The Memory Book Read Online Free PDF

me. There was always Gran, of course, the third musketeer, and we all love each other fiercely. But somehow Gran has always seemed a little out of step. Everything she says and does rubs Mum up the wrong way, and everything Mum says or does seems to disappoint Gran, ever so slightly. I’ve gotten used to it over the years, the constant bickering between the two of them; it’s only recently I’ve come to wonder why they don’t really get on. But anyway, I was the one who really knew Mum – I was the one she truly belonged to – until there was Greg. And when he showed up on the scene I was fifteen, not a little kid, and yet still I was jealous and angry, and I didn’t want him around even though I knew well enough that wasn’t fair of me. It wasn’t until I realised that he got her, exactly the same way I did,that I finally understood: Greg wasn’t going anywhere, and Mum belonged to both of us now.
    She reaches out and takes the book from him.
    ‘It’s a very fine notebook, beautifully made, thank you,’ she says politely.
    The three of us follow her as she walks into the kitchen and puts it down on the table. ‘I always wanted to write a book, you know. I always thought the attic would make a good room to write books in.’
    The three of us do not look at each other. The times when we exchanged glances over Mum’s head when she did or said something a little off stopped a few weeks ago, when we realised that those moments were going to happen every day now. It is amazing to me how quickly something that had been so extraordinary and so alien had become normal, part of our little world, the world that Mum has always ruled. The stomach-clench of sadness still accompanies those moments, but the looks and the disbelief have gone.
    ‘You
have
written a book,’ I remind her. ‘Remember your novel?’
    It sits in the drawer of her empty, abandoned desk in the attic, all three hundred and seventeen pages of it, held together by a long, thin, red rubber band stretched to its maximum capacity. Mum insisted on printing it out because she said it wasn’t a book until it had pages, and I remember her reading it through up there in a day, then putting it in the drawer and climbing down the ladder. And as far as I know,she never went back up there again. She never did anything with the book, never asked anyone else to read it, never sent it off to a book agent or a publisher, never even talked about it again. She said that when your business was literature – teaching it, reading it, knowing it, loving it – you ought to at least have a crack at producing some of it yourself. So she had done, and that was that.
    When Esther was about six months and I was deemed sensible enough not to accidentally kill her if I looked after her, Mum and Greg went away for a night in a hotel, just up the road, just to be alone together. The moment Esther was asleep in her cot, I pulled down the ladder and went up into the attic room. It smelled musty and damp, old, and … empty. I was going to pull the book out of the drawer and read it. I’d been planning to do so for a long time, and this was my chance. I wanted to know what the book was about, what it was like, if it was any good, and part of me, a part I am not very proud of, sort of hoped that it wasn’t. Mum has always been so good at everything – even her falling in love, when it finally happened, happened like something out of a movie – and sometimes it feels like she is an impossible act to follow, even now that she has started getting everything wrong. But as soon as I put my hand on the handle of the desk drawer, I changed my mind. I didn’t even open it. For the first time in my life I understood that everyone needs secrets, and sometimes those secrets should never be uncovered. Everyone needs something that is completely private. I gotthe feeling that if I read the book, it might change things, and I didn’t want things to change. I suppose wanting that isn’t