The Man Who Forgot His Wife (19 page)

The humid, echoey atmosphere overwhelmed me and I just stood there trying to take it all in. When a jarring siren went off, I optimistically wondered if this might be a fire alarm, but instead children excitedly grabbed body-boards and lined up to surf towards an unconvincing beach featuring plastic palm trees and an assortment of soggy sticking plasters lapping at the shore. Dillie and Jamie had arranged to meet me ‘at the beach’ once they had been down their favourite flume, and they found me looking suspiciously dry, leaning against a killer-whale litter bin. We agreed to start my lesson in the Little Tadpoles pool in the far corner, where a sprinkling of under-fours splashed around with
over-keen
parents and an inflatable great white shark, which, on closer inspection, told you that it was not a life-saving device.

The warm water of the learner pool came halfway up my thighs, so I decided it might be a little less embarrassing to squat down as the children debated the best way to proceed with Dad’s first lesson.

‘We could both sort of hold him underneath while he practised kicking his feet?’ said Jamie.

‘Yeah, I remember he did that for me. Or there are some inflatable water wings in that basket. He could put those on?’

‘Shhh – I can’t wear those!’ I protested. ‘They’re for the under-fives!’

‘No answering back in the learner pool!’ declared Dillie.

‘Yes, be a good boy and if you’re very brave we’ll buy you an ice cream!’

The kids seemed to find this reversal of power hilarious. Another parent looked our way and I tried to adopt the air of a responsible dad supervising my own over-large kids who really ought to be swimming by now.

‘And if you want a wee, DO NOT do it into the pool!’ said Dillie too loudly.

‘Especially off the top diving board!’

They were in hysterics now. I was sure that when I had taught them to swim it wouldn’t have involved me utterly humiliating them first.

‘So how are we going to do this, then?’ I demanded as a four-year-old swam confidently past me.

‘Well, er … why don’t you just push off the side and see if it all comes back?’ suggested Jamie.

‘What?’

‘You know – just start kicking your legs and moving your arms and stuff, and just see if you can do it?’

‘Is that it? Is that how you teach something?’ My children had
turned
into a 1930s information film for no-nonsense parenting.
Today: How to teach swimming. (1) Put the non-swimmer in the water. (2) Tell him to swim
.

But I recognized that there was actually a simple logic to it: just push off from the end and see if it comes back.

‘All right! I will. Here goes …’

‘Go on then!’

‘I’m going to just try to swim …’

‘Yeah. Get on with it!’

And then I just fell forwards into the water. It felt unnatural and foolhardy, but I just closed my eyes and braved the depths of the Little Tadpoles splash pool. I put my hands out to break my fall and discovered that actually my arms could reach the solid bottom of the pool, so I pushed my body upwards again. But now I found my arms were sculling and my legs flexing and pushing me onwards, and as long as you kept moving forwards you didn’t sink. I was swimming! I knew how to swim – it seemed the most natural, instinctive thing in the world.

I could hear my two kids cheering and applauding, but I didn’t want to stop, so I swam to the end of the pool, turned and pushed off again, punching the water now in a forceful front crawl, twisting my head to the side every third stroke to breathe, and I was at the other end already. I did a flawless tumble-turn, pushed off and powered my way through the water, breaststroke, backstroke, even butterfly – it was all still there in my repertoire. I was an alpha-male macho-swimmer, clocking up the lengths as I pushed my body to the limits. And then I became aware of a lifeguard blowing a whistle, and I stopped and stood up to see that the parents of the toddlers in inflatable armbands were clutching their frightened children and staring at me.

‘Oi, mate, this is the children’s pool!’ said the young Australian.

‘I can swim!’ I told him delightedly.

‘Yes, we can see that. If you want to swim like that, use the Olympic pool, you idiot.’

