The Memory Cage Read online

  Leonard, of course, had to try and spoil things.

  “If you think that’ll save his last few brain cells, you’re more stupid than you look, Bosnia Boy.”

  But, like I said, I really felt I was getting somewhere.

  That is, until Mum gave me that album.

  It was Tuesday morning. Grandad and I were sitting at the kitchen table, rain streaming down the patio doors, making jokes about his teenage hairstyle, when Mum came in carrying a thick book. The album was one I’d never seen before. She said she’d hunted it out from somewhere, and from the dust on the cover, I guessed it hadn’t been looked at for years. It was the old-fashioned kind that had little sticky squares holding the photos by the corners, and sheets of tissue paper between its black pages. We took the album to the Den so we could look at it in peace, away from Leonard’s scowling and Sophie’s felt tips. Wrapped it in a plastic bag and made a dash for it.

  We put the album on the tea chest and sat around it on our rickety chairs. On a special gold-edged page at the front of the album was a photograph of a woman, smiling at the camera, and written beside it in white pencil was “Freda. Aged 19”. She was pretty. Her eyes looked sparkly and kind.

  Grandad was very still, running a finger gently round the picture. He let out a long sigh, and said, more to himself than to me, “The last portrait I ever took …”

  His voice trailed off.

  “What was she like, Grandad?” I asked. “My grandma?”

  Grandad sat back. It was a bit before he answered, but his eyes were bright, sort of happy and sad at the same time, and his voice went all strange.

  “An angel, she was, Alex. That’s what our Freda was. I miss her. There’s not a day goes by when I don’t think about her.”

  I saw his face screw up like he’d hurt himself, and then he turned away from me.

  After all these years he still missed my grandma. It was hard for him to even talk about her. Probably he’d never stop missing her, never stop feeling pain, unless … Unless he forgot who she was. He’d forgotten who I was, that day on the cliff. Would he forget her too one day? Would it be easier for him if he did forget her?

  I knew one thing. It was easier for me to forget my past.

  Much easier.

  We leafed through some more pages.

  There were photos of Grandad and Grandma’s wedding. They were dated 1941. I studied the curly writing. Yes, definitely. That was strange.

  “You married Grandma in nineteen forty-one?” I asked.

  “Nineteen forty-one. I remember it clear as a bell. January, it was. The church was freezing. It was mad to have a wedding in the middle of winter!”

  I thought back. The photo in Dad’s study of Grandma and Grandad’s wedding had said 1940, hadn’t it? It must have had the wrong date on it.

  We carried on looking at the album.

  Grandad could tell me what the little pictures on the place settings at his wedding were (bluebirds), who had worn the most hideous hat (Great-Aunt Mildred with her wax fruit and roses), and how many glasses of home-made dandelion champagne he’d had to drink (ruddy war rationing, although he wasn’t one hundred per cent sure he could trust his memory on that one!).

  There was Grandma sitting at a writing desk, pen in hand. There was Grandma lifting Dad out of his cradle. There were photos of Grandma holding Dad as a baby, Great-Aunt Mildred holding Dad as a baby, and loads of Dad as a baby in general, doing the usual baby things. Grandad made a joke that Dad, even at that age, was dressed like he was ready to spend all day in the office, but he was generally more quiet, made fewer comments, even looked at some pages without saying a single thing. Some moments, the only sound was the rain drumming loudly on the windows. I guessed he was thinking about Grandma again.

  A face we came across looked like a really young version of Miss Kirby.

  “Yes, that’s Hatty Kirby,” Grandad told me. “Your grandma’s best friend. That’s Mildred in the background, with Henry Webb. They were engaged, those two, would you believe? Nice chap, that Henry. Nothing like his brother.”

  He turned the page. There was a photo of a man. I’d seen that face somewhere before. He looked like Grandad, but …

  “That’s our Tommie,” said Grandad. He had the same expression as he did when he had been talking about Grandma. “My brother. Your great-uncle. Very close we were. Me and Tommie.”

