Remember Me This Way (3 page)

The bedroom is how it would have been left the last time we were here – pillows stiff, bare duvet folded like a body under the antique Durham quilt. The sheets are in the bottom drawer of the linen press – crisp, lavender-scented. I remember the last time we put them away: Zach’s broad hands as he folded, the look of concentration on his face, the small dance as we came together, the drop, the laugh, noses above the sheets, a long kiss. Moments of perfect happiness – I can never deny those.

My legs feel shaky. I sit down on the side of the bed and lean my head against the wall. We didn’t match, Zach and I. People used to wonder what he saw in me. His confidence, my diffidence. I’m nothing to look at. His were the kind of looks that drew the eye, that made shop assistants simper. What a catch he was. All my friends thought it. I’d lucked out – I could see it in their expressions. Jane was envious of the newness. But it was more about oldness. I felt tied to him, almost as soon as we met, caught at the ribs. Connections tangled beneath us, drew us together. He had been at school with my old boss. We had rented flats in the same block in Clapham, been unwitting neighbours. He voiced feelings I had had myself but hadn’t put into words. He stood up for me – no one had ever done that before. And he had this way of speeding things forward (‘How many children shall we have?’; ‘Where shall we retire to?’) to the point where I felt I’d always known him, and always would.

And in bed, with our clothes off, we fitted. The things I’d read about in books turned out not to be clichés after all. I would melt. I didn’t know where he ended and where I began. Whole nights would pass in a tangle of limbs. And he felt it too. I know he did, for all his experience. His hands in my hair, the breathless silence, the look of ecstatic anguish on his beautiful face as he came. His sighs afterwards, his weight pressing me into the sheets, the rasp of his chin in the crook of my neck. The small moan of satisfaction as he pulled me to him. I had my own power.

My eyes have closed, but I open them now and I realise I am staring down at a wire on the floor, trailing from a plug in the wall. I poke at it with my foot. It’s a dirty white in colour, half coiled, with an adaptor halfway along. I bend down and, reaching under the bed to where the wire leads, bring up a silver laptop – a MacBook Air.

I try and make sense of it, turn it over in my hands, feel the coldness of the metal.

Zach owned a MacBook Air. He wrote on it all the time, poured down his ideas, notes for paintings, for projects. He was obsessive about it. He never let it out of his sight. He had it with him when he left London. He would have had it with him when he died. His was destroyed in the fire. So this isn’t that one. This must be someone else’s.

I open it.
Zach Hopkins
flashes across the screen, with a space for the password. The screensaver is the view from the clifftop – low cloud, rolls of Atlantic Ocean, Zach’s favourite view. I snap the laptop shut and, hands trembling, lay it down carefully on the bed next to me.

Zach wouldn’t let me touch his laptop. I lifted it off the kitchen table once, just to clean underneath, and he yanked it so roughly out of my hands it fell to the floor. He picked it up, checking it over, swearing at me, and I left the room so he wouldn’t see my face. Later, when we made up, when he clung to me in bed, he apologised for over-reacting. ‘It’s just that my life is on it,’ he said.

I stand up quietly now, trying not to make any noise. I pull out the drawer where he kept a few old clothes. I think a pair of shorts is missing, navy ones, and a grey sweatshirt, and a worn leather belt that is normally coiled in the corner. I kneel down on the floor and look under the bed. There should be a holdall – kept here as it’s too bulky for the closet – but it’s gone. I run into the kitchen. I search the oven and the cupboards, shake out the tea towels. From the cupboard, a torch is missing, along with a stash of emergency money, £40 or so, that was kept in an empty box of muesli. I go through the house, room by room, searching for evidence with a different eye, with a different set of assumptions. On the wall in the living room, a dirty square below an empty nail. A picture has been taken down. It was an early work of Zach’s, an oil, simple, rough, of a woman in a doorway. His Hunter boots, in accordance with his strict sense of orderliness, should be in the hall closet, lined up in their usual place. My old blue Dunlops are there. But his – dark green, size 43, the left one chewed by Howard and mended by me in panicked secrecy with some special glue I bought online – are gone.

I sit down in the chair by the fireplace. My mouth is dry. I’ve started shaking. It’s beginning again. I’m back where I started. People have told me I’m mad, and maybe I am. Perhaps I am imagining it. But I’m not. He has been in this house.

