Nostalgia is my second novel, a magical-realism sci-fi drama about memories, family, addiction and the dangers of living in the past.
The story so far: Demanding answers and threatening serious consequences, Paul is taken to a rundown industrial estate: Home to Roger and Kirk’s experiment which they were working on with Paul’s Dad.
Inside, Roger unveils the machine which makes it all happen: The Locus. The machine enables the subject to revisit their memories as an invisible bystander. Paul demands to see the machine in action, and after some arguing, Paul is soon inside The Locus, revisiting his life… the better times.
After, Paul insists they continue the experiment; taking over where his Dad left off. Roger is reluctant, but knows they have come too far to stop now…
‘Come take a look at this.’
My foot taps uncontrollably on the back seat of the bus, my tense arms outstretched, gripping onto the bar of the seat in front of me. I’m wired, struggling to focus on the world as it speeds past but seeing nothing but a blur. The dragged horizon slows, its oily colours melting together.
The image reforms into a crisper resolution. I am now moving along a busy high street which resembles something from a grainy 1970's documentary. On the street corner, I see a young mother pushing a pram. Not one of those mini off-roaders that blocks every shop doorway at the shopping mall: It’s one with a big blue arch and large spoked wheels. In a glimpse that lags for seconds, the mother also appears out of time in her retro spotty dress and beehive hair-do. I lean closer to the window, watching her pass by in slow motion.
‘Come on. Look at this.’
At the Pier Diner, my sunglasses mute the daylight’s sting through the rows of flaking windows. Anthony Newley’s ‘Why’ tinkles on a distorted radio; aggressively loud and scraping against my brain. A mug of hot chocolate arrives, and the waitress asks if there’s anything else she can get me. I shake my head, unable to speak.
My head rests back, as a recent phone call plays through my thoughts. ‘This is Paul Angest. I’m feeling ill today, so I won’t be in. I’ll keep you up to date with my progress…’ Skipping work was never my thing, but there’s no way I can face anyone today.
I assure myself it’s only a migraine. It will pass. See, I’m feeling better already. I glance up at a framed embroidered quote on the wall close to my head. “The proper function of man is to live, not exist”. I’m willing to bet Jack London never visited this particular pier cafe.
My teeth ache. Or is it my ear? I tell myself I’ve been clenching my teeth and need to calm down. The pressure behind my bulging eyes is unbearable. Feels like they’re going to pop out any second.
I order myself out onto the pier. The fresh winter’s sea air will blow away the cobwebs. Then I’ll feel better.
The pier stretches out into the grey clouds and choppy waves. The summer season has long gone. At the end of the pier, I stare down into the crushing icy abyss. A familiar fog of deja-vu falls upon me, and the winter sky sifts through to a cloudless bright summer sky.
I’ve been here before.
We drove here, windows down, sunglasses on. I took a photo of Meredith in her bottle green swimming costume and sarong before she insisted on going into the water.
‘I don’t have a costume,’ I stated, voice cracking in fear that Meredith might be suggesting we go nude.
‘You don’t need to dress up for me,’ she winked. ‘You’ll dry off in no time.’ Meredith dragged me to the water’s edge.
‘Is it clean? I watched a documentary about sea pollution and—’
I was soon shoulder-high in the sea, my stiff posture wasn’t getting the message across. My disapproving tone would. ‘We didn’t bring towels.’
Meredith splashed water in my face, and I don’t see the funny side for three seconds before I splashed her back. Then she kissed me. The clear blue sky fades to rolling grey clouds of varying bleak hues, as the horizon carries a foreboding message from the future.
I detect movement out of the corner of my eye. A young woman swiftly passes by, steering my gaze. Intrigued, tread along the pier boards. The biting wind and stony grey light dissipate to a picturesque summer’s day. Rides and funfair sounds echo out to sea, as holidaymakers swarm around me from nowhere. I close in on the back of the woman, but she blends into the holidaying enraptured throngs. I can’t move for the bodies. Senses overcome, I cover my ears with my hands.
‘Come take a look at this. Paul. Paul!’
