Can you remember fourteen and the light that filled you up? How we crackled with life so extravagant it threatened to tear us at the seams? Can you remember the slap of wet pavement under leaking sandshoes on the day your best friend betrayed you? Can you remember the pain in his voice when he called to plead his case?
Can you forget these things? Have you been blessed with that gift?
Magpies chiming the afternoon are startled to a brief lull by the neighbour’s lawn mower, a call to arms for the other garden warriors of our quiet cul de sac.
I am curled up in a corner of the patio, reading a Christmas gift. The scent of jasmine carried by the soft sussuration of the ever present summer fan offers sluggish relief from the heat worn afternoon.
My focus is briefly interrupted by a burst of melodies from the elderly neighbour next door as he potters in his garden, quickly muted to an acceptable background hum.
It is summer in Queensland, and I miss my long dead mother.
Forced, one again, by my misfiring brain to contemplate moments I would just as soon forget.
Longing is a poison that eventually saturates even your happiest recollections. A noise, a smell or a word has jarred loose a long unconsidered memory and sent it tumbling down the chasm of concsciousness.
And so, in a background layer to the current reality I am experiencing, mum and I are briskly striding up Shawbridge Street, she with her tartan trolley, me with several bags, walking our belongings a piece at a time to our new home.
I shift in my seat, taking a futile moment to remind my mind that there is simply no need to constantly fetch reruns of my life on a repeating loop. There is no quest to fulfil. Any forgiveness required has been given, long, long ago. There are no lessons left to be wrung from this cloth. These moments are lost in time, as Rutger once said, like tears in rain.
The drops become rivulets that turn into streams, and if you follow the current, rushing torrents.
And this is not, as some mistakenly believe, a symptom of wish fulfillment or grief. It’s the world’s longest and most pointless game of thought association.
A kaleidoscopic jumble, unrelated to yearning or longing, loss or desire, sparked by a flash of an image, a word, a sound, a song, a conversation. Little bursts of memory, sparking all day long, one after one another, a conga line of pointless remembrances.
And though not generally stemming from any particular yearning or grief, sometimes the random ball will land in the wrong pocket and become the cause of melancholic musings. On those days, as today, regrets pile up around me, like Autumn leaves, and I pray again for memories, good and bad, to begin to fade.
What must it be like to have quietude in contemplation?
I am cursed with eternal remembering. It’s not yearning, regret or sorrow that fuels this tiresome whirligig - just an idiot quirk of my cognitive processes.
You’d think eventually I’d start to run out of hard drive.
Once, I thought it a gift, albeit a slightly aggravating one. But the novelty has long worn off, like bubble gum once sweet, now tastless. I long to dispose of it, yet somehow my jaw will not cease its unyielding, witless rhythm.
I am the weary custodian of unwanted remembrances, inadequate to the task, my frail gifts insufficient to craft a net fine enough to capture the fragments of her soft sweet voice, lifted in a melancholy melody passed to her from her own mother, and her mother’s mother.
As I cannot share these liquid longings, what then is the point to their continual surfacing?
I have spent my life trying to bear witness, and I have failed.
And still they bedevil me, the zoetrope never stops revolving.
When I was a child, I had a yearning to take photographs, and a kind, and unfortunate uncle somehow saved enough to buy me a small Brownie camera. Thank you, Joe, and may God rest you well.
I could barely afford the film, certainly no more than once or twice a year, and only rarely a flash bulb. Sometimes the film would lie undeveloped for months while I spent my meagre pocket money on other, more pressing things, like fish and chips and chocolate bars.
When eventually recovered, the pictures were often oddly hued from lying around in the damp air for so long - but this somehow added to their enigmatic charm.
I was keen to clutch the coruscating baubles of moments flashing past me, to reach out and grasp some sliver of the present and set it in amber.
I rarely look at old photographs now. I try to let the dead rest. I wish to hand in my resignation from the post of memory keeper.
