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  The Memory Game

  Sharon Sant

  THE MEMORY GAME

  Sharon Sant

  Kindle Edition Copyright 2013 © Sharon Sant

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  One: The End

  The sky shows the first pink light of a freezing dawn. I should go somewhere, but I can’t seem to leave my corpse alone. It looks so… vulnerable. Stupid, I know – it’s just a body now, after all. And where am I supposed to go? In films they tell you there are tunnels of light and other dead people you loved waiting for you. It’s not like that. One minute you’re alive, lying under the mangled steel of your wrecked bike, the next you’re looking down at the mess trying to understand what happened.

  I take a seat on the roots of a bare tree that overhangs the roadside. I’m not doing anything, of course. Or at least my body isn’t. There’s something strangely fascinating about it though. I must be cold by now, I suppose. The ground of the ditch is black with my blood and I can smell the metallic tang from here. My head is sort of cocked to one side at a funny angle and my leg is twisted backwards under the buckled wheel of my bike. I suppose it would have hurt pretty bad. I think it did at first, but time seems to be robbing the memory already. I don’t want to stop remembering. It feels like the minute I forget the pain I’ll be dead for real.

  I hear a rustling coming from behind the tree. I listen for a moment, the sound intermittent but coming closer all the time. A fox emerges from the dewed grass and then stands perfectly still as it sniffs at the morning air. It sees the dead me. Then it picks its way over, slowly, nervously through the long grass and down into the ditch and pushes its black-tipped snout to my face.

  ‘Get away from me!’ I jump up and shout, trying to scare it away but it just looks startled and stands exactly where it is. After a while, it trots off. I watch it go and then sit again, head in my hands. I couldn’t even chase away a fox. I’m nothing, already in the past.

  I look up and see that the sun is rising, a blinding white disc behind the bare trees. I can’t sit here for ever. Perhaps I could try to tell someone where I am. Mum must have done her nut when I didn’t go home last night. Roger probably threw a party though, he always hated me.

  I stand and look up and down the lane. It’s still deserted, as it has been all night. ‘I have to go somewhere,’ I say.’ I have to get help.’

  I don’t even know why I’m talking as there’s no one here but me. My dead self just stares. I wish I could close my dead self’s eyes but I tried and my hand is made of nothing. The films got that bit about ghosts right. I wonder how I’m not sinking into the earth beneath my feet.

  So, where do I go now?

  I suppose I’d better go home.

  Mum is pacing up and down with the phone clamped to her ear. Her eyes are all puffy and she has an old cardigan pulled tight around her. ‘Yes, David Cottle. He’s fifteen… dark brown hair – sort of floppy fringe – brown eyes… um, how tall? Oh my God, I can’t remember… I can’t even remember how tall he is…’ Mum’s voice starts to crack. I want to hug her and tell her where I am but she can’t hear me. ‘Sorry…’ she squeaks out a sob and takes a deep breath to stop it. ‘I’m fine. He’s been missing since teatime yesterday. I thought he was at his friend’s house… we had an argument but I thought…’ The crying takes her again and she can’t speak.

  Roger comes in from the kitchen. He hands her a mug and takes the phone from her. ‘Sorry, officer, it’s a difficult time, as you can imagine. Yes, we can sort out a photo… about five-foot-six… What was he wearing? I’m not sure, my wife might be able to tell if she goes to the wardrobe and sees what’s missing. Will you send someone round? Ok, thanks.’

  Roger ends the call and gives Mum her phone back. She sticks it into her cardigan pocket and Roger puts an arm around her. Even though I could smack his big mono-browed face in every time I look at it, I’m glad he’s trying to make her feel better. I suppose things are going to get a whole lot worse for her when the police find me in that ditch and she’ll need someone to make her cups of tea and stuff because she’ll be crying too much. I hope it doesn’t take them a long time; that road is pretty out of the way and I might start decomposing before she has to come and identify me – that would be horrible. My mind goes back to the fox. What else is out there that might start eating me? What about bugs and microscopic stuff that no one can see, steadily devouring my body even as I sit here watching my mum and Roger discuss where I am? I shouldn’t have even been on that road but I thought it was a clever shortcut. Go me.

