The Art of Forgetting
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Authors: Julie McLaren
The Art of Forgetting
by
Julie McLaren
Copyright © Julie McLaren 2015
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photocopying or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the copyright owner of this book
With thanks to all the members of my family who have read this novel in various stages of its development and have offered support, ideas and encouragement. Thanks also to my sister, Ginny Constable, for the cover design. I’m grateful to Kath Middleton for beta reading and other members of the KUF authors’ forum for many different forms of advice.
She almost throws it away. It is in a Tesco carrier bag along with some old newspapers, a couple of empty envelopes (each with a neat square cut out of the top right-hand corner), a pair of tights and a framed photograph of Robin on the day he left to go to university, all those years ago. Laura recognises that photo, remembers the day it was taken. All the excitement of packing everything into the car and then Mum saying,
“Hold on Robin, just stand there by the gate.”
So it could very well have ended up in the recycling, but she notices the familiar neat hand and retrieves it; puts it to one side. An A4 pad, filled with pages and pages of writing.
Sighing, she picks up the next carrier bag from beside her mother’s bed. She’s been here all morning and barely made a dent in it. How could they have let it get this bad? But then her mother is a very independent woman – or at least she was, right up until recently – and has steadfastly resisted all offers of help until they felt obliged to take action. This bag contains underwear – that goes straight into the black bag by the door – Jip’s old food bowl, a handful of change, a five pound note and a broken alarm clock. That’s what makes it so difficult. Most of the bags contain rubbish or at least things she will never need again, but then you come across something valuable, like the gold chain she’d found mixed in with a stack of Christmas cards, a kitchen knife, a tangled knot of garden string and yet more newspapers.
“Laura, do you want coffee?”
It’s Kelly, calling from downstairs. She is making a start on the kitchen, a simpler task on the face of it.
“Please. I’m coming down for a bit,” Laura replies, picking up the pad from the bed. There is only so much of this you can do without a break. However hard you try to remain detached, this is their mother’s life in chaos and disarray; as if someone has picked up the house, held it aloft, given it a thorough shake and put it back down again. It feels both intrusive and wrong, going through the evidence of her decline behind her back. What had she been thinking as she filled all these bags?
Downstairs, she puts the pad on the table and picks up the mug of coffee. There is a tiger on the side of it and she remembers buying it for the children to give to her. When was that? Only a couple of years ago and she had been almost fine, laughing at her forgetfulness.
“Oh, it’s old age creeping up on me.”
But it had been more than that and no-one had guessed how soon it would be before it was no laughing matter.
“What’s that?” says Kelly, looking at the pad.
“I don’t know, but it’s full of Mum’s writing so I thought I’d better check before I threw it away,” says Laura, picking it up. “Let’s have a look.”
***
Something is happening to me; something creeping and insidious. If I’m honest, I know what it is, but I’m not ready to acknowledge it yet, certainly not to anyone else. The signs are all there, and it’s happening too quickly to put it down to the ageing process. One day this week I took Jip for a walk and couldn’t remember the way home. I had to ask someone, pretend I was a visitor to the area, but actually I was only about a mile away, just the other side of Kelston Woods. Thank God it wasn’t anyone I knew! I’ve been that way hundreds of times before, but suddenly it looked strange and different. Anonymous trees, unfamiliar paths. And then yesterday – I think it was yesterday or some other anonymous day – I met June Farraday on my way back and she called across, “Hi Judy, you’re energetic today. Two walks before lunch!” and I just laughed and blamed Jip, but honestly, I couldn’t remember taking him out earlier. That’s why I know it’s serious. It’s one thing forgetting that I was supposed to go to the dentist, or finding the car keys in the cutlery drawer, but completely forgetting taking the dog out? That’s way beyond getting a bit absent-minded, even if I do have days, sometimes several in a row, when everything seems to be fine.
