by Chris Birch
Chapter Ten: Piecing Together The Past
'Christopher, you must remember, it was that time we were on holiday,' Mum said, for what felt like the twentieth time.
With absolutely no idea what she was talking about I simply shrugged in response.
'Come on, you know, that time, you were about ten.’
It was the morning of my first day back at work since I had the stroke. We were both nervous, returning to my job was a big step. Thankfully, we had agreed that I would only do a half day to begin with, then a full day, working up slowly to my full-time hours. There was no reason to think I would struggle. Although I was still taking painkillers the headaches that had once crippled me had diminished down to a slight stabbing pain, which would come and go. But the doctor had warned me that too much exercise, work, or, even socialising, could bring on a mini-stroke.
In an attempt to distract me from my nerves, Mum had been reminiscing over some story of a holiday we had been on when I was a kid. But like most of the stories Mum had told me recently, I had no idea what she was talking about.
'You spent the whole day swimming,' Mum said before handing me a box of cereal from the other side of the kitchen table.
I rolled my eyes. That’s not really memorable is it? I thought.
Most of Mum’s stories were hardly dramatic, often you got to the end of her tale only to discover nothing really happened and there wasn’t a punchline. Why would I remember this? I usually reasoned. But that morning Mum just wouldn’t drop it.
'Come on Chris, you must remember,' she insisted.
I concentrated on my bowl of cereal and hoped Mum would realise I was distracted and drop it. She had insisted on eating breakfast with me that morning, I had thought it was a nice gesture but now I felt suffocated.
'Yeah, that wasn’t me Mum, it was probably Frank.’
I sighed and brought my spoon to my mouth. Since I didn’t recall so many of the stories Mum had told me in the months following the stroke I suspected she was getting a bit absent minded and confusing my brother and I.
'Frank?' Mum said, then took a long sip of her tea.
I looked at Mum and wondered why she was so puzzled. She was still in her towelled dressing gown and there was a slight pillow mark on the side of her face. Maybe she hasn’t woken up properly yet, I reasoned. She took a piece of toast, dripping with strawberry jam, from her plate and moved it up to her mouth.
'Whose Frank?' she said and held the toast away from her mouth momentarily.
I rolled my eyes.
'Your son Mum,' I said, in disbelief, ’you say I forget things, how can you forget the name of your child?'
It was nice to have the chance to tease her about her memory for a change.
'Your brother is…called…Simon.'
She was still holding the toast but her hand had gone limp so a big lump of jam dripped off it and onto the kitchen floor. I stared at the sticky red stain on the tiles but Mum didn’t seem to notice, she just frowned at me.
Simon? I thought. Simon did seem familiar. No, that’s right, of course it was Simon, I know that, I thought.
'Yeah, I know,' I said casually, 'why? What did I say?'.
'You called him Frank, you keep calling your brother Frank.’
She was right, for some reason, since the stroke, my brain seemed to have renamed my brother as Frank, no matter how many times my Mum corrected me it didn’t stick.
'Ah, anyway, I think you were talking about Simon…' I said.
'The doctor did say that the stroke might of affected your memory.’
I quickly shovelled the last spoonful of cereal in my mouth, rushed out of the kitchen and up the stairs to get my coat. People forget names all the time, I thought and pushed the conversation from my mind. I was getting better, I didn’t want to consider that the stroke might have affected parts of my body that I couldn’t see.
On my first day back at work I was greeted at the office by my managers, they held out a card and I was given a series of pats on the back.
'Great to have you back, Chris.’
A man I didn’t recognise congratulated me.
‘Thanks.’
Returning to work was the first step to getting my life back, if I was back at work it meant I was on the mend.
The man held out his arm, motioning for me to move towards my desk. I followed the direction of his arm towards a bank of four tables. Oh god, I don’t know which desk is mine, I suddenly realised. I tried to scan the tables for clues, the man began to look puzzled, his arm rested back by his body.
'Right here, Chris,' he said and patted the back of a black office chair on the left-hand side.
'You sit right here, remember?'
'Oh yes right.’
I hadn’t stepped foot in the office for four months, it was no wonder I was a bit rusty, I reasoned.
'Now, remember, if you feel unwell or need to go home just tell me.’
He smiled at me and then squeezed my shoulder before walking out of the room.
I settled into my chair and vowed to take it easy, the last thing I wanted was to take a step back.
That weekend Paul came to the house, desperate to get me to the rugby club.
'I don’t fancy it,' I shrugged.
Paul’s face creased, he looked hurt. He and the other lads had invited me out every week since the accident and nine out of ten times I had made up an excuse not to go. It was awkward, I didn’t want to see them but they obviously felt some loyalty to me so kept inviting me.
'We never see you anymore,' Paul said plainly.
It felt like an uncomfortable break-up. I wanted to say, 'I know, that’s fine by me,' but knew it was unkind.
'Maybe next time,' I offered.
