by Hugh Breakey
A series of soft bumps and rustles followed, and I got the sense she’d given up at last.
I rocked my head back against the door, feeling wrung out. I let the minutes trickle past. Silence. Surely she must have gone now. I pulled myself up from the floor, snapped back the locks, and opened the door.
Coast clear. My groceries sat in a neat pile beside the door. There was a pale green plastic card on top. Julie’s licence. She looked different in the photo. Long red hair tumbled about her shoulders, framing her face. The colour, the pixie cut, were new. She’d darkened her eyebrows and lashes too. Under the photo her name was laid out in black and white. Julie Penfold, I read. Penfold. And beneath it, a Melbourne address.
Evidence.
I tried to think it all through as I put the groceries away. Her story was making more sense now. It did seem possible I’d been so angry with her for leaving me on my own that I’d refused to reunite with her. The licence showed not only that we shared a surname, but also that she’d originally lived in Melbourne. And that wasn’t all. Her final words had rung with confidence, as if she had options that she hadn’t used yet. They’d almost sounded like a threat.
That was a worrying thought. What if she was my wife—and that wasn’t a good thing? She might have all sorts of legal powers over me, especially in the period just after the forgetting. What if she arrived outside my door that day with her lawyer by her side? If I called the police, who would they believe? The hysterical guy with no memory? Or his loving wife, doing her best to help her poor confused husband?
I shivered, my skin prickling into goosebumps under my shirt. Even if everything she’d said were true—especially if everything she said were true—then she was a stranger to me. Everything I’d seen of her so far was part of a ruse. Apart from her willingness to lie, I knew nothing about her for certain. Yet she held enormous power over me.
No more cowering behind doors. I had to act. I had to fix this.
‘How were we separated?’
‘Robbie. Hi.’ The smile in her voice was audible even over the telephone line. ‘I’m glad you called.’
‘You said we were apart when it happened.’
‘Can’t we do this face to face?’
‘No. Right now. I want to hear it.’ I didn’t want to give her time to make up a story.
She sighed. ‘Okay, well, this was back before we realised about the timing, so we didn’t know when it would strike. I would never have left you for a moment if we’d known.’
I nodded to myself. That was possible, at least. It would have been the third forgetting when we were separated. That was the one where the pattern became clear. ‘But why didn’t you come find me as soon as you found out? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘I was out of touch. Away in the country.’
‘Why?’
‘I was off helping someone. Ironic, given how my own life was about to explode.’
‘Who were you helping?’
‘Jacinta. Jazi.’ A sigh. ‘I’d been doing well at AA. Over a year dry, and I was a sponsor, if you can believe that. You thought I looked too young to be an alcoholic; Jazi wasn’t even twenty. I went on a trip with her to help her sort her life out. After the forgetting happened, it took ages for them to contact me. Then once I finally got back, finding where you were in the hospital system turned out to be bureaucratic hell.’ I could hear her shudder. ‘By the time I’d tracked down where you were, you’d been working it all out without me. It was hard for you. I think the horror of those first hours when you were lost and alone affected you. And maybe you blamed me for us being separated. I can’t argue with that. I blame myself.’
‘You’re my wife. Wouldn’t you have had some legal right to make me come back or something?’
‘I did see a lawyer. But the problem was your doctor. We’d been upfront about my drinking problems, and she didn’t think I was reliable enough. Without Doctor Varma on my side, there was nothing I could do.’ Her voice became more urgent. ‘But, Robbie, you have to remember we didn’t know about the date. I would never for a moment have left you if we’d known. Not for Jazi. Not for anything. That’s why I’m being smarter now. To make up for us not being smarter then.’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay, you’ll come back to me?’ The rush of hopefulness in her voice was almost unbearable.
‘Okay, I believe you. That you were my wife.’
She paused. ‘So what now? Can I come over?’
‘Not here.’ I wouldn’t be trapped in my own home like I was yesterday.
‘I could take you out to dinner tonight, then. How about that? I know a place.’
‘No, not today, not tonight.’ I didn’t want to give her any strategic advantage. ‘Tomorrow.’
‘In the morning then. First thing. Breakfast’.
I hesitated. Early morning seemed wrong. Too intimate, too…domestic. To my mind, the only people who had breakfast together were…
Married people.
‘We’re on a clock, Robbie,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you want this still unresolved come Sunday.’
‘Okay. Not over here, though. You said you lived locally. You pointed out your apartment.’
‘Yes.’
‘Was it true? Or just part of the act?’
She sighed. ‘It’s true.’
‘I’ll come to you.’
She gave me the street address and some directions.
‘Eight a.m.,’ she said. ‘See you for breakfast.’
I bit down on my lip. Was I just falling further into another trap?
‘Do you want this sorted out or not?’ She sounded as if she’d read the doubt from my silence. And why wouldn’t she? This was my wife. She would know my mannerisms better than anyone. Better than me.
‘More than anything.’
