The Memory Book

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘I’ve got Alzheimer’s,’ I say. It comes back to me, like the last rays of sun piercing the clouds, and I’m relieved. ‘I forget things. They come and go. And sometimes just go.’

  ‘I know, Cassie told me. She and Caitlin met up a few days ago, caught up. I have your Caity’s number here, from that time they were supposedly sleeping over at each other’s houses, and attempted to go clubbing in London. Remember? You and I waited all night for every single London train that came in, until they finally got home at about two. They hadn’t even managed to get into the club. A drunk man had propositioned them on the tube, and they were crying so much we let them off the hook in the end.’

  ‘They sound like a right pair,’ I say. The woman frowns again and this time I decide it’s concern rather than anger.

  ‘Will you remember Caitlin,’ the woman asks me, ‘if she comes?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I say. ‘Caitlin, yes, I remember what she looks like. Dark hair and eyes like rock pools under moonlight, black and deep.’

  She smiles. ‘I forgot you were a writer.’

  ‘I’m not a writer,’ I say. ‘I do have a writing room, though. I tried it, writing, but it didn’t work, and so now I have an empty writing room right at the top of the house. There’s nothing in it but a desk and a chair, and a lamp. I was so sure I was going to fill it to the brim with ideas, but instead it just got emptier.’ The woman frowns again, and her shoulders stiffen. I’m talking too much and it’s making her uncomfortable. ‘The thing I’m scared about the most is losing words.’

  I’ve upset her. I should stop saying things. I’m never that sure what I am saying any more. I have to really think. And wait. Talking too much is not a fun or sweet thing about me any more. I close my lips firmly.

  ‘I’ll sit with you, shall I? Until she gets here.’

  ‘Oh …’ I begin to protest, but it peters out. ‘Thank you.’

  I listen to her make a call to Caitlin. After exchanging a few words, she gets up and goes outside the café. As I watch her through the window, in the glow of the street lights, and I can see her still talking on the phone. She nods, her free hand gesturing. And then the call ends and she takes a deep breath of cold damp air before she comes back in and sits at my table.

  ‘She’ll be here in a few minutes,’ she tells me. She seems so nice, I don’t have the heart to ask her who she is talking about.

  2

  Caitlin

  I open the front door for Mum, and then step back, secreting my key in my pocket. Mum doesn’t have a key any more, which is one of the things she really doesn’t like about this new world order. Her hair hangs down her back – its bright, fiery auburn now a dark ruby-red. She is soaked through and shuddering. When Gran told me Mum had just marched off into the night, I wanted to ask her why she’d let her go, why she didn’t try to stop her, but there wasn’t time. I was out looking for her when I got the call from Cassie’s mum.

  Now we are back and, for Mum’s sake, I am struggling to not be furious. What would have happened if I hadn’t been here to go after her? Would Gran have stubbornly refused to stop Mum, determined to stand her ground and make a point, still somehow believing that Mum was showing off and should be ignored? I’m supposed to not be here soon. In the next few days, actually, I was supposed to be returning to London for my final year of university. What then? What would have happened then? Mum would have been lost out there in the rain, and who knows when or even if she would have got home.

  Perhaps it is a good thing after all that I am not going back – not that any of them know that yet. Perhaps I can just tell them that this is why I have decided not to go back – because Mum needs me.

  Gran is in the hallway waiting, one hand clasped in the other, her lips pressed into a thin line. She’s anxious and angry and upset. Mum is instantly on edge the moment she sees her. I watch the pair of them look at each other, angry, uncertain, resentful, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to make this better, especially not when I know that when the truth comes out, I will have made everything much worse.

  I feel that now familiar sickening feeling, the surge of nausea that hits me when I think about what I’ve done, and I push it away. I have to: I don’t have a choice. My mum is sick, really sick, and our family is falling apart around her. I don’t have time for my own problems, not yet. I’m waiting, waiting for it to be the right time. But the right time might never come, and then … It might be better for everyone if I just left.