That’s why I have got to write this now, so it doesn’t disappear along with my memory. I don’t know whether it is part of the same process, but events that I thought I had filed away for good have been popping up in glorious Technicolor and perfect detail recently, and I have had to think about them again, from a different aspect. What would have happened if I had told somebody at the time? Was it the right thing to do, keeping quiet all these years? Now I wonder if all the reasons I gave myself then were simply a cover for the fact that I was protecting myself. Maybe, by the time I have written it all down, I will have the answer.
I can remember when it all started. I had been working for a few months and it was a normal day in the office with Mr Jones at his desk, probably having a little doze in the afternoon sun. I had just started on a new and intensely dull technical document, but it was very badly written and I was trying to decide whether to make only the necessary amendments or re-type the whole thing. That’s when a phone rang and I saw Bob looking across at me whilst he was talking.
“Yes, she does. Do you want to speak to her? Who am I speaking to?”
He held the receiver away from him and looked at it, before putting it down with a shake of his head. A little frown creased his forehead.
“That was a bit odd. Some chap wanting to know if you worked here, but then he just put the phone down.”
I didn’t think any more about it then but later, after it was all over, I remembered and put two and two together. That was the start of it all. Of course, I was much too busy being an eighteen year old girl in London at the tail end of the Swinging Sixties to care much about an odd phone call. I could jump onto the Tube and be in Oxford Street in five minutes, and that’s what I would do, window shopping for the latest fashions and make-up, joining the ranks of other long-haired, miniskirted girls with panda eyes and pale lips. It was a scene of infinite promise, and when I remember it now it is always bright with sunshine, or glowing in the reflected lights of the window displays in the gentle after-work twilight. I’m never cold or tired or miserable and life stretches out in front of me. All I have to do is be there and everything will be fine.
Sometimes I would have a little money to spend, and I can remember buying some white, knee-length patent leather boots with Cuban heels. Looking back, they were probably plastic but I loved them and wore them right into the summer, when my feet became simply too hot to bear. My skirts were tiny and home-made, fashioned out of scraps of fabric and stitched on my mother’s sewing machine, and that didn’t go unnoticed in an office largely populated by men. But we didn’t care about that in those days. It was fine to attract a little attention.
So that was the context. We had always lived in Kent but every day, from the week after I got my A level results, I travelled up to London on the train to work in the Research and Development department of what was then the Telecoms division of the Post Office. It was still Government-owned, a bit like the civil service, and I had been lucky enough to get a junior management post as a communications officer. The work was dull – amending and updating instruction manuals and technical documents of all sorts – but everything else was exciting and I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.
My dad walked me down to the station on my first day, worried about me making the journey alone. I was protesting but secretly pleased, and he was all proud and protective and chest puffed out. To be honest, I wished then that I’d agreed to let him take me all the way, just that once. But there on the platform, wearing high-heeled, strappy sandals and a skirt even shorter than mine, was Linda. She was a girl I recognised from school, a year or two older than me. She was tall, with long, dark, wavy hair and olive skin and I would have given anything to look like her. She smiled, but didn’t look inclined to say anything. At least, not until Dad, in the most embarrassing way possible, checked that I knew her, then marched across and asked her to keep an eye on me. I could have killed him, but actually it was quite nice to sit with her on the train and listen as she chatted away. She had been doing this for three years now, having left school as soon as she could. So she was an old hand and, it seemed, only too happy to take me under her wing.
So that developed into a routine. She didn’t live in the same village as me but we met at the station every day, stood in the same place on the platform and caught the same train. I soon found out that commuters are creatures of habit and there were often familiar faces around us, reading their newspapers or catching up on their sleep. Not that we did either of those things. We had much more important things to do, like discussing our favourite bands, or who was going out with who. Then there were fashions to love or hate, models to admire and parents to moan about. Oh no, we didn’t read a word, but chatted throughout the journey, giggled, whispered, batted our mascara-caked lashes and generally behaved like a pair of silly girls. In one sense we were grown up but actually we were terribly innocent and immature – nothing like the streetwise girls of today. It felt as if the whole world was there for us, waiting to welcome us with open arms, benign and full of opportunity.
