Forget Yourself (30 page)

Tie laughed. I never heard him laugh much before.

“I should have worried for their sake.”

“I thought you said—”

“I’m rambling, I know. I’ll stop.”

And he did stop, for a while. But I needed company. I asked him a question, the one I’d always wanted to ask.

“Why did you leave, Tie?”

It was a few minutes before he spoke. The stone woman watched.

“I was tired, Blondee.”

“No, really, how could you leave?”

“I couldn’t cope. I looked to the future and saw nothing. And there was nothing. I know what you’re thinking: you’re thinking that you should have been enough to save me. You were. You weren’t. I may have gone sooner if not for you, Blondee—I was able to help you and you could distract me. You saved me for a while, and that’s all any of us can ever do: help each other for a while.”

“I thought you left because your heart was broken.”

“You distracted me. This lover of mine—I’ll never tell you their name because I want you to stay—this lover reminded me. When they ended the relationship I could do nothing else but look ahead—and see nothing. It’s not their fault—they just reminded me, that was all.”

“What will happen to me now, Tie?”

“You have no future either, Blondee. But you never did. You were just good at distracting yourself.”

There was nothing more to say to him, not for the time being. I stared down at the lino: I stared at her. A series of brown shapes, jagged together, light-brown, dark-brown, shit-brown. I watched the shapes with real focus, staring and staring at them and waiting for them to move. They didn’t.

My legs were cramping. I had crossed them again, and shards of pain swelled through them in screams. I stood up, and looked for the shard, for the mirror glass which had pierced her neck.

I felt my neck. I couldn’t remember how long the glass had been, but it must have been big, to make her bleed like that.

I fell to my knees, looking out the window. Had that been her last view? Facing the world? Or had she been the other way? I spun round. Perhaps she had been facing our bed.

I lay down, my neck over the big brown stain. She had either been looking at the window frame, or under the bed, the edge of the lino where I hid the magazine, and a t-shirt, and her hair. I pretended I could feel her.

My clothes are of significant quality—you can tell quality by touch. They fit my form well and—I can feel—I have expensive jewellery about my neck and ears. They cause my skin to tingle, each and every time I place them about my person. I appreciate such things—things which others with money so often fail to notice, and which renders them vulgar. They buy larger and larger cars, build a cinema or a large swimming pool right into their gaudy house, or even buy up exotic animals to play with. Modern-day barbarism. It’s the little things that matter: the fine cool lining on a well-cut jacket, or a properly-bred hound. Such things are priceless.

In their vulgarity they say that there is nothing new that riches can buy. Some people, and by that I mean my friends, say such things. They grow bored. Their husbands leave to go hunt prostitutes in some evangelic third-world nation (as I say, modern-day barbarism) and they simply do not know what to do with themselves. More specifically they have not learned to appreciate the small things.

I was having lunch with two such friends of mine: Lamia, whom I met on some charity drive the two of us have long since forgotten, and Callidi, who happened to live nearby. Our three husbands were likewise friends with one another. The lunch was going well and we were even eating on the terrace: something I had not dared do when the horrifying collection of nudist neighbours had purchased the farm next door, but which I now did for the first time since I’d had them removed.

Instead I was to grapple with other concerns. Lamia had drunk one cocktail too many (I had attempted to distract the staff from attending her, but to no avail) and was moaning once more about her husband’s absence. Callidi and I listened patiently—Callidi’s husband likewise being called away by that vague cliché, ‘on business’—as Lamia grew redder and redder in the face. We hadn’t guessed it, but there was a purpose to this rant.

“We need to get away, girls,” she announced.

I hated her referring to us as ‘girls’. I didn’t much prefer the prospect of a holiday with the two of them—I had been on holiday with friends twice before; the first time being terribly boring and the second an unbearable chaos. I was determined to let the idea die gently. I would deliberately take the wrong meaning.

“A wonderful idea, we should go out for the day. Somewhere we can take a good walk and find somewhere nice for dinner. I would very much like that.”

Callidi agreed, but Lamia would have none of it. She swung her red face from side to side.

“No, no, no,” she whined, repeating herself like a child. “I don’t mean that at all. I mean we should go somewhere for longer.”

“Yes,” Callidi agreed, “Two weeks away somewhere carefree and warm. It’s a lousy summer here and it’s been so long since I took a vacation anywhere.”

“No, no, no,” Lamia said again. I ran my fingers over my bracelet. She was irritating me. “I don’t mean for two weeks.”

“So,” I began, “you do not mean for the day, and you do not mean for two weeks. How long, then, do you mean?”

Lamia calmed herself and reached for her handbag, carefully withdrawing a leaflet and placing it on the table before us.

Forget Yourself.

“I mean longer than two weeks, though how much longer depends on certain factors. It says it all in here,” she said, motioning to the leaflet. Callidi collected it from the table and began reading. I was left to twiddle my thumbs.

“What exactly are you talking about, Lamia?” I asked her. Her madness had intrigued me—perhaps I have lied to you in my implication that I am never bored myself. And if I am honest I hid beneath my clothes to hide my clumsy frame, the fact that I didn’t feel I was doing any of it right, that I couldn’t even walk as a woman should. I was never good at just
being
, not like Lamia.

“I will tell you girls, but you must promise me no further interruption. Can we agree on that? Good. Well this is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. I found the leaflet in my husband’s desk. Don’t look at me like that, Merope, I have to know what’s going on or else how am I to keep it all together? Anyway, I didn’t want to read it at first—I presumed it was one of those ‘alternative’ holidays organised by one of those sinister Russian organisations—but something about it piqued my curiosity and so I began reading.