  ‘Mummy!’ Esther, my little sister, charges at Mum, bowling into her. Mum picks her up and attempts to hug her hard, but she is cold and wet, and Esther quickly squirms out of her arms. ‘You’re icky! I hungry, I tired, I poorly.’

  It’s Esther’s new mantra whenever things aren’t going exactly the way she wants them to. Her sad little face, her querulous bottom lip – it’s a winning act every time, and Esther knows it. She does it because she knows it works so well on all of us.

  ‘Want some biscuits before bed?’ I ask her, offering the naughtiest thing I can think of, just to see her smile. She nods and jumps up and down, happily.

  ‘Go on, then.’ I nod in the direction of the living room. ‘I’ll put some on a plate for you.’ Mum lets go of her hand, releasing her back into the living room, her fingers hovering in the air for just a moment, perhaps regretting letting Esther go.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ Gran asks Mum furiously.

  ‘Look,’ I say, handing Mum a towel that I grab from the downstairs loo. She stares at it, and after a moment I take it and rub her hair for her. ‘There’s no point going over this now, is there? There’s no point having a go at her. I mean, if we are going to get into the whole blame thing, we might be wondering what she was doing heading off like that in the first place, mightn’t we?’ I look pointedly at Gran, but it rolls off her.

  ‘I was worried sick,’ Gran says accusingly. ‘You have to understand, Claire, you have to realise that you can’t just …’

  ‘Gran,’ I say, taking a step between her and Mum. ‘Gran, Mum knows that.’

  I don’t understand why Gran is so angry. I can see why she would be sad, and at a loss, unable to deal with this all happening again, but the anger I don’t get. The anger makes no sense.

  ‘Well, I just went out for a walk and …’ Mum waves at the door. ‘And I forgot the colour of the curtains.’

  ‘Mum, why don’t you have a hot bath, I’ll run it for you.’ I gesture towards the stairs, but she doesn’t move.

  ‘I can run my own bath still,’ she says. ‘And anyway, I don’t want one.’

  ‘I know, but, you know … I’ll run it for you. You can relax, warm up a bit.’

  Just as I think she is about to agree, Greg comes in through the kitchen, back from work. He’s carrying a bag. ‘Hey, babe,’ he says. ‘You’re soaked through.’

  ‘Winning awards for stating the obvious!’ Mum looks uncomfortable, self-conscious, as soon as she sees him. ‘I’m just going to have a bath actually, so …’ She looks at me, hoping I’ll whisk her straight upstairs and out of the path of her husband. But I don’t. If there was just a way to make her see him again, feel good around him again … If I knew she at least felt safe, then, then I could talk to her. I could tell her about me, like I used to, like I always have. A sudden surge of loss threatens so I turn my face away from Mum’s silent but obvious pleas and I look at her husband.

  ‘What’s in the bag, Greg?’

  He smiles, pleased with whatever it is. ‘I just wanted to give you this.’ He reaches into the brown paper bag he’s carrying and brings out what I recognise at once as a notebook. It’s large, A4 size, with a smooth, shiny, deep-red leather cover.

  Greg has chosen the perfect notebook for Mum, because red is her favourite colour. She wears it all the time, even though she is a redhead and it’s not supposed to work: red hair, red dress, red lips and nails, to school, the most glamorous teacher in the county, possibly the world. When I was little, I used to
wish Mum would be less obvious when she came to pick me up after school; I used to wish she’d wear a parka and jeans like everyone else’s mum. But now the fact that she always dresses up for everything seems like something precious, something special. Mum will always be Mum as long as she is dressed right up to the nines. Once, when I’d complained about how she always stuck out like a sore thumb, she told me that red was her warrior princess colour, and red lipstick was her warpaint. She felt braver when she wore it, and I understood that. I understood needing to feel brave; it was just a shock to me that it didn’t come naturally to her. I’m not sure how old I was then, maybe around ten, but I remember it because I remember feeling like I knew something that made me a little bit more grown up. And the older I got, the more it made sense, the more I understood. Mum’s been fighting for something for as long as I can remember.

  This is the first battle she’s ever engaged in that she knows she cannot win.