Today’s tributes include graveyards of welcome shelter, moss on damp stones, sunlight pouring in lavish warmth through the wide windows of Pollokshaws library, coarse carpet squares. Sanctuary.
Writing this shakes more mementos free.
I walked, skipped, trudged, fled and staggered mile upon mile through streets that are now torn, scattered and razed to the ground, like my childhood.
A 2 pence piece in my pocket, as Brown Owl taught us, making a phone call, pushing it in over the beeps, prank calling the fire brigade with Jane and Anne and the understandably angry voice of the woman at our childish laughter.
Daisy chains in the Queen’s Park in Glasgow. My mother knitting, her fingers a flying wonder, her faraway eyes.
Lost in the vast deep Pollok Park with Jane as night fell like a hammer, singing hymns and holding hands as we stumbled our uncertain way to nana’s cottage.
Hagg’s castle, and the rocking horse I would ride all afternoon, if permitted.
Daddy painting Humpty Dumpty on his hard boiled egg, my brothers and I rolling our eggs down the hill near the site of the future Burrel Collection, mine decorated with flowers with pink and white petals. The horses in the field at the bottom of the hill.
Smell of watercolour paints in the infant’s department and the deep satisfaction of contemplating a wide blank sheet of paper. A watch with a beautiful maroon strap and gold face for my 10th birthday, and my subsequent agony at breaking it. Falling on a piece of glass, embedded in my knee while skipping with a school cardigan.
Alison Smith’s laughter as I fell on the ice. All the lost girls, far flung and never to be seen again, Sharon who had the hair of a princess and who was claimed by heroin, and Caroline, who was a Botticelli angel, and whose husband later beat her.
Jack and I flowing Barnstormer kites, double handled beauties bought with hard saved pocket money, wheeling and spiralling into the mystery of the sky with the ocean lapping at our feet.
Mum teaching me clock patience in a caravan in the rising wind, with the gaslight hissing comfortably and hot chocolate warming my hands.
The Clydesdale Bank and its whispering hush, the nails of the bank clerk polished and manicured, trying to hide my own bitten stumps as I took my cash, the smell of old wood and old money.
Toby running helter skelter through the field at the back of the cottage where we went on our last ever family holiday. Four years later, stroking his fur as the vet pushed the needle in and telling him he was a good boy, a good boy.
Wet tarmacadam, shoplifting with Sandra, tadpoles in a jar, bluebells and magic mushies. The rain driving up the field towards me in a sharp straight line.
The ubiquitous stench of phone boxes. Kissing Kenny McKinnie outside the phone box at the bottom of Banchory Avenue.
Trying to read a book in the field, tripping out of my gourd, finding the book in bits under my bed the next day.
John Good crushing a beer glass in his hand at my rejection, the blood pooling onto the wide oak table and finally starting to clot as I sat, shaking, trying to mask my terror like a mouse in the shadow of an owl, and making a run for it when he finally went to the toilet to clean his wound.
In a grey council tower, fourteen floors in the air, overlooking the River Cart and backing on to a graveyard holding the bones of Rabbie Burn’s long dead niece, offering up my virginity and my heart to a boy named Mark. The building long gone, perhaps the air holds the ghosts of warm breath and murmured promises.
He painted his ceiling with the Rising Sun, and we decorated his walls with pages from Omni magazine. The day we made love over and over while his parents were away, our bodies’ protests merrily overruled by fervent and exuberant youth.
Gary strangling me unconscious and headbutting me.
The bewitching arousal of Paul’s growing stiffness through his trousers, as he pressed himself against me with growing ardour, at a bus stop in Arden.
Bells on my anklets, cider in my glass, tarot cards at midnight by candlelight, the Rocky Horror Show in a basque. Fiona playing the guitar and singing Annie’s Song. Dancing in the streets on Hogmonay. Two men beating a third unconscious at a taxi rank on a Friday night, spraining my ankle falling off a kerb in Paisley.
Andrea and her flat of dirt and doom, Sharon the thief and the Christian cult I accidentally joined, Martin dragging me by the hair from the kitchen to the living room.
