Memory of Love (9781101603024)

by Olsson, Linda

  ‘Are you always going to be here now?’ He was fingering the edge of the table, running his hands over the wood. His nails were dirty and the skin across the knuckles bruised. He held the fingers closely together. The impression was of someone trying to smooth the surface. I knew by then that crumbs made him uneasy, so I made it a habit to keep the table spotless.

  I stood and collected our plates and walked over to the kitchen counter. I looked out the window. It was a sunny day with a light wind and the sea sparkled with blinding intensity.

  ‘I think so,’ I said with my back to him, ‘but you can never be certain. Things change. You change, and everything around you changes. Things happen.’ I returned to the table and sat down. ‘But yes, I really do think I will stay here.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘How about you?’ I asked. ‘Will you always stay here?’

  ‘No,’ he said quickly, shaking his head with force. ‘No way. I’m going away. Far away.’

  ‘Aha,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  He shrugged his shoulders, as if he thought it a stupid question, not worthy of an answer.

  ‘Are you not happy here?’ I asked.

  He stood and walked over to the open door where he placed himself on the threshold with one hand on either side of the doorframe. It looked as if he was pushing hard. He had his back towards me and he said nothing. I waited.

  ‘Are you sad now?’ he said finally without turning around, ignoring my question. ‘Are you sad when you are here?’

  I considered the question for a moment before I answered.

  ‘No, I’m not sad. I’m a kind of happy. A little happy in a sad way.’

  He remained where he was and I could see the muscles on his back playing. For some reason he was still pushing hard against the doorframe.

  ‘Come and sit here at the table,’ I said, ‘and I’ll tell you about other places where I have lived.’

  He took his time but eventually he returned and sat down across from me.

  And so we talked about other places.

  I think we were both relieved to change the subject.

  4.

  Someone once shrugged off something I had told him, saying that such things didn’t happen in real life. That it was too far-fetched to be believable. But far-fetched things do happen. In fact, many people’s entire lives are completely far-fetched. I think we are constantly surrounded by extraordinary possibilities. Whether we are aware of them or not, whether we choose to act on them or not, they are there. What is offered to us that we choose not to act upon falls by the wayside, and the road that is our life is littered with rejected, ignored and unnoticed opportunities, good and bad. Chance meetings and coincidences become extraordinary only when acted upon. Those that we allow to pass us by are gone forever. We never know where they might have taken us. I think they were never meant to happen. The potential was there, but only for the briefest moment, before we consciously or unconsciously chose to ignore it.

  As I was slowly becoming aware of my growing sense of restlessness I had also come to think that human bodies are brought together as if by gravity, or by some other kind of natural law unknown to me. We are helpless and unable to resist. Gathered or separated by a power that has nothing to do with our own will. If we could view ourselves from above we would observe an intricate pattern emerging: a chain of minute incidents and developments, seemingly random, but all part of a coherent process with an ultimate goal. Or at least an end result of some kind. A reaction, if you like. As if a power beyond our control is using us in an experiment. Pushing us together in different combinations to see what will ensue.

  When I stopped to reflect, I realised that everything that had ever happened in my life – even before my own life began – had contributed to bring me to where I now was, physically and emotionally. There is no such thing as a considered choice. That was what I had come to think. There had been a time when I would have argued the opposite with passion. Believed it. But not any more. No, now I had come to believe that at the moment we make our decision, it is clear it is the only option. I could fool myself into believing there were choices, but they were only mine until the moment I made my decision. There is no going back in time, and there are no opportunities to change anything. So the idea of free choice no longer had any meaning for me. I no longer believed in it. I had concluded that there was no such thing. I could possibly learn from experience and in that manner adjust my response to a future situation. I wasn’t even sure that was true. Few people seem to learn from experience. And nobody can ever change a single action of the past.

  I don’t think my changed view had anything to do with a longing for forgiveness.

  Or perhaps it did. But it was only my own forgiveness I needed.

  At the time when the pivotal incidents of my life took place, I had seen life very differently. Then, I saw myself as a person who had choices, and made conscious decisions about them, and who was therefore also fully responsible for her actions. There was nobody to help me understand that they were not considered decisions at all, but instinctive reactions to circumstances imposed on me, for which I could in no way be held responsible. Perhaps what I was now trying to do was give myself some peace of mind by adjusting my perspective. I wanted a sort of moral amnesty, which only I could grant myself.

  It wasn’t that I was unwilling to accept responsibility for my actions. I had always carried an absolute sense of responsibility, and an overwhelming sense of guilt. But now I wanted to teach myself forgiveness.

  I wasn’t aware of any conscious analysis of the events that had brought me to this point. Yet I realised that they lived inside me, all the moments of my life. Significant as well as insignificant, they were there, in their separate boxes. I had been careful to keep them at the back of my mind. I had suppressed them, in a sense, but I had lived with a constant awareness of their weight. I had worried sometimes that I would forget. That I would begin to doubt my memory. So from time to time I had allowed myself a glimpse. Just to make sure they were all there. That I remembered.