My letter.

The pile of mail is still lying by the front door. I pick it up and take it to the table, push through the brown envelopes and free newspapers and flyers for plumbers and electricians, gas bills and TV licence demands, then drop it all at my feet. There’s no letter from me.

Howard is still out the front, in the garden. I move to the door and call him. It’s a cold Cornish night, with a wisp of warmer Gulf wind. It’s completely silent. He’ll have gone further down the lane, on the nose of a scent, perhaps looking for Zach. I shout louder.

Phrases spool over and over in my head.
My beloved
, I’d begun.
I need space . . . a little time apart
: pat sentences, the kind of fake sentiments Zach hated, received ideas. I was too scared to write the truth. ‘Be honest,’ he used to say. ‘Look at me. Tell me how you feel.’ Panic rises within me, remembering that. Often, I didn’t know how I felt. Sometimes, frozen by the ferocity of his desire to know, I didn’t feel anything at all.

‘You’re everything,’ he used to say. ‘I couldn’t live without you.’

You love that dog more than me.

Howard still doesn’t come, and I go back into the house, into the kitchen. The bin is Brabantia, top of the range – Zach insisted. It has a vintage look to it. Details were so important to him. I click open the lid.

My letter and its envelope are scrunched up at the bottom.

‘HOWARD!’ I’m out the front, screaming now, too loudly, filled with trepidation.

My dog comes bounding, skidding across the dank grass, falling over his own feet. He knocks into my legs and then passes me into the house. His dirty paws, the white boards, the pale rug. The old panic sharp in my chest: I’ll have to clean up before Zach sees.

In London, at night, I leave the light on since the accident. I don’t trust myself. I double- and triple-check windows and doors. My brain is unreliable. When I am with people, I have a thought and then I don’t know whether I have actually said it out loud. I repeat myself, Jane says. Other times I am unnaturally silent. I feel as if I’m waiting. My limbs turn heavy and uncooperative. If I’m not careful, I think, I will fall down the stairs, crack my head, break all my bones. I’m scared I might die.

I see Zach everywhere. I’ll see a man in the street or along the platform on the Tube and my heart will stop. I’ll run, pushing people out of the way and then I’ll reach him, or he’ll turn, and it won’t be Zach at all, but a stranger with the same gait or messenger bag, the same floppy dark hair.

Peggy is always telling me to clear out his clothes. But it feels wrong. How can I get rid of his shoes, his shirts? He’ll need them when he comes back.

PC Morrow assures me this is common. The brain needs to forge new synapses. It hasn’t caught up with the heart. I am like a soldier, she said, experiencing phantom sensations in an amputated limb. It is neuropathic confusion. It will stop, she said, when I am more myself.

I am still waiting. But my mind seems to be getting more confused, not less. I sense his breath on my neck. Once, at work, I was alone in the library, putting books back on the shelves, and I smelt his aftershave. Acqua di Parma – Colonia Intensa (not Assoluta: I made that mistake once). The light in the room changed, as if someone were blocking the doorway. When I got there and looked out, the corridor was empty.

We had a break-in. I had a break-in. Although ‘break-in’ isn’t quite the word. No busted lock or broken window; nothing left on its hinges. My handbag, the television, the loose change on the kitchen table, were untouched. They took Zach’s iPod. ‘It’s all kids want these days,’ Morrow said, ‘small electronic gadgets they can sell on.’ Even so. The front door tightly closed, the post neatly piled on the table in the hall – did I leave it like that? I couldn’t remember. Morrow said I must have left the door unlatched. An open invitation. I make that sort of mistake all the time. Was it dread or longing that sent quivers up my spine, that made me imagine he had let himself in with his key?

At night I hear noises. A car pulled up in the street in the middle of the night a few weeks ago. Elvis Costello, ‘I Wanna Be Loved’, his favourite song, leaked from the rolled-down window. The car stayed there, engine running, right outside the house. The music was loud enough to reach me, even in the back bedroom where I sleep. By the time I got to the study window, the car had pulled off. I saw its lights at the end of the road.

