Ghostwriting (9 page)

“I take it that Laura has appraised you of my latest work, Mr Carstairs?”

Laura said, “I thought I would let you explain the process.”

Enright nodded. “In that case I might begin with a short overview of the theoretical base for my research, if I may?”

I stared at Laura. We’d come here for help, not a lecture.

Enright gave forth. Ninety per cent of what he said went straight over my head. He had the exasperating habit of talking through my questions. I’ve noticed this with some intellectuals: they have in common with autistics the inability to appreciate the other person’s point of view, and hurriedly say, “Yes, yes...” waiting for the first opportunity to jump back into their own solipsistic riff.

I’ll paraphrase what I did understand of his speech.

“We are coming to understand more and more the working of the brain,” Enright said. “My company, Neuro-tech, has refined our research and located the source of memories within the thalamus, the hippocampus and the temporal lobe cortex. More, we can actually tag specific memories. My team has developed the process of selecting target memories and effectively initiating their subsequent extirpation.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them I stared at Enright and said, “In other words, you can edit memories?”

He inclined his head. “Put crudely, yes, we can. We call the process Mem-erase.”

“So you could... you could edit from our memories the day of the accident, the accident itself?”

Enright assented, a slight smile playing on his lips. Perhaps he was human, after all?

Or, as I was to think later, perhaps he was inhuman?

Laura leaned forward, eagerly, and gripped my arm. “Don’t you see, Ed, the horror of what happened, the accident... we could be rid of it for ever.”

I sat back, aware of my thumping heart. How many times had I woken in the dark early hours from nightmares of the accident, haunted by the visions of my daughter lying crushed beneath the back wheels of the Volvo?

“As easy as that?” I said. “Zap, and they’re gone? What about our... how to put it? Our memories of the memory? What about all the times since the accident that I’ve relived what happened? Christ, not an hour passes...” I stopped, aware of the catch in my throat.

Enright said, “For the process to be one hundred percent effective, Mr Carstairs, it would be necessary for the entire corpus, as it were, of your memories of your daughter to be expunged from your consciousness.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but words were beyond me. I turned and looked at Laura. She had the good grace to look away.

To Laura I said, “Are you serious? You want to... to effectively get rid of Ella. Wipe her completely from our memories?”

She had obviously considered my objections. “Ed, Ella is already wiped from our futures... For our sanity, we could lose the memories.”

I held up a hand. “‘Lose the memories’? Isn’t that a euphemism? You actually mean that we’d lose our daughter.”

She grimaced. “We
have
lost her, damn you!” she cried.

I shook my head. “I can’t think about a future without the memories, the recollections of the good times. They mean something to me, Laura. They were the happiest times I’ve ever...” I stopped again, unable to continue for fear of breaking down.

I turned to Professor Enright. “Thank you for your time. I couldn’t begin to consider taking up your offer. I can’t speak for my wife.” I left it at that, anger in my tone, stood and hurried from the room.

I paced the plush, carpeted corridor, stared down upon by a phalanx of stern-faced Deans portrayed inexpertly in oil and acrylic.

Laura joined me minutes later.

She murmured, “I had to excuse your rude behaviour,” as we fell into step and hurried from the college.

I kept my rage in check.

“I don’t see how you could even contemplate...” I began, and sneered, “Mem-erase indeed!”
 

We were silent for the duration of the drive home. Once there I sought sanctuary in my studio and resumed work. I lost myself in the depiction of tortured figures, dark little-girl-shapes consigned to oblivion...

Laura was silent during dinner. She drank with a forced determination. As soon as I’d finished, I pushed back my chair and said that I intended to continue work.

She stood and followed me from the dining room, through the kitchen. She stood in the doorway as I crossed the cobbled yard. “Don’t you ever think of me?” she said.

I stopped and stared at her. “What did you say?”

“What the hell,” she said, biting off each word with barely suppressed anger, “what the hell do you think it was like for me? I was standing there, watching, unable to do... to do a damned thing.
I saw it all
!”

