‘That’s why I won’t allow myself to befriend old people any more,’ said my sharp neighbour. ‘I can’t afford to invest my time and emotion in them when the outcome’s inevitable.’
‘That’s hard!’ I exclaimed.
‘So’s grief,’ she growled. ‘Don’t give me grief. I’m not volunteering for it any more.’
Look at these benches, inscribed with the dates of the various dear departed, positioned at the side of the path so the living can rest on the dead and enjoy the view. There seems to be a new one every time I go for a walk. They’re the modern version of a headstone or a sarcophagus. ‘David Ford – A Kindly Man and a Good Citizen.’ How distant he must have been from the rest, to have this as his epitaph. Or here, equally depressing, ‘Marjorie Smith – Her Life Was Devotion to Others.’ We all know what that means.
The sharp woman this morning, she had a whiff of therapy-speak about her. What she said, the way she said it, reminded me of my father in some way. Let the past go, he declares; what’s the point in raking over the past, chewing over old news. As my mother would say, how convenient. And when, precisely, does the past begin, according to him? Last year? Yesterday? A minute ago?
My father, living in Toronto at the moment, has a deliberately poor memory and refuses nostalgia point blank. There has been a refreshing lack of clutter in the various places he’s lived since leaving home when I was five. He treats his life as a picaresque adventure, sloughing off old skin and moving on, reinventing himself on a regular basis. He lives with the freshness and brutality of an infant. He can’t see the point of continuity, he feels no loyalty to the past. What he values is how he feels now. That phrase, ‘Where are we going?’, he’s allergic to it, and from the moment a woman delivers herself of those words to him she’s on the way out as far as he is concerned. Goodbye Sarah, Lauren, Anna, Phoebe and countless others, the women whom he refers to as romantic episodes.
I don’t see my life in quite the same way, though I have a certain sympathy for that nonchalant approach. Aidan, for example, likes to identify his objectives and be proactive at taking life by the scruff of the neck; whereas I prefer to nose forward instinctively, towards some dim but deeply apprehended object of desire which I can’t even put into words. He says that’s our age difference showing: I’ve inherited a touch of the old hippy whereas he’s free of those sentimental tendencies. Anyway, I used to say to him, what if nothing much happens to you, or lots of different disjointed things? Does that make you any less of a person? I suppose I was being aggressive-passive.
At least I was being open, unlike Aidan, who has a selective memory and failed to mention he was married. When I found out, then it was time for me to let the past go, to move on, despite his talk of leaving. I wasn’t born yesterday.
My mother could not be more different from my father. Why they married is a mystery. She is perpetually at work on weaving the story of her life; she sees herself as the central figure in her own grand tapestry. She carries her past with her like a great snail shell, burnished with high-density embellishments. She remembers every conceivable anniversary – birthdays, deaths, first kisses, operations, house moves – and most of her talk starts ‘Do you remember?’ There is quite a lot I don’t remember, since I left home and Scotland as soon as I could, not popular with my stepfather, the Hero in her quest, her voyage-and-return after the false start that was my father. I was heavily abridged in the process. I’d be willing to bet a thousand pounds that her main concern once I tell her about the baby will be how to incorporate the role of grandmother into her carefully woven narrative. Still, Aberdeen is a long way off.
I’m finding more and more when I meet new people that, within minutes of saying hello, they’re laying themselves out in front of me like scientific diagrams which they then explain, complex specimens, analysed and summed up in their own words. They talk about their past in great detail, they tell me their story, and then – this is what passes for intimacy now – they ask me to tell them mine. I have tried. But I can’t. It seems cooked up, that sort of story. And how could it ever be more than the current version? It makes me feel, no that’s not it and that’s not it, as soon as I’ve said something. Perhaps I’m my father’s daughter after all. It’s not that I’m particularly secretive – it’s more to do with whatever it is in us that objects to being photographed.
