The Man Who Forgot His Wife (21 page)

‘Are you okay, Dad?’ said Dillie.

‘It must be a bit weird,’ added Jamie.

‘Yeah – I’m fine. It’s just … she looks nice.’

‘Yeah, she was,’ said Jamie. ‘She always gave us chocolate and pound coins and said, “Don’t tell your dad!”’

‘What else did she say?’

And my children allowed me to stay up late as they told me all about the times I couldn’t remember, and we found more photos of my mum and dad and of me as a child, and they made me laugh with family stories and tales from the olden days.

‘Happy New Year, Dad!’

‘Happy New Year.’

The next day I took Jamie and Dillie to see their grandfather and I felt an enormous pride in them being so valiant and mature, so affectionate towards him, unembarrassed at showing that they cared. His face looked slightly yellow, and there was long white stubble in the wrong places, but Dillie didn’t hesitate to lean in and kiss him. She had brought a hand-made card as always and Jamie even lent his grandfather his iPod; he had cleared his own music collection to fill it up with audiobooks he had downloaded himself.

‘That button is “Play”,’ Jamie explained. ‘That’s if you want to skip to the next chapter,’ he continued, and even though I doubted whether his grandfather would have the energy to listen to an
audiobook,
the vision of my teenage son taking this much trouble brought me close to tears.

‘You are so kind,’ said my father. The children told him all about their Christmas, and reported what presents they had got and all the places we had been. And when it was time to go, they instinctively knew to hug him long and hard.

‘Goodbye, Granddad,’ said Dillie.

‘Goodbye, dear.’

‘See you, Granddad,’ said Jamie, leaning in.

‘What lovely grandchildren! Thank you for coming. You must have more important things to do.’

‘No,’ said his grandson, firmly, suddenly seeming twenty-five years old. ‘Not more important than you.’

The week passed far too quickly. On the final day I cleaned the house from top to bottom, prepared a dinner and packed my bags ready to move back out. Maddy arrived alone at the front door and embraced the excited children as I hovered in the hallway. She had presents for them and pictures to show of cute dogs in Italian ladies’ handbags, and an inscrutable smile and a hello for me.

‘Wow, it all looks very clean everywhere. We should send photos to my mum!’

I had invited myself to stay for dinner by cooking a big casserole, and afterwards Maddy and I had the chance to talk on our own.

‘So how was your holiday?’

‘Oh, you know … One minute I was travelling in great comfort in a gondola, the next moment I was travelling in extreme discomfort with a budget airline. They sort of cancel each other out.’

‘Well, it was great being here with the kids. They’re so funny and clever and interesting and everything …’

‘Yeah, they get that from their mother.’

‘Though I don’t understand how they can prefer
The Simpsons
to
All-Star Mr & Mrs
.’

‘Listen – I’ve been thinking,’ she announced. ‘What you said in
the
courtroom … We don’t actually have to get legally divorced, if you really don’t want to.’

I stood up and gently pushed the kitchen door closed.

‘You’re so much easier to talk to since your amnesia that I wondered if we could just work something out like adults? If we didn’t spend so much on lawyers, we might just be able to hang on to the house.’

‘For you and the kids to live in without me?’ I had started stroking the dog, but now I could feel my fingertips digging quite hard into his fur.

‘Well – this is my proposal. The kids live here all the time, keep their rooms, keep Woody, keep walking to school with their friends. But you and I split the cost of a little flat somewhere cheap, and take turns to live in that when it’s not our turn to be here with the kids.’

The dog grunted in pleasure at the rigour of fingers digging into his mane.

‘What about the summerhouse? I could live in there. Or the spare room?’

‘I’m just trying to find a way to protect the children, so that their lives are not disrupted. Once they have grown up and left home we can sell the house and work out how to split the proceeds. But just for the next seven or eight years, we could both have the same second home …’

Privately I had to concede that this seemed like a constructive and mature suggestion. I’d get to have every weekend in this house with the children. Dillie would still have her lovely bedroom and Jamie could still do his schoolwork in that summerhouse with Woody lying at his feet.

‘So part of the time you’d be here,’ she said with a smile, ‘and the rest of the time it would be me and Ralph.’

‘What?’

The dog turned round, indignant that he was no longer being stroked.

‘So this is Ralph’s idea, is it?’ I said, feeling my face heating up. The neglected dog let out a bark. ‘No, Woody, shut up!’

