Read by Suzanne Goldberg
We saw him again for the first time about three months after the accident.
I was at the far end of the bar when he entered, watching my pale cheeks and pigtails cohere in the chrome of the espresso maker as I buffed it raw. I heard the door open way up front, shooing in a burst of traffic noise, and I wouldn’t have bothered to turn had not Lewis, standing there in anticipation of the day’s first customer, failed to deliver the jaunty, rather servile greeting he’d invented for us all to use, which had long since evolved into communal reflex.
When I looked up, the door had closed again on Soho’s waking grumbles and there he stood: the Memory Man, tall enough to look down on Lewis’s bald patch, his gallows frame draped in a salty-grey trenchcoat. He nodded to Lewis as if it were the first time they’d met, and made his way alone to the usual booth.
“Morning,” managed Lewis, belatedly and off-script, his eyes swivelling to meet mine. We stared at each other in shared confusion until Lewis tilted an urgent eyebrow in the direction of the Memory Man, who had hung up his coat and was busy folding his endless limbs beneath the table.
I snatched my pad, smoothing my skirt with the backs of my hands and wondering how in God’s name I should greet him. Could I bring myself to mention what had happened? After all, he would have no idea that we knew anything about it, and I might be guilty of a cataclysmic intrusion. On the other hand, would a discreet but warm condolence be exactly what he needed - expected even? Why, oh why, hadn’t we discussed it all beforehand? I suppose, deep down, none of us had ever expected to see him back.
I’d settled on a gentle but meaning-laden “it’s lovely to see you again”, when I noticed the Memory Man muttering to himself, the great extruded bow of his back thrust out across the table. A reclining Betty Grable in the factory print behind him bathed her heels in the copious black hair that coiled from his brow toward a rushmoresque nose. When he noticed my presence, he leant back with a smile, shot a sheepish glance at the opposite seat, and placed his order. As I walked away, I heard him muttering again.
I showed Lewis the pad. “Look what he asked for!”
Lewis scrutinised, bit his lip and shrugged. “Customer’s wish is our command, right? ‘Specially the loyal ones.”
When the omelette and fries came through from the kitchen I took them over, along with two coffees, an orange juice and a lemon and poppy seed muffin. Once again the muttering stopped, but when I lifted the muffin from the tray his prizefighter’s hands indicated the spot not where he himself was sitting, but opposite. Without being asked, I placed a cup of coffee there too.
We tried as hard as we could not to stare. With a kind of terror I allowed myself the occasional crimson-faced peek at the progress of his meal, mostly by watching the reflection in the surface of the Cimbali. When he’d finished, he nodded his thanks and left, leaving one coffee drained and the omelette devoured. The muffin lay untouched, and since it couldn’t go back in the counter cabinet, I ate it myself.
He was back on Friday (Tuesday and Friday had been their days), and I saw now that he spent as much time in silence as he did muttering, and that during those periods his eyes, large and doleful like the rest of him, stayed fixed on the opposite seat. He’d chew sagely on a forkful, giving the occasional nod or low laugh. The following week he was back, and the week after – same two days, same murmured facsimile of a conversation, same order and the same uneaten muffin.
Just no girl.
She had, of course, been beautiful – subtle features and chestnut hair tied back, clothed in smooth pastel shades like something from a Nordic catalogue. She and the Memory Man (although we didn’t call him that at first) had started meeting at Ol’ Compton’s Diner a year or so earlier, theirs being one of the first orders I took. Even back then, they were hard not to look at – his drooping potency in earnest communion with her serene, intelligent gaze. Sexy enough to be writers, we thought, or chess prodigies, or some near-extinct breed of revolutionary philosopher.
It was Lewis who first saw the posters springing up in the West End, promoting a brand new act at a trendy fringe venue. “You will not believe what he does for a living!” he grinned, brandishing a flyer, and there was no mistaking the face. The Christian name was Alexis, the surname something none of us tried to pronounce for fear of sounding stupid, and he was, said the poster, a “memory artist”. We had conflicting ideas of what this might mean. For me, he was a sexed-up heir to Mr Memory from the Hitchcock film - a man who’d absorbed and could instantly recall every spec of human knowledge, his brain a handy repository for stolen formulae. Hannay tests him on the distance between random Canadian cities. Winnipeg was one. Can’t remember the other. None of us went to see his act.
Whether we were party to a love in its infancy, or to a longer affair approaching some breathless zenith was hard to say. But it was clearly love, on an upward curve, played out twice-weekly in spellbinding, near-identical instalments. If the diner wasn’t busy, I or one of the others could sometimes be found with a blissed-out smile, elbows on the bar, staring off into space or even directly at the pair, while Lewis eyed us nervously.
As a rule, he would be waiting when she arrived, although she was always first to leave, with a kiss and a tapering touch of outstretched fingers. After a while, he too would pick up the bill and go, turning left outside the door.