And here’s the oldest jogger I’ve seen for a while, barely moving, white-bearded – look, I’m going faster than him even at walking pace. It’s hard not to see a bony figure at his shoulder, a figure with a scythe.
I was on the tube this morning minding my own business when I realised that the old fellow standing beside me – not quite Zimmer frame, but bald, paunchy, in his early seventies – was giving me the eye. I looked back over my shoulder instinctively. Then I realised that it was me he was eyeing and couldn’t restrain a shocked snort of laughter. The parameters shift once you’re past forty, it seems, when it comes to the dance of wanting and being wanted. Though that was always very good with Aidan, whatever else was wrong between us, and he’s seven years younger than me.
You would think that a science teacher and tutor of PHSE would know how not to get pregnant. You would think so. Once again it was to do with my age. My GP noticed that I’d just had another birthday and advised me to stop taking the Pill. It was time to give my system a rest, she suggested, time to get back in touch with my natural cycle again now that I was so much less fertile because of the years. There are other methods of contraception far more natural, she continued, and far less invasive than stroke-inducing daily doses of oestrogen and progestogen. She sent me off to a natural family-planning guru.
I learned to chart the months, colouring my safe days in blue and my fertile days in red, in advance, thanks to the clockwork regularity of my cycle. It was pretty much half and half, with the most dangerous time from day thirteen to day seventeen, day one being the first day of my period. I took my temperature with a digital thermometer every morning and believed that I was safe once it had risen by 0.2 degrees from a previous low temperature for three days in a row. The onset of a glossy albuminous secretion, though, meant I had to be on red alert.
Emboldened by contact with my own inner calendar, its individual ebb and flow, I took a pair of compasses and made a circular chart for each monthly revolution onto tracing paper, with several inner circles all marked with the days of my private month, recording dates of orgasm, vivid dreams, time of ovulation, phases of the moon and so on. I was steadier and more pedestrian during the first half of my inner month, I noticed – and more thin-skinned, clever and volatile in the fortnight before my period.
When after several months I placed the translucent sheets of tracing paper on top of each other, I was able to see both the regularly repeated events and also the slight variations over time as a wheeling overlap, so that looking back down the past year was like gazing into a helix with seashell striations.
‘My cycle seems rather disturbed,’ I said to the Wise Woman at one of our consultations.
‘Two teaspoons of honey daily should regularise that,’ she said. And I nodded and smiled. No kidding. Me, with a Biology degree from a good university and a keen interest in neuroscience. Then, of course, three weeks after saying goodbye forever to Aidan, I found I was pregnant. Talk about the biological clock.
Thirty-six minutes left. See the sun on the bark of this sweet chestnut tree, and how it lights up the edges of these spiralling wrinkled grooves. Our brain cortex looks like wet tree bark, as I was telling Year Eleven only yesterday. This expansive outer layer with its hundred billion nerve cells has to contract itself into tightly concertinaed ripples and ridges; it has to pleat and fold back on itself in order to pack down far enough to fit inside the skull.
It’s hard to think of Stella this morning in her coffin, her bones, her skull with the brain annihilated. She could remember ninety years ago, as many nonagenarians can, as though it were yesterday; but – unusual, this – she coul
d also remember yesterday. That is a great thing in extreme old age, to be both near- and far-sighted. Once I asked her what was her earliest memory, and she thought it might have been when she was one or possibly two, sitting outside the post office in her pram on a snowy day. She was watching the boy in the pram on the other side of the doorway as he howled and howled – ‘And I thought, “Oh do be quiet! They’re coming back, you know. It’s really ridiculous to make a noise like that. They haven’t left us here forever.” He was wearing a white fur bonnet which I wanted for myself.’
This memory of hers sent some messenger running in my brain, zigzagging along corridors and byways of the mind, and triggered the retrieval of my own earliest memory, which she heard with a hoot of incredulity. I was standing outside my parents’ bedroom door and for the first time felt flood over me the realisation that they were not part of me. They were separate. And I thought of my own selfish demands, and wanted to go into them and say how sorry I was for being a burden to them and how considerate they would find me now that I had realised I was not part of them. The bedroom door was tall as a tree in front of me.
