Remember Me (9 page)

“No,
not just because of that.”

Maria
fumbled in her bag.

“Look,
Catlin, I have no idea how to explain this, so if I show this to you, perhaps
we can decide from there how to proceed.” She handed Catlin an old photograph.
It was Catlin’s turn to be rendered dumb. She looked at the picture, could see
it, but it would not register in her brain, forcing her to continue to stare at
it, but the longer she looked the less she trusted her eyes. She did not
understand, could not understand. She had in front of her a black and white
image of a group of thirty something year old men and women at a celebration of
some kind. She could pick out Maria, and thought she recognised William. There
were three other people there, a gorgeous woman and two men. The others were
near invisible compared the man at the centre of the huddle, and he was the one
who held Catlin’s attention. She recognised him straight off. There was no way
she could have failed to identify him, for the man in the photo was none other
than Ben.

Catlin
was blown into silence. Her mind endeavoured to come up with some logical
explanation for the inexplicable. The photo had to be thirty years old at the
very least, older based on the age of the Maria in it and the Maria sat next to
her. Yet, was it not a remarkably easy conundrum to solve? The man in the photo
had to be Ben’s father or some such relation. That would account for the
similarities in their looks. As tempting as it was to take that theory and run
with it, Catlin was not able to deceive herself. She knew in her heart as well
as her head that the Ben in the photo and her Ben where one and the same
person. The resemblance was too precise, too close. Too perfect. Her knees were
beginning to shake and she sank down onto the arm of a chair.

“I
don’t understand. What is this? What’s going on?”

Maria,
who thought Catlin had been on the verge of passing out from the shock, chose a
chair near to her and took a long, steadying breath.

“I’m
not sure myself. I thought I was going mad at first, seeing him and you on the
balcony. It was like glimpsing a snapshot of the life I might have had. A life
I wished could have been for these past thirty five years.” Through her haze of
bewilderment, Catlin was able to see that Maria was suffering from the same
symptoms she was experiencing. She tried to get her brain into some order in
the hope of finding the solution to the puzzle she had been dropped into the
middle of. Maria was surveying the apartment again. “It’s as if I’ve stepped
back in time coming here. I can still see him, Catlin, sat here rehearsing his
lines or trying to draw us into a debate on the deeper meanings and hidden
themes of this or that book, failing more often than not. We were interested in
nothing more intellectually challenging than discovering if so-and-so was
wearing a wig and how to sneak into the newest club.”

As
a rule, Catlin had the patience of a saint, but listening to the ramblings of
this woman as she talked of the life she had lost when Catlin’s own world had
been bombed caused it to run out in double quick time.

“I
don’t mean to be rude, well I suppose I do, truth be told, but can you get to
the point of why it is you’ve come here. I’m assuming there is one, besides
your intention to ruin my life that is.” The older woman seemed stunned,
whether it was Catlin’s comments that had the effect or another agency was
unimportant, all that mattered as far as Catlin cared was that Maria was back
in the room with her and not off on some voyage to the past.

“I
apologise, but when you’ve heard my story, our story, I am certain you will see
why it is that this has had such an impact on me.”

“What
do you mean, ‘our story’?” Catlin asked, but had a horrible stomach-knotting
feeling she was in possession of that answer already.

“Mine
and Ben’s,” Maria replied, confirming Catlin’s suspicions and sounding like a
guilty mistress who had been confronted by the betrayed wife.

It
took considerable will power on Catlin’s part to remember that Maria, who was
gazing dove-like at the photo again, was not only speaking of a different
period in time but that she was a woman of nearly seventy years old and keep
from scratching her perfectly lined eyes out of her skull.

“Ben
and I met shortly after he came out here to chase his dream of being an actor.
I was quite the spoilt princess back then. My father was wealthy, even by
today’s standards, and had many influential friends. The combination ensured I
had no difficulty in finding my way into the same industry Ben was slogging his
guts out in to gain the slightest amount of recognition.  It should have been
the other way around. He was far more gifted than I ever was.

