Vic. How could he do this to me? How could he leave me behind, with all these years stretching out in front of me without him? I never considered suicide – that just isn’t in my nature. But I did wish, fervently, that I’d been there beside him that night, that we’d experienced together those few seconds of shock and disbelief before being snuffed out of this life for ever. I didn’t care that two families would have been grieving instead of one, but I imagined our two coffins, side by side with matching heart-shaped wreaths, and wished for it to be true.

  Looking back, I suppose I was very silly and selfish to compare my grief to anyone else’s. Having had children now I can only imagine what his parents went through and I’m sure they were just as devastated as I was. Parents are not supposed to outlive their children and that is a loss that I don’t suppose they ever recovered from. But that doesn’t change what I felt. I hadn’t lost a child, but I had lost my other half. Not the silly, trite expression that people use instead of husband or wife, but my real other half. Vic made me complete. We fitted together like two pieces of a jigsaw. Each one turned and sanded to fit perfectly with the other, as if someone had designed us that way. I don’t really believe in anything like that but I have never changed my mind about the way we were together and I never will.

  Of course, if it had been today, there would have been even more people there. It would have been all over Facebook and Twitter and goodness knows what else, and those people who only found out about it later wouldn’t have had to send cards and messages expressing their shock, their horror. I know that’s what happened as his parents were very kind afterwards and they invited me over to read them. Not that I did; I couldn’t walk up their front path knowing that he wouldn’t be there to open the door. As it was, if it did anything at all, the funeral showed me that I hadn’t known everything about Vic. There were people there I hadn’t met, hadn’t even heard of, and not just his family. There were old school friends, old college friends who must have known him, liked him, admired him. People who had shared experiences with him that I hadn’t had. I was jealous of those people and I didn’t want them there.

  That’s the thing about the internet. It’s good and it’s bad. I don’t think we were that late getting online, but the kids did, and they pestered us so much that we felt we had to. And of course Kelly was beginning to use it for homework by then, even if it was painfully slow, but I hardly used it at all at first. It was Laura who showed me the Friends Reunited site and how she’d been in touch with people who had settled all over the country. I think she even put in my details but I scoffed and said I wasn’t interested, which was true. I had too many painful memories to want to revisit that time of my life. But then, when Barry was out at the Rotary one night, I just thought I’d have a look.

  I wonder how many people have said that. “I’ll just have a look.” And then all the names are there and suddenly you feel young again. There’s a little ripple in your stomach or a twinkle in your eye, so you click on one or two, just to see what life has done for them, to them. To be honest, most of the people I recognised appeared to be extremely dull, just as I suppose I did. ‘I have two amazing kids and I’m working in insurance.’ ‘I recently got married for the second time and I’m renovating a Victorian mansion.’ I was about to click off again when I saw it. Andy Marchmant. ‘I’m a musician and I’ve spent most of the last 20 years on the road. Ready to put down some roots.’

  I have no idea why I kept it a secret. Well, I do have an idea, but if it’s true, I’m not a very nice person and I don’t like to think that. I suppose it could be that I’d been so vehement about it: “I’m really not interested in digging up the past. I don’t care what Sally Bowers is doing now. I don’t care how many kids she’s got or where she’s living!”

  Maybe I thought they’d laugh if they knew what I’d been doing and certainly there would have been a lot of teasing if I’d told them about Andy. “Oh, Mum! Going to see your old boyfriend! Dad, you’d better go with her, you never know what might happen!” But I didn’t want to take Barry with me. When I thought about that possibility, the whole thing became mundane. I wanted to retain the spark of excitement that had been rekindled by his email:

  Why not meet up? Lots of memories to share! And then you can fill me in on the past 25 years or so!r />
  Why not? There was nothing in it, nothing to feel guilty about I told myself, so why did everyone need to know chapter and verse? I was going out for the day, meeting an old friend in a country pub an hour’s drive away then coming home. So what?

  He wasn’t at the funeral. I suppose it’s hardly surprising, given that Vic had effectively stolen me away from him. That sounds very old-fashioned, as if I’d had nothing to do with it, but it is the sort of thing people said at the time. Even if he had moved on, had other girlfriends – which he had, as I still kept an ear open in that respect when I could – he might have felt awkward about coming. It may even have looked as if he was gloating. As it was, I wasn’t really very aware of who was there and who wasn’t until the thing with Linda’s mother started. That’s when I realised that there was an overlap with the friends Vic and I had shared and others who were in a wider circle that could have included Linda. That’s why she was there.

  I can still remember her face as my mum approached her. There was enough sadness, enough anguish on faces all around us, but her expression was something different. There was desperation, panic. Of course it didn’t help that she’d obviously been drinking – I suppose she had to do that to summon up the courage to get there at all – but they couldn’t let her carry on approaching anyone who was of an age to have possibly known Linda, pressing her photo into their hands.