‘What you said about how things get distorted to make people feel more comfortable, that has to be part of it. You’re right – that’s exactly how history gets rewritten.’
I was already worrying that I should have reflected upon this perilous idea before suggesting it, but Tanika’s education was going to end soon unless I could find a way of getting her engaged. ‘Anyway, have a think about it,’ I said, and she nodded blankly, put the photo away and started to head out. An eleven-year-old boy had placed his open mouth against the glass in the door and was inhaling and exhaling like a giant human slug.
‘Sir, what the other teachers do to stop them doing that is, like, spray the glass with a really disgusting cleaning fluid. Just thought you might have forgotten …’
‘Ah, thanks, Tanika. I might just try that.’
After school I sat at the computer screen in my form room, battling a fresh onslaught of emails, grimly aware that for every one that I killed off, two would pop up to replace it. I resisted the siren voices of the internet for as long as I could bear it, but after a whole minute and a half of actual work, I finally succumbed to the significant distraction of a window to everything in the whole world. Gary’s user-generated news site had an interesting main story on its front page explaining how the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had been deliberately staged as part of a white supremacist conspiracy between Buckingham Palace and the American Military-Industrial Complex to destabilize Barack Obama. Surprisingly, none of the major news outlets had yet picked up on the YouNews exclusive:
British royal family (Jews) told BP poodles to be faking oil spill for to keep blood-money of oil-dollars, yes, and not to tell how they kill Lady Di, for Obama ‘black’ president, (Africa) like Dodi, will face same fate as M. L. King, Malcolm X and Marvin Gaye – all executed, yes, by zionist CIA (true).
It made me feel marginally less guilty for having told Gary I didn’t want to resume my involvement in YouNews. He thought I had sold out; he couldn’t believe that I didn’t want to topple those evil, all-powerful, super-rich media moguls and become an all-powerful, super-rich media mogul.
I had not looked at my online Wiki-biography for a week, following a session when I had methodically reversed all the facetious edits, deleting the claims that I ‘could talk to the animals’, that I had ‘discovered France’ and had ‘a spare pancreas’. One joke in particular had played on my mind afterwards:
On 22 October, Vaughan experienced a psychogenic fugue on learning that he had won the National Lottery. The shock was so great that he suffered chronic amnesia and still doesn’t remember that he is entitled to £4 million on production of the winning ticket that he put in a very special hiding place for safekeeping.
It was clearly an inspired wind-up; I was not going to let it bother me any more. Especially now that I had looked in every hiding place imaginable.
Previously when I had deleted such yarns they had soon been replaced with new jokes, but in the time since I had last corrected the document no further changes had been made. The writers had clearly just got bored; reinventing Mr Vaughan’s life had been fun for a bit, but apparently the creative young minds had now moved on to other things. I couldn’t help but feel a little hurt.
But then I noticed a new paragraph under ‘Career’ that I had never read before. It said:
Mr Vaughan was the best teacher I ever had. When I left the sixth form to work in JD Sports he kept coming into the shop to persuade me to come back. I would never have got my A levels or gone to university if it wasn’t for Mr Vaughan.
This one comment from a former pupil utterly transformed my mood. I had been a good teacher after all, I reasoned. There had been a time when I had transformed lives. ‘Now I am manager of JD Sports,’ boasted my former pupil.
Despite the accumulating evidence and recovering memory, I still found myself regarding the negative side of Vaughan Mk 1 with a dispassionate objectivity. The marital break-up in particular was an event that had happened to another man. And the Maddy before the fugue had been a completely different person from the woman I knew now. The first was just a fictional character from some trashy half-remembered domestic drama; the other was a living, breathing woman who, despite all our problems, seemed to understand me better than I did myself. But what was so irrational about this Maddy was that she kept getting the two genres mixed up. She minded about things that had happened to her imaginary counterpart; she resented real-life Vaughan for things that fictional Vaughan had done. I was different now, she had acknowledged as much; but I was not going to be allowed to forget things I couldn’t remember.
