In the end, we met them in an Italian café on Northcote Road, close to the school. Zach recovered his temper and we chatted happily, the four of us, about Brighton, their plans to start a family. They had shown interest in my job. I had talked about my mother, how painful it had been caring for her (the slipping away of the person I knew, the distance, the loss of her love) and also how funny (her nudist period). Nell, who was wearing a green top that exactly matched the colour of her eyes, gave me a hug. I imagined them becoming my friends too. But a crack formed without me noticing. When I invited them back for coffee, they made an excuse. At the time, I wondered whether something had happened when I went to the loo, whether they had argued.
I mentioned them once or twice over the next few weeks. Zach always changed the subject. We never saw them again.
Pete was a graphic designer, and Nell was in film production. I rack my brain for their surnames. In one of our first meetings, Zach had mentioned a gallery in Brighton. He was friends with the owner, though the relationship had soured. Somebody owed somebody money. Zach felt betrayed. Pete and Nell had mentioned him, that time we had lunch – they knew him too. Jim. That was his name. Jim.
It doesn’t take me long. Blank Canvas, a ‘creative and innovative exhibition space’ in the ‘vibrant North Laine area of Brighton’, run by Jim Ibsen, ‘artist, sculptor and freethinker’. There’s a number and I call it. When it goes to answerphone, I leave a message, explaining who I am and asking him to ring.
Zach loathed Facebook. He said only the lonely and the disconnected needed social media, that it brought out the worst (smugness, insecurity) in people. I used to look at it in secret. Not that I have many friends – thirty-three actually, most of them people I haven’t seen in years, contemporaries from my primary school or the occasional former pupil.
One drunken evening in Jane’s flat, before I met Zach, we looked up her old boyfriends, to see what they looked like, to laugh at their photos, to pretend to be young. It was surprisingly easy to track most of them down.
No point searching for Nell and Pete: I don’t have their surnames. But my mind dredges up someone else. Fred Laws: my old boss at Westminster Library. It turned out Zach had been to school with him. Fred and I were good friends; he was a sweet, serious man. We used to eat our sandwiches together in Parliament Square. In fact, it was Fred who encouraged me to do my day-release course. I was so childishly excited when we discovered the connection, but an expression came over Zach’s face, scared, almost trapped. He covered it quickly – did an impression, not entirely kind, of Fred holding his index finger in the air when he spoke. I understood. I think he had spent all that time trying to put the violence and trauma of his childhood behind him; he didn’t need reminders. So we never got together. Our wedding at Wandsworth Town Hall was tiny – just the six of us, me and Zach, Peggy and Rob, Jane and Sanjay. (Nell and Pete didn’t come in the end.) But the cremation at Putney Vale . . . I’ve lost Fred Laws’ contact details, but I should have tried to track him down.
Fred is not the Facebook type, but then a lot of people on Facebook are not the Facebook type. Lots of Fred Lawrences, plenty of Fred Lawsons. Only one Fred Laws. No photograph, or details, just a silhouette. I send a message anyway. I write: Sorry if this is the wrong Fred Laws, but if it is the right one, please get in touch.
How bold I have been, sitting here in my lipstick. Ruby red, the colour of cochineal, the colour of blood. But once I have done this, I snap the laptop shut, the lid cold and hard against my fingers.
After lunch – a tin of tomato soup I eat from the saucepan – I force myself into the world outside. I lay Zach down in the back of my mind and drive to Colliers Wood to the Beeches, the care home where my mother lives.
I find her today, after I have signed in, sitting in the lounge in front of Judge Judy. My heart clenches with love and guilt, as it always does. She is sitting next to a man with Parkinson’s whom the staff refer to as her ‘boyfriend’. He is fast asleep, his mouth open. My mother’s head is cupped by the headrest of the chair, her eyes watering, the skin on her cheekbones thin and taut. She has lost a lot of weight, though I notice with concern that her legs are more swollen than they were before the weekend.
I’ve brought her the chocolate eclair toffees she likes and I lay them down in her lap.
‘How are you, Mum?’ I say, kissing the top of her head.
‘That man,’ she says, nudging the toffees on to the floor with the back of her hand, ‘took all my money.’
