Alice leaves Frank to his own devices that evening. He’d gone straight to the shed when they got back from lunch, claiming to be tired. But she knew he was just looking for solitude, for space in which to ponder the memories unlocked today.
She goes up to her room to check on her parents on the iPad. They’re sitting side by side on their nice John Lewis sofa, staring at the TV. She knows that neither of them has a clue what they’re watching. If she called them up now and said, What are you up to? they’d struggle to find an answer. But even in the fog of their fading faculties, they are holding hands. There are their hands, clutched together between them. They don’t know who the prime minister is; they don’t know what day of the week, month or even year it is. They can’t quite remember their daughters’ names and they certainly can’t remember if they had lunch today or what the plan is for supper tonight. They know nothing of any significance whatsoever. But they do know they love each other.
Alice turns to appraise her bed. The sheets are twisted into a very particular post-coital knot, the bedsheet wrinkled and ridged like a tide-rippled beach. She doesn’t linger over the memories of the night before. Instead she yanks off the bedclothes and rolls them into a large ball which she leaves on the landing outside her room so that they can go directly into the laundry. She tugs out a handful of clean sheets from the airing cupboard and redresses the bed, speedily and efficiently. From the corner of the room she retrieves the embroidered cushions she bought long ago to decorate her bed and which have never decorated her bed because she cannot be arsed to take them off and put them back and take them off and put them back and she is really and truly not a bed-cushion kind of person. She places the pretty cushions in a row against the puffed-up pillows and pulls the duvet smooth and then considers the effect. It is nice. It doesn’t look like a bed for having intense, life-changing sex with potentially murderous strangers. It looks like a single woman’s bed, like a place for reading novels and comforting children and talking to dogs as though they can understand what you’re saying.
On the screen of the iPad on her desk she hears her parents talking.
‘I love you,’ her father says to her mother.
‘I love you, too,’ her mother says to her father.
Then: ‘I wonder if we’re going to get any lunch today?’
Frank lies on his back, his hands clasped together over his stomach, his eyes taking in the detail of the wooden ceiling overhead: the cobwebs, the knots and whorls, the joints and cornices. His mind is clearing. It’s clearing fast. He can now remember the place where he lives. It’s a flat in a big house, down some stairs, through a door, then inside and down some more steps; there’s a living room ahead, a bedroom to the right, a hallway to the left that takes you to a kitchen and a bathroom. The walls are painted yellow. All his shoes sit in a pile by the front door. He owns trainers, and walking boots, brightly coloured football boots and several pairs of leather shoes with laces. Mostly brown. Above hang his coats. There’s a pot with an umbrella in it. A table with some keys. The floor is made of laminated wood boards of a pale apricot colour. The living room is square and scruffy, with a big battered cream sofa – he thinks it might have been a hand-me-down from his mother – and a long thin coffee table covered in paperwork and empty mugs. There’s a view through two sash windows of a wall, some white plastic garden furniture and the bulge of a green lawn above and beyond.
He’s been searching and searching this newly remembered terrain for signs of a family or of a woman but there are none. He wants to rush upstairs and tell Alice: There’s no woman! I live alone! But there’s so much more he needs to know before he can assure of her of anything.
He can remember his job. He works in a school. He teaches thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. He’s mentally searched through the faces of the children sitting in rows in front of him, looking for the girl called Kirsty. He can’t find her face, but he can see the book on his desk and the work on the whiteboard behind him and it appears, rather appallingly, that he is a maths teacher.
He hadn’t felt like a maths teacher last night in bed with Alice. Last night he could have been anything and anyone, he’d been raw and vital, stripped down to the very essence of himself. He’d liked himself in bed with Alice, but now, with every memory, he’s whittling himself down to a smaller and smaller thing. A maths teacher, living alone in a scruffy flat.
He can hear music coming from Jasmine’s bedroom window across the courtyard. He can hear one of the dogs barking, the clatter of someone cooking in the kitchen. It would be so tempting to opt out of remembering, to stop the process right here, right now, crawl back into Alice’s bed, be enigmatic, empty, needy Frank for ever and never find out anything else disappointing about himself.
He rolls off the bed and opens the door to the shed. He stands in his socked feet, the evening air cold and harsh against his skin, and he looks upwards into Jasmine’s window. As he looks she appears there, framed in her window, a white-faced apparition, all eyes and hair and lips. She stares down at him for a moment; then she raises one hand at him before moving away and closing her curtains behind her.
Franks turns and goes back into the shed. No, he thinks to himself, I don’t belong here. I can’t be here, however much I wish I could. It’s not fair on Alice and it’s not fair on her children. The police will tell me who I am and then we can take it from there. He collapses back on to his bed, heavily, feeling a painful swell of tears in his gullet at the thought of leaving, at the thought of losing Alice. And then, suddenly, in his mind’s eye, there’s a red cat. A red cat called . . . Brenda. He sees the small brown bowl that sits in his galley kitchen, crusted with uneaten meat. He sees the cat rolled into a ball on the scruffy cream sofa. His cat, he realises, with a stab of surprise. Why would he call his cat Brenda? Then he is taken by a wave of concern. Who is feeding his cat? Who is taking care of her?
And this, more than anything, seals his resolve. This is over. Tomorrow he will know.