‘It is why he distrusts memory. Memory shifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes do with what it is given. Memory is not about facts. Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one’s life.’ Brandon Taylor Real Life.
Now here’s one take on memory I had not considered before and yet there’s some truth to it. We tend to remember events that are emotionally laden, and what more heavily laden than pain. Though of course, if the pain enters the realm of trauma, it can well be repressed, buried, and forgotten until sometime into the future when a tiny trigger, a pin prick on our skin, can sting with all the ferocity of a deep cut. And then in the form of a flash back, memory has all the clarity of fact even as we might not get all the details correct.
When his car pulled up in the street outside I hesitated to get up and take a look. The floorboards creaked and even as I knew he would not be able to hear them from all the way in front of my upstairs apartment still I imagined he’d know I was there and the sound of my footsteps proof of my presence.
I knew it was only a matter of time before my brother decided to check up on me. Only a matter of time before he decided to take matters into his hands and restore order to the chaos of my life.
The street was usually quiet in the middle of the day, most people away at work, and there were plenty of spaces in which to park my brother’s white Volvo there on the nature strip directly in front of the block of flats.
I could see him then through the venetian blinds, his silhouette truncated through the slats. Just as I hovered at the window hidden from view and he returned to his car, his knock on my door unanswered, he sat in his car busy with something.
I could not see whether he was reading or writing, or otherwise just thinking but when he appeared at the side of his car and gave the door a loud slam before he clicked it shut with his keys. It gave me a start.
I needn’t have let him in. I knew that. I could go on hiding. I’d done things like this when I was small. When there was a knock on the door and my mother urged us all to stay silent as beetles in the grass because there was someone at the door looking to be paid and she had not enough money.
I knew about not having much money that’s why I had agreed to give my boyfriend the $200.00 the government gave me and which I was supposed to put into an account to be shared between me and my sister to pay for our board and living expenses throughout the year.
I hadn’t told my sister about this loan because I believed my boyfriend would earn it back in no time at the races.
This at a time when my Volvo-driving brother took on the role of paternal presence. I did not welcome his authority, as if he could arrest me or my then boyfriend on charges of stealing.
When he finally penetrated my door some weeks later and caught me unexpectedly one Saturday Morning late, my boyfriend away at the races, Moonee Valley or Sandown, I did not have the foresight not to open the door.
‘There you are now,’ he said. ‘We need a chat.’
And chat we did, the outcome of which was I agreed to tell my boyfriend he must return the money, and he could do this promptly by buying us a refrigerator. Ours had packed in weeks ago and we were subsisting on non-refrigerator foods, long life milk, melted margarine and no ice cream.
The next win at the races made this possible.
Memories shape us. They add colour to the universe of