The Art of Forgetting Read Online Free

we were on the train home, both of us a little drunk, but then she could talk of little else. Oh no, this wasn’t going to be the end of it at all, this was just the beginning, and if he didn’t like it, he should have thought about that when he started chasing young girls.
    I hoped she would forget about it once she had sobered up and reflected, but she had another plan all worked out by the time I saw her on Monday. This time we were going to wait at Charing Cross until we saw him board the train after work, stay on until his station, follow him until he was nearly home, then stop him. Would he like us to come home with him, explain to his wife what he had been up to, or would he prefer to pay for us to have another night out?
    I may have been the junior partner in this friendship and I may have looked up to Linda, but I couldn’t go along with this and I told her so. To her credit, she didn’t get angry, nor did she try to change my mind, but there was a different feel to our relationship from that point. She started to catch a later train sometimes, or she would rush onto the platform just as our usual train arrived and jump into a different carriage. We had already changed our regular seats, not wanting to see the man, but if we did travel together the atmosphere would be strained and we never discussed that evening, not once. I noticed also that she often wore new clothes – decent clothes, not the cheap and cheerful stuff she had worn before. Was she simply earning more or was the money coming from somewhere else? I couldn’t ask her, and when I complimented her on the new shoes or new jacket she would merely say ‘thanks,’ so that didn’t throw any light on the subject.
    It was only a couple of months later that I met Andy, and then my whole life started to revolve around him. That’s what it was like then; girls tended to fit in with their boyfriends’ social circles, not like now, when they still go out with their mates and boys have to fit in with them. Andy was a year older than me, and he was in a band – just some local lads practising in the village hall, but it seemed so glamorous to me – and pretty soon I hardly saw Linda at all. It wasn’t as if we had often been out socially anyway, and if I saw her once a week on the platform we might exchange a few pleasantries and that would be that. I didn’t mind too much, although it did feel rather sudden. It seemed that the relationship had run its course.
    That’s probably why it was such a shock when I heard. My parents were full of it when I came down to breakfast one Saturday in October, about seven months after the incident with the man. He was always that: ‘the man,’ even though I knew his name. Using it would have been too personal. They shooed a protesting Wendy out of the kitchen so they could talk to me and I was still wondering what had happened, who had died, when they told me. Linda was missing – hadn’t been seen for two days, and there were posters going up everywhere. It had been on the radio, but Mum had also been talking to someone from the WI who knew somebody who knew the family, so it must be right.
    I sat down heavily, my stomach churning. Linda missing. It didn’t seem possible and I tried to remember when I had last seen her, but I couldn’t pin it down to a particular day. I wasn’t even sure if it was last week or the week before as we had barely spoken; a quick “How are you?” and “ Oh, I’m fine thanks, and you?” and it had been over. The train had arrived, but we didn’t even pretend that we were more than acquaintances by that time, and we had both turned and walked to different carriages with nothing more than a goodbye smile.
    I had to take some decisions very quickly, there and then, at the kitchen table. The stark ordinariness of the scene – the box of cornflakes, the yellow teapot, the crumbs of toast on Mum’s plate standing out like something from a Warhol print – made what had happened