  It clicked where I’d seen Tommie before! On that wedding photo in Dad’s study, of course. The one with the wrong date. At first I’d thought it was Grandad standing there with Grandma in the picture, but now I realized it was Tommie.

  So the photo in Dad’s study was Grandma posing with her new brother-in-law. It was pretty odd, though, Dad having a photo of Grandma with Tommie, not Grandad. Maybe it was because Grandad was behind the camera doing his own wedding photos! Knowing Grandad, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  I was about to ask him, but Grandad had already turned the page, and we suddenly came across a photo of Tommie in army uniform with a gun rested along his arm.

  I felt images flick at the edge of my mind. Men with guns …

  I flipped the page quickly. “Were you a soldier, Grandad?”

  Grandad made a noise that could have been either yes or no, and then he closed the album. “I don’t want to look at more now.”

  “But Grandad,” I said, opening up the album again, “we haven’t finished.”

  Grandad pressed the cover down with his fist. “I said I don’t feel like it! I don’t like you asking all these questions!”

  Rain pounded on the roof overhead. The images in my head were getting stronger. There were noises now too. Heavy boots on mud. Shouts. I felt my skin crawl as I tried to block them out.

  Grandad had never tried to push me to say things I didn’t want to, and here was me trying to make him tell me stuff. I was Stupid Tie Man with my black leather settee and certificates in gold frames on the wall. I wanted to leave him alone, but I knew I had to go on. I had to make the scrapbook. I had to keep my promise.

  The trouble was, sitting there, going back through Grandad’s life with him, it was making my past come back too. My past, waiting in the shadows like an enemy. Waiting to jump out on me. Ambush me.

  I felt the old familiar panic grow inside me. I forced myself to think calmly. This is for Grandad, I told myself. We’ve got less than four days.

  “Come on!” I said to him. “You’ve not told me anything about the war. Surely you can remember …”

  He pulled the album away from me and spread a hand over the front.

  “What’s the point? I can’t remember what I did yesterday, never mind what I did during the war!” He stood up, all agitated. “How do you expect me to remember what I did in the war? All I know is I didn’t fight and I didn’t have to shoot anyone!”

  “OK, Grandad. Sit down.”

  “I told you, Alex. I’m not talking about that.”

  “I said OK.”

  Grandad sat down, breathing heavily, the bruise under his eye looking red and sore. Slowly, the bad stuff in my head faded. I felt guilty I’d got him so wound up. I made us an extra strong cup of tea and got out a packet of chocolate digestives.

  Grandad must have felt guilty too, about the way he’d reacted, because after a bit he put down his tea, opened the album again and started turning the pages.

  “Freda, Tommie, Hatty … Ruddy Mildred with her Henry …” He gave a short laugh. “Seems like only yesterday. Where’s that tea you promised, Alex?”

  I pushed his half empty mug towards him.

  Grandad turned a page, and his face changed so much that I let the digestive I was dunking fall straight into my tea.

  “What’s he doing in there?”

  I looked to see what had upset him so much. It was a shot of Tommie and Freda sitting on the riverbank grinning. There was a man I didn’t recognize next to them. Grandad flipped the page, bending the corner in his hurry. On the next sheet was the same man, a cigarette bet
ween his teeth.

  “I’m not having him in there! I’m not standing for it.”

  “Who is he?” I said.

  “Never you mind, Alex.”

  The next thing I knew, Grandad was pulling at the photo. Before I had time to react, there was a tearing sound as the picture came away, taking most of the page with it.

  “Grandad!”

  “It’s no place there,” he said. He screwed up the photo and tossed it to the floor.

  “I don’t like you asking all these questions, I said, especially not about my Freda!” He got up. “Anyway, I can’t sit around here idling. I’ve got much more important things to do!”

  He strode towards the door, then stood there a moment like he was trying to remember what all those important things were. He went over to the gramophone as if he’d forgotten I was there and took a record from the pile. He slid the black disc from its sleeve and held it between two palms, studying its label. He put it on the turntable, set it going and lifted the needle on to it.