My hand waved and I slowly shut the front door, relieved that the uncomfortable exchange was over and I didn’t have to go out with them. But then I began to wonder why I didn’t want to go. It seemed like I didn’t want to do anything that I had enjoyed before. Is it because of the stroke? I wondered briefly but then, just as quickly as the thought had entered my mind, I brushed it away. People grow apart all the time, I thought, it’s totally normal.
The following week, as I got ready for another day at work, Mum came into my room with a cup of tea, she looked nervous and from the way she loitered in the doorway I could tell there was something on her mind.
'Lauren called to see how you are,' she finally blurted.
I could tell from her face that Lauren was someone significant.
'She’s called before hasn’t she?' I asked.
I felt like I had heard the name before but I hadn’t seen anyone called Lauren and no memories were coming back to me from before the stroke.
Mum looked awkward
'Whose Lauren then?'
Mum stayed silent for a moment as if she was weighing up what to tell me.
'You really don’t remember her?'
I shook my head.
'Well, she was your girlfriend.’
'What, when I was a kid?'
'No love.’
Mum paused.
'You were engaged to her, recently,' she said quietly.
'What?'
I couldn’t compute what she was saying. Engaged? Why haven’t I heard about her before? And why don’t I remember her?
'I didn’t agree with it at the time, thought you were too young…'
'Hang on a minute, I was engaged?'
My body temperature immediately warmed, my heart raced and beads of sweat formed on my forehead. I couldn’t make sense of what she was saying.
'Well, you had been dating for two years, you got engaged and then you split up a few months before the stroke, so you weren’t together when it happened.’
I could tell by her expression that she wished she had never mentioned it. Puzzled, I sat back down on my bed and tried to compute what she had told me. It sounded familiar but the memory was distant, like it had happened in another life, not in the past year.
I had a fiance? Hang on yes. Yes, of course I did, I thought, as the idea slowly slipped into place. Suddenly, an image of a toaster came into my mind. Nan bought us a toaster as an engagement present, I realised. But no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t picture the face of my ex-fiancé, it was as if she had been erased from my memory.
'You’ll be late for work.’
I looked down at my watch, Mum was right. I haven’t got time to think about this, I told myself. Just thinking about the idea of Lauren was making my brain hurt. Dozens of questions raced around my mind. Should I see her? Why did we break up? I felt myself get breathless. I remembered the doctor’s warning, ‘stress could cause another stroke’. Drop it Chris, I told myself. I couldn’t risk having another stroke and going through the past four months of torment again. I needed to keep calm and the only way to do that was to forget. I opened an imaginary black box in my mind and dropped any thoughts of Lauren into it before firmly closing the lid. You can’t miss what you don’t remember, I told myself.
That night, when I got home, I found Mum on the sitting room floor, surrounded by boxes, photos were sprawled out in a huge fan in front of her.
'I thought it might be useful to go through some of your old things,' she said.
The time at work had wiped me out. It wasn’t strenuous, I had just sat in an office typing but it was a huge step after the accident. All I really wanted to do was sleep but I could see that Mum had gone to a lot of effort, so, I hung my coat up and kneeled down beside her. All the lamps in the sitting room were on, the bright lights reflected off a photograph she was holding of a little boy cuddling a baby.
'That’s you and your brother,' Mum started holding the photo proudly in her hands, before quickly adding, 'Simon, your brother, Simon.’
Mum had started feeding me people’s names before I could make an incorrect guess. It saved both of us the heartache of me not remembering and the frustrated conversations that would follow, where Mum would have to try and convince me that I was confused.
Mum passed me the photo, Simon, I told myself but I had called him Frank, in error, so many times, that I was somehow convinced that was his name.
'It will come back to you,' Mum sighed.
'I know,' I lied.
I thought back to all the times, since the accident, that I had forgotten the face of a so called friend, or, the name of a family member. Having an explanation for why I forgot things didn’t make it any less frustrating.
'What’s that?' I asked.
A tiny keyring had caught my eye, a blue motorbike that had a miniature figure on top of it, wearing a helmet. Mum picked it up and looked glum, each time I struggled to remember something it upset her. She wanted to reminisce in our memories together but now she was totally alone in them. My presence had been wiped out by the stroke, as if I had never been there at all.
'Your Dad gave you that, you loved it, oh you boys were always at that bloody race track, you would come back, stinking of petrol…'
As she spoke Mum’s face warmed.
I looked down at the tiny figure and suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of sadness. It meant nothing to me, any connection I had to it had been stolen, like so many of my memories.
Most people have some kind of memory box. In most houses there is a trunk, a cupboard, or, a shoe box, full to the brim of tokens, each one a bookmark to something in the past. A moment in time that for whatever reason was special.
But for me, the items mum had laid out in front of her, years of sports days, school reports, holidays and birthdays, meant nothing. They were part of a great mystery.
It reminded me of a school trip we had once taken to a Castle’s ruins. Rocks were strewn around the grounds, pictures illustrated what they thought the castle had once looked like but however hard I tried, I couldn’t picture what it had once been. Since the stroke I remembered most major milestones but other mementos from my life were as puzzling to me as historical artifacts and just as much of a challenge to understand. I had no control over the memories I had kept and the ones I had lost.
'Do you remember the race track love?'
