How Not to Disappear

by Clare Furniss

  ‘How come it didn’t work out with any of them?’

  She looks up at me as she opens a carton of pineapple juice.

  ‘If you’d met them you wouldn’t need to ask that question. And, to be honest, I’m not sure I’m really cut out for marriage. Always found the thought of it rather horrifying, actually.’

  She’s in such a different mood today, jokey, playful almost. I’d been expecting it to be awkward, even thought she might have changed her mind completely about seeing me, about our day trip together. I’d wondered whether I might actually be a little bit relieved if she had. Still, at the very least she’s not being rude to me. It’s a chance to get to know her better, which was all I really wanted in the first place.

  ‘So why did you get married to them at all?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know now. Why does one do anything? Boredom. Intoxication. Lack of willpower. Because they asked. Because, despite their many and varied failings, they were either rich or handsome. Perhaps I’m just a girl who can’t say no.’

  ‘I find that hard to believe,’ I say. I imagine Gloria’s very good at saying no.

  She smiles.

  ‘You’re quite right, of course,’ she says.

  ‘What’s this?’ I say, pointing to the note on the fridge with ‘Ophelia Act 1 Scene 3’ written on it. I’ve been looking at it as Gloria’s been talking, wondering about it.

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘It’s a memory test. I write down parts I’ve played and see if I can remember any of them.’

  I smile. It’s not hard to imagine Gloria as an actress.

  ‘And can you? Remember them?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Bits of them anyway. Long-term memory isn’t a problem, you see. Not yet anyway. Things from long ago are safely stored away. They haven’t gone yet. Though I suppose they will soon enough. It’s the short term that gets muddled.’

  ‘Is it Alzheimer’s?’ I ask.

  ‘Probably,’ she says. ‘But I need a doctor to tell me what exact brand of dementia it is.’

  I remember the letter from the hospital I found last time. ‘So have you got an appointment?’ I ask, not wanting her to think I’ve been snooping.

  ‘Delicious,’ Gloria declares, taking a sip from her glass, not looking at me.

  ‘I didn’t realize that there were so many different kinds of dementia,’ I say.

  ‘You’ve been investigating?’ she says, looking amused.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, blushing. ‘I just wanted to understand it better.’

  ‘And what did you find out?’

  I think it over. That it affects everyone differently, especially in the early stages, that no one knows how fast it will develop, that it is terminal – none of these are things I really want to say out loud. It’s not as though Gloria doesn’t already know this stuff.

  ‘Just everything you’ve already told me really. I think you put the gin in already,’ I say as she attempts to pour in a second measure.

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Oh, well. A little more won’t hurt. Shall we sit out on the balcony? Bring that, will you? The book thing.’

  She gestures to a leather-bound photo album and I pick it up and bring it outside.

  We sit in the sunshine at a little wrought-iron table, Gloria with her gin sling, me with my glass of water. (‘Are you quite sure you won’t have a cocktail?’ Gloria has now asked three times and I’m not quite sure whether it’s because she’s determined I should have one or because she forgets she’s already asked.) She picks up the album and starts to flick through it. There aren’t any of Dad, as I’d hoped. The pictures are all much older, of Gloria and Nan as babies, of her dad in his army uniform.

  ‘Is that your mum?’ I say, pointing to one of the photos.

  I show her a faded black-and-white picture of a young woman, a girl really, my age perhaps. She’s petite and fair, dressed rather formally, looking wide-eyed into the camera with half a smile.

  ‘My mother,’ Gloria says, and her voice is unexpectedly soft, almost surprised. I look up at her and see that her face is different too, gentler, sad, more real somehow, as if she’s taken off a mask of herself.

  She sits in silence for a moment, staring intently at the picture, tracing the woman’s face with her finger, the nail of which is painted an unexpected iridescent blue like a peacock feather. She’s deep in thought, staring at the photo, and it’s such an intimate moment I feel as though I shouldn’t be watching. I just sit there as quietly as I can and examine my own unmanicured nails, trying not to intrude, thinking about how precious this moment is for Gloria, remembering the mother she might not be able to remember for much longer.