  There was a scratching sound as the record spun, then familiar music. It was one Grandad played all the time. A woman started to sing. Vera Lynn.

  “There’ll be bluebirds over, the white cliffs of Dover …”

  Grandad slumped down in the armchair and closed his eyes.

  I watched him, but he didn’t stir, so I quietly got a bit of sellotape and fixed the torn up photo as best I could. When Mum had said I could take photos out of the albums, this definitely wouldn’t have been what she had in mind.

  Why had Grandad reacted like that, anyway? Who was the man in the picture and what had he done to make Grandad so angry, even after all these years?

  I checked Grandad still had his eyes shut and turned the photo over. There was some of that curly handwriting they used back then that I found really hard to read. The rips right through the words didn’t help.

  Somebody has a smoke? Let Vel? I couldn’t make any sense of it. I looked at the photo again. The man was kind of hunched up with his cigarette, like there was something wrong with his shoulders. Something caught my eye. Something in the buttonhole of the man’s jacket. It was a dark flower. Had to be red. A red carnation.

  “They’re after me.”

  I jumped, startled. Grandad was right by me, whispering. I hadn’t heard him get up out of his chair. He edged over to where rain streamed down the windowpane and eased the curtain closed.

  “Trying to get rid of the evidence, they are.” He looked angry. Scared.

  The woman’s singing filled the room.

  “… And Jimmy will go to sleep

  In his own little room …”

  Grandad’s face relaxed again and he clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Where’s that tea you promised me, eh, Alex?”

  I looked at Grandad.

  He looked back at me, grinning.

  “You already drank it,” I said.

  – CHAPTER 8 –

  MR WEBB

  Bottom of the garden. Tuesday, 1:15 p.m. Trying to keep a clear head.

  Lia pulled up her hood and rotated herself round and round in her chair, studying the sellotaped photograph. Her wheels made muddy circles on our soggy end lawn.

  The river was high because of all the rain. Water dripped off the branches of the willow trees, making tiny dints on the fast-moving surface. I kept my distance, eyeing the way the water churned at the tops of the banks. Our old rowing boat, the Little Swift, bobbed up and down, straining against its mooring rope. It looked about ready to sink.

  I offered Lia the half empty packet of chocolate digestives I’d smuggled out of the Den. She handed back the mended photo I’d been showing her and took a biscuit.

  “All this stuff about your grandad doesn’t make any sense to me either,” she said.

  I licked the chocolate on the top of my biscuit. “The weird thing is, Grandad seems to remember the stuff from years ago better than the stuff from last week.”

  “Yes!” Lia wagged a finger at me. “That’s classic Alzheimer’s. I read about that somewhere. Apparently that’s what happens. People can think they’re living back when they were loads younger. They truly believe it. I read a story about an eighty-year-old woman who got up one morning and went off to work in the local factory where she’d worked when she was nineteen. Course, the factory wasn’t even there any more. It must have been a real shock when she found out.”

  Lia bit into her biscuit. “Well,” she munched, “what I’m getting at is that maybe your grandad sometimes thinks he’s back in the past somewhere and …” She finished her mouthful. “He’s kind of reliving things that happened to him.”

  “Like Moggy,” I said.

  “Exactly. All that stuff about being watched, and people out to get him. It might not really be happening now, but maybe it did once in the past.”

  I nodded. It kind of made sense. “He said they were trying to get rid of the evidence.”

  “Yes, well, I also read somewhere that paranoia can be a symptom of Alzheimer’s, you know, when you think people are after you but you’re just imagining it? But what if maybe someone was after him, years ago, and that’s what he meant.”

  I nodded again, but I wasn’t so sure. I’d definitely seen a figure in that photograph Grandad had developed, hadn’t I? And that was from a few days ago, not a few decades.

  The rain started to pour down again and the wind sent small branches tumbling from the willows.

  “Come on, we’ll get soaked!”

  I ran, pushing Lia round to the front of the house and into the porch, and we stayed there, watching the rain against the glass.