  The thing is, hardly anyone uses that road because of some old story about it being haunted. They say the Black Death came to our village and

  Yarrow Lane, the road that I was on, was the border where nobody from the village could go beyond until the plague outbreak had ended. But this boy from another village nearby where they had no plague and this girl from ours used to meet there in secret. Eventually she caught the plague, then he caught the plague and gave it to his whole village, then they both died and people say their ghosts hang around on the lane at night. The irony of this story is not lost on me. Although it still amazes me that people are so freaked out about it that, even now, they refuse to use that road. Except for the car that hit me, of course. Oh yeah, he used it alright. Roger pulls her into a hug. ‘Don’t worry about him, love. He’ll turn up; he’s probably just sulking somewhere.’

  ‘All night? Where would he have been all night?’ Mum turns her swollen face to him. ‘I’ve phoned every one of his friends and nobody has seen him.’

  ‘Someone could be covering for him. I’ll bet you his year’s pocket money that he’s holed up in Matthew Spencer’s bedroom without his parents knowing. It wouldn’t be the first time.’

  Tit. What would he know about it?

  ‘I phoned there,’ Mum says. ‘They hadn’t seen David at all.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean he’s not there. Matthew’s mum is so dopey she could have Elton John in concert in her son’s room and she wouldn’t notice.’

  Mum tries to smile. ‘I suppose,’ she says. He thinks she’s agreeing but he doesn’t know her like I do. I’ve seen that look before, a hundred times with my dad – she doesn’t think that Roger is right at all, she just doesn’t know how to say it. And I don’t want her to agree, I want them to come and look for me.

  In my frustration, I shout at Roger. ‘Don’t tell her that! Don’t you want me to be found?’ It’s pointless, of course, I worked out pretty quickly that neither of them can hear me, no matter how loud I shout.

  Mum sniffs and wipes her nose on the tissue Roger has given her. ‘I’d better go and see what’s missing from his room.’

  ‘A quick check in the wardrobe should be enough,’ Roger says, ‘You should take it easy, especially now. Maybe I could go and see.’

  ‘I’ll know his clothes better than you, I do iron them after all…’ she gives him a tiny, strained smile. ‘Besides, I want to see if anything else is missing.’

  Roger’s eyes go wide. ‘You think he’s run away?’

  I don’t like the way Roger looks as he says this, there’s something a bit too close to hope in his expression.

  Mum shrugs. ‘It’s possible, I suppose.’

  ‘Do you really think he would, though?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, ‘I don’t feel like I know him at all anymore. But I should check because the police will probably ask us that.’

  ‘Want me to come and help?’ Roger asks.

 
She shakes her head. ‘Wait by the phone. Somebody might call.’

  Roger looks like he might argue for a moment. Then he gives her a short nod and flops down on the sofa. I swear I just heard a spring bust.

  I follow Mum upstairs. She’s walking in this really wobbly way, gripping the handrail like she can’t quite remember what her legs are for.

  She opens the door to my room. Now that I look at it, I’m a bit ashamed. She spends, like, hours every day telling me to clean it and I ignore her. The curtains are closed but hanging off the rail at one end where I pulled it down and couldn’t be bothered to fix it. There’s a strange damp, sweaty smell like there are wild animals being kept in there. My Radiohead t-shirt is screwed up on my unmade bed. I nearly put it on when I got in from school last night, but it didn’t smell that good when I pulled it from the drawer. Dad bought it for me, the last time he went to see them in concert. I wanted to go with him, but Mum said I was too young. When he gave me the t-shirt, I pretended I didn’t like it because I wanted to go and see them so bad. Mum told me I was an ungrateful brat but Dad just smiled; he knew that I did really. It was way too big, of course, when I first got it because they only had adult sizes. Three years on and it fits ok.

