by kendra Smith
She nodded. ‘I’ll feel better when someone has given me a few more answers. It’s so tricky playing cat and mouse with my memory.’
‘One step at a time,’ he said, slowing down and easing into a parking space.
She went to touch his sleeve, but then slid both hands under her legs and leant forward instead and looked out onto the striped yellow lines reserved for ambulances.
‘I guess so. I know that nobody said it would be easy, but nobody said I’d forget this much. I just feel so hopeless at times.’ She shrugged and felt something inside her deflate. In the old days James would have said, No you’re not. He’d prop her up, hug her maybe, they would have found something funny to laugh about in the car park, he’d have tickled her under her chin and pulled one of their funny faces, made her laugh. He certainly wasn’t going to go anywhere near her chin today.
‘We’d better go.’ James reached for the door handle.
‘James?’
He looked over at her and she noticed how wide his pupils were and she wanted to say more, she wanted them to be more, but she felt wrung out, unable to make amends from the past. Even a past she couldn’t quite remember.
‘Nothing. Let’s go.’
The consultant took off his glasses and pointed at the image on his screen.
‘Most of this looks normal, Mrs Allen.’
Most.
‘What can you tell us, Mr Anderson?’ James crossed his legs and looked over the consultant’s desk to the screen.
‘As I’ve told your wife when I first saw her, retrograde amnesia is a funny thing.’ He nodded to the screen again. Victoria could hear a voice in her head: I’m not laughing now, doctor. ‘And in your wife’s case, things seem to be following a familiar pattern.’
‘Familiar?’ James scratched his head.
‘As I explained before, she can remember all the things from a while ago – say seven years plus, but even then there will be holes, but recent memories, from just before the accident, they will be gone.’
‘Like the actual accident, doctor?’
‘Yes, I doubt you’ll remember what actually happened.’ He smiled. ‘But it might be for the best, don’t you think? These things are normally pretty traumatic.’ He looked over at Victoria.
‘I wish I could feel the same, but somehow everything seems to be hinged on that day.’
‘It’s possible that something just prior to the accident will be at the forefront in your brain, but you are associating it with the accident. And the brain is a mysterious thing. We still only know so little about it. It looks like your working memory is fine – for example, if you played chopsticks on the piano as a child, you’ll remember that. Recent memories will be the most affected. But looking at your MRI scan, I’m satisfied that things are progressing as they should.’
Chopsticks? What bloody use was playing some parlour piano song when she couldn’t even remember exchanging her marriage vows?
He leant back in his seat. ‘It will take patience, Mrs Allen. Some memories will come back, others, I’m afraid will be lost. The damage has occurred to the memory storage areas of your brain. Some people will lose maybe a year or two, others,’ he coughed, ‘decades.’ He adjusted his tie. ‘You could try looking through more photos, talking about shared memories with friends and family, find physical things which might trigger a memory, you know, significant things, or a favourite possession, ornament – he looked over and shrugged. It could be anything which sparks things off.’
‘Right. I see.’ She didn’t see at all. It just seemed that because she was living and breathing, the fact that her family were semi-strangers was just an annoying consequence of the accident; it felt as if all the consultant really wanted to know was that she was basically alright.
As if reading her mind, he pulled on his tie and said, ‘Have you tried hypnotherapy? Visualisation?’
She shook her head.
‘Right. Well, in terms of your scan, everything looks normal. You will, of course, have bouts of tiredness and any stress will make this worse.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Unless you have any more questions, then I’m afraid I need to see my next patient. I’m running a bit late.’
The sun was hidden behind some clouds when they left the hospital and the warmth she felt earlier had disappeared. She pulled her cardigan tight around her and shivered. The sky was slate grey now with pockets of blue remaining. The air was damp. They walked side by side back to the car, their footsteps in time with each other. They seemed to fit together, be two pieces of one puzzle, and she had a memory, a hazy one, of walking somewhere like this with James, the sound of the road beneath her feet, the staccato clip-clip of her shoes, James’s arm around her. The hospital, the blood, the ache in her stomach, the awful antiseptic smell. She was walking away from it, he was there, he was – what? He was squeezing her shoulders, they were in this car park, she was sure of it.