I think our school must have had some kind of link with the Post Office, as Linda worked on the postal side and, she said, there were other ex-pupils dotted about in various departments. We talked about work only occasionally though, having much more interesting things to discuss, but early on I told her about Mr Jones and how he liked to take me with him when he visited other departments.
“Judy Bakewell, you are a shameless hussy, showing off your legs to all those engineers!” Linda had said, crossing her own legs with a flourish. “And that Mr Jones, he’s a dirty old man!”
I really don’t know how long afterwards the second phone call came. I know it was a bright, crisp day, just before lunch, and I was clock-watching when my phone rang. This was actually quite unusual, as my work rarely involved speaking directly to the engineers, but I picked it up without thinking.
“R and D, Judy speaking. Can I help you?”
“Hello.”
“Hello, R and D. Can I help you?”
I thought the person at the other end must have been having trouble hearing me, as there was quite a long pause and I was about to repeat my standard response when he spoke.
“Hello. I’ve seen you on the train in the mornings and I wondered if you’d like to come out for a drink with me? Somewhere nice, in the West End if you’d like.”
What I should have done at that point was to put the phone down without saying another word and that would have been the end of it. I’m sure that’s exactly what both Laura and Kelly would do if anything like that happened to them, but I was so unprepared, so polite.
“Um, I don’t know. I don’t know who you are, and I can’t ...”
“Oh, come on, you must have seen me looking at you. I’m usually in the next compartment to you, but I try to sit where I can see you. Brown hair, medium height …? Surely you’ve seen me?”
A picture came into my mind. A man, not a boy. Not someone my age. Straight, greasy hair. Glasses. Bad skin. Yes, I’d seen him looking at me, but he was old! He must have been at least thirty. He was usually already on the train when we got on, but I had seen him move to a different seat sometimes. The trains were a different design then, with each compartment having four sets of seats facing each other and being connected to the next by a central passage. So, if you were sitting in certain seats, you could see some of the people in the next compartment and it wasn’t unusual to look up and catch somebody’s eye. Maybe this illustrates how innocent I was, but I’d never felt threatened, even when Linda told me about a friend who was lucky enough to get a seat in a crowded rush hour train, only to find herself at eye level with somebody’s exposed penis. She had been too polite to mention it and I’m not sure that I would have either.
“I’m sorry, I’m, er, I’m a bit busy. I’m babysitting tonight and tomorrow I’m ... I’m going out with a friend.”
“Well what about later in the week? Will you at least think about it?”
By that time, my face must have been as red as a tomato and I could hear my heart pounding away in my ears. I wanted this to stop, for him to go away.
“OK, I’ll think about it,” I said and put the phone down, but I was shaking and Bob noticed. Pretty soon I’d told them all about it, including the fact that he was obviously way too old for me.
“You don’t have to be young to fancy you,” said Bob with a wistful little smile, but mostly they told me what to say if he phoned again and advised me to have nothing to do with him.
“He’s a creep,” said Sandy, but there was no need for them to worry. Now I was calmer, I had no intention of ever speaking to him again and I would simply put the phone down if he called, which was unlikely in itself. He must have guessed I wasn’t interested.
By the next morning, I was almost ready to forget about it. I hadn’t told my parents as they would have panicked and Dad probably would have gone to berate him at the station. However, I told Linda about it whilst we stood on the platform. The train was late, so I had plenty of time to describe the conversation and her eyes grew wider and wider as I spoke. I may have embellished the story a little, as it was usually me listening to her with wide eyes and it was nice to be centre stage.
“Come on,” she said, grabbing my arm, “I’ve got an idea, but we need to go and sit where he can’t see you. Keep him guessing.” So we moved farther down the platform and sat in a different carriage when the train finally arrived. As the journey progressed, Linda told me about her plan.