In a panic I dropped the call and threw the handset back to Bernard.
‘Did you recognize his voice?’
‘Er, no. No, I … It’s probably just some random bloke,’ I stammered. But the stranger was ringing straight back. And soon they were having quite an animated chat about me.
‘Not any more,’ said Bernard. ‘I think I’m his best friend now …’
Chapter 3
GARY HUGGED ME meaningfully while I just stood there, enduring the physical contact like some teenage boy cuddled by his aunt at Christmas.
‘Vaughan! I was so worried about you. I love you, man!’
‘You love me?’ I stammered. ‘So am I your …? Are we, like, homosexuals?’
The meaningful embrace ended very suddenly as Gary glanced across at Bernard. ‘No, I don’t love you like that. I mean I love you like a brother, you know …’
‘You’re my brother?’
‘No, not literally your brother – I mean we’re like brothers, you and me. Gazoody-baby!’
‘What?’
‘Gazoody-baby! That’s what we used to say, isn’t it? Gazooooooody-baby! Remember?’ and he gave me a little playful punch on the arm which actually hurt slightly.
This was my visitor being reserved and unassuming after he’d been given a little talk by the doctor. She had warned him on the phone that I was unlikely to know who he was, and might react nervously if he was too presumptuous or over-familiar. It was good that he had taken so much of this on board. Despite the solitude I’d felt up to this point, the sudden friendliness of this stranger felt inappropriate. Some primal defence mechanism kicked in; clearly early hunter-gatherers had learned that total strangers were only this friendly when trying to get you to come to an Alpha Course meeting.
‘Look, I know this is going to sound a bit rude, but I’m afraid I really don’t know who you are. Until you called me “Vaughan” I didn’t even know that was my Christian name.’
‘Actually it’s your surname. That’s just what everybody calls you.’
‘See? I didn’t know that! I don’t know anything. Do I have a mother, for example? I don’t know.’
The man paused and placed his hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, mate. Your old mum kicked the bucket about five years ago.’
‘Oh, okay.’ I shrugged. ‘Well, I don’t remember her anyway …’
And he laughed as if I was making a joke.
‘Yeah, the nurse said you’ve lost your memory or something? She’s hot, isn’t she? Has she seen you naked?’
‘Er, no.’
‘Well, that’s probably just as well. Do you want to go and get a pint or two? I really fancy a pickled gherkin.’
And then I found myself emitting an unexpected laugh. It was the first time I had laughed since Day Zero, and my visitor hadn’t even been trying to be funny. Just the randomness of his thought processes felt comical and refreshing. My own personality had been a mystery to me when I walked into the hospital; the various darkened rooms just needed the right people to open the doors to show me the way around. Bernard had lit up my irritable, slightly intolerant side; Gary had shown me what made me laugh.
‘So, Vaughan, put some clothes on, for Christ’s sake, ’cos you can’t go to the pub in your fucking pyjamas!’
‘He’s not allowed to leave the hospital!’ interjected Bernard, looking a little put out by this interloper’s arrival. ‘In fact, the doctor said she wanted to be here when you two first met.’
‘Yeah, but I got fed up of waiting, didn’t I? I’ve been sitting out there twenty minutes. I don’t need an appointment to see my best friend!’
I tried not to look too smugly towards Bernard at this description of myself. After a week in an institution, my friend’s disregard for rules was infectious and part of me was tempted to jump at this opportunity for a trip into the outside world. I might have remained in two minds, had Bernard not explicitly forbidden me to leave the ward.
Walking out of the hospital with Gary felt both exhilarating and terrifying. I had almost forgotten what fresh air smelt like and here was someone who knew all the secrets of my past life. I jumped slightly at the noise of a passing motorbike and felt intimidated by the other hurrying pedestrians, who all seemed to be so sure about where they were going.
