The Memory Book (21 page)

I’m writing in the book when Esther brings me a story book to read to her. I’ve read this book to her about a thousand times at least, and I was just writing in the memory book, the tip of the pen obediently following my thoughts – or at least I think it is. I believe it is. I think words and the pen moves, and produces patterns and swirls on the page that look familiar, and it’s comforting to assume that they mean something. Caitlin is driving to meet her father – no doubt with that little crease between her brows that she always has when she
is driving on the motorway – and I am trying not to think of her weaving in and out of the big trucks in my flimsy little heart-coloured car. Esther’s book is full of animal drawings – a big rabbit and a little rabbit. Or possibly hare, I’m not sure. But it doesn’t matter, and I don’t mind, as I haven’t lost the name for either long-eared animal, and that is a small victory. Only there are words, too, and it’s the words that I cannot decipher any more. Decipher. That’s a good word. I have the word decipher in my head, which is a long and complicated word that I know the meaning of, but this children’s book, with its large, simple symbols printed underneath the picture of Hare or Rabbit, might as well be written in Greek.

I know the words are there, and I know what they do. I’ve read this book a thousand times or more to Esther, but I cannot remember what takes place between the big rabbit (or possibly hare) and the little rabbit (possibly hare).

I panic, anxious that this will be the moment Esther finds me out: the moment when she looks at me anew, withdraws from me, and joins the ranks of people who prefer not to engage me in conversation any more.

‘Come on, Mummy,’ Esther says, wriggling impatiently. ‘Do the voices, like you usually do. The really high one and the low one, ’member?’

The pitch of her voice soars and then falls; she knows exactly how it should sound.

I look at the picture of the big rabbit and the little hare, and I try to invent something about a magical rabbit who
turned his best friend into a midget, and then … threw him at a plate in the sky. Esther laughs, but she is not satisfied; she is even a little bit cross.

‘That is not the story, is it, Mummy?’ she admonishes me. ‘Read me the proper story, with the voices, like normal! I like things to be like normal, Mummy.’

It’s those last words that crush me: Esther craving normal. Until now, Esther has been the only one who’s assumed that everything is like normal, that I am just like I’ve always been, but for the first time she is seeing that it’s not. I am failing her.

‘Will you read it to me?’ I ask her, even though she is only three and a half, and she doesn’t know how to read beyond sounding out a few letters. This is one thing we have in common.

‘Of course I will,’ Esther says confidently. ‘There is Big Rabbit and Little One … the mummy and the baby … and the baby wants some new Lego, the Dr Who kind, so when Mummy Rabbit says, ‘Ooh, I love you, Little Rabbit,’ the baby rabbit says can I have some Dr Who Lego, please, specially with a Tardis …’

As she goes on, seemingly happy to turn the story into a shopping list, I rest my chin on the top of her head and think about the things that we won’t be able to do soon, or will never do. Will I be with Esther on her first day of school? Probably not. Or if I am, I might think she is Caitlin, and wonder why her black hair is yellow, now. I won’t see her in her first school play, or take her shopping when she becomes
more interested in clothes than toys – during those rare few years when she might have listened to my opinion on what she wears and how she does her hair. I won’t see her pass her exams, or get into uni; I won’t see her wear a cap and gown, become a fighter pilot, or a ninja, or Doctor Who, which is her ultimate ambition. Not a companion – she doesn’t want to be a companion – she wants to be the Doctor. All of these things will be lost to me. Lives will play out behind my back, and I won’t know a thing about them – that’s assuming my brain hasn’t forgotten to tell my lungs to breathe by then, and I’m not already dead. Dead might be preferable: if there is heaven, and ghosts, I could watch over her, watch over all of them. I could be a guardian angel, except I still know that guardian angels are party poopers. And anyway, I don’t believe in God, which I think would stop me even getting through the application process, although I am fairly sure I could talk him round in the interview. ‘What about equal ops, God?’ I’d say.

Stop thinking. Stop this crazy roller coaster of thinking and listen; listen to Esther telling you that she wants the Hot Wheels Super Racer Shooter track, and make yourself be here in this moment, with your daughter, breathing in the milky scent of her hair, feeling her body so relaxed against you. Be in this moment.

‘We should bake a cake,’ I say. Esther stops talking and twists around in her chair, the book sliding to the floor with a plop.

