Tag: memory

Categories
memoir

Fish Tank

We are in his flat, and it has been some time since we have seen each other.  We stand apart and we look past each other and we do not know how to begin because we began already. 

We are young and we were together and now we are not.  

After our end there was a period when we were both in Australia, on either side of a great divide. He was doctoring and I was grouting sauna tiles and picking melons in heat that would be obscene in our own country. I arrived first and I did not know he was coming and I still do not know how he worked out where I was.  

He wrote me a letter about being hungover on night duty in a fly-blown outback clinic, falling asleep in a bathroom, and being carted out over a matron’s ample shoulder. Take me, Matron, I am forever yours, he wrote with a smiley face as a full stop.  

His handwriting flowed neat neutral black loops across the pale blue page. I was with Penny as I read out the letter, standing up and acting it out, beating myself over the back. We were laughing too hard. Sculling cheap rum in a budget hostel above a greasy takeaway in downtown Townsville.   

I wish I still had the letter. I wish I still had Penny. Penny will die of breast cancer decades later and I will be broken for weeks. 

He was in Darwin when he wrote the letter. Or Katherine. Or Nitmiluk Gorge. I cannot picture him in any of these places. All that ochre nature dust. His buffed polished shoes. Squat brown stubbies of lukewarm beer. His crisp white shirts. Termite castles. His milk soft hands. Sweetwater Pool. His city grin. Christ, the flies. 

I was packing mandarins before dawn in a vast shed in Queensland. I was picking tomatoes in Victoria for a gang master. I was weeping over onions in the Northern Territory. Our paths never crossed. 

And now we are in his flat in Glasgow.  

It is a dark flat, the walls are pine forest green, and one of the walls has an inbuilt fish tank that you can see both in the tight living room and the hall. It is the late ’80s and I do not now recall how we have hooked up again or why.  

It is a dark flat, the furniture is utilitarian, modest, and brown. The fish tank spills light and shimmer onto a floor that is not as dark as the walls. We drink half a bottle of red wine from amber glass tumblers, we share stories about flies, and our tongues and lips stain cephalopod ink.  

It is a dark flat, he lives alone, and he works shifts at a university hospital. I look in his fridge and it is as spare as his flat. I do not ask about his heritage although I used to. I do not ask about much at all.  

It is a dark flat, his bedroom is small and plain. The duvet cover may have a pattern, if it does it is subtle, and the bed may not be properly made although I do not doubt it is tidy. When it is time to sleep we sit down on his bed. Both he and the bed feel clean. We talk about the fish tank. There is routine in keeping the water just right. Later we will make unruffled, almost certainly silent, love.  

In the morning he leaves early and maybe he explains to me how to lock the door, maybe he touches my arm as he goes, and later, after I feel the shiver of the tenement door slam, I stand in his shower and he has two soaps, lime and Pears, and I choose the lime and I lather it all over and rinse it off, and then I use his only towel, and my stomach knots. The knot is the shape of the things unsaid. 

I stand naked in front of the fish tank. The water bubbles. The aquarium houses a miniature sunken forest that willows and sways in rippling undulating song. There is pale yellow gravel on its floor. And a tiny black wooden wreck. There are no fish. No fish at all. 

I make myself a coffee and my heart beats too hard and my fingers shake and I have to find the Yellow Pages, he must have the Yellow Pages and I find them in the drawer under his black phone with its curly cord. I dial the number and I stretch the cord around my fingers around and around and I cannot help myself, my voice trembles and I could be sixteen instead of twenty whatever it was. 

I leave and I take a bus and my feet tap and I breathe his lime from my skin and I sit in a yellow room on a plastic chair with frothy magazines and bowls of condoms and a tableau of women who are looking at their feet or in their bags or anywhere but each other. I am in this room because I could not get the words out and neither could he and now I am in a panic room, and I have to tell a stranger a story.  

It is easier to talk to the stranger about the shape of the knot in my stomach than to the man with the sterile fish tank.  

The stranger, who wears important shoes and wafts lilac and mild disinfectant, washes her hands and listens to my confession, my confusions. She is reassuring. She asks only what is necessary. She offers me free condoms, for the next time she says, but I shake my head with hot cheeks and a stammering thank you and go on my way. Back to the bus station. Back to my city.  

The thing I cannot remember is his face. 