“We
met on the set of some police show, both of us as extras. Oddly enough, he was
not my type of guy, and our very opposite social circles meant that normally
I’d not have mixed with him, but there was no way a girl could ignore those
looks of his, not that he thought of himself as good-looking or remotely
handsome, which I suppose made him all the more attractive.” Catlin understood
that all right. “He was quite unlike any man I’d met before and there has
certainly never been anyone like him since. Intelligent, caring, funny, quiet and
serious, nothing at all like me. I used to drag him to the best nightclubs, the
swankiest parties and he hated it. He did his best to get me involved in his
interests, but in those days I threw a tantrum if I had to go without a
hairdryer, so camping or hiking through the mountains were not high on my list
of things to do of a weekend.

“I
guess we weren’t remotely suited, but he was so rare a find I held onto him by
any means necessary. Don’t get me wrong, there were good times together, but he
didn’t quite fit in with the lifestyle I sought and I did the best I could to
change him. He refused to allow me to use my connections to help advance his
career, would not give up this poky little den and take a residence in an area
where I didn’t have to be embarrassed to bring my friends, despite his having
the money to. He said it was a waste of money, to move into a five bedroomed
house when it was just him and that it shouldn’t matter to his friends where he
lived, be it a palace or a park bench and if it did, they weren’t friends at
all. Stupid, wasn’t I? After falling for him because he was different from the
other men I’d dated I did my utmost to make him into one of them.

“Then
his break came – Ben was offered the lead role in a movie, one which would have
made him a world re-known star. That photo was taken the night our gang went
out to celebrate. The young lady there, she was his leading lady in the film.
They began to spend a lot of time together, rehearsing together, nothing more
to it than that, but I was a jealous creature and when a mutual friend hinted
their on-screen relationship had crossed over into their personal lives, my
possessiveness and spoilt nature took hold of me. I flew into a rage and
marched around here one evening and accused him of having an affair with her.
He kept saying it was rubbish, but I was having none of it. I told him he was
useless, a failure and had no hope of succeeding as an actor and that it had
been with my assistance that he’d got the role and had nothing to do with his
alleged talent. For good measure I threw in that while he thought himself to be
clever he wasn’t actually smart enough to see the obvious when it was right in
front him. How else had he failed to see that William and I were dating behind
his back and had been for months. It was a lie, but I knew Ben held Will as a
brother and the remark would cut deep. I dumped him, vowing to make him pay for
all he’d done to me.”

Maria
was close to tears as the errors of her past were dragged to the surface.

“What
was I thinking? I discovered in the weeks that followed how wrong I had been
about the pair of them, but it was too late to make amends by then.” Catlin did
not believe that. Ben would have forgiven her a thousand times over if he had
been in love with her half as much as she thought he had been.

“Didn’t
you make any attempt at an apology?” she asked, handing the woman a box of tissues.

“I
couldn’t. I wanted to, but I couldn’t do it.”

“Couldn’t
or wouldn’t?” Catlin stuck in abruptly, outraged that anyone could treat Ben so
badly. And yes, she included herself in that.

“Couldn’t,”
Maria affirmed. “You see, the morning after our fight, Ben failed to turn up
for work. When no-one was able to raise him on the phone one of the crew went
to his apartment and that’s when they found him. Dead. He’d taken an overdose
of sleeping pills and washed the whole lot down with a bottle of whiskey.”

Catlin
went cold as the irrevocable truth of their situations began to fully unfold.

“It
transpired that Ben had not been as happy in his life as we had taken him to
be. How could we have guessed that the success he had achieved actually meant
very little to him, that he loathed the person his lifestyle was forcing him to
become, and that money could not actually buy you all the things you wanted and
how, despite being surrounded by the elite of the human race he always felt isolated
and alone. On the night of the longest day of the year, it seemed he could
stand it no more and my rejection of him and the terrible things I said to him
were the final straw.” Catlin was struck by two points at once. The first was
that to think of Ben,
her
Ben, being so low made her feel physically
nauseous and the second was how Maria, in relating his story, pretty much
described how she, Catlin, had felt the night she had been on the verge of
committing the same act of obliteration he had done years before, and on the
same night too. June twenty first - the longest day of the year. Was that
significant?

