The Museum of Forgotten Memories

by Anstey Harris

  Chapter Three

  Inside, the house is grand. A staircase leads the eye away from the front door and breaks into two galleries running away from each other and around the top of the hallway. Hallway isn’t really the right word – our whole flat in London would have fitted in this space, upstairs and downstairs – perhaps it won’t be so bad after all. Maybe it has improved since Richard last came here.

  The galleries that run out from the stairs like twin branches are – Araminta says as she rushes us through – open to the public. She didn’t have to tell me: you couldn’t possibly mistake this for a home, there are ‘exit’ and ‘fire door’ signs everywhere, red rope cordons hang on bronze pillars either side of the stair carpet. Nothing about it is homely but it’s certainly grand. I can see portraits and antique furniture, display cases and statues. This is the worst of all environments for Leo: Leo who dances with his headphones on; Leo who runs headlong everywhere; Leo who loves football.

  A door on the landing is marked ‘private’, it leads into a far narrower corridor. We pass door after door, but Araminta does not pause until we see a smaller staircase going up to the next floor. I can only assume this would have been the servants’ quarters, once upon a time. The first two floors, or what I’ve seen of them so far at any rate, have oak-panelling along the lower halves of the walls and patterned paper above that. These walls are dark, mostly painted and, here and there, sections of some sort of hessian or sacking stuck up instead of wallpaper. Phil, following with the first box, whistles through his teeth.

  Araminta doesn’t turn to look back at me once as we go up to the rooms, just leads the way with an irritated energy and assumes we are following.

  And they are ‘rooms’, like something you’d expect to find if you took an academic residency in the oldest university in the country, or the matron’s job at an expensive, but ancient, private school. It’s a long way from the ‘apartment’ described by the solicitor. ‘Apartment’ implies modern and well-proportioned, airy and clean. This place hasn’t been lived in for years, unless you count spiders and woodlice and earwigs. The solicitor failed to say that the wallpaper was peeling in the corners and the windows grey with years of winter rain and summer dust. She didn’t mention the bathroom: a chipped enamel bath with taps white with limescale and – next door to that – a loo with a cistern up above it and a long rusty chain to pull to flush it. The solicitor forgot to say that the only thing that marks our rooms out as separate to the rest of the building is a green baize door that doesn’t quite shut. Most of all, she kept the absence of a kitchen right out of every single piece of correspondence.

  ‘There isn’t a kitchen, Mrs Buchan,’ I say as Araminta goes to leave, her whirlwind tour completed.

  ‘It’s “Miss”,’ she says. ‘But, as I said, you may call me Araminta. And we do have a kitchen, it’s downstairs. Do you need it tonight?’

  I thought about the burger we’d had at the Services when Leo felt sick, remembered the crisps, apples, and chocolate biscuits in the car. ‘I’m sure we’ll be all right for tonight.’

  ‘You might, Cate,’ Phil says, ‘but we won’t. We’ve got at least ten boxes marked “kitchen”.’

  ‘The kitchen is fully stocked. There will be very little you could need that you won’t find down there already.’ Araminta stands in the hallway. ‘And there is no spare cupboard space.’

  I realise that we can’t stay here, this was a mistake and this place isn’t for us. A second later, I remember that we have absolutely nowhere else to go.

  *

  It is late by the time Frank, Phil, and the removal man whose name I could never quite catch have carried all the boxes upstairs.

  They put Leo’s room together first to try and bring some semblance of order. Now they’ve finished, I’m relieved that we have this oasis of our past to hide in. Leo’s room looks much as it always did. Frank even helped him get some posters on the wall until Phil and the other man realised he wasn’t helping them carry boxes up three flights of stairs.

  I’ve convinced Leo that a bedroom picnic is exciting and we’re sitting on his bed with apples and chocolate biscuits pretending, like we did when he was little, that the bed is a boat and all around us is water. He still thinks this will be an adventure.

