Remember Me This Way (13 page)

‘Zach was always happy by the sea,’ I say.

My mother is humming, plucking at the bedspread with the tips of her fingers.

When Zach first moved in with me, he couldn’t believe how many knick-knacks my mother owned – the decorative wooden cockerels from Portugal, the dolls wearing Greek national costume, the pottery jugs and brass bells, the copious spider plants. It all got packed up in boxes, but there wasn’t space in her room at the Beeches. We brought only her favourite items – the plants and photos and a collection of Coalport porcelain houses, which Zach thought hideous but we always loved, growing up. My father had given one to my mother on each birthday during their married life.

They’re lined up on the shelf. I count them. Then I count them again. There are five and there should be six. One is missing. Which one? I check them off in my head. The yellow mansion is here, and the house shaped like an umbrella, the red villa and the twin cottages, encircled with roses; they’re all on the shelf. But the blue-and-white Swiss chalet, Peggy’s favourite when we were little: it’s gone. I search under the bed, in case it has fallen down, and on the shelf by the television in case it has been moved there.

‘You didn’t come for ages,’ my mother says suddenly. ‘You never visit me.’

She is watching me, chewing her lip. I sit down next to her and take her hand. I remind her that I came on Friday. I couldn’t come at the weekend, I say, because I had to go away. I start telling her about the last couple of days, or at least certain aspects: how I had been to the seaside and met a grand MP called Alan Murphy. I tell her about the house at the top of the hill, the umbrella stand made out of a poor dead fox. I try and think of as many details as I can remember. It’s the sort of story she used to enjoy.

‘I like the other girl better,’ she says when I pause for breath. ‘The pretty one.’

‘I know.’

‘I wish you would leave me alone.’

‘OK.’ I kiss the top of her head. ‘I’m going.’

‘And tell that man I don’t want him to come again either.’

‘What man?’ I say, my heart jerking, but she has set her mouth and turned to the window.

Flo, a different nurse, is on reception when I leave. She tells me my mother had ‘a little problem with regurgitation’ at breakfast and we talk about why that might be. I ask her casually if she knows anything about the missing ornament – whether it might have got broken. I don’t want to make a big deal of it. My mother’s wedding ring disappeared just before Christmas. Peggy, who was upset about it, made a fuss. The staff here felt accused – they blamed the hospital where Mum had been for a blood test – and I don’t want to dredge that up.

‘Not that I know of,’ Flo says. ‘Are you sure there were six?’

‘Maybe I got it wrong,’ I say. ‘By the way, has anyone been to visit her?’

‘Don’t think so,’ Flo says. ‘But you can check the book.’

I flick through the pages but no one has been to see her at all, except me.

I take a detour on the way home, into the web of streets behind Clapham High Street, known as the Old Town. It’s a mixed area – lovely big family houses opposite blocks of council flats, long Victorian terraces that were carved up and sold off in sections during the property boom of the 1980s, the odd row of 1950s infill semis. I park outside the big red-brick house where Zach and I discovered we must have once been neighbours. I rented a studio on the top floor, he lived in the basement, the tenant of a banker from Antwerp. We talked about passing each other unwittingly in the street. ‘How could I have kept my hands off you?’ Zach said.

From the car, I stare up at the house. Is this the sort of place he would be living now? A basement flat in an anonymous building? How would he be feeding himself? Odd jobs, maybe, here and there. Theft? I wouldn’t put it past him.

As I gaze at the brickwork, a throb sets up in my forehead. My vision swims. Black spots bloom on the insides of my eyelids. I see Zach walking across the pavement towards the car, his hand on the door, hear the clunk as it opens, sense the cold draught of air on my face. I feel the yank of his arms pulling me, his weight against my chest, his mouth moist on the crook of my neck. I can hear myself gasp. I imagine it so vividly, it’s like a crack of the heart when I open my eyes and remember I’m sitting here alone.

This is absurd, I tell myself. I get out of the car, lock the door and descend the short flight of steps to the basement. Rubbish has blown in – a dirty paper bag, a takeaway container smeared with curry sauce. I am not sure the bell will be heard above the blare of the television.
Deal or No Deal
. Noel Edmonds asking the questions. Music. Applause. An elderly man comes to the door, clutching a large, limp black-and-white cat. He looks vaguely familiar and so does the cat – though black-and-white cats often do. ‘What do you want?’ he says.