‘Very guilty,’ I told Stella. ‘I feel guilty generally. Don’t you?’
She paused and we both waited to see what she would come up with. Talking to her was like mackerel fishing, the short wait and then the flash of silver.
‘I don’t feel guilty enough,’ she said, with emphasis, at last.
When her doorbell rang, she would open the front room window of her first-floor flat and let down a fishing line with a key attached to the end of it where the hook would otherwise have been. That way her visitors could unlock the front door and let themselves in, saving her the stairs.
She listened with interest while I tried to describe the latest theories about memory, how they now think that when you try to remember something you are not going to your mental library to take a memory-book off the shelf or to play back a memory-video. No, you are remembering the original memory; you are reconstructing that memory. The more frequently you chase a particular memory and reconstruct it, the more firmly established in the brain that memory track becomes.
This short cut I’ve just taken – thirty-one minutes, I’m watching the time – at first it was nothing but that the grass had been walked on once or twice; but it’s obviously been trodden over again and again, hundreds of times, and has become an established path. Repetition – repeated reconstruction of the memory – strengthens it.
‘So, Stella,’ I said, ‘you remember that fur bonnet from ninety years ago because you’ve remembered it so often that by now it’s an established right of way, it’s on all your maps.’
‘I am not aware of having called up that memory more than once or twice,’ said Stella. ‘In fact I could have sworn it appeared for the first time last week. But you may be right.’
Occasional Bentleys used to glide down our mean street and disgorge a superannuated star or two – a fabled ex-Orsino, a yesteryear Hamlet. Stella had been a well-known actress, she had travelled the world with various theatre companies; she had never married, nor apparently had she ever made much money, for here she was in extreme old age living in a rented room on next to nothing. She was still working, for heaven’s sake. Three times a week she would creep painfully down the stairs a step at a time, allowing a good twenty minutes for the descent, then wait for the bus to take her into Gower Street, where she introduced her students to Beatrice and Imogen and Portia and the traditional heartbeat of the iambic pentameter. She remained undimmed, without any of the usual inward-turning self-protective solipsism, open like a Shakespearean heroine to grief and chance and friendship even in her tenth decade.
If it is true that each established memory makes a track, a starry synaptic trail in the brain, and that every time we return to (or as they insist, reconstruct) that particular constellation of memory, we strengthen it, then so is the following. Stella’s billion lucent constellations may have been extinguished at her death, but she herself has become part of my own brain galaxy, and part of the nebulous clusters of all her myriad friends. Every time I remember Stella, I’ll be etching her deeper into myself, my cells, my memory.
Twenty-nine minutes until I’m due back at school. That staffroom yesterday was like a rest home for the elderly. The young ones had all gone off to leap around at some staff-pupil netball match, leaving the over-thirties to spread out with their sandwiches. I sat marking at a table near to where Max, Head of Maths, was chatting with Lower School History Peter and the new Geography woman.
‘It’s on the tip of my tongue,’ said Max, his eyes locking hungrily onto Peter’s. ‘You know, the one that looks like. . .’
‘In Year Eight?’ said Peter.
‘Bloody hell, I’ve got that thing,’ groaned Max. ‘You know, that disease, what the hell’s it called, where you can’t remember anything. . .’
‘No you haven’t!’ snapped Peter. He fancies him.
‘I went to get some money out on Sunday,’ he fretted. ‘I stood in the queue for the cash machine for ten minutes then when it was my turn I couldn’t remember my PIN number. I’m Head of Maths, for pity’s sake. So I tapped in 1989 – in case I’d used my memorable date, because that’s it – but apparently I hadn’t because the machine then swallowed my card.’
‘You read about people being tortured for their PIN number,’ said the new Geography woman – what is her name? – ‘Well, they could torture me to within an inch of my life and I still wouldn’t know it. I’d be dead and they still wouldn’t have the money.’
