She’s lost me completely. Something about poor circulation maybe? I think I heard the word “circulation” in there somewhere. And possibly something about eating? And mauvaise—she’s been sick perhaps? She had food poisoning?
“Oui,” I say, putting a hand to my lips, “um—” I turn to Nate for help and realize that he is almost crying with silent laughter, as is Cat.
“Claudette speaks excellent English, Robs,” Nate says. “She’s practically fluent.”
I look at my wife, then back at Claudette, who shrugs and says in perfect, if softly accented English, “Thanks for having us and I’m really sorry we’re late. That honestly wasn’t my idea.”
“You were in on this,” I say, turning to a grinning Cat. Nate’s arm is slung around her shoulders, the siblings delighting in the thrill of their guile. “I hate you all. Come and eat before I throw the lot of you out. And that,” I say to Cat, “includes you.”
While everyone finds their seats, Cat and I load dishes on to the table—crab cakes and steamed red snapper with Thai basil and lime, bowls of pickled cucumber sprinkled with tiny red chilies, vegan curries of varying spiciness, vegetables tossed in coriander and soy, sticky rice and lots of bright, fragrant dips. We top up our guests’ wine and water glasses and, to my relief, the room is filled with talk. No one is sitting where I’d planned.
Nate’s positive energy is a joy. He talks about their life in Paris, his work teaching music, his band, their gigs, the project that has brought him to London. He describes how Claudette was teaching his yoga class, the months it took him to persuade her to go on a date. Claudette raises her eyebrows, cocks her head on one side and looks more amused than flattered. Cat and I exchange a look. This is a first: to our knowledge, Nate never chases anyone. It fits that she’s a yoga teacher, I think: she’s completely self-possessed, the picture of studied serenity. I can totally imagine her in the lotus position, eyes shut, meditating. I steal glances at her and I realize she’s doing the same—I see her looking carefully at Cat, at me, at Liv, angling her head down the table to where Willa sits at the other end. Her focus is fascinating. When she talks, and when she listens, she gives each person her full, undivided attention, as if they’re the only person in the room. I watch her take small portions of the various curries. She doesn’t touch the wine.
“What’s your thesis about, Liv?” Cat says, as later we clear the table of the main course and bring out a long wooden platter filled with slices of mango, strawberries and watermelon scattered with mint.
“I’ve been looking into the corruption of memory,” Liv says, “by which I mean how memory can be changed, altered with time. I’m a psychologist.”
“Oh,” I say, genuinely surprised. I had somehow just assumed that Liv worked in the Zoology Department with Michael.
Michael looks at me and smiles. “Go on,” he says, “say it. You thought she’d be studying the sex lives of limpets.” I laugh. He knows me far too well.
“Interesting stuff,” says Claudette, turning dark, tranquil eyes toward Liv.
“It is,” Liv says. “It really is. I’ve been looking into false memories. It’s truly extraordinary how easily the human brain can be tricked into believing it remembers something that didn’t happen. You’d be amazed.”
She has our attention now. We all sit up a little.
“Even on a simple level, we can have wildly differing memories of a single event, where you’d be right in thinking that everyone experienced the exact same thing. Take this supper party, for instance. If in six months’ time, I asked you individually to recall tonight in as much detail as possible, it’s more than likely that you’d each give me a slightly, perhaps even a wildly different account—with variations in everything from what everyone was wearing and the order in which people arrived, to what we ate, what we discussed and who said what.”
“I don’t really see how that would work,” Jamie says; “we’re literally sitting around the same table.”
“You’d be surprised,” Liv says.
“Do it, then,” Jamie says, “six months from today. Count us in.”
“But if we knew we were going to be asked to recall everything, wouldn’t that fact alone alter the way we processed tonight’s events? People would be actively trying to remember everything as it happened,” Nate says.
“Definitely,” Liv says.
“More than that,” Cat says, “wouldn’t it even alter the way we acted tonight? Right down to what we said? We’d all become hyper self-aware. Nobody would want other people remembering that they were the one who’d come out with something stupid. We’d all be trying to outdo each other with our fierce wit and intelligence.”
“Totally,” Liv says, “no doubt about it.”
Now Willa joins in. “So what factors influence how we actually remember events?”
“Good question.”
“Drugs, alcohol,” Jamie says.
“Sure,” Liv says, “they’re a given.”
“Dementia, aging,” says Claudette.
“Yes. And there’s some fascinating research being done in that area. But now we’re really crossing into neurology, because we’re talking about irreversible changes to the brain’s structure. Similarly with brain injury. Also, there’s your general health and we know the quality of your sleep affects memory too, not to mention other environmental factors such as distractions—physical, mental, what’s going on around us. Also, prior events, whether they’ve been consciously noted or not.”
