The Memory Book (17 page)

‘I love you,’ I’d said.

‘Yeah, right,’ she’d said. And then, just as I’d been about to go out of the bedroom door, she called my name. I’d stopped, but she’d just smiled at me and said, ‘I love you too, worse luck.’

After work, I arrived at her house, our house now, covered in muck and grime. She opened the door and told me I wasn’t coming in like that, so I stripped off on her doorstep – my boots, and my work trousers, even my shirt – looking her right in the eye the whole time. Claire leaned against the doorframe and watched me, with her arms crossed under her breasts, laughing, frowning and flushing this gorgeous shade of pink all at once.

I stood before her on her doorstep in my boxers, the sun on my back.

‘Good job Mrs Macksey’s privet hedge is so damned high,’ she said, looking me up and down. ‘She’d have a stroke if she could see you right now.’

She led me into the kitchen, which wasn’t exactly the room I expected to be taken to, but I followed, my hand in hers. We stood there on the tiles and she went to her handbag. I could tell she was bracing herself to tell me something, and suddenly I was certain she was going to end things. I remember thinking, what sort of person lets a man strip down to his knickers
to tell him it’s over? And that’s when she finally came out with it.

I was standing there in just my underwear when she told me I was going to be a father.

‘I went to the doctor’s today,’ she said. She looked so edgy and nervous that it worried me. I thought it might be something serious.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked her. I remember how she nodded, pressing the palm of her hand on to my bare chest. She closed her eyes for a moment, then presented me with this thin slip of paper.

‘I was a bit worried, because I’d been bleeding a little bit, just a few spots when I shouldn’t have been. And I read somewhere it could be serious, so I went to get it checked out.’

‘Oh, babe.’ I was instantly worried.

‘But it’s fine,’ she said. ‘Sort of. Look at it.’

I stared at it, this odd grainy image, and I couldn’t make sense of it for a few seconds. I wasn’t sure what she was showing me.

I must have looked confused, because she laughed.

‘Gregory,’ she said. ‘I am having your baby.’

I remember my knees going, and hearing myself gasp as I sank on to them, right there on the kitchen tiles, which I try not to bring up too much – it’s kind of embarrassing. And I remember the look on Claire’s face as she watched me. She thought I wasn’t pleased.

‘I know it wasn’t planned or expected,’ she said. ‘And it’s fine,
you don’t have to worry. You can be as much or as little a part of the baby’s life as you want. After all, I know you weren’t exactly thinking of settling down and having a family with an older woman, so …’

‘Yes,’ I said, grabbing her hand and pulling her to me. ‘Yes, that is exactly what I was thinking about, Claire. All day today, I was thinking about you. You, and that having you in my life has changed me, for the better. Before I met you I was just a … bloke. But you love me and I feel … beautiful.’

It was maybe the most stupid thing any grown man has ever said to any woman, especially when he is wearing just his underwear and kneeling on her kitchen floor, but it was the way I felt, so I thought I’d say it out loud and see how that went. I expected Claire to do the usual thing she did when I told her I loved her, and laugh it off as if it were a joke, but she didn’t. She just stood there, in the kitchen, holding my hand, and I realised she was trembling.

‘You
are
beautiful,’ she said, reaching out and touching my face. ‘I should know, you are in my kitchen in your pants.’

We stayed there for a moment, looking at each other, and then we laughed. Without having to think about it for a second more, I put my arms around her middle, and gently pressed my face against her stomach.

‘Claire, we are going to get married,’ I told her.

‘Because I’m up the duff?’ she asked me.

‘Because I love you, and our baby. And this is the best and happiest moment of my life.’

And amazingly enough, she agreed.

Whenever I look at this picture, of Esther in the womb, I remember that day, and I think it was then that I really became a man.

I watch Caitlin’s profile as she is driving. I am taking her shopping – we decided it last night, during an impromptu sleepover. Caitlin didn’t want to go back to Becky’s house to get her things, not even her iPod. She didn’t want to see Becky, at least not for the time being, and I understood that: Becky was part of her old life, and Caitlin is getting ready to embark on a new one. Even so, Mum called Becky to tell her that Caitlin was coming home, and asked her to pop a few things in the post.

