‘Right. So you didn’t talk about anything important?’
‘Rising sea levels are important. But no, we never really talked about the elephant in the room.’
‘What was the elephant in the room?’
‘Well, you, obviously …’
‘So you’re saying I’m an elephant?’ she said dangerously.
‘No – the subject of you was like an elephant in the room.’
‘So I’m a big fat elephant – that you can’t ignore because I’m so enormous and fat?’
I couldn’t quite understand how I found myself on the defensive. Her phone beeped again, and she read the next message at the traffic lights.
‘He says he thought you were going to hit him!’
‘What? Over a discussion on sea levels? Talk about paranoid! And as if I’d hit a man in a dressing gown!’ That detail embarrassed her, which had been my intention. ‘From which I am deducing that he’s already moved in.’
‘No! The kids were on sleepovers, so he stayed the night. They don’t know he ever stays either, so don’t say anything.’
‘Anyway, I went round there because I wanted to talk to you about something. I had another brain scan today—’
‘Okay – back to you, then.’
‘It’s important. I remembered something. The day you had the results of your test for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The thing is I had concussion that day – I had been shoved to the ground by an aggressive parent and I banged my head on the kerb. I think it might be related to my amnesia since October.’
‘Did you tell the doctor?’ She was being deliberately obtuse.
‘That’s not the point. We never slept in the same bed after that argument – but there was a medical reason for why I forgot to ask you about it, not to mention all the stress of the assault and the police and everything that I never got the chance to tell you at the time. Remember it was the final straw for you that I forgot to ask you about it?’
‘The point of that phrase is that it takes a lot of other straws as well.’
‘But the more I remember, the more I see that we didn’t need to break up. I knew that from the moment I fell in love with you back in the autumn.’
‘You didn’t fall in love with me, Vaughan. You just loved the idea of being married.’ She was cross now. ‘And now I have to put up with everyone saying, “Oh poor Vaughan – he can’t even remember his own wife!” But you always forgot your own wife – you just took your world view to its logical conclusion!’
The light had changed to green and a car behind was tooting impatiently. Maddy leaned out of the window. ‘And you can fuck off as well!’
I was knocked back by the depth of her resentment, but had one more line I had prepared and polished and was ready to detonate.
‘Have you any idea what it’s like to lose your identity? And then to find out who you were, only to have that taken away from you too?’ Frankly I was just grateful that we were no longer discussing whether or not I had called her an elephant.
‘Do I know what it’s like to lose my identity?!’ she spat in disbelief. ‘Are you serious?! Before I married you I was “Madeleine”. Not “Vaughan’s wife” or “Jamie’s mum” or “Dillie’s mum”. I existed in my own right as me. I was Maddy the photographer who earned her own money doing something she loved. But then suddenly there was no time for that and nobody wanted to talk to me about me any more. It was all, “What does your husband do?” And, “How old are your children?” or, the double-whammy, “So will your kids go to the school where your husband teaches?” So do I know what it’s like to lose my identity? Yes, I do. Every bloody wife and mother has known that since the dawn of fucking time—’
‘Maddy, you’re doing nearly seventy miles an hour in a thirty-mile zone—’
‘And now I’m doing what I want for the first time I can remember! I’m going to Venice and I’m working towards an exhibition and I drive too bloody fast when I feel like it, and I don’t have to compromise my entire existence any more.’
‘I think that speed camera just flashed twice—’
‘Yeah, well, I’ll appeal, explaining that my ex-husband was being really fucking annoying. You think because you got a bang on the head I’m going to go, “Oh, that changes everything! It was all my fault …” It’s not that simple. Didn’t all the wiped files in your brain leave enough room for you to understand that? It’s over – we are finished!’
I felt humiliated by her onslaught and clumsily tried to hurt her back.
‘Don’t try and chuck me, because I already chucked you.’
‘What? Are we thirteen years old or something?’