I had found myself pondering how much my brain-wipe had altered my actual character. I suggested to Gary that this question raised all sorts of issues about the philosophical relationship between memory and experience. We were sitting in a busy pub, beside a noisy quiz machine. It was probably not the best setting for an existential debate about the influence of the conscious and subconscious on the evolution of the ego and id.
‘What I’m trying to say is, when I had completely forgotten all the events of my life, was I suddenly no longer shaped by them? Is it possible that my personality could have reverted back to my essential core nature, with the nurture starting all over again based on subsequent experiences?’
‘Well, you were shit at football before, and you’re shit at football now. So what’s that tell us?’
‘Well, I’m about average at football actually …’
‘No, you’re really shit. I mean you run like a girl, and the last goal you scored bounced in off your arse.’
I felt the philosophical discussion was drifting from the central thesis.
‘What I’m saying is: is it possible that all the character-defining experiences of my life were wiped along with the memories of them? I had a teenage cycling accident which I don’t remember. I still have the scar on my leg. But do I still have the mental scars of a failed marriage and all the other disappointments and unrealized ambitions, whatever they may have been?’
‘Being shit at football—’
‘Yes, you said.’
‘Can’t drive a car … never shagged enough girls at college … can’t hold your drink … appalling dress sense …’
‘Yeah, all right, you don’t have to list them all. I’m just saying, don’t you think this offers a unique case study in the whole “nature versus nurture” debate? Surely we don’t have to remember something to be affected by it? None of us can recall every single thing that’s happened to us, yet all of it helps shape our personalities.’
‘Nah,’ Gary said, taking a sip of his beer. ‘’Cos you were always into all that philosophical bollocks. Can I eat your crisps?’
But even Gary’s rhinoceros sensitivity was gradually being affected by the outside world. The photo on his iPhone was from the scan of his unborn child. And no moustache or sideburns from his favourite app could make the foetus look like a seventies porn star. He was actually coming to terms with the notion that we might not be an inseparable pair of radical students any more. He even had an idea about a possible girlfriend for me.
‘Do you know who I thought you ought to ask out on a date?’
‘Who?’
‘Maddy!’ he declared, as if this was the radical brainwave of a total genius. ‘Think about it. You’ve got loads in common with her already – and I’ve got a hunch you’ve still got a bit of a soft spot for her.’
‘Wow! Thanks, Gary. I’ll bear that in mind.’
Deep down, I feared that as more memories of my marriage came back, I might reacquire some of the bitterness and cynicism of my pre-fugue incarnation. I could now recall various stages of our marriage. The power struggle in our home seemed to have escalated like a small regional war. I had been insistent that the shelves above the television were the historic homeland of my vinyl LP collection, and demanded an immediate end to the provocative settlement of scented candles and framed photos in the disputed territories.
Madeleine upped the tensio
n in the region, with the infamous 10 July massacre of all the history programmes stored on the TV planner. Dozens of recorded documentaries about the Nazis that I definitely intended to watch at some point were systematically wiped out; her ethnic cleansing of the Sky Plus box had been Maddy’s final solution to end Hitler’s occupation of the recorder’s hard drive.
The general resentment meant we ended up fighting about all sorts of stupid things. ‘No, they are completely different types of songs!!’ I remembered shouting. ‘How can you possibly compare “Fernando” to “Chiquitita”?’ And the tension following any fight would continue for days, with a coded war of attrition fought on a dozen different fronts. Maddy would insist that she filled up the car with petrol, and then deliberately let the price slip to £50.01 just because she knew how much that annoyed me. Her critical appraisal of detective thrillers on the television became unreasonably sympathetic towards the deranged wife who murdered her husband. Traditional little kindnesses between us disappeared: favourite treats were no longer placed in the supermarket trolley; just a single cup of tea was made at any one time. Years earlier the news of other couples splitting up would have been recounted in the same tones as a car crash or a serious illness. Now the reporting of such events sounded more like an innocent person being let out of prison.