I tried to focus my mind on the little key ring she was holding, I took it from her hand and hoped it might bring something back. Pictures of motorbikes came to mind, red ones, blue ones, the black and white cheques of the track flags. But I didn’t know if the images were from my memory, or, just something I had seen on TV recently. I imagined my dad in the crowd of a race track, he would probably be smoking a cigarette, I thought and in my mind I saw him blowing smoke out next to a race track. But I had no way of knowing whether I was inventing the memory or not. Suddenly, a strange sensation came over me, it wasn’t the memory of a face, or the racetrack, it was a smell, the thick odour of fried onions.
'It reminds me of fried onions.’
A warm smile spread across Mum’s face.
‘That’s right! You used to come back stinking of fried onions because you would get a burger from the food van,' she explained, excitedly.
I didn’t quite remember what she was telling me but it seemed to somehow make sense.
A fluffy teddy sat at Mum’s feet. It was covered in stains, each one, I was sure, had a story that was now lost.
'This is what we gave you when Simon was born,' she explained and stroked it’s arm tenderly, as if the teddy represented baby Simon.
Simon? I thought, she means Frank. No, Simon, that’s right.
I glanced over some of the photographs, a podgy, red-face stared back at me. It was clearly me, but it didn’t match with the reflection I had seen in the mirror that morning. The guy in the pictures was fatter. Since the stroke my clothes had become baggy, Mum had even had to go and buy me some new jeans. I knew I had lost weight but didn’t realise quite how different I looked now. Two other faces stared back at me from the photograph, blonde girls with huge grins on their faces. I looked pretty happy in image too.
'Do you remember this one?' Mum asked, hopefully.
She thrust a photograph towards me. This time, the chubbier version of me was next to two other boys on a beach, I recognised them from the restaurant we had gone to for my 21st birthday recently.
'This is your first holiday with the boys,' she said.
Mum studied my face for a twinge of recollection but I couldn’t remember anything about the holiday.
Then suddenly, a lightening bolt.
'Hang on, didn’t we get in trouble for going on that holiday..?'
Mum’s eyes widened.
'Yes...yes you did…'
'We booked the holiday during the last week of our lessons, I can remember being outside the school and a teacher….our French teacher, she was furious,' I said.
I had surprised myself, where did that come from? I looked back at the photo as if it were a magical object, capable of bringing back memories that had been stolen by the stroke.
'See, it’s all still in there, we’ve just got to drag it out of you,' Mum said with a smile.
She had been given a seed of hope and was clearly elated that not all of the last twenty-one years of my life were lost. As Mum rifled through the pictures I collected a few of the items, carefully placing the teddy bear and keyring in a tiny shoe box. Something made me want to keep those items safe, as if creating a box of mementoes would help me keep hold of those recovered memories and maybe even remember more.
'These are your friends Chris,' Mum told me, pointing at faces in a long rectangular school photograph.
Some of the people she pointed at meant nothing to me, others, I recognised from when they had come to visit recently.
'Look, this is you and the boys together when you were eight, you’ve always been as thick as thieves.’
Mum smiled and passed me an aged photograph of two cheeky boys holding footballs.
'That’s Paul, so, you see, you’ve known each other your whole lives, you’re like brothers,' she said.
Like brothers? I frowned back at Mum, it didn’t feel like tha
t now.
'You do really get on, it’s just you’re out of sorts,' Mum explained.
It dawned on me why Paul had been making such an effort to see me and a slow burn of guilt began to form in my chest.
After my chat with Mum I was plagued with regret about how I had treated Paul, so the next time he invited me to the pub I agreed. But when we arrived, him and the other lads almost immediately started to reminisce over our high school days.
'Do you remember that time Mrs Smith lost it?' Paul began, before taking a sip of his pint.
I followed suit and sipped my vodka and coke but then noticed one of the lads looking at me with a puzzled expression. They had made a fuss when I had ordered my drink, they said it was weird that I didn’t drink pints anymore.
'Yeah, she started hitting the table with her rolling pin,' Ben chuckled.
'Oh god, that was so funny, she was shouting at everyone,' Paul agreed.
They looked at me as if they were expecting me to be laughing along with them but I didn’t know what they were talking about. I had grown so bored of not being able to share memories, of feeling like I was disappointing people by not remembering, that I decided to start bluffing.
'Oh yeah,' I grinned.
'That was so funny, she was a proper nutter wasn’t she? Then she...what did she do next.. she…' I stuttered as if I were recalling something and just about to say it.
Thankfully, Paul stepped in.
'She gave the whole class detention I think, didn’t she?' Paul said, looking up as he gathered the memory.
'That’s it!' I laughed.
Paul shot me a wide grin and I felt like a fraud, I had tricked him into thinking his old friend was back.
Pretending I could remember seemed to make Paul happy so I tried the same thing on Mum. When Dad told me that Nan had gone for an operation just before I had the stroke I used the information to make Mum think I remembered it.
'I was thinking about Nan, how is she now, she had her operation before I fell ill didn’t she?' I started, pretending the thought had just come to me.