The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [24]
His mother’s expression gradually changed. “She found three men on the seashore. Shipwrecked. They were all unconscious.”
Noel’s features froze, his breathing stopped.
“She nursed them back to health, and they all fell in love with her.”
Noel stared at his mother, incredulously. And then launched himself into her arms, laughing, rocking back and forth on the bed. “Yes, Mom, that’s right. I knew you’d remember! This is good news, very good news.” Vorta’s drugs are kicking in, he said to himself. I knew this would be the right batch!
His mother began to stroke his hair, as she used to. And then out of the blue she said, “Your father … had a passion for family trees. But what you didn’t know, what I never told you, was that he was easily taken in. Despite his … brilliance.”
Noel tried to stop his heart from pounding, shocked at this new lucidity. “You mean … Byron’s really not my ancestor?”
His mother merely smiled. “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, your father used to say.”
Why did she remember that line? Noel wondered. Because of the amaranth?11 His brain began to generate rows of coloured letters but with effort he shut the generator down. “I … I never heard him say that, Mom.”
“Your father was unhappy with the acknowledged legislators.”
Noel desperately wanted to hear more—she had never talked of his father’s unhappiness in this way—but his mother’s mind leapt abruptly to another subject. “I’ve got some stuff for Émile,” she said. “Can you take it to him, dear? You can read it if you like.”
Before he could reply, in the blink of an eye she fell asleep. For a moment he thought of waking her, of extending these precious moments, but he didn’t have the heart. She’d suffered from insomnia for weeks. So he ever so gently lifted her fingers from his hair, and kissed her on the forehead. On tiptoes he then crept towards her blue Olivetti Lettera (a gift from her husband that a computer would never replace) and picked up a sheaf of papers beside a well-thumbed thesaurus. There was a half-finished page still in the typewriter, barely readable. Must change the ribbon, he thought. Taking one last peek at his mother, Noel switched off the light, closed the door. In the hall, after selecting a key from a ring, he locked the door from the outside—his mother’s jailer!—as emotions rose to fill his throat and flood his eyes.
A sound from below distracted him. Someone was ringing the doorbell, piercingly and long, while pounding maniacally on the door. A picture quivered on the foyer wall. The cacophony of clangs and bangs continued for several minutes before a dead silence redescended on the house. At the top of the stairs he sat down and began to read his mother’s pages.
Chapter 6
Stella’s Diary (I)
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
— Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Friday, 9 February 2001. A huge day, in the hugely negative sense. According to the doctor I have ‘mild cognitive impairment’. That doesn’t sound too bad at first, but let me put it another way: I’m in the first stage of ... Alzheimer’s Disease. The very names of certain diseases bring dread and AD is one of them. It’s a death sentence. A long and slow one.
Émile asked me to keep this journal while I still have ‘self-insight’ -i.e. the ability to recognise what’s happening to me. Later on, because of the deterioration in the cells in my temporal lobe, where insights are formed apparently, I won’t be able to do this. ‘Don’t forget to keep it every day,’ he told me.
Fine, I still have insight, but that’s more a curse than a blessing. Because I know