Remember Me This Way Read online

  Rustling behind my head. A black-and-white cat hovering at the top of the fence, staring. It opened its mouth, pink tongue, sharp teeth. A miaow so quiet it was like a silent scream. I gestured with my arm and it scarpered, claws scraping, a thud. Adrenalin pumped as I ran across the lawn. I didn’t have long.

  Back door shut. Damn. A flickering of pique. I’d been so sure. How dare she?

  I scanned the rear of the house. A first-floor window was open a few inches at the top. By standing on the garden table, I could reach the sill with my hands and swing my legs up to a small ridge above the kitchen door. With that as leverage I could free a hand to push up at the window and it gave.

  I wriggled through on my stomach, collapsing on to the floor head first and tearing my shirt, thankfully not a Paul Smith. I used the facilities, then washed my hands – a nasty rust stain running from the tap to the plughole. Decided against drying them. None of the towels slung across the radiator was sufficiently clean. A weird contraption rested over the blue plastic bath, the sort of thing you might use for sit-ups, and a non-slip mat lay along the bottom. On the floor sat a large brown box, too big for the cupboard, containing what looked like packets of cotton wool. The smell, too, wasn’t nice: sweet and cloying, the tang of acid. No lock on the door.

  Two rooms opened out at the top of a small flight of stairs. The walls were covered in pink-and-yellow wallpaper depicting garlands of miniature flowers, and on the floor was an old-fashioned green carpet, like moss. Doubts began to grow. She had said she lived alone, hadn’t she? The first room I went into was obviously Lizzie’s – the trousers she had worn to the cinema had been thrown, inside out, onto the floor. Her best trousers. Too good for a dog walk. She must have put them on specially for me. I felt a stir of tenderness at the sight. The room itself was small and messy with clothes hanging untidily on an open metal rail. Worn shoes in tragic heaps. A Victorian fireplace housed a trailing spider plant, and books were piled on either side. A small desk with a diary and an address book neatly piled. I found details for Fred Laws, tore out the page and stuffed it in my pocket.

  By her bed, bookmarked with a kid’s drawing, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. In one alcove, a cheap white plywood chest of drawers splattered with photographs in mismatched frames. Several of the same infant – in a paddling pool, on a swing, in a highchair – her beloved nephew, I assumed. One photo of Lizzie as a teenager with another girl – her sister, by the physical resemblance. They had their rangy arms around each other, close enough for their cheeks to touch. Such ease, such love. It fascinated me. I couldn’t draw my eyes away. I almost slipped it out of its frame and stole it.

  I switched the socket off at the wall. A small trespass, but I couldn’t restrain myself.

  Her underwear was in the top drawer. Plain knickers probably bought in multipacks and a spare bra – only one – that seemed far too large for her slight frame. This was underwear that had never seen active combat. Home Guard undies.

  I was easing the drawer closed when I sensed a shift in the air. I froze – a click, the shuffle of footsteps. Downstairs. The noises were indefinite, indecisive. I hadn’t heard the door. Was Lizzie back? Or had she just let the dog in, while she did something outside? I thought about that cat on the fence, though these noises had too much weight behind them for that.

  The bedroom window was stuck fast; the drop, looking down, alarming. I moved back to the doorway and stood, listening, my eye on the bathroom door, calculating how many paces I needed to reach it, whether I could jump the short flight of stairs in one, get through the window and back across the garden without being seen.

  A creak and then another. The person, or whatever it was, was just below. If I took a step forward and looked over the bannister, I would be able to see who or what it was.

  I was aware that my teeth were gritted. I was breathing more slowly. Quiet anger. A psychiatrist, or even that CBT psychologist the other night, would have a field day. I felt a current through my veins, as if this were my house, and this interruption was trespassing on my time. Before I knew it, I had walked out on to the landing and I was taking those three, four steps down to the bathroom in large strides.

  I turned when I reached the door. A figure was in the hall, looking up at me. A blank expression in her eyes, her mouth half open. Old. Stark naked.

  She said, ‘Where’s Elizabeth?’

