The Memory Trap

by Andrea Goldsmith

  She wished she could swallow a pill and be whisked out of here, she wished she could hitch a ride on a passing aeroplane, she wished she could leap onto a rainbow and walk its entire length; she wished, in short, her life was different.

  She dragged herself to her feet. She didn’t want to see or talk to anyone, she just wanted to go home, but Ramsay was expecting her and she knew she wouldn’t default. Although just in case he might have cancelled she checked her email; nothing from Ramsay, but heading the inbox was the latest instalment from Elliot. No, he hadn’t given up on her yet.

  The email was headed REMEMBER? and consisted of a poem by Nikki Giovanni. The poem.

  i wanted to take

  your hand and run with you

  together toward

  ourselves …

  She read slowly, each line out loud, all the way down to the end: and we’ll run again/together/toward each other/yes? Of all the poems he might have sent, he chooses this one. She feels the tears rise, doesn’t stop them, is sobbing when her phone rings. A glance and she sees it is Ramsay, probably wondering where she is. She shoves the phone aside, holds her head in her hands and closes her eyes. The call rings out while she’s back in New York, not the restaurant where he first read her this poem, but at the apartment not long before their marriage, the cockatiels in their corner, she and Elliot together on the couch. There’s cheese and pickles and smoked whitefish on the low table, and fresh bread from the local bakery, and her legs are draped across Elliot’s thighs and he is reading to her, reading this poem. It’s so real, so vivid, she feels his legs under her own, she can hear his voice. It’s like meeting an old lover after a long absence.

  She reads the poem a second time, she lives each line, and at the finish she sits silently in the memories. Time passes, and only when the phone rings again does she rouse herself: Ramsay again, and still she doesn’t answer. She dashes off a text, running late, on my way, and collects her belongings. Slowly she walks to the car. Slowly she leaves the school premises.

  During the fifteen-minute drive, lines and images from the poem surface. Could this poem ever refer to her and Ramsay? Would Ramsay ever send this poem? Has he ever sent her poetry? In this as with everything he is so different from Elliot. Elliot loves poetry as much as she does; the first years of their marriage were full of poetry. But those days ceased long ago to feel like her marriage.

  She is tired no longer, hard to know exactly how she feels. I wanted to take your hand and run with you floats in her mind like a familiar song, she can even imagine the music, is humming a phrase as she turns into Ramsay’s driveway. Ramsay is waiting on the front verandah, he’s pacing. The music stops, the poetry slips away.

  He runs down the steps, opens the car door before she has switched off the engine. ‘Where’ve you been? I thought you weren’t coming.’

  Whatever he has been doing since she saw him earlier at school he certainly hasn’t been playing the piano. His shirt is grubby and covered in dog hair. He’s changed his jeans for sweatpants and they too are stained and streaked. His face is ravaged, the normally rosy skin is pasty, there’s dirt beneath his nails.

  ‘What on earth have you been doing?’

  He looks sulky. ‘Waiting for you.’

  She glances at his clothes. ‘I mean while you were waiting for me.’

  He shakes his head, he looks lost. ‘I was rummaging around in the shed.’ He flings his arms forward in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I don’t know what I was doing.’

  She suggests he cleans himself up while she starts dinner.

  ‘There are emails, Zoe, at least a dozen of them, most of them about China.’ Ramsay is shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders. ‘The China tour. It’s three months away and they want to lock in schedules and hotels and the food I like, all the things George looked after. And they want to do it now.’

  She tells him not to worry, she’ll deal with it. All the things George did she’ll handle. ‘You just need to concentrate on your music.’

  She ushers him into the house. He’s just standing there in the hall, his body drooping, the sinewy hands dangling. He seems unable to move. Seeing him so helpless, a terrible thought occurs to her. ‘The program is confirmed?’

  He nods.

  ‘And you are on schedule with your preparation?’ She speaks slowly and clearly – she sounds like a teacher.

  He turns to face her. His mouth opens as if to speak, then he presses his lips together, almost violently it seems to her, nods again and marches down the hall.

