Everything She Forgot

by Lisa Ballantyne

  The pulses of the heart machine quickened. George pressed his lips together again and again.

  “Do you need more water?”

  He looked away and closed his eyes. She poured some for him anyway, an inch in the plastic beaker beside the bed. He took it into his hand, but then spilled it right away. Ben leaned over and brushed the water off the top sheet.

  “He’s too tired,” Margaret said. “We should go.”

  “We should,” Ben whispered. “And your dad’s with the kids.”

  George’s eyes opened wide. “I’m her dad,” he said loudly, although it seemed to cost him all his strength.

  Ben nodded.

  “They wrote such lies about me,” George said. The word lies forced open his lips, revealing his purple gums. “They said I hurt you and I never. I never would …”

  “I know,” said Margaret, stroking the back of his hand. “Don’t let yourself get upset. It’s all over now. I’m here.”

  “When I got out of the hospital and I got set up, I started taking classes. When I rented that first flat I was able to write Maxwell Brown. I knew how. We …”—he broke off to cough again—“we are both left-handed.” He held up his left hand and Margaret put her left hand against his.

  “We are,” she said.

  His eyes were now half closed, and Margaret got to her feet. She was worried that he would not feel it were she to kiss the waxy skin of his forehead, so she leaned forward and kissed the palm of his hand.

  “I love you so,” he was still whispering, as if trying to sing again.

  Ben rubbed Margaret’s shoulders and then they left him. Walking along the corridor, Margaret felt enervated, depleted.

  She walked with her fingers loosely laced through Ben’s.

  When they got home, it was late and the children were in bed, but Margaret was in time to say good night. Her father had done all the dishes by hand and stacked them on the kitchen table. The cutlery was shining: little regiments of teaspoons, knives, and forks.

  “We have a dishwasher, Dad.”

  “Oh, they’re a waste of money. It gave me something to do.” Margaret went to him and kissed his cheekbone. He smiled and dipped his head a little in response. She had called him while Ben was driving back, to say they were on their way.

  Her father folded the tea towel he had been using. “I told them to go to bed. I thought it best, when it was nearly ten. They gave me no argument. They’re a credit to you.”

  Margaret pressed her lips together in a smile. Ben had gone upstairs to kiss the children good night.

  “Let’s sit down for a moment,” she said, putting a hand on her father’s elbow.

  She sat down at the table opposite him. She was exhausted, but there was more to say. She remembered the words that she had said to him before she ran out of the house. His face was pale, his eyes saddened. She took a deep breath.

  “I need to tell you about what’s been going on with me since the car crash.”

  The skin on John’s high forehead wrinkled.

  “I don’t want to upset you, I …”

  His fingers fluttered on the table, as if his feelings were of no consequence. The stacked spoons trembled audibly.

  “A few weeks ago, I found the man who had pulled me out of the car on the M11. He had a head injury too, and … he was put in a coma, so that when I found him I couldn’t thank him, but I kept on visiting.” Margaret wiped a hand across her eyes. She was deeply tired, yet there was a bright, crackling wakefulness in her veins. “I was in shock after the crash and, sitting quietly with him, I guess I did a lot of thinking. That was when all that stuff … all that stuff … started to come back to me … or not come back to me exactly, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to know.”

  John nodded gravely.

  “Mum’s things … that box of cuttings and photographs, letters … it was so hard for me to go through, but I had to do it. And it was harder because she’s not here,” her throat clotted with hurt, “and she had collected all of it.”

  John licked his lips, as if tasting the grief one more time.

  “And tonight, when I ran out, I went to the hospital again to see the man, the man who saved me on the motorway. I didn’t know when I left, but he had woken up from his coma and then I started to understand why I’d been so drawn to him.”

  She paused and looked across the table at her father. He was frowning, as if anticipating what she was going to say. She swallowed, once again wondering what it had been like for John—searching for her, thinking she was dead. She had been stolen from him—the man who had always loved her, from her earliest memories.

  She wasn’t sure how he would react if she told him she had been visiting George McLaughlin—a gangster who had been her mother’s first love, and had taken her away from home as a seven-year-old child.

  He would be angry. He would be angry at the man who he thought had hurt his little girl. If he knew that the person who had taken her was her real father it might devastate him.

  He was waiting for her to speak. She reached over and clasped his hand in hers.

  She cleared her throat and struggled to reform her thoughts. “I was drawn to him because he saved my life and I realized that I was so glad to be alive.”

  Her hands were warm inside her father’s. “I’m so sorry … about what I said to you at dinner.”

  John nodded with his eyes closed.

  “I think everything suddenly came into focus. The car crash … they said I was in shock, but it seemed like the opposite was going on. Suddenly things became clear to me—where I was from, who I was, what had happened to me and … it made me miss Mum.”

