The Memory Book Read Free Page A

Greg? I come here sometimes with Greg and Esther for a pain au chocolat.
    ‘You all right, love?’ the girl, who’s about Caitlin’s age, asks me. She is smiling, so perhaps I know her. Or perhaps she is just being friendly. A woman sitting with her toddler buggy, just to my left, pushes it a little further away from me. I must look strange, like a lady recently emerged from a lake. Haven’t they ever seen a wet person before?
    ‘Coffee, please,’ I say. I feel the weight of change in my jeans pocket, and produce it in my fist. I can’t remember how much the coffee is here, and when I look at the board over the counter where I know the information is displayed, I am lost. I hold out the coins in the palm of my hand and offer them up.
    The girl wrinkles her nose, as if money I’ve touched might somehow be tainted, and I feel very cold now and very lonely. I want to tell her why I am hesitating, but the words won’t come – not the right ones, anyway. It’s harder to say things out loud than think them in my head. It makes me scared to say anything to anyone I don’t know, in case I say something so ludicrous they just cart me away and lock me up, and by that time I’ve forgotten my name and …
    I glance towards the door. Where is this café? I went to the hospital with Mum, we saw the consultant, Mr Thingy, I couldn’t remember his name, I thought that was quite funny, and now I am here. But I can’t think why I am here, or even where here is. I shudder, taking the coffee and the brown coins that the girl has left on the counter; and then I go and sit down, very still. I feel like if I move suddenly, I might trip some hidden trap, and that something will harm me or I might fall off something. I feel like I might fall very far. I sit still and concentrate hard on how come I am here and how on earth I will leave. And where I will go. Little pieces come back to me – fragments rushing forward with pieces of information that I must somehow decode. The world is shattered all around me.
    I’m not responding to the treatment, that much I know. It was always likely. The odds of the drugs doing anything for me were just the same as flipping a coin and calling heads: fifty-fifty. But everyone hoped that, for me, the treatment would make all the difference. Because I am so young, because I have two daughters, and one of them is only three and one will be left to pick up the pieces. They all hoped it would work for me, and work better than anyone – even the doctor with the long and difficult name – ever thought possible. And I too hoped for the groundbreaking miracle that would change everything. It seemed right that fate or God should allow me, of all people, some special dispensation because of my extenuating circumstances. But fate or God has not done that: whichever one it is that is having a good laugh at my expense has done the opposite. Or perhaps it’s nothing so personal. Perhaps it’s just genealogical accidents stretching back millennia that have brought me to this moment in time when I am the one chosen to bear the consequences. I am deteriorating much faster than anyone thought I would. It’s to do with these little emboli. I can remember that word perfectly well, but I have no idea what the metal stirring thing that came with my coffee is called. But the word emboli is quite beautiful, musical almost, poetic. Tiny little blood clots exploding in my brain. It’s a new feature, not something the experts expected. It makes me almost unique in the world, and everyone at the hospital is very excited about it, even though they try to pretend theyare not. All I know is that every time one pops up, some more of me is gone for good – another memory, a face or a word, just lost, like me. I look around me, feeling colder now than before, and realise I feel afraid. I have no idea how to get home. I’m here, and I feel sane, but leaving this place seems impossible.
    There are Christmas decorations hanging