  She collects George’s laptop, sets it up on the kitchen bench, and while the food is cooking she answers the various emails, all of them dealing with practical details to ensure Ramsay’s comfort in China and the smooth progression of the tour. None of it is difficult and anyone with a knowledge of Ramsay could have responded, but still, and despite the lingering sour taste from the morning, despite, too, the sad intrusion of her lost marriage, she’s pleased he asked her to help.

  Although he hadn’t asked.

  She arrived at his house, she saw he was in trouble, she leapt in and smoothed things over. He didn’t need to ask for a thing. She’d behaved in a similar fashion with the children when they were young, catching them before they fell or failed. It was Elliot who made her see what she was doing, that she had to allow them to stretch themselves, meet challenges, cope with disappointment. ‘If you do everything for them,’ he said, ‘they’ll neither learn nor grow. And they’ll certainly never leave home.’

  She doesn’t want to be Ramsay’s mother, she doesn’t want to be his housekeeper, she doesn’t want to be his nursemaid, although she’d perform all these roles if … If what? If he’d love her? It was a glorious dream when George was around, but now the position is vacant – George’s role and she assumes more besides – what does she really want with Ramsay? The question hammers her and the terrible fatigue pours in again. She needs to get out of here. She calls out to Ramsay that his dinner is in the oven and she’s about to leave.

  He rushes into the kitchen. He is wearing only singlet and shorts. His face is wet, water drips down his neck, drops glisten in the fluorescent light. No, no, he says. Don’t go. Stay and eat with me.

  It’s an invitation she would normally seize. But not now, not today. She pecks him on the cheek and rushes to the car before she can change her mind.

  Chapter 12. Newly Minted Prospects

  1.

  Hayley stood in front of the open refrigerator. There were several plastic containers neatly stacked on the shelves, some with a smear in the bottom, others with a few centimetres of food. This was what remained of the meals of the past weeks, the period of her mother’s madness. The chicken and Chinese mushrooms smelled all right, if she could only remember when it was bought; a spoonful of stiffish fried rice was from the same era. She put both aside and continued her search. She didn’t even bother sniffing a piece of hamburger wrapped in plastic and a single triangle of pizza, just threw both into the rubbish bin. In another container neatly arranged were a wedge of roasted pumpkin, a teaspoon of peas, a roasted potato and a single lamb chop, all from the carvery meal of just a couple of nights ago. It looked fresh enough, although meat and three veg was not exactly what she had in mind for an afternoon snack. There were four separate containers of limp and slimy salad, and another with some sour-smelling white stuff she failed to identify.

  This frustrating array was her mother’s work. Pretence that takeaway meals were real meals, and sufficiently self-conscious about her privileged life to be uneasy about waste, Zoe appeared to have thrown nothing out since her delinquent behaviour began.

  Hayley again inspected the old Chinese food; it was old, she decided, and shoved it back in the fridge. She found some toasted muesli, the gourmet stuff that tasted better without milk, was eating it from the packet – what did it matter? Callum wouldn’t care, and neither her absent father nor crazy mother would ever know – when her phone rang. It was Maddy. Maddy was a texter
and a tweeter not a phoner, it must be important.

  And it was.

  A gig. A proper gig in a pub. With Adam, Maddy’s brother, twenty-eight years old, brilliant song-writer, legend on the guitar, seriously cool. A gig, not with his band, not with MagneticBlue, just with him. She knew his music, Maddy kept her up-to-date, and most of his songs figured in her top-rated playlist. And there’d been two memorable occasions when she had jammed with him, casual, spontaneous happenings, singing and playing guitar together. And now he wanted to know if she was available. To sing with him. Tonight.

  ‘His usual partner’s been in a car accident,’ Maddy said. ‘She’s fine, or rather she will be. Broken limbs, awful of course, but fixable. And –’ she paused both for sympathy and effect, ‘what a chance for you.’