The yellow light from the candles plays on our faces and I find myself taking a mental snapshot of the scene, each of us trapped like insects in amber, leaning into the center of the table, absorbed in the discussion and in each other. Michael looking at me. Cat and Jamie looking at Liv. Willa looking at Claudette.
“Then we get on to other factors: state of mind, wish fulfillment, stress. Embarrassment. Humiliation. Guilt.”
“You mean reworking events to fit our own narrative,” says Cat.
“Exactly. And now it gets really interesting: transference of memory, by which I mean absorbing other people’s memories, taking possession of them, as if they belonged to you. And, as it happens, this is my area of research. We all do this, to some extent. For instance, we all have that one story that gets slightly embellished in the retelling and, over time, the exaggerated story becomes the version we actually believe, indistinguishable from the original in our own minds. And here’s another example, and you don’t have to answer this out loud, but did you ever date someone who, when you look back, you think of as highly irritating?” There’s an awkward laugh, and a pause in which no one meets anyone else’s eye. “Well, it’s a bit like that,” she says. “You’ve shifted your perception of them. Your memory is colluding with your subliminal desire to put that person firmly outside your emotional reach. And this shift in thinking happens on a cultural level too—take Princess Diana, for example—she was treated like a saint when she died, whereas now she’s very often described as if she were slightly unhinged. How did that shift in thinking happen on a national—even a global—scale?”
“We’ve been collectively manipulated,” Cat says, “to remember things differently.”
“Precisely,” Liv says.
“It’s important research,” Michael says, “given we’re constantly bombarded with information, much of which comes with a certain agenda attached. We need to know the extent to which our memories are reliable, and, equally, the extent to which memory itself can be deliberately constructed.”
I look at my beautiful, brilliant brother and smile. He sounds so flipping earnest and I love him for that. He’s always been that way, Michael. Even as a kid he was that person, a small, ardent professor of life, even then when we were both so utterly unfettered by life’s responsibilities, entirely free to do whatever we liked. How green I must have been, somehow imagining my summers would always be like that: just an endless stream of warm, carefree days that seemed to stretch on forever. Then Willa came to stay and everything changed after that. Michael was there too, that summer, and I wonder now just how much he still remembers of that time: how much he saw in the first place, how much he missed.
Me? I remember it all.
4 Summer Break Robyn
When Dad taught Willa how to throw a bowl, even Michael came to watch, which just goes to show that we were all a little in love with my friend. Mum said she had very nice manners, which meant she called her Mrs. Bee. She called my dad Chris. I watched my brother’s eyes following her around the house. I’d never seen my brother pay attention to anyone before, let alone one of my friends. After all, he was nearly four years older than me. He used to call me Kid.
“Don’t they have girls at Oxford?” I asked him when Willa was in the shower. “What makes you think she’d be interested in you?” In my head those words had sounded playful and fun, but that’s not the way they came out. I grinned. I poked him in the ribs. “Just joking,” I said.
Michael even invited Willa into his bedroom to look at his rock collection, a gray cardboard box filled with a variety of specimens, some from the moor but others from far more exotic locations. Each one was nestled in a tiny bed of cotton wool: malachite, azurite, obsidian, rock rose, and Brian, a yellow pebble I’d found in the river and gifted to my brother, writing his name on a tiny paper slip in the same miniature handwriting that Michael used to label everything else. Willa trailed slow fingers over the fossils on his windowsill.
“Do you ever collect birds’ eggs?” she said. She would honestly ask the oddest questions at times.
“You mean from nests?”
She nodded.
“Well, no,” my brother said. “First off, that’s illegal. But, more than that, it would be wrong.”
Willa nodded and moved on around his room. For the longest time she stared at a map of the oceans that Michael had pinned to the wall.
“Show me where there are blue holes.”
“Blue holes? Sure. The one everyone’s seen pictures of is here”—Michael pointed toward Belize—“but there are others too, less well known, not as big or impressive. There’s one off the coast of South Africa. One here, near Egypt. The Caribbean. There’re lots of them, actually, even inland ones. Here—Oman. They’re all just sinkholes, but aerial photos make them look really impressive—like you’re looking into an abyss.”
Willa seemed to sigh and for a beat we all stood in silence. Then I showed her the line my brother had drawn on the boards of his floor, marking the point I wasn’t allowed to cross until I was almost thirteen.
“She was a contamination hazard,” Michael said. “She contained glitter.”
