Remember Me This Way (12 page)

A group of students was waiting outside my door. My extra literacy class was due to start. It was pouring with rain. I told him to meet me halfway, on the bridge. I ran all the way, unnerved by the desperation in his tone, and when he wasn’t there, I ran all the way home. He had filled the house with flowers. He’d made a cake. The table was laden with treats – biscuits, chocolate. ‘Surprise!’ he said. He pulled me on to his lap and kissed the rain off my face. A long time before, I had told him about visiting a school friend when I was little and how her mother had prepared the kind of tea we never had at home, and how it had been a glimpse of a different kind of family life. He’d remembered. He always remembered things like that. I was touched. I left my students at the library door.

What does he want from me now?

His laptop. He must have known it was at Gulls. Why didn’t he go back and fetch it? Is there something on it he wants me to see? Is there something on it I
shouldn’t
see?

I fetch the MacBook from the bedroom cupboard and plug it in at the kitchen table. Again, the screen lights up; again Zach’s name appears across the cliff scene and the cursor blinks expectantly on the password window. My finger hovers above the keys. Guilt creeps down my arms and stops me. I close the keyboard. If I came up behind him when he was writing, he would push his chair back into my knees and snap his laptop shut. He accused me of spying on him, which wasn’t true. I trusted him. I always assumed he was writing down ideas for his painting. I understood. He was sensitive to criticism; he was like a child who covers his work with his arm.

I stare at it. He
must
have intended me to find it. I need to prove to him that I am looking for him. On here there could be answers, solutions. I could find out where he is, forgive and be forgiven, bring him home.

I open it again. The box for the password flickers. What would Zach use? Something impossibly obscure? Or something achingly obvious – a double bluff?

I move a trembling forefinger to the keyboard and, one by one, peck at the letters of his name.

Z A C H

Then I press ‘Enter’.

The screen darkens and then illuminates.
INCORRECT PASSWORD
.

I peck again, a little more boldly this time – both his names.

ZACH HOPKINS
.

Again the screen flashes and the message comes:
INCORRECT PASSWORD
.

I try his birthdate, and then a combination of his birthdate and his name. I try the name of the village where he grew up, then
Cornwall
,
Stepper Point
,
Gulls
. Nothing. With a flicker of emotion, I try
Xenia
.

INCORRECT PASSWORD
.

Frustrated, I take my own laptop out of my bag.

I Google ‘Xenia’. The screen fills with a series of websites.

‘
Welcome to Xenia, Ohio: the home of hospitality.
’ Also Xenia: an online fashion company in Australia, currently selling an ‘Ullawatu Playsuit’ for A$58. Also Xenia: an American singer who came second in the first season of
The Voice
.

Google Images throws up a page of blonde women in a state of undress, which I close quickly.

After that, for inspiration, I Google ‘pseudocide’. I find the word deep in an article about John Darwin, the ‘canoe conman’ who, after faking his own death, lived in a mocked-up bedsit in the family home, spending his own life insurance. The site lists ‘how-to’ books on the subject, including
Get Lost! How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found
. Notable faked deaths include John Stonehouse, ‘Lord’ Timothy Dexter, Dorothy Johnson. ‘
According to an unnamed study, as many as a quarter of suicides from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in which no body could be found, could be faked.
’

I stand up and pace the kitchen. How absurd the word sounds. Pseudocide. It’s a
pun
. The idea is so callous and empty. When the canoe man was in the news, after he had been discovered hidden behind his plywood walls, the talk at school was how heartless he was. What sort of person would put his loved ones, his own children, through that?

I sit down again and try to focus. If I try hard enough, perhaps I will visualise Zach in my head – work out where he is. The answer is out there. He must be somewhere. I close my eyes tight and nothing comes. There are no leads. The sea. The clifftop. The horizon.

Where would he go? John Darwin hid in his own house, with the collusion of his wife. For a dizzying moment, before I discount it, I wonder if Zach has been here all along, slipping into the house when I am out, sleeping in my bed in the day.

Where would he expect me to look? His parents are dead, and he swore he would never go back to the Isle of Wight. He had no friends from his childhood. There were only those, like Victoria Murphy, from whom he had drifted apart. Edinburgh? He studied there. Brighton? Or living rough out on Dartmoor?

I don’t know. I’ve just got this sense that he is close to me. Now.

What do I know about his past? Less than I imagined. Both parents dead, no family to speak of. He had so few friends too. It was one of the things that concerned me over those last few months. At first, it was so new, so enticing, the feeling that I was enough for him. Once, early on, I said something about seeing more people, going out more, and he squeezed my cheeks between his hands, held my face close to his. ‘It’s what makes us special,’ he said with a ferocity that made my heart beat faster. ‘It’s you and me.’

I told myself it was normal to cast off your friends, that it was what you did when you fell in love. Fell in love: am I allowed to say that? It’s not the sort of language of which Zach approved. He would have said it was pat. And yet –
falling
, the lack of control, the bodily tumble, the sense of an abyss, it’s what it felt like.

It was only in the last few months that it began to concern me. I went for a drink after school on Jane’s birthday and he was waiting in the kitchen, in the dark, when I got home. ‘Are you bored of me?’ he said. ‘Do you want me to fuck off?’

I told him he was being stupid. Of course I didn’t. We argued. Later, we went to bed, as we always did.

Where would he have gone if I had then told him that I did want him to fuck off, that yes, that
was
what I wanted?

Pete and Nell: they are the only people I can think of. They were his best friends at art school. He and Pete were close – the only two mature students in their year. Zach stayed with them when he first moved to Brighton.

I met them once. Once only. Pete rang one Sunday morning when Zach was in the bath. They were up in London for the weekend – they’d been at a party in Battersea – and I invited them for lunch. It led to one of our first rows. Zach said it was thoughtless of me to arrange it without checking with him first, but I think he was just embarrassed about the house. My mother had only recently gone to the Beeches and, although he had redecorated downstairs, the first floor was tatty.

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.