  ‘She’s out,’ I said conversationally. So much flesh.

  ‘Is it time for my tea now?’

  I thought for a moment and said, ‘I expect Elizabeth will make it for you when she gets back.’

  ‘What am I going to have? I want something hot.’

  ‘Well, hot is what you shall have.’

  ‘I might go down for the OAP menu at the Fox and Hounds. I can get a bus.’

  ‘What? You’re going to go out dressed like that?’ I said. ‘As my mother used to say.’

  ‘She was a decent woman, your mother. Don’t you go giving her lip.’

  I stared down at her and she stared up at me. I swallowed a laugh and said, ‘Well, cheerio,’ and opened the door to the bathroom. I closed it behind me and leaned against it. It all fell into place. The box of cotton wool: incontinence pads. The contraption over the bath: a disability aid. The smell: urine, old age, decaying skin. I clambered out on to the sill, easing the window closed behind me. I didn’t bother with the table – leaped out into the middle of the lawn. I took my time walking to the end of the garden, ambling as if the whole place belonged to me.

  The poignancy of Lizzie’s abandoned best trousers keeps coming into my head. I found Fred Laws’ details scrunched into a ball in my pocket earlier today and felt a sense of loss.

  Her number has just come up on my phone. She’s never rung me before. She’s always waited timidly for me.I wondered for a minute if she’d found me out. But I don’t see how – there’s no way of connecting me to the intruder. Not unless I return to the house and meet the mother legitimately, which I can’t do now. I’ve blown it.

  I forced myself to switch my phone to silent.

  I should let it lie, chalk it up to experience. What’s the matter with me? My mind keeps turning. I keep remembering the look on her face when she talked about the damaged children at school, how hard she tries to save them.

  I must be getting soft in my old age.

  She rang again today, and I couldn’t stop myself. I answered.

  She came straight out with it. ‘Have I done something to offend you?’

  I was taken aback, spluttered about having been busy. I felt like closing my eyes and lying down, letting her voice slip into my ears, over my body, giving myself up to it.

  ‘It’s just that until last weekend you were ringing every evening. We seemed to be getting on so well. But since the day we went to the cinema, you haven’t rung at all. And then . . . my friend Jane said she saw your profile was back up on Encounters and . . .’ She paused and then the rest came out in a rush. ‘I’ve been thinking about it and wondered if you were cross about what happened.’

  ‘What did happen?’

  ‘Me not inviting you to mine.’

  She didn’t do that thing women do when they are upset, which is pretend to be upset about something completely different, so your subsequent row is surreal and pointless. Disarmed, I said, ‘Yes, maybe I was. Hurt perhaps. I’d been longing to, I don’t know, get to know you better.’

  ‘Longing?’ There was laughter in her voice, and something sexy too.

  ‘Longing,’ I repeated. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. ‘I got the impression you didn’t want to take it any further and, being the gentleman I am, I thought I’d give you an out.’

  A short silence and then she cried: ‘I do want to take it further. I don’t want an out. I want an in . . . I just . . .’

  I tried to detach myself. ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve kept something from you.’

  And then an outpouring: how she lived with her mother, who had advanced
dementia, and how she hadn’t told me because she thought it would put me off, and that was why she was often distracted and didn’t invite me back. Her mother had been confused and incontinent for a while now, but she had also started hallucinating. She claimed there were men wandering around the house. She had abused the neighbours, shouted obscenities at them over the fence, accused the carer of destroying garden pots and spat in her face. The other day, the police had found her up at the bus stop on Trinity Road with no clothes on, fixated on the OAP menu at the Fox and Hounds. Lizzie wasn’t sure if she could carry on.

  ‘Meeting you . . .’ she said. ‘It’s just . . .’

  ‘What?’ I said again.

  A silence and then, ‘I was always the stupid one, and the not very attractive one. I never . . . I never imagined something like this might happen to me.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘A life of my own,’ she cried. ‘You’re everything that . . . and that you’re interested in me . . . I mean, bloody hell.’ She laughed again; this time I wondered if it might not be through tears.

