Nicci French - The Memory Game

‘Ssssh.’ I stroked his hair, and felt his breath hot against my thigh. This felt like incest. ‘Ssssh. There, Claud, don’t cry. I can’t bear it if you cry.’ He lay there like a heavy child, and I raised him up and cradled him against my breast.

I was back where I’d started, in Alex Dermot-Brown’s kitchen drinking coffee out of a thick mug. Alex was on the phone to someone, making non-committal noises, uming and ah-ing, obviously trying to get the caller off the line. Every so often, he looked across at me and smiled encouragingly. I gazed around the room. It was the kind of kitchen I felt at home in: cluttered, recipes tacked to notice-boards, bills in a pile on the table, newspapers scattered, photographs propped up against candle-sticks, breakfast dishes stacked in the sink, garlic cloves in a bowl and flowers in a vase. I noticed a photograph on the window ledge of a woman with dark hair and a self-conscious smile: his wife, I supposed. I wondered how important Alex’s kitchen had been to the whole process of my therapy. Would I have trusted myself to a man whose kitchen was neat and cold?

He put the phone down, and sat down across the table from me.

‘More coffee?’

‘Please.’

It felt odd to be on an equal level to him, meeting his direct gaze.

‘You’re looking a bit better.’

This morning I had put on a low-waisted woollen dress and a funny little hat, and I’d applied lipstick and mascara.

‘I’m feeling a bit better. I think.’

I’d wept so many tears I felt drained of them.

Alex leant across the table. ‘Jane,’ he said in his low, pleasant voice, ‘you have shown enormous courage, and I’m very proud of you. I know it’s been hard.’

‘Why don’t I feel any better?’ I burst out. ‘You said it was like bursting an abscess. So why do I feel so terrible? Not just about all of them, but about me. I feel terrible about me. ’

Alex passed me a tissue.

‘Bursting an abscess is painful and brings problems of its own. At a very vulnerable stage in your life, just when you were crossing over from childhood to adulthood, you witnessed something so atrocious that your mind censored it. You can’t expect everything to be all right immediately. Knowledge is painful; to take control over your own life is hard; and healing takes time. But you have to realise, Jane, that you can’t go back to your previous state. You’ll never forget again.’

I shivered.

‘What shall I do?’

‘You agree that you can’t run away from this new knowledge?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think you could live with it and do nothing?’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘You do realise, of course, that if you did decide to do nothing, just to live with this terrible memory, that you’d still be exercising your power, making a choice.’

‘Yes, I know that.’

‘Who matters to you?’

The question took me aback.

‘What?’

‘I said, “Who matters to you?’“

‘Robert and Jerome.’ Their names came out of my mouth so quickly I realised that my sons, the horror they would experience from all of this, had been near the front of my mind all the time, suppressed. ‘Dad. Kim. And Hana now.’

‘Who else?’

‘Well, Claud in a way. Still.’

‘Who else?’

‘After that, lots of people. But not so much.’

‘Alan?’

‘No, of course not,’ I said almost in weariness. I could hardly bear the mention of his name now.

‘No one else in particular?’

‘Not especially.’

‘Nobody?’

‘Alex, what is this?’

‘What about you?’

‘Me?’

I didn’t understand.

‘Don’t you matter to yourself, Jane?’

‘Yeah, right, I know what you mean but…’

‘Don’t you think, Jane, that you owe it to yourself to acknowledge this openly. You’re thinking of your sons, your father, your ex-husband. You are so busy thinking of the world beyond you that you haven’t thought of the most important thing of all.’

‘But I have to think of everyone else. I’m wrecking their world.’

Alex leant further forward, stared at me intently. ‘I have dealt with cases similar to yours before,’ he said. ‘In all of them, women have had to be brave and determined. They have not just had to deal with their own considerable pain but with the simple disbelief of the people they know, of the authorities. You don’t just owe it to yourself to go through with this, you owe it to them, Jane, all those women who know the pain of repressing their memories, and all those who have found the courage to speak out. Don’t cry.’

His voice became gentle again. He handed me another tissue and I blew noisily into it.

‘I don’t suppose you’d let me have a cigarette?’

He smiled. ‘We could go into the garden.’

Outside it was damp and cold. Mud seeped up through the balding lawn. Snowdrops wilted in pots by the door. I put a cigarette in my mouth and struck a match; it flared and blew out. I struck again, shielding the flame with my hand. Inhaled gratefully.

‘Those other women,’ I said at last, ‘what did they do?’

‘Most of them,’ Alex replied, ‘remembered being abused themselves, not witnessing an atrocity like you. We’re starting to discover that the mind is capable of a self-protective amnesia. But the hidden memories are not lost. They are like files in a computer which can be recovered with the right triggers. Some kinds of therapy can retrieve this information.’

‘Yes, but what did they do ? After they knew.’

‘Some did nothing, of course, except cut themselves off from their abusers.’

‘And the others?’

‘They brought their injuries into the open. They confronted their abusers; they even went to the police. They refused to remain victims.’

I lit another cigarette and walked to the end of the garden. Alex made no attempt to follow me. He watched as I paced. Eventually I said:

‘So you think I should confront Alan?’

He said nothing, just looked at me.

‘Or go to the police?’

Still Alex said nothing. All at once I felt massively angry. Rage danced across my eyeballs. I felt itchily hot in the cold air.

‘You have no idea,’ I shouted into his face, ‘what you are asking me to do, no idea. This is my family we’re talking about here. My whole life. I won’t have anywhere I belong any more. I’ll be an outcast.’ My face stung with tears. ‘How can I just go to the police and tell them about Alan. He was like my father. I loved him.’

I stopped on a wail, and there was silence. A few gardens away I heard the thin gulpy scream of a baby who’s been crying a long time, and isn’t going to stop. I fumbled in my pocket for my cigarettes, lit one, and incompetently dabbed at my messed-up face with a soggy tissue.

‘Here.’ Alex gave me another one.

‘Sorry. I’m ravaging your tissue store.’

‘It’s all right. I have a tissue mountain. I get an EC grant for maintaining it.’

We turned back to the house. At the door, Alex stopped and put his hand on my shoulder.

‘I’m not asking you to do anything, you know. Of course you have to decide that for yourself. I’m just asking you if you can do nothing.’

Inside, Alex made us some more coffee, while I went to the bathroom to wash my face. I looked terrible. Mascara ran in rivulets down my face, my hair straggled out from under my hat and stuck to my snotty cheeks in strands, my eyes were puffy and my nose was red from the cold. ‘Pull yourself together,’ I muttered to the woman in the mirror, and watched a mirthless rictus spread over her grubby face. I whistled a tune: ‘You’ll never get to heaven.’ A song all of us used to sing at the Stead. Never mind, it had been a long time since I’d believed in heaven.