  ‘It’s a memory book.’ Greg holds out the notebook to her. ‘For you – for all of us – to write in. Remember how Diane said it would help you?’

  I had not been there when Mum first met her counsellor, Diane, or heard about Diane’s idea for her to write down everything that seemed important to her – everything that had ever meant anything. The idea of a book of memories had intrigued Mum, who’d joked at the time: ‘I wish I’d thought about doing that before I lost the plot.’

  ‘Yes, I remember the memory book to help me remember,’ Mum says now, smiling carefully.

  It’s her polite smile, her meeting bank managers, greeting parents at parents’ evening smile. It’s not real. I wonder if Greg notices that too, and I think he does. I used to be the only person in the world who really knew Mum, and she used to be the only person in the world who really got me. There was always Gran, of course, the third musketeer, and we all love each other fiercely. But somehow Gran has always seemed a little out of step. Everything she says and does rubs Mum up the wrong way, and everything Mum says or does seems to disappoint Gran, ever so slightly. I’ve gotten used to it over the years, the constant bickering between the two of them; it’s only recently I’ve come to wonder why they don’t really get on. But anyway, I was the one who really knew Mum – I was the one she truly belonged to – until there was Greg. And when he showed up on the scene I was fifteen, not a little kid, and yet still I was jealous and angry, and I didn’t want him around even though I knew well enough that wasn’t fair of me. It wasn’t until I realised that he got her, exactly the same way I did, that I finally understood: Greg wasn’t going anywhere, and Mum belonged to both of us now.

  She reaches out and takes the book from him.

  ‘It’s a very fine notebook, beautifully made, thank you,’ she says politely.

  The three of us follow her as she walks into the kitchen and puts it down on the table. ‘I always wanted to write a book, you know. I always thought the attic would make a good room to write books in.’

  The three of us do not look at each other. The times when we exchanged glances over Mum’s head when she did or said something a little off stopped a few weeks ago, when we realised that those moments were going to happen every day now. It is amazing to me how quickly something that had been so extraordinary and so alien had become normal, part of our little world, the world that Mum has always ruled. The stomach-clench of sadness still accompanies those moments, but the looks and the disbelief have gone.

  ‘You have written a book,’ I remind her. ‘Remember your novel?’

  It sits in the drawer of her empty, abandoned desk in the attic, all three hundred and seventeen pages of it, held together by a long, thin, red rubber band stretched to its maximum capacity. Mum insisted on printing it out because she said it wasn’t a book until it had pages, and I remember her reading it through up there in a day, then putting it in the drawer and climbing down the ladder. And as far as I know, she never went back up there again. She never did anything with the book, never asked anyone else to read it, never sent it off to a book agent or a publisher, never even talked about it again. She said that when your business was literature – teaching it, reading it, knowing it, loving it – you ought to at least have a crack at producing some of it yourself. So she had done, and that was that.

  When Esther was about six months and I was deemed sensible enough not to accidentally kill her if I looked after her, Mum and Greg went away for a night in a hotel, just up the road, just to be alone together. The moment Esther was asleep in her cot, I pulled down the ladder and went up into the attic room. It smelled musty and damp, old, and … empty. I was going to pull the book out of the drawer and read it. I’d been planning to do so for a long time, and this was my chance. I wanted to know what the book was about, what it was like, if it was any good, and part of me, a part I am not very proud of, sort of hoped that it wasn’t. Mum has always been so good at everything – even her falling in love, when it finally happened, happened like something out of a movie – and sometimes it feels like she is an impossible act to follow, even now that she has started getting everything wrong. But as soon as I put my hand on the handle of the desk drawer, I changed my mind. I didn’t even open it. For the first time in my life I understood that everyone needs secrets, and sometimes those secrets should never be uncovered. Everyone needs something that is completely private. I got the feeling that if I read the book, it might change things, and I didn’t want things to change. I suppose wanting that isn’t enough to make it happen, though.