None of this, of course, featured in this Wiki-memoir that I had pulled together, where I had taken care to be as neutral and objective as I could be. In any case, I was uneasy about trusting my own memories of the marriage; in the narrative I had reconstructed in my mind, the unhappy ending still didn’t seem to work. I could remember the Maddy who had been my companion, my best friend, my soul mate. Was that the last stage in all those marital self-help books? Or was a bitter divorce always going to be the final chapter in this case?
Over the past months, I had spent many long hours thinking about this relationship and wanting to understand why it had fallen apart as it did. Like a detective continually mulling over the clues leading up to a crime, I had kept staring at the basic life events mapped out in front of me, wondering where the wrong turning had been taken. And then in a flash I saw what was wrong. I was only thinking about me. That was the only history I had investigated, the only perspective I had viewed. Could it be that the problem with my marriage had been the same as the shortcomings of this memoir? That I had approached it as an individual, not as one half of a pair, or one quarter of a family?
Feeling inspired by this flash of insight, I created a new document, a private one this time, and wrote the title at the top: ‘The life story of Madeleine R. Vaughan’. And then I deleted that and put in her maiden name. In no particular order, I began to recall everything I knew about her story. Her family background, her interests and, with all the objectivity I could muster, details of boyfriends before me. I took care to write as much as I could about her work. The struggle of being a professional photographer, and how she had to reinvent her work completely when the digital revolution came along. I described some of the brilliant photomontage creations that she developed once the childcare had become less exhausting. I recalled the excitement she had felt when buyers began to be interested, and the indignant fury she had sometimes expressed when she suspected me of regarding her job as less important than my own.
I attempted to chronicle our own entire relationship from her point of view. Memories I was unaware I had recovered poured out of me: of the day we had squatted our home, and how we had spent a frightened first night failing to sleep downstairs, expecting at any moment to be physically dragged out by security guards. I wrote about her pregnancy and the birth of Jamie – how she had confessed to feeling frightened before it all began and the tearful explosion of joy as she held the bruised and waxy newborn in her arms. I wrote about the time she was called up at home by a telephone salesman and she pretended to be really, really stupid. ‘Yer wha?’ she just kept grunting to every question, no matter how many times he repeated it. I pictured her being stopped by a chugger in the King’s Road, pretending to be deaf as she used rather unconvincing sign language to ask if he signed too.
My fingers were still eagerly pecking away at the keyboard two hours later. Fellow teachers, cleaners and daylight had long since drifted off; now it was just me, lit by the glow of the computer screen in the darkening classroom. Even if I did not agree with what I understood to be her analysis of my own faults and mistakes, I recorded them in this document. I was determined to see our two lives from her point of view. Finally, I brought the story right up to date. My first draft of Maddy’s pocket biography ended with her splitting up with Ralph and then grieving for her father-in-law. I had felt almost as moved writing about Madeleine’s response to my dad’s death as I had felt myself at the time.
In just a couple of hours of trying to see the world through her eyes, I felt as if I had discovered an extra hemisphere in my brain. I didn’t pretend that now I completely understood Maddy’s psyche, but at least I had found a way in.
We used to have these stupid arguments about nothing, which had driven me mad with their self-defeating illogicality. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I would finally ask, having failed to ignore Maddy’s meaningful sighs.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she would lie.
‘Well, it clearly does matter,’ I would say, with the emotional sensitivity of Mr Spock. ‘If there’s something wrong, just tell me what it is.’
‘I shouldn’t have to tell you. You should just know.’
And I would feel exasperated and aggrieved that not only was she angry but she was also immensely disappointed in me for not being a circus psychic with magical telepathic powers. But now I think I understood what she had meant. ‘I shouldn’t have to tell you. You should just know.’ It was Maddy-speak for, ‘Did you ever once stop to look at the world from my point of view?’