‘Ooh, yes,’ she says excitedly. ‘Let’s bake a cake! What do we need? We need flour!’ She hops off my knee, dragging a chair over to the cupboards, and climbs up on to the worktop without hesitation in a bid to find flour. I go to the kitchen door and listen. Mum is hoovering again. Mum decided that I can’t be trusted with cookers, flames or gas, so if she knew we were making a cake, she’d come in here and supervise me, and then it wouldn’t be me making a cake with Esther, it would be Mum.

Closing the door softly, I think perhaps we have long enough to at least put some things in a bowl and mix them around before Mum discovers us.

‘Is this flour?’ Esther asks me, producing a pink packet of something powdery, thrusting it under my nose for inspection. I inhale, and it reminds me of fairgrounds.

‘Yes,’ I say, although I am not certain. ‘It might be.’

‘Do we weigh it?’ she says happily. ‘On the scales?’

Climbing down from the chair, she fetches a small bowl from the cupboard.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Weighing is for losers. We are going to live life on the edge.’

‘You fire the oven,’ she tells me. ‘You have to do that because you are a grown-up and ovens get hot, hot, hot!’

I turn around and stare at the appliance. I remember choosing it because it was big and showy, and looked like it belonged to a woman who knew how to cook, but I never knew how to cook, not even when I knew about flour. I have
only ever cooked Esther’s lasagne, which requires very little skill, and now even that has gone. So I look at the cooker, and while I remember that I picked it out because it looked like a cook’s cooker, I now wonder what all of the things do. I reach for something protruding out of the front and turn it around. Nothing happens, so I assume that I haven’t done any damage, and at least Esther thinks I’ve done something.

‘We need eggies,’ Esther says, going to the fridge and pulling out an array of things on to the floor, with a variety of splats and plops, until she finds a soggy cardboard box, right at the back, that is egg-shaped. She puts it on the table. It is full of smooth, beautiful-looking objects that look like they fit just perfectly in the palm of my hand. I love the eggs, because I know what they are, and because I have not forgotten them, and now they seem more perfect and more beautiful to me than they ever have before.

‘How many?’ Esther asks me.

‘All of ’em,’ I say, because although I know they are eggs, I don’t know how many there are.

‘Can I do the smashing?’

I nod, even though I don’t want to break the beautiful, round, friendly eggs. But Esther does, slamming the first one whole into what might be flour, so that the shell explodes, the clear insides oozing out between her fingers, puffs of powder rising up to greet our noses.

‘This is fun,’ she says, her fingers dripping as she reaches for the second egg, and, smash, in it goes. Esther’s laughter is
raucous, like an old man’s who smokes forty a day, rather than a little girl’s, which makes me laugh all the harder, setting her off again. Her eyes sparkle as she looks at me.

‘Again? Yes?’ Her face is a picture of such joy.

‘Yes,’ I say, gulping in air between giggles.

She reaches for the third egg, then climbs up on to the worktop, clearly with a plan in mind that she finds hilarious. Her shoulders shudder with giggles. And then she drops it from standing height into the bowl. There is a dull thud as the egg meets it fate, and a puff of white in the air, and Esther does a little dance of joy. This is a perfect moment, and I do my best to cling on to it.

‘What the …’ Mum walks into the room. ‘That’s gas,’ she says. ‘Oh, my God, you’re filling the room with gas!’

She goes to the back door and throws it open, letting a rush of cold wet air fill the kitchen, drenching mine and Esther’s fun in health and safety. Going over to the cooker, she twists the knob I’d turned in the other direction.

‘Get off there at once, young lady,’ Mum says, not giving Esther a chance to climb down, lifting her up by hooking her hands under her armpits. ‘Outside, now, the pair of you!’ She looks at the mess on the table. ‘Outside now, until it’s clear!’

She orders us out into the wet and cold, like we are a pair of errant dogs who’ve been caught chewing a favourite table leg, or something. Holding her breath, Mum goes back inside while Esther and I stand on the patio. Esther’s hands are still sticky with the innards of the eggs.

‘Is baking finished?’ Esther asks me, miserably. ‘I want it to be baking again.’

