The Long Forgotten Read online

  ‘Come on,’ Maud said, ‘you must be hungry.’

  A vegetable soup simmered on the hob, the pan lid jigging on a stage of steam. Len served it up. He ran a finger around the rim of his bowl, tore a thick slice of bread in two and plunged it in, disappearing to the crust. He brought it to his mouth and swallowed it whole, the boy watching it slide down his throat.

  ‘Nothing to be frightened of here,’ Maud said, gesturing to mean the house but waving her hand across the view from the window, where the North Yorkshire Moors swooned into darkness. Dove held his butter knife so tightly his whole hand paled. ‘Anything you can see is yours to use. Anything in the cupboards is yours to eat. You are one of us.’

  ‘You don’t speak much, do you?’ Len said, with a wobble of his head rendering the nature of the question difficult to discern. No, he didn’t. Was he supposed to? ‘It’s OK. They always speak in the end.’

  ‘Len!’ Maud said, tossing her spoon into the sink. ‘You make it sound like he’s here for a bloody interrogation.’

  ‘Do I? Oh, well, that’s not what I meant. I meant you’ll relax soon enough, and then you’ll want to speak or you won’t, but either way is fine with us. Do whatever you like, as long as it makes you happy.’

  In truth, Dove was already happy, and thus also afraid this was a giant trick, greater than any that had ever been played on him. That every time they went to the shops, or Maud took him to the library, or Len took him out to ride his bike, they would leave him on the corner of the street and drive away.

  He wouldn’t know until many years later how they’d suffered abandonments of their own. How Len had first suggested he and Maud become foster-parents in the bruising days after Maud miscarried for the third time, a moment of internal violence so barbarous their sanity demanded they consider it an unlucky twist of fate and not a bodily mutiny of which she was the cause.

  Months later, when Maud was physically recovered, they began to take the suggestion seriously, eventually figuring – why not? The house seemed a third empty with just the two of them in it. The grass on the moors needed trampling by feet other than those of the goat they kept, roaming the outposts of their idyll with illusory freedom.

  If it wasn’t for them, if it salted the wound, they could end it whenever they liked. Each child would only be with them for a few weeks anyway, a couple of months at most. Just until they’d found a new and permanent home. If they decided against continuing, then, really, there was no harm done.

  Eighty-two children passed through their doors before Dove arrived. They told themselves he would be the last of them, their swansong from a career of foster-parenting that rewarded and nourished them in ways they never thought possible, let dazzling fauna grow on stricken ground. They would then fully embrace their retirement, of which they’d long fantasized. They’d go to exhibitions and the theatre and watch so many films. Their love was forged over a shared appreciation of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. Though Maud disputed the fact while Len stood by it – their first kiss came after they’d rolled, literally rolled, around laughing at the scene in The African Queen where Bogart’s stomach rumbles loudly at dinner.

  They were too old to be following young children around a field. Her knees ached, and Len’s back was permanently sore: there was winter in their bones. And the parting got no easier with time. They might not be able to take it again. With eighty-two cracks in their hearts already, wasn’t it inevitable they’d shatter soon? The eighty-third might just be the one.

  ‘We should do the photograph now,’ Maud said, digging a scuffed Polaroid camera from a shoebox on top of the fridge. Dove’s face felt strange: aching, stretched, and he realized, lit white by a flash that bleached his vision, it was because he too was smiling, like the children in the other photographs. And now he knew why. When the three of them were together, the earth was a record spinning at the speed at which it should be played.

  Dove is standing outside the building where he works, black cabs skulking by like a queue of kettled buffalo. A light rain is falling. He doesn’t care. Today he has remembered his watch, and takes a perverse thrill from seeing the seconds pass. With each tick the day matters less, as does his existence in it. When he closes his eyes and remembers Peter Manyweathers – finding the bog violet, meeting Angelica Meek, chancing upon the love letter in the library book – his blood turns to warm gold.

