Memorandum

She knew my name long before we met. When she first said it, she pronounced it intimately, as if her mouth savoured the sound.

*

‘And the past?’ I asked her during our first date. We were crammed in the booth of an airport cafe. She liked, apparently, the comings and goings of aeroplanes.

‘Gone,’ she said.

‘But how can we have a conversation if you can’t remember what I’ve said?’

‘I just remember forward, I remember what I’m going to say,’ she said.

‘Like reading from a script?’

‘Exactly.’

*

When we moved in together, she knew how the house should be best arranged. We followed the blueprint of our future selves, configuring our rooms with a sense of ergonomic destiny. My books had never been so well ordered. The kitchen cupboards, a masterpiece. Christmas, perfect.

She possessed an essence about her, as if she were drifting through life, instrument-like. There was never a smashed glass in our house. Never a scream due to a surprise spider. Often she suggested exactly the dinner I wished to have, and when it came to my problems, she simply fished the solutions from the future.

‘There’s a good bit, coming up,’ she would say, and lo and behold there it was, the good bit. 

It felt good, I think, to be on rails for a while, to have time contained, to trust it a little, to relax a little.

*

We broke up, and got back together. For that first break up, she came into the kitchen and said: ‘today is the day we break up.’ 

I said, ‘but things are going so well?’ 

She shrugged. 

‘I’ve started to collect my things in the hallway,’ she said.

‘So you’ve just accepted it, with no argument? Aren’t we meant to at least have a fight?’ 

I felt my voice rising. I could not help it.

‘You see,’ she said, ‘today is the day we break up.’

At work, my boss assigned me more work than usual. It was his route to kindness. His wife, I knew, was able to fix the weather; when it rained, he gazed mournfully through the window in his corner office, as if beset by a great burden.

At midday, the coffee machine broke. I hated the surprise of it. I called her on my lunch break. 

She told me she was already driving over.

I told her I would have liked a heartfelt reunion.

I’m not wearing any underwear, she said.

*

We could not watch movies, they made no sense to her. She read books, but only because fate drove her to the easy seat and the hardback. In a battered grey notebook, she kept the facts of her life. Where she went to school. Where she used to work. I was a new entry. Boyfriend: Michael.

Of course, she did not remember our first date, our pet cat, our moving in together. But then I could not foresee the date with the candles and the piano. Or my sister’s wedding. Or the time we went to Paris.

We were children, one building a sandcastle and the other taking theirs apart for the sand.

*

As we drew closer to the end, her happy futures dwindled. She became bitter. She asked, often, why I was such a tyrant. 

‘I’m not a tyrant,’ I told her. 

‘You can’t see what I see,’ she said. 

I became forceful with my  decisions. I stood her up at restaurants, only to find she’d never gone. I changed my job to archivist, on a whim, but she knew before I got home. I hid her umbrella, her toothbrush, her socks. I kept the fact that I had taken up Tennis a secret, and that the dental work I needed would cost a minor fortune.

We had arguments with predetermined outcomes. She would just sit there, letting my words land on her, then stand up to leave. 

‘Oh, argue back for once!’ I shouted after her.

‘Why?’ she said. ‘My words don’t convince you.’ 

*

In the final week, she was counting down the days. I asked why she didn’t just leave. It doesn’t happen like that, she said. 

‘And besides,’ she said, ‘there’s a good bit coming up.’

On our last night, she came to me, with her journal clutched to her chest.

‘Could you remind me,’ she said, ‘of the good times.’

Something broke in me. The anger went away. I sat. I took her hands in mine. 

I told her, once, we kayaked during the sunrise and bathed in golden light. I told her about the time someone stole the flamingo from the front garden and we trawled the neighbourhood until we found it in a skip; I told her of the kisses on picnic blankets and in alcoves and on nights out, drunk, everything a mess; about the times we’d spent, here, in this house, the intricacies of our morning routines, the DIY we had attempted, and I told her about this night, the night where we’d sit for the last time, at the horizon, one of us filling the other up with the past. 

‘I suppose that’s the whole thing, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose it is.’

*

On the last day, I helped her load her things into her car. She looked at me like a stranger. When she said goodbye, my name, which she often made so beautiful, so sweet sounding, was mispronounced, as if, finally, she was spitting out the taste.