The Skeleton Man

Because I don’t have to remember. That’s how it works. The doctors have set the same prognosis, that the past will return but from the earliest memories first, rolling forward to the present. Flashes out of sync perhaps, no more. But there are no guarantees the process will ever be complete. It’s started already, my childhood unfurling. But it might just stop: stop short – so that I’ll never know about Kathryn, and I’ll never know why I was on that bridge. And who did I meet? And will they come for me again?

I know more about you, Laura, than I know about my wife. At least you and I have a past, however brief it’s been.

Liz told me what my life was like. I think she knew I couldn’t remember, and she wants me to remember, so that we can have something to share. But it’s like sharing ashes, and there’s not even a memory of the fire.

And then there’s what I do remember, the past revealing itself. It’s an odd feeling, not so much remembering as uncovering. I don’t recall the past with any sense of triumph or discovery, it just appears, fully made, already stale somehow, tarnished by a thousand other rememberings I’ve forgotten.

The present is the only reality in which I feel alive.

My life so far then, in a few paragraphs, as I’ve actually remembered it. Yes, I was born in Jude’s Ferry. In Orchard House, where the garden ran down to the river. I only have the one memory before we started moving – hiding amongst the box hedges and watching a car crackle past on the gravel drive. Why that memory? I doubt I’ll ever know. My father, a diplomat, took us away. The house, mothballed, we said was home. And we did come back for the summers, and a single Christmas.

But my life was somewhere else. To Singapore – where the wonderful gardens ran down to the harbour – to Belize, to Washington. A life oddly untroubled by all that movement. English schools in exotic climates, and the poor glimpsed through the windows of the polished cars that always whisked us from the airport. And then mother died – while I was at Coniston. I was ten and a boarder and father was in Saudi Arabia where we couldn’t go. I can remember being told. I was out on the rugby pitches, the snow on the hills. I was called to a cold room, lined with books, and there was a slab of sunshine on the floor which edged away from me as the headmaster talked. University. English at Oxford. Keble, the rain running down those depressing red bricks.