It was soon after his departure one Friday that Kimberley came stumbling back from some errand or other in floods of tears. She’d seen the accident on her way through Golden Square, or rather heard the crash and seen Mrs Memory, as we by then referred to her, in mid-flight towards a shop front. Days later, once she’d calmed down, Kim described how the woman had seemed to lie still on the air for a moment, like an illusionist’s assistant, and how she couldn’t remember hearing anything as the glass caved in.
We stood there that morning, listening to distant sirens, and I too began to cry. It felt as if we’d lost a sister rather than a customer, and all the time we were wondering did he know? The prospect of his ignorance seemed even more painful than her death, and Lewis hurried off white-faced to Golden Square, to inform the police and paramedics they must track down Alexis Something-or-Other, The Memory Man.
Ol’ Compton’s was a miserable place after that. Though only one was dead, we fully expected them both to be gone from our lives. Soon after the Memory Man started showing up again, I realised he’d done so exactly a year after they’d first appeared together. A year to the day. There was no way of checking for sure, but I knew.
Waiting on him again, I also realised his mutterings were not mere mutterings, but one half of a conversation – an imaginary one, I thought at first, filled with uncanny reactions and gaps where her answers would have been. Within days, though, it became obvious that none of it was invented, but instead remembered. I knew because I remembered some of it too, and was amazed at how much of their conversation I, hovering in attendance, had heard and retained, storing it all away to the point where occasionally (just occasionally) I could have filled in those gaps for her. Even from a distance I might sometimes observe a sequence of gestures and asides I’d seen before, not approximated but replicated, cloned in their subtle entirety, unmistakeable.
There was never any sugaring or wishful distortion. What trifling disagreements they’d had were faithfully played out, keenly felt but always swiftly healed. He wasn’t doing this, I quickly realised, in order to change any of it, but simply because he could. After he’d left, I would sink my teeth furtively into her untouched muffin, trying to taste it exactly as she would have tasted it, swilling coffee with the crumbs to make each mouthful last.
Next to him, of course, I was an amateur. For him, every fragment of every second they’d spent together was a living, breathing thing, preserved like reels of film and stacked in the infinite chambers of his mind to be replayed at will. Where I could, I helped. There was one date I remembered exactly: November the third. Back then, Lewis had taken to playing live sport on a small TV above the bar in a bid to create “the right ambience”, although most people objected to the razmatazz so early in the morning. That day it had been baseball, an exhibition match in Japan between the touring Yankees and Hanshin Tigers, and when Hideo Matsui had cracked a home run against his fellow countrymen the Memory Man had whooped aloud, causing the girl to snort into her coffee. I spent hours, days, tracking down a recording of the game, pressing play at exactly the right moment when the date came round again. Again, he whooped. Again, he turned and guffawed at where she would now be wiping up coffee spatters with her napkin. He didn’t look at me, but on clearing up I found he’d left a twenty pound tip.
As the cycle neared its end again, the final Friday loomed large and horrible. Whilst maintaining my attentiveness to him as best I could, I worried that something would show through in my manner, and I ached to say something. The Memory Man, for his part, seemed unaffected, and in this I knew he had no choice. Each day, he drooped his shoulders low over his steaming coffee like a priest at a temple flame, and at night I would dream of him, still there in the empty diner, consuming meal after meal with no one to clear away the remains, cups and crockery piling up around him like mounds of scoured cockles.
Only on that final Friday did he vary from the script. The weather wasn’t quite as it had been a year before (the same blinding blue as Dallas 1963 and New York 9/11), but it was close enough. Back then, they’d been happy right to the end, and yet now I looked on helpless as both meals sat untouched and there was agony in his eyes, not laughter. I watched as he threw aside his lines and said things for the first time, the kinds of things we all might wish we’d said to a loved one before they were snatched from us. He couldn’t, of course, reveal to her what lay in store a block away, and so at the appointed time his giant hands reached across and closed round phantom wrists, his eyes followed her up from her seat and across the floor, lingering for a second at the door to acknowledge her final wave. A last smile, and then he sat alone.
Fifteen minutes later the Memory Man laid a banknote on the table and got up. He stopped at the till where I was standing beside Lewis, my tears at a rolling boil, and he told us thank you, that he’d never forget our kindness.
And then he left us. This time for good.
(c) Jim Cogan, 2014
As a freelance copywriter and corporate filmmaker, Jim Cogan weaves spellbinding tales that deal with all the big themes: global skincare trends, potato cultivation in Essex, mailroom technology and risk management in local government. He studied creative writing at Birkbeck College and languages at Oxford.
Suzanne Goldberg’s theatre credits include: Macbeth (National Tour), Miniaturists (Arcola Theatre), A Big Day for the Goldbergs (New End Theatre), Who Will Carry the Word? (Courtyard Theatre) Moll Flanders (Southwark Playhouse), Soho Streets (Soho Theatre), The Cherry Orchard (Greenwich Playhouse), & Theatre Souk (Theatre Delicatessen). Suzanne regularly narrates for RNIB Talking Books.
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