I dream about him most nights. In the folds of sleep, my eyes shut tight, I think of his face pressed against mine. I put my hands between my legs and imagine his lips running across my neck, down to my breasts, his fingers around my nipples. A feeling of something weighing on me, under the sheets, my hands curled tight, the cotton sucked into my mouth. In the morning, when I wake, I think he crept in through the window and under the covers. I can smell him on my skin, see the dent of his head on the pillow. He has spent the night with me. It is Zach, I am sure, who made me come.

I don’t tell anyone. They will think I am madder than they already do. Peggy says that when you lose the love of your life, you are allowed to lose your grip on reality, though I am not sure she banked on it lasting more than a year. Probably exactly a year. Peggy believes in absolutes. She doesn’t do messiness.

Jane knows a little about my marriage, but no details.

There is darkness in my head, memories that burn – things neither of them know, that I couldn’t begin to tell.

I destroy the letter and its envelope on the front step. I take a match to them both, watch them curl, and then sweep up the papery grey ashes and throw them out into the lane. Zach was here. I clean my teeth, gulping water straight from the tap – clay-red in its first gush – and sit upright in the armchair. I’m trying to think straight. I’d been so fearful of his reaction, so weak, I’d sent a letter to a cottage two hundred miles away. I spoke to him an hour before he died. Nothing in his tone told me he had read it. He was lying even then, suppressing his anger, working out what to do to me.

Darkness presses against the windows. Night noises – the wind rattling the windows, mice in the eaves. I think about running away, finding a hotel room, driving back to London, but I’m unable to move. I resolve to wait. If he’s out there, let him come. I deserve it.

The truth is, I would never have left him. Zach could be funny and confident and clever, but it was his darkness that drew me. The shadows that crossed his face, the unexplained headaches, the snaps of anger (not directed at me; not to begin with). Once, after we’d been out with my sister and her husband, he ranted about how Rob had put him down: ‘Did you see him smirk every time he mentioned my “art”?’. It made me love him more, things like that. His obsessions and his insecurities, the sensitivity to condescension: I knew where they came from. I’ve seen what childhood abuse does to kids at school – how withdrawn and angry they can be, how delicate their sense of self. His moods, I knew they weren’t about me – the wrong food I’d cooked, the wrong clothes – even if he said they were. I knew that; I really did. By the end everything was so tangled between us and so intense, so absorbing, the loss of it, the hole he has left, has been almost too much to bear.

I think about Xenia and her heart-shaped note, let myself feel a clean, sharp jealousy for this unknown woman, this person I have never met, a wild, dizzying pain under my breastbone. Was she his lover? I let myself imagine him here, with me, a whiff of whisky on my neck, the feel of him against my thighs. Early on he told me he was touched by my obsession with his body. He said I was like a hatched gosling who had imprinted itself on the first living creature it saw.

The year is up. He has been biding his time, waiting for me to come to Gulls before he makes his move.

I am ready.

Whatever he wants, he can have.

I will stay awake all night.

Zach

July 2009

The way she chews plays on my nerves. Her mouth hangs half open, her small teeth crunch; there’s a sucking sound as the two surfaces separate. She mops her lips with her tongue between each bite. I know it’s unreasonable of me to mind, but I can’t stop myself. It turns my stomach. The flat is too small, a bad conversion: I think that’s part of the problem. I’m claustrophobic. Every time she shifts on the sofa, the springs twang.

Her eyes were fixed on the television. We used to call it a TV dinner. Now it’s a ready meal. Count on Us. Four hundred calories or less. Salmon and wild rice. When she finished, she put her tray down on the carpet. A dollop of miso sauce from the bottom of the tray stained her skirt, but she didn’t notice. She swung her feet up and laid her stockinged toes in my lap – except she was wearing popsocks. I could see the horizontal indentation where the fabric dug into her flesh. Her popsocked toes. I shifted my groin away. After a bit I moved her feet to one side, got up and went to the window to look out.

If only you could see the sea from here, that would be something. Instead, it’s a run of red and grey roofs, the distant glass dome of the shopping centre. I don’t get this about Brighton. Most of the houses shoulder the water when they could face it. Why would a builder worry about the wind, not the light? She likes the warmth and practicality of this place – two square rooms, a single hop from TV to bed. One road up, now that’s a place I could fancy – a Georgian parade, a wedding-cake sweep, with its own communal garden.