The Forgetting(35)
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.’
‘God, did you do all that from memory?’ I turn around, find Zahira standing behind the bench. ‘I must have read that poem a hundred times and I’d never be able to recite it like that.’ She sits down and pulls Elyas onto her lap. Pressing her face to his neck, he giggles as she covers his skin with kisses.
I watch them and something cramps in my chest.
‘Elyas loves rhymes, don’t you?’ She turns to me. ‘That’s very impressive, knowing it off by heart.’
She squeezes her son tightly, and I look away, the sight of their intimacy like a naked flame threatening to scorch me should I get too close.
‘I’m afraid, little bear, we have to get going.’ Elyas lets out a plaintive wail. ‘I know, I’m sorry – we haven’t been here nearly long enough.’ Zahira stands up from the bench, reaches for the pushchair. ‘Usually we’re here for hours, but I need to get some work done. So much for working part-time.’ She rolls her eyes, puts Elyas into his buggy, slips his arms through the straps.
‘What do you do?’
Zahira grapples with the clasp, clicks it into place. ‘I’m a portrait photographer, for magazines and newspapers mostly.’ She untwists one of the straps over Elyas’s shoulder.
I think about my own idle days, empty for months since being made redundant, and feel a stab of envy that Zahira has so much with which to fill hers. ‘That sounds really interesting. So do you photograph famous people?’
Zahira laughs. ‘Sometimes.’ She lowers her voice conspiratorially. ‘They’re rarely as interesting as you’d hope. But a lot of my work is human-interest stories – weekend supplements, women’s glossies, that kind of thing.’ Zahira reaches for the bag tucked beneath the pushchair, pulls out a banana. She peels it, hands it to Elyas before turning back to me. ‘We’re going to my parents’ this Friday, but why don’t you give me your mobile number and I can let you know when we’ll be here next week.’
I shake my head, knowing even before I speak that my answer doesn’t really make sense. ‘I don’t have a mobile.’
Zahira looks confused. ‘But everybody has a mobile.’
I know she is right: I may have lost my personal memories, but I haven’t forgotten the existence of modern technology. I feel foolish, suddenly, that I haven’t asked Stephen about it before. A phone would have all my contacts in it – friends, former colleagues, previous correspondence. ‘I’ll ask Stephen about it tonight.’
Zahira presses a foot down on the brake of the pushchair, turns it in the opposite direction. ‘Anyway, we’ll be here next Tuesday morning – about nine-ish – unless it’s pouring with rain. Maybe see you then?’
I tell her I’ll be here and watch them leave. Zahira leans forward over the handlebar, chatting to her son, and it is there again, that feeling twisting beneath my ribs, as it has been each time I’ve seen them together; something unnameable tugging deep inside me.
And then I realise what it is. In all the conversations Stephen and I have had over the past ten days, there has been no mention of children. We have been married twelve years and yet we are childless. As I watch Zahira and Elyas exit through the park gates and on to the street, the sensation billows inside me as though it has a life of its own. I know that this feeling – a yearning, painful and raw – is not a symptom of my head injury. It speaks to something deeper, and I feel sure that there are other things about my life Stephen has chosen not to tell me. What I don’t know yet is why.
LIVVY
BRISTOL
Livvy pulled armfuls of dirty washing from the linen basket and piled them onto the floor. She wondered how it was possible for three people to generate so much laundry. In the bedroom next door, Leo was having a mid-morning nap. The night had been restless, Livvy unable to soothe him back to sleep when he’d woken just after four a.m., both of them becoming increasingly fractious as the minutes had marched on. Eventually, a little after six-thirty, Livvy had given up, taken him downstairs, retrieved some toys from the chest beside the fireplace, and played with him in the sitting room, her eyes scratchy and dehydrated from lack of sleep. By ten-thirty, Leo could barely keep awake, and Livvy had put him back in his cot, closed the blackout blind and sung to him until he had fallen asleep.
Piling the clothes into her arms, she carried them down two flights of stairs to the kitchen and stuffed them into the washing machine. The lack of sleep clung to the backs of her eyes and she tried to imagine how she would cope if she were heading into the office today, leading a team of policy advisers, running meetings with NGOs, lobbying politicians. The prospect was exhausting and yet still there was a desire to be there.
Measuring out the laundry liquid and pouring it into the dispenser, she thought about her call yesterday with Aisha, the confirmation that any extension to her maternity leave would rule her out of the promotion. ‘You are still okay to come back as planned, aren’t you? I managed to persuade Christian he can do without a Policy Director for a month, but there’s no way he’ll agree to any longer.’ Livvy had backpedalled furiously, told Aisha not to worry, reassured her that she still planned to return as agreed and take on the new role.
Now, twenty-four hours later, the conversation seemed like a moment of madness, or perhaps just hope over reality. She had accepted a job despite having no idea how she would manage childcare for the first two months of it.