She had seemed so quiet after the funeral, pensive and distracted. Obviously she was upset about my dad, and splitting up with Ralph must have been distressing, but there was something else going on in her mind: she had not heard the offers of egg-and-cress sandwiches, she had not heard the elderly relations informing her that her children had grown. At one point I had caught her on her own in the kitchen and had asked her if she was all right.
‘I just don’t know what I think any more,’ had been her enigmatic reply.
‘Don’t know what you think about what?’
‘About anything,’ and I thought for a moment she might be about to put her head on my shoulder.
‘I don’t know what I think about bloody anchovies,’ boomed Gary, striding into the kitchen carrying a can of lager. ‘Sometimes I love them; sometimes I hate them.’
‘Maybe you should have married an anchovy, Gary?’ said Maddy, and I laughed, but she was already wandering back out to the reception. I didn’t get another chance to talk to her after that; there were just a few words about practical arrangements as she left. I gave the kids some money for their school ski trip and told her that I could walk the dog at the weekend if that was helpful. I had wanted to be her counsellor and confidant, but instead I was watching her car drive away while I was forced to listen to an old man in a beret explain that he had been stationed with my dad at Northolt.
‘Ah yes,’ I said, ‘my dad often spoke of you fondly.’
‘Did he?’ said the old man, seeming pleasantly surprised. ‘Oh – that’s nice to know.’
Sitting in the empty classroom on my own, I felt a deepening worry on Maddy’s behalf. Maybe I possessed an intuition that was unique to me: instinctive empathy with her acquired through two decades of marriage; perhaps it had remained hardwired within me. I glanced at the time in the corner of my computer screen and realized it was now too late to go round there and just check that she was all right. I should have rung her over the weekend, I thought; I should have gone round to see her. I could go past in the street and just see if any lights were on? No, it was a ridiculous idea. I was making something out of nothing; I was just flattering myself tha
t she needed me to talk to – she was probably completely fine. And then I shut down my computer, packed my things away and hurried out of the door.
‘Working late again, eh, Mr Vaughan?’ chuckled John and Kofi on security, before scrolling through the CCTV locations on their monitor, hoping to find a female teacher putting her clothes back on.
Even before I was close, I could see that lights were on all over our house, which struck me as quite unlike Maddy. Even the outside porch light was still glowing like a beacon. I watched the place from the street for a while, but couldn’t see her moving about inside. I could have telephoned first, but didn’t want to give her the chance not to pick up my call. Finally I climbed up the steps and hesitantly reached for the button, as if pressing it gently would make it buzz slightly less loudly. I didn’t quite understand why, but I was relieved to see some movement from the other side of the glass. She checked the peep-hole and then opened the door. But to my disappointment, it hadn’t been Maddy on the other side but her mother, looking fretful and anxious.
‘No, it’s not her!’ Jean called back into the house. ‘It’s Vaughan!’ She urgently beckoned me in. ‘I was going to ring you, dear – I was going to ring you if we didn’t hear from her this evening. It’s been two days – we’ve been worried sick …’
‘What? What is it? Where’s my wife?’
‘She’s disappeared, Vaughan. She’s completely vanished.’
Chapter 21
MY FIRST THOUGHT was that Madeleine had experienced exactly the same sort of neurological breakdown that had befallen me. That at this very moment she was wandering the streets, not knowing who she was or where she belonged. This was not such a fantastical notion: one of the early theories put to me by Dr Lewington was that I had contracted viral encephalitis – perhaps Maddy could have literally caught this amnesia virus off her ex-husband?
I remembered my own bewilderment and confusion as the strangeness of myself crept upon me and hoped that nothing so severe had befallen Maddy. She might be in a hospital somewhere labelled ‘UNKNOWN WHITE FEMALE’; she could still be trying to talk to hurrying passers-by unwilling to unplug their headphones to listen to her pleas for help.
The Man Who Forgot His Wife Page 24