Categories
musings poetry

blue

I take the kettle to the sink, flick open the lid, turn the tap on. The tap is stiff, needs fixing but of course I’ll never fix it. I never fix anything. The bulbs from the two hall lights died within seconds of each other three winters ago. They sit, after a friend who is good with his hands took them down for me, gathering dust and guilt, on a piece of white paper on the upside down printer’s drawer that operates as a table in the living room. The printer’s drawer, in turn, sits on the Iranian carpet I bought in Wellington out the back of a white van from three men with warm eyes, in grey anoraks and beige sweaters, cash only. It was a lot of money in those days, that carpet. I ummed and ahhed and ummed and ahhed before offering around 80% of the asking price. They accepted immediately. Exchanged smiles with each other and slammed the van doors shut. Drove off with a surely illegal puff puff of diesel exhaust. I spluttered, and kicked myself for months afterwards. The reds of the rug have faded now, but the blues have stayed. Staying blue, stalwart, true.

I fill the kettle just under a third full with whatever temperature the water happens to come out of the tap. I can see it’s just under a third full as it’s an eco-kettle, transparent, or would be if I cleaned it. A third full is enough for a mug of hot water with a mint sprig and just enough water for the hot water bottle I keep on my knees eight months of the year when I’m not moving. The hot water bottle has printed the pale thinning skin of my stomach and thighs a pink tartan cross-stitch. It would be hard to explain this pattern to any doctor or nurse. Sometimes I tell people about it and they laugh and I laugh but I don’t show them the pattern. The hot water bottle is itself reddish pink, which is ironic in a way. Feeling its way onto my stomach and leaving its mark. Staying pink, private, stalwart, true.

I flick the switch on the kettle. Kristine gave me the hot water bottle and the cover seven years ago. She was dying of a cancer that started in her eye and worked its way down to her stomach and everywhere else. She knitted during her various therapies as she thinned and misshaped and she knitted me a hot water bottle cover. She said the pattern was easy and she didn’t need to concentrate. Green and blue and yellow and pink, sock wool, I think they call it, so that when you knit the socks they come out stripey. The stripes are a kind of miracle. I cried a little when she gave it to me. Held it to my cheek. It was rough smooth, two plain two pearl, and smelt of lanolin. There was no miracle for Kristine.

I pinch the top of two mint sprigs from their glass on the window ledge. Drop the leaves into the mug.

Neither was it a miracle that the moth babies ate Kristine’s hot water bottle cover three or four years after she died and I spent three months working up the courage to drop it into the bin in the kitchen. The bin was a Christmas present from a lover who lived here once. We agreed on the bin present so it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. The bin was after Kristine’s eye cancer but before it woke up and tore her apart.

In the meantime the moths did what moths do and bred and flew and travelled and bred and flew and travelled and the moth babies moved onto other precious articles – a Mediterranean blue cashmere sweater once owned by a now dead aunt – and a black Icebreaker t-shirt – a present from Bronwyn in New Zealand. Bronwyn took me on a tour of Christchurch after the earthquake, after I’d been to my father’s memorial tea party in Hobart, and showed me what was left of the houses that weren’t insured, and the houses where the owners refused to move out despite being in the Red Zone.

The kettle boils, spitting bubbles at its lid and I turn it off just before it turns itself off. I like to get ahead of the kettle. In my mind I’ve mixed up Bronwyn’s two categories and I imagine a family living under a blue tarp under a street sign, in amongst the hebes that have shrubbed up over the leftover roads and paths, so that even the people who should know, the lawyers and the surveyors and the engineers, no longer understand what they are looking at and they spin around and around, pointing and gesticulating at the street with no houses, no sheds, no BBQs, no trampolines, no swimming pools, not even a roof tile, until they leave too fast and moist-eyed in oversized black or navy SUVs with official logos branded proud white on bonnets and boots.

Moths are efficient eaters of memories, especially the hand-knitted variety. I pour the boiling water into the blue handmade mug I bought on the west coast of Ireland on a camper van holiday. I buy pottery and hand-knitted socks on every camper van holiday. It’s become a thing. Sometimes I keep the socks for myself, sometimes I give them away as presents. The blue of the mug is the same blue as the still blue in the Iranian carpet. I hold the mug to my chin. Inhale the fresh mint. I put the mug down, twist the stopper out of the hot water bottle, pour the rest of the boiling water into it, and reseal the bottle. Kristine’s husband, Kenny, told me never to pour boiling water into a hot water bottle. That it perishes the rubber. I don’t know if that’s true. It sounds kind of true. Like it could be. Me doing to the bottle what the moth babies did to Kristine’s hand-knitted cover.