  However clear my memories were, I was aware that there was more to each one than I could ever recall. That there existed other, equally valid perspectives. And that those who might have been able to offer other points of view were no longer here. I could never know their observations, hear their interpretations. Their memories, irrevocably intertwined with mine, were forever out of reach. I knew that I didn’t own the complete truth, but what I had was all there was. So I guarded my memories and my truths, such as they were. Held on to them with a kind of desperation. Like a film cut into a number of individual stills I kept the images at the back of my mind. I needed to be able to access the beginning, to keep it in mind. So that I would be able to tolerate the other images. Live with them. Own them.

  Because they were there. All the stills.

  My life in pictures, locked up in their respective sealed boxes.

  5.

  Ika’s question during that early meal together awakened memories. Some of those on which I seldom dwelled. Those that sat at the furthermost back of my mind as an ever-present background murmur, a sea forever undulating in a constrained dark place. Never visible, yet always there. Those memories coloured everything. In a sense, they were the reason I lived where I lived, did what I did. Perhaps they were my reason for living. I carried them in my thoughts and in my dreams, but never as a shape or form, only as a fragrance, a colour, a mood, that in its elusiveness yet seemed like a prerequisite for everything else. In a way, living with those memories felt similar to living with my heart: I trusted them to be there and support me, but I rarely gave them a conscious thought.

  After Ika had left that day I walked down to the beach, and I allowed myself to think. I thought about the journey. How I came to land here on the other side of the earth.

  Almost fifteen years ago. I was thirty-six years old. It was February, still summer. I don’t know what made me choose this country and this particular place. Perhap
s it was the sheer distance. A need to remove myself as far away as possible from my previous life. I could not remember much of the process that had carried me here. It felt as if the time between the moment I stood barefoot on the tiled bathroom floor in a house in London, and the sensation of the warm sand under my feet and a blindingly bright light in my eyes here on this beach, had dissolved. It was as if the scenes had been cut from the film and discarded.

  I did remember waking up one day and realising I had no wish to live. Or perhaps I just didn’t want to continue the life I was living.

  I looked at the man with whom I had shared my home for eight years and I realised I didn’t know him at all, and that I no longer wanted to. I recognised every feature of his face where it rested still on the pillow beside me, eyes closed. I took it in but the sight evoked no emotional response. If I felt anything at all it was a kind of subdued sadness. And a sense of mild compassion. For him, and perhaps for me. For our lives. He looked so innocent and vulnerable, asleep beside me in our bedroom in the house we had bought with such anticipation, renovated with such energy.

  I listened to the sounds that surrounded us. The hum of the awakening traffic in the street outside our window, the morning paper landing on the hallway floor, the closing of a car door. The familiar sounds of a city waking up. But suddenly I realised they were no longer a comfortable backdrop to my daily life, but identifiable, individual sounds that had nothing to do with comfort; rather the opposite. Just like the man beside me, the signs of life outside seemed to have nothing to do with me. Or perhaps it was I who had stepped outside the surrounding world. I could suddenly see and hear it all with acute clarity.

  Later, as we sat in the kitchen, each with a section of the morning paper in front of us, I again looked at his face across the table. He had aged, I noticed. There were small wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and the one across his forehead was deeper than I remembered. His hair was thinning. It was an attractive face, yet curiously alien. I kept looking, searching for an emotional response. In him. And in myself. He must have felt my gaze, because he looked up and gave a surprised quick smile. Instantly I could see that he was unused to my interest, and it made me sad to realise this.

  I saw my solicitor a few days later. Then I walked into a travel agency and booked my flight. Not that same day, but shortly after, as a logical consequence. With hindsight it seemed very swift, as if it had been carefully planned for a long time. Perhaps it was just the passage of time that made it feel like that. My mind working to compress this long period into a tiny shard. A concentrate of a substantial part of my life. Thousands of mornings, days and nights reduced to just a few scenes.

  I was married to this man for eight years, and I had known him for three years before that. Eleven years of my life. Our separation was what is usually called amicable. I find it a strange term. Certainly there was no animosity. Little feeling of any kind, in fact. But amicable? I think he felt as I did – just a vague sense of sadness at the futility of it all. We were able to sort out our affairs without conflict. Perhaps that is what constitutes an amicable separation. It was defined not by the presence of friendship but the lack of animosity. And then he walked out of my life, leaving nothing behind. Or rather we just walked in different directions, leaving our shared life to dissolve behind us. Not one leaving the other, just the two separating, taking different routes forwards. After the odd sporadic contact as practical matters required us to talk, there was nothing. Yet there had been a time when I loved him. There must have been. I thought about him as I let my feet sink into the soft sand and I tried to recall my feelings. But all I could hear were my conscious justifications: his good looks, kindness, sense of humour, loyalty. I could remember the years when we tried so hard to start a family. The shared sadness at the inevitable monthly disappointment.

  But love? No, I could not remember love.

  Not now that I knew what love was.

