A Traitor to Memory

by Elizabeth George

  He set off up the stairs, seven flights of them. She loved—as she said—“'aving me a bit of a view.” This was important since she never did anything but stand, sit, lounge, smoke, drink, eat, or watch telly in that sagging-seat chair that had stood forever next to the window.

  He was out of breath by the second floor. He had to pause on the landing and breathe deeply of its urine-scented air before climbing upwards. When he got to the fifth floor, he stopped again. By the seventh, his armpits were dripping.

  He rubbed down his neck as he walked to the door of her flat. He never suffered a moment's doubt that she would be there. Jen Pytches would move her arse only if the building were going up in flames. And even then she'd complain about it: “Wha' abou' me programme on the telly?”

  He rapped on the door. From within he heard the sound of chatter, television voices that marked the time of day. Chat shows in the morning, afternoon and it was snooker—God only knew why—and evening brought the soaps.

  No answer to his knock, so Pitchley rapped again, louder this time, and he called out, “Mum?” He tried the door and found it unlocked. He opened it a crack and said, “Mum?” another time.

  She said, “Who's it, then? That you, Paulie? You been to the job centre already, 'ave you? Don' think so, lad. Don' be trying to pull the wool over, you go' tha’, son? I wasn' born this morning.” She coughed the deep, phlegm-cursed cough of the forty-year smoker as Pitchley used the tips of his fingers to move the door inward.

  He slipped inside and faced his mother. It was the first time he'd seen her in twenty-five years.

  “Well,” she said. She was by the window as he thought she would be, but no longer the woman he remembered from his childhood. Twenty-five years of not stirring a muscle unless forced to do so had made his mother into a great mound of a woman wearing stretchy trousers and a jumper the size of a parachute. He wouldn't have known her at all had he passed her on the street. He wouldn't have known her now had she not said, “Jim. Wha's a dolly to make of this sor' 'f surprise?”

  He said, “Hello, Mum,” and he looked round the flat. Nothing had changed. Here was the same U-shaped blue sofa, there were the lamps with the misshapen shades, up on the walls were the same set of pictures: each little Pytches sitting on the knee of his or her own dad on the only occasion Jen had managed to make any of them act like fathers. God, seeing them brought it back in a rush: the risible exercise of all the kids lined up and Jen pointing to the pictures, saying, “Here's your dad, Jim. He was called Trev. But I called him my little fancy boy.” And, “Yours was Derek, Bonnie. Look at the neck on that bloke, will you, dear? Couldn't put me 'ands anywhere near round his neck. Oooh. Wha' a man your dad was, Bon.” And on down the line, the same recitation, given once a week lest any of them forget.

  “Wha' you want, then, Jim?” his mother asked him. She gave a grunt as she reached for the telly's remote. She squinted at the screen, made some sort of mental note about what it was she was watching, and pushed the button to mute the sound.

  “I'm off,” he said. “I wanted you to know.”

  She kept her gaze level on him and said, “You been off, lad. How many years? So wha's this off that's different from that?”

  “Australia,” he said. “New Zealand. Canada. I don't know yet. But I wanted to tell you I'm making it permanent. Cashing in everything. Starting over. I wanted you to know so you could tell the others.”

  “Don' think they been losing sleep wondering where you wanked off to,” his mother said.

  “I know. But all the same …” He wondered how much his mother knew. As far as he could recall, she didn't read a newspaper. The nation might go to hell in a wicker basket—politicians on the take, the Royals stepping down, the Lords taking up weapons to fight off the Commons' plans for their demise, sport figures dying, rock stars taking overdoses of designer drugs, trains crashing, bombs exploding in Piccadilly—and none of it mattered or had ever mattered, so she wouldn't know what had happened to one James Pitchford and what had been done to stop more from happening.

  “Old times, I suppose,” he settled on saying. “You're my mum. I thought you had a right.”

  She said, “Fetch me fags,” and nodded to a table by the sofa, where a packet of Benson and Hedges spilled out onto the cover of Woman's Weekly. He took them to her and she lit up, watching the screen of the television where the camera was offering a bird's-eye view of a snooker table with a player bent over it studying a shot like a surgeon with a scalpel in his hand.

