When I was three a man turned up to live in the basement flat with the woman who’d escaped the Czech revolution. She, a refugee, had been given a job and a home by my mother, he was her husband, not Czech, probably Australian or from New Zealand. It’s likely she married him for Commonwealth residency, I’ve spoken to other Czech refugees who knew her and that is their best guess. Our home, the tall, cold house in London, was a place of many rooms and many lives; bohemian, socialist, crowded, wealthy, artistic, noisy and lonely and trying to track the details of one particular person is like chasing a ghost. My mother recalls him as handsome and freckled, blond hair. Someone else has compared him to Donny Osmond. Another is adamant she doesn’t remember him. One person called him a memory implant, someone else said shadowy, there’s a report of him cooking eggs in the kitchen, no one remembers speaking to him. I can find no details of who he was or where he came from and this haze speaks volumes of a person who was there for nearly three years and, like Keyser Söze, was gone. If it weren’t for the fact that he’d remained for me a memory unbroken, his name and the truth of him would have sunk entirely. But I never forgot him. In my mind, unquestioned, he’d had the title first love, a mystery figure who’d paid me attention in a house where it was scarce. I had nothing to base this conviction on, it just sat there like a sticker on a box I carried around as I travelled through my life searching for what was wrong, no memories for illustration except this one, the day of his leaving. We were in the hall by the big black front door, I was nearly six. He crouched down before me and told “me he had to go but he would take me with him. I was to pack a bag and wait for him in the garden. I ran upstairs, fetched my rainbow rucksack, goodness knows what I put in it but I put it on my back and went outside and sat on the wooden bridge that linked the playroom glass doors to the patch of grass and I waited. And I waited and when I couldn’t wait any longer, I walked to the end of the street and then I walked home, in through the big black front door and this person who I’d been willing to leave with was gone and his existence never mentioned and it was as if he had never existed at all.
“Only Robinson Crusoe had everything done by Friday.”