I explain that my husband once lived here, in 2001 or 2002, that he was the lodger of a Belgian banker. He had been working for a builder at the time. I am on a pilgrimage to places that had meant something to him. Would it be very rude to ask if I could spend two minutes looking around?

He fixes me with his eyes, this old man. They are a vague colour, the whites yellow with age. He juts his jaw over the cat’s head and makes a chewing movement with his gums. ‘That’s a new one,’ he says eventually. ‘I give you marks for ingenuity, but I wasn’t born yesterday.’

‘Sorry. I—’

He begins to close the door. ‘I’ve lived here since 1970,’ he says. ‘And my mum and dad lived here before that. So go and find someone else to con.’

Zach had claimed only to have lodged at this address for a few months, between working as a tour guide abroad and studying in Edinburgh. It was more than ten years ago. He could have misremembered the house number. He could have realised his mistake but seen how much pleasure the coincidence gave me and found himself unable to backtrack.

Excuses are there. Reasons. Explanations. And yet how uneasy this makes me feel. I feel unstrung, as if a thread in my past has been snipped. Small untruths – I did occasionally catch him out. Nell and Pete, for example: he told me he had invited them to the wedding, that they couldn’t come due to a family commitment. When we met for lunch, it was clear they didn’t even know we were married. I didn’t bother to worry at the time. I knew he was private. It was a small puzzle I skipped over. It was the same when I heard him tell Peggy his mother came from a family of landed gentry in Somerset. He had told me Dorset. A tiny detail – and the counties are next door to each other. I passed over it. Now I’m not sure I should have done.

On the way home, my head thick and churning, I take the wrong road and end up heading into town, snarled in traffic, unable to turn round. I get lost in the backstreet one-way system of Kennington, trying to get out. When a road takes me round to where I started, I pull into a parking space and rest my head on the steering wheel to clear it. He was concealing things, I realise, ducking and diving, even when our relationship was fresh and apparently untainted. The thought gives me the impetus I need. I’m going to catch him out. I’m going to find him, whether he wants me to or not.

When I finally let myself into the house, the phone is ringing. It is dead when I pick it up. I dial 1571, but ‘the caller withheld their number’. I clank the receiver down. I have had a lot of silent calls over the last few months. Peggy says it’s just someone in India with an urgent message regarding a non-existent insurance claim, that the wires often don’t connect. But now I don’t know. Is he checking I am in?

Without taking off my coat, I leave the house and take Howard around the block – along the road past the prison where a large white Serco van is pulling in. The car park at the garden centre a little further on is almost empty. It’s cold again, the sky heavy. The world looks bleak. I should have gone the other way – it might have contained more distractions. I walk fast and turn right on Earlsfield Road at the lights, up to the dual carriageway and down into the underpass. Four teenage boys are kicking a ball about down there, knocking it back and forth against the concrete walls. Out the other side, on the patch of common where the steam fair comes at Easter, two women with prams are drinking cups of Starbucks on a bench under a tree.

The phone in the kitchen rings again when I step through the front door, as if it has been waiting for me.

‘Lizzie Carter?’ The voice is deep and a little dissolute. You can hear red wine and late nights in the corners of it.

‘Yes.’ A nerve has started pulsing at the back of my neck.

‘Jim Ibsen.’ I catch the sharp inhalation of a cigarette.

‘Oh gosh, yes.’ I gabble nervously for a bit, thanking him for getting back to me. He says, ‘You’re all right’ several times. I know I need to get to the point, to be listening to
him
, but I am walking back and forwards across the kitchen, trying to work out what to say, what to ask.

Finally, Jim Ibsen interrupts and says, ‘I’m sorry for your loss. I heard about Zach . . .’

‘You weren’t at the funeral. I should have thought. It wasn’t much of one. You know, because of the circumstances. I never got to meet you, or many of Zach’s friends.’

‘Were you married long?’

‘Two years. Almost. Not long really, is it? There’s so much I never got to find out about him and . . .’

‘Yeah. Me and Zach, we’d kind of drifted apart.’

‘Right.’ My ears have been tuned to pick up clues of knowledge or collusion but his voice is flat and uninterested. This is a dead end. Jim Ibsen knows nothing. ‘I see.’

Another inhalation of nicotine. ‘Good to you, was he?’