‘No, not exactly … I only meant eventually, if Ralph and I decide we want to live together. The kids would have to be cool with it, of course – they’ll always come first.’

‘So your great plan is, we don’t have to legally get divorced to save money so that Vaughan lives in a shoebox in the slums, while Ralph moves into my half of the double bed here?’

‘No – that’s not it at all …’

The dog barked again.

‘No, shut up! Bad dog, do you hear me?’ and I pushed him away. ‘You’re very bad and I don’t want to hear it any more.’

‘You’re distorting it all – Ralph said we shouldn’t rush into anything—’

‘Oh, well, if that’s what Ralph suggests, then that’s definitely what we should do! I can’t believe you try and dress it up as what’s best for the kids, when really it’s just your fancy man trying to save on his rent bill!’

The kitchen chair fell over as I brushed past it on the way to the front room to give my children a farewell kiss. Madeleine was still trying to talk to me in the hallway as I marched to the door and put on my old coat, which was hanging by the door.

‘Um … that’s Ralph’s coat,’ mumbled Maddy.

‘What? No, this is mine – I’ve been wearing it all week.’

‘No – it’s Ralph’s. He left it here, it’s his. But I’m sure he wouldn’t mind you borrowing it …’

Chapter 15

‘RIGHT, YEAR ELEVENS
, it’s good to be teaching you again. Today we are going to be talking about the causes of the Second World War,’ I predicted a little optimistically. ‘Now, Ms Coney, who I understand was taking you while I was away, has told you all about the Treaty of Versailles, which was of course greatly resented in twenties Germany, but today we are going to ask how extreme politics came out of an extreme economic situation—’

‘Sir! Mr Vaughan, sir?

‘Yes, Tanika?’ I was pleased to demonstrate my apparently effortless grasp of all their names. It had involved much time staring at school photos of spotty faces and committing the matching names to memory. ‘Is this a question about hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic?’

‘Not exactly. Are you a mentalist, sir?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Dean said you’d gone mental in the nut and shit and didn’t know summit or nothin’.’

‘Well, first of all, can you not use that word in my class—’

‘What – “mentalist”?’

‘Well, yes, that one as well actually, but I was thinking of the swear word. And in answer to your question, it is no secret that my absence last term was due to me suffering a very rare neurological condition from which I am rapidly recovering and which in no way affects my abilities to teach you about the fall of the Weimar Republic.’

I pressed a link on the interactive whiteboard and was proud to see it display an image of a one-million-mark banknote.

‘Yeah, but are you off your nut, sir?’

‘No, Tanika, I am not
off my nut
, as you so charmingly put it.’

‘Are you a loony, though? Do you, like, bark at the moon and shit?’

‘No, but I might be in a minute. Since Tanika insists on referring to my memory loss, it’s worth asking whether it is possible for whole countries to lose their memory as well. That’s why history is so important—’

‘Are you a psycho, though? Are you a nut job, sir?’

‘What exactly a nation chooses to remember or forget comes to define the identity of its people and affect their future choices. And I would suggest, for example, that we in Britain opt to remember too much about the parts of the Second World War that we are comfortable with, and we prefer to forget about all the colonial wars of conquest that weren’t a million miles from what Hitler was attempting.’

This point seemed to have made them think, and a few different hands went up.

‘Yes – Dean?’

‘But are you a mentalist, sir?’

‘Do you think you’re the Messiah, sir? Are you going on a shooting spree in McDonald’s?’

‘Could we concentrate on the lesson plan,
please
. Now, the failure of democracy in Germany to deliver economic security increased the attraction of a traditional militaristic leader—’

‘Did you find them, sir?’

‘Did I find what?’

‘Your marbles, sir. Oh no – have you still not found them?’

‘Do you want some fruitcake, sir? It’s really nutty …’

‘Do you foam at the mouth, sir? Are you afraid of water?’

‘LOOK!’ I finally snapped. ‘THIS IS THE BLOODY EASY STUFF! THE RISE OF HITLER AND THE BLOODY NAZIS – THIS IS THE EASIEST HISTORY I CAN BLOODY TEACH! IT’S ALL THEY EVER SHOW ON THE HISTORY CHANNEL, SO BLOODY LISTEN OR WE’LL DO MODULE FOUR INSTEAD AND WE’LL TALK ABOUT THE REPEAL OF THE CORN LAWS, ALL RIGHT?’

