“We swam in the Med, but of course you wouldn’t remember that.”
“Actually, we’ve been to Turkey, too. I remember the Med.”
“Twat,” she said, and threw my Rubik’s Cube at me. I ducked and it smashed against the wall. I didn’t care. I could never do the fucking thing.
We weren’t having a baby, so I took her back to Greece with the money. We had a great time, fixed things, made love to repair what we had. Made new memories. On a balcony eating salad and feta cheese we decided Jo would go on the pill. Just for a while.
We had a lot of good times. I know because I still have the receipts. We were in love, and people always want that. It’s in demand, you could say, and it’s a seller’s market. For every roll around in a tangle of bed sheets, every romantic dinner, every walk along the beach I do remember, I’m sure I’ve sold just as many. I was careful, though. Or thought I was, anyway.
At first the extra money was great. We were able to do more things together, enjoy ourselves, snuggle deeper into our love as we decorated the flat, ate out, saw the newest films and pulled them apart over drinks in cosy bars. The more things we did, the more I could sell one or two of them so we could have more. But it wasn’t long before it started to show. Jo would make jokes I didn’t understand or I’d ask questions I should’ve known the answers to, things like that. Once, as she stripped off her shirt for another bout in the bedroom, I noticed she had a tattoo hooked around her belly-button, a curl of ivy with little green hearts for leaves. It freaked me out a bit, that one, because I didn’t know she had it. Luckily her shirt was up over her head at the time, caught on her ponytail, and she didn’t see my surprise. I helped her undress with a shaky laugh and we rolled around together. I kissed her tattoo a lot and as she traced patterns on the back of my shoulder I realised I had one too.
But on the whole, things were good.
Lucid Ltd is a large building, new and expensive but otherwise modest about its identity. There are no signs outside except for an engraved panel of glass. Inside it’s all thick carpet and huge photographs of weddings, newborns, children on swings, graduations, acceptance speeches, other stuff. The pair on the front desk wear their smiles like it’s part of the uniform, but I know from experience they’re nice enough really. If they still have the same staff there.
The man on the front desk was called David and he told me they couldn’t divulge the sort of information I required. I offered him money, but they must give the desk staff training or something because he turned it down. And it was a lot.
“Please. I need to remember.”
“Sales are non-returnable,” he said. “Come on, you know this.”
I was a regular by then. I no longer got the “sir” treatment.
The woman he shared the desk with was looking on with interest. She was new. I should have tried her.
“Jenny, can you go and tell Martin to come to the front please?”
Her eyes widened just a little and she picked up the phone. Martin was security.
“No, go get him personally. It’ll hurry him up.”
She nodded obediently and went. David took the cash I still held out and pocketed it quickly.
“I’ll email you,” he said. “And you’ll delete it immediately afterwards, ok?”
I nodded. Delete it. I could do that.
Jo and I ate the rest of our meal in silence. I’d reminisced about the time we ate here last, me relishing every mouthful of rainbow trout and she nearing orgasm with every forkful of truffle-topped risotto.
“What did I look like?” she asked eventually, dabbing at her mouth with a napkin. She never dabbed at her mouth with a napkin. She put her hands flat on the table and looked at me. “Did I have red hair, maybe? Blonde? Blue eyes? Maybe I had bigger tits.”
“What are you talking about?”
I was pretty sure she hadn’t changed her hair in a while, and I was certain she hadn’t had any surgery. Whatever the trap was, I was missing it.
“The girl you came here with last time, what did she look like?” She smiled, but it was her quick one, sharp like a paper cut. “When we came, you and me, for our anniversary, the place was a sushi bar.”
I had no reply. I didn’t need to explain.
“You said you wouldn’t go there anymore. You promised me no more Lucid. We’re doing fine now. We don’t need the money.”
“I promised I wouldn’t sell anything else.” I sounded whiny even to me. “I bought something this time. I bought back our anniversary but they must have tinkered with it, changed some things.”
“No shit.”
That was when the waiter turned up to ask if everything was alright. He meant with our meal. We both told him yes, and Jo ordered dessert as if nothing had happened in that way women can do. As soon as he was gone she was back in combat mode.
“They ‘tinkered’ with it so the dick who bought it wouldn’t see me in the street and say hi.”
I tried to speak but she held up a finger and continued, anticipating my comeback.
“No doubt they tinkered me back in for you. What did you do, take them a photo? And they must have tinkered the food too, or not tinkered it, or whatever, because I fucking. Hate. Risotto.”
She pushed away from the table and left.
I ate her sorbet when it came and paid the bill. The sorbet tasted of frozen nothing.
I stopped selling anything to Lucid for a while then, except for the occasional Great Expectations. We got back to normal again, and eventually normal wasn’t bickering and making up; normal was only good stuff. We visited family, that’s how serious we were, and one day in January, when the air was so crisp it hurt your nose to breathe it and the sky was such a frosted blue you thought it would break if you could throw a rock high enough, I proposed. We’d moved from our dingy flat above the pet shop to a rented house that had cycle routes into the country. We’d pedalled our way through leafless woods and over tiny streams that crackled their ice beneath our wheels and when we stopped at a kissing gate I refused to let her pass until she’d said yes. I’m not making any of this up or reading it from her diary. I remember. It hurts the same way the wind did as it bit our hands and faces going downhill. We sped our way down to the nearest pub and celebrated our engagement with mulled wine and a ploughman’s lunch, of all things.
I still have the ring. Lucid offered me a lot of money for it when I sold the wedding day, but I told them they’d have to make do with just the one. It’s engraved, anyway. The best of times, the worst of times. She likes Dickens. I kept the memory of buying it, too, because the woman in the shop had said “If it makes her as happy to wear it as it’s making you to look at it, you’ll be fine.”
I like to remember that and imagine it’s true.
There was a case in the papers, you might remember it, about a young woman who breezed through her exams two years early because she’d bought memories from her lecturer. That lecturer was me. It wasn’t the first time I’d done it, but it was the one that got me fired. The little bitch sold the story to the papers herself to recoup the money she’d spent at Lucid. The university couldn’t fire me for the memory thing, it’s not illegal (though my case forced a few revisions there, I think), but they could fire me for being under qualified, which they decided I was after I failed an exam of my own.
Jo wasn’t angry. She was upset and cried a lot (which was worse) but she wasn’t angry. I’d started selling my education because I wanted to keep everything that was ours, but I needed to sell something because by then she was pregnant. Our darling little Daniel. Oh, Danny boy. So, so beautiful.