The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of pages and is available in Hardcover format. I had sleepless nights reading this. A spark of electricity. Suddenly I was not sitting in a bedroom with a blank page in front of me but somewhere else. Back in the past — a past I thought I had lost — and I could touch and feel and taste everything. I realized I was remembering.
I saw myself coming home, to the house I grew up in. I am thirteen or fourteen, eager to get on with a story I am writing, but I find a note on the kitchen table.
Uncle Ted will pick you up at six. I get a drink and a sandwich and sit down with my notebook. Mrs Royce has said that my stories are strong and moving; she thinks I could turn them into a career.
I seethe in silent fury. It is their fault. Where are they? What are they doing? I screw up the paper and throw it away. The image vanished, but straight away there was another. More real. My father is driving us home. I am sitting in the back of the car, staring at a fixed spot on the windscreen.
A dead fly. A piece of grit. I speak, not sure what I am going to say. When were you going to tell me? Will you die? Of course not. With lots and lots of grandchildren! I opened my eyes. The vision had ended, was gone. I sat in a bedroom, the bedroom I had woken up in this morning, yet for a moment it looked different. Completely flat. Devoid of energy, as if I was looking at a photograph that had faded in the sun. It was as if the vibrancy of the past had leached all the life from the present.
I looked down at the book in my hand. The pen had slipped from my fingers, marking the page with a thin blue line as it slid to the floor. My heart raced in my chest. I had remembered something. Something huge, important. It was not lost. I picked the pen off the floor and started writing this. I will finish there. When I close my eyes and try to will the image back, I can. My parents. Driving home.
It is still there. Less vivid, as if it has faded with time, but still there. Even so, I am glad I have written it down. I know that eventually it will disappear. At least now it is not completely lost. Ben must have finished his paper.
He has called upstairs, asked if I am ready to go out. I told him I was. I will hide this book in the wardrobe, find a jacket and some boots.
I will write more later. If I remember. That was written hours ago. We have been out all afternoon but are back at home now. Ben is in the kitchen, cooking fish for our dinner. He has the radio on and the sound of jazz drifts up to the bedroom where I sit, writing this.
If I write quickly I should have time. We did not go far, and parked the car by a low, squat building. It looked abandoned; a single grey pigeon sat in each of the boarded windows and the door was hidden with corrugated iron.
Shall we walk? I thought of my father, of his death and the fact that I had remembered a little of it at least. A lone jogger padded around a running track and I watched her for a while before the path took us beyond a tall hedge and up towards the top of the hill. There I could see life; a little boy flew a kite while his father stood behind him, a girl walked a small dog on a long lead. The city sprawled before us under the low cloud.
It seemed peaceful. And smaller than I imagined; I could see all the way across it to low hills in the distance.
There were other, less familiar, landmarks, too: a glass building shaped like a fat cigar, a giant wheel, way in the distance. Like my own face the view seemed both alien and somehow familiar.
Most of the benches were occupied, by people alone or in couples. We headed for one just past the top of the hill and sat down. I smelt ketchup; a half-eaten burger lay under the bench in a cardboard box. Ben picked it up carefully and put it in one of the litter bins, then returned to sit next to me.
He pointed out some of the landmarks. It was odd to hear a decade that I could not remember living through summed up in two words. I must have missed so much. So much music, so many films and books, so much news. Disasters, tragedies, wars. Whole countries might have fallen to pieces as I wandered, oblivious, from one day to the next. So much of my own life, too. The wind gusted up the hill, cold against my face. A dog barked somewhere. He put his arm around my shoulder.
I began to recoil, then remembered he is not a stranger but the man I married. Do you remember that? What did I study? I saw myself in a library and recalled vague ideas of writing a thesis concerning feminist theory and early twentieth-century literature, though really it was just something I could be doing while I worked on novels, something my mother might not understand but would at least see as legitimate.
The scene hung for a moment, shimmering, so real I could almost touch it, but then Ben spoke and it vanished. I would see you all the time. At the library, in the bar, whatever. I would always be amazed at how beautiful you looked, but I could never bring myself to speak to you. And intense. You would sit for hours, surrounded by books, just reading and taking notes, sipping from cups of coffee or whatever. You looked so beautiful. I never dreamed you would ever be interested in me. But then one day I happened to be sitting next to you in the library, and you accidentally knocked your cup over and your coffee went all over my books.