‘Yes,’ I say. I sit down at the kitchen table. ‘In his own way. Yes. Yes, he was.’

‘Well, I am glad about that. Zach Hopkins. A forgotten talent. Did he carry on showing?’

I don’t like his tone – it has a mocking edge – and I feel a tug of allegiance. ‘Yes. In fact, he was doing well. In fact, I really think, at the time of his accident, he was on the cusp of something big.’

He laughs. ‘He was always on the cusp of something big. No disrespect. He had talent. But you have to compromise, and he never would. We had a nifty little business going, the two of us, casting children’s feet and hands – lot of young families in the Brighton and Hove area. It brought in some money, but he thought himself above it. He put clients off with his attitude. If he believed he could make a living with those tiny dark canvases, fair play to him. But some of us have to live in the real world.’

‘A dealer in Exeter had just taken a lot of his work,’ I say, defensively. ‘They were planning a solo exhibition at his gallery.’

‘Did it ever come off?’

‘Well . . . well no.’ After Zach’s accident, I tried unsuccessfully to track the gallery down. I never retrieved the paintings he had left there. Someone is sitting on them. Unless – of course – unless
Zach
is.

‘There you go. Same old story.’

‘OK.’ I want to get off the phone from him now, this chippy Jim Ibsen with his jaded assumptions. ‘Look. I’m trying to get in touch with an old friend of Zach’s . . . Xenia. Does the name Xenia mean anything to you?’

‘Anya?’

‘Xenia.’

‘Doesn’t ring a bell.’

‘What about Nell and Pete: do you know them?’

‘Nell and Pete. Course I do.’

‘Perhaps I could have their number?’

A silence at the other end. For a moment I think he is about to be evasive, but he’s only taking time to look them up on his phone. He reels off their contact details. I scribble them down on a corner of the newspaper, on the grey patch of brickwork behind Murphy’s yellow hat.

I decide to ring the home number. It’s only 5 p.m. They’ll still be at work. They talked a lot about their jobs, that day we met for lunch. Long hours. Creative pressure. Demanding bosses. For Pete at least, a commute. I am brave enough to ring, but cowardly enough to want to leave a message.

My plan backfires. Nell isn’t at work. She answers the home phone breathlessly, as if she had to run upstairs when she heard it ring.

I force myself not to hang up. I remember the stickiness of our goodbyes that Sunday. Pete, his eyes narrowed, gazed over Zach’s shoulder as if something fascinating in the distance had snagged his attention.

‘It’s Lizzie Carter,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry to bother you.’

‘Lizzie Carter?’ My name means nothing to her. Or she’s pretending that it doesn’t.

‘Zach’s wife?’

A heartbeat and then: ‘Oh my God, Lizzie Carter.’

‘Do you remember?’

‘Yes.’ A slight delay – recognition, but other emotions too. I can’t gauge her tone. I wish I could see her face. An eerie dizzying thought: she
does
know where he is.

She recovers quickly. ‘Of course I remember. How are you? I heard about Zach. Jim read it somewhere, and I meant to write . . .’

‘Did my sister Peggy get in touch? She was going to try to.’

‘Maybe, yes. I think perhaps she did. Pete said something . . . But we’ve been busy, what with the new house, and juggling—’

In the background, a small hiccup rising to a proper cry.

‘You’ve got a baby!’

‘Yes.’ She laughs. The crying gets louder and then stops. ‘There we go. I’m on maternity until September. It’s my second actually. Do you remember, when we met I thought I might be pregnant, well I was! But that was the first. How time flies. But anyway, Lizzie Carter,
how are you
?’

She says it a little too enthusiastically. A forced laugh, my name repeated like code, as if she is alerting someone in the room. I close my eyes. Have I struck lucky? Was my very first guess right? Is she shielding him? If so, she’s on his side. I can’t trust her.

Or am I running away with myself? Is she just embarrassed, wondering why on earth I’ve rung?

I try to talk normally. ‘I’m sorry to ring you out of the blue. You’re probably thinking, “Aghh. What does she want?” I’m on half-term from school and I’m going to be in Brighton this week. I just hoped I might be able to buy you a cup of coffee. I just . . .’
Stop saying, ‘I just’.
‘I’ve got a few questions about Zach, and I ju— I thought you might be able to answer them for me.’