Gary was a tall, spindly man about my age who dressed in the clothes of someone twenty years younger. He wore a leather motor cycle jacket, though it turned out there was no motorbike. His sideburns came slightly too low for someone whose hairline was creeping that far back, and he exuded an air of easy confidence and a powerful reek of nicotine. But although I was a little thrown by his overly casual manner, it was refreshing to be talked to as if I was normal. It made me like him – this was my friend ‘Gary’. I had a friend and we were off to the pub together.
‘So we might as well get this out of the way …’ he said, looking a little awkward as we got to the street corner ‘… but you do remember you owe me two grand?’
‘Do I? Sorry, I don’t have any money … I … if you could just hang on a bit?’ and then I caught the glint in his eye and he burst out laughing.
‘Ha ha ha – yeah, ’s all right!’ He laughed. ‘I’m just pissing with you!’
‘Yeah, obviously!’ I said, doing my best to laugh along.
‘I should’ve made it a bit more, shouldn’t I? Can you really not remember anything?’
‘No. I have no idea what I’ve been doing for the past forty years.’
‘Yeah, well, I know how you feel.’
Forty years had been a good guess. It turned out I was thirty-nine, and according to Gary, my fugue state was just ‘a typical bloody mid-life crisis’. I got the impression that he didn’t consider my medical condition to be a particularly big deal – as if he’d done so many drugs down the years that this was just one of many altered states on the spectrum. I found it a little disarming that this man casually addressed me as ‘Wanker’ and ‘Dingbat’, as if these were my actual names. Although I quickly understood that these must be ironic terms of matey affection between two old friends, when someone you have just met says, ‘It’s this pub here, Shit-for-brains,’ you have to fight an instinct that finds this a tiny bit rude.
The pub was filling up with lunchtime customers so we grabbed the last booth. Now I had free rein to ask him whatever I wanted. It would be like my own private edition of This Is Your Life, except in this version the host recounted the incredible life story to the star for the very first time: ‘You won’t remember this voice,’ or, ‘And here tonight is that teacher who inspired you all those years ago, although you’ll have to take our word for it; it could just be the old lady who runs the tea bar downstairs.’
I had chosen a pint of Guinness because Gary told me that’s what I usually had. The infinite possibilities felt overwhelming; I might like bitter, lager or a mineral water with a dash of lime. I might be twice married, a father of seven, an Olympic sailing champion or a bankrupt criminal.
I resolved to ask the questions in some sort of chronological order, so that we didn’t jump about all over the place and miss out any important details. Perhaps at some level I wanted the news broken to me slowly: if I was a total loser, I might feel better if I understood how I ended up that way. But my attempt to pin down some basics about my early years did not start well.
‘So. Have I got any brothers and sisters?’
‘Nope. You’re an only child. Oh, I forgot to get anything to eat—’
‘Okay. Where am I from?’
‘Nowhere really. Everywhere. You’re from all over the place. Your dad was in the forces, so you moved constantly as a kid. You lived in West Germany, Cyprus, Malaysia, er … Yorkshire. Where else did you mention? Hong Kong, I think. Shangri-La maybe?’
‘That’s not a real place.’
‘Isn’t it? Oh well, not Shangri-La then. Shanghai maybe? But I remember you saying that you were never in the same school for more than a year.’
‘Blimey.
So I’m a very adaptable sort of person, I expect?’
‘Er, if you want … I wish I’d got some pork scratchings or something—’
‘Well travelled.’
‘Well travelled. Rootless, yeah.’
‘The son of a soldier!’
‘Air force. He was quite high ranking, though I think he only did the accounts or something. Yeah, poor bloke had a heart attack soon after your mum died.’
‘Oh.’
‘But I remember your parents from when we were younger. They were a lovely couple, God bless them. Very powerful home-made wine.’
With no memory of them whatsoever, my mother and father felt like abstract concepts – just names on a family tree. Everything he told me about myself might as well have happened to another person, in some made-up story. In fact, Gary knew very little about my early years and was vague on any specifics before the two of us had actually met. ‘How do I know what grades you got in your bloody GCSEs?’ he protested.
‘Sorry, I just feel a bit nervous about getting my exam results. I feel nervous about all of it. So did I go to university?’