Maria
also appeared to be struggling with her emotions. She had buried most of the
guilt she carried deep inside her for almost four decades, but once she started
talking to Catlin she could not stop herself from telling the girl the entire
tale.

“That
was why I had to come and see you. Don’t get me wrong, I love Will, but in an
entirely different way to how I loved Ben, and he is aware of the majority of
my story but not all the details. When I told him I had seen you and Ben
together he thought I had snapped, but I was so adamant he agreed to look into
it. He got the names of those people who had seen you and your mystery man from
Guy and tracked them down. They had caught little more than brief, sideways
glimpses of you, out of the corner of their eye, or in the low glow of the
evening sun but from the description they gave, he too recognised it to be Ben
they were speaking of. These past few weeks, since we found out where it was
you lived, we have taken to following you about, in the hope of proving our
conclusions right and being absolutely certain before telling you this. Until I
entered here tonight however, I still had doubts, but not anymore.”

Catlin
looked dubious, still favouring the insanity theory where Maria was concerned
but her instincts told her otherwise. Neither of them spoke for a while, the
woman who had broken his heart and the one who fixed it, sitting there battling
with their private thoughts. How could it be true, any of it? Ben was not a
misty apparition who materialised by walking through walls. Catlin had touched
him, held him, shared the warmth of his kisses, made love to him. That had been
real, so real that as she thought about it, Catlin was transported back to her
bed and could feel him pressed between her thighs, taking possession of her
body. That had been no trick of the imagination.

“I’m
sorry, Maria, you probably mean well, but I cannot take a word of what you’ve
told me seriously. I’m not saying you are lying, but the man you are on about
and the one I know can’t be the same person.”

“But
they are.” The voice came from within her own being and Catlin heard it
clearly. Maria sank back in the chair.

“You’ve
seen the photo and heard the story. How else do you choose to explain it?”

“Coincidence.
It’s just not possible for someone who died thirty five years ago and the man
I’m in love with to be one and the same.”

“But
they are.” There it was again. Her own instinctive recognition of an unreal
reality.

“I
said I wasn’t sure until I came here tonight, but I have proof that what I said
is the truth. I found here.”

Catlin
was growing angry. Did this woman have the slightest inclination what it was
she was doing to her? Did she not give a damn that she was tearing her life
apart? Perhaps she did. Having ruined her own chances of happiness maybe Maria was
set on destroying hers and for no greater reason than the fact that their lives
had some uncanny resemblances.

“Oh
indeed. What is it? Got a medium or two stuffed in your handbag?!” Maria put
the photo, the accursed object which had allowed the curse to come to pass and
destroyed the picture of the life Catlin had saw for her and Ben, in front of
the young woman. “I’ve seen it thanks,” she said, pushing it away. “Photos can
be manipulated. It means nothing.”

“Do
you see that?” Catlin did not want to, but her eyes betrayed her mind and
looked.

“What?”
Maria placed her finger on a specific spot on the photo.

“Does
that seem familiar in any way?”

The
few hopes Catlin had struggled to hold onto were dashed. On his finger, the Ben
in the picture wore a ring. A very distinctive ring made of silver with a
turquoise stone in its centre. The same ring Catlin was wearing on her hand and
that Ben had given to her that very night.

“It
could be someone else has the same ring,” she said clutching at straws.”

“No.
That ring was one of a kind. His mother had it made for him for his twenty
first birthday. She died a year later. It was Ben’s most treasured belonging
and nothing could induce him to take it off.”

Catlin
crumbled inside. Her hopes, dreams, beliefs, heart and soul fell into a pile of
rubble and dust, their screams of agony ripping through every cell of her body.
It was still make- believe, like the worlds she created in her books. None of
had any substance but unlike her stories, this one could not be altered. There
was no happy ending. Maria could see the turmoil Catlin was in and decided to
make her exit.