  Mum almost trips on my school shoes as she walks in, but she doesn’t say a word, she just moves them out of the way. The rest of my uniform is on the floor and strewn over the bookcase, which does not house books as they’re all on the floor in a pile next to my bed. I keep all the ones I’m reading out and I seem to be reading all the ones I own at once. The TV has greasy marks on the screen and there are chocolate wrappers on top of it. Mum doesn’t seem to care today though. I suppose she’ll care even less when she finds out I’m dead. She goes to the wardrobe and rifles through. Half my clothes are missing, though, mostly stuffed into various crevices around the room, and I can’t imagine how she’s going to figure out what I’m wearing. Come to think of it, I can’t even remember what I’m wearing. I look down at myself. Jeans, blue checked shirt, one of the really soft, fleecy ones, with the sweatshirt underneath to keep me warm that Mum nags me to wear every time I go out to do the papers, and my battered trainers. When I look up again Mum is sitting on the bed with her head in her hands and her shoulders sort of heaving.

  ‘Mum…’ I sit down beside her. I never hug her or anything anymore, but right now I really want to. But when I try to put my hand on hers, I can’t, it goes straight through, just like it did before. ‘I’m ok, Mum, please don’t be upset.’ Of course, I’m really not ok, but I suppose this is as good as it’s going to get now.

  ‘Oh, David… where the hell are you?’ Her breaths are hitching and she can’t speak without stammering. I wish I could put my arms around her and tell her I’m still with her. But maybe that would freak her out anyway. It probably would have freaked me out if it had been the other way around.

  So I sit and watch her. I want to cry myself now, I feel so bad for her. I don’t think I can stay here after all. If she’s like this now, imagine what she’ll be like when the police come and tell her that they’ve found me, imagine what she’ll do when she has to go and see me at the place where dead bodies are kept, imagine what the funeral will be like. I’ll be like a wreck seeing all that crying. But I don’t know where else I can go. I feel like an empty crisp bag on the wind, blown around, useless and unwanted. So I sit next to her on the bed; I listen to her cry quietly and stare at the mess in my room and wonder what is happening to my body now. Your joints go stiff; how long does that take? Do you turn a funny colour? When do you start to smell bad? We saw a film once in biology, a speeded up film of a dead rabbit rotting. I can’t stop thinking about that film now, only it’s me with all the flies and stuff coming out of me.

  There’s a knock at the front door. I can hear Roger talking to someone in the hallway and then the door clicks shut.

  ‘Lisa…’ Roger calls up the stairs. ‘The police are here.’

  She’s only just phoned them so I’m guessing this visit can only mean that they’ve already found me. Mum takes a huge breath and wipes her face. I wonder if she’s thinking that too. She stands up, takes a last look at my room, her eyes skimming over me as I sit on the bed, and goes downstairs.

  ‘You might want to sit down, Mrs Smith.’ The policeman has a nice voice, gentle, that bad news voice that they have on detective dramas. But I don’t like the way he says her name, because her name shouldn’t be Smith, it should be Cottle like mine, like it used to be before bucket-faced Roger arrived in our lives. Hearing her called Mrs Smith doesn’t stop making me angry, just because I’m dead.

  She glances at Roger and then sits on the sofa. Roger joins her and takes her hand.

  ‘I haven’t figured out what he’s wearing yet…’ Mum begins. ‘But if you give me a few more minutes I should be able to.’

  The second policeman glances at the first one and then hands her a wallet. ‘Is this David’s?’

  Mum takes it from him and turns it over in her hands as though she doesn’t quite believe it exists. ‘Yes,’ she says in small voice.

  ‘I’m sorry, but we found this on a boy matching David’s description at the scene of a road traffic accident. He had a bag on him from Village News, we checked with the proprietor and he said David never returned after his round yesterday, although he hadn’t been unduly concerned as, apparently, he often goes straight home when he’s finished –’

  ‘Oh God, we didn’t ring the shop,’ Mum says. ‘We thought he was sulking at a friend’s house – he’s done it before – we’d had an argument and…’ she can’t finish and I can tell she feels gutted now that she didn’t ring the paper shop when I didn’t come home.