‘You suggested cancelling the divorce and sharing the house, but it was me who said no, so I finished with you.’
She pulled the car over to the kerb.
‘Why don’t you just get out here, before you make me run someone over? Or even better, get out here and then maybe I can run you over.’ She gestured to the passenger door.
‘Oh. But – couldn’t you at least drop me where my bike is locked up?’
‘Where’s that?’
‘At the hospital.’
It seemed that everything I said was somehow really annoying. I watched her speed off without glancing in her mirror. I stood there for a while in the winter drizzle and eventually crossed the road to catch the bus back in the opposite direction. When nothing came for ten minutes, I began to walk and soon the drizzle turned into rain. I picked a slightly broken umbrella from a litter bin. As soon as there was a small problem these days, you just threw it away and got a new one; umbrellas, computers, spouses: they were all casually disposable. But there must have been a time when a couple really valued their umbrella; when a snag or a tear was patched up and made good. Except I quickly realized that this broken umbrella was completely bloody useless and I dropped it in the next bin. Eventually I reached Chelsea Bridge with the hollow shell of Battersea Power Station towering behind me. The rain had eased slightly now, but I was so soaked that it had long ago ceased to matter. A huge rusty barge passed under the bridge and the dead drone of its engine boomed across the water.
Around my neck I could feel the dog tag that I wore in case my amnesia recurred. But so what if I lost my memory all over again? I might handle it all better second time around. This ID tag weighed a few grams but felt like a couple of kilos; it sparkled in the mirror and rubbed against my neck, a constant reminder of my broken brain. In a knowingly dramatic gesture, I pulled violently on the tag, but the chain didn’t break, it just really hurt where it dug into my skin. Having looked around to check that no one had heard my squeal of pain, I now carefully undid the little clasp, looked for a moment at the emergency contact details and then cast it down into the swirling, murky Thames. I heard no sound and saw no splash. And then I just walked on to face the rest of my life without Madeleine.
Chapter 17
‘I AM NEVER, ever, getting a mobile phone!’
‘Yeah, you say that now …’ laughs my fiancée.
‘No – I know it for a fact,’ I confirm. ‘Cell phones are for twats. Come back to me in the year 2000 and even if I’m the last man in Britain without one, I guarantee you will never catch me shouting into a handset like those wankers on trains, who probably have a flat battery anyway, but are just trying to impress everyone else in the carriage.’
‘It’s different for a woman,’ asserts Maddy. ‘I might be stuck somewhere at night and be worried about being mugged or something.’
‘Oh, right, so you make sure you have something really worth nicking ringing away in your handbag like an advertisement! Sorry, but I can wait until I find a telephone box … as Gary said when he needed the toilet.’
This conversation came back to me twenty years later as I sat in the pub with Gary taking turns to show off the stupid apps on our iPhones. ‘This one finds your location and tells you how many crack houses have been closed down in the area …’
‘Hey – that’s useful.’<
br />
‘Or there’s this one, where you can take a picture of yourself and then add moustache and sideburns to turn yourself into a seventies porn star.’
‘I really don’t know how we managed before these things came along …’
I had now officially moved out of Gary and Linda’s flat, having felt increasingly less comfortable there as the weeks passed. Linda was now visibly pregnant, which at least reassured me that she was not just a nutter with a fetish for baby products.
‘Gary, did you tell Vaughan about the new clothes I bought Baby?’
‘The baby. No.’
‘And I’ve bought a big sweatshirt that says on the bump, “Yes I am!”’
‘And on the back it says “Mental”.’
When I had popped back to leave a gift and return their keys, I found myself hovering on the step, unsure whether I should intrude on a screaming match that could be heard from the other side of the front door. Hoping it might blow over, I waited outside for a while, but eventually got so cold that I let myself in and tiptoed into the kitchen to find that there was no argument. Gary was alone, listening to an old fight on the iPod speakers while he was peeling some potatoes.