‘Then tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow.’ I hung up the phone. Exhaustion washed over me, though it was only early afternoon. But I refused to let it slow me down. I prepared for tomorrow’s trip as best I could, packing my backpack with everything I could think of. But I could hardly wrap my head around it. I paused and stood there, looking at the little wooden elephant in my hand. Looking beyond it.
I’d been married.
No. Wrong. She’d spoken in the present tense. I was married. I was married to Julie. I’d known, met, touched, kissed, courted, caressed, fallen for, loved, argued, proposed, laughed, married, yelled, carried, apologised, commiserated, shared…and left her. In that order, or pretty close. I’d done all of those things with her. By her. To her. Against her. And I’d forgotten, re-met and rejected her, and then forgotten again.
I had history.
Part of me wanted to feel pride in it. To have once won the affections of a woman as beautiful and determined as Julie. But I may as well have been learning the achievements of a stranger. I felt no connection to the man who had married her.
Too bad. I stuffed the last of the mementoes in the backpack and buckled it up. There was enough time left in the day to get in some more hours on the dominoes.
Work went slowly. Today my focus was on the floor, and over the course of the afternoon, almost five thousand new tiles spanned out. I raided the bed again, emptying another two large cartons. I had to rework some of the dominoes I’d already laid down on some of the earlier platforms, to get the overall timing of the collapse to flow through to the newer platforms and bridges.
This was the first platform Julie and I had put up, on the afternoon of her birthday. Except it wasn’t, of course. Her birthday. That claim had obviously been part of the whole ruse. I’m new here. It’s my birthday. No wonder she’d sucked me in. It was all part of her plan…
I stopped work and put the dominoes down. It wasn’t the birthday that first changed things between us. That happened earlier. The fire; her reaction to it.
I felt my back straighten. Surely not.
Julie hadn’t been scared at first. When the alarm went off, she was the one who realised it wa
s the fire alarm and prompted me to gather up my things. The moment replayed over and over in my mind’s eye. I’d just complimented her on her idea about the barriers. She smiled and said something, her words all but drowned out by the alarm. Not completely drowned out, though. I could still recall something of them.
‘When I need to, I have a very strat—’
I could recall her lips moving around the last words as those eyes sparkled with intelligence.
Strategic mind.
My stomach tightened, and my mouth became thick with liquid. She had faked her fear to pull us together. Who does that? Who even thinks to do that?
And I had agreed to meet up with her tomorrow. What had I got myself into?
Day Four
In the end, I slept well. Surprisingly. With the showdown with Julie looming today, I’d feared another restless night. But when the alarm woke me I felt refreshed and alert.
THE MORNING routine zipped by: exercise, shower, shave. No breakfast, of course. A few pangs of hunger gnawed at my belly as I tossed the backpack over my shoulder and set out.
Outside, the familiar heat settled in and I squinted into the sun’s brightness. At this hour on a Wednesday morning the streets were busy, and the footpaths too. I flowed with the crowd across intersections and down laneways. It took less than ten minutes to get to Julie’s solid red-brick building. Into the lift, down a long hallway—then I was standing outside her third-floor apartment. It felt weird. Usually I stood on the other side, with the door and locks defending my space.
I checked my watch. It gave the time as a few minutes to eight. I took a deep breath and knocked.
The door opened within moments. Julie smiled in welcome; we said our hellos. She was wearing a dark blue cotton dress with leggings beneath. Bare feet. She looked relaxed, and at home. Maybe for the first time I was truly seeing her. Or perhaps it was just another mask.
Either way, she was beautiful. Her little apartment was too, filled with life and energy, posters, patterned wall-hangings and a warm rug by the couch.
‘I’ll make us breakfast soon.’ Julie ushered me towards the sofa. ‘Can I get you a coffee?
‘I don’t drink coffee.’
‘Right.’ I got the impression she meant ‘wrong’. ‘Juice, then?’
I nodded, sinking uncomfortably deep into the couch’s too-soft cushions.
A stick of incense burned on the coffee table, filling the air with a sweet, exotic scent. Nearby lay a picture frame, face-down. Beside them stood Julie’s phone, upright in a little wooden box. Music came from it, and the box seemed to amplify the sound. The music wasn’t at all like the driving rock Julie had put on at my apartment. It was melodic and instrumental. Relaxing. I wondered if that was the intended effect, and if so, who it was meant to relax.
Julie returned with my orange juice, and one for herself. For a panicked moment, I thought she might sit down next to me, but she settled in the armchair on the other side of the coffee table. She folded her legs under her with an easy flexibility.
‘So…’ Julie began. ‘Husband.’ She smiled. Curled up as she was, she looked almost playful.
‘Wife.’
‘Sorry again for springing it all on you on Tuesday. ‘That wasn’t part of the plan.’
‘I’m sorry for shouting. For overreacting.’
‘I’m not sure what counts as an overreaction in a situation like that.’ She leaned forward. ‘You must have questions.’
About a billion, yes. ‘How much of what you said over the first few days did you make up?’
‘Let’s run with the premise that absolutely everything I said to you back then was part of the ruse, then if it turns out any honesty slipped in we can treat that as a bonus.’
Well, at least it sounded like she’d be honest about her dishonesty. That was something. ‘True or false? You’ve just moved here?’