  ‘That’s not really a book,’ Mum says, sitting down at the kitchen table, and opening the notebook at a random empty page. The book is full of thick, undulating pages of milky paper, the kind that is slightly textured with tiny ridges that almost chime against the tip of a pen: the kind of paper that Mum most likes to write on. Greg and I know that. The paper is stiff against her fingers; it resists just slightly as she turns the pages. We watch as she leans her cheek into it, laying her face down on the pillow of pages, and it’s such a Mum thing to do, something she would always have done, I think, that I feel comforted. Funny how the odd things, the mad things, are also the reassuring things.

  ‘That whole book business was more of a download,’ she says, lifting her head from the pages and smoothing her hand over the paper. ‘I guess I had to get it out of my system. Maybe the Alzheimer’s is the reason why. Maybe I was already going through the process of emptying my head. Empty head, empty attic. It fits.’

  She smiles up at Greg, the same polite parents’ evening smile. ‘It’s a lovely book. Perfect. Thank you.’

  Greg touches her on the shoulder and she does not move away. It’s painful to see how relieved he is.

  ‘That’s mine book,’ Esther says, appearing at the table, probably looking for her long-promised biscuit. Her nose fits just over its edge. ‘It’s mine book for drawings, isn’t it, Mummy?’

  I wonder if Esther has any sense of how important she has become to us all, how we rely on her to make us laugh. I look at her and wonder how it happens, how a person so complete and unique emerges from another one. A person who is so small but so essential to all of us: she is our collective smile.

  ‘Please may it be mines, Mummy?’ Esther asks her sweetly. ‘Yes?’

  We have all learned that since Esther turned three, it’s generally best not to openly disagree with her, else the famous Armstrong temper will makes its presence felt and she’ll throw something, or hit someone, or lie down on the floor and wail like the true drama queen she is. None of us minds very much – well, not Mum or I, anyway. We both have the Armstrong temper too, and when we see it in Esther, we know she is truly one of us. Instead, Mum manages her, agrees with her or changes the subject, and makes it so that although the little madam doesn’t get her way all the time, she doesn’t know that she doesn’t. Mum has been brilliant at managing Esther: mothering her, I suppose the right word is. I watch her all the time now. I try to note it all down. The things she does, her smile, her jokes, her phrases. All the things
she used to do for me when I was three years old, I suppose, but back then I didn’t notice either. Now I need to notice – I need to know everything she does – so that when the time comes, I can look after Esther in exactly the same way Mum would have. That is the thing I can do, which makes everything else, the stupid, stupid mess I’ve made of my life, all the worse. Other people get to make mistakes at my age, but not me. I can’t, I don’t have time. I have to be here for Esther; I have to give her the same life that Mum would have given her.

  ‘Oh yes, you can draw in it,’ Mum says, picking up a pen and handing it to Esther straight away. I see Greg wince, but Mum reaches out and takes his hand. Her touch instantly melts away all the tension in his body. ‘This isn’t just a book for me to write in, is it?’ she says, smiling up at him, the teacher smile replaced – for now, at least – by one that means everything. It reminds me of my favourite wedding photo of the two of them: she’s gazing up at him, and he’s standing behind her laughing like a loon, looking so happy. ‘This is a book for you all to write in too. It’s for my memories, but yours as well. It’s a book for all of us. And Esther can start it off.’

  Greg pulls out a chair and sits down next to Mum as Esther climbs on to her lap, the tip of her tongue poking out as, earnestly, she begins to carve lines into the paper with the Biro Mum hands her. I watch her as she draws two circles – one big, one small – then fills each with two dots for eyes, one for a nose and then a big grinning smile. Finally, she draws sticks straight out of the circles, representing arms and legs. Two of the arms touch, and Esther scribbles where they join, a small tangled spiral to show they are holding hands.

  ‘That’s me and you, Mummy,’ she says, totally satisfied with her work.

  Mum holds her a little tighter and kisses the top of her head. ‘The perfect way to start the book,’ she says. Greg puts his arm around Mum, and I see her shoulders stiffen, just for a moment before they relax. She looks at him. ‘Will you write the date underneath?’