I pick up the toffees and place them carefully next to her on the chair. ‘On Judge Judy?’
‘Here,’ she said. ‘The one who lived in the bathroom. He came into my room, pretending to be nice.’
‘When?’ I ask. ‘What man? When was he in the bathroom?’
She puts on a different voice, almost sing-song. ‘They’re all the same. Cunts.’
I stare at her.
‘Now, now,’ says Angie, one of the nurses, who has been sorting Phil’s medication in the corner. ‘Language, Lyn.’
The caregivers here think my mother is rude and difficult, but it isn’t what she’s really like at all. She would never have sworn before the Alzheimer’s. She was strong and capable. Widowed at twenty-eight, with two children under six, she got a job as a school dinner lady and then as a receptionist at the GP. She taught herself to type and in the evenings she took in secretarial work for a former colleague of my father. She wanted the best for us. She was so proud of Peggy, with her university degree and her rich husband. My poor mum. I always let her down. I’m still doing it now.
I gaze out into the atrium garden. The statue in the middle, an abstract form made out of concrete, is surrounded by swathes of dry ornamental grass. Nowhere to hide. I can hear voices in the reception area. A woman in a wheelchair is being pushed down a ramp to a waiting car. A male nurse is holding open the door. There’s always someone on the front desk. It would be impossible just to wander in.
I persuade her to stand up and take her through to her bathroom to wash her hair. I run the water for a while to let her get used to the sound – it can startle her otherwise. I bring up a chair to the basin and she leans her head back and closes her eyes. I wash it carefully, dabbing the water from her eyes and face, blotting it with a towel so as not to irritate the skin. Her scalp is so dry it is like parchment. She doesn’t say anything, but she also doesn’t object.
Back in her room, I settle her on the edge of the bed and smooth her wet hair with a comb. I ask her about her childhood in Kent. She likes that. It seems to make her feel safe. She is telling me about the apple trees at the end of her garden while I fill her water jug, water her plants and tidy up. I try to work out if anything’s been touched. I check again in the bathroom, searching under the basin and behind the bath. Nothing seems out of place. In her bedroom, the photographs are dusty, but show no fingerprints. I wipe them with a cloth – the picture of my father first, taken on a beach in Devon. I think I remember that holiday, the salt and ice cream on my lips, his smile, the scrape of his beard, but I am cheating. It’s a memory of the photograph. Peggy and Rob’s formal wedding portrait next, and then one of Peggy and me as small girls in matching dresses. Tucked into the corner of that is a small photo of Zach. I put it there once. It slips out of the frame as I polish and I study it for a moment. It was taken on holiday in Cornwall, on a rock, the water behind. He looks brown and windswept; he’s laughing. We’d just raced each other down to the cove. He’d let me win. After the picture was taken, we skimmed stones and threw sticks for the dog. We rolled up our jeans and paddled. He took off his top and rubbed my feet with it.
‘Zach was always happy by the sea,’ I say.
My mother is humming, plucking at the bedspread with the tips of her fingers.
When Zach first moved in with me, he couldn’t believe how many knick-knacks my mother owned – the decorative wooden cockerels from Portugal, the dolls wearing Greek national costume, the pottery jugs and brass bells,
the copious spider plants. It all got packed up in boxes, but there wasn’t space in her room at the Beeches. We brought only her favourite items – the plants and photos and a collection of Coalport porcelain houses, which Zach thought hideous but we always loved, growing up. My father had given one to my mother on each birthday during their married life.
They’re lined up on the shelf. I count them. Then I count them again. There are five and there should be six. One is missing. Which one? I check them off in my head. The yellow mansion is here, and the house shaped like an umbrella, the red villa and the twin cottages, encircled with roses; they’re all on the shelf. But the blue-and-white Swiss chalet, Peggy’s favourite when we were little: it’s gone. I search under the bed, in case it has fallen down, and on the shelf by the television in case it has been moved there.
‘You didn’t come for ages,’ my mother says suddenly. ‘You never visit me.’