‘False. I’ve been here for months. It took me ages to find a way into your life.’
‘Last Saturday wasn’t your birthday.’
‘Correct. My birthday’s April eight. You might want to write that down. You completely forgot my last one, so I’m expecting something impressive this time around.’
A joke. She was teasing me. Part of me, some strange instinct, wanted to smile too.
‘You deliberately placed an error in my first grocery delivery so you had a reason to come over again.’
‘True. Well spotted. I’ll make a strategist of you yet.’
‘We’re married?’
‘Of course!’ Julie snapped up in her chair. ‘That’s completely true.’
‘We’re still married? I mean right now?’
‘Sure.’ Her eyes flickered to the right. ‘True.’
‘You don’t seem certain.’
‘I am certain.’ In a flash, her composure returned. She fixed her eyes back on me. ‘We’re married. Right now. Legal fact. You don’t need to take my word for it. It’s a matter of public record.’
‘You went to all that trouble to get back inside my life, but you didn’t seem to like me at first. Or even notice me.’
‘Well, I couldn’t be too obvious. You might have suspected something, and then I’d be back at square one.’
‘Suspected something?’
‘I was pretty sure you didn’t have any photos of me, so you would have forgotten my face. But you’d still know you had a wife out there somewhere, so you could have suspected.’
‘But I didn’t know.’ I shook my head. ‘I wrote myself a letter. But I didn’t mention you.’
‘You wrote yourself a letter and you didn’t think to mention you have a wife? Great. So I cut and dyed my hair for nothing.’
‘I saw that you’d changed your look.’ I pulled her licence from my pocket and set it down on the coffee table. ‘You looked nice. With the long hair I mean, and without the colouring.’ I realised the compliment may not have come across exactly as I’d meant. ‘Not that you don’t look nice now.’
Julie gazed at me levelly for a moment. ‘I have thousands of photos, of course.’ She nodded to the picture frame lying face-down on the coffee table. ‘But I wasn’t sure what you wanted to see. I didn’t want this to be…’ She sighed. ‘Intimidating for you.’
My fingers itched to turn the frame face-up. But instead I spoke. ‘How is your name different on the business card you gave me?’
‘Please.’ Julie rocked back in the chair. ‘That was the easy part. Nobody checks identification when you’re getting business cards made. But I did have to pay for a hundred cards to be printed. That was the smallest order they’d let me do. Unless we’re going to keep playing this game for the next fifty years, that’s money down the drain.’ She grinned at me with her crooked smile.
Again with the joking about my condition. Or our condition. Was this the real Julie? Perhaps she could be herself now. If so, she had an acid sense of humour.
‘So you changed your name and acted uninterested just in case I’d told myself to be on the lookout for a wife?’
Julie nodded, lifting herself from the chair and taking back her licence. ‘I suppose I would have had to change my name anyway. Even without being on the lookout for a lost wife, you might have twigged if we had the same surname.’
I nodded slowly. I liked that Julie would think I might be clever like that. But in truth I doubted the idea would ever have occurred to me.
‘Why don’t I get breakfast?’ Julie went to the kitchen.
The warm smells of cooking soon began to fill the room. I looked around. The stars and swirls on the posters on the walls tickled my memory. Perhaps they were famous. Or perhaps they were from our home in Melbourne, and that was why they seemed familiar.
The more I looked around, the more it felt like memory was tugging at me from every direction. The incense burner. The rolled-up yoga mat in the corner. Even the polished wood bowl on the kitchen counter.
Julie was cooking omelettes, and she already had the mixture ready. I set the table
as she finished up.
‘This smells good,’ I said, as she put a plate in front of me. ‘What’s in it?’
‘I should give you the recipe.’ She smiled and tossed a forkful of omelette into her mouth. ‘Back.’
‘I used to cook?’ The breakfast in front of me wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the hip-looking cafes along the river. A lot more appetizing than the dull toast I ate every morning. ‘I used to cook these?’
‘Every morning.’ Julie nodded. ‘I missed having omelettes for breakfast, without you here, but it turned out I’d picked up a few practical life skills from you. So I started making them myself.’ She looked away from me and down at her meal. ‘It’s nice to have you here.’
I picked up my juice. ‘Cheers to that.’ I held up my glass.
‘Cheers.’ She clinked my glass with her own. Her eyes shone with hope.
It was long past my usual breakfast time, and the omelette was good. Warm cheese melted with mushrooms. Perhaps tastebuds possess their own memories. Or maybe this had always been my favourite breakfast. Julie knew what I liked because I’d known what I liked.
‘When did you decide to pick up everything and come after me?’ I asked.
‘Decide?’
‘After you met me here the first time, you went back home.’
Julie nodded. ‘I rushed off as soon as I found out where you were. Grabbed the first flight here, not even packing a toothbrush. I’d had this fantasy I would just swoop in and rescue you, and we’d be home together in a flash.’ She sighed and skewered the omelette with her fork.
‘But then after you’d gone back home, what happened to make you decide to leave everything behind and move up here?’
