Memory

Memory - Chapter 1

Without guilt we would all be monsters.

My mother had a china plaque on the kitchen wall that read: Do remember to forget, anger, sorrow, and regret. I've always felt this to be bad advice, if not for the individual then for the society they live in. We need to remember our failures, our wounds, our losses.

"Leave some milk!" I reached to stop Mary raising the end of the carton any higher. "And those things are ninety percent sugar already. Don't go adding more."

Mary scowled at me from beneath a blonde fringe, pure venom, replaced by a sunny smile in the next moment. Her ability to freefall through the emotional spectrum might have been down to being ten, or due to being close to ninety percent sugar herself, or simply a permanent feature gifted to her by an absent mother.

"Sarah will pick you up from school," I said.

"Good. She does it better than you." Mary set the milk carton down. It sounded suspiciously empty.

"Don't play her up." Sarah was one of two women I paid to look after my daughter after school until I got back from work. Of the two she was the more nervy one, prone to calling me at the lab over a knee skinned in the playground or the appearance of a mystery rash.

"Helen Anderson still talks about when you tried to kidnap her." Mary had more to say but opted to render it unintelligible by spooning a large amount of crunchy milk-drowned sugar cereal into her mouth.

"I just thought she would make a better daughter is all," I said. "She seemed very polite."

Some people never forget a face. Others are bad with faces. What is seldom understood is that this talent for recognition is a spectrum that goes to extremes on either side. It's well known, among brain surgeons at least, that there is a localised area of the temporal lobe that has evolved to recognise faces. In me, that part of the brain didn't develop properly. It leads to a condition called prosopagnosia, which essentially means that, while I can remember how to spell prosopagnosia and as many phone numbers as I need to, if my mother rang the front doorbell right now I would open it and enquire politely whether I could help her.

To compensate my failings in the recognition department I use other clues such as context, clothing, facial hair, and accessories. Unfortunately Helen Anderson happened to be the same height as Mary, have the same long blonde hair, and on that day the same vacuous boy band on the same satchel. She was even wearing identical red hair slides set with little plastic Hello Kitties.

The police weren't called, but it had been a near thing.

"Sarah will be staying late tonight and putting you to bed at nine. I don't want to hear that there was any fussing. I'll be back around eleven."

"Why, what are you doing?" A question worth pausing the sugar delivery system for.

"I'm going out after work."

"With Dave and Mo?" Mary asked. "Will Rachel go too? Where are you going? Why can't I come? I-"

"Not with them, no." I would have lied but I've never been good at it.

"You're going on a date!" Her eyes widened then narrowed.

"It's a friend of Rachel's, and no you can't come, it's after your bedtime."

It took another fifteen minutes to lever Mary out the front door into a light drizzle.

"Everyone else drives their kids to school."