She is watching me, chewing her lip. I sit down next to her and take her hand. I remind her that I came on Friday. I couldn’t come at the weekend, I say, because I had to go away. I start telling her about the last couple of days, or at least certain aspects: how I had been to the seaside and met a grand MP called Alan Murphy. I tell her about the house at the top of the hill, the umbrella stand made out of a poor dead fox. I try and think of as many details as I can remember. It’s the sort of story she used to enjoy.
‘I like the other girl better,’ she says when I pause for breath. ‘The pretty one.’
‘I know.’
‘I wish you would leave me alone.’
‘OK.’ I kiss the top of her head. ‘I’m going.’
‘And tell that man I don’t want him to come again either.’
‘What man?’ I say, my heart jerking, but she has set her mouth and turned to the window.
Flo, a different nurse, is on reception when I leave. She tells me my mother had ‘a little problem with regurgitation’ at breakfast and we talk about why that might be. I ask her casually if she knows anything about the missing ornament – whether it might have got broken. I don’t want to make a big deal of it. My mother’s wedding ring disappeared just before Christmas. Peggy, who was upset about it, made a fuss. The staff here felt accused – they blamed the hospital where Mum had been for a blood test – and I don’t want to dredge that up.
‘Not that I know of,’ Flo says. ‘Are you sure there were six?’
‘Maybe I got it wrong,’ I say. ‘By the way, has anyone been to visit her?’
‘Don’t think so,’ Flo says. ‘But you can check the book.’
I flick through the pages but no one has been to see her at all, except me.
I take a detour on the way home, into the web of streets behind Clapham High Street, known as the Old Town. It’s a mixed area – lovely big family houses opposite blocks of council flats, long Victorian terraces that were carved up and sold off in sections during the property boom of the 1980s, the odd row of 1950s infill semis. I park outside the big red-brick house where Zach and I discovered we must have once been neighbours. I rented a studio on the top floor, he lived in the basement, the tenant of a banker from Antwerp. We talked about passing each other unwittingly in the street. ‘How could I have kept my hands off you?’ Zach said.
From the car, I stare up at the house. Is this the sort of place he would be living now? A basement flat in an anonymous building? How would he be feeding himself? Odd jobs, maybe, here and there. Theft? I wouldn’t put it past him.
As I gaze at the brickwork, a throb sets up in my forehead. My vision swims. Black spots bloom on the insides of my eyelids. I see Zach walking across the pavement towards the car, his hand on the door, hear the clunk as it opens, sense the cold draught of air on my face. I feel the yank of his arms pulling me, his weight against my chest, his mouth moist on the crook of my neck. I can hear myself gasp. I imagine it so vividly, it’s like a crack of the heart when I open my eyes and remember I’m sitting here alone.
This is absurd, I tell myself. I get out of the car, lock the door and descend the short flight of steps to the basement. Rubbish has blown in – a dirty paper bag, a takeaway container smeared with curry sauce. I am not sure the bell will be heard above the blare of the television. Deal or No Deal. Noel Edmonds asking the questions. Music. Applause. An elderly man comes to the door, clutching a large, limp black-and-white cat. He looks vaguely familiar and so does the cat – though black-and-white cats often do. ‘What do you want?’ he says.
I explain that my husband once lived here, in 2001 or 2002, that he was the lodger of a Belgian banker. He had been working for a builder at the time. I am on a pilgrimage to places that had meant something to him. Would it be very rude to ask if I could spend two minutes looking around?
He fixes me with his eyes, this old man. They are a vague colour, the whites yellow with age. He juts his jaw over the cat’s head and makes a chewing movement with his gums. ‘That’s a new one,’ he says eventually. ‘I give you marks for ingenuity, but I wasn’t born yesterday.’
‘Sorry. I—’
He begins to close the door. ‘I’ve lived here since 1970,’ he says. ‘And my mum and dad lived here before that. So go and find someone else to con.’
Zach had claimed only to have lodged at this address for a few months, between working as a tour guide abroad and studying in Edinburgh. It was more than ten years ago. He could have misremembered the house number. He could have realised his mistake but seen how much pleasure the coincidence gave me and found himself unable to backtrack.