  ‘What?’ I repeated.

  ‘What I’m trying to say is that the thought of “taking it further” makes me weak at the knees.’

  I listened to the silence that followed. For a long time, I listened.

  And then I managed to control myself. ‘Poor Lizzie.’

  I could hear her breathing hard.

  ‘I’m not surprised you aren’t coping.’

  A small gulp her end.

  I felt an enormous welling of relief. A new life could be opening, a rescue, for both of us: an end to her humdrum existence and for me, perhaps, a safe haven, a chance to start again. I was so stirred I could hardly speak. I managed to croak out the necessary. ‘Have you . . .’ I moved from tender to tentative. ‘Have you thought about a home?’

  Chapter Seven

  Lizzie

  I wrap the dead bird in newspaper and sweep up the broken glass. In the Yellow Pages I find a glazier, who is at the house within the hour. The broken pane was the original Victorian, he says, as he replaces it; rolled plate, you could tell from the imperfections. It was thin and unreinforced, would have smashed easily.

  As soon as he leaves, I sit at the kitchen table and think hard. What does Zach expect me to do now? I need to second-guess him. He had this thing about how ‘nice’ I was to other people, how passive. Does he assume I will sit back and wait? Maybe he expects me to fall apart, maybe he wants me to. Is he waiting for me to prove my love for him that way? Surely I have done enough for him over this past year. He must have seen me, out in the street, eyes red-rimmed, hair unwashed. He could have put his ear to the walls of the house and heard me wailing late at night. No, this is something different. This feels more like one of his tests.

  In the early stages of our marriage, he would ring me at work with small entreaties – a tube of particular oil paint he wanted, could I go to the art-supply shop and buy it for him? Or there was a cheque on the kitchen table that urgently needed to be banked. He’d do it himself but he was down at the studio and for once he was inspired, he didn’t want to lose his flow. Usually, these requests would come in the morning so I would sort them out in my lunch hour. But then, early one afternoon, he rang in a state. He was locked out. He’d lost his key. A painting had gone wrong. He was a useless human being. He didn’t know what to do, where to go.

  A group of students was waiting outside my door. My extra literacy class was due to start. It was pouring with rain. I told him to meet me halfway, on the bridge. I ran all the way, unnerved by the desperation in his tone, and when he wasn’t there, I ran all the way home. He had filled the house with flowers. He’d made a cake. The table was laden with treats – biscuits, chocolate. ‘Surprise!’ he said. He pulled me on to his lap and kissed the rain off my face. A long time before, I had told him about visiting a school friend when I was little and how her mother had prepared the kind of tea we never had at home, and how it had been a glimpse of a different kind of family life. He’d remembered. He always remembered things like that. I was touched. I left my students at the library door.

  What does he want from me now?

  His laptop. He must have known it was at Gulls. Why didn’t he go back and fetch it? Is there something on it he wants me to see? Is there something on it I shouldn’t see?

  I fetch the MacBook from the bedroom cupboard and plug it in at the kitchen table. Again, the screen lights up; again Zach’s name appears across the cliff scene and the cursor blinks expectantly on the password window. My finger hovers above the keys. Guilt creeps down my arms and stops me. I close the keyboard. If I came up behind him when he was writing, he would push his chair back into my knees and snap his laptop shut. He accused me of spying on him, which wasn’t true. I trusted him. I always assumed he was writing down ideas for his painting. I understood. He was sensitive to criticism; he was like a child who covers his work with his arm.

  I stare at it. He must have intended me to find it. I need to prove to him that I am looking for him. On here there could be answers, solutions. I could find out where he is, forgive and be forgiven, bring him home.

  I open it again. The box for the password flickers. What would Zach use? Something impossibly obscure? Or something achingly obvious – a double bluff?

  I move a trembling forefinger to the keyboard and, one by one, peck at the letters of his name.

  Z A C H

  Then I press ‘Enter’.

  The screen darkens and then illuminates. INCORRECT PASSWORD.

  I peck again, a little more boldly this time – both his names.

