Everything She Forgot

by Lisa Ballantyne

  “You really are hurting me,” she said firmly, quietly.

  His perfect blue eyes were wide and she found that it was his eyes more than his scarred appearance that terrified her. He was holding her wrist at an angle, so that pain shot up her forearm. He looked straight up into Margaret’s eyes and she saw that he was trying to speak. His lips were dry and cracked, and he blinked and a tear flashed over his shiny, poreless face.

  “Please,” she said again, but then realized he was urging to get her to sit down or move closer to him.

  There was a plastic chair near the bed and she pulled it over. As soon as she sat down, he released her.

  She exhaled, holding onto the side of the bed, as he turned to face her. His mouth opened and shut.

  “Would you like some water?” she asked.

  He nodded, his blue eyes following her as she stood and poured a little water into a plastic beaker. She placed the glass in his hand, but he struggled to hold it, in turn gripping too hard and then not strongly enough.

  “It’s all right, let me.” She raised the glass to his lips and he took a sip. When he drank again, a little water ran over his chin and down his neck. She reached for a tissue and dabbed it away.

  Just the act of drinking seemed to exhaust him. His head fell back on to the pillow and he closed his eyes, his bare chest rising and falling. She watched him. The water had made his lips pink. Finally, he opened his eyes and scrutinized her again. Now that she looked at him calmly, she was once again flooded with gratitude. She felt a rare kinship toward him.

  He reached for her hand again, and she hesitated but then gave it to him. He rested his palm over her fingers, patting and then stroking, his eyes closed. Margaret swallowed, unsure what to say. His hands were cool and smooth as alabaster.

  “It is so good to … see you,” he said, speaking slowly, as if each word was an effort.

  Margaret smiled. “And you. Thank you, once again.”

  “Don’t you know me?” he said, turning to her slowly, the scarred skin on his neck twisting like rope. “I know you.”

  Margaret said nothing, feeling a flush on her cheek. She opened her lips to speak.

  “Don’t you remember?” he said. “You taught me to read.” The words came with dry choking coughs. “You taught me how to read and write.” He rose up a little on the bed and Margaret patted his shoulder and then helped him again to more water. He drank it audibly, sucking and gulping, as a child might.

  He rested back against the pillow. While he recovered, Margaret put a hand on his arm. “I saw … I saw that you had my work telephone number on you. I wondered then … did we meet at school? You’re too old to be a pupil—a parent perhaps?”

  He seemed to smile. It was a garish stretching of his face, to reveal teeth that were straight but yellowed. “I am your pupil,” he said, still laboring to speak. “Maybe your first.”

  As if it were a game, Margaret sat back, smiling, looking up at the ceiling as she thought back to a time when they could have met. She remembered the first classes she had taught. She had volunteered as a tutor of illiterate adults when she was applying to teacher training college.

  “Was it the volunteer center in Tower Hamlets?”

  Again the face stretched into a smile. He was teasing her, she realized.

  “Your name: Maxwell Brown—I would have remembered it. I don’t believe I’ve ever known any Maxwells, until now.”

  He turned to her again. His blue eyes were fierce as truth. He tried to rise, but couldn’t and instead settled for twisting toward her on the bed. “That’s not my real name,” he said, licking his lips and staring at her, unblinking, so that, despite herself, she had to look away.

  Margaret began to feel very hot. The person in the adjacent bed was vomiting again and the acrid scent of it drifted across to them, until nurses came and briskly drew the curtain.

  She clasped her hands and leaned toward him, whispering, “Really? The hospital has records for you going right back. You were unconscious but they must have found your wallet or something …” He nodded, looking up at the ceiling. From the side, even though the tip of his nose had been burned, there was something about the structure of his face that resonated in her memory.

  “I’ve been going as Maxwell, with that date of birth, for some time, for as long as I’ve …”—he turned to her—“been like this.”

  A second spasm of coughs racked his body.

  “I like it,” he continued. “It suits me. Maxwell is a grand-sounding name, I think, and Brown is nothing, ten a penny.” He placed one of his palms against the other. “Put together, that’s just about right. That’s who I am.”

  Now that he had been speaking for longer, in sentences and idioms, she realized that there was a subtle but noticeable Scottish lilt in his voice, not unlike her own. She had lived down south since her late teens and had been to university, to teaching college, and then worked in England. Ben teased her when her old accent crept into their conversation. When she was in pure emotional states—anger, love, joy—her childhood accent was more discernible.

  “So, who are you then?” she asked, leaning toward his face. Although the skin around his eyes was immobile, unable to wrinkle in appreciation, it seemed as if his blue eyes were smiling at her.

  “You know,” he said, nodding, letting his eyelids close.

  Margaret put a hand in her hair. She didn’t know who he was. She was frustrated with the game now and only wanted him to tell her. She put a palm on the bedsheets covering his stomach, worried that he was about to go to sleep.

  He opened his eyes.

  “What do you mean? I really don’t. I need you to tell me.”

  He closed his eyes again, as if her chatter was tiring him. He took a deep breath—his expansive, scarred chest rising up, buoyed by it. She thought he was sighing, preparing for sleep, but then he cleared his throat and began to sing.