  We did have a massive row and I suppose she thought I was staying out of her way. I was pissed off alright but I wouldn’t have done that to her, I wouldn’t have given Roger the satisfaction. Maybe she was sulking more than me. The thing is, if she had looked for me straight away I’d probably still be alive; it took me ages to die. I hope the police don’t tell her that.

  ‘Is he alright?’ mum says in a panicked voice. ‘What’s happened to him?’

  The first policeman just looks at her with his most well-trained sympathetic face. ‘I’m sorry, Mr and Mrs Smith, but we’re going to need a formal identification on the body. We need you to come and confirm whether it is or is not David.’

  I think Mum might faint – her skin suddenly turns grey and her eyes look like they can’t focus. She already knows, I can tell. Roger puts an arm around her.

  Two: Ingrid

  Today is sunny. The churchyard in our village is nice, I suppose, if you think things like churchyards can be nice. It has old stone walls that have been there since the plague and oak trees all over the place. People in our village seem really proud of it. There are weatherworn plaques, built into the walls of the church, that tell the stories of soldiers from our village, who fought in wars years ago and died in far-off lands. Sometimes, when I was younger, I used to walk around the church, reading them all and wondering what sort of men they were. If you look at the dates, you can work out that some of them were teenagers. I think a lot of their families still live here.

  In the shadows of the trees and the church it’s cold, but when you stand in the sun you can feel its heat on you, or, I suppose, the others can. I can see it in the way it bounces from Ingrid Stephenson’s hair, in the way Matt and Paulie squint when they look across at my coffin being carried up the path and, for once, neither of them sniggers or takes the piss. Mum and Roger follow and Mum looks like she’s in such a daze she can barely walk. I really don’t want to file in behind all the other kids when they go to hear the service, but there’s a bit of me that can’t resist it, like that bit of you that wants to look at the gash in your leg that you know will make you throw up the minute you do. I watch them all go in first: Mum, Roger, aunts and uncles from Dad’s family that I haven’t seen since he died, Nana and Granddad, teachers, my best mates, Matt and Paulie, Ingrid an
d a bunch of her girl-worshippers (all crying, which is weird because they hated me), loads of kids from my year and even some from different years and neighbouring villages. It’s not that I was popular; I suppose it’s just that a kid dying is a big deal, especially when you’re a kid yourself.

  When everyone is inside, I stand right back by the doors and peer in. Nobody can see me, I know, I could stand right next to the vicar and whisper crap in his ear and nobody would know. But even though it’s only me they’re burying, it still feels like a really solemn occasion and I feel like I should show some respect. Maybe that’s for my mum, though, because when I look across at her, she seems like she can hardly breathe for crying. Roger rubs her back and strokes her hair and pulls her into a hug but she fights her way out of his arms and drags a deep breath like she will stop herself from crying, but then the vicar says my name and she starts again. Some people are even staring at her, like she should shut up or something. Everyone looks freezing in here, huddling in their coats; outside the air was golden, but in here it’s grey and cold.

  Everyone stands up and sings a hymn, The Lord’s My Shepherd. I don’t even know why they’re singing that, I hate it. I watch them all, their mouths moving slowly and out of time, not one of them making an effort to sing the actual words from the sheet, apart from the vicar, who’s belting it out like he’s on the main stage at Glasto or something. Me and Matt always said we’d go there as soon as we were sixteen. The idea suddenly makes me sadder than anything else I’ve seen so far today.

  The song feels like it goes on forever but then they finish and everyone sits down. The vicar says some stuff about me: what I was like, jokes that I’d played on people, how popular I was at school (yeah, right) how I was the family rock when my dad died (Roger doesn’t like that bit, I can tell by the way his jaw clenches). I don’t know how the vicar knows so much about me, apart from when Dad died, we never went to church. The vicar knew who I was, because everyone sort of knows everyone around here, but he didn’t really know me. I suppose Mum must have told him a lot of things. He says some stuff about forgiveness (I wonder how forgiving he would feel if someone ran over him in their pimped up shitheap and left him for dead) and then they all sing another hymn.