She stopped and rubbed her arms, he carried on for a few paces. ‘When we were last here, James, I mean before the accident, it was the baby, wasn’t it?’ He turned around and looked her in the eye. She saw the strain on his face, the way he tilted it to one side. She saw the man she loved weigh up what to say.
‘Yes, we were coming for the scan. And yes, it’s when we lost her – the baby.’ He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he opened them again and walked back to her and touched her arm. ‘Let’s get you home.’
The doctor said she would find it hard to locate memories, but this wasn’t just a memory, it was a wrench in the pit of the stomach, a twisty-turny emotion like seasickness, with no name, flashes of images were popping into her brain unbidden – a glittery mobile, humming as she washed baby blankets, the scent of sweet baby powder. The sun popped out again briefly from behind the grey overhead and she could feel its fleeting rays on her cheek, yet she shivered. The pink ribbon. It all made sense now. James was still standing next to her. His arms were folded. ‘Come on, it’s cold.’ And they both walked back to the car.
James slid the key in the ignition and turned towards her. ‘I know this is hard for you, Victoria – and,’ he looked up at the car ceiling briefly, ‘it’s bloody difficult for me. The wife who’s been distant, who you feel has given up, she has an accident. Then she’s,’ he shrugged, ‘different. Like time-warped back to another era, when, I don’t know, when things were different, when she loved you. And then, then pictures of half-naked men on her phone… I mean, one minute it’s going in one direction, then,’ he tapped his thumb on the steering wheel, ‘the next,’ he let out a sigh, ‘well, I really don’t know what’s going on.’
‘James, I do love you. The phone? That was a prank, a joke. Maybe not the best timing, I know. When I think back, losing the baby – I don’t know, perhaps I didn’t know what to do, perhaps I couldn’t reach anyone.’ Her eyes slid across at him. ‘Maybe I just didn’t know what to do, so I started to focus on myself which meant I stopped focusing on the pain.’ He nodded and stayed silent.
‘But James,’ she coughed, ‘you made decisions too – we both made choices.’ She closed her eyes as a wave of exhaustion flooded over her. When she opened them, he was sitting looking out in front of him, his hands in his lap. She studied the familiar shape of his mouth. How powerful his scent was as she sat next to him, inhaling every breath, and she frowned.
‘Choices,’ he muttered as she stared at the specks of dust dancing in the air around her.
‘James, I don’t want to go back to how it was before, whatever that was. It sounds awful. I seemed awful.’
‘You weren’t awful, Vicky, you—’
‘Were probably a bit lost,’ she said.
‘Yes. We both were.’ He glanced at her then and looked down at his lap.
‘James, all I know now is that I want to go back – to how we were. I may have lost some of my memory, but I never forgot you were my husband.’ Her stomach was twisting in a little dance, one of nerves, of reaching him after all the days of silences.
‘Hey, we s
houldn’t be discussing all this, the doctor said no stress.’ He brushed some invisible dust off his trousers and looked over at her.
Victoria let out a long breath. To hell with stress, this was her marriage. ‘The one thing I do know, is that right now, the woman sitting in front of you, the old Vicky, she’s sorry about what happened, the baby, the pain, the distance between us, and all she wants is her husband back, to pull funny faces with, to laugh with, to have him fold her into his arms,’ she sniffed, ‘to stop the ache at night in the pit of my stomach when I think I’ve lost you, to put the missing piece of our family jigsaw back in to make it whole again.’ She took a deep breath. ‘The old Vicky, the one right here, she really, really wants you back.’
James shifted in his seat and handed her a tissue.
‘Can we at least try again?’
‘Maybe.’
A feeling blossomed in her heart as he turned the engine on. It was as if she’d seen a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. It wasn’t a definite ‘no’, it wasn’t ‘absolutely not’, it wasn’t ‘I don’t think so’, it was ‘maybe’ and it gave her hope – a rising feeling of anticipation that her heart clung to all the way home.