  It was not really a song. His voice was dry and weak, and it was more of a passionate whisper.

  Margaret listened, politely at first, smiling, nodding her head to an imagined beat.

  Then she heard him and the words and melody assaulted her deep inside. Her nose stung, and tears flashed over her cheeks.

  “And I love you so,” he sang.

  “The people ask me how,” she said, louder than she had meant, but the tears in her throat made it difficult to speak.

  They looked at each other.

  Suddenly she knew the flames that had engulfed him, searing his skin before her very eyes. She blinked and blinked again, remembering an explosion and the sound of metal bending, breaking. She could hear his screams, so loud that they seemed to rip through the very core of her. For years afterward, they were the only thing she could hear inside her head. It had made her unable to speak, unable to think of anything else. But she had methodically bedded the memories down, as her mother had boxed her scraps, notes, and articles—storing them safely away—so that they might move forward.

  “I thought you were dead,” she whispered. “I watched you burn.”

  “I burned, but I didn’t die, although I felt like I was dead,” said Maxwell. “For years to come, I wished that I had died.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “But for the joy of seeing you again …”

  “You saved my life.”

  “You saved mine first.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “It was easy. There’s the Internet now. I looked you up. I found out where you worked, where you lived even—your husband is Ben, he writes articles for the New Statesman, the Guardian sometimes. Your children are Paula—and she looks so like you, I think—and Eliot. You work too hard and you go home late. It was like that the day of the crash. You shouldn’t have been out at that time, driving in that weather. You should have gone home earlier or taken the train.”

  “I had a meeting.”

  “You always have a meeting.”

  Margaret put a hand over her face. The r
ealization was blinding, sudden.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his wild, scarred face lifting up from the pillow. “I was following you but I meant you no harm. I only wanted to be near you. It was all I ever wanted. I didn’t want to frighten you—but I knew if I had introduced myself you would have been … The sight of me—I terrify everyone. But then you were in danger and I had to protect you …”

  The curtains surrounding the adjacent bed sounded against the rail as the nurse dragged them open. The woman who had been vomiting was pale and impassive, raised up on three pillows. The nurse, a short woman with large hips and chest, pressed her lips together in apology as she carried two cardboard bowls of vomit out of the warm ward.

  “It’s really you?” Margaret whispered.

  “Hold my hand.”

  She took his hand with her left, then with her right touched the skin of his chest, just above where his heart should be. “My name. It’s gone.”

  “Your name was gone and you were gone. It broke my heart. I let you down.”

  Margaret felt a fist of pain in her stomach. Tears blurred her eyesight. “You didn’t let me down.”

  “If you look closely,” said Maxwell, wiping a hand over his scarred chest, “you can still see a bit of the red ink. You can see part of the letter M.”

  He struggled to raise his head off the pillow, his neck wrinkling as he looked down at his chest. She followed his gaze and sure enough there was a red line with a tail that had once been part of her name. She palmed a tear from her cheek.

  “Your eyes,” he said, gazing at her. “They fixed your eyes. They’re beautiful, but they were always beautiful.”

  “And I remember you were so handsome.”

  His face stretched into a smile. “Aye, I was not bad at all.”

  “Why did you take me?” said Margaret, leaning forward and swallowing as she waited on his reply. He looked away from her, at a point in the distance.

  “I’ve had a long, long time to think about what happened—nearly thirty years to wonder what on earth I thought I was doing. I’ve gone over it in my mind a million times.” He turned to meet her eyes. “What can I say? I was young and stupid. I only knew that I loved you from the first moment I saw you, and your mother … I loved her too, you know.”

  Margaret pressed her lips together as she listened, a pain in her throat.

  “I didn’t mean to take you. It all happened so fast. You were crying and I was trying to get out of town and then that was it; we were on our own, on the run together.”

  “But why come for me then? Why didn’t you want me when I was a baby?”

  “Want you? You were all I wanted, but your mother didn’t want me. I couldn’t blame her either and you had a good life. That old man she married, did he love you?”

  “Yes,” Margaret whispered.

  “And who wouldn’t. It’s hard to say this, after all that happened—not just getting burned, but how lonely I’ve been these last years—but if I had to go back, I might do it all over again. It was the wrong thing to do, but even after all that happened, I might just do it all again … just for that time with you. That time with you … I have no regrets.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just … I can’t …”

  She got up, leaving her coat and bag by Maxwell’s bedside, and ran out of the ward. She made it to the elevators before she had to throw up into a metal-lidded waste bin.

  When she finished, she wiped her mouth and eyes with the back of her hand, then walked down the rubber-floored hall. She took the stairs instead of the lift, walking as fast as she could, thinking only of the cool winter air that would absolve her.

  As she descended the stairs, her mind was a kaleidoscope of images, smells, and sounds from her childhood. Her throat hurt and her legs felt weak, but with each step she took she remembered more.

