Nicci French - The Memory Game

‘Go on then; you’re going to tell me anyway.’

I felt damp and cross. A bit of grit in my shoe pressed against the ball of my foot; my scalp itched under my head and my neck itched and my hands sweated and my nose felt cold. Why couldn’t she just listen and nod and hold my hand?

‘I think you’ve turned this into a self-consuming obsession. Solve this puzzle, and another one will appear. You want some ultimate, complete meaning to a messy tragedy. You’ve lost your wit.’

‘Wits.’

‘Wit. You’re getting boring. Can’t you let it go?’

I climbed over a stile, staining my palms green with slimy lichen.

‘I want to. I thought it would all be over, that I was coming here to end the whole foul business and – this’ll sound stupid – to find Natalie again. She’d become like a jigsaw puzzle or something, and the only bits of her character I thought about were the bits that made sense of her murder. And then the other day I had this really clear image of her, it was as if I could reach out and touch her. I did love her, you know; she was my first best friend. So I needed to come and say goodbye to the real her, in the place where she last was. But I feel so… so strange, somehow. It’s as if I know something more, but I can’t get at it. It might be boring but… oh shit, lateral thinking, that’s what I need. I feel like I’m going mad.’

Kim said nothing. We walked down the hill to the car.

‘You do still want to stay for the rest of the weekend, don’t you?’ asked Kim, as we drove back to the hotel.

‘Yes, of course.’ Then: ‘Well, actually, Kim, I don’t think I can. I feel all restless now. I’m really sorry, but can we drive back tonight?’

Kim looked grim.

‘It was a bit of a long drive for one late night, and a single soggy walk.’

‘I know. I just wouldn’t be very good company.’ I opened a window and lit a cigarette. ‘Unfinished business and all that. It’s like that mad woman said to me: it’s not over yet.’

‘As usual today, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. However’ – Kim reached out a hand and touched me briefly on the shoulder – ‘let’s not bicker. I don’t mean to be so grouchy.’ She grinned ruefully. ‘It’s just that I’d planned what my evening meal would be: scallops and raw tuna marinaded in lemon juice and herbs, followed by spring lamb. Then I rather fancied the apple strudel and cream.’

‘I’ll buy sandwiches for the journey,’ I said. ‘Cheese and salad on brown, with an apple to follow.’

‘Whoopee.’

It was still not quite eight o’clock when we left the hotel with our bags and boots. I insisted on paying for the unused second night, and apologised to the perplexed owner.

‘They probably think it’s a lover’s tiff,’ said Kim.

‘They probably think we’re fair-weather walkers from London, fleeing from this rain.’

It was still raining as we drove off in the growing darkness, a horrible June evening. The windscreen wipers slapped down water, and Kim put on some music. Bent jazzy notes of a saxophone filled the car, drowned out the patter of wild weather. We sat in a silence that was not uncomfortable. Gradually the rain ceased, although puddles in the road still sprayed up under our tyres, and Kim had to turn on the wipers every time a lorry thundered by in the opposite direction.

I sat back wearily, and gazed at the countryside flowing past. I could see my face, a hazy blur, in the window. I hadn’t been able to stay, but I didn’t really know what I was going back for. What should I do now? My life was at an impasse. Maybe the only thing to do was to return to Alex’s couch and try to sort out all the ugly, itchy inconsistencies. With Alex, I had managed to illuminate one sickening patch of my past, but everything else lay in shadow. Perhaps I had to illuminate all of that, too. I felt unutterably tired at the very thought, as if my bones ached. When I had begun this journey back into my childhood, I had used the image of a black hole in the visible landscape of my past. Now it seemed as if, like the negative of a photograph, that image had been reversed. The only thing that was visible, dazzlingly visible, was that which had been obscure. Topsy-turvy land ruled over by a dead child.

‘Can you turn the light on while I try to find another tape?’ asked Kim, scrabbling among the mess of cassette cases in the compartment of her door.

‘Sure.’ I blinked in the light, and the world outside the car was blotted out. ‘You know, Kim, it all feels so inside out. When I walked up Cree’s Top this morning, I felt exactly like Alice in the looking-glass garden, where everything is back to front, and in order to get somewhere you have to walk away from it. Strange, isn’t it?’

I blinked back unexpected tears, and gazed at the window. A middle-aged woman, her thin face lined with worry, stared back, stuck in her world on the other side of the glass. We looked at each other, eyes wide and appalled. She wasn’t a stranger; we knew each other quite well though perhaps not well enough. A cold knife was slicing through my brain. Oh no, oh dear God, please no. What had I done?

I reached up and turned off the light. A flute, haunting, silver, trembled in the air. The woman’s face was extinguished. I had been looking at myself. Of course. I was that girl on the hillside, Natalie for an hour; I had seen myself on that hillside, and tracked myself down. I had been in the looking-glass garden and I had followed my own image and when I had found myself I had lost myself most terribly. Most terribly. I felt a scream rising up in me and clapped my hand over my mouth. It had never been Natalie on the hill; it had only ever been me, Natalie’s friend, her lookalike. It was me who had been seen all those years ago by an old man on his way to dismantle the marquee, me who had been called Natalie. It was me for whom I had searched among my living nightmares.

‘Please Kim. Please can you drop me off at the next tube station.’

We were coming into the suburbs of London and I knew where I had to go next.

Kim looked at me in astonishment but obediently braked.

‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Jane, because I certainly don’t.’

I kissed her on the cheek then gave her a long hug.

‘I know what I’m doing; for the first time in a long long while I know what I’m doing. There’s something I’ve got to sort out and I think it’s going to be painful.’

‘Jane,’ said Kim, as I turned to go. ‘If you ever get through this you owe me one. More than one.’

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, is that Dr Thelma Scott?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is Jane Martello, you may remember we met at…’

She interrupted me with a new note of interest in her voice.

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘I know this will sound stupid but could I come and see you?’

‘What? Now?’

‘Yes, if that’s all right?’

‘It’s Saturday night, how do you know I’m not having a dinner party or going to a nightclub?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to interrupt anything.’

‘That’s all right, I’m reading a novel. Are you sure this is important? You can’t just ask me over the phone?’

‘If it isn’t, you can send me away. Just give me five minutes.’

‘All right, where are you?’

‘ Hanger Lane tube station. Should I get a taxi?’

‘No, you’re quite close. Just take the tube to Shepherd’s Bush.’

She gave me some brief instructions and in a few minutes I was walking out of Shepherd’s Bush tube station and around the corner into a quiet residential street by Wood Lane. Knocking at the door, I was greeted by the small woman with the alert expression I remembered from before, but dressed casually in jeans and a very bright sweater. She had a slightly sardonic smile, as if I were acting up to expectations, but her handshake was friendly enough.