  So he is two hours late and counting when he opens his eyes again to see, outside the supermarket, the old man who works the till is rolling a cigarette without once looking down at the component parts in his hand. He brings it to his lips with the care one might afford a rare and precious musical instrument. The cracks in his face fill with smoke. When it clears, Dove is entering the building, the door hinge’s squeak so familiar he can imitate it with a whistle.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Cliff waits by the vending machine, arms cocked at his hips, a physical manoeuvring of his limbs so ungainly it can only have misfired.

  ‘I work here,’ Dove says. ‘Did you think I only came to buy snacks?’ Cliff laughs a little too exuberantly – a man who loves to be in on a joke.

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘You meant me being late. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m not talking about you being late either. I’m talking about the fact that it’s only twenty-four hours since I sent you home because you were sick. You should be in bed.’ Cliff follows Dove to his desk.

  ‘I think it was a migraine, except it didn’t really develop.’

  ‘I didn’t know you suffered from migraines.’

  ‘I don’t. Not really.’

  ‘Listen.’ Cliff’s Adam’s apple pumps like the forestock on a shotgun. ‘I want you to think of me as a pal, rather than a supervisor.’

  ‘I do,’ Dove says, nodding awkwardly. It’s not lost on him that Cliff is perhaps his only friend.

  ‘Then you’ll understand that sometimes I worry about you.’

  ‘You worry about me?’ Dove prods at his own chest in hope this might bring the conversation to an abrupt end. ‘You worry about me?’

  ‘Sometimes, yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  Cliff produces a coffee-stained napkin, dabs it at his palms. ‘Well, it’s not nice to go home to an empty house when you’re sick. You should get out more. Maybe meet someone.’ He lifts a mobile phone out of his pocket, a slug of lint hanging from the charger socket that he peels away with a slight air of shame. ‘There’s this new app . . .’

  ‘Please, Cliff.’

  ‘It’s so easy to meet people through it. I’ve been on two dates in these last three weeks.’

  ‘I’m happy for you, but . . .’

  ‘All you have to do is input a little bit of information about yourself, upload a photo and you’re away. A brave new world.’ He holds the phone in front of Dove’s face, close enough Dove has to make an effort to refocus, until he finds before him the photograph that welcomes new users to the app. A powerfully attractive man and woman hand in hand on a beach, their teeth a brilliant white. Neither appears ever to have worried about anything, or had sand in their shoes.

  ‘Really, Cliff, I appreciate your concern, but it’s not what I’m looking for right now.’ The app seems so completely opposed to what Dove understands of romance or even lust that Cliff might as well be holding roadkill under the nose of a man to whom he’s trying to sell a dog.

  ‘You’re not looking for fun times and nights out with like-minded single women?’ Cliff waggles the phone from side to side.

  ‘Not really, no.’ Dove closes his eyes, desperate to slip quietly into the memories of Peter Manyweathers once more. It was the love letter that had piqued his interest most – just as it had Peter’s – and he allows himself to fantasize about a world before apps, where that kind of thing – hidden notes, grand gestures, globe-trotting affairs of the heart – happened all the more frequently.

  When he opens them again, Cliff, disheartened, slides the phone back int
o his pocket.

  ‘There are other apps you might want to use.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like those that help you trace your family tree.’ Dove spins a hundred and eighty degrees in his seat. He’d long regretted telling Cliff he was adopted – a brief discussion on one of the few occasions they’d socialized outside of work. Cliff, out of a misplaced kindness that on any other matter Dove would have found endearing, had made it a kind of personal mission to coax Dove into finding his parents when really he wasn’t interested. Cliff thought this was the root of Dove’s problem, and liked to allude to this hypothesis whenever he could.

  ‘Might not be such a bad idea,’ Cliff says with a wink that feels in no way apt.

  ‘Seriously, Cliff,’ Dove says. ‘Not now, huh?’