Midnight, the cupboard big enough for a bed, that smelled faintly of patchouli. Dirty phone calls and mocking the makers of them.
Viewing the world through the window of a rain spattered bus, from Glasgow to London, sleeping in my seat for 5 restless hours, scarecrow hair and melted mascara, rushing home to change and start work again at 9am in Deanston Drive, and out that night again somehow with energy to spare.
Singing California here I come on a repeating loop to the great irritation of my London co workers; chattering like a budgie on trill for 24 hours straight on the plane from London to California, excitement thrumming through my nerves.
A pink bikini on a Californian beach. Yearning to gobble up the world.
My bra springing open on Wyatt’s dad’s boat as we skimmed over Lake Erie to the vineyard, bouncing like a pebble over the shallow waters and trilling laughter behind us over the lake.
The agony of miscarrying, curled around my misery while they sauntered around looking for permission to give me painkillers. The peculiar and exquisite relief of the pethidine, which had the strange effect of allowing me to still feel the pain but be indifferent to it.
My son planting windmills, flowers for his daddy, underneath the trampoline at Fawn Street.
Teaching my children to fly a kite in their turn, the red lifting into the blue, freedom on a leash.
Being befriended by a psychopath, and the aftershocks and damage that lasted years.
Living in the high house with my teenage children as a single mother. My 20 something daughter walking me up the grassy aisle when I was married again, the two of us in gales of laughter.
Slowly but surely becoming an Australian, moment by moment, year by year.
Side by side with a mad woman cooling our feet in the brook in a different Queens Park, on the other side of the world from my first Queens Park.
Friends flashing past in a kaleidoscope of faces I loved and hated and will never see again.
Hands up, kick the can. Dodge the ball in the lift bit. Falling in love and falling into hate.
“Singing taste it, taste it, don’t say no for tomorrow is my wedding day and I must go.”
Raspberries in the old orchard, blackberries at the old kirk, our hands and mouths full to bursting.
Across three continents and a lifetime, I have gathered bushels of melodies, mysteries and moments that will live only as long as my tricksy mind can give them safe harbour.
I wish I could set them free, or if I am to be tormented by this pointless ability, I long for the skill and patience to do the moments justice.
To take your hand in mine, and lift the curtain, and show you the moment I saw God reflected in the faces of my children, delivered from my womb into this perilous world.
But words are like water, they slip away laughing, twist like knives in my grasp, I cannot manifest the notes to share the cold clean light of a November morning in Glasgow, or all the many different textures of air and light and space.
At the corner of my eye, my father walks beside me sometimes still, his head bent in that contemplative way, his sure and steady stride quite like no other, memory has him quote Rabbie Burns, Omar Khayyam and Mark Twain from the bottom of his whisky glass.
And sometimes, I still dream of my long dead mother.
This is my seemingly unshakeable fate.
On good days, the melodies and moments are a mellow murmuration, brown noise in the basement of my brain. On others a cacophanic carousel crowing their demands.
As I grow older, I long more frequently for a little peace from the turbulent sea of reflections, from the hall of dead echoes.
If there is a point to all of this, I fail to understand it. All of these remembrances, the extravagant and the banal capering within the walls of my skull, all of these moments that hold me captive as I hold them unwilling hostages, will be lost to time and the universe soon enough.
And some day it will be quiet, perhaps, and I will be sprinkled upon the warm earth, and washed away by the tropical rains of this strange country.
This is how it is to have the curse of unceasing memory - icons, melodies and moments cavorting and tumbling, endlessly.
Relentlessly, and evermore, the carousel continues.
Tomorrow may be a better day.
But today, regrets pile up around me, like autumn leaves.
***
This is a wonderful piece of writing that conjured up memories of my own, some good, some bad. I don't know if I should hate you or if I should love you. Well done.
So many vivid and contrasting images, each sentence a short story. The juxtaposition of John, Mark, Gary and Paul… woah. The messiness of relationships.