  ‘I don’t remember her like this,’ she says at last. ‘She’s like another person from the one I knew.’ Her voice is tight and contained, trying not to let out whatever emotion is inside.

  ‘She does look very young,’ I say.

  She shakes her head. ‘It’s not just that. She looks so . . . unguarded. She’s looking straight into the camera. She could never meet anyone’s eyes by the time I can remember her. She’d look at the floor or at her hands. If you caught her gaze, her eyes would slide away to somewhere to the side of your head.’

  I look over her shoulder at the girl in the photo.

  ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘What changed her?’

  ‘By the time I knew her, my real mother had hidden, leaving behind a person who looked just like her but was completely empty. So that no one noticed she was gone, you see? The empty person did all the basic things that were necessary so that people wouldn’t notice she was gone, smiling and saying what terrible weather we’d been having to the neighbours and cooking liver and onions for tea. And all the while she just kept quiet in her hiding place and hoped she wouldn’t be noticed. Like leaving pillows under the bedclothes when you sneak off at night. If you don’t look too closely, if you don’t shine a light on it, it’s really quite convincing.’

  She snaps the album shut.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I say.

  ‘Like I said in my letter, my past is not a very happy place,’ she says. ‘You must know that.’

  ‘I do.’

  She looks unsure.

  ‘Perhaps this isn’t such a good idea after all.’

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘I’ve come all this way. Come on. It’ll be great.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says.

  ‘Look, if nothing else, we can go and sit on the Common and eat ice creams.’

  She looks at me, uncertain. Scared almost.

  ‘Or perhaps a pub,’ I say, certain she won’t be able to resist. ‘Maybe we can find somewhere with a nice beer garden.’

  She nods. ‘Right then,’ she says, draining her glass of the last drops of her gin sling. ‘Let’s hit the road.’

  The address Gloria has given me is in south London. The journey there isn’t too difficult, and I only get lost a couple of times. Gloria is quiet and I can’t tell whether she’s nervous or lost in thought.

  ‘This is it,’ she says at last. ‘I used to walk along this road every day on the way back from school.’ We’re driving along a busy road lined with tapas and sushi bars, organic cafés, little boutiques, toyshops and billions of estate agents. She is looking out of the window intently, at the shops, at groups of well-dressed women pushing complicated-looking buggies, at joggers, and men with beards and trendy glasses clutching takeaway coffees.

  ‘Posh, isn’t it?‘ I say. ‘Lots of fancy shops. Loads of four-by-fours. I bet the houses round here cost a bomb, don’t you?’

  Gloria is quiet, and just keeps watching out of the window as we stop at the lights.

  ‘It’s so different,’ she says. ‘The same but at the same time so different. It’s like a picture that’s been painted on top of an old painting. The ghost of the old one is still there underneath, and that’s the one I know. But all this—’ she gestures at an All Bar One—‘It’s all so different. That’s where the greengrocer’s was. And the haberdasher’s was just there –
or was it the sweet shop?’ She sounds disconcerted.

  ‘Well, it’s bound to have changed, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘I mean, it is more than half a century since you lived here.’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Gloria snaps. ‘I’m quite aware of that.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’ I try and fail to think of something that sounds diplomatic and not like I’m saying she’s unbelievably old. ‘It must be really weird seeing all the changes. Especially when it’s somewhere you’ve got so many memories of.’

  I park near the Common, which is stressful. I get hooted at by two Land Rovers going in opposite directions (bloody yummy mummies, I mutter under my breath, as I accidentally switch the rear windscreen wiper on and reverse into the bumper of the mint-green convertible behind us, and I catch Gloria looking at me approvingly).

  Once I’ve finally managed to get the car somewhere near the kerb and fed the meter, I help Gloria out of the car.