  “Old times,” she repeated. “Good of you, Jim. Cheers, then.” And she pushed the sound button on the remote.

  Pitchley shifted on his feet. He looked round for something that would do as employment. She wasn't really who he'd come to see, anyway, but he could tell that she wasn't about to part with any information on his siblings if he asked her directly. She owed him nothing, and both of them knew it. One didn't spend a quarter of a century pretending that one's past had never occurred only to come calling from the blue with the hope one's mum might decide to be helpful.

  He said, “Look, Mum. I'm sorry. It was the only way.”

  She waved him off, cigarette smoke creating a filmy snake in the air. And seeing that cast him back through time, to this very room, to his mum on the floor, to the baby coming fast and her smoking one fag after another because where was the ambulance they'd rung for, God damn it, didn't they have rights to get their needs seen to? And he'd been there with her, alone when it happened. Don't leave me, Jim. Don't leave me, lad. And the thing was slimy like an uncooked cod and bloody and still attached to the cord and she smoked, she smoked all the way through it and the smoke rose into the air like a snake.

  Pitchley strode into the kitchen to rid himself of the memory of his ten-year-old self with a bloody newborn in his terrified hands. Three twenty-five in the morning, it had been. Brothers and sister asleep, neighbours asleep, the whole sodding world indifferent, deep in their beds, dreaming their dreams.

  He'd never much liked children after that. And the thought of producing one himself … The older he became, the more he'd realised he didn't need that drama twice in one life.

  He went to the sink and turned on the water, thinking that a drink or a bathing of his face would drive the memory out of his head. As he reached for a glass, he heard the flat door open. He heard a man's voice say, “You made a right cock-up of that one, di'n't you? How many times I got to tell you to shut your gob when it comes to jollying the customers?”

  Another man said, “I di'n't mean no harm. Birds always like a bit of oiling, don't they?”

  To which the first said, “Bollocks. We lost them, you yob.” And then, “'Lo, Mum. How's going wha's going?”

  “We got a visitor,” Jen Pytches said.

  Pitchley drank down his water and heard the footsteps cross the sitting room and come into the kitchen. He placed his glass into the grimy sink and turned to face his two younger brothers. They filled the room, big men like their father with watermelon heads and hands the size of dustbin lids. Pitchley felt in their presence as he'd always felt—intimidated as the dickens. And he did what he'd always done at the first sight of those hulking creatures: He cursed the fate that had inspired his mother to couple with a veritable midget when she got him and to choose an all-in wrestler—or so it seemed—to father his brothers.

  “Robbie,” he said as a hello to the elder one. And “Brent,” to the younger. They were dressed identically in boots and blue jeans topped with windcheaters on which the words Rolling Suds were printed front and back. They'd been working, Pitchley concluded, attempting to keep alive the mobile car-wash business that he himself had initiated when he was thirteen years old.

  Robbie took the lead, as always. “Well, well, well. Lookit wha' we got here, Brent, our big bro. And don't he look a real pitcher in them fancy trousers?”

  Brent snickered and chewed on his thumbnail and waited, as always, for direction from Rob.

  Pitchley said, “You win, R
ob. I'm shoving off.”

  “Shoving off like how?” Robbie went to the fridge and pulled out a can of beer, which he tossed to Brent, calling out, “Ma! You want somethin' in there? Eat? Drink?”

  She said, “Cheers, Rob. Woul'n't say no to a bite o' that pork pie from yesterday. You see't there, luv? On the top shelf? Go' to eat it 'fore it goes off.”

  “Yeah. Go' it,” Rob called back. He plopped the crumbling remains of the pie onto a plate and shoved it at Brent, who disappeared for a moment as he delivered it to their mother. Rob ripped the ringpull from his beer can and flicked it into the kitchen sink, pumping the beer directly into his mouth. He finished it in one long go and began on Brent's, which the younger man had foolishly left behind.

  “So,” Rob said. “Shoving off, are you? And where 'bouts you shoving off to, Jay?”

  “I'm emigrating, Rob. I don't know where. It doesn't matter.”

  “Matters to me.”

