One day when Maddy turned on her new computer, the screen was filled with a digital photo of the leprechaun, with instructions to check inside the printer tray. When Maddy suggested I ordered myself a pizza from my usual home-delivery service, I opened the big flat box to find that Madeleine had arranged with the local pizza company to deliver me Great-auntie Brenda’s card instead. When Maddy had put tasteful framed black-and-white photographs of the children up the stairs, she came home one day to notice that every single frame contained a colour photocopy of a grinning Guinness-drinking leprechaun saying ‘Top o’ the mornin’ to yers!!’ with the original in a huge clipframe of its own surrounded by flashing fairy lights.
The memory of all this came back to me in one split second, sitting in front of a computer terminal during my first day back at work. It was as if the search facility in my brain had finally located a certain file extension. I wanted to tell everyone seated around me, but the school admin team seemed uncomfortable enough with having one of the teachers suddenly parked in their office like this, without me drawing attention to my strange mental illness.
I wanted to contact Maddy right now to share all the memories of our running private joke, but I sensed that to do so would also kill it. Nor could I add the episodes to my online memoir. Instead, despite having been desperate to remember details just like this, I had to tell myself to try to forget about it for the time being, in order that I could actually get on with my life right now.
My first day in my new job felt empowering. I was making a contribution; I had a reason to get up in the morning. Being the temporary administrative assistant in an inner-city comprehensive came with more status and variety than all the other life experiences I could remember, such as lying in a hospital bed or watching repeats of All-Star Mr & Mrs. Now I was returning to school to undertake my own education, revising the complex syllabus of where I fitted in and what sort of school I worked at.
I had in front of me access to detailed information on a thousand pupils. I could click on any name and know their Key Stage 2 Sats, their GCSE or B.Tech targets, whether they were on free school meals or had English as an additional language. Yet access to data on Jamie and Dillie was still restricted; none of my records of my children’s lives could be summoned. My task for the day was supposed to be entering data on 540 Key Stage 3 pupils. But I couldn’t prevent my mind from returning to two children in particular whom I was going to be meeting that very evening.
I had agreed to go to the house at six o’clock to take my son and daughter out to the Christmas funfair on the Common, which seemed like an appropriate divorced-dad sort of thing to do. Then we would meet Maddy for a pizza, and by the end of the evening I would, I hoped, feel like a father again. They had been told about my neurological condition, though I was not confident they would understand the extent of my amnesia. But Maddy had been kind enough to tell me that they were looking forward to seeing me and her suggested arrangement was that I was to come to the house for a cup of tea and a chat and then take my children across to the Common on my own. ‘Make sure you get a good look at them before you go to the fair,’ warned Gary. ‘’Cos you’d feel a bit stupid at the Lost Children’s Tent, saying you had no idea what your kids looked like.’
I arrived at the house twenty minutes early. I walked up and down on the frosty pavement for a while until Madeleine opened the front door and shouted over to me.
‘So are you going to ring on the buzzer or what?’
‘Sorry – I was a bit early and didn’t want to … you know, like, inconvenience anyone.’
‘That’s okay – I think they’ve seen this particular episode of Friends a hundred and twelve times before.’
Without pausing, I put my hand over to pull back the catch on the gate the moment I pushed it open.
‘Hey – I just opened the gate!’
‘Well, yes …’
‘But without thinking about how to do it! It’s a subconscious memory!’ It made the place feel part of me. Madeleine was wearing a red spotty dress that had an almost humorous edge to it, but, standing at the open door, she folded her arms against the cold as I approached.
‘Kids!’ she called out. ‘Your dad’s here!’
An avalanche of enthusiasm came thundering down the stairs. The force of it hit me all at once, knocking me off balance as both children threw their arms around me and hugged me tightly.
‘Daddy!’ exclaimed little Dillie, and I stood there uncertain as to what I should do, ending up patting them a little self-consciously on the back. They smelt of washing powder and hair conditioner – my children were all fresh and new. The dog, circling this melee, barked in enthusiasm. My heart definitely remembered what my head had forgotten: I felt like I had regained a couple of limbs that I had not realized had been amputated. I would have to learn how they operated, I would need months of practice to be able to love them really properly, but it was still a miracle – Maddy and I had made these beautiful human beings together, these two separate individuals; it was the wonder of new life that struck me most powerfully.