  There was a jumble of sounds from inside the house. Mum’s orchestral CD. Victoria’s Radio One I’ll-take-as-long-as-I-like-in-the-bathroom clatter. The shooting and explosions of Leonard’s computer games. Nothing from Dad – he was at work as usual. Sophie singing “I’m a princess! I’m a fairy princess!” at the top of her lungs.

  “The big question is …” Lia used her elbow to rub condensation off the glass. “What has your grandad actually forgotten, and …” She stopped to look me right in the face. “… what does he remember but he’s deliberately trying to forget?”

  “Eh?” Lia did my head in sometimes.

  “You know! Stuff he remembers, but doesn’t want to talk about!”

  I shrugged at her.

  “It’s like that locked room at the top of your house,” Lia went on. “The one that Sophie thinks is full of crocodiles and tarantulas.”

  “But what has that got to do with anything?” I said, trying not to think of Grandad’s outburst after the ripped pillow incident. “It’s got rotten floorboards, that’s what Mum says, and the key was lost years ago.”

  Lia tapped her head. “Well, you see, which of Grandad’s rooms up here have really lost their keys, and which keys is Grandad pretending he’s lost?”

  What was Lia going on about now? Locked rooms in your head? Keys? I was the one who was lost.

  Lia waggled the sellotaped photo at me. “Tommie and Freda and this bloke, they’re the key to all this, I reckon. If your grandad won’t tell you about them, you’ll have to find out for yourself.” She drew a frowning face in the condensation. “Start with what you do know. Tommie?”

  “Killed in France during the war,” I said.

  “Well, he’ll be buried abroad, so we can’t look for his gravestone so easily. That leaves your grandma. When did she die? Where’s she buried? Must be in our graveyard, right?”

  I shrugged. All I knew was that Grandma had died when Dad was really little.

  “Can’t you just ask your mum or dad?” said Lia.

  “I’m not asking them anything!” I said. I felt a fresh wave of anger at their scheming over Grandad. “I’ll find out myself! Besides, Dad always clams up when there’s any mention of Grandma.”

  “Ask your grandad then.”

  I shook my head. “He got massively upset the last time I asked too many questions. He said he did
n’t want to talk about Grandma. Do you want me to wind him up even more?”

  “OK, OK,” Lia soothed. She blew the fringe from her eyes. “Wow, do your family never discuss anything?”

  “How would finding Grandma’s grave help anyway?” I said grumpily.

  She handed me back the photo. “I don’t know, but you have to start somewhere!”

  I had an uneasy feeling. Was it right to dig up all the memories? I thought. Weren’t there some it was best to keep hidden?

  Look at how Grandad had reacted when I’d tried to force him into telling me things. And all that war stuff, it had got to me too.

  Maybe it was better to forget. Keep the memories buried.

  “I’m just not too sure it’s a good idea,” I mumbled.

  Lia came close to me. “Don’t you get it, Alex?” Her cheeks were flushed and she sounded angry. “You have to find out, for the scrapbook. A life isn’t only happy stuff, is it? It’s not only the stuff you get in holiday snaps. It’s the bad things too. The stuff you want to shove in a box and never look at again!”

  She was giving me this really hard stare when she said the thing about the box.

  Shut it, Lia, I thought. Leave me out of this. I wished I’d never told her about the box under my bed. Just shut it.

  I turned away from her and watched the river churn by. A tree trunk floated past and my mind made it into a body, face down in the water. Not now, I told myself. Focus on Grandad.

  Lia sighed. “Look, Alex, all I’m saying is this scrapbook thing, well, if there’s not very nice stuff in your grandad’s memories, that’s still part of who he is, surely? If you could find out why he’s so upset and get him to talk about it, then he might open up about other things.”

  “Maybe,” I said, still not looking at her. I knew she was right, but I didn’t want to admit it.

  “Look.” Lia jabbed a finger into my arm and it hurt. “Do you want to make this scrapbook or not?”

  I pulled myself out of my brooding. We only had until Saturday. What was I doing? I gave her a punch back and made an effort to think.