I had a memorable lunch with my children. The gourmet food guides had yet to decide the number of stars they would award this restaurant, but surely it could be only a matter of time before they were struck with the debonair ambience of the burger franchise that sat within the Splash City fun park. Because families came to this complex for the whole day, the eatery boasted a convenient waterside location at which it was traditional to dine in the ultra-casual dress of soggy swimming trunks and nothing else. At no other restaurant in the world was it possible to see so clearly both the food and its dietary consequences. And how utterly charming to be entertained by the parade of the bare body shapes of those who were regular patrons. Sure, no Michelin stars yet, but no shortage of real-life Michelin men squeezed on to the bar stools, eating Whoppers and Fries, their bellies hanging over their skimpy Speedos. After lunch some of them lay stretched out in the shallow area of ‘the beach’, where teams of Greenpeace activists would pour buckets of water over them and try to help them wriggle back out to sea.

‘May I have a hamburger, please, and, er, some chips and, er, a lemonade as well?

‘You want a Meal?’

‘Yes. Of course I want a meal. That’s why I’m ordering all this food …’

The kids quickly took over the ordering while simultaneously pretending not to know me.

‘So are you going to move back out when Mum comes home?’ asked my daughter sadly, finally taking a break from a huge vanilla chocolate shake.

‘Dillie! Shut up!’

‘No, it’s okay, Jamie.’

I blushed with suppressed satisfaction at this question. Clearly the implication was that my daughter would prefer me to stay at home for ever.

‘’Cos I was thinking you could move into the summerhouse.’

‘Dillie, shut up!’

‘That’s a very sweet thought, but I think when couples get divorced they’re generally supposed to live apart. I’ve been looking for a little flat as near to home as possible – they’re just very expensive. But wherever I live, we’ll still see lots of each other.’

‘I want you to move back home,’ said my daughter straight out.

‘Well, that’s very nice of you …’ My smile faded as I noticed the thunderous expression on Jamie’s face.

‘No! No, you can’t do that!’ he snapped. ‘Because then you and Mum will just end up shouting at each other all the time again …’ and tears were streaming down his red face. His white plastic chair fell over as he stood up and stomped off.

‘Jamie! Jamie, come back!’

I didn’t know whether to jump up and run after him or just give him some time to cool off. Plus there was an additional complication in that Dillie had taken advantage of the opportunity to help herself to his chips.

‘Dillie, don’t do that. He’s upset!’

‘If you get down from the table it means you’ve finished eating. That’s what you always said …’

I watched my son march around the perimeter of the big pool, his pace gradually slowing before he sat down, looking as indignant as it is possible to appear while seated on a plastic octopus. I watched him for a while, aware that he was casting the occasional sideways glance in our direction. And then I thought that the chips would be cold soon anyway, and it was a shame to waste them. I made a half-hearted attempt to suggest to Dillie that she shouldn’t go straight back in the water after lunch, but I wasn’t sure if I even believed this old cliché myself. ‘If you jump in the water straight after eating, you could get stomach cramps. And then a swan might break your arm, or something.’ So while she was queuing for a giant slide I walked all the way around and finally flopped down next to Jamie.

‘You can push me in the pool if you want.’

‘No. It’s all right.’

‘But we ate your chips.’

‘They’re not chips, they’re fries.’

‘You know, the whole point of me moving out of the house was so that you and Dillie didn’t have to put up with all that shit any more.’

‘Yeah, but then it’s just different shit, isn’t it?’

‘What sort of different shit?’

‘Mum crying in her room at night. Us having to move house.’

‘But eventually things move on and you realize that the new shit isn’t as shitty as the old shit. You know, I don’t think this casual use of swear words is making me seem like a cool dad …’

And then Jamie’s face broke into a smile.

‘Do you want me to replace those fries we ate?’

‘Don’t say “fries”, Dad; it sounds stupid coming from you.’

When we got back home, I asked Jamie to help me see if I could still ride a bike and, to my amazement, that came back to me instinctively, too. Jamie clapped and cheered and proudly claimed to have taught his father to ride a bicycle, and I allowed that little bit of distorted history to stand. But there had not even been a single wobble; it turned out that you really did never forget how to do it. It was the same as swimming: as long as you made an effort to keep going forwards, you were okay.

‘Yeah, it’s like marriage,’ said Gary on the phone that evening. ‘You can’t just freewheel or simply hope to float along; you always have to be working at a relationship … LINDA, SHUT UP! I’M ON THE FUCKING PHONE!’

