After a sometimes fraught four-hour car journey, my wife and I and three friends arrive at a remote, sea-facing house in Greece. I’ve been here once before, a couple of years ago, but my memory of the place is fragmentary. I’ve remembered, for example, that you can’t get the car anywhere near the house – you have to lug your stuff across a beach and over some rocks – and have packed accordingly. But the view from the top of the rocks still comes as a disheartening surprise.
“I forgot about the second beach,” I say, looking at the house in the distance.
“I didn’t,” my wife says. “Press on.”
As we trudge along the sand, I think: how could I not remember this? Along with my bag I am carrying my wife’s suitcase – whose wheels have never been less use – just as I did two years ago. It’s precisely the sort of personal hardship I pride myself on being able to relate in numbing detail.
Once we’re in the house my brain serves me no better: I’ve retained a memory of the layout, which turns out to be back-to-front. This will cause me to lose my way over and over again in the course of the coming week: seeking a terrace, I will end up on a balcony, and vice versa.
“It’s not that I don’t remember it,” I say to my wife the next morning. “It’s that I’m remembering it wrong.”
“Do you remember getting up in the middle of the night to stand in the cupboard?” she says.
“Yes, I do remember that,” I say. “And I wasn’t trying to stand in the cupboard, I just thought it was the bedroom door.”
A few days later more friends arrive. We have all been on holiday together many times before, in varying configurations, with and without children. These memories form the basis of a lot of the conversation.
One evening I walk into the kitchen where a few people are preparing supper. They’re talking about an Easter weekend in Dorset long ago, and laughing about egg-rolling in terrible weather.
“I was there,” I say. Everyone stops talking and turns to look at me.
“Were you?” says Mary, dubiously.
“Yeah,” I say. “The weather was bad, as you say, and we went egg-rolling.” I try to think of another detail from the weekend that will convince them of my presence, but absolutely nothing comes to mind. Maybe, I think, I wasn’t there. My wife walks in.
“What are we talking about?” she says.
“Easter in Dorset,” says Chiara.
“I remember that,” my wife says. “Egg-rolling in the rain.”
“That’s right!” says Mary.
“When I said that, everybody looked at me as if I had dementia,” I say. Everybody looks at me again, in a way that makes me want to go and stand in a cupboard.
I recently read that to retrieve a memory is also, in some way, to rewrite it. Frequently recalled episodes are particularly fragile – the more you remember them, the more fictionalised they become. But to be honest, I’m not even sure I’m remembering this correctly.
The next day everyone spends the afternoon reading on the terrace. At some point I fall asleep. When I wake, my book is resting on my face, the sun has set, and I am alone.
I find everyone else in the kitchen, cooking. I open a beer and listen as my wife tells a story about a holiday in Portugal from 20 years ago. She is recounting the part about the hired van getting a flat tyre while going down a hill. This, at least, I remember.
“The tyre came right off the wheel and started rolling ahead of us,” she says. “We watched as it rolled all the way down, and halfway up the next hill, till it slowed and stopped. Then it started rolling back down towards us.”
“Well, almost,” I say.
“What?” she says. “Am I telling it wrong?”
“No, you’re being remarkably accurate,” I say. “Which is weird, because you weren’t there.”
“Yes I was,” she says.
“No, it was just me and him,” I say, pointing to a friend whom I’ll call Paul, because his real name is Piers.
“Yeah, it was just us,” says Paul.
“But I remember the wheel coming off,” she says. “I can see it.”
“It’s because he’s told you the story so many times,” says Paul.
“My memory has infiltrated your brain to become your memory,” I say.
“That’s so sweet,” says Paul.
“If you’ve got any more of mine,” I say, “I’d quite like them back.”