  Maddy was an average student, she made the B teams in sport, she was musically ordinary, attractive without being drop-dead gorgeous, but she notched up world’s best practice as a friend. She was genuinely happy when good things happened to you, happy without a skerrick of jealousy. And she was so sharp about people, she understood you, usually before you understood yourself. In fact, if you believed in mind-reading you’d be convinced Maddy was a leading practitioner.

  ‘I guess you feel a bit like the understudy who gets to play the lead because the star’s sick or in rehab,’ she now said. ‘Your great fortune because of someone else’s misfortune. But this is the system, Hay. So it’s okay to feel happy.’ She paused to allow this to sink in. ‘By the way, Sissy’s recovery is expected to take months and Adam tells me the band has a great line-up of gigs booked.’

  Now Adam himself took the phone. ‘We’ve got about three hours before we’re due at “Crossroads”’ – her first proper gig and it’s at ‘Crossroads’! ‘I’ll pick you up at six.’

  She had thirty minutes to turn herself into an enigmatic, hip singer. Hayley had met Sissy twice and both times she was wearing black. In the pigsty of her mother’s dressing-room, she found a body-hugging sleeveless jacket made of a black leathery material – it would be perfect with her own black pants and boots. Her hair, straight like her mother’s and dark like her father’s, she shined up with a bit of product and left hanging loose and long. She ringed her eyes with eyeliner and on a whim added a beauty spot above the left corner of her mouth like an old-fashioned Hollywood star. Definitely enigmatic.

  She wrote a note for her mother – band practice, she explained, and was about to add she’d be late, but decided not to bother: as late as she might be her mother would be later – put the note on the kitchen bench and was waiting in the street when Adam drove up with Maddy.

  Adam appraised her. ‘You look great. You look the part. Now we’ve only the music to worry about.’

  A half-hour later they were tuning up at the house Adam shared with a couple of other guys. His musical influences were retro, the same rhythm and blues singers that were her father’s favourites. She and Elliot would regularly adjourn to the turn-table and listen to Ray Charles, Nina, Aretha, Otis, Clapton, Jerry Lee Lewis, all the old greats. Thanks to her father, Hayley knew exactly where Adam was coming from. And thanks to Maddy, she knew all of his work. Adam was impressed. As for her harmonising, ‘You’re a natural,’ he said. And while she already knew this, having been surprised long ago to discover that what came to her naturally did not to most people, she thrilled to his praise.

  If they had stopped after the practice session it would have counted as the best night of her life, but that was only the beginning. When they set off for the venue, Adam seemed to think they wouldn’t embarrass themselves. In fact he struck her as surprisingly calm.

  The pub was a jangle of bodies and voices, and as they moved through the room everyone seemed to know Adam; even Maddy was acknowledged by a couple of people.

  ‘Do your parents know you come to places like this?’ Hayley asked, once they were settled at a table reserved for the musicians.

  Maddy looked at her as if she had asked the dumbest of questions. ‘Of course not.’

  There was a band up before them, rhythm and blues covers, good not great, but with a stash of friends in the audience the applause was enthusiastic. Their bracket gave her nerves plenty of time to warm up, so by the time she and Adam took to the stage the blood was belting around her body and she was shaking so violently she doubted she could sing or play a note. While Adam explained Sissy’s absence and introduced her as his ‘fabulous stand-in partner’, he kept a steadying hand on her shoulder. It helped. The first song, deliberately chosen, required only harmonising vocals from her and a bit of strumming. By the time she launched into ‘Blueswoman’ she was switched on and ready, and when she sang his signature ‘Gravel Planet’ there were whistles and foot-stamping and calls for more.

  Forty minutes passed in a moment. She and Adam left the stage, the applause continued, the shouting grew louder. They returned for an encore and then another. At the end of the last song Adam pushed her forward to take a bow, and the roar of the crowd increased. She looked out at the faces, the waving arms. She loved being here, she loved the crowd, she loved that they loved her.

  It was a debut performance of which fantasies were made. Afterwards when they were unwinding over a drink, Adam put his arm around her. ‘You’re good,’ he said. ‘You’re really good.’ And cocked his head to the side. ‘So? Are we in business? And not just the duo, but MagneticBlue as well?’