‘Hi, Gary. Listening to your Greatest Hits tape?’
‘Yeah. Fifteenth of August last year – it’s an interesting one.’
From the expensive trendy speakers, a tearful Linda shouted, ‘You never talk to me about anything! You always just go all quiet if I want to discuss things …’
‘Because this is the alternative to quiet!’ Gary’s voice shouted back. ‘You don’t mean “talk”, you mean “agree”. You don’t really want me to “talk”, as in “put alternative point of view”, you just want me to be like your friends who think it’s somehow supportive to go along with every nutty thing you say.’
‘Good come-back line, eh?’ commented Gary. ‘See, I was ready for her set-up. It’s like the presidential debates – you’ve got to have your counter-arguments rehearsed.’
‘Isn’t the point to try to avoid the arguments?’
‘No, you’ve got to have fights in a marriage. Otherwise what’s the point of being together? What is it you see tattooed on people’s fingers? “L.O.V.E.” on one hand, “H.A.T.E.” on the other. They’re two sides of the same coin.’
‘I don’t hate Maddy.’
‘You did before your brain wiped it all. You hated her because you loved her – that’s how it works.’
‘But why does it have to be “love” and “hate”? Why can’t it be “compromise” and “mutual empathy”?’
‘Tattooist would run out of fingers.’
It was a short walk to the pub – or it would have been, if we hadn’t taken the route suggested by Gary’s new ‘Barfinder App’. In my defence, when I said I would never get a mobile phone, it was before you could do so many useful things with them. Gary and I generally used our phones to text one another, email, Facebook, though for some reason we never just rang one another up.
Many weeks had passed since Maddy and I had fought in the car and I had decided to make the most of my freedom and live in one of the world’s great tourist locations at the perfect time of year. Which one was it to be: Paris in the spring, New England in the fall, or Streatham in March?
‘So what’s the High Class Hotel in Streatham like?’ said Gary, returning from the bar with a couple of pints.
‘Well, it’s very high class, obviously. Except for the fact that it spells “class” with a “K”. Oh, and “high” doesn’t bother with the last two letters either.’
‘Eye-catching …’
‘But it’s very cheap for me, because I’m the only guest who wants a room for more than half an hour. They have a sort of chambermaid pit-stop team changing the sheets after every punter all through the night.’
‘Maybe you should make the most of the convenience. It must be a while …’
‘What?’
‘Since you had sex. When was the last time?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?!’
‘Yes, I can’t remember ever having sex. The experience has been completely wiped from my brain.’
Gary almost fell off his bar stool with laughter. ‘Wow, you must have been really rubbish!’ And then he laughed some more to the point where I stopped pretending to smile in the sporting manner expected of me and just sat there waiting for him to stop.
‘Oh, my God, you know what that means, don’t you? For all intents and purposes, that makes you a virgin!’
The pub jukebox had gone quiet at exactly that moment and now various regulars looked round to see who the virgin was.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve got two kids.’
‘Makes no odds. You’re a born-again virgin. You do not know what it is like to make love to a woman. Ergo, you’re a virgo!’ Gary was clearly really enjoying this and was now tapping his phone in search of suitable singles bars and pick-up joints.
‘What are you doing?’
‘We, my friend, are going to make a night of this. We are going to make a man out of you.’
Before we left, Gary popped to the toilets and came out with a small foil square which he thrust into my hand.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a condom. Be prepared. Wasn’t that the Boy Scouts’ motto?’
‘I dunno, I never got my Casual Sex Badge …’
‘Go on, take it. You’ll thank me later. This is a once-in-a-life-time opportunity! Most men your age would love to be in your position.’
Had I not been so worn down, I might have put up more of a fight, but Gary’s certainty about the rightness of his mission made him difficult to resist. I had no intention of sleeping with some stranger on the first date, but I agreed to humour Gary and see if meeting a few other interesting and sensitive ladies might prove to be the antidote for the disastrous crush I had briefly had on Madeleine.