  Dove logs into his phone, which rings immediately. He swallows his fury, slides his headset into position in a way that suggests it’s best they pretend this conversation never happened.

  ‘London ambulance,’ he says, guiltily watching a dejected Cliff zigzag across the Pit through a higgledy maze of half walls, head tilted to the floor.

  The calls come thick and fast. Probable cardiac arrest. Possible broken femur. A woman in early labour somewhere in the back of a cab. By lunchtime he is exhausted, and keen to find a quiet corner where he can return to Peter’s memories, remove himself from the humdrum of the office, of his life. He heads towards the staffroom with a badly made sandwich sliding around inside a plastic tub under his arm.

  The staffroom is painted pastel green, with the dimensions of a shipping container. People pull the chairs from the wall into the centre of the floor, forming two smaller circles of conversation. Typically there is one circle for older staff and one for younger staff, and though plenty of people come and go, nobody notices Dove by the empty water cooler in the corner. There is no reason for anyone to bother him here, and it affords him the opportunity to listen, and, as best he can, distract himself from what he’s increasingly convinced, and concerned, are symptoms of madness, or worse, a tumour pressing down on his frontal lobe. What other explanation could there be for Peter’s memories than vivid hallucinations? Maybe Cliff was right. Maybe he does need to get out more. Find someone else. Maybe he is lost.

  Two of the newer recruits are talking. Tania has copper-coloured hair, parted cleanly in the middle into two columns hanging over stark white skin. She’d friended Dove on social media – just as she had most of his colleagues – within days of starting work, but they’d never spoken in real life. This is how he knows she graduated in Women’s Fashion Design and recently had a public spat with her ex-boyfriend after some pictures were posted of him with his arm around another young woman at a party. His attempts to remove the pictures from the Internet backfired spectacularly when he accidentally shared them with an even wider audience, at which she felt embarrassed and hurt. She is discussing this with Jed, another colleague with whom Dove is also friends on Facebook only. He is short and thin. He studied Business (Advertising and Marketing), and posts photographs – on a beach, in a club, at a supermarket – in which he’s pulling a face (eyes narrowed, lips pinched) unrelated to any of the expressions he uses on a day-to-day basis. If he’d tried to explain this compulsion to a psychologist as little as twenty years ago, Dove doesn’t doubt he’d have been institutionalized.

  ‘So I’m getting my own back,’ Tania says.

  ‘How?’ Jed asks.

  She holds her phone in front of his face – the window to her soul. In the photographs she is at a party. Her mouth is wide open, fist raised in the air. ‘Making him jealous.’

  ‘You look great,’ he says, an inflexibility to his tone that makes it impossible to discern between enthusiasm and sympathy. ‘Was it a good party?’

  ‘Terrible.’

  ‘Oh, babe.’

  ‘I think I’m not over him. I think I’m depressed.’

  ‘The job doesn’t help,’ Jed says, glancing over his shoulder, a cowardly hush to his voice. ‘If I get another pensioner that’s fallen over I think I’m going to kill myself.’ They laugh and finish the sandwiches they bought from the old man at the supermarket. They bin the packaging and head towards the door, footsteps in a perfect counter-time.

  ‘If it wasn’t for the drunks and nutcases I don’t know what I’d do,’ Tania says. Jed laughs again, louder this time, his hand on the small of her back. ‘Had a woman yesterday who reckoned she was looking after some old guy who can barely move. Said he’d never even spoken a word.’

  ‘Oh, that’s sad. Poor man. Like a mute?’

  ‘I don’t know. But anyway she said she thought he had a headache.’

  ‘How would she know?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  He laughs so hard he is unable to hold the door fully open as she approaches. ‘And she was calling an ambulance for that? For a headache?’

  ‘Oh no. It gets worse. The reason she was calling was because she thought she caught him looking at something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah, I know, right? Said she came into his room and swears he was focused on something outside his window.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Some purple flower.’ She pauses in the doorway, as though on the other side of it she’ll instantly adhere to higher standards of professionalism. ‘Hardly an emergency, right?’

