The Man Who Forgot His Wife Read Online Free PDF

soldier!’
    ‘Air force. He was quite high ranking, though I think he only did the accounts or something. Yeah, poor bloke had a heart attack soon after your mum died.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘But I remember your parents from when we were younger. They were a lovely couple, God bless them. Very powerful home-made wine.’
    With no memory of them whatsoever, my mother and father felt like abstract concepts – just names on a family tree. Everything he told me about myself might as well have happened to another person, in some made-up story. In fact, Gary knew very little about my early years and was vague on any specifics before the two of us had actually met. ‘How do I know what grades you got in your bloody GCSEs?’ he protested.
    ‘Sorry, I just feel a bit nervous about getting my exam results. I feel nervous about all of it. So did I go to university?’
    ‘Ah, right, yeah, now this is where we met,’ he recalled, with more enthusiasm. ‘I was doing English and American Studies. I switched from doing straight English—’
    ‘Sorry, where was this? Oxford? Cambridge?’
    ‘Bangor. I chose there because this gorgeous girl at my school had put it down, although she ended up in East Anglia so it didn’t really work out …’
    Over the next ten minutes I learned that Gary and I had shared a student house in North Wales, that I had been in a college football team with Gary, and that I had done the same degree as Gary, though I had not copied my entire dissertation off a student from Aberystwyth like Gary. Frankly, it was fascinating to find out so much about myself.
    He came back from the bar with another pint, despite me requesting just a half, and a greying pickled egg, which I think he chose because it was the least fresh thing they had. There was one question that I had been desperate to ask, and the whole time he’d been at the bar I had found myself staring down at the white shadow where the ring had been. I was almost too nervous to broach the subject. If there was a wife out there, I wanted to understand the context in which I had come to meet her. I wanted to know who I was when I got married.
    ‘So you don’t remember this pub at all?’ said Gary, sitting down.
    ‘No. Why? Have we been here before?’
    ‘Yeah – you used to sell crack in here before all that shit with the Russian Mafia kicked off—’
    ‘Oh, yeah, of course, the Russian Mafia. They left a beetroot head in my bed, didn’t they?’ I felt a shiver of pride at succeeding in making Gary chuckle. ‘It’s weird. I don’t know who I am or what I did. But I know I wasn’t a crack dealer.’
    ‘No, hard drugs were never really your scene. You fret about whether it’s acceptable to give your kids a bloody Lemsip.’
    That was how I discovered I was a father. ‘Your
kids
’ Gary had said, in the plural. I had children.
    ‘Oh, right, yeah – your kids!’ said Gary, when I pressed him for more information. ‘Yeah, you’ve got two nippers. Boy and a girl, Jamie who’s about fifteen or twelve or something, and then there’s Dillie who’s younger, like ten maybe. Actually, she must be eleven, ’cos they’re both at secondary school. Though not at your school.’
    ‘What do you mean “my school”?’
    ‘Your school where you teach.’
    ‘So I’m a teacher? Look, just slow down a minute, will you? See, this is why I wanted to do everything chronologically. Tell me about my children first,’ I said, while filing away a bizarre image of myself wearing a gown in front of an old-fashioned blackboard.
    ‘Well, they’re just kids, you know. They’re cute. I’m actually god father to Jamie. Or is it Dillie? I can’t remember, but I’m sure I’m godfather to one of them. But, yeah, great kids. You can be really proud of them.’
    But I couldn’t be really proud of them. I dearly wanted to be proud of them, but they were just a cold, historical fact.
    ‘Mind if we sit here?’ interjected a woman carrying bags of shopping, and