  It was still painful for me to recall what followed. But over time the memories had taken on a different quality. Or perhaps rather my way of living with them. It was as if the happiness that preceded the inevitable end didn’t quite shine with the energy required to penetrate. That changed. But it was painful then.

  I groped for my memories. The most important ones. The most precious ones. I thought about my arrival, and the film slowed down until the pace was unbearably slow. It was as if it wanted to ensure that it would be able to stop before it had carried on too far, to that part my memory had learnt to avoid. So the film that contained my memories kept returning to the beginning, like a scratched disc. I could view my arrival here, but that was as far as I was able to get. The consequences of my impulsive journey to the other side of the earth were still hidden.

  I wasn’t able to reach the memory of my jubilant joy, the intense colours and the feeling of absolute freedom. The love. Instead, as I sat there on the beach that day I still saw everything through the filter I had created in order to survive. I could not see the happiness that preceded the abyss. I had forced myself to keep this memory suppressed, forced myself not to acknowledge my life’s most splendid moment, in order to be able to live out the rest of my life without it. I think that was what had happened. It has changed since, but back then it was impossible for me to embrace the happiness I had lost.

  I had driven from Auckland in the early afternoon. I took my time, for several reasons. I wanted to find a new, slower rhythm. And I wanted the foreign landscape to come alive. I wanted to take the time to see how the changing light shifted the hue on the green hills. Take in the vastness of the sky. And finally that of the sea. I wanted to own the sense of infinity that the sea offered. I wanted to find a way back to life.

  And so I had slowed down, driven off the road onto the dry sandy grass and parked. Why there? Why at that exact moment?

  I tried to inspect my travels from a higher perspective. A dispassionate and objective view. And from above it looked strange: the taxi through the busy streets of north London and on to Heathrow. The anonymous flight to Singapore and two nights in an equally anonymous hotel. Surrounded by people and no doubt by innumerable possibilities, yet contained in a space of my own. Then the flight to Auckland: one long sleep cocooned in a capsule racing through the air. Another hotel. Sightseeing. The human intercourses I experienced brief and impersonal. Yet logically, there must have been many situations with more promise.

  But it was here, on the deserted beach that stretched before me now, that I came to stop.

  Before stepping out of the car she removes first her earrings, then her watch and the clasp that holds her hair together. Then her shoes. She needs to rid herself of all that connects her with the person she was. Shed the past. Here she is, dressed in her light cotton dress and nothing else. She has the car keys in her hand, but that is all she carries. As she descends the snaking ladder that leads down to the beach the breeze blows her hair and lifts her skirt. At the bottom she stops in the shade of the trees, looking out over the beach and the sea.

  She is still Marion Flint. Yet not the one she used to be. She is still thirty-six years old. She has been here on the other side of the world just a few days. Yet the old world is fading fast. Something new is beginning. Here, by herself, in an environment that doesn’t acknowledge her presence, she finally feels a kind of hope. She can breathe. That is how it feels. As if she were born just now, just here, and released of all that has been before.

  The vast beach lies in front of her. There is not a person in sight. In the distance, the air quivers over the mirror created by the latest withdrawing wave. She stands still, her feet deep in the warm sand. It is as if this is where she wants to be forever. To see the world as it appears at this exact moment.

  I am just a speck. A grain of sand, she thinks.

  She starts to walk towards the water. The sand is very hot and she has to run to reach the sea. She lets the waves lap against her legs, and even here, with the water only up to her shins, she can feel the pull as the
sand is dragged away around her feet. She bends down and wets her hands, and puts the palms on her cheeks. The water is cool against her skin and salty on her tongue.

  She walks along the edge of the water. The roar of the sea fills the air and the only sound that penetrates is the odd shriek of a bird. There are no smells other than the sea. No other visual impressions. It is as if the sea occupies all her senses. She is completely enveloped by it, as insignificant as the shells that roll in the surf.

  She carries on, keeping to the cool wet sand near the sea. Stops here and there to pick up a smooth pebble or a polished shell. She walks much further than she had intended, letting the breeze tousle her hair and the salt spray set on her skin. The beach is endless, one smooth bay following the next. And no sign of any human presence.

  Eventually she slows down, and when she spots a large log lying further up the beach she heads for it. Again, she has to run over the hot sand.

  It is not until she almost stumbles on it that she sees it. And for a split second her brain leaves the visual impression to be interpreted by the part that has hitherto spotted stones and shells. The part of her brain that has noticed the beauty of the towering waves and the sweeping surf. Shapes and forms, light and colour.

  For that brief moment it is a natural object of beauty, nothing else.

  But it is a man’s body. And it is naked.

  It is a man lying face down on a beach towel with a camera bag beside him.

  He must have felt her presence because he wakes with a start, twisting to look at her without turning over. She takes a few steps back.

  ‘I am so sorry, I just didn’t see you,’ she says. Which is partly true.

  He is busy trying to wrap the beach towel around himself before struggling to his feet.

  ‘Ah …’ he says, stumbling a little before standing in front of her with the towel around his hips. ‘Well, I’m sorry too. I thought I was alone here.’