My eyes open like shutters. It takes me a few moments to realise I’m draped across my bed. A reverberating echo of Newley’s ‘Why’ fades to the intimate rasp of my rapid breathing. I hear Mick’s voice bellowing up the staircase. ‘Paul? Are you alive up there? Got something to show you. You’ll love it.’
In one of the spare rooms, Mick has installed a sprawling desk with monitors, a glowing computer tower and expensive speakers. He sits in the centre of the room in a leather chair, like the Captain of the Starship Enterprise.
‘I’m thinking we could install a sound booth in the corner. Y’know, for recording voice-overs.’
I can’t hide my confusion, nor do I want to know more. Heady with melancholy, all I can think about is how tired I am. I could murder a bowl of sugar puffs.
Mick continues. ‘This magnificent beast is the key to my future as a documentarian. I’m gonna breeze my final exam piece thanks to this. Got any idea how you switch it on?’ Mick exhales a semi-pathetic chuckle, aiming for cute.
Instantaneously, I’m in the kitchen. A jump cut from one location to another, I’ve no idea what happened in between but I am now leaning against the open fridge cramming slices of liver sausage into my mouth like there’s never going to be enough. I delve into the biscuit barrel, grabbing a handful of custard creams; wedging them into my already full mouth so much I can hardly breathe. The sound of my stuffy snorts fills my ears.
I can feel the sun on my face and a gentle breeze. My eyes open up at a cloudless sky, lowering to the craggy face of Mick, who is serenely bemused. I realise I’m slumped on a rattan chair on the patio, not looking my best.
‘Are you on the glue?’ asks Mick in a mocking tone. All I can only manage is a ‘pfff’ and a flick of my hand.
‘Food’s up. Fresh grapefruit juice. Berries. Nuts. Or shall I fetch a dirty burger, a tub of ice cream and marshmallows?’
I slur excitedly at Mick’s suggestion. ‘Food. It’s a taste of home… It’s amazing how inanimate objects can become significant because of the memories attached. Sometimes only certain food can settle the craving, like, they take on a whole new being. Licking the cake crumbs from your fingers… The smell of a freshly baked apple pie can transport you to your Nan’s kitchen in her maisonette… It can be so comforting…’
‘I’ll get the bag of marshmallows.’
I thrust myself to my feet, wobbling to a stop. ‘I need to go. Stuff to do.’
‘Don’t forget tonight. Louise and Claire,’ says Mick.
‘Who?’ I respond, without thought. Then I remember. Mick’s divorcees. ‘Oh, the two… hmmm. Yeah, no. I told you no. Don’t wanna…’
‘Mate, what else do you do? laughs Mick, half-serious. ‘Life is about making memories!’ Mick pats me on the cheek, oblivious to my apathy.
I have enough memories to be getting on with, thanks.
Kirk offers to collect the flask from my place, but I tell her I’d deliver it in person. I’m in charge, I call the shots, and all I can think about is The Locus. The thought circles my head like a catchy earworm. Kirk sends me directions, and two bus journeys later I arrive at the industrial estate with itchy, tired skin and feeling dishevelled. Thankfully the emotional fatigue has cleared, and I’m feeling high from all the sugar I consumed for breakfast.
I announce my arrival at the intercom, and I’m buzzed in without a word. I find Roger and Kirk standing expectantly in the lab. I produce the canister from my backpack, which makes the pair of them perk up.
Roger unscrews the lid, checking the contents. His mouth scrunches tightly under all the beard. ‘Where’s the rest of it?’
‘I don’t know you. Not enough yet, anyway.’
‘This isn’t building any bridges with me, either,’ says Roger, gesturing the canister at me. ‘Tell me you’ve got the rest of the samples refrigerated?’
I assure Roger that the other samples are safe, but he’s not pleased. Roger raises a finger of warning. ‘I want it all back,’ to which I reply with an immature ‘We’ll see, won’t we?’
Moments later, Kirk runs through the pre-checks and assessments.
Roger is business-like in his instruction. ‘The strongest memories surface easier. The ones that make us who we are.’
I respond with weary arrogance. ‘I know what core memories are.’
‘You may have seen ‘Inside Out’, but a brain expert you are not. You may naturally gravitate to those impactive recollections, but try to remain blank. Let the machine do the work. Don’t try to influence the thought process with any preconceived thoughts. Got it?’