  Hayley didn’t know how she would arrange it – with her mother, with her father if he ever returned, with her school work – but she knew what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. Only a fool or a coward would pass up this opportunity.

  2.

  The house is empty and very quiet. Zoe is accustomed to feeling Elliot’s presence even though he would rarely greet her; Addie, in contrast, always made a fuss when she arrived home. No Elliot and no Addie. Callum is at a friend’s place and Hayley, according to a note left on the bench, has band practice. No need to cook, no one to cook for. Zoe makes coffee and withdraws to the sunroom; she opens the sliding doors, sits on the couch, sips her coffee and smokes. It’s not yet dusk but the sun is low and the garden is in shadow. There’s a hint of autumn in the air and the leaves look more sprightly than they have for months; even the flowers appear to have perked up. If she had energy to move, she’d sit outside.

  On the coffee table is a stack of periodicals, mostly issues of the London Review of Books, some going back years. Elliot never manages to catch up, but neither can he ditch an issue until it is thoroughly read. ‘I’m an intellectual manqué,’ he would joke. ‘Can’t afford to risk missing out on the goods. Can’t reduce my chances.’

  Once she would have laughed with him, but not now. Theirs has become a humour-free marriage and maybe doomed forever to be. Although not at the beginning, even the shoddy fortune-teller had predicted a future of laughter and happiness. That fortune-teller down in Greenwich Village … And she wonders at this caprice of memory that it throws up forgotten events when you least want them but perhaps most need them.

  It was exactly two months after they met, their second anniversary. They had celebrated with a sandwich and champagne lunch eaten in a chilly Washington Square, surrounded by the usual hobos, junkies and students who hung out there. The plan was to visit a local gallery, but as they were making their way through the Village they saw the shingle, both of them saw it at the same time – they were often in sync like that. FORTUNE TELLER, the sign said. YOUR FUTURE FOR CHEAP.

  ‘I dare you,’ Elliot said.

  ‘I dare you,’ Zoe replied.

  ‘I dare us.’ Elliot was triumphant.

  The shop was tiny and reeked of freshly fried chips; lurking beneath the new oil was the taint of old fry-ups and greasy carpet. The light was dimmed by a grimy shawl thrown over a lamp. Business isn’t booming, Zoe whispered, and turned to leave, but Elliot held her. ‘It’ll be fun,’ he said.

  An old woman lumbered in from the rear through parted curtains, just like in a B-
grade movie. Up close they could see she was more worn than old; a stink of cigarettes and fried food wafted about her. She was dressed in B-grade movie gypsy garb: full floral skirt, maroon velvet jacket laced across a bulging bosom, scarf about her head. Her accent was pure Brooklyn. They sat on one side of a small square table, she occupied a stool opposite, and between them was a crystal ball. It was as much as they could do not to laugh. The walls were draped in lengths of material oddments, their colours dulled by dust.

  They were an easy study: a young couple, obviously happy, asking about their future. She told them she saw much joy and laughter in their lives, and the occasional obstacle as well; she even mentioned a shadowy man who would threaten their relationship. They would enjoy health, wealth and – she must have noticed Zoe’s cello brooch – music. The telling of their future lasted no more than ten minutes and she wanted to charge them fifty dollars – a huge amount in those days. Elliot referred to her sign. Fifty dollars isn’t cheap, he said. She argued that there were two of them, it’d be cheaper for one. In the end they settled for thirty-eight dollars plus two special stones. Real amber, she said – more likely to be plastic, they decided, although they always referred to them as our amber stones.

  The stones represented their two souls, she said. ‘This one,’ she gave a stone to Elliot, ‘represents her soul,’ she nodded at Zoe. ‘And this one,’ she put the other in Zoe’s hand, ‘is the stone of his soul. You must keep them close forever.’ As she ushered them out she added as a parting shot, ‘They’re usually eighty bucks extra.’