  I lie back on his pillows and listen to the empty house. I imagine that I’m in London, that I can hear the Pearsons next door – their television always too loud for us but not quite high enough for them to hear. Or Delores and Alfie upstairs, art students that Leo has counted amongst his best friends for the last couple of years. Instead, there’s us: Leo and me.

  I don’t know where Araminta went. She said a very firm goodnight and told me that she’d be back at 9 a.m. to show me how things work and where the kitchen is. I sip warm water from a plastic bottle we had in the car and think about when I lived in a city, when I could get a mocha chai latte with almond milk at midnight if I ever felt like it; I never did, but that doesn’t stop me adding the rural isolation to my list of woes.

  Leo is scrolling through music on his iPad, displaying an impressive line in choices for someone whose literacy skills aren’t that hot. He puts his big headphones on and lies back on the pillow. Every now and then he bursts into song. Leo inherited his father’s voice. If he’d had mine he might have been able to roughly carry a tune, maybe even do a reasonable karaoke. Instead he sings like Richard, like a cinder under a door, but that doesn’t harm his love of singing loudly and often.

  The music makes Leo smile, his fingers tap out a rhythm on the duvet and his feet jiggle. I envy him his ease and his confidence. Leo feels like this because he has me, because he has every trust in me. I don’t have anyone to lean on right now, unless you count Simon – inexorably linked to us by shared history and by the fact that he’s Leo’s godfather – but he’s 12,000 miles away researching fish that walk along the bottom of the sea.

  I leave Leo to it and go into my own room, before he can see the tears that are welling up in my eyes. I lie back on the bed and breathe deeply. The mattress is solid and lumpy: we are not going to get on well. With each breath I take in more of the musty smell, the creased old curtains, I become more and more aware of the utter hopelessness of our surroundings. I think I had visions of moulded ceilings, patterns of white plaster edging every room. Instead, this low ceiling is cracked at the edges, with a tiny gap all the way round for insects to come and go through. A spider clings to a dusty web in the off-white corner as if to prove to me that he was here first.

  I pick up my phone – I just want to share my wretchedness, my deflating hopes as they ebb into the threadbare old rug. I scroll through my recent calls, through my friend list. The trouble with being a teacher for so long is that all my friends are teachers too. They have escaped to warmer climes, as I used to, on the first day of the holidays and – apart from texts and postcards – none of them will really be in touch again until the grind of the September term starts anew. It’s going to be a long summer.

  Simon and I signed up for an online grieving course, after the first months of incredulity had worn off – when it had been long enough for me to realise I’d never love anyone as much as I’d loved Richard, and for Simon to learn that you only have one lifelong best friend. Some of our other old friends find it hard to talk about suicide: they’re embarrassed and sorry for me in equal measure. Others can’t deal with my anger. Simon knows exactly what I’m going through: the sadness, the regret, the pulsing guilt that has pounded in my ears every day for the last four years. And the utter negativity of helpless powerless fury. Simon knows first-hand that people are able to support you in sadness, but not so comfortable with despair.

  *

  There was never a moment where Simon wasn’t Richard’s best friend, wasn’t utterly devoted to him – even when things became so complicated, when those relationships were blurred and stretched and hard to focus on.

  My first problem when I met Richard wasn’t how to finish with Simon but how
to tell Richard why I’d done it. I let Simon down gently and without too much anguish, then spent two nights tossing and turning, wide awake: nights that would have been far less troubled had Richard and I had mobile phones or emails.

  On the third day, I slunk into work for an afternoon shift, exhausted and tense. I was working in the uni bar: the floor was sticky with spilt beer and the customers were mostly a nightmare, but it was near my halls and it fitted round my course.

  I’d had my back to the bar when Richard approached and I heard his voice before I saw him.

  ‘Si said I’d find you here.’

  I blushed to the roots of my hair. Warm lager splashed onto my hand as I turned. My hand was shaking so much I had to put the plastic cup down on the bar. My throat was dry and all my words lost somewhere deep in my belly.

  ‘Can you talk? Do you have a break any time soon?’ His fringe was slightly spiky at the front; it made him look vulnerable and it quivered nervously when he spoke.