Clasped into the frame, the machine guides me inside the shell, and it seals me inside. This time there is no fear or resistance. I give in to it.
In the silence of the void, I enforce a sense of peace and try not to think about anything, but just as Ray Stantz in Ghostbusters suffered his moment of weakness, my own personal Marshmallow Man pops into my mind, and the simulator runs with the suggestion.
Lemon meringue pie. The perfect slice.
As a child, I had always wanted to try it, but it wasn’t ever an option. It would have been like asking for caviar and the finest champagne. The usual suspects were a slice of arctic roll, Ice Magic (chocolate sauce which you squirted onto ice cream and waited for it to “magically” solidify), or something from the Ice Cream Man (usually a two-ball screwball, mini milk or a strawberry split.). When I turned thirteen I caught the bus into town and paced to the covered market with increasingly sweaty palms at the thought of this in-coming extravagance.
Right now, I am standing in a covered market, staring at thirteen-year-old-me in his ski-jacket (never been skiing, ever), grey marl jogging bottoms and Hi-Tec trainer boots, watching as he stutters his request for a slice of lemon meringue pie.
I follow my younger self to a clear corner of the market, where he regards the pie in his hand as a thing of immaculate beauty. Then comes the taste. His eyes are closed, in heaven. It’s better than he thought it would be. So luscious that even I can taste it. I can taste the memory of the perfect slice of pie as if the pie wants me to remember this moment forever.
The taste of the lemon curd lingers as the scene turns and angles like rotating mirrors, reflecting a new image.
I’m inside Tesco at a check-out. My Mum’s there, chatting to the cashier as the boy by her side scuffs his trainers against the floor, tired and bored. Me. I must be five or so.
I crouch down with amazement to take a closer look at my infant self. The blonde pudding bowl hair and a knitted brown and white seventies jumper… the little shoes…
‘I used to be cute…’ I smugly beam to myself, as if I had anything to do with it.
I could wrap my arms around him as he stands beside a small display of chocolate bars. All the sorts I used to love, with their familiar branding. But there’s a sense that all is not right. The boy stares at the chocolate with longing eyes. I remember this moment and feel all the rampant turmoil the boy is feeling too. Longing. Temptation. Greed.
The boy asks his Mum if he can have some chocolate and is instantly refused as his Mum doesn’t pause for breath in her conversation.
The boy sees a broken, exposed bar of chocolate. Loose pieces of deliciousness, carelessly left in the open on the shelf. He wants it. No one will know. No one sees him. He wants the chocolate, even if it’s been there for weeks. As he reaches for the broken chocolate, I feel consumed by his childish imagination which projects his future arrest and sentencing in court.
Life in prison for stealing a centimetre of broken chocolate. His Mother’s unbridled sadness and disappointment; heartbroken at her five-year-old’s crime.
At the final moment, as his little fingers make contact with the prized delicacy, he looks up at his mum. She notices what he’s doing, tugging him away from the display with a look of condemnation.
The scene swoops and shifts like a television camera searching for its subject, fixing on my Dad. He leans down with a pointed finger of judgment as he admonishes me with a sincere voice.
‘Never - NEVER - steal. You must always do the right thing, even when no one is looking. Because there is always someone looking.’
Sat face to face, Kirk records my experience, asking questions from her clipboard. ‘And how did you feel?’ I think for a second before awkwardly confessing. ‘Sinful.’
I laugh at my ridiculousness and attempt to play down the memory, but it has tarred me as if I had just attempted a stick-up at the 7-11. ‘I’ve always had a vibrant sense of self-condemnation.’
‘Have you been officially diagnosed as having ADHD?’ she asks. I shake my head, wondering where she’s going with that question.
‘How do you feel when you make a mistake?’ asks Kirk.
‘Not great. That’s why I do my best to avoid making them,’ I say. I watch Kirk for a moment as she writes in her notes. ‘How do you do it? How’d you get to be so cheery? I ask, before realising how presumptuous I’m being.
‘Ah, well… years of practice,’ says Kirk, raising her eyebrows as she continues with her notes.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like you’ve got an easy life or something. You just strike me as happy.’