39 Victoria
It wasn’t exactly easy at home, but tensions had lifted a bit and the kids were back at school. James had been away for three weeks now and it was early May. He’d told her that he just wanted some space, that it was probably a good thing for both of them. She hadn’t wanted to push it any further and was trying to live in the moment as much as she could. She and the twins had fallen into a routine of domesticity – Izzy and Jake went to school, she had time on her hands to cook or to garden, and to just spend some quiet moments with herself, at home. May had produced some beautiful sunny days. The azaleas were blooming in the garden, the wisteria was fluttering next to the kitchen windows and she was discovering that she actually liked weeding, pruning, digging over the rich soil, she loved the silence, the therapy of tending to a patch of soil and standing back and looking at her work, watching it grow. Perhaps James was right. Time on her own had been healing.
Lulu was due back in two days. She’d been at their Dad’s for nearly a month. Last time Victoria had spoken to her on the phone she sounded brighter, she said she was ready to come home and ‘face the music’ and follow her dream, whatever that meant, but Victoria hadn’t pushed her. She was just glad she was in a more positive mindset. She’d also told Victoria that she had really cut down on her drinking. Said she just didn’t need it there. That she felt happier and more positive – and that she’d agreed to some kind of counselling, but would tell Victoria more about that later. Oh, and that all her jeans were too tight because she and Dad had been ‘treating’ themselves to home baking almost every day. Victoria laughed at that bit. She was glad Lulu was looking after herself.
It was Saturday afternoon and Victoria was sitting at the kitchen table in her grey leggings covered in soil, her gardening trousers, a floppy hat and a dirty blue V-neck T-shirt. She was flicking through emails on her laptop, catching up with admin, when an email from Izzy’s school caught her eye. She had just spent two hours weeding a small patch under the lilac tree at the front of the house. Jake and Izzy were playing tennis, she could hear the thwack of the ball every now and again. It didn’t cease to amaze her that they had a tennis court still, it just seemed so unlike her, them. A tennis court built by the New Victoria – someone she very much wanted to distance herself from.
Thinking of distance, her eyes flicked to her phone to see if there were any new messages. She and James were still skating around on polite ice, there had been little more than communication on text about arrangements for the kids. The connection she had felt in the hospital car park had gone for the time being. Some texts were meant for her, where he asked if she was feeling alright. He just wanted facts, not an emotional outpouring, she could tell. There had been no more mention of the divorce. She held her breath every time a message came through in case it was about that. She could hear Jake and Izzy speaking to him almost daily; she heard laughter in the bedroom at night, listened as they joked with him as she went past the corridor, and she tried not to mind. They’d emerge later and say things like ‘Dad says hi and you need to make sure you double-lock the French doors’ or ‘Dad says don’t forget the car needs its MOT tomorrow’. Domesticity without the intimacy. But she’d take that for now.
He was due any minute to pick up some things and take the kids out. They were being very civil. But despite the civility, there had been a few tiny step-changes. She replayed them in her mind: hovering on the doorstep just a fraction longer than he normally would when he dropped off the kids, noticing that she’d had her hair cut – ‘looks great’ – her handing him homemade chutney when he last dropped the kids off from school. She felt that a piece of the twining in their relationship that had been pulled taut was being teased out a little. She jumped up, dashed upstairs to change her T-shirt, wash her hands and put on a smear of lip-gloss.
As she was coming down the stairs she could hear the car on the gravel. Registering a small flutter in her belly, she walked back into the kitchen and moved the rack of newly baked brownies to one side of the kitchen table. She heard keys in the lock – he usually knocked and waited by the door. Then suddenly he was in front of her, standing in the kitchen. ‘Hey.’
‘Hi, James.’ She forced herself not to fling her arms around him and instead clutched the edges of the kitchen counter.
‘You look different,’ he said. She tilted her head to one side and looked at him. ‘Messy,’ he lifted an eyebrow. ‘Suits you.’