  Of course, Pitchley thought. For where else would the money come from when he placed a bad bet, when he crashed another car, when he fancied a holiday by the sea? Without Pitchley there to write out the cheques when Robbie had a financial itch that wanted scratching, life as he'd known it was going to be different. He'd actually have to make a proper go of Rolling Suds, and if the business failed—as it had been threatening to do for years under Rob's quixotic management—then there would be no fallback position. Well, that was life, Rob, Pitchley thought. The milk cow's dried up, the golden egg's broken, the rainbow's vanishing permanently. You might've tracked me from East London to Hammersmith to Kensington to Hampstead and all points in between when you fancied, but you are going to be hard pressed to track me across the sea.

  He said again, “I don't know where I'll end up. Not yet.”

  “So wha's the point in all this, then?” Robbie indicated Pitchley and his presence in their shabby childhood flat by raising the empty can to him. “Can't be ol' times now, can it, Jay? Ol' times's the least of what you'd want to come round to have a chat about, I 'xpect. You'd like to forget them, you would, Jay. But here's the ringer. Some of us can't. We don't got the wherewithal. So everything we been through stays right up 'ere, circling round and round.” He used the can again, but this time to indicate the alleged movement in his head. Then he shoved both cans into the plastic grocery bag that hung from the pull of one of the kitchen drawers and had long done service as the family dustbin.

  “I know,” Pitchley said.

  “You know, you know,” his brother mocked. “You don't know nowt, Jay, and don't you forget it.”

  Pitchley said for the thousandth time to his brother, “I didn't ask you to take them on. What you did—”

  “Oh no. You di'n't ask. You just said, ‘You saw what they wrote 'bout me, Rob!’ Tha's what you said. ‘They're gonna end up pulling me limb to limb,’ you said. ‘I'm gonna be nothing when this is over.’”

  “I may have said that, but what I meant was—”

  “Bugger what you meant!” Robbie kicked a cupboard door. Pitchley flinched.

  “Wha's this, then?” Brent had returned to them, having pinched their mother's packet of Benson & Hedges. He was lighting up.

  “This yob's doing another runner and claims he don't know where he's going. How'd you like that?”

  Brent blinked. “Tha's shit, Jay.”

  “Bloody right tha's shit.” Rob jabbed his finger into Pitchley's face. “I did time for you. I did six months. You know wha' it's like inside? Lemme tell you.” And the catalogue began, the same dreary recitation that Pitchley had heard every time his brother wanted more money. It began with the reason for Robbie's run-in with the law: beating up the journalist who'd unearthed Jimmy Pytches from the carefully constructed past of James Pitchford, who'd not only printed the story pulled from a snout at the Tower Hamlets station but had the audacity to follow it up with another despite being warned off by Rob, who stood to gain nothing—“sod all, Jay, you hear me?”—for taking up arms to protect the reputation of a brother who'd deserted them years ago. “Us lot never came near to you till you needed us, Jay, and then you bled us dry,” Robbie said.

  His capacity for rewriting history was amazing, Pitchley thought. He said, “You came near me back then because you saw my picture in the paper, Rob. You saw a chance to put me in your debt. Bash a few heads. Break a few bones. All in the cause of keeping Jimmy's past hidden. He'll like that, he will. He's 'shamed of us. An' if we keep him thinkin' we're 'bout to pop out of his cupboard at any time, he'll pay, stupid git. He'll pay and he'll pay.”

  “I sat in a cell,” Robbie roared. “I shat in a bucket. You go' that, mate? I go' done over in the shower, Jay. And wha'd you get?”

  “You!” Pitchley cried. “You and Brent. That's what I got. The two of you breathing down my neck ever since, hands out for the dosh, regular as rain in the winter.”

  “Can't wash cars in the rain, can we, Jay?” Brent offered.

  “Shut up!” Rob threw the rubbish sack at Brent. “Blood and guts, you're so fucking stupid.”

  “He said—”

  “Shut up! I heard wha' he said. Don' you know what he meant? He meant we're leeches. Tha's what he's saying. Like we owe him and not the reverse.”

  “I'm not saying that.” Pitchley reached in his pocket. He brought out his chequebook, where inside was the incomplete cheque he'd been writing when the cop had shown up at his house. “But I am saying that it's ending now, because I'm leaving, Rob. I'll write this last cheque and after that you're on your own.”

