The Man Who Forgot His Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

clothes of someone twenty years younger. He wore a leather motor cycle jacket, though it turned out there was no motorbike. His sideburns came slightly too low for someone whose hairline was creeping that far back, and he exuded an air of easy confidence and a powerful reek of nicotine. But although I was a little thrown by his overly casual manner, it was refreshing to be talked to as if I was normal. It made me like him – this was my friend ‘Gary’. I had a friend and we were off to the pub together.
    ‘So we might as well get this out of the way …’ he said, looking a little awkward as we got to the street corner ‘… but you do remember you owe me two grand?’
    ‘Do I? Sorry, I don’t have any money … I … if you could just hang on a bit?’ and then I caught the glint in his eye and he burst out laughing.
    ‘Ha ha ha – yeah, ’s all right!’ He laughed. ‘I’m just pissing with you!’
    ‘Yeah,
obviously
!’ I said, doing my best to laugh along.
    ‘I should’ve made it a bit more, shouldn’t I? Can you really not remember anything?’
    ‘No. I have no idea what I’ve been doing for the past forty years.’
    ‘Yeah, well, I know how you feel.’
    Forty years had been a good guess. It turned out I was thirty-nine, and according to Gary, my fugue state was just ‘a typical bloody mid-life crisis’. I got the impression that he didn’t consider my medical condition to be a particularly big deal – as if he’d done so many drugs down the years that this was just one of many altered states on the spectrum. I found it a little disarming that this man casually addressed me as ‘Wanker’ and ‘Dingbat’, as if these were my actual names. Although I quickly understood that these must be ironic terms of matey affection between two old friends, when someone you have just met says, ‘It’s this pub here, Shit-for-brains,’ you have to fight an instinct that finds this a tiny bit rude.
    The pub was filling up with lunchtime customers so we grabbed the last booth. Now I had free rein to ask him whatever I wanted. It would be like my own private edition of
This Is Your Life
, except in this version the host recounted the incredible life story to the star for the very first time: ‘You won’t remember this voice,’ or, ‘And here tonight is that teacher who inspired you all those years ago, although you’ll have to take our word for it; it could just be the old lady who runs the tea bar downstairs.’
    I had chosen a pint of Guinness because Gary told me that’s what I usually had. The infinite possibilities felt overwhelming; I might like bitter, lager or a mineral water with a dash of lime. I might be twice married, a father of seven, an Olympic sailing champion or a bankrupt criminal.
    I resolved to ask the questions in some sort of chronological order, so that we didn’t jump about all over the place and miss out any important details. Perhaps at some level I wanted the news broken to me slowly: if I was a total loser, I might feel better if I understood how I ended up that way. But my attempt to pin down some basics about my early years did not start well.
    ‘So. Have I got any brothers and sisters?’
    ‘Nope. You’re an only child. Oh, I forgot to get anything to eat—’
    ‘Okay. Where am I from?’
    ‘Nowhere really. Everywhere. You’re from all over the place. Your dad was in the forces, so you moved constantly as a kid. You lived in West Germany, Cyprus, Malaysia, er … Yorkshire. Where else did you mention? Hong Kong, I think. Shangri-La maybe?’
    ‘That’s not a real place.’
    ‘Isn’t it? Oh well, not Shangri-La then. Shanghai maybe? But I remember you saying that you were never in the same school for more than a year.’
    ‘Blimey. So I’m a very adaptable sort of person, I expect?’
    ‘Er, if you want … I wish I’d got some pork scratchings or something—’
    ‘Well travelled.’
    ‘Well travelled. Rootless, yeah.’
    ‘The son of a