‘Ah, right, yeah, now this is where we met,’ he recalled, with more enthusiasm. ‘I was doing English and American Studies. I switched from doing straight English—’
‘Sorry, where was this? Oxford? Cambridge?’
‘Bangor. I chose there because this gorgeous girl at my school had put it down, although she ended up in East Anglia so it didn’t really work out …’
Over the next ten minutes I learned that Gary and I had shared a student house in North Wales, that I had been in a college football team with Gary, and that I had done the same degree as Gary, though I had not copied my entire dissertation off a student from Aberystwyth like Gary. Frankly, it was fascinating to find out so much about myself.
He came back from the bar with another pint, despite me requesting just a half, and a greying pickled egg, which I think he chose because it was the least fresh thing they had. There was one question that I had been desperate to ask, and the whole time he’d been at the bar I had found myself staring down at the white shadow where the ring had been. I was almost too nervous to broach the subject. If there was a wife out there, I wanted to understand the context in which I had come to meet her. I wanted to know who I was when I got married.
‘So you don’t remember this pub at all?’ said Gary, sitting down.
‘No. Why? Have we been here before?’
‘Yeah – you used to sell crack in here before all that shit with the Russian Mafia kicked off—’
‘Oh, yeah, of course, the Russian Mafia. They left a beetroot head in my bed, didn’t they?’ I felt a shiver of pride at succeeding in making Gary chuckle. ‘It’s weird. I don’t know who I am or what I did. But I know I wasn’t a crack dealer.’
‘No, hard drugs were never really your scene. You fret about whether it’s acceptable to give your kids a bloody Lemsip.’
That was how I discovered I was a father. ‘Your kids’ Gary had said, in the plural. I had children.
‘Oh, right, yeah – your kids!’ said Gary, when I pressed him for more information. ‘Yeah, you’ve got two nippers. Boy and a girl, Jamie who’s about fifteen or twelve or something, and then there’s Dillie who’s younger, like ten maybe. Actually, she must be eleven, ’cos they’re both at secondary school. Though not at your school.’
‘What do you mean “my school”?’
‘Your school where you teach.’
‘So I’m a teacher? Look, just slow down a minute, will you? See, this is why I wanted to do everything chronologically. Tell me about my children first,’ I said, while filing away a bizarre image of myself wearing a gown in front of an old-fashioned blackboard.
‘Well, they’re just kids, you know. They’re cute. I’m actually god father to Jamie. Or is it Dillie? I can’t remember, but I’m sure I’m godfather to one of them. But, yeah, great kids. You can be really proud of them.’
But I couldn’t be really proud of them. I dearly wanted to be proud of them, but they were just a cold, historical fact.
‘Mind if we sit here?’ interjected a woman carrying bags of shopping, and without waiting for an answer she slumped into one of the two spare places at our table. ‘Over here, Meg! Got two seats here!’
I was a parent to two strangers. But not like some passing ship’s captain who’d unknowingly fathered a child in a distant port. These children would know me; hopefully, they would love me.
‘Get a menu!’ shouted the lady to her companion, her daughter maybe. ‘I can’t read the blackboard without my glasses, and they never put menus on the table.’ This woman’s face was now imprinted on my mind, yet I had no idea what my own children looked like.
‘So what are they like?’
‘What do you mean?
‘My kids? What are they like?’
The woman did a poor job of pretending not to listen.
‘Well, Jamie looks just like you, actually, poor bastard. He doesn’t say a great deal, but that’s probably his age.’
I nodded, but inside I was shrugging. I was a father and teacher with no experience of children whatsoever.
‘He’s getting quite tall now, trendy, into music. Don’t think he has a girlfriend, but he might be keeping it quiet, I suppose.’
‘What about my daughter – Dillie? Is that her real name or is it short for something?’
‘Don’t think so – you’ve always just called her Dillie.’
‘Could be Dilys,’ said the woman at our table.
‘Sorry?’