I resolved to follow their lead and just be as natural as possible. I asked them what they’d been up to, and listened to funny stories from school, and I could sense Maddy watching me interact with them and noticed her smile a couple of times as I found the confidence to joke with them both. For all my worry in advance of this meeting, they just made it incredibly easy. They were confident and chatty – when Dillie was excited she talked faster than I had imagined was humanly possible, segueing wildly from one subject to the next in mid-sentence, and I had not yet learned that it was not even worth trying to keep up. ‘Oh-my-God-it-was-so-funny-Miss-Kerrins-told-Nadim-in-science-not-to-bring-in-his-rat-yeah-cos-like-it-always-gets-out-and-freaks-out-Jordan’s-slow-worm-oh-I-like-your-suit-is-that-new-anyway-he-put-it-in-her-handbag-on-her-desk-we-had-curry-for-lunch-today-yum-and-you-could-see-it-moving-around-in-the-bag-oh-I-got-an-A-in-Maths-by-the-way-so-he-got-sent-to-the-referral-but-he-left-his-rat-behind-with-Jordan-who-put-it-on-his-head-and-she-is-like-totally-phobic-about-rats-so-she-screamed-and-ran-out-of-the-classroom-and-it-was-so-funny-can-we-record-Friends-on-Comedy-Central-before-we-go?’
Perhaps this was why her brother spoke so little; there just weren’t enough gaps. Although it seemed he had developed the skill to extricate the important points.
‘Yeah, why are you wearing a suit, Dad?’
‘Yeah, why did you shave your beard off? Are you having a mid-life crisis?’
‘Oh, I thought I should make a bit of an effort. Fresh start and all that. Is it too much?’
‘No,’ said Maddy. ‘It looks very nice.’
I wanted to thank her, but couldn’t quite find the words.
‘Dad, you’re blushing. Why are you blushing?’
The four of us sat around the kitchen table as I drank sugary tea. The dog completed the perfect family scene, gazing longingly at us all casually eating biscuits, his head hanging in shame at the guilty thoughts going through his mind. ‘Oh, God, I feel so weak and worthless, but I cannot fight these dark desires inside me for those sweet-scented HobNobs. Oh no, now my mouth is salivating, I am disgusting, I’m sorry, I despise my own base obsession …’
‘No, Woody, stop scrounging,’ said Jamie.
‘Ah, poor Woody. Don’t tell him off in a cross voice,’ said Dillie.
I used up one of my prepared questions and asked them what they were hoping to get for Christmas. Dillie’s wish-list seem to go on for about twenty-five minutes and might have carried on indefinitely through all the different brands of make-up and trinkets from Accessorize if I hadn’t eventually cut her off and said, ‘What about you, Jamie?’
‘Dunno.’ He shrugged. ‘Money?’
‘Last year we gave a goat to an African villager,’ recalled Maddy. ‘We thought this year they might just prefer a Nintendo Wii instead.’
‘Good idea,’ I concurred. ‘Or an iPad maybe?’
‘Oh, can I have an iPad?’ sugge
sted Dillie. ‘And a goat?’
‘No, you can’t have a goat,’ I decided unilaterally. ‘Because you might take it into school and scare Miss Kerrins—’
‘What?’ said Jamie and Maddy in unison.
‘Was I the only one listening to Dillie just then?’
‘Yes,’ they both said nonchalantly.
The kids were impatient to go to the Winter Wonderland funfair but, standing in the hallway by the scorching radiator, they insisted that it wasn’t cold enough to require woolly hats and gloves. I deftly headed off an argument by suggesting I carried all their sensible insulation until they’d been outside for a few minutes, by which time they’d be begging for extra layers.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to come?’
‘No,’ said Maddy, with a half-smile. ‘You’ve got too much catching up to do to have me in the way.’
‘Well, I have a lot of catching up to do with you as well.’