  ‘Where do you want to go? Straight to your old house? Is it near here?’ I ask, but she’s not listening to me. I watch her face as she looks out over the wide expanse of grass in front of us, criss-crossed with paths, cyclists zooming along them, more joggers and buggies too, and people lying out in the sun, children kicking balls about and scooting.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, though not to me. ‘This is right. This is how I remember it.’

  And then she just walks off as though I’m not there.

  ‘All right, wait for me,’ I call after her, double-checking I’ve locked the car, then checking again one last time, imagining Mum’s face if I had to phone Spain to tell her the car had been stolen.

  She keeps walking across the grass, looking around at the trees, and the houses that fringe the Common, taking it all in.

  When I catch up with her and see her face, I can see Gloria’s not really here with me. She puts her arms out and her head back and slowly starts to spin.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I say, looking around to check whether anyone’s watching. ‘Gloria, steady. You’ll get dizzy.’

  But she can’t hear me, because she isn’t here with me. She’s back there on a long-ago Sunday morning, twirling, round and round, her arms held out, head tilted back in the sunshine.

  She tells me about walking across the Common with her mum – my great-grandmother – on a Sunday after Mass, about her drunk father and her smug, irritating brother-in-law. She tells me about Sam, the boy she wished she’d been meeting instead, and how she couldn’t stop herself from dancing in the sunlight in the middle of the Common. And as she tells it, she is transformed. I can see the girl she used to be standing in front of me.

  ‘Just a large gin and tonic for me, please,’ Gloria says to the very handsome, very camp waiter. We’ve settled on a gastropub near the Common for lunch before going to Gloria’s old house. Now we’re here she seems to want to put it off.

  ‘Gloria,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought we were going to have lunch.’

  She looks at me. ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Perhaps I can interest you in one of our Lighter Bites, madam?’ says the waiter. ‘The goat’s cheese and quinoa salad with the honey and orange dressing is to die for.’

  She ignores him.

  ‘It does sound delicious . . .’ I say, trying to sound enthusiastic. Gloria is pretending she can’t hear either of us. ‘I think I’ll go for the burger and chips.’

  She’s been quiet since our walk on the Common, and so have I, my head full of everything she described. It was so vivid, so real for her, so present. I was thrown off balance by it somehow, the realization that she had been young once, that inside she still felt young when she remembered it. I could almost see the girl she had been, still there inside, and it made me feel sad, the thought that she had grown old, and that soon she wouldn’t be able to remember the girl she had been.

  My head is buzzing with her story, there’s so much more I want to know, about her violent father, her poor mum, about Nan and annoying Vinnie – my grandad. And most of all I want to know about – what was his name? – Sam. Her face when she’d spoken about him, her voice . . . My food and Gloria’s drink arrive. I try to prompt her into telling me more as I devour my burger, offering Gloria the occasional chip, which she declines with a wave of her turquoise-nailed hand. She drains her first gin and tonic and asks for another. ‘With a little more lime this time, if you please,’ she says accusingly.

  ‘Your wish is my command, madam,’ says the waiter, winking at me, and I smile at him apologetically.

  After she’s finished the second gin I try again.

  ‘So,’ I say. ‘Sam. Was he your boyfriend?’

  She looks at me.

  ‘Yes.’

  I wait for her to tell me more, but she doesn’t.

  She snaps her bag shut and goes off to the loo.

  As I’m waiting I can’t help noticing the group of women at the next table who all have tiny babies. They’re talking about breastfeeding and how many times their babies wake in the night and whether you should give them formula milk or was that bad for them and should you sleep with them in your bed or in a crib next to your bed or in a different room and which was most likely to cause cot death, whether you should feed them at particular times or just whenever they felt like it and whether you should let them cry or was that practically child abuse and then what about colic, what a nightmare that was, babies crying non-stop for five hours every night and—