Though swimming and cycling had returned easily, it seemed that other basic skills would have to be relearned. I did my best around the home, but it was very difficult for me following my amnesia, because I had clearly forgotten how to use an iron or a hoover.

‘Wow, Dad’s using the Hoover!’ said Jamie. ‘I’ve never seen that before!’

‘I know, and he was actually doing some ironing this morning!’

I stripped the beds where Maddy’s parents had slept, and when Jean rang to say they had got home safely, this detail somehow slipped into the conversation. ‘Oh, Jean, I found a hairgrip when I was stripping your bed. I’ve put it on the bedside table for next time you’re here.’

‘Did you hear that, Ron? He stripped the beds. Oh, you are marvellous!’

‘Oh no, it’s nothing. I’m just glad I found it before I put the sheets in the washing machine.’

‘And you washed them too? Did you hear that, Ron – he does washing!’

I felt empowered by discovering that physical memories had been unaffected by my amnesia. ‘So if I can still do all the things I learned before,’ I reasoned, ‘that means I can still drive. It’s like the swimming and the cycling – you just have to go for it!’ I waited until the children were out at friends’ and then picked up the car keys. ‘I must have sat in that driver’s seat a thousand times before,’ I told myself. ‘I’m just going to get in and drive!’

Forty minutes later the garage truck arrived to hoist the car off the ornamental wall at the front of number 23. Previously the Parkers’ front garden had been separate from the pavement, but now it was all much more modern and open-plan. And instead of having to park on the street, I had created an entirely new parking space for them on top of this pile of bricks and the remains of the hedge, as long as you didn’t mind securing your front wheels in their goldfish pond.

‘I’m terribly sorry. Obviously I’ll pay for all the damage,’ I said to Mrs Parker, a very nervous American woman who only seemed to leave the house for Neighbourhood Watch meetings.

‘I thought it was a terrorist attack!’ she stammered. ‘I thought
this
was my nine/eleven.’ She had stayed inside for some minutes after the accident. I think she may have been waiting for a second car to crash into the other wall.

A couple of police officers arrived fairly promptly, though not the elite anti-terrorist unit that had been suggested by the person making the emergency call. One officer fiddled uncertainly with a new laptop on which he was supposed to log the accident details, while the other was perplexed that I tested negative for alcohol and that no calls seemed to have been made on my mobile phone.

‘So there was no other vehicle involved,’ continued the older policeman, ‘and it was broad daylight on a straight road … I’m struggling to understand how you managed to crash into a garden wall.’

‘Well, I sort of forgot how to drive.’

‘You forgot how to drive?’

He looked at the scattered remains of the ornamental wall, with a badly dented Honda Jazz brought to a halt halfway through it.

‘Er, Dave, there’s no box for that …’

‘What?’

‘On the new form – there’s no box for “Forgot how to drive”.’

‘Let’s have a look? Hmm … Are you sure you didn’t “Swerve to avoid pedestrian or animal”, sir?’

‘Sure.’

‘“Skidded on treacherous road surface”, perhaps?’

‘No, no – it was completely my fault. I’m sure I used to be able to drive, but I forgot.’

‘And when did you forget, exactly?’

‘The twenty-second of October.’

The older policeman looked at me uncertainly. ‘And are you planning to attempt to drive again?’

‘Not until I remember.’

The policeman on the computer chuckled at this unintended jest, but immediately dropped his smile when the senior officer
shot
him a glare. It was time to bring this to a close. ‘Put that he swerved to avoid a cat.’

‘Got it!’

‘Tortoiseshell, wasn’t it, sir?’

‘No.’

‘Swerved to avoid animal,’ mouthed the second policeman as he ticked the appropriate box, and another little bit of history was made official.

‘What were you thinking?’ said Maddy, on the phone from Italy, when I had decided that it would be best to be completely honest and open about the tiny little scrape on the car. ‘Why did you imagine you’d suddenly be able to drive?’

‘You mean I
couldn’ t
drive?’

‘No! You never learned on principle. It was one of the things that used to really piss me off. You thinking you were all ecologically sound and pro-public transport, and then asking me for a lift everywhere when I wasn’t running the kids from one place to another.’

‘That’s a shame, and it was such a nice car …’

‘What do you mean,
was
?’