The Man Who Forgot His Wife (30 page)

‘No, it’s not, sir – they changed the Behaviour Policy. It’s five consequences now, and then you go to the referral. You must have forgotten it when you went all mental.’

‘Sir, do you bury your victims under the patio? Is that where you was on Friday? Burying a victim?’

‘If you must know, I was burying someone.’

The moment I said it, I felt it was probably a mistake, but the room fell into a stunned silence that demanded some further explanation.

‘Er, well, it was a cremation, actually. I wasn’t in because I was at my father’s funeral, okay? He had been ill for some time and he died during the holidays, so that’s why you had a supply teacher on Friday, for which I apologize.’

The teacher-baiting stopped after that. They must have thought that it was hard enough for Boggy Vaughan to have lost his dad without being reminded that he was a mentalist as well. They cooperated with the lesson, answered the questions and wrote down their homework assignments at the end. In fact, I was wondering if I could get away with announcing a family bereavement at the start of every class, but guessed the sympathy might diminish a bit after a couple of weeks of dead great-aunts and elderly in-laws.

After the students had all filed out, I noticed Tanika hanging back to speak to me alone.

‘Er, I’m sorry about your dad, sir. I didn’t mean to disrespect him and shit.’

‘That’s okay, Tanika. Only, just … let’s drop it with the “mentalist” thing, eh? I didn’t have all my memories of my father back before he died, so I do have some sort of mental condition that is still affecting me and can be quite difficult at times.’

She didn’t say anything, but didn’t go to leave either.

‘Was there anything else?’

‘Sir? My dad died …’

I had never seen Tanika drop her cocksure guard before, but could sense that this was anything but a wind-up.

‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Tanika. Was that recently?’

‘No, it was when I was three. He was shot.’

‘Shot!’ I exclaimed, unprofessionally revealing my alarm.

‘It was on the London news and that. They said it was a drugs-related murder, but it wasn’t. Would you like to see a picture of him?’

She had already got a photograph from the little plastic wallet that held her travel pass and her dinner card. It looked scuffed and crumpled, but there through the misty plastic was a tiny toddler version of Tanika standing next to a tall man smiling for the camera.

‘He looks like a very nice man.’

‘It wasn’t drugs-related though.’

‘I believe you.’

‘They just said that to make everyone feel better.’

The queue of Year 7s waiting to come in for the next lesson was peering in the door, and I pushed it closed.

‘What do you mean?’

‘If people see a picture of a murdered black man and then the free newspaper says it was like ‘drugs-related’, all the posh white people think, “Oh, that’s all right, then, it won’t happen to me.”’

This was a level of analysis that I had not witnessed in Tanika before, but clearly her father’s death was always going to engage her more than the collapse of the Deutschmark.

‘Well, losing your father at three is much, much harder than losing your dad at my age. I can’t imagine what you must have gone through …’

She was no longer staring at the floor but making direct eye contact with me. There wasn’t any sadness or emotion there; instead I understood the hard shell that had grown over her to make her top dog in the classroom.

‘Tanika? You know you have to do an independent history module for your final bit of coursework?’

‘I’m gonna start it – shut up, man!’

‘Why don’t you set the history straight on your dad?’

‘What?’

‘Your project doesn’t have to be about something that happened centuries ago. Why don’t you gather all the records of your dad’s murder – in the newspapers, online or whatever – and then set about correcting them with the true story of what really happened?’

‘Are we allowed to do that?’

‘What you said about how things get distorted to make people feel more comfortable, that has to be part of it. You’re right – that’s exactly how history gets rewritten.’

I was already worrying that I should have reflected upon this perilous idea before suggesting it, but Tanika’s education was going to end soon unless I could find a way of getting her engaged. ‘Anyway, have a think about it,’ I said, and she nodded blankly, put the photo away and started to head out. An eleven-year-old boy had placed his open mouth against the glass in the door and was inhaling and exhaling like a giant human slug.

‘Sir, what the other teachers do to stop them doing that is, like, spray the glass with a really disgusting cleaning fluid. Just thought you might have forgotten …’

‘Ah, thanks, Tanika. I might just try that.’