So even though she barely took anything with her to London when she ran away, and I am taking her shopping; it’s still a tenuous excuse to leave the house, but I’ll take it. I am allowed out if Caitlin is with me, and it’s the next best thing to being alone. Things have been a bit better between Mum and me since I went for a walk with Ryan, and she took me to London to find Caitlin. It’s not that we suddenly understand
each other, or that everything is now OK between us, simply because we got a train and fronted up to a strip club owner, but it’s the first time in a long while that we’ve had a shared experience that I still remember. We’ve got something to talk about apart from the articles she cuts out for me from the
Daily Mail
. And we are trying to be kind to each other. She is trying her best not to be quite so in charge of me. I have even been allowed my credit card, and I know my PIN – it is the year of my birth, 1971. I am unlikely to forget the year I was born, which is why I chose it a few years ago, way before I was diagnosed, because I’d forgotten the standard issue one so many times that I was getting my card retained and cut up on almost a monthly basis. We used to laugh about it, Caitlin and I. We used to laugh about how ditzy and silly I was. How cute, I suppose. Silly Claire, never can remember her PIN, her head is so full of thoughts. Now it’s hard not to wonder if, even then, little chinks of darkness were breaking through the light, claiming little bits of me.

Caitlin yawns, just as she used to when she was a baby, her whole face stretching into a wide circle.

‘Are you tired?’ I ask her, unnecessarily, and she nods.

‘I’ve been exhausted almost since it happened, I suppose,’ she says.

I do remember that we got home after nine last night, but Esther was still up, engaged in a game of hide-and-seek with Greg. I felt odd seeing her with him: she looked so happy, so smiley, and yet I felt like he shouldn’t be looking
after her. Almost like I’d left her with a stranger. Although I know he is her father and my husband, I didn’t like the fact that she had been with him. The sense of unease and disquiet I feel, whenever I see him, grow. I read what I have written, what he has written, in the memory book, and it’s such a beautiful story. But that is exactly what it feels like to me: it feels like a story. It’s such a shame that the heroine has checked out already. Like Anna Karenina throwing herself on the railway tracks at around chapter three, or Cathy dying before Heathcliff even arrives.

Esther was overjoyed to see Caitlin, and she fell asleep in her big sister’s arms within a matter of minutes. Caitlin had carried Esther upstairs, but I’d steered Caitlin into my room and tucked her up in my bed, Esther still in her arms. Then I got in too.

‘Remember when we used to have sleepovers, you and me?’ I said.

‘You must be the only mum in the world that wakes their child up so they can come and sleep in bed with them.’ Caitlin smiled.

‘I missed you,’ I said. ‘I never got enough time with you when you were little. I was working or studying so much. There isn’t a rule book that says you can’t have a little midnight chat with your children!’

She settled down into the bed, and we put on the TV, keeping the volume low so as not to wake Esther. We didn’t talk about the pregnancy, or the boy, or the exams, or the
secrets or my illness – we only watched some terrible film until finally Caitlin drifted off too. For a long time after that, I watched my daughters sleeping – the colours from the screen playing out across their faces – feeling very calm, very peaceful.

At some point, I heard Greg stop outside the bedroom door, probably thinking about coming in, and my heart raced and every muscle in my body clenched, because I didn’t want him to. The idea of this man that I know increasingly less coming into my bedroom unnerves me. Perhaps he sensed it because, after a moment, the shadow of his feet at the bottom of the door moved away. I stayed awake a lot longer after that, though, listening, waiting. Anxious that he might come back.

When I announced that I was taking Caitlin shopping, I could see that Mum thought this was a bad idea – the woman with dementia going out alone with her fragile daughter – but still she let us go, watching Caitlin pull my car out of the drive, standing with Esther on her hip, my younger daughter still protesting loudly about being left behind.

‘How are you feeling?’ I ask Caitlin.

‘You mean, aside from tired?’ Caitlin says now. ‘Sort of better, now that it’s all out. Relieved, I suppose.’