  She remembered the warmth of her mother’s hand one morning, and the smell of her terry-cloth dressing gown as she hugged her before she set off to school. She remembered her black patent shoes with the single buckle and the rattle of her pencils in her school satchel. She remembered the too-green grass of the park near their home. She remembered running so hard that it felt as if her lungs would burst, and hearing his weight thundering behind her, like a racehorse. She remembered skinned knees and classmates taunting her. She remembered returning home, thinner and taller than she had been when she left, and the strange way that her father embraced her, awkward and unloving, as if she had done something wrong. She remembered hospital curtain hooks sounding against the metal rail and having to spread her legs wide. She remembered her mother shaking her, as if to jolt the words from inside her, when the only words she now knew were fire, burning, and death.

  Outside, the winter air was a relief. She unbuttoned her shirt and put a hand to her throat, feeling it wet with sweat. There were smokers at the hospital entrance and she moved away from them. Her eyes hurt and she saw white spots. She put her hands on her knees and bent over, thinking she might faint, taking deep breaths, as if recovering from a run. After a few seconds she felt better.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder and a pair of battered red All Star baseball boots appeared next to her feet.

  “Are you all right?”

  It was Ben, and the sight of him was blissful, a relief hard as the sea. She folded into him, pressing herself against him and reaching up his back for his shoulder blades. She cried silently, and he squeezed her tight, as if he had forgiven her.

  “What’s going on?” said Ben, taking her by the shoulders and holding her far enough away from him so that he could look into her face. “What on earth are you doing?”

  “I’m sorry, I …”

  “You’re here to see this burned guy who helped you?”

  She nodded, catching her breath.

  “I wish you hadn’t run out like that. Anything could’ve happened. I was worried sick.”

  “I’m sorry …” The tears in her throat made it hard for her to speak.

  “What happened? Did he … die?”

  “I thought he had,” said Margaret, her teeth suddenly chattering. “But he’d been moved. He’s awake and … you remember the number in his wallet? He’s been … following me and I know him and—”

  “Slow down,” said Ben, taking off his jacket and putting it over her shoulders. “What do you mean, he’s been following you?”

  There was a fine silt of rain in the air and Margaret felt it dampening her hair.

  “Where are the children?” she asked.

  “Your dad’s watching them. I knew you’d come here. I got a taxi. I was worried you’d crash again.”

  Margaret smiled as tears spilled down her cheeks. “Thank you,” she whispered, looking at the night and the drizzling rain and the far-off oily streetlamps. She took his hand and squeezed it as she sat down on a bollard next to one of the disabled parking spaces.

  “You’ll get a medal for this last month. Husband of the Year badge or something …” She tried to smile.

  Ben crouched down beside her and took her hands into his. His face was full of concern. “Your dad and I had a chat … Over dinner, I had no idea what that was all about, and he told me some things. Not the whole story of course. When you’re ready …”

  She nodded and got to her feet. The rain was becoming heavier. Their hands hung at their sides, fingers interlaced, foreheads touching.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered again, into his neck.

  “Let’s go home,” Ben said, running two hands down her arms.

  “Not yet,” Margaret said, straightening, wiping her face with her palms and smoothing her hair, tucking it behind her ears. “Do something for me. I want you to meet him.”

  He frowned, hunched, looking down at her. “Mags …”

  “I need you to meet him,” she said, washing two hands over her face. “Please.”

  “Sweetheart, we shouldn’t leave your dad with the kids …”

  “I know, but I need you to meet
this man.” She folded her arms, nodding. She was still trying not to cry and despite Ben’s jacket she was still shivering. The shoulders of Ben’s shirt were wet with rain. A raindrop flashed from the hair that hung over his forehead.

  Ben took a deep breath and looked away, as if preparing to disagree with her. She reached out and took his hand. “If you want to know what happened back then, then you have to come and meet this man.”

  Ben turned to her. “What’s he got to do with that?”

  Margaret took a deep breath and looked up at her husband.

  “He’s my father.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Big George

  Thursday, October 10, 1985

  THE EXHAUST OF THE OLD CAMPER VAN WAS ROARING BY THE time they drove into Penzance, and George knew that he would soon have to patch the hole. He lay on the ground and shimmied underneath to inspect it. The hole was the size of a halfpenny piece.

  The engine was overheating. The temperature gauge on the dashboard had been almost into the red and he had opened up the back of the van to look at it. He had waited for the engine to cool, but still singed the knuckle of his forefinger brushing against it when he added water. He inspected again a loose wire that he had found when they were in Stoke. He wondered what Tam would have made of it.

  The old van had slowed them down, but arrival had filled George with elation and he decided to drive on while he could. There would be time to look at the engine when they found the cottage. It was a fine October day. The sky was blue and blown with thin clouds. The wind was up, and it buffeted the sides of the van as they pulled into town. Everything was so much more beautiful than George had imagined it. After Glasgow, the buildings seemed tiny and clean. He rolled down the window and took a deep breath.

  “Do you smell that, Moll, can you taste it?”

  Moll shook her head, taking deep breaths with her mouth open.

  “It’s the smell of the sea. Isn’t that grand?”

  Moll rolled her window down and knelt with her head outside, and her tongue sticking out as they drove slowly along Alverton Road.