I thought I did it rather well. I fooled everyone, but most especially, it turns out, I had fooled myself. My life wasn’t a mosaic of dim memories, it had been invented out of whole cloth. It was all lies, lies which I cleaved to despite the fact that they hurt me, cost me my peace, could have cost me my job, could have cost me my life, if last night was anything to go by.
It was all just lies.
And the only thing to replace them with was unimaginable horror.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was plunging for the door.
Martin found me outside, standing on the steps under the awning, watching the snow fall. He didn’t say anything, but came and stood next to me, watching the snow with me for a little while.
As far as I was capable of feeling anything, I felt grateful for this. I wanted him to put his arm around me, knew that he would not, because if it had been an unwelcome gesture it would have been an unconscionable thing to do to me at that particular moment.
Perhaps I needed to put my arm around him.
‘Margot… about…’
‘I have an idea.’
He did not reply, waiting.
‘I need some cigarettes,’ I said.
‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
‘I don’t. Or rather, I don’t any more. I gave up.’
Beside me, I could feel him wanting to object.
‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘Trust me as I trusted you. Come with me while I smoke a cigarette.’
We crossed the road to the little Co-Op opposite, and queued patiently at the counter while a man in front of us quibbled with the shop assistant over which scratch card he wanted.
Bloody hell, it was practically a tenner for a pack of twenty Silk Cut Blue nowadays. It only seemed like a couple of years since I gave up, and it was a fiver then. You could have knocked me over with a feather.
You could have knocked me over with a feather anyway.
I bought them and a pink plastic Bic lighter, which the boy behind the counter obligingly flicked into a flame a couple of times, just to check that it worked.
Martin observed all of this, and me, with an aura of bemused indulgence.
‘What’s this about?’ he asked, as we emerged back on to Parker’s Piece in the snow. It was growing, if not exactly dark, then dim.
I hadn’t forgotten that we were on a clock. Far from it.
‘It’s about drugs. And memory,’ I said. ‘Sit on the bench with me.’
We settled on the bench opposite the fire station, with its new gleaming frontage. Behind the glass panels the engines were vast and quiescent.
I unwrapped the cellophane from the packet, willing myself to remember this action – I must have done this hundreds and hundreds of times over the course of my life.
‘Am I interrupting something if I ask questions?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It won’t make a difference. It’s beyond words.’ I thumbed open the top of the box, regarded the tesseract of packed filters within for a long moment. At one point this sight filled me with equal parts desire, self-contempt, resignation – or even nothing at all, something I did without thinking.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘The minute you said it, I knew I could never have been a heroin addict. The thought of applying a needle to my own flesh makes my skin crawl. The thought of loss of control terrifies me. It had just never occurred to me before, because of course, I’d never had to think of it that way. I could remember how to do it, but I didn’t long for it. It was just a fact, one I assumed was true.
‘If I was truly addicted, I would have got past it. But no. There wasn’t even the residue of desire. Now these,’ I shook the box at him. ‘Holding these, looking at these, smelling that herby scent, that… that male scent – grassy, slightly bitter yet very rich – these hold the residue of desire for me.’ I lifted them to my nose and inhaled.
He was silent, listening.
‘Our minds are tricksy,’ I said, gazing down at the box. ‘But our senses… our senses have memories, too, and they’re harder to fool.’ I pushed one of the cigarettes upwards, drew it out, put it between my lips. They pursed around it, adopting the correct shape, as if they’d been waiting to do this for years.
I was right, I knew it.
I lifted the lighter, ignited, inhaled.
It tasted horrible. But that was OK. I expected that. It tasted like a welcome from people that haven’t recognized you yet, but will soon, and will be overjoyed when they do.
The smell of burning was like a little hearth, warming me. I blew out a puff of smoke into the cold air.
Martin’s intense gaze followed it.
‘I know everything there is to know about how to shoot up heroin,’ I said. ‘I know to crush the pills. How to cook the mixture, how to draw up the solution through cotton wool so the bits don’t get sucked up into the needle. I know everything there is to know about it, because I watched Angelique do it.’
I inhaled again, the burning, sweet heat of it. It still tasted disgusting. But I had no desire to stop.
‘Angelique’s dad… well, it wasn’t sexual abuse, the way she told it, but there was a sexual component, or maybe that’s not right.’ I shook my hand, as though to conjure the right phrase, and it seemed to work: ‘There was a control component. He made her get up at six every morning and inspected her. I mean, he watched her shower, and brush her teeth, and get dressed, until she was about fifteen years old. She kept a diary, which had to be submitted to him every week for his approval. She was allowed no friends that he didn’t vet, and he didn’t rubber-stamp any of them. They were all dirty, or sly, or ignorant, or rebellious. Basically, he had no chance of controlling them, so out they went.
‘And Angelique went along with all of it, until she was fifteen. Then she met a boy on the way home from school, who offered her a lift in his car. By the end of the week, she’d run away with him. To London. Where I met her.’ I let out a sad little laugh. ‘Isn’t that what everyone does, at least once in their lives? I did it, Bethan’s mother – my mother – did it, and Angelique did it. She ran away to the big city.’
The glowing tip of the cigarette jutted out from between my ring and index finger on the right hand, as though it had never been away.
‘I’d like to say she was happy ever after.’ The smoke curled out of my mouth. ‘But I’m quite sure that she wasn’t.’ I let my forehead sink down on to my hand. ‘I know that she wasn’t.’
He waited. The snow had stopped for a little while, but was now whirling downwards again.
I sighed.
‘Somehow, I became Angelique,’ I said. The words sat on the still air, in a little cloud of their own craziness. ‘I can’t tell which parts of me I’ve stolen from her, like the heroin, or which are really me, like the cigarettes.’
‘It will be all right,’ he said, putting a hand on my trembling arm.
I cast about me. The sun had set and the stream of passers-by was drying to a trickle. The streetlights had started to glimmer redundantly in the gloom.
I touched my hair and snow came away in my hands. I didn’t feel cold though.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘It’s about triggers. My mind doesn’t remember, but my senses can feel the way, if I let them. I need to get up close and personal with more triggers. But first, we need to make that crew in there do that DNA. And the hypnosis. Now.’
‘You’re freezing,’ he said after a minute. ‘And we do need to go back. We can’t sit here all night.’
‘Another minute,’ I said.
‘Let me get you your coat, then. It’s only in the car.’
I nodded, these arrangements passing me by, like a dream.
I watched Martin walk up to the Land Rover, watched his feet plodding through the slush. He moved aside for a man passing along the inside of the pavement.
The cigarette had burned away practically to the filter. I dropped it, ground it into the snow.