  I try to think about something else because their conversation is making me feel sick and panicky. It’s nothing to do with me. I’m not going to have a baby. But I can’t stop listening. How can looking after a baby be so difficult? And from nowhere I have a sudden memory of Mum after the twins were born. Dad was off reporting from somewhere – where was it? Gaza maybe. I used to stick drawing pins in a map on the kitchen wall to show where he was. Wherever it was, it was a long way away from us. The twins were growing bigger every day and Mum was looking thinner and paler all the time, as if the twins were tiny vampires, sucking the life from her with their perfect, hungry little mouths. I remember something waking me in the night and going downstairs and finding Mum feeding them, one baby tucked under each arm, and tears were streaming down her cheeks. ‘Does it hurt?’ I’d asked. She’d nodded and for a while I almost wished the twins hadn’t been born.

  I look back at the women and think how weird tiny babies look, some of them with bald, scaly scalps, some with too much hair, some scrawny, some with rolls of fat. The mums all seem transfixed by them. The baskets of their buggies are full of cloth books and toys for their tiny babies. Do babies really need all that stuff? And how do you find out? How do you know if you’re doing it right?

  I look away again. I don’t know why I’m even thinking about it. This has nothing to do with me. I’m not having a baby. I’m going to university. I’m going to book the doctor’s appointment and then the doctor will send me off to the abortion clinic and it’ll be as if it never happened. Perhaps I don’t even have to tell Reuben.

  It can all be exactly as it was before.

  After lunch we walk to Gloria’s old house. She doesn’t speak as we walk down her street but I can see that she’s taking in every detail. At last, about three quarters of the way down, she stops in front of the house. I can see from the buzzer at the front door that it’s divided into flats. The front garden is paved, with a few half-hearted shrubs growing in tubs. It’s hardly changed from the house in the black-and-white photo in Gloria’s album; it’s still an ordinary-looking terraced house in a street of identical houses.

  ‘Is this it?’ I say, pointlessly. She doesn’t answer.

  ‘It must bring back a lot of memories,’ I try. I’m hoping that seeing the house will prompt another outpouring of memories, a continuation of her story.

  But her face is set and she doesn’t speak. Whatever she’s remembering, she’s not sharing it with me.

  At last she turns away. />
  ‘There used to be roses growing in the front garden,’ she says at last. ‘You could smell them as you walked down the street.’

  And she walks away from the house and away from me.

  ‘It must bring back a lot of memories,’ she says, the girl at my elbow. Hattie.

  This house that I have only seen in my dreams for so many years. It is hard to believe it really exists, that the memories in my head are things that really happened once, to someone who was me, long ago. I wonder what she thinks I feel as I look at the house, its blank windows staring back at me. She cannot imagine the darkness of the things I remember in this house.

  The wood of the table is cold under my chin. I examine the stems of the roses in the jam jar of water in front of me. They are cloaked in tiny bubbles, each bubble perfectly round, like the Earth. Gwen told me the world is round. She learned it at school. I imagine that each bubble is a world with millions of tiny people living on it, a tiny me and a tiny Gwen, a tiny Mum and Father. Perhaps in one of the worlds I am more like Gwen, prettier and less naughty. I don’t mean to be bad, but the things that seem to me to be the right things to do don’t seem to be the things that everyone else thinks are right. Think before you act, Mum says, but my thoughts don’t work like that. They come afterwards. You’re too soft on her, Father says. Perhaps in one of the worlds, Father is less angry.

  I like looking at the room through the jam jar. It bends and stretches like the Hall of Mirrors at the circus that pitches up on the Common every year. They are talking, Mum and Father, but I’m only half listening. It’s boring things like mutton for dinner again and paying the milkman, and then she makes a joke about his tie not being straight and reaches a hand out to straighten it for him. There is a crack and her head whips back. She has her back to me and the flowers – pale-pink roses, they were, that Mum and I had cut from the bush by the back gate the day before, taking care the thorns didn’t prick us – block my view of Father. Then I hear the back door slam and I know he has gone. Perhaps I have misunderstood what has happened. I must have. But when she turns to me there is blood trickling from her nose. She tries to cover the look of dazed hurt on her face with a smile.