Kirk clicks her pen, putting her clipboard down to address me.
‘Y’know, I read in a magazine years ago that if you revisit an event in your past, you could re-shape it. So whenever anything bad happens, I deal with it,’ says Kirk.
I frown at Kirk’s reasoning. ‘You convince yourself it didn’t happen?’
‘The more we revisit an event in our past, the more we re-shape it. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s like telling yourself a lie. Say it enough times, you believe it. Something embarrassing happens, and you convince yourself it wasn’t like that. It releases the burden. Reprogram the brain. Make a bad thing into a good thing, y’know…’
I marvel at her outlook. ‘You should go into politics.’
‘The truth sets us free, right?’ says Kirk, clicking her pen.
Whose truth, though?
Roger taps on the control room screen, gesturing at us to get on with it. We go again.
With each test, I can stay under for longer, as more memories present themselves. Random, bizarre memories - certainly not anything I’ve ever dwelt upon, but once seen I recall them like an old song not heard for an age. A flick book of childhood television shows: Bagpuss, Zippy and George from Rainbow, Hartley Hare, Trumpton, Mr Benn… their numerous distinctive theme tunes drowning each other out like an insane collision of exploding fireworks.
All the Christmas’s and family holidays return with clarity, pulling out into visions of a blue Grifter bike I received for my eighth birthday, before melting into Wayne as a nine-year-old, dangling my favourite teddy over the toilet with intent; goading me to try and snatch it back.
I then see myself resting on my elbows on my parents’ living room carpet. It must be the eighties, as I’m rubbing transfers of the A-Team onto a printed background of some bad guys’ hideout; my parents arguing out in the kitchen.
These momentary glimpses fractal and I struggle to keep up where the images are flowing.
Joy bleeds into disconcerting, awkward embarrassment, informing the next memory in the sequence. From leafing through the ladies’ underwear section of a catalogue to breaking things. A lot of things. I see a young version of myself climbing up my parents’ sideboard, reaching for a stash of Easter eggs at the top, only for the lower shelf to collapse under my weight. Next, I’m jumping up and down on my bed like it’s a trampoline, bouncing arse-first onto the mattress, shattering the bed frame.
‘Is that everything? Be honest,’ asks Kirk, as I reel off the succession of cringe-inducing incidents. Roger stands over Kirk, looking even more irritated than normal.
‘The last thing I was… I was ten or eleven, and I’d been to Our Price to buy ‘Rain or Shine’ by Five Star, and some idiots on the bus took the piss out of me all the way home.’
‘Public humiliation. That’s good,’ enthuses Kirk.
‘For you, yeah.’
Roger pinches the bridge of his nose, reeling from the boredom. ‘It’s all very interesting seeing memories of yourself as a child arguing with the kids down the road over who gets to play Luke Skywalker—’ Kirk reads from her notes. ‘He was always Princess Leia or R2.’
Roger pauses to give her a silencing side-eye. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. What use is it? We need something more.’
It’s hard not to feel hurt. ‘I can only tell you what I saw. I’m sorry if my life is so unremarkable. What did you do as a kid? Time travel experiments?’
Roger walks around the other side of the machine to hide his frustration.
‘What is it you want to see? What are you looking for from all of this?’ I ask, with good reason.
‘That’s the thing. If I knew, I’d tell you!’ exclaims Roger with an agonized smile. ‘Random results are… I can’t do anything with it.’
I counter Roger’s negativity. ‘You want the machine to mind-read. Figure out what the problem is without giving it anything to go on. I’m no expert but…’
‘Yeah that’s right, you aint…’ jeers Roger.
‘Then we need to control it somehow,’ suggests Kirk. ‘Rather than be at the mercy of whatever brain farts his mind throws up, we need to be specific. Provide some influence. Rather than no external stimuli, do the opposite.’
‘But then it’s nothing more than a series of Pavlovian responses,’ says Roger, as if Kirk is being tiresome. ‘Not to mention the risk of creating a false memory trace. We could play audio clips from Starsky and Hutch and he could convince himself he drives a red and white Gran Torino in a woolly cardigan. Or that he’d committed a murder that never happened.’
‘You don’t know what it is that you’ve created,’ I say, flatly. ‘Are you even qualified to do this?’