  ‘I finished with Simon,’ I told him, instead of answering his question.

  Even at twenty-four his boyishness caught up with him. ‘I know,’ he whispered, and his voice trembled.

  I made my excuses to the other bar staff and led him outside to a bench in the university plaza. Students wandered past us like safari animals ranging the plains: they were all a blur, all background. The sun was low in the sky and the afternoon still warm, still brightly lit.

  ‘I have to know that you feel the same.’ He just said it, no preamble, no explanation. ‘I need to talk to Si about him and me and you, and I need to know that – that you feel the same – before I do it.’

  ‘I do,’ I said, for the first time.

  ‘He’ll be very upset, betrayed.’

  I nodded, looked at the floor, the detritus of sweet wrappers, leaves, and cigarette ends.

  ‘But there’s no point in not telling him, in not doing it.’ He reached out for my hand and his skin against mine was like fire. ‘I’m going to tell him today.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I dared look up at him, at his earnest face, his worried eyes. ‘It’s the right thing.’

  ‘This is it, you know.’ He leaned in towards me. In the distance someone played a radio through a window, people called out to one another across the quad. Our world was just the tiny space between the two of us. ‘I mean this is really it,’ he said – before we had so much as kissed for the first time. ‘Till death do us part.’

  *

  Now, as part of our therapy, Simon and I are supposed to email each other every day with memories of Richard – things that touch us and make the past a warm day or a Christmas morning, or things that are less happy, even painful. Over time we’ve got lazy, we either don’t write for days or we send one line at best. More often than not, it ends up being a brief history of what we’ve had to eat.

  Tonight, I wait until Leo is engrossed in his music, dancing around his new bedroom without a care in the world and go into my own room. I close the curtains, although there’s nothing and no one outside: an overhanging roof or something obscures my view and I can’t see the stars. It is truly dark in a way I doubt Leo has ever seen. I sit down on my bed and write an email on my phone; at least now I have something to write about.

  From: Cate Morris

  To: Simon Henderson

  Subject: We’ve arrived

  Mail: It’s so much worse than I ever thought it could be: I don’t know what I was actually expecting. Not this, anyway. At work we’ve all been telling ourselves that these things are new beginnings, that when one door closes etc, we’ve said it so much we’ve all started believing it. Not that anyone else who took the redundancy is in a cartoon spooky castle in the middle of nowhere.

  Not even any food to report today, your godson and I mainly lived on burgers and chocolate biscuits.

  Seriously though, I wish you were here. Or Richard. One of you. Anyone really (if that doesn’t make you feel unimportant).

  C xxx

  PS Did Richard ever mention living here to you?

  If there was a time when Simon resented Richard and me, he has never said so. He has been charm and elegance itself from the first time Richard and I met him as a couple.

  It didn’t take him long to meet someone new: a succession of someone-news as it turned out. Simon was always the more handsome one, the more outgoing: he’d always found it easier to charm the girls than Richard had.

  The three of us got on and pretended it hadn’t happened; that I had never known Simon before Richard and that they were, equally, my two best friends. Girlfriends of mine queued up for years to have a go at being the fourth wheel of our strange little friendship but it never quite-worked out.

  One of my best friends tried harder than most. It suited me and I encouraged it at every opportunity. It was going well: we had some good laughs together. And then, one day, we were on the way home from a seaside funfair. We went together in Richard’s car: he drove and I rode shotgun – Simon and Emily were in the back. The boys had won huge teddy bears in displays of uncharacteristic machismo at the sideshows and Emily and I were still laughing at how easily they’d turned into totally different sorts of men once they’d started competing.

  The light was fading into dusk, the scent of wheat fields and wild flowers was drifting through the car windows on the warm breeze. It was a balmy dream end to a beautiful day.

  Simon saw it at the same time as Richard and me – I don’t know how. The tiny baby rabbit lolloping on soft grey paws across the road.

  The moment of brakes and shouts lasted only a second and then we saw the oyster-coloured ball of fur bounce away behind us before lying still in the middle of the lane.

