Remember me - Fiction

I had never even considered smoking a pipe up until then, but the way she looked at me with those big doe eyes, I mean, how could I say no to her? I just fell will to her every command. Later that day we went down to the corner shop and I bought a white carved wooden pipe with a rosewood handle. It looked like a Siberian tigers toe with a long black nail. We went back to our apartment and tried it out. We pulled cushions off the sofa and sat on them cross-legged on the balcony. I remember it being sunny, because the red tips at the end of her bleach blonde hair looked pink in the sunlight. We sat so close that we were able to touch our toes together. She placed a box of matches, a pouch of GoldBerch tobacco and, of course, the tiger toe pipe in the space between our feet.

I asked her to do the honours, to break in the pipe for me because I knew the pipe wouldn’t be mine for long. She would become attached to it and borrow it constantly until the day came where I was happily forced to donate it to her properly, and she would reject it and wait for me to insist. Like always she would snap it from my hands and cradle it to her chest before throwing her arms around my neck and telling me how much she loved me. But in that moment, she just admired it.

She opened up the pouch, pinched a wad of tobacco between her fingers and stuffed it into the pipe with her thumb. I have tried since to stick my thumb in the hollow where hers fit so easily, but it wouldn’t. She picked up the matches and emptied them out onto the balcony.

“Oh, Goodie.” I remember her saying, “I can finish off my drawing with these.” You see, Annie was a phenomenal artist, but a terrible clot and as a result of both we always had an abundance of burnt-out matches lying around the apartment or ‘tiny pencils’ as she would call them.

“They create the best effects.” She would say when I asked her to clear them up. She scooped up the ‘tiny pencils’ and dropped them in her pocket. She picked up the one remaining red-tipped match and struck it against the edge of the box. A bright red flame burst and fizzed for a second before settling back to yellow. She was always in the habit of burning herself, so my first instinct was to reach to protect her hands, her skin, like ivory bone, almost transparent. But this time she held it steady. She raised the tiger toe to her lips and dipped the match into the tobacco inhaling the fumes. After a moment thick whitey-grey smoke blew through her nostril. Then she smiled and I realised I was the luckiest woman in the world. She slipped an imaginary deer-stalker onto her head and took short puckered drags from the pipe. I grabbed her by the elbows and pulled her tiny body onto my lap.

“You are the strangest and most wonderful girl I’ve ever met.” She clenched the pipe between her teeth and spoke back to me in a lispy whistle.

“On the contrary, my dear Watson. I am the strangest and most wonderful girl you will ever meet.” I pulled the pipe from her mouth and cupped her cheeks in my hands.

“My gorgeous girl, don’t ever change.” And then she pressed her lips into mine.

Her lips were waxy, like raw chicken breasts left out too long to thaw. And when I stepped back from her she wasn’t smiling anymore. The kiss had probably worn her out. She was too tired to smile. She was too tired to do anything anymore; too tired to walk, too tired to speak, too tired to eat. The nurse would have to wake her up to feed her and even then she would often fall asleep mid-swallow and almost choke. So mostly I read to her. I read her columns from her favourite magazines and I read her chapters from her favourite books, but most of the time she would fall asleep in the middle of a sentence and wake up in a different world. And it scared her. I could almost recite The Sign of the Three to her by heart, if I wanted to. But I don’t. I never want to look at that story or that book again. I decided that neither of us had the time, or the patience to reread the same adventures over and over, so I decided to start reading her children’s comic strips. The short little strips, only three or four frames long, something she might be able to stay awake long enough to enjoy. Sometimes she listened, sometimes she didn’t, but she couldn’t control whether she did or not and I could never hold her to that regardless. I placed my hand on her tiny bony wrist to centre her, to bring her back to me. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me like I was a stranger. It broke my heart and this was only a mild reaction.

“No, love. It’s me. It’s only me. Don’t worry, it’s only me.” Once she put my face back together and realised I was human, she relaxed her shoulders and almost smiled with those waxy lips I used to spend whole nights dreaming about kissing.

There was a long moment of silence while she studied every detail of my face, like a newborn scans their mothers face. A split second later her face had contorted into a mask of absolute stilling fear. And she had forgotten me… again.  

  “No. No please, Annie. Listen to me. It’s Martha. Please listen to me it’s Martha.” I went to touch her arm very gently, but as soon as I touched her skin, she jolted in the bed and her face was set in tremendous shock.

 “Darling, please listen to me. It’s Martha. Your Martha. Annie, darling. Can you hear me?” I jumped up and grasped her shoulders firmly. Tears were flooding my eyes and streaming down my face. Her body was stiff and dark shadows flushed across her face as she held her breath tight in her lungs, like it was the last breath she would ever take. She tried to move her limbs but they were too heavy. She started to panic and whimper, like a child and I was all but rolled up in a ball at her feet. I didn’t want to call the nurse because I knew my time was almost up with her. So I improvised. Looking around the small room I saw a small red plastic table adorned with children’s books and toys. I raced over and picked up a cardboard book with a family of bears on the front, all with fur lined bellies. I hoped it would be soft enough to calm her down. I tried to lift her wrist but her bones had locked into place with panic. The blood pounded so loud in my ears that I couldn’t even check to see if she was breathing. I flipped the book over and rubbed the fur across the back of her hands, hushing softly over and over. My breaths were shaky and my face was wet with tears and mucus but I didn’t care what I looked like. I needed her back. I needed her more than the air she was depriving herself of in fear. In fear of me. Because to her was a stranger that only fades in and out of existence. Sometimes my face was friendly and she would smile when she saw me. Other times I was the sum of all her greatest fears coming to destroy her. But I never knew which I was to her, a friend or a monster. Right then I must have been a monster.   