‘My background is in dream psychology, uh, studies on sleep paralysis, and, um, research on the psychotomimetic nature of dreams…’ blusters Kirk.
‘Get one thing straight. I’m not here to be judged by you. Your Mom is in a care home, living out her days with dementia, yeah? This machine has the potential to turn her diagnosis around. So don’t be giving me shit about not knowing what I’m doing, because I’m doing it for people like your mother. Alright?’
By now, Roger is in my face, so close I can feel his antagonized bursts of air from his nostrils.
Roger’s point sinks in. I ease off on the Star Player act and try to be useful. ‘Uh, music. They place music to my Mum to er… what did they call it… a… a memory bump. Music unlocks the memories.’
Kirk looks hopeful that Roger will go with it. I try to lighten the mood with a drowsily laid-back attempt at positive thinking.
‘Is this an experiment or what?’
In the control room, I compile a playlist of my favourite songs on Kirk’s laptop, as the scientists set up an audio feed to The Locus. I wrack my brain for important songs that sum up significant moments in my life. Christmas songs, birthdays… I try to do that sciencey thing they call “Thinking outside of the box” by adding theme tunes to old television shows. And I add ‘Take on Me’ by A-ha, because it’s my favourite song.
Roger tells me he will play thirty-second extracts of each piece of music, and then move on to the next piece.
Minutes later I’m loaded into The Locus, blood pumping with the eagerness of a dog waiting to chase the ball.
I hear the instantly recognisable theme of Blue Peter, and blurry colours pull focus into my parents’ living room. Elliot is a toddler, rolling around on the carpet in his little fantasy world. Brydie is sat centre on the sofa watching the television in the corner of the room. Blue Peter, as expected. Blue Peter presenters Janet Ellis, Simon Groom and Peter Duncan bid viewers hello, and I’m tempted to take a seat on the sofa and watch what’s coming up on the show.
I realise something is missing. Me. Young me, anyway.
It must be 1983 or so, I would be eight. The angled memory seems to point in the direction of the eyes which originally beheld it. I find my younger self out in the hallway, sitting on the stairs watching the telly through the open living room door. I look at eight-year-old me and wonder why he’s sat out there and not with his family. He looks lonely, and I can’t recall what caused him/me to be like this. One thing I do notice is his expression. It slows alters from lonely to puzzled, as if he’s trying to figure out a difficult song.
Before I can grasp what this means, the music changes to A-Ha’s ‘Take on Me’, and my surroundings drain to black and white. Everything is a pencil sketch. Morten Harket stands opposite Bunty Bailey, divided by a large portal which, depending on which side you stand, renders either side as human or a rough, sketch-out animation. I stand on one side of the portal and wave my hand up and down on the other side, amusing myself immensely. Human. Sketch. Human. Sketch.
The song changes once more. ‘Songbird’ by Fleetwood Mac.
Warmth and colour return. I’m in a candle-lit hall with tables of smiling faces directed towards the couple on the dance floor. My hands cover my mouth and my breathing is shallow, as I watch myself dance with Meredith on the evening of our wedding. Our first dance. They’re dancing close and slow, whispering things to each other; eye contact unbroken. I notice Wayne is sitting near me, knocking back a beer before moving on to the next. Brydie is chatting loudly to some relatives. Across the room, I spy Elliot at the bar… I can’t see my parents. Wayne sits at the edge of the dance floor, watching with a melancholy distance in his eyes.
None of this happened. This is a memory of a vivid dream that I had after I left Meredith.
Invisible to everyone in the room, I pace onto the dance floor, slowing as I close in on the happy couple. I stare at Meredith and how beautiful she looks. I want nothing more than to shove the married me out of the way so I can cut in.
‘Remember the first time I saw you?’ asks Meredith to the other me. The one she still loves.
‘That dinner party,’ he replies.
‘That party was so boring,’ she laughs to herself.
‘It couldn’t have been that bad,’ smiles the me that’s dancing with Meredith.
I cautiously reach out a hand to her shoulder, senses expecting to feel the lacy material of her dress. My hand flows through her without any distraction to the moment.