  A thin tear flashed over John’s gray face.

  She took a deep breath. “You’re my dad and you always will be.”

  John cleared his throat. “You were trapped and the car was burning. The fire,” her father wiped his eye with his forefinger, “the fire … I know what that must have meant to you.”

  Margaret heard Ben’s footsteps on the stairs. They got to their feet, expecting the membrane of their conversation to be broken.

  “I’m sorry,” her father said, hurriedly.

  “Don’t be silly. It’s me who should apologize for running out like that—causing a scene.”

  “No, I mean, I’m sorry, back then … I could have been better. Your mother and I, we both could have been better.”

  “Thanks for coming, Dad,” she said. “That’s all that matters.”

  He patted her shoulder. “I should turn in now. Early start back.” His hand stayed on her shoulder for a moment, and then he clung to the wool, balling up her cardigan in his fist. He covered both eyes with forefinger and thumb. Margaret put her arms around his waist.

  “Uh-oh,” said Ben, “not more tears, just when I’m ready to get the party started.”

  “We’re fine,” said Margaret.

  “An excellent bit of dishwashing, Pater,” said Ben, motioning to the table. “You can come back.”

  “I shall look forward to it,” said John, his face puckering into a smile.

  Ben and Margaret sat up past midnight, with glasses of wine, talking. The fire was on, but Margaret was shivering, so much that Ben put a blanket around her shoulders. She sat with her feet in his lap as he rubbed them.

  “Moll,” he said, and then again, “Moll,” as if trying it out on her.

  “Should I start to call you that?”

  Margaret laughed. “It was my baby name. Just before I started high school, I decided I wanted to be called my full name. Maybe even my name was a reminder …”

  It was not until later, when she was in bed lying curled into Ben, that she fully remembered the very first day she met George. She remembered the smell of his aftershave and the clear sparkle in his eyes as he knelt, one knee on the pavement as he unbuttoned his shirt, showing her the name written on his chest.

  Margaret blinked in the darkness of their bedroom. She could taste black smoke at the
back of her throat. She could hear him screaming but she couldn’t get to him.

  When they took her to the hospital they had stripped her and inspected her for harm. She had deep, purple bruises on her arms, which the doctors and her parents all decided had been inflicted on her by the tall dark man who had kidnapped her. Margaret had not said a word—she had been unable, but she knew that the journalist who had arrived at the scene and tried to hold her back had made the bruises. She still remembered the pain—wanting to protect her father, sure she could help him but unable to get free. It had been this shame that had so overwhelmed her later: that she had not been able to save him.

  She turned again, her mind bright despite her need for rest. Ben was sound asleep, his breaths low and rhythmic. Down the hall, she could hear the intermittent long inhalation of her father’s snores.

  She had been drinking, and her mind was scorched with tiredness, but Margaret smelled burning in the bedroom. It wasn’t a fire, or a cooking smell, and after a moment, lifting her head off the pillow, she realized that it was a cigarette. She frowned, wondering about Ben, her father or, God forbid—the kids. She turned over and inhaled again. It was unmistakable, at the back of her throat, mixed in with a briny whiff of aftershave. Margaret looked up, and George was standing at the foot of the bed. He was in his dark blue suit, like the day when he had met her after school. He was smiling at her, all clear skin and stubble and bad blue eyes.

  “You go to sleep now, angel” was all he said.

  Calm flooded her. She lay down and began to drift off to sleep. The telephone rang and Ben was startled, jumping out of bed to answer it, palm pressed against the wall. He tried to turn on the light but knocked it clean off the bedside table. The lamp crashed to the floor as he answered the phone. Margaret lay, eyes wide open, as lights went on down the hall, first Paula’s room and then her father’s.

  Ben hung up and came around to her side of the bed, smoothing her hair and taking her hand.

  “Listen …” he said, frowning.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered.

  “He’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  She smiled, knowing that she was, for the first time in her life, whole again, present. She was ready to go back to work, ready to look after her family. He was with her, and he always would be.

  Songs

  “And I Love You So,” by Don McLean, 1970, Tapestry, writer Don McLean, label Mediarts.

  “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” by Otis Redding, 1965, Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul, writers Otis Redding and Jerry Butler, label Volt/Atco.

  “Like a Virgin,” by Madonna, 1984, Like a Virgin, writers Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg, label Sire Records.

  “Save All Your Kisses for Me,” by Brotherhood of Man, 1976, Love and Kisses from Brotherhood of Man; writers Tony Hiller, Lee Sheriden, and Martin Lee; label Pye Records.