She walked past him towards the kettle. He smelt slightly different – of shower gel, like limes. ‘Want coffee?’
He glanced at her and at the cafetière and nodded; his eyes scanned the kitchen. ‘Where’s the machine?’
‘Gone. To a charity shop. I expect some uptight bitch with nothing better to do than whine about coffee will have snapped it up.’
He held her eye for a split second; there was the beginnings of a smile around his lips, then he carried on rummaging through a pile of post. She came over with the coffee and two mugs. She moved the rack of warm brownies between them. He picked one up and bit into it at the same time as she did. It was gooey and warm and her best yet. She stole a look at James in his crumpled polo shirt as he wiped his mouth.
‘These are good,’ he said brushing icing sugar off his jeans.
She moved her laptop to one side. ‘Well, they’re not fat-free anyway. Can you imagine? Tell me, did you used to compliment my cooking?’
His lips twitched. ‘I did, as a matter of fact.’ He nodded to her laptop. ‘What have you been looking at?’ They had forged a small step forward, surely? He was in the house. She wanted to celebrate. In fact, what she really wanted to do was to grab his reading glasses from the top of his head, put them on upside down, make a funny face, the way she used to do, and say, ‘And now for the ten o’clock news!’ in a mock-serious voice to make him smile. Instead, she kept her hands clasped together and looked back down at the screen, then up at him.
‘A fun mini-duathlon, for the anti-bullying campaign at Izzy’s school.’
He moved the screen to read it. ‘Really?’
‘Yes. Perhaps – I was, er, maybe…’ Where was she going with this? She wasn’t really sure, but he seemed interested. ‘It might be a nice gesture for Izzy, to um, to, you know, do it,’ she blurted out before she had time to think. ‘What do you think?’
‘What, together? I think that’s the sort of thing the old Vicky would do,’ he met her gaze and bit into another brownie.
The gauntlet had been thrown down. Not only would this be good for Izzy to see, it would mean she could spend some time alone with James. Do something on his terms, duathlons were certainly not something she’d normally do, for lots of reasons. ‘The old Vicky?’ she said calmly. ‘She’s right here. Let’s do it.’
He stopped chewing mid-bite. ‘You want us to
do it? Seriously?’ he said.
She nodded.
‘Wouldn’t you, you know, chip a nail or something?’ He stared at her, deadpan.
‘I’m willing to risk it.’
His eyes darted to her quickly, then back to the brownie between his fingers. ‘OK then. What are the distances?’ he said, licking his fingers.
She pulled her laptop towards her. What had she said? Blood rushed to her ears as she started to scroll. She hated swimming, ever since the – well, it was a bit hazy. Anyway, she would worry about that later. Her stomach was flipping around as if a million butterflies were trying to escape. She put down her brownie, she suddenly wasn’t hungry. She peered at the screen. ‘It’s a 3k run in the woods round the school, followed by a two-hundred-metre swim.’ She gulped. Last time she looked, she could barely run for three minutes when she’d been chasing after Pickle. Even though the New Victoria seemed to be toned, it was more down to bendy-type Pilates classes and very upholstered gym wear. And what about her new ‘enhancements’ – how could she run with those? James would be fine – he’d won third place in the Sussex Sevens, after all, and although that was years ago, he still went to the gym, often boasting about how far he’d run on the treadmill, competing with colleagues.
Just then Izzy and Jake flew in the back door, Izzy trying to whack Jake with her tennis racket. ‘Stop it, you loser! You’re just pissed off coz I won! Hey, Dad!’ and with that she flew at James, who got up and held his arms out for her as she tumbled into an embrace with him. Vicky chewed her lip; witnessing such a tender moment, she nearly started to cry.
‘Whoa! Steady, Venus! How are you?’ he said, kissing the top of her head, then gently put some hair behind her ears. For once it hadn’t been locked into a plait and was falling about her shoulders.
‘I just won at tennis!’
‘You so cheated!’ Jake stood with his hands on his hips.
‘Sore loser.’