The vision dematerializes, and as I beg to God in a desperate desire to remain, I am wrenched from the moment. My eyes hold the image of Meredith like a photograph, which burns out to reveal Kirk’s face.
Kirk’s eyes are questioning as if she doesn’t quite believe everything she sees or hears. Some people have miserable resting faces, and I don’t know Kirk well enough yet to deduce if her awkward, suspicious smile means anything. A dreaded, sinking sensation informs me that I am outside of The Locus.
Kirk releases me from the frame, observing me with concern like she can see my aching heart on my face. ‘You alright? What did you see?’
Quickly and randomly, I make something up. I don’t tell her about the A-Ha video. And I certainly don’t mention my first dance with Meredith, at our wedding that never happened.
Knee-high boots hypnotise me as they sashay across the floor of a nightclub saturated with swirling lights. Mick’s hand is planted firmly inside the back pocket of a tall blonde woman’s tight jeans as we head for a VIP area. What I’m doing here is beyond my understanding, like a child sneaking into an adult movie they don’t want to see.
Tucked away in a large curved booth of crushed purple velvet, Mick and Claire (or is it Louise?) get along famously. I perch on the end of the sofa, swigging beer as Louise (or is it Claire?) tries to look like she’s having a great time. I avoid eye contact, glancing at the bodies down below on the dance floor. The memory of my wedding-that-never-happened lingers. I want it to be real. I want more, and the thought of not having it makes no sense to me.
‘Do you want to dance?’ I think that’s what I hear through the reverberating bass. Claire/Louise is already on her feet, hand proffered. Unable to think of an excuse, I find myself being led towards the dance floor. I scowl back at Mick, who hasn’t noticed my departure. My heart pumps as my fight or flight response kicks in.
‘I Remember’ by Deadmau5 kicks in. It still sounds new, even though it’s older than I care to remember. The woman whose name slips me unappealingly slinks onto the dance floor. I stand on the shadowy border as she beckons me on. I point to my beer bottle, drinking it in small sips.
I watch as she attempts to move seductively. As she strobes in the light, this total stranger alternates between the past and the now. I think of how Meredith used to dance. Not like this cheap attempt to impress. I hate dancing, but Meredith made me not feel like a total idiot. When she took my hand it felt alright. To block out the nightmare of this evening, I focus on the first time I saw Meredith dance, and soon our arms are around each other on the dance floor. Meredith’s hands move up to my chest before pulling me closer for a kiss. Startled, I pull away. Louise/Claire frowns back at me, not understanding my cause for concern. I raise my phone, gesturing that I need to make a call.
Escaping to the pavement outside, I loosen my tie to relieve the grip around my throat. The back of my hair is dripping with sweat, my chest tight like I can’t get enough oxygen. I double over in pain like I’ve never felt in my life, a sickness coursing through my veins. Propped against the wall of the club, the bouncer barks at me to move away.
An arm wraps around my shoulders, guiding me to safety. Mick oozes phoney humility as he compliments the doorman on the excellent job he’s doing before growling in my ear.
‘We need to have a chat. Important chat about stuff.’
“Important chat about stuff”. I repeat, mocking his choice of words.
‘Listen, you contemptible bastard. I don’t ask much of you…’
‘I… I don’t feel right.’
‘The problem is there are two gorgeous single women in there and we’re out here. Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on with you. You’ve gone to that blue place once again. You’re stuck where your wound is. You walked away, but you’ve not moved on. Don’t think I don’t know about all that old tat you buy. The books, the films… bloody VHS tapes, I mean!'
'You said it was cool, collecting old videos was cool!'
'Deliberately remembering to provoke misty-eyed sentimentalism? Who wants to go back to living on crispy pancakes and spangles? Yeah, that's cool. The spiritual path says be here now. Now is what it’s all about. It’s all any of us have got.’
‘Is that it? You forgot to say ‘if things don’t change they stay the same.’ That’s a good one, yeah—
‘Hey, sorry for being concerned. No effs given here.’
‘Good. Then you can keep them to yourself,’ I sneer.
‘Ungrateful twonk…’ mumbles Mick, before whistling for a cab. Its ear-piercing pitch makes me wince.
I try to placate Mick. ‘My experience is not your experience, alright?’