  “Fuck that shit!” Rob advanced on him. Brent took a hasty step back towards the sitting room. Jen Pytches called, “Wha's goin' on, you lot?”

  “Rob and Jay—”

  “Shut up! Shut up! Christ on the cross! Why're you such a bleeding git, Brent?”

  Pitchley took out a biro. He clicked out the ink. But before he could put pen to paper, Rob was on him. He ripped the chequebook from Pitchley's hand and threw it against the wall, where it hit a rack of mugs which crashed to the floor.

  “Hey!” Jen shouted.

  Pitchley saw his life flash before him.

  Brent dived into the sitting room.

  “Bloody stupid wanker,” Rob hissed. His hands went for the lapels of Pitchley's jacket. He jerked Pitchley forward. His head snapped back. “You don't understand fuck all, you git. You never did.”

  Pitchley closed his eyes and waited for the blow, but it didn't come. Instead, his brother released him as savagely as he'd taken hold of him, shoving him backwards against the kitchen sink.

  “I di'n't do nowt wanting your stupid money,” Rob said. “You handed it over, yeah, right. An' I was glad to take it, yeah, I was. But you're the one what go' out the chequebook every time you saw my mug. ‘Give the bloody git a thousand or two and he'll disappear.’ Tha's wha' you thought. And then you blamed me for takin' the handout when the handout was nothing but guilt money in the first place.”

  “I didn't do anything to feel guilty—”

  Rob's hand chopped the air, silencing Pitchley. “You pr'tended we didn't exist, Jay. So don't blame me for wha' you did.”

  Pitchley swallowed. There was nothing more to say. There was too much truth in Robbie's claim and too much falsehood in his own past.

  From the sitting room, the sound of the television rose, Jen raising the volume to drown out whatever her oldest two sons were doing in the kitchen. None of my business, her action said.

  Right, Pitchley thought. All of their lives had been none of her business.

  He said, “I'm sorry. It was the only way I knew to make a life, Rob.”

  Rob turned away. He went back to the fridge. He brought out another beer and opened it. He raised it to Pitchley in a mocking, farewell salute. He said, “I only ever wanted to be your brother, Jim.”

  GIDEON

  2 November

  It seems to me that the truth about James Pitchford and Katja Wolff lies between what Sarah-Jane said about James's indifference to women
and what Dad said about James's besottedness with Katja. Both of them had reason to twist the facts. If Sarah-Jane had disliked Katja and wanted James for herself, she'd not be likely to admit it if the lodger had shown a preference elsewhere. And as for Dad … If he was responsible for Katja's pregnancy, he'd hardly be likely to confess that transgression to me, would he? Fathers tend not to reveal that sort of thing to their sons.

  You listen to me with that expression of calm tranquility on your face, and because that expression is so calm so tranquil so unjudging so open to receive whatever it is that I choose to maunder on about, I can see what you're thinking, Dr. Rose: He's clinging to the fact of Katja Wolff 's pregnancy as the only means currently available to him to avoid …

  What, Dr. Rose? And what if I'm not avoiding anything?

  That could be the case precisely, Gideon. But consider that you've come up with no memory relating to your music in quite some time. You've offered very few memories of your mother. Your grandfather in your childhood has all but been deleted from your brain, as has your grandmother. And Raphael Robson—as he was in your childhood—has barely warranted a passing mention.

  I can't help the way my brain is connecting the dots, can I?

  Of course not. But in order to stimulate associative thoughts, one needs to be in a mental position in which the mind is free to roam. That's the point of becoming quiet, becoming restful, choosing a place to write and writing undisturbed. Actively pursuing the death of your sister and the subsequent trial—

  How can I go on to something else when my mind is filled with this? I can't just clear my brain, forget about it, and pursue something else. She was murdered, Dr. Rose. I'd forgotten she was murdered. God forgive me, but I'd even forgotten she existed in the first place. I can't just set that to one side. I can't simply jot down details about playing ansiosamente as a nine-year-old when I was meant to play animato, and I can't dwell upon the psychological significance of misinterpreting a piece of music like that.