‘Your daughter’s name? Dillie could be short for Dilys. Or “Dillwyn” is a name. Welsh, I think. You’re not Welsh, are you?’
‘I dunno. Am I Welsh?’
‘Nah, don’t think so.’
‘Well, it could be that.’
‘Thank you. That’s very helpful.’
The detail of my own parenthood suddenly recast everything in an even more serious light. Now my mental breakdown was not just something that had happened to me, but to a whole family.
‘So what else would you like to know about them?’ Gary asked me, though the lady might have thought he was addressing both of us.
‘Er, it’s okay,’ I mumbled, ‘it can wait.’
‘Been in prison, have you?’ enquired the woman, nonchalantly.
‘Er, something like that,’ I smiled.
‘Murder,’ added Gary, in the hope of scaring her off, but she didn’t seem thrown by this detail.
‘My husband walked out on us when Meg was two. We never heard from him again. He wouldn’t recognize her if he passed her in the street.’
‘Right …’
‘Er, so what other news can I tell you?’ Gary said. ‘Er, the Tories are back in power. And everyone has mobile phones and home computers and Woolworth’s went out of business and, er, Elton John came out; that was a big shock obviously—’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know all that stuff. It’s just everything about my life that’s been forgotten. I can remember who won the FA Cup all through the eighties and nineties; I know every Christmas Number One. But I just can’t remember anyone’s name or anything about them.’
‘Ha! That’s just being a bloke, isn’t it?’ said the woman, with a sigh.
After that we talked in hushed mumbles, which suggested that Gary was divulging information that was somehow classified. Now that we seemed to have abandoned any idea of doing my life in chronological order, I jumped to the question that had been gnawing away at me since my mind had first pressed the reset button.
‘So, Gary, I’m father to two children,’ I whispered. ‘Tell me about their mother.’
There was a pause, punctured by a food order being called out from the bar.
‘Er – she’s cool, yeah. God, actually, this egg is disgusting. I might get something else. I wonder if they sell peperamis—’
‘No, no – hang on. I just want to get my head round this. Let’s start at the beginning. W
hat’s her name?’
‘Her name? Maddy.’
‘Maddy?’
‘Madeleine, yeah.’
‘My wife is called Madeleine! That’s a nice name, isn’t it? Madeleine and Vaughan!’ I rolled the name about in my head, feeling how it fitted with my own. ‘Vaughan and Maddy.’
‘You know Vaughan, don’t you? He’s Madeleine’s husband!’
Just this fragment of information felt enormously reassuring to me; this would surely be the foundation stone on which my life would be rebuilt.
‘So where did I meet her? And don’t say she was mail order from Thailand.’
‘You hooked up in your first term at university, didn’t you? It was like “Bye-bye, Mummy, hello, Wifey!” Know what I mean?’
‘No.’
‘Well, you were like so totally into one another, it was actually quite annoying for the rest of us.’
‘Thanks.’
‘So, yeah, anyway, after college you both spent a few years bumming around doing nothing. And ’cos you didn’t have the faintest bloody idea what to do, you decided you might as well train to be a teacher.’
‘Yeah, so I’m a teacher! Wow! That’s not just a job, is it? That’s a vocation! A teacher …’ I stroked my beard as I pictured myself as Robin Williams in Dead Poets’ Society, as Sidney Poitier in To Sir, with Love.
‘Yeah, some god-awful comprehensive next to the Wandsworth one-way system,’ he said. ‘I think you said your school specializes in Business and Enterprise, so you don’t produce drug addicts – your kids learn to be the dealers—’
‘A teacher. I like that. What do I teach? Tell me it’s not metal-work.’
‘You teach history – and sometimes “citizenship”, whatever the fuck that is.’
‘A history teacher? Ha! The historian with no history of his own.’
‘Yeah, I suppose that is quite ironic. You don’t know anything whatsoever about the past, but then neither do any of your pupils, so it makes no odds really …’
Another food order was called out from the bar and Gary looked forlornly at the plate of fish and chips being handed out.
The Man Who Forgot His Wife Page 3