I was torn, I admit, between striking Laura and attempting to embrace and comfort her. Instead of doing either, I said, “And what the hell do you think it was like for me? Spare a thought for me, Laura. How do you think I feel, knowing that I was responsible for... that I...” I took a breath. “I have it on my conscience twenty-four hours a day! How wonderful, how fucking wonderful, it’d be for me to simply wipe away the pain! But I’m not doing that – I’m not taking the cowardly, easy option, if it means losing the only things I have that allow Ella to remain alive – my memories of her!” Tears rolling down my cheeks now, I stumbled off to the studio, cursing, raging, and found my stash of brandy and sought oblivion in the only way I knew how.

~

Laura was sleeping when I eventually came to bed, and she went to work early the following morning. I spent a bad day, plagued by the memories of the accident. I tried to paint, but even this catharsis failed me. I even hit the bottle again, and then was overcome by inordinate guilt at seeking solace in the stultifying balm of alcohol. I hurled the bottle across the studio and faced my demons sober.

I considered everything Professor Enright had said, and thought through the consequences. What if I did accede, and had all memories of Ella expunged from my consciousness – how easy, how pain-free, that would be.

And how corrupt.

We are, as human beings, the sum of our experiences, and little else. The wonder of maturity is the realisation we all come to, sooner or later: that we have learned, or failed to learn, from our mistakes, that we are the people we are because of the decision we have made, whether those decisions were for good or bad. Our memories, often false or faulty, are the only indices of our experiences, and without these indices we are incomplete.

How could I remain true to my humanity, to the artist I claimed to be, if I had Ella eradicated from my awareness?

How could I be true to the love of my daughter? I owed it to her brief existence to exalt it in the only way I knew how – in my memory.

That night Laura was silent during dinner, and I fully expected another argument.

Over coffee she broached the subject.

“I’ve been thinking it over, Ed.”

I winced. I prayed that she would not accede to Enright’s treatment. I nodded. “And?”

She took a breath. “If I don’t have the Mem-erase therapy, then will you at least allow me to remove the photos of Ella from the bedroom?”

I felt like telling her that she should work to come to some accommodation with the painful reminders of the past – but that would have been churlish and small-minded of me.

I nodded. “That’s fair enough,” I said.

That night, when I entered the bedroom, all the photos I’d put on display over the weeks, the framed snaps of Ella at school, on the beach, in the local park, in my arms, hugging Laura, smiling, smiling, had been cleared away. There was no evidence in the house, now, that she had ever existed – save for my secret store of memorabilia in the attic, and the more copious store of memories in the attic of my head.

~

Life continued.

The Mars mission successfully erected the dozen living-domes, awaiting the arrival of the multi-national colony
en route
from Earth – but I found myself unable to concentrate on what before might have fascinated me.

Laura threw herself into her work. Exam term came and she was stressed and overworked, as usual. She put in long hours, and I often ate dinner alone. I, for my part, worked through the series of cathartic oils depicting my abstracted nightmares. I had bad days, and even on good days I had bad hours of debilitating remorse, but I was coming to some acceptance of what had happened, some accommodation of the magnitude of our devastating loss.

As the weeks passed, it came to me that Laura was working through her loss, too. At lest, she cried less in my company – though she might have sought privacy in which to wail: the mantle of melancholy, which had been ever-present, lifted from her demeanour. She laughed a little, from time to time; she reached out for me, voluntarily, which she had ceased to do after the accident.

We made love for the first time since Ella’s death, six months earlier, and it was a wondrous sharing of what before we had taken for granted, an affirmation of our love and a token of hope.

After one afternoon in bed, as the sun cascaded into the room and warmed us, I said, “Remember when Ella—”

Laura’s vision clouded suddenly, and she said, “Please, Ed...”

Chastened, aware that perhaps I was further along the road to recovery than was Laura, I nodded and held her to me.

In time, in time...