  Dove dashes through the door before it closes behind them, his tread so heavy they stop as they hear him coming. Tania’s eyes move over his face, coming to rest on the background behind him, and just like that he doesn’t exist.

  ‘Yeah?’ she asks. Jed snorts and returns to his desk, a grin cleaving open his lips that Dove suspects is finally a glimpse of his real smile.

  ‘We haven’t met,’ Dove says. ‘Well, not really. I sit over there.’ She shifts her weight from her left foot to her right, indignantly enough that he rushes to end the silence. ‘My name’s Dove.’

  ‘You’re the one who went home sick yesterday.’

  Suddenly aware of the phones ringing, people watching, the words repeated over and over again – What is your emergency? – Dove tries to concentrate on the pale blue of her eyes, but finds her so singularly cold he wants to walk away. ‘It was a migraine. But it didn’t really develop. Listen, about the call.’

  ‘The call?’

  ‘The one you were just talking about.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ She puts her hands on her hips and scans the room, and he understands immediately what she’s thinking – can you believe this guy who sits here all day and never says anything was listening in on my private conversation? – as though she can broadcast her thoughts as well as she does her disdain.

  ‘Do you remember his name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even his first name?’

  ‘Why would I? It was a time-waster. And even if it wasn’t, does anyone seriously remember the names of callers?’

  ‘Then who was the woman?’

  ‘How should I know?’ Over Tania’s left shoulder, Dove spots Cliff exiting the bathroom, tugging at the zip on his fly. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘I have to get back to work.’

  ‘Wait!’ Dove grabs her forearm. For a second he is holding it, and she is pulling away, and he is stopping her, which he doesn’t mean to do, but he is. People are looking, and suddenly he is angry, that familiar sensation of the cavity inside him filling with hot black smoke. He lets go, and she’s gone, back to her desk. For a moment all is silent.

  Then it comes again. This time he recognizes the tingle moving across his scalp, so that by the time the headache is forming he is ready. But more than that, he wants it. He wants to know what happened next.

  It comes first as soft, warm light. Then the light becomes shape. A thin band of tension streaks across his shoulders as the shape gathers form, with edges, curves, corners, something almost complete. Pain worse than before. The form fills with colour. But this time it is different. This time Peter is not full of love and hope and excitement.
This time he’s angry. This time he’s scared. Dove remembers. He remembers the man at the top of the cliff face, his silhouette blotting a blistering sun. He remembers Dr Hens Berg. And it fills a cold hollow inside him with fear.

  FIVE

  If Peter had known it would lead to him meeting Dr Hens Berg, would he even have picked up the newspaper in the first place? He’d been scanning the classified advertisements at the back for weeks, and was considering placing one himself (Like flowers? Want to meet other people who like flowers?). After all, the notice he placed to find Angelica had reaped greater results than he could ever have imagined. But on a quiet Sunday afternoon, when Peter entered the library to find the reference book fetched and ready for him to continue his studies, the librarian, who saw him scanning the classifieds and asked why, brought his attention to the communal noticeboard. New club for enthusiasts of botanical etchings. Peter didn’t care much for etching. Art had always been his sister Susan’s realm. But it was as good a place as any to start. If he managed to get even five minutes of meaningful conversation about flowers, or indeed anything, out of the experience, it would certainly improve the prospects for a balmy evening he’d otherwise have spent at home, nursing a cold beer, trying to stay out of his new housemate Angelica’s way to avoid cramping her style, and drowning out the sound his neighbours made when they argued by submerging himself in the bath.

  And anyway, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the love letter since he discovered it in the library. Yes, it was someone else’s story, but he wanted to live it. He hoped learning more about flowers would draw him closer to the romance within the words, a romance he secretly desired in his own life. Until now, it had seemed unreachable, as though love was something that took place in another room. But something about the letter had left a door ajar.