I carry the hot mug and the hot rubber bottle, which of course doesn’t resemble a bottle at all, through to my study. Place the blue mug on my desk, plump up the cushions on my seat, and sit down. I hug the bottle on my belly. It burns a bit. Adding a bit more pink. Private, stalwart and true.

Categories
poetry

can you see the sun on my chin

I remember holding buttercups under my chin and asking can you see the sun on my chin can you see the sun on my chin can you see the sun on my chin

I remember plucking sorrel from laybys on the single track road and chewing on the sweet sour with no worry at all about dog piss no worry at all

I remember having knock knees or bandy legs and a pink dress above the knock knees or the bandy legs and an unnamed flower, yellow maybe, in each hand   the photograph assures my memory I was smiling   maybe so

I remember so many first days at schools I’ve forgotten what order they were in and even what flag fluttered in the playgrounds where I was too feart to play British Bulldogs or some other nationalist brag

I remember falling over drunk and skinning my knees outside Bannerman’s Bar and meeting a boy man I’d never meet again

I remember when we realised the driver of the purple or was it lilac Combi was illiterate and we’d missed 17 turns to Lismore in 13 hours

I remember the trapped pink in my cheeks when he told me he was a male model and what was he thinking being with me

I remember marrying a man that doesn’t share memories with me anymore

I remember feeding the blind Pekin bantam from a teaspoon every day for a week until we found her, me and the man that I no longer share memories with, stiff feet up, slaughtered by her feather-footed cousins

I remember wanting to kill them, to wring their necks with my ringed fingers, but what would have been the point of that

I remember, with another man that I don’t share memories with, being passed a baby wrapped in pale rags through a train window and everyone weeping except the baby, was it even alive?

I remember I was at physio and she was twisting turning twisting my arm neck shoulder and there were three missed calls and my father was dead

I remember when I fell over in the street running for the 26 bus, wearing a fake leopard skin knee length coat and Austrian brown ankle boots with a little pink bow at the side of each heel

I remember that he wore glasses and so did I

I remember losing my flip flops in a Peruvian mud forest and hanging onto the bare-footed guide with tears in my eyes and a squadron of fantastical leaches carving up my calves

I remember falling in love with a moto-taxi driver in a town full of bandits as my helmet with no strap dipped and dived as we slid around corners the exhaust burning a belting stripe across my bare ankle

I remember times when I didn’t understand that chaos was the natural order of the world and now I don’t remember the way back to that world not even the first step

I remember tramping in moss soaked hills and through gum seared mist and I remember the moment I knew I’d never go tramping again

I remember laughing at his corduroy suit and then not laughing when he died

later, a day later

I remember the other man I don’t share memories with and it startles, this lack of memory, and I pick a buttercup and I say

can you see the sun under my chin

Categories
blog fiction monolgue

The tree the old lover left behind

Christ, Life are you still here? There’s laws against this you know. You must have heard it on the news. Or the Archers. Remember Helen and Rob? No one saw that coming. All blind blade and the bloody bulge of blood. Then prison. For her not him. Life’s a bitch, right? And then you die. Coercive control they call it. A posh way of saying abusing bastard.

Controlling is an art, like everything else, you do exceptionally well, you do it so it feels like hell. You do it so it feels real. I guess I could say you have a call.

Shut you out with pills and pillows and blown bulbs I don’t replace. Bitter on my tongue.

Life.

Shut you out with closed blinds and turbo training spinning spinning spinning look Mum no hands!

Life.

Shut you out with other people’s words that trip across the page irrepressible iridescent irreprehensible.

Amen.

Careful, that was almost a cheery thought and we’re not here to talk about cheer, Life.

No sirree.

They say some are dealt a bad hand. But you’ve got to be in to win, right? Pick the card but don’t turn it over. What’s the point. You’re the biggest card cheater in town, Life. And a dab hand at the clichés.

I’m sorry about the clichés. I really am. But these days you sap me

of imagination

of irritation

of imitation

There’s something of the puddle about me. Crumble oil grey violet. Or moody slush. Or sallow sludge. Depending on the season.

And the height of my heels.

And you insist on holding onto the queerest of things. That fig tree my lover left behind in a previous life that I’ve attempted to murder at least annually for eleven years. Root bound and pot bound and soil that has long forgotten the purpose of its toil. And you, Life, you insist on making sure the bloody thing continues sprouting.

Continues its photosynthesis.

Continues its irksome in your face will not forget cannot ever cast off that damn previous past living.

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