You were so apologetic, even though it hardly mattered anyway, and we mopped up the coffee and then I insisted on buying you another. You said it ought to be you buying me one, to say sorry, and I said OK then, and we went for a coffee. And that was that. I could not, and felt the hot stab of sadness.
I imagined how every couple must love the story of how they met — who first spoke to who, what was said — yet I have no recollection of ours. The usual, you know? I finished my degree, and you finished your Ph. Who asked who? Tell me how it happened.
He looked away, into the distance. You shared a house, but you were hardly there at all. Most of your time you would spend with me. It made sense for us to live together, to get married. Expensive soap, the kind you really liked, and I took off the cellophane wrapper and I pressed an engagement ring into the soap, and then I wrapped it back up and gave it to you. As you were getting ready that evening you found it, and you said yes.
It sounded messy, a ring caked in soap, and fraught with the possibility that I might not have used the bar, or found the ring, for weeks. But still, it was not an unromantic story. Anyway, we got married the following year. In a church in Manchester, near where your mother lived. It was a lovely day. The sun shone, everyone was happy. And then we went for our honeymoon. To Italy. The lakes. It was wonderful. Nothing would come.
I understand. We lost a lot of things. After the marriage, the honeymoon? We were very happy. Awedding, a honeymoon, a marriage. But what else was I expecting? What else could there have been? The answer came suddenly. I realized with a shudder that that was what seemed to be missing from my life, from our home.
There were no pictures on the mantelpiece of a son or daughter — clutching a degree certificate, white-water rafting, even just posing, bored, for the camera — and none of grandchildren either. I had not had a baby. I felt the slap of disappointment. The unsatisfied desire was burned into my subconscious. Even though I had woken up not even knowing how old I was, some part of me must have known I had wanted to have a child.
Suddenly I heard my own mother, describing the biological clock as if it were a bomb. My ambitions would disappear and all I would want to do was have children.
It happens to everyone. Or something else had happened instead. I looked at my husband. My memory. It all came back to that, in the end. I looked out across the city. The sun hung low in the sky, shining weakly through the clouds, casting long shadows on the grass.
I realized that it would be dark soon. The sun would set, finally, the moon rise in the sky. Another day would end. Another lost day. It was not a question. He held my hands in his, rubbing them, as if against the cold.
For himself, or me? I could not tell. I let him rub my hands, hold my fingers between his. I realized that, despite the confusion, I felt safe there, with this man. I could see that he was kind, and thoughtful, and patient. No matter how awful my situation, it could be so much worse. He looked at me, the expression on his face one of pain. Pain, and disappointment. I fixed my eyes on a little girl riding a tricycle in the distance. Possibly I ask him every day. I realized this time is different.
This time I will write down what he tells me. He took a deep breath. You were on your way home, a short walk. There were no witnesses. You were very badly injured. Both legs were broken.
An arm and your collarbone. I could hear the low beat of the city. Traffic, a plane overhead, the murmur of the wind in the trees. Ben squeezed my hand. I could remember nothing of the accident, and so did not feel angry, or even upset. I was filled instead with a kind of quiet regret. An emptiness. A ripple across the surface of the lake of memory.
He squeezed my hand, and I put mine over his, feeling the cold, hard band of his wedding ring. I felt myself go cold. It was a hit-and-run. I thought of what I had read of my meeting with Dr Nash. A neurological problem, he had told me. Structural or chemical. A hormonal imbalance. I assumed he had meant an illness. Something that had just happened, had come out of nowhere.
One of those things. But this seemed worse; it was done to me by someone else, it had been avoidable. If I had taken a different route home that evening — or if the driver of the car that hit me had done so — I would have still been normal.
I might even have been a grandmother by now, just. We sat in silence for a while, our hands locked together. It grew dark. The city was bright, the buildings lit.
It will be winter soon, I thought. We will soon be halfway through November. December will follow, and then Christmas. What had I been doing? What was I doing? What I wanted to say was, You told me I had a Ph. Why had I settled for that? Times were hard. Watson Free Download pages Author S. Watson Submitted by: Jane Kivik. Read Online Download. Nash, Clare category: fiction, mystery, thriller, suspense, thriller, mystery thriller Formats: ePUB Android , audible mp3, audiobook and kindle.
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