  ZACH HOPKINS.

  Again the screen flashes and the message comes: INCORRECT PASSWORD.

  I try his birthdate, and then a combination of his birthdate and his name. I try the name of the village where he grew up, then Cornwall, Stepper Point, Gulls. Nothing. With a flicker of emotion, I try Xenia.

  INCORRECT PASSWORD.

  Frustrated, I take my own laptop out of my bag.

  I Google ‘Xenia’. The screen fills with a series of websites.

  ‘Welcome to Xenia, Ohio: the home of hospitality.’ Also Xenia: an online fashion company in Australia, currently selling an ‘Ullawatu Playsuit’ for A$58. Also Xenia: an American singer who came second in the first season of The Voice.

  Google Images throws up a page of blonde women in a state of undress, which I close quickly.

  After that, for inspiration, I Google ‘pseudocide’. I find the word deep in an article about John Darwin, the ‘canoe conman’ who, after faking his own death, lived in a mocked-up bedsit in the family home, spending his own life insurance. The site lists ‘how-to’ books on the subject, including Get Lost! How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found. Notable faked deaths include John Stonehouse, ‘Lord’ Timothy Dexter, Dorothy Johnson. ‘According to an unnamed study, as many as a quarter of suicides from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in which no body could be found, could be faked.’

  I stand up and pace the kitchen. How absurd the word sounds. Pseudocide. It’s a pun. The idea is so callous and empty. When the canoe man was in the news, after he had been discovered hidden behind his plywood walls, the talk at school was how heartless he was. What sort of person would put his loved ones, his own children, through that?

  I sit down again and try to focus. If I try hard enough, perhaps I will visualise Zach in my head – work out where he is. The answer is out there. He must be somewhere. I close my eyes tight and nothing comes. There are no leads. The sea. The clifftop. The horizon.

  Where would he go? John Darwin hid in his own house, with the collusion of his wife. For a dizzying moment, before I discount it, I wonder if Zach has been here all along, slipping into the house when I am out, sleeping in my bed in the day.

  Where would he expect me to look? His parents are dead, and he swore he would never go back to the Isle of Wight. He had no friends from his childhood. There were only those, like Victoria Murphy, from whom he
had drifted apart. Edinburgh? He studied there. Brighton? Or living rough out on Dartmoor?

  I don’t know. I’ve just got this sense that he is close to me. Now.

  What do I know about his past? Less than I imagined. Both parents dead, no family to speak of. He had so few friends too. It was one of the things that concerned me over those last few months. At first, it was so new, so enticing, the feeling that I was enough for him. Once, early on, I said something about seeing more people, going out more, and he squeezed my cheeks between his hands, held my face close to his. ‘It’s what makes us special,’ he said with a ferocity that made my heart beat faster. ‘It’s you and me.’

  I told myself it was normal to cast off your friends, that it was what you did when you fell in love. Fell in love: am I allowed to say that? It’s not the sort of language of which Zach approved. He would have said it was pat. And yet – falling, the lack of control, the bodily tumble, the sense of an abyss, it’s what it felt like.

  It was only in the last few months that it began to concern me. I went for a drink after school on Jane’s birthday and he was waiting in the kitchen, in the dark, when I got home. ‘Are you bored of me?’ he said. ‘Do you want me to fuck off?’

  I told him he was being stupid. Of course I didn’t. We argued. Later, we went to bed, as we always did.

  Where would he have gone if I had then told him that I did want him to fuck off, that yes, that was what I wanted?

  Pete and Nell: they are the only people I can think of. They were his best friends at art school. He and Pete were close – the only two mature students in their year. Zach stayed with them when he first moved to Brighton.

  I met them once. Once only. Pete rang one Sunday morning when Zach was in the bath. They were up in London for the weekend – they’d been at a party in Battersea – and I invited them for lunch. It led to one of our first rows. Zach said it was thoughtless of me to arrange it without checking with him first, but I think he was just embarrassed about the house. My mother had only recently gone to the Beeches and, although he had redecorated downstairs, the first floor was tatty.