After school I sat at the computer screen in my form room, battling a fresh onslaught of emails, grimly aware that for every one that I killed off, two would pop up to replace it. I resisted the siren voices of the internet for as long as I could bear it, but after a whole minute and a half of actual work, I finally succumbed to the significant distraction of a window to everything in the whole world. Gary’s user-generated news site had an interesting main story on its front page explaining how the BP oil spill in the Gulf
of
Mexico had been deliberately staged as part of a white supremacist conspiracy between Buckingham Palace and the American Military-Industrial Complex to destabilize Barack Obama. Surprisingly, none of the major news outlets had yet picked up on the YouNews exclusive:

British royal family (Jews) told BP poodles to be faking oil spill for to keep blood-money of oil-dollars, yes, and not to tell how they kill Lady Di, for Obama ‘black’ president, (Africa) like Dodi, will face same fate as M. L. King, Malcolm X and Marvin Gaye – all executed, yes, by zionist CIA (true).

It made me feel marginally less guilty for having told Gary I didn’t want to resume my involvement in YouNews. He thought I had sold out; he couldn’t believe that I didn’t want to topple those evil, all-powerful, super-rich media moguls and become an all-powerful, super-rich media mogul.

I had not looked at my online Wiki-biography for a week, following a session when I had methodically reversed all the facetious edits, deleting the claims that I ‘could talk to the animals’, that I had ‘discovered France’ and had ‘a spare pancreas’. One joke in particular had played on my mind afterwards:

On 22 October, Vaughan experienced a psychogenic fugue on learning that he had won the National Lottery. The shock was so great that he suffered chronic amnesia and still doesn’t remember that he is entitled to £4 million on production of the winning ticket that he put in a very special hiding place for safekeeping.

It was clearly an inspired wind-up; I was not going to let it bother me any more. Especially now that I had looked in every hiding place imaginable.

Previously when I had deleted such yarns they had soon been
replaced
with new jokes, but in the time since I had last corrected the document no further changes had been made. The writers had clearly just got bored; reinventing Mr Vaughan’s life had been fun for a bit, but apparently the creative young minds had now moved on to other things. I couldn’t help but feel a little hurt.

But then I noticed a new paragraph under ‘Career’ that I had never read before. It said:

Mr Vaughan was the best teacher I ever had. When I left the sixth form to work in JD Sports he kept coming into the shop to persuade me to come back. I would never have got my A levels or gone to university if it wasn’t for Mr Vaughan.

This one comment from a former pupil utterly transformed my mood. I had been a good teacher after all, I reasoned. There
had
been a time when I had transformed lives. ‘Now I am manager of JD Sports,’ boasted my former pupil.

Despite the accumulating evidence and recovering memory, I still found myself regarding the negative side of Vaughan Mk 1 with a dispassionate objectivity. The marital break-up in particular was an event that had happened to another man. And the Maddy before the fugue had been a completely different person from the woman I knew now. The first was just a fictional character from some trashy half-remembered domestic drama; the other was a living, breathing woman who, despite all our problems, seemed to understand me better than I did myself. But what was so irrational about this Maddy was that she kept getting the two genres mixed up. She minded about things that had happened to her imaginary counterpart; she resented real-life Vaughan for things that fictional Vaughan had done. I was different now, she had acknowledged as much; but I was not going to be allowed to forget things I couldn’t remember.

I had found myself pondering how much my brain-wipe had altered my actual character. I suggested to Gary that this question
raised
all sorts of issues about the philosophical relationship between memory and experience. We were sitting in a busy pub, beside a noisy quiz machine. It was probably not the best setting for an existential debate about the influence of the conscious and subconscious on the evolution of the ego and id.

‘What I’m trying to say is, when I had completely forgotten all the events of my life, was I suddenly no longer shaped by them? Is it possible that my personality could have reverted back to my essential core nature, with the nurture starting all over again based on subsequent experiences?’

‘Well, you were shit at football before, and you’re shit at football now. So what’s that tell us?’

‘Well, I’m about average at football actually …’

‘No, you’re really shit. I mean you run like a girl, and the last goal you scored bounced in off your arse.’