Excuses are there. Reasons. Explanations. And yet how uneasy this makes me feel. I feel unstrung, as if a thread in my past has been snipped. Small untruths – I did occasionally catch him out. Nell and Pete, for example: he told me he had invited them to the wedding, that they couldn’t come due to a family commitment. When we met for lunch, it was clear they didn’t even know we were married. I didn’t bother to worry at the time. I knew he was private. It was a small puzzle I skipped over. It was the same when I heard him tell Peggy his mother came from a family of landed gentry in Somerset. He had told me Dorset. A tiny detail – and the counties are next door to each other. I passed over it. Now I’m not sure I should have done.
On the way home, my head thick and churning, I take the wrong road and end up heading into town, snarled in traffic, unable to turn round. I get lost in the backstreet one-way system of Kennington, trying to get out. When a road takes me round to where I started, I pull into a parking space and rest my head on the steering wheel to clear it. He was concealing things, I realise, ducking and diving, even when our relationship was fresh and apparently untainted. The thought gives me the impetus I need. I’m going to catch him out. I’m going to find him, whether he wants me to or not.
When I finally let myself into the house, the phone is ringing. It is dead when I pick it up. I dial 1571, but ‘the caller withheld their number’. I clank the receiver down. I have had a lot of silent calls over the last few months. Peggy says it’s just someone in India with an urgent message regarding a non-existent insurance claim, that the wires often don’t connect. But now I don’t know. Is he checking I am in?
Without taking off my coat, I leave the house and take Howard around the block – along the road past the prison where a large white Serco van is pulling in. The car park at the garden centre a little further on is almost empty. It’s cold again, the sky heavy. The world looks bleak. I should have gone the other way – it might have contained more distractions. I walk fast and turn right on Earlsfield Road at the lights, up to the dual carriageway and down into the underpass. Four teenage boys are kicking a ball about down there, knocking it back and forth against the concrete walls. Out the other side, on the patch of common where the steam fair comes at Easter, two women with prams are drinking cups of Starbucks on a bench under a tree.
The phone in the kitchen rings again when I step through the front door, as if it has been waiting for me.
‘Lizzie Carter?’ The voice i
s deep and a little dissolute. You can hear red wine and late nights in the corners of it.
‘Yes.’ A nerve has started pulsing at the back of my neck.
‘Jim Ibsen.’ I catch the sharp inhalation of a cigarette.
‘Oh gosh, yes.’ I gabble nervously for a bit, thanking him for getting back to me. He says, ‘You’re all right’ several times. I know I need to get to the point, to be listening to him, but I am walking back and forwards across the kitchen, trying to work out what to say, what to ask.
Finally, Jim Ibsen interrupts and says, ‘I’m sorry for your loss. I heard about Zach . . .’
‘You weren’t at the funeral. I should have thought. It wasn’t much of one. You know, because of the circumstances. I never got to meet you, or many of Zach’s friends.’
‘Were you married long?’
‘Two years. Almost. Not long really, is it? There’s so much I never got to find out about him and . . .’
‘Yeah. Me and Zach, we’d kind of drifted apart.’
‘Right.’ My ears have been tuned to pick up clues of knowledge or collusion but his voice is flat and uninterested. This is a dead end. Jim Ibsen knows nothing. ‘I see.’
Another inhalation of nicotine. ‘Good to you, was he?’
‘Yes,’ I say. I sit down at the kitchen table. ‘In his own way. Yes. Yes, he was.’
‘Well, I am glad about that. Zach Hopkins. A forgotten talent. Did he carry on showing?’
I don’t like his tone – it has a mocking edge – and I feel a tug of allegiance. ‘Yes. In fact, he was doing well. In fact, I really think, at the time of his accident, he was on the cusp of something big.’
He laughs. ‘He was always on the cusp of something big. No disrespect. He had talent. But you have to compromise, and he never would. We had a nifty little business going, the two of us, casting children’s feet and hands – lot of young families in the Brighton and Hove area. It brought in some money, but he thought himself above it. He put clients off with his attitude. If he believed he could make a living with those tiny dark canvases, fair play to him. But some of us have to live in the real world.’
Remember Me This Way Page 10
