Remember to Forget - Softcover

Jonny Gibbings

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782793887 ISBN 13: 9781782793885

Verlag: Perfect Edge, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Richard, a successful businessman, is deep in a coma. Unknowingly to all, he can hear everything said around him. He has no choice but to listen as his wife Anna and daughter Ella long for his passing. He also has a son that no longer acknowledges his existence. His family lay in waste, the fallout of his selfish life spent pursuing money and excess. Frustrated by what he has now learned about his family, he wishes someone could hear him so he could apologise. Just as all is lost, a voice, inside his conscious says, I can hear you.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Jonny Gibbings is the author of the shock comedy 'Malice in Blunderland' and renowned for his humor. He is also critically acclaimed for his emotional pieces that draw on a painful past. He lives in Billingshurst, UK.
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Jonny Gibbings is the author of the shock comedy 'Malice in Blunderland' and renowned for his humor. He is also critically acclaimed for his emotional pieces that draw on a painful past. He lives in Billingshurst, UK.
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Remember to Forget

A novella

By Jonny Gibbings

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2013 Jonny Gibbings
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78279-388-5

CHAPTER 1

AND.

'And' is a word that shouldn't be able to cause such pain, it is a functional word not a provocative one. There are so many words that could be loaded with the bullets of hatred or ignorance or bigotry that would never be directed at him, delivered with such potency that they could penetrate his thick hubristic skin. Yet the ones he did qualify for, what hatred he warranted, he had defended against with vainglorious armour hewn from a life he now knew to have been selfish. A fact that was every bit a revaluation. Hindsight, he thought, was a pointless and painful endeavour, in much the same way as truth is. They say, 'With the benefit of hindsight.' The only benefit he knew of that resulted from hindsight was the knowledge of what was done was already done. Unlike the truth. Truth was like air, it surrounded him, and so he hid from it in a vacuum and slowly suffocated.

He knew Anna was in the room due to her perfume. It clung to the air, sweet and floral, yet exotic. It triggered a distant memory that seemed to not want to reveal itself, of a long ago time on far away shores. Under any other circumstance he might have smiled, let a crease creep across his mouth and announce pleasure. But he knew his wife Anna wasn't wearing perfume for him, it was for Robert. He didn't know who Robert was, but he seemed to make her happy, he made her laugh. Richard was like a child that has walked in halfway through a movie, he had no point of reference as to how long this affair or fling or love or whatever it was called had existed. The only time he would hear Anna's voice was when she was on the phone to him. Once she was embarrassed to take the calls, it wasn't decent to conduct herself in such a way in front of him, Anna always was classy like that. But now she did. She discussed post-him plans, of a future and its arrangements, of them staying at her hotel and soon the flat, and when it got sexual, she would speak in low hushed tones, embarrassed and accented by a uniquely abashed laugh. He knew this, because he knew this.

The exception to this was of course her monosyllabic responses to the nurses. Usually 'Thanks' or 'Okay'. Or when trying to instil some semblance of the seriousness of the situation to her errant daughter, who like her mother, scheduled ever-waning visits due to being obligated to appear to care. Presumably only to each other.

"Ella, for Christ sake, what do you mean you won't be able to visit for a couple of weeks? You've seen your father for an hour at best."

"I'm going to Kavos," she said with defiance, placing a clutch of large boutique shopping bags on the floor.

"Ella," Anna pleaded. "You do realise your father might very well die this week?"

"And?"

The heaviness of the small, empty word worried little about his armour, overwhelmingly crushing him as it fell from his daughter's lips. He was a vessel, his family his cargo that he selfishly sailed into oceans of isolation and regret only to foolishly run aground. His family now waited on the shore for him to sink from view so they could profit from what flotsam and jetsam would wash ashore. He wanted to open his eyes and look upon his wife. She was the star he once navigated by. He wasn't foolish, he knew just as all stars, what he saw and what is, were not the same. The distance between him and his star so vast that the love that once shone so bright died so very long ago. Even if he were able to open his eyes they were taped down to protect them from drying out. Not something he needed to fear now. Two tiny globes of tear formed in the cusp of each eye, and rivered down his cheeks.

Silence quickly filled the void in the room, what wasn't said so much more painful than any words that could have been weaponised and used. Anger he could cope with, but nothing? No response. At best he was an inconvenience.

They were both still there in the room. He could hear the gentle tap of lacquered acrylic nail upon smartphone and the digital notification that whomever Ella was talking to had replied. He imagined 'SOZ not ded yet lolz' being typed. He could hear Anna rubbing cream into her dry ageing hands that protested with a whispering rasp as she tried to erase evidence of liver spots. He could hear perfectly well. They didn't know that, nobody did; but he heard everything.

The nurses spoke to him for a time. They would say 'Morning, Richard, how are we?' Or 'Can you hear me, Richard?' They would ask and engage him as if he were still the person that he once was as they fluffed pillows, took blood, applied a clip to his finger to register heart rates. Over weeks Richard became Mr Price. Now they addressed him in the indefinite, 'the patient', almost existing in past tense as they readied Anna progressively for bad news.

Except for one nurse who sang each attendance of joy and hope. She had what he believed was a Caribbean or Jamaican accent, he wasn't sure though if they meant the same thing. She smelt of biscuits and when she walked her feet slapped the floor as if her legs were accidentally too long or the floor simply surprisingly nearer than she expected. He imagined her overweight, in slippers, like the black woman in the Tom and Jerry cartoons, seeing her illustrated only from the calf down and in red slippers. He worried if thinking as such was racist. He had spent far too long thinking about what to be rather than who he was, to have previously suffered such dilemmas.

He heard the nurses' intimate conversations, grievances with work, heard when the breakfast and lunch trolleys arrived. He heard the cleaners, the porters and how the nurses spoke differently to people when doctors were doing their rounds. He heard everything. His hearing registered as brain activity on CT scans and was the one thing keeping the machines on continuing his life. He knew this, because Dr. Raul told his wife, who said, "That is fantastic news."

As soon as the doctor had left, she growled, "Hurry up and die, you old bastard."

He had been ready to die, happy to go in fact, knowing he had provided for a family and that they were cared for, right up to where they accidentally informed him that he hadn't.

He couldn't sink yet. He had to find some way to swim to shore and build them a raft of salvage and sail them to safer waters, away from the bleak and barren wastes he had beached them upon. Except that he couldn't.

He wished they could hear him, hear him say sorry. To tell them now was their time to blossom. But he couldn't. Denied even the ability to physically manifest his anger and grief, God, I wish someone could hear me, he wished.

'I can hear you,' a voice said.

Richard lay silent. For all the many weeks he lay prone, mania had set in, he was sure of this. What little grasp on reality existed in his black world had more suffered a tectonic shift than a slip. He could hear his daughter sigh. Smell Anna and feel some third party busy with the chart at the bottom of his bed.

'Hello?' he said.

'Hello,' the voice replied.

'You can you hear me?'

'Yes.'

'Am I imagining this?'

'No.'

'Prove it,' Richard said, believing solely in his doubt.

'No.'

'Then I don't believe you're real.'

'Okay.'

'What the fuck do you mean okay? It doesn't bother you that I don't believe you?'

'No.'

The darkness seemed limitless, where thoughts and regrets collected along a sluice of reminiscental loathing....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Perfect Edge
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1782793887
• ISBN 13: 9781782793885
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 74
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland