longingly. ‘Shame I can’t have another.’
‘Why not? It’s not as if you have to drive anywhere.’
‘Well, yes, I do. Because I thought everything was
above board, I agreed they could come and install it
tomorrow morning. So if we’re not going to try and
get it cancelled, I have to be there for when they arrive.’
‘Can’t you stay the night anyway and leave early?’
‘What, at six-thirty in the morning?’
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‘You wouldn’t need to leave that early.’
‘Well, I will if they’re going to be there at eight.’
I can’t help wondering if his refusal to stay the night is his way of punishing me because he won’t let himself be angry with me for ordering the alarm in the first place.
‘But you will come back tomorrow evening, once
they’ve finished?’ I say.
‘Yes, of course,’ he says, taking my hand in his.
He leaves shortly after and I go up to my room and
watch a film until my eyes droop with tiredness. But
I can’t sleep. The knowledge that I managed to fill in
a whole contract without any recollection of doing so
has shaken me to the core. I try to tell myself that I’m
not doing anything as bad as Mum was when I first
realised there was a real problem. It was in the spring of 2002 – she’d gone to the local shops and had got lost on her way back home, only turning up three hours later.
Before the alarm, it was only little things that slipped
from my memory. Forgetting what I was meant to have
bought for Susie, forgetting Matthew was going away,
forgetting I’d invited Hannah and Andy for a barbecue,
forgetting Rachel was coming to stay – all those things
are bad enough. But ordering an alarm without realising
what I was doing is huge. I want to believe more than
anything that the salesman tricked me into it. But when
I think back to when we were in the kitchen together, I
realise that I don’t remember very much at all – except
at the end when he handed me the brochure and said
that my husband would be very impressed indeed.
SUNDAY AUGUST 2nd
We don’t talk very much as we check out from the
hotel. I’d suggested going on somewhere for lunch but
Matthew said he preferred to get home. I know we’re
both disappointed that the weekend didn’t live up to
our expectations. Even though Matthew’s explanation
of why he didn’t want to stay at the hotel on Friday
night held up, I couldn’t help worrying that he was
getting fed-up of all the hassle my forgetfulness has
been creating. So yesterday, while he was at the house
waiting for the alarm system to be fitted, I plucked
up my courage and googled ‘periodic amnesia’ which
directed me to Transient Global Amnesia. Although the
term was familiar to me in relation to Mum, my heart
still dropped a little further with each line I read and I closed off the page quickly, trying to squash the panic mounting inside me. I don’t know if it’s what I’ve got Title: The Breakdown ARC, Format: 126x198, v1, Output date:08/11/16
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and, more importantly, I don’t want to know. For now,
ignorance is bliss.
When Matthew had finally turned up at seven last
night, in time for a drink in the bar before dinner, I
was aware that he was watching me more closely than
usual and I kept expecting him to tell me that he was
worried about me. But he didn’t say anything, which
made it somehow worse. I thought that maybe he was
waiting until we were in the privacy of our room. But
when we eventually went up, instead of saying that he
wanted to talk to me, he turned on the television and I
wished that he hadn’t because there was a special report
about Jane’s murder following her funeral earlier in the
day. They showed footage of her flower-covered coffin
being carried into the little church in Heston with her
distraught parents following behind and tears had seeped
from my eyes.
During their report, the police revealed that Jane’s
mobile phone was missing, information they had previously held back. They showed a photo of a smartphone similar to Jane’s and asked anyone who’d found one
like it to contact them. Then a photo of Jane appeared
on the screen, a different one to the one they’d been
using before.
‘She was so pretty,’ Matthew said. ‘It’s such a terrible
shame.’
‘So it would be less of a shame if she hadn’t been
pretty?’ I retorted, suddenly angry.
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103
He looked at me in surprise. ‘That’s not what I meant
and you know it. It’s terrible when anyone gets murdered
but especially so in her case as she has two young children, who are bound to find out one day that their mother was violently killed.’ He turned back to the
television where the report showed police stopping and
searching cars using Blackwater Lane, which was once
again open to the public. ‘They’re hardly going to find
the murder weapon in someone’s boot,’ he went on.