Maddy raised her eyebrows as if to suggest that I was dangerously close to crossing the line. ‘See you at the pizza place at half seven.’ And the door was closed.
Inside the Hall of Mirrors I saw my distorted face smiling at the kids laughing and waving at our bizarre reflections. Jamie was stepping back and forward to change the length of his neck, and Dillie was putting her hands out and laughing as they stretched to the length of her body.
‘Of course, this might be what we actually look like,’ I ventured. ‘Maybe the mirrors we have at home are the crazy ones.’
‘No, because then our eyes would have to be wrong as well,’ pointed out Jamie, whose intelligent point was rather undermined by his forehead being longer than his legs.
‘Depends what our brain does with the info it receives. Maybe we just see everything the way we want to see it.’
In the mirror, I saw Dillie think about this for a second as she made eye contact with her distorted father.
‘Dad?’ she asked after a moment. ‘Did you really completely forget me and Jamie?’
‘Erm – well – it’s all still in there,’ I said, banging my forehead in an exaggerated comedy manner that brought a smile to her face. ‘But I just can’t find where I left everything. So at the moment I don’t remember lots of facts about you, but I haven’t forgotten how I feel about you.’ I felt excited enough to say it and it seemed important. ‘I haven’t forgotten … how much I love you.’
‘Aaaah,’ she said, touched by the sweetness of these words, while in the mirror I could see Jamie miming putting his fingers down his throat.
The only other visitors in there were an enormously fat couple who had presumably come in here to see themselves looking normal. They moved slowly from mirror to mirror without laughter or comment, remaining stony faced and utterly neutral in response to everything they saw. In contrast, Jamie and Dillie dashed about, jumping forwards and backwards, and even people walking past outside the tent must have been infected by their laughter. I stopped looking at my own distorted image and just watched my new son and daughter instead. They were so full of enthusiasm and energy, living in the moment, delighting in whatever the world offered next. They made me feel as if my lost past wasn’t important; it was right here, right now that really mattered.
‘Dad, your head has got another blob of head hovering above it.’
‘Oh yeah, I hate it when that happens. It’s so embarrassing.’
‘Urgh – look what’s happened to my body!’ shrieked Jamie.
‘That’s what I say to the mirror every morning.’
‘Aah no, Dad,’ said Dillie. ‘You’re in quite good shape. You know, for someone who’s, like, really old.’
I actually felt ten years younger today. The children’s energy and optimism was infectious, and although I still had no memory of them before my fugue, I felt a cocktail of pleasure, anxiety, responsibility and delight that I realized was how it must feel to be a parent. There was a tinge of sadness that there was no one I could excitedly call to announce the arrival of these children into my life. ‘Mum! Dad! It’s a boy! A hundred and forty pounds and three ounces! We’ve called him Jamie and he’s got blue eyes, quite a lot of hair and he’s already feeding really well. Candyfloss, mainly. Oh, and guess what? Maddy had a little girl as well! Yeah, Dillie – slightly smaller than her brother, but she’s already walking and talking. Talking quite a lot, actually.’
‘Dad can we go on the waltzer now?’
‘Sure, we’ll all go.’
The children looked unsure, and explained that I couldn’t go on rides like that because they used to make me throw up.
‘Really? Nah, that was the old Dad. You see, that’s what I was trying to say back there about our brains and preconceived ideas and everything. Maybe I used to be sick on the waltzer because that’s what my mind told my body I always did. But that expectation has been erased, and now I’ll probably really enjoy it.’
Five minutes later I staggered off the waltzer and puked up behind a generator.
‘Are you all right, Dad?’
‘Do you need a tissue?’
I was sick once more, and sat on the tow bar with my head in my hands, the sirens and the lights flashing in the dark adding to my nausea.
‘Do you want me to get you a bottle of water?’
‘No, it’s okay. Sorry,’ I groaned. ‘I’ll be all right in a minute.’