‘Ooooh!’ said Tanika, seemingly vindicated. ‘Boggy Vaughan’s gone mental.’

After my first lesson with Year 11, I slumped into my chair in exhaustion and reflected on the distressing revelation that I seemed to lack the natural authority required to teach a challenging class of inner-city teenagers. Younger students were just as disrespectful; in fact, it seemed worse hearing the same swear words in higher-pitched voices. Deep down I already knew something, but now this depressing truth was fighting its way to the front of my consciousness: I was not the inspiring, life-changing teacher I had imagined when I had first learned of my occupation.

I stayed at my desk all through lunchtime, marking homework, doing lesson plans and ringing the parents of one particular student to try to understand how their child might have developed an attitude problem.

‘Hello, it’s Mr Vaughan here, Jodie’s history teacher.’

‘Oh yeah, Boggy Vaughan … You’re the mentalist?’

Perhaps there might be something a little more positive on my online memoir. Perhaps by now former pupils had recalled how I had transformed their lives and future prospects with one interesting lesson on the causes of the Agricultural Revolution?
When
I logged on I found that a number of students had indeed discovered my Wikipedia page, although their accounts of my past did not smack of the rigorous accuracy for which the open-source encyclopaedia has become so famous.

For example, I was sceptical about whether I had indeed genuinely been the so-called ‘Fifth member of Abba’, playing the oboe and tambourine on ‘Gimme, Gimme, Gimme (A Man After Midnight)’ and supplying backing vocals and handclaps on ‘I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do’. I read with interest that I had spent three years fighting alongside Islamic militants during the Second Chechen War, eventually deputizing for Akhmed Zakayev during the 1999 Siege of Grozny and then switching sides to the Russian Federation ‘because they had nicer trousers’.

Once the sixth-formers had become aware of this open document, it seemed that a competition had ensued for the most outlandish back story to the mystery of Mr Vaughan’s life before he taught history at Wandle Academy. I learned that I had been assistant editor of
What Caravan?
magazine but had been sacked following a fist-fight with the editor over the merits of the new Alpine Sprite and the easy-to-reach butane regulator mounted on the front bulkhead. I was pleased to learn that I had single-handedly identified the genome of the Giant African Badger, though less proud that I had threatened to kill myself on the steps of Nestlé’s headquarters unless they promised that in future Quality Street would have more of the yummy green triangle ones.

Looking at the document’s history, I could see that new facts about me had been replacing old facts every day. ‘Jack Joseph Neil Vaughan was previously “Ingrid Fjola Johansdottir”, a popular and notorious West End nightclub hostess who, despite her well-documented sexual exploits with Eastern Bloc diplomats during the Cold War, increasingly came to feel that she had been born into the wrong body. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the “Icelandic Mata Hari”, as she was known to MI5, was no longer
able
to procure Communist military secrets for sexual favours and so decided to have a sex change and adopt a new persona as a male history teacher in a South London comprehensive.’

I considered taking down the Wikipedia page, but the worthy teacher in me decided that it was providing a valuable outlet for student creativity and literary experimentation on the blurred borders of fiction and non-fiction. Some of the original true facts that I had put in about myself had been left up there beside the students’ bizarre inventions, but this just had the effect of making everything I had written seem invented as well.

Dr Lewington had asked me to come up with some memories that I had recovered, and to think of some significant life events that were still out of reach in my memory banks. I duly arrived for another brain scan with a wide selection of episodes from my past life – happy memories like scoring my first goal in a junior school football match, and unhappy memories like being informed that the teams had changed ends at half time. I was to concentrate on these moments and my brain activity would be compared to the chemical and temperature changes that occurred when I tried to recall chapters that were still blank.

The new brain scanner itself looked as if it had accounted for most of the NHS budget for the previous financial year. It was a huge, hi-tech, gleaming-white module, roughly the size of Apollo 13. There was a gentle whirr as the conveyor transported me inside the pod, and it seemed to know when to stop once my skull was in place for the internal mapping to commence. The idea of a female doctor being able to see inside my brain made me feel slightly uncomfortable. ‘Don’t think about sex,’ I told myself, thus immediately doing so. How would that show up on the screen? Could she search through past thoughts and go back over my imagination’s last browsing session? Over the hum of the machine I could hear Dr Lewington giving me instructions into her microphone and so I duly summoned up a significant recollection.