I felt the philosophical discussion was drifting from the central thesis.

‘What I’m saying is: is it possible that all the character-defining experiences of my life were wiped along with the memories of them? I had a teenage cycling accident which I don’t remember. I still have the scar on my leg. But do I still have the mental scars of a failed marriage and all the other disappointments and unrealized ambitions, whatever they may have been?’

‘Being shit at football—’

‘Yes, you said.’

‘Can’t drive a car … never shagged enough girls at college … can’t hold your drink … appalling dress sense …’

‘Yeah, all right, you don’t have to list them all. I’m just saying, don’t you think this offers a unique case study in the whole “nature versus nurture” debate? Surely we don’t have to remember something to be affected by it? None of us can recall every single thing that’s happened to us, yet all of it helps shape our personalities.’

‘Nah,’ Gary said, taking a sip of his beer. ‘’Cos you were
always
into all that philosophical bollocks. Can I eat your crisps?’

But even Gary’s rhinoceros sensitivity was gradually being affected by the outside world. The photo on his iPhone was from the scan of his unborn child. And no moustache or sideburns from his favourite app could make the foetus look like a seventies porn star. He was actually coming to terms with the notion that we might not be an inseparable pair of radical students any more. He even had an idea about a possible girlfriend for me.

‘Do you know who I thought you ought to ask out on a date?’

‘Who?’

‘Maddy!’ he declared, as if this was the radical brainwave of a total genius. ‘Think about it. You’ve got loads in common with her already – and I’ve got a hunch you’ve still got a bit of a soft spot for her.’

‘Wow! Thanks, Gary. I’ll bear that in mind.’

Deep down, I feared that as more memories of my marriage came back, I might reacquire some of the bitterness and cynicism of my pre-fugue incarnation. I could now recall various stages of our marriage. The power struggle in our home seemed to have escalated like a small regional war. I had been insistent that the shelves above the television were the historic homeland of my vinyl LP collection, and demanded an immediate end to the provocative settlement of scented candles and framed photos in the disputed territories.

Madeleine upped the tension in the region, with the infamous 10 July massacre of all the history programmes stored on the TV planner. Dozens of recorded documentaries about the Nazis that I definitely intended to watch at some point were systematically wiped out; her ethnic cleansing of the Sky Plus box had been Maddy’s final solution to end Hitler’s occupation of the recorder’s hard drive.

The general resentment meant we ended up fighting about all sorts of stupid things. ‘No, they are completely different types of
songs
!!’ I remembered shouting. ‘How can you possibly compare “Fernando” to “Chiquitita”?’ And the tension following any fight would continue for days, with a coded war of attrition fought on a dozen different fronts. Maddy would insist that she filled up the car with petrol, and then deliberately let the price slip to £50.01 just because she knew how much that annoyed me. Her critical appraisal of detective thrillers on the television became unreasonably sympathetic towards the deranged wife who murdered her husband. Traditional little kindnesses between us disappeared: favourite treats were no longer placed in the supermarket trolley; just a single cup of tea was made at any one time. Years earlier the news of other couples splitting up would have been recounted in the same tones as a car crash or a serious illness. Now the reporting of such events sounded more like an innocent person being let out of prison.

None of this, of course, featured in this Wiki-memoir that I had pulled together, where I had taken care to be as neutral and objective as I could be. In any case, I was uneasy about trusting my own memories of the marriage; in the narrative I had reconstructed in my mind, the unhappy ending still didn’t seem to work. I could remember the Maddy who had been my companion, my best friend, my soul mate. Was that the last stage in all those marital self-help books? Or was a bitter divorce always going to be the final chapter in this case?

Over the past months, I had spent many long hours thinking about this relationship and wanting to understand why it had fallen apart as it did. Like a detective continually mulling over the clues leading up to a crime, I had kept staring at the basic life events mapped out in front of me, wondering where the wrong turning had been taken. And then in a flash I saw what was wrong.
I was only thinking about me
. That was the only history I had investigated, the only perspective I had viewed. Could it be that the problem with my marriage had been the same as the shortcomings of this memoir? That I had approached it as an
individual,
not as one half of a pair, or one quarter of a family?