‘You mustn’t touch the cooker!’ Mum says to me when she returns with warm stuff. She hands me a jacket as she slips Esther’s on for her, holding it out so Esther can put her arms in. I stare at the garment she’s brought me. It’s not the jacket I want, and she knows that. I think she’s brought this contraption as a punishment. I like to wear a hoody now, because it is simple: I know where my head goes, and can work out where the arms go from there. And there aren’t any things to fix together, which I hate doing. I am still chasing it round and round, trying to get an arm in a hole, like a dog after its tail, when Mum steps in. She puts it on me like I am a little child, just like she did for Esther. I pout just like Esther.

‘How many times have we told you? You just can’t do things like that any more!’ Mum admonishes me.

‘I don’t know,’ I say, sullen. ‘I’ve got this short-term memory thing …’

Mum’s eyes narrow, and I can see that, this time, she is angry, really angry with me. Like the time I got very drunk in the Fifth Year, and came home from school and threw up on her bed, which she was asleep in.

‘Why not?’ Esther asks her, as Mum furiously wipes at her hands with an antibacterial hand wipe. ‘Why can’t me and Mummy do fun things?’

‘I mean,’ Mum says, ‘what if you’d lit something, or the
pilot light on the boiler went on, or there was a spark from the light switch? We all could have been killed!’

‘Killed!’ Esther looks alarmed. ‘Like deads?’

‘I didn’t do it on purpose,’ I say unhappily, as Mum puts a scarf around my neck. ‘It was fine. It was … a mistake. We were having a lovely time. I didn’t do it on purpose.’

‘No, you never do,’ Mum says. It’s her stock response, one she’s been giving me since the very first time I said I didn’t mean to spray her entire bottle of perfume on the dog, drink all of her Christmas sherry, and then need two days off school, have sex with the builder and then marry him. Only this time, I actually mean that I didn’t mean it.

She finishes buttoning up my coat. ‘Wait there,’ she says. ‘I’m going back in to make sure it’s safe.’

Esther tugs at my hand in a gesture of solidarity. ‘We were only making a cake.’

I look around for something for us to do while we are waiting – a ball, perhaps, or Esther’s little wheelie thing that she likes to whiz around on, especially downhill – and I see the back gate is slightly ajar. I’d imagined that it would be double-locked and bolted, but it isn’t: it’s actually open, revealing a slash of freedom beyond.

‘Shall we go to the park?’ I ask Esther.

‘I should think so,’ Esther says, and leads me out of the gate.

Esther knows the way to the park, even in the near dark, which it suddenly becomes, quite soon after we begin our expedition. That’s winter afternoons for you: they are over before they have begun, and suddenly the night is rolling in, pressing down. I hold her hand and let her lead me, chatting away happily as she skips along, not remotely daunted by the fact that the sun has sunk almost all the way behind the black, tightly laced horizon of trees – or that the lights of the cars whiz towards us, a procession of eyes.

Esther is excited when we stop at a crossing, and she pushes the button. ‘We wait for the green man,’ she tells me with authority.

Across the street I see a telephone box, and it seems to shine out to me like a beacon. It reminds me of a warm summer’s evening. Of going out of the house with a pocketful of twenty-pence pieces to talk to this boy I was seeing when I
was a girl. We only had one phone in the house and it was in the hallway, so if I wanted to talk in private, I had to go to the bottom of the road and make a call from the box. It became a sort of a haven for me, that little box, with the graffiti etched into the glass and the cards offering sexual favours blu-tacked to the sides. It was where I organised my life, whispered sweet nothings and had them whispered in return into my ear, pressed against that receiver like it was a sea shell and I was listening for the sea.

A while back, I stopped noticing telephone boxes – they are surplus to requirements these days – but now here is one. A thought comes to me from nowhere: it just materialises into an empty space, and underneath my tightly buttoned coat I reach into my cardigan pocket and pull out a piece of paper. Seeing it makes me remember the man in the café. The stubby pencil. The walk. Ryan. This is the piece of paper he gave to me in the café; this is the cardigan I was wearing that day, and somehow the slip of paper is still there.

‘Esther, what’s this?’ I say, handing the piece of paper to her. She squints at it under a street light that flickers on above our heads.

‘Numbers,’ Esther says. ‘Lot of them in a row. There is zero and seven and four and nine and …’ In my jeans’ pocket, there are still a few types of money. Hard, shiny, silver money – remnants of independence.