‘What happened in 1989?’ asked Peter keenly.
‘Arsenal beat Liverpool 2-0 at Anfield,’ said Max.
‘Did they?’ said Peter.
‘You’re not into football, then,’ said Max as he turned to the crossword, shaking out his newspaper, and Peter’s face fell.
It reminded me of that scene in the restaurant last time I was out for a meal with Aidan. The couple at the neighbouring table were gaping at each other wordlessly, silent with frustration. Then he electrified everyone within earshot by softly howling, ‘It’s gone, it’s gone.’ I thought he’d swallowed a tooth, an expensive crown. His expression seemed to bear this out – anguish and a mute plea for silence. But no – it was merely that he had forgotten what he was halfway through saying. He was having a senior moment.
I’ve always had a very good memory. It used to be that any word I wanted would fly to me like a bird, I’d put my hand up and pluck it out of the air. Effortless. Gratifying. Facts, too, came when called, and when someone gave me their phone number I would be able to hold it in my head till later when I had a pen – even several hours later.
Thanks to this, I never had any trouble with exams, unlike my GP cousin who spent her years at medical school paddling round frantically in a sea of mnemonics. ‘Two Zulus Buggered My Cat,’ she’d say. ‘Test me, I’ve got to learn the branches of the facial nerve.’ And what was the one she found so hideously embarrassing? See if I can remember. It was the one for the cranial nerves.
Oh
Optic
Oh
Olfactory
Oh
Oculomotor
To
Trochlear
Touch
Trigeminal
And
Abducent
Feel
Facial
Veronica’s
Vestibulocochlear
Glorious
Glossopharyngeal
Vagina
Vagus
And
Accessory
Hymen
Hypoglossal
Not that she’s prudish, but she was in a predominantly male class of twenty-two-year-olds at the time, and that’s her name – Veronica.
The minute I hit forty, I lost that instant recall. I had to wait for the right cue, listen to the cogs grinding, before the word or fact would come to me. Your brain cells are dying off, Aidan would taunt.
Even so, I sometimes thi
nk my memory is too good. I don’t forget enough. I wish I could forget him. It’s all a question of emotional metabolism, whether you’re happy or not. You devour new experience, you digest and absorb what will be nourishing, you let the rest go. And if you can’t shed waste matter, you’ll grow costive and gloomy and dyspeptic. My mother always says she can forgive (with a virtuous sigh); but she can never forget (with a beady look). She is mistaken in her pride over this. Not to be able to forget is a curse. I read somewhere a story that haunted me, about a young man, not particularly clever or remarkable in any way except that he remembered everything that he had ever seen or heard. The government of whatever country it was he lived in grew interested, thinking this might be useful to them, but nothing came of it. The man grew desperate, writing out sheets of total recall and then setting fire to them in the hope that seeing them go up in flames would raze them from his mind. Nothing worked. He was a sea of unfiltered memories. He went mad.
Max is worried that forgetting his PIN number is the first step to losing his mind, but really his only problem is that he knows too much. How old is he? Near retirement, anyway. Twenty years older than me. After a certain age your hard disk is much fuller than it’s ever been, thanks to the build-up of the years. Mine has certainly started refusing to register anything it doesn’t regard as essential – I frequently find myself walking back down the road now to check I’ve locked the front door behind me. Your internal organs stop self-renewing at a certain point, and at the same time your mind begins to change its old promiscuous habits in the interests of managing what it’s already got.
I sometimes taunt Max with the crossword if I’m sitting near him in the staffroom in the lunch-hour. ‘It’s on the tip of my tongue,’ he moans. Last week there was a brilliant clue, tailor-made for a mathematician too – ‘Caring, calm, direct – New Man’s sixty-third year (5,11).’ He rolled his eyes and scowled and moaned, followed various trails up blind alleys, barked with exasperation, and his mind ran around all over the place following various scents. It was interesting to observe him in the act.
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