“It’s like a vacation, but the amount of time depends on certain things. They take you away to a remote part of the world—without telling you where—and they wipe your memory clean. That is the point of the whole thing. They wipe your memory. Merope, do not look so horrified, it’s all temporary. It’s the way to see the real you. They place you into this encampment, with no recollection of the outside save for the very basics, and from then on it’s up to you. What sort of person will you become? What might have been?

“And they record everything for you to view afterwards. Behavioural reports, video footage, simply everything. You can learn anything you want about yourself. When it becomes too much you’re removed from the programme. As simple as all that. You get to lead a whole new life and view the results afterwards—it’s the sort of thing that the Christians dream of.”

I would be lying to you once more if I said that the idea held no interest for me—but it was simply too extreme. I had a whole life—my husband, the houses—there was no way I could leave it all behind until it became ‘too much’. I conveyed these concerns to her, hoping that it would be an end to the matter. Besides, she couldn’t very well leave her husband behind, could she?

She listened carefully and slowly, as though she were now at the peak of sobriety, before giving her response.

“My husband, dear Merope, is already in the programme. He left without telling me.”

“My god, Lamia, how terrible for you,” Callidi comforted, placing the leaflet back down upon the table. “We are both here for you, of course, for as long as it takes for him to return. Surely though, we simply can’t go ourselves. I have my own husband and he—”

Lamia interrupted her.

“Your husband has gone too, Callidi. I found the receipts in the desk along with the leaflet. Yours as well I’m afraid, dear Merope. It seems they left early this morning. Don’t look so shocked, the two of you. You know I’m telling the truth. I’m certain letters from them explaining everything will arrive tomorrow. Are you angry? I’m actually quite excited. If we go ourselves not only do we get our revenge on those insensitive, thoughtless men, but we also get to meet them all over again and see what happens. We will never have another opportunity like this for as long as we live.”

I opened up the leaflet.

Pilsner was coming. I knew he’d come, I knew it. I heard the footsteps outside the hut. I could hear everything that went on—there hadn’t been any rain, or loud storms, or even much wind to batter bits about and muffle those going to-and-fro. There weren’t many footsteps around, and I knew that these were for me.

“Pilsner,” I uttered. It wouldn’t do to be impolite. Whatever happened it wouldn’t help.

He said my name. There was nothing to the way he said it, and I searched the sound for clues, but nothing.

“How long should I stay?” I asked, without moving from the floor. He stood stooped before me, careful not to hit his head on the window-frame. His trousers were torn to the back of one leg, and I thought of touching his calf, feeling the prickle of hair and bare skin, but I didn’t.

“Blondee,” he said my name again. “Blondee, Blondee, Blondee.” He shushed them out in a sigh, all in one breath, Blondee-Blondee-Blondee. There were clues that time, clues in his voice. He was worried—he was tense, he wanted sympathy. The world was going to-and-fro without me. Sometimes I had hoped it would, and sometimes I wanted it to stop, and to wait for me to come back.

“Pilsner.”

He asked if he could sit down, sit on the foam where we had lain together, perched above where I had hidden that magazine, the strange memories of a past that didn’t fit, one shattered shard scattered and surrounded by a hundred others. He asked again: can I sit down? His voice made of wood this time, not foam.

I nodded. “Sure. Yes. Of course. Go ahead.” What else could I say?

And what could he say? At first he said nothing. He stared from the window, and Fluffed walked by but no-one else, and Pilsner stared until he placed his face and hands together. His hands and head were shiny, and sunlight bounced from his pores.

In return I sat in silence, as I had been. I returned to the cycle-swirl of thoughts which I’d filled the hut with, to thoughts of vomit and blood on lino, the masses of skin stretched over one another in pleasure, of bad news from post-women. Of computer networks—networks!—what they’d have done with that information. I’d have filled five books over. But it wouldn’t have made sense to them, it never could, they wanted truth, they wanted to glue all the shards together, but they were from different mirrors, and they’d never fit. There was no single outside.

“Blondee,” he said. “Do you know why you’re here?”

I wanted to ask him what was the matter.

“It’s the severes,” Tie whispered to me. I nodded. Had he ever told me something I didn’t already know?

I answered Pilsner. “I’m here, because I’m a thief. It’s why I was placed in the world.”

“Why,” he asked, “are you in this hut, right now?”

I answered Pilsner. “I’m here, because I’m a thief. But you knew that already, we all did. I committed a crime I’m already being punished for.” And I remembered Burberry’s words, of how we were guessing, guessing at things we couldn’t know.

“Blondee,” Pilsner said, “you stole from us, you stole from everyone. You took all they had. You took their memories.” For a moment he stopped. “Frederick.”

“You took our guilt, or you tried, my love,” Tie mouthed.

“And I gave them new memories,” I replied.

“It was never yours to take,” Pilsner told me, his voice strong and ordered. “Where are you looking, what are you thinking about?”

“I was thinking about Tie.”

“Never heard of him,” Pilsner told me, his voice weak and confused. He was lying, or had forgotten. Nobody was ever mentioned much, after they’d left.

“And what’re you thinking about, Pilsner? It’s not me, I know that.”

He paused, a reluctant tut from his tongue and teeth.

“It’s the severes,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

And Pilsner nodded. “It is. It’s the severes.”

He told me how there weren’t as many of the least now, how there must have been as many severes as were the others, as there were of
us
.
Us
, he said it like he meant them and not me. I didn’t care, he could say
us
how he wanted. Soon they would come for us, he said, they’d come and, well, who knows. Their crimes are worse than ours, they’re capable of anything, considering what they’d done. A horde, a swarm, a mass of angry uncontrollables. The worst thing in all the world.