  Richard ran from the car, leaving the door open in the road. He crouched by the tiny rabbit, his head in his hands. ‘No, no,’ he kept repeating. I put my hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Rich, mate, it’s a rabbit. It’s only a rabbit.’ Simon was standing over the two of us and the little dead body. He picked it up by its ears and swung it into the field beside the road. ‘At least another animal can take it.’

  ‘I killed it.’ Richard was whispering, still squatting in the road. ‘I killed it.’

  ‘Are you all right, Richard?’ I got him to his feet.

  He shook his head, his face was wet with tears.

  ‘Do you want me to drive?’ I asked. I’d never driven his car before and it seemed intimate somehow.

  He nodded and we all got back in the car. Behind us a red Mini beeped to get us to move.

  Richard didn’t speak again until we got back to the flat he shared with Simon. ‘Can you stay?’ he asked me. ‘I don’t want to be on my own.’

  I didn’t say, ‘It’s just a rabbit.’ Not then or when he woke up screaming in the night. Instead I held him tight, my arms around his muscular back, and murmured, ‘It’s okay, Richard,’ until he went back to sleep.

  I think of today’s little fox, a bigger mammal than the rabbit and on a more sensitive day. Not for the first time I am thankful that I have never felt the weight of world as heavily as Richard did. Not for the first time, a diamond dust of resentment grinds in my silent inner self; in the part that always copes, in the part that bears the whole weight of the boy who was once Richard’s world.

  *

  It takes a second to remember where I am when I wake up. Some things are normal. The duvet cover is mine and instantly recognisable, but the view at the end of its straight blue stripes is completely new. The furniture isn’t mine. The heavy old oak drawers were too solid to move when we tried yesterday; it wasn’t even worth trying the wardrobe. The wardrobe is antique and enormous; it would easily hold any number of children looking for adventures and it will easily hold far more clothes than I have ever owned. The wardrobe smelled the same as the rest of the room when I looked inside – a strange smell, not mothballs and not damp, but a smell of neglect and emptiness, nonetheless. Leo wakes early.

  ‘And we can go in the garden.’ He is excited a
nd I haven’t been listening or, for that matter, awake. ‘It’s a really big garden. Look.’ Leo pulls the dark velvet curtain away from the window.

  The sunlight streams in uninvited; the day insistent upon me, demanding my attention. In the morning light, I can see that the overhanging roof that obscured my view of the sky last night is so much more than that. Wooden panels, as intricate as lace, line the guttering of the roof above my window. They drip down like icicles, roughened by peeling paint that would be impossible to reach to redo. At the top of each eave, I can see the underbelly and chin of a gargoyle, both with their tongues poking out in front of them. ‘Gog and Magog,’ Richard used to say every time he met a pair of anythings – puppies, infants, artwork – that could be described as ugly. I wonder if these two stone monsters are the reason why.

  We are three storeys up and the view of the garden is breathtaking. Then I realise that’s the wrong phrase. This isn’t a garden, these are ‘gardens’: wild and sprawling, over-grown and unkempt, but ‘gardens’, in the same way that this apartment is ‘rooms’. I wonder if every aspect of this place will require new vocabulary. The lawn spreads away from the house – it isn’t as overgrown as I would have expected. Someone mows this vast expanse of grass, clipping the edges where the trees have been so carefully planted around it, ancient enormous trees with trunks you could never fit your arms round.

  Beyond the lawns – they are large enough to be plural too – I can see what I assume is the outside edge of a walled garden. There are shrubs and vines growing over the red brick wall and back towards the house. I can only imagine what else might be in there.

  To the left of the walled garden and gesturing up to the back of the house, two gold statues gleam. They are so incongruous in all the disorder, as if they have a daily maintenance routine that involves scrubbing and brushing and polishing. The two life-sized figures look like skaters, moving across the surface of a large pond but stuck, for now, in the middle. Each balances on one leg, the opposite arm outstretched and their heads turned slightly to look at one another.