Chapter 67
HOW TO FORGET
I followed my physiotherapist’s instructions to the letter.
I cooked risotto after risotto in my parents’ kitchen, standing on my left foot and doing proprioception exercises.
I got up and sat down very slowly. I sat on Carolyn and Armand’s chaise longue with a docile baby Freddie in my arms. I listened to the score for Giselle with half-kilogram weights on my ankles, to build strength for my debut as Myrtha in March.
I returned to the Dance Hall just for the barre section of morning class, then for barre and centre work, and finally for my first learning call with Mariska.
Fiona and Isabel hugged me tenderly, afraid of bashing into my knee even though I now had to put it to the test. Charlie, Jamie, Lorenzo, and George patted my shoulder in the corridors.
Sander’s name was nowhere to be heard around the building. Without my habitual checking on them, my friends had forgotten again. It made me sigh, but I was willing to put in the work to make them remember. I just had to get through the learning calls first.
I successfully survived two afternoons of diagonal bourrées and andante leaps with Myrtha’s magical rosemary branches, willing them to clear a path to the midnight realm of spirits and fairies.
You’d think I’d have recognised the bang as soon as it happened on the third day. And yet, once again, I looked around for whatever had fallen over.
It was the left knee this time. The pain still made me crumple, but apparently I didn’t scream. Just cried, quietly.
Another operation. Another convalescence in my parents’ guest room.
I held Sander’s mixtape in my hands, but couldn’t bring myself to listen to it.
I got tired of watching my parents recognise his face in Armand’s photographs every time I went through them.
I got tired of hiding the photographs under the shoebox lid so that I wouldn’t have to watch them forget again.
I got tired of my self-imposed Sisyphean task, holding a torch in a cold, dark, windswept place I no longer understood, waiting for someone who was lost to me forever, out there in the unknown unknowns.
For the first few weeks after I got out of hospital, my friends made house calls, but they didn’t seem to know what to do with my silence, or my tears. Mum occasionally went to my flat to collect post and check my answering machine.
‘Someone named Erin was asking after you.’
A flicker of… not hope, but something. I looked up from the Sunday Times crossword.
‘Erin? What did she say?’
‘She just wanted to know how you were bearing up. And that she was sorry not to have any more breakthroughs for you.’ She searched my face – I presume that means something? ‘I didn’t know critics were allowed to befriend dancers. Doesn’t that constitute a conflict of interest?’
‘She’s just being nice. No one else?’ I could only infer that Bill and Terry hadn’t thought to sellotape their reviews to their own desks.
They were probably back to more pleasant concerns, like Vic-Wells’s newest prodigy Darcey Bussell, or Charlie’s first foray into collaborating with a contemporary choreographer.
‘No, that was all.’ She brought the telephone to my side and left it there. ‘In case you’re inclined to ring her back.’
I wasn’t inclined to do much of anything anymore. Nothing would go back to how it was. I would seek comfort in memories of Sander, only for them to thin like tissue paper over a flame. The ones that held on the longest hurt the most. Here is what could have been. The life you almost led.
I began to envy everyone else’s memory loss.
I kept the lid on the shoebox. Eventually, it migrated to the back of a wardrobe.
Whenever something reminded me of Sander – cherry blossom, Hampstead Heath, Fleetwood Mac, storms, little dogs, Mendelssohn, Romeo and Juliet, wildlife conservation charities, an advert for skiing holidays, soft-spoken baritone voices – I closed my eyes and drank something ice cold, or searing hot. Reset. Clean the slate.
I did what I thought was a kindness to myself: slowly, incrementally, I followed everyone else’s lead, and forgot.