‘You all right, mate? You seem a bit down for a bloke who’s about to lose his virginity.’
‘Yeah – I dunno. I’m just finally coming to terms with it all. It seems like everything in my life was held up by the two tentpoles of Maddy and Vaughan.’
‘Tentpoles?’
‘Yeah – you know, I remember we had this old two-man tent which just needed two poles to hold it up. The ropes might have been pulling in all sorts of directions, but as long as both poles were there, the tent stayed up.’
‘Er, well, our tent has this big bendy rod across the top, so I don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you thinking of going camping, then?’
‘It doesn’t matter … Without Maddy’s pole, the whole tent of my life collapsed, didn’t it – family, finances, home, my ability to do my job …’
Gary thought about this for a while and finally said, ‘Well, you can probably get a replacement tentpole on eBay. But you don’t have to sleep in a tent, mate – you can always come back and stay at our place, you know.’
I thanked him for his sensitive support and understanding and told myself that, though it would take time and patience and many false starts, there must be another woman out there somewhere. I was just slightly doubtful that I would find my own Miss Right here, inside Secret Whispers, the Gentlemen’s Entertainment club to which Gary had led me. I stood on the threshold looking at the electric-blue outline of a naked lady jiggling her neon breasts.
‘I can’t go in here. What would Maddy think?’
‘Vaughan, it’s over. You said so yourself. This is just to get you in the mood. Look, they’ve got “Live Girls”!’
‘What – as opposed to dead ones? Anyway, what about Linda?’
‘She’s not going to want to come to a bloody strip joint, now is she?’
‘Just the two of you, is it?’ grunted one of the bald-headed bouncers from behind a velvet rope.
‘No, I can’t go in there. It’s … well, it’s sexist.’
‘Sexist? Where’ve you been, Vaughan? It’s not sexist any more. Didn’t y
ou see that lap-dancer talking about it on the telly? It’s empowering for the woman … to be in control of … something, something. I stopped listening to be honest because they cut away to her tits …’
‘Are you coming in or what?’ said the bouncer, dangerously.
‘Don’t you think it’s sexist?’ I asked him.
‘Of course it’s sexist, that’s the whole bloody point. Sexy girls you want to have sex with.’
I was about to explain the nuanced difference in the etymology but Gary gave me a little shake of the head.
‘But are the girls interested in the likes of me? I bought Olga flowers, I left chocolates in her dressing room, but she still goes home in the Porsche of the bastard club owner …’ The bouncer didn’t seem quite so intimidating any more, and rather than stand on the pavement consoling him, I followed Gary inside.
Fifteen minutes later we were back out on the pavement.
‘Vaughan, you bloody idiot – what were you playing at?’
‘I didn’t do anything, honest. I was just trying to be polite.’
‘First off, everyone knows you’re not supposed to touch the girls.’
‘But it seemed rude not to offer to shake hands …’
‘It’s a strip joint, not a bloody church fete. And you don’t have to ask what she does for a living – she was doing it! Jiggling her breasts in the face of out-of-town businessmen is what she does for a living!’
‘I’m sorry, I’m just not used to meeting women and I wasn’t sure of the etiquette.’
‘I can’t believe I paid all that money for you to have a private dance in a booth and you get us both thrown out!’
I had indeed gone behind a crimson curtain for an ‘intimate one-to-one encounter’ with a sweet-looking Lithuanian lady called ‘Katya’. Despite her wearing nothing but a leopard-skin thong, I had done my very best to maintain 100 per cent eye contact throughout and had found out some very interesting facts about her brothers and sisters back in the Baltic port where she had grown up.
‘So why was she crying when she came out of the booth?’
‘Well, I was just telling her about Maddy and the kids and everything. And then I mentioned my dad in hospital, and she said it was so sad, and that I was a sweet, kind man …’
The Man Who Forgot His Wife Page 19