~

I looked about for new subjects, and decided I wanted to paint nudes. I asked Laura to pose, but she declined, as I thought she might. I hired a model from Oxford and she came twice a week to my studio, and I embarked on a series of positive, life-enhancing studies.

Samantha was twenty-two, slim, blonde and I suppose attractive – though the reason I chose her from the three others who applied was because I found her face, her body, her
shape
, interesting. Only later, as I got to know her, did I wonder how much my choice had been influenced by the subconscious realisation that Samantha physically resembled the woman Ella might have become.

Weeks passed and Samantha and I developed a rapport, an understanding, that sometimes grows between artist and model. I explored her visually, getting to know every curve and sinew of her body, and of course I talked to her and got to know the person within the form I was portraying.

In time she came to represent to me the grown up daughter I now would never know. Certainly, as the weeks passed, I began to feel towards Sam what I had experienced before only in my relationship with Ella: a consuming paternal affection, a concern for her well-being.

This misplaced identification with Sam culminated one Saturday morning when I was in the studio with her. She was reclining on a settee, staring at me, holding her pose, while I painted.

I happened to look up from the canvas, into her eyes, and something in her regard, the innocent fixity of her stare, felled me.

She was Ella, and yet not Ella, and in that second I was flooded with despair, the terrible knowledge, almost made incarnate, of what I had lost – of what I had destroyed.

I sobbed, fell to my knees and sobbed.

Sam uncurled from her pose and hurried across the studio. Naked, she knelt before me, reached out and took me in her arms. I am convinced that there was no sexual intent in the gesture, just the desire to console. I held onto her and wept.

A little later she stiffened in my arms, and at the same time I heard the studio door creak open. I turned, still embracing Sam, to see Laura framed in the doorway, a realist study in shock.

Before I could say a word she gave an abbreviated cry and ran from the studio.

Sam said, “Ed, I’m sorry. I—”

“I know. Don’t worry.”

I stood and hurried outside. By the time I emerged into the dazzling sunlight, momentarily blinded by the sudden brightness, Laura had climbed into her car.

She reversed down the drive, crunching gravel. I flinched and called her name, but she was already on the main road and accelerating away.

Sickened, I returned to the studio. Sam was dressing hurriedly, embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”

“Sam, I understand. I’ll talk to Laura. It’ll be okay.”

She gave me a faint smile as she swept past me and left the studio.

I stood there for a long while, regarding the half finished painting of Ella as she might have been.

Then I found the brandy and drank.

~

It was dark, after ten, by the time Laura returned home.

I was still in the studio, pretty much drunk by then. I heard the car come to a halt in the drive, the door open and shut and Laura walk towards the back door. I gave her five minutes, then stood unsteadily and followed her inside.

Between bouts of self-pity, and raging grief, in more lucid moments, I had rehearsed an apology, an explanation of what had happened in the studio that morning.

“Laura...” I found her in the bedroom, readying herself for bed.

She looked up and smiled. “Ed, you’re late. How was work?”

The bright tone of her enquiry disconcerted me. She was not being sarcastic. I stood in the doorway and swayed, blinking drunkenly at her, thinking that my senses must be at fault.

“Are you coming to bed, Ed?”

“About this morning – I want to explain.”

She smiled at me, as if she didn’t know what I was talking about. “About what?”

“Samantha, it wasn’t what you think.”

“Oh, Samantha. Your model.”

“I just wanted to say...” But under the light of her smile, I could not continue.

She said, “Will you stop swaying like a drunk and come to bed!”

I was too drunk, too confused, to make sense of what was happening. I undressed and rolled into bed, and Laura pressed herself to me.

She was passionate. We made love. I recall her energy, my retarded reactions, and something else. At some point while entangled and sweating I recall thinking that I was making love to a stranger.

Laura made no reference to the incident with Sam the following morning, or that evening. It was as if it had never happened. I awoke with a pounding migraine, with only a hazy recollection of what had occurred the day before, my breakdown in front of Sam, Laura’s odd behaviour the night before.