  “Song Sung Blue,” by Neil Diamond, 1972, Hot August Night, writers Neil Diamond and Leon Russell, label MCA, Universal.

  “Sweet Caroline,” by Neil Diamond, 1968, Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show, writer Neil Diamond, label Uni Records.

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More … *

  About the author

  *

  Meet Lisa Ballantyne

  About the book

  *

  Q&A with Lisa Ballantyne

  Reading Group Questions

  Read on

  *

  Books on My Shelf

  About the author

  Meet Lisa Ballantyne

  LISA BALLANTYNE was born in Armadale, West Lothian, Scotland, and studied English Literature at University of St. Andrews. She lived and worked in China for many years and started writing seriously while she was there. Her first novel, The Guilty One, has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and short-listed for an Edgar Allan Poe Award. The Guilty One was also the autumn 2012 Richard and Judy Book Club winner. Everything She Forgot is her new novel.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  About the book

  Q&A with Lisa Ballantyne

  Both Everything She Forgot, and your first novel, The Guilty One, deal with questions of nature vs. nurture. Do you believe one plays a more important role than the other?

  I think the interplay between nature and nurture and free will is endlessly fascinating, and I continue to hope for the power of human choice to overcome, but oftentimes this proves futile. George and his family of Glaswegian gangsters came to me instinctively. I was attracted to the idea of someone growing up amid great violence but refusing to be inured, broken by it. George is an example of the tragic questing hero, struggling to escape his environment and, to a large extent, himself, but who ultimately fails. I think George is the soul of this novel, and his failure is heartbreaking.

  What was the first creative seed for Everything She Forgot? Did a character or a storyline come to you first?

  When I first began to work on Everything She Forgot, I was interested in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the mechanism of memories from the past impacting on the present. The first scene of the book—involving the car crash and the strange savior—came to me quite quickly and I knew that the burned man who rescues Margaret would be the key to her past. In writing the 1980s scenes, I knew I wanted to write about a man who steals his daughter and for the journey they took to be a redemptive one, spanning the whole country. I wanted the relationship between father and daughter to gradually soften as the road trip progresses, from one of captor and captive to one of genuine affection and love.

  Did any of your initial ideas change as you wrote?

  In the early beginnings of the novel, the father-abductor that I sketched was too harsh and faceless and I had trouble with the relationship between him and his stolen daughter. I started over, and concentrated on George himself, his past and what he had been through to take him to the point where he would want to steal his daughter after all these years. It was then that Big George was born and I fell in love with him straightaway.

  Children play an important role in your books, why do you think that is?

  In my writing, I always return to relationships between parents and children because they are such fertile ground. Families in general are a wonderful resource for novelists, but children in particular are interesting because their personalities are still developing.

  I was also interested in the child, Moll, teaching her newfound father something—as all children are important teachers of adults. It was then that I hit on the idea of George being illiterate because of the institutional violence that he had experienced at school. Moll’s patient teaching not only liberates George but also repairs some of the damage that was done in his past.

  You grew up in the eighties like Moll. What, if anything was taken from your own memories of childhood at that time?

  I enjoyed plundering my memory for the quirky details of those times, such as the insalubrious Tennent’s lager cans with the underwear models on the side. The ubiquitous powder-blue Volkswagen camper van that features in the road trip was something I remembered from childhood, as close family friends used to transport their seven children around in an olive-colored VW. It was fun for me to revisit those years, with real telephones and telephone directories, and Angel Delight desserts.

  Do characters ever take you by surprise while you are writing?

  The scene where the teenage George and his loan shark father visit a debtor on a building site was an interesting one to write. It was one of the rare occasions when a character takes over and I as the writer watched the scene I was writing unfold. I knew George intimately, and I knew that he couldn’t do what his father was demanding of him. The outcome of the scene was George’s only choice and so he made it for me.

  Did you ever imagine the book ending another way?

  It is hard for both the writer and her readers when the hero d
ies at the end of the book, and for me I wanted to literally bring George back to life—not just as he had become, but as he had been, all those years ago, in the dark recesses of Margaret’s memory. Ghosts are tricky to render if not infrequent in novels, but the ghost’s manifestation at the end of Everything She Forgot is exactly how one of my aunts described her husband appearing to her, soon after he died. It was an image that has always stayed with me and so I chose it for the ending of my novel. It seemed right that the love between my main characters would survive in some tangible way.

  Reading Group Questions

  1. Memory plays a significant role in this book; in what ways does it inform identity? Do you think even the things you don’t remember can affect who you become?

  2. Big George wants desperately to change his path, and yet can’t seem to stay on the right side of the law. Do you believe people can change, that they can escape the circumstances they come from?

  3. How do the events of the “road trip” affect George? How do they shape Moll’s future?