Maddy was already seated in Pizza Express when we arrived. She laughed when she saw her two kids; they had evidently prepared for dinner by seeing how much candy floss they could get stuck to their hair and faces. This response was surely a signal of approval, I thought. She could have been angry with me; a woman who was 100 per cent set on divorce would have interpreted this as evidence of my incompetence or irresponsibility. Over dinner she asked about my father, she took an interest in my return to work, she even laughed when I told her that Gary was now recording all his rows with Linda on his iPhone. ‘Honestly, what are some married couples like?’ suggested our shared laughter. ‘Why can’t they just sort it all out and get on with one another …’
The comfortable atmosphere prompted Dillie to ask if I was going to come and stay for Christmas, but Maddy took this opportunity to go to the Ladies. Her unwillingness to have this conversation in front of the children was not a good sign. Or maybe she was composing herself in the toilet right now, rehearsing the right words to suggest I move back home so that we could give the marriage another chance.
‘So, kids, let’s go out again soon. Or if your mum is busy one day, I could come round to the house and look after you.’
‘Hey yeah!’ said Dillie. ‘Or when Mum goes away after Christmas, you could come and stay instead of Granny. Please, Dad, please!!’
‘Oh, that would be wonderful. I’d love that.’
It was almost too perfect. I had somehow got myself invited to come and stay in the house, to live with them while Maddy was away.
‘So, where’s Mum going?’
‘She’s going to Venice with Ralph,’ said Dillie, as her brother shot her a look.
‘Ralph? Who’s Ralph?’
‘Durr! Ralph is Mum’s boyfriend.’
And Maddy returned to the table and took a sip of her wine.
‘Everything all right?’
Chapter 13
‘OH, VAUGHAN IS marvellous!’ said Maddy’s mother, Jean, as I carried a couple of dirty plates from the table and placed them vaguely near the dishwasher. ‘Look at that, Ron – now he’s clearing the plates. Isn’t he marvellous, Madeleine?’
‘It’s only a couple of plates, Mum. It was me who went out and bought all the food, made the stuffing and all the trimmings, set the table, made the gravy, and carved the turkey.’
‘Well, I think it’s wonderful when a man helps around the kitchen. Look at that! He’s scraping the plates into the bin. He is good.’
I said nothing, but couldn’t resist stirring things a little more by offering to make everyone coffee.
‘Oh, you are a dear. No, you sit do
wn; you’ve done enough already. I’ll make the coffee. Madeleine, can you give me a hand, dear?’
Christmas dinner had been easier than I had expected. Everyone had admired the huge steaming turkey surrounded by bacon rolls and mini-sausages; especially the dog, who hung his head in disgrace at the sinful thoughts going through his head. ‘Oh, I am so ashamed, but oh, the moist tender meat so physically close to me yet so utterly out of reach; oh, God, I’m drooling again, I can’t stop myself, the indignity of it all …’
Maddy’s mother had shown no hostility to her estranged son-in-law; on the contrary, I found my apparently abundant qualities constantly highlighted, usually when Jean’s own husband was in earshot. ‘Vaughan has brought some Christmas crackers! How thoughtful. Did you see that, Ron? Vaughan brought crackers. That’s nice, to think of contributing something.’
It might have been more honest for Jean to hold up large cards explaining the sledgehammer subtext every time she spoke. ‘What a good dad he is! Did you hear that, Ron? Vaughan took the children to the funfair the other day. They are lucky children to have him …’ That would have come with the subtitle: You never did anything with the children, Ron. Why couldn’t you have been more like Vaughan? Or, ‘Your father never helped around the house, Madeleine. You must be finding it harder now, without Vaughan here to help?’ telegraphed the message: My husband was much worse than yours, but I stuck with it. And finally: ‘Why don’t you and Vaughan bring the children to stay this summer? It’ll be lovely to have all four of you together, and I can help Ron with some of the jobs on the house that he still hasn’t started …’ This angle of attack was too unsubtle for a mere sign; it should have come with a klaxon and flashing lights, as a police negotiator shouted through a megaphone: ‘DO NOT GET DIVORCED, MADELEINE! YOUR MOTHER WASN’T ALLOWED TO GET DIVORCED, SO WHY SHOULD YOU BE?!’
The Man Who Forgot His Wife Page 13