‘We’re going back to our place. They’re getting their coats, so stand up, socks up, man up, do all that. You’ve got two minutes to be normal. Go.’
I brush Mick away, gazing up at the night sky to shut out everything around me. As I lower my head, I feel someone pass by, close enough to smell their aftershave. The kind you would buy your Dad for Father’s Day when you were a kid. I turn sharply, squinting at the familiar sight. The back of my Dad’s head. I drift along in his wake, uncertain if this is a ruse. Did he even die?
It must be him, it has to be.
Weaving around drunk nightclubbers on the street, I clear the obstruction to find nothing but an empty expanse of pavement.
‘Louise, let me show you around the house…’
Perched at Mick’s faux-Hawaiian-themed Tiki Hut in the back garden, I watch Mick escort Louise inside the house. At least I now know which one is Claire. I look at her, smiling awkwardly as my twitchy fingers pick at the beer bottle label. The J. Geils Band ‘Centerfold’ booms from inside the house. Outside the house it’s loud, inside the house it must be deafening. Mick has changed gears -his ‘showing off the technology’ phase, which always segues into ‘drowning out whatever is going to happen next’ phase. Tired of this charade, I ask a question without a hint of interest. ‘So… Do you get on well with your ex?’
‘We don’t communicate on a human level. Not even eye contact. Divorced three years ago. You?’ asks Claire.
The words would spill from me if my head was to tilt forwards a millimetre. I met Meredith Venner at a mutual friend’s dinner party. At that time we both worked for universities (I still do; Meredith is now an IT software consultant). We both loved 80’s movies and were big fans of A-Ha. Our age difference - Meredith was 27 and I was 35 - was a constant source of amusement to those who knew me and I’m pretty certain those close to Meredith viewed me as a cradle snatcher. Neither of us had the most dazzling of dating track records, due to Meredith’s bad luck at falling in with control freaks and my inability to put up with anyone in general. Or was it the other way round?
We shared the same sensibilities: politics, humour, laughing at politicians and were both tired of living up to other people’s expectations. She was down to earth, normal, but not like anyone else I’d known. We laughed at the same stuff. On our first date, I got ‘pecan’ muddled up with ‘toucan’, which led to lots of jokes about ‘Toucan pie being a bit beaky.’ (You probably had to be there.) We just liked being with each other, enough for me to propose and for her to say yes.
So why didn’t we marry? It’s a question I frequently ask myself and have no answer for. We had plans for the future (we were going to buy a house and move in together)… I don’t know why it ended. Well, it ended because we fell into constantly aggravating each other and bickering like an old married couple. Silly spats about putting things back in the wrong cupboard would spiral into reeling off lists of past grievances. But then again my parents took annoying each other to an Olympic standard, and they stayed married 'til the end.
Instead of expressing what’s on my heart, I tell Claire the short version. Less boring for her, and she would care as much as I care about her being divorced.
‘I don’t see her anymore. We weren’t married. I think…’
‘You don’t know if you were married?’
‘No, I know I wasn’t. Of course I wasn’t. What I mean is… do you ever think back and wonder… was it just a dream?’
Claire answers uncertain at first, then with assurance ‘No. No, I’m certain my husband was a cheating pig. He lied and lied and ruined my life. So not a dream, no. Just a joke.’
I apologise for my flowery thinking. Claire tells me not to, even though she’s unable to look at me, pitiful specimen that I am.
‘Uh… anyway…’
Claire cuts me off, aggressively enquiring if I’m going to bed with her or what. Before I can get into excuses, the glare of Claire brings this chapter to a close. She grabs a bottle of chardonnay and wobbles off inside the house. Once I’m sure the coast is clear, I retreat to my room.
Bedside lamp on, photo album in my hands, I pass over family photos and memories from long ago. Family Christmas parties, day trips to the zoo, summer holidays in Newquay. The smell of chips complimenting the sea air. The sickly sweet scent of candy floss. People that I once loved who are no longer in my life. People I wish I could have done more for, or loved more, vice-versa...
In my emotionally exhausted state, I could swear the images in the book are moving. My fingers pass beyond the photographs, stroking the pudding bowl-shaped blonde hair of that boy lost to time.
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