‘Gran’s making you appointments,’ I tell her, even though I am fairly sure she knows it already. I tell people things more than once, so that I can also remind myself. Load and reload my short-term memory, like constantly filling up a bucket
with holes in it. The opposite of bailing out my brain. ‘GP tomorrow, hospital and then …’

I stop talking, and Caitlin keeps her eyes straight ahead as she pulls into the shopping centre car park. She doesn’t want to talk about the pregnancy; even though she’s decided to keep the baby, she doesn’t want to discuss it. Perhaps it’s because she thinks it’s insensitive to talk about the future, when that word has so little meaning for me. Or perhaps it is because she is so uncertain about what the future will mean to her. We have never talked about it, about the possibility that this affliction might be lying in wait for her and her children. That alone would be enough to make anyone hesitant about what may come.

‘Where shall we start?’ I ask her, determined to be cheerful, as we head into the first store. ‘Dreary Black Goth Clothes ’R’ Us? Or maybe something with a bit of colour?’

Caitlin looks around us, at rail after rail of garments, all of which I could have worn and probably did in the late 1980s – me and Rosie Simpkins, who was my best friend back then. Every Saturday we would try to buy an outfit for under a fiver. We did it nearly every week, as well, going out that night feeling like the bee’s knees, with our bits of lace tied round our wrists, trying to look like Madonna, circa ‘Like A Prayer’. Everything in this shop could have come from that era.

Funny how things change, and yet nothing changes. I look around for Rosie, wanting to show her a leopard-print shoulder-pad dress I’ve found in the sale, when I remember
that Rosie Simpkins is married now, and fat and round and happy as a clam, with about a hundred kids. Caitlin looks up at me, over her arm a seemingly endless array of leggings and large T-shirts, all of them black, everything almost identical to what is already in her wardrobe, except slightly bigger and made with Lycra.

‘I know what it’s like,’ I say to her, as she adds another T-shirt to the bundle. ‘I have been there, remember, with you? Maybe this is the time, you know? To give up the goth rock chick look and just be what you are naturally, which is exceptionally pretty. You know, as you are about to become a mother?’

She stops and looks at me for a moment, and then, taking a deep breath, walks on.

‘OK, then, fine. I’ll go there. Please, buy a nice dress for your mother, who is seriously ill. You made me say that, and you’re making me say I just want to see you in something pretty just once before I die. It’s your fault!’

I expect Caitlin to laugh, or at least smile in that way she does when I crack a joke that she knows is funny but doesn’t want to admit it. Nothing.

‘I’m not you,’ she says, pausing by a rack of peach ra-ra skirts. ‘Or then again, maybe I am you, and that makes it worse. Not because I don’t want to be you, just because …’

I follow her as she stops in front of a mirror and looks her reflection in the eye, refusing to dwell on her abdomen. Her breasts look a little bigger, but her stomach is still pretty flat;
perhaps there might be a little bump there, but if so, it’s barely visible, and yet she doesn’t want to look it.

‘Are you afraid of coping, on your own?’ I ask her. I had my mum, of course. Most of the time, I didn’t want her – most of the time, I thought she fussed too much and was controlling or cross, or sometimes just crazy – but she was always there, and I was always grateful. My mum has always been my constant fallback position, and she has never once shirked from that. Not even now, when it’s costing my mum her happy little life, her operatic society, her bridge club, that nice chap who plays piano at the am dram and takes her out every Wednesday when it’s two-for-one at the cinema. The films they’ve seen this last year, Mum and her gentleman friend. She’s become quite an expert on Tarantino. I’m sure they don’t care what they see: it’s just an excuse to hold hands in the dark. Now, though, all of that, all of the life she has built for herself away from me, is on hold, perhaps for ever. And yet still she came.

‘I’m afraid of everything,’ Caitlin says suddenly. ‘This …’ She gestures at her middle. ‘This has happened at the worst time, hasn’t it? It feels like I shouldn’t be happy about this now, but I am. I know I am, but it’s like my heart won’t tell my head that I am. My head is still freaking out about it.’

‘Of course it is,’ I say. ‘And it will take you a while to adjust to that little person. But you can be a great mum and still do whatever you want to. This isn’t the end of your life, Caitlin, it’s just the beginning …’