 It took several minutes and my arm was seizing from the motion. But it work. Her body relaxed and went limp in the bed. The glowing purple drained from her cheeks I remember thinking in that moment that Annie was right after all. I would have been a terrible nurse. If I couldn’t even look after Annie, how could I possibly look after those who meant almost nothing to me? I rested on the side of the bed, trying to ease my nerves before I leaned over her with shaky arms and whispered.

“Annie, it’s me. Please, please remember me.” I curled my fingers through hers as tightly as I could.

“Please, Annie. Please remember me.” I was crying into my arm when I felt her fingers twitch in mine. I looked up and saw that she was looking down to our hands with something similar to simple curiosity clouded her face. She ran her thumb over my hand and her waxy lips curled into a smile.

   “Mar-tha.”

She said it. She said my name. And for the first time since that horrific winter night I saw Annie again. I saw my Annie.

“Yes, of course, darling it’s me.” I held her face in the palm of my hand and rubbed her temple covered in red tinged bandages. “How are you feeling? Are you in pain? Will I call the nurse?”

Annie gripped my hand tighter. “Oh, Martha. I’m so glad you’re here.” A small tear formed in the corner of her eye and dribbled down her face. I brushed it away with the pad of my thumb.

“Of course, I’ll always be here with you.” She smiled and closed her eyes for a few minute and I was the happiest person in the world once more.  

But then her eyes changes. I saw it happening. I witnessed it, the moment she forgot everything. The doctor told us afterwards that before… before the… that everything fires up one last time. One last hurrah before the end. But at the time I didn’t know. So I just kept screaming at her to remember me, to remember my face and remember my name over and over. But I was too late. I was so tired of trying, trying to save her, of holding on to that last glimpse of a dream, and when I looked to her once more I saw her face was grey. She was scared of me. I wept openly because right then I really was the monster she saw in me, this stranger lying in a hospital bed. And the world started spinning.

I was vaguely aware that the door was knocking behind me. Then a tall, African American woman with wide hips came in and told me I had to leave. But I didn’t want to leave. Not when she had just started to remember me again, or so I thought. The nurse told me I had to leave, that there were other people in to see her and that I couldn’t be there.

“But she said my name. She remembered me.” I told myself out loud. But she didn’t believe me and she didn’t notice the fear in Annie’s face. She didn’t care. But I did.

 “She did. She did say it. There a second ago before you came in.”  But the nurse was starting getting angry with me, said that I was being a nuisance around the hospital and that I had to leave. But I didn’t want to leave. So I just stood there and held on to the end of the bed shouting at her. It was terrible of me, looking back on it now. She was only doing her job. I just kept telling her over that she had said my name, with my own ears I heard her say it. She came over and grabbed my arm, pinching the skin with her nails. I can still feel it sometimes; the pressure of her grip on me. When I looked at her I knew she didn’t want to kick me out. I knew she was under orders from a higher authority, and I wasn’t paying her bills. She dragging me to the door but I wasn’t going without a fight. So I kicked and screamed like a child and called back to Annie

 “Annie. You’re going to be okay. Everything will be back to normal. I promise. We will have our lives back. I promise.” And I immediately regretted my words because when I looked at her in the bed, Annie was lying with wide bulging eyes and was reaching with thin fleshy arms towards the sky.

Suddenly a loud high-pitched tone sounded from the cardiac monitor. And a wave of nurses rushed into the room.

I can still heart that sound. It haunts me every night when I try to sleep. The sleepless nights have caught up on me to the extent where the world passes by and I barely register what’s happening. When I awoke from another void blankness, I was standing in the doorway of an old church. It was raining sideways into the doorway and my feet were getting wet but I didn’t feel the cold. I ran my fingers along the wooden panels of the doors trying to feel something, anything at all. I just needed to feel sensations again. But it didn’t work. I saw the splinters in my fingers and the blood run down my wrist, but I didn’t feel a thing not even heat. I felt like I was watching the life a character on screen through a grotty spy glass. I remember an elder man in a black suit told me to stand aside as six men in matching suits walked by carrying a wooden coffin. It was only when I looked to the long black hearse ornamented with flowers that I realised where I was. It was spelled out for me in daisies, her favourite, Annie’s favourite, my beautiful wonderful Annie. People didn’t sympathising with me because they didn’t know about me. They didn’t know about the life Annie and me had built together over the last eight years. No one shuck my hand, not even her family. Because we were in sacred grounds, and according to them I was not sacred. After I watched the men in black suits put Annie, my poor Annie, in the back of the hearse, a young woman came up to me. She was a friend of Annie’s from home and she knew about her and me and our life in the big city. Then she hugged me. And I felt it. Like lightning. Sadness burning in my chest. It was the heat I wanted all along. She pulled back and big fat tears were rolling down her cheeks.

“I’m so sorry, Martha.” She whispered to me and pulled me in tighter. When I looked up I could see Annie’s mother staring at me with big red puffy eyes. It was the first time I had ever seen her in person. And hopefully I’ll never see her again. I hugged the girl back to make it look like I was consoling her and to take away from my humility. I never said a word. I couldn’t push the words past my lips, waxy with the cold. I was just so tired, too tired to speak. Then I watched as the hearse drove out of the yard and down the street away from me.

I remained in the courtyard of the church as the crowd left and made their way to the small graveyard at the bottom of the hill behind the hearse. I could see them all congregate in black around a hole in the grown. I don’t know how long I stood there in the cold watching from a distance as they lowered the love of my life into the cold, hard grown in a cold, dark box. Annie had always been afraid of the dark and that just made the fire burn hotter in my chest.  

I lifted my hand palm out and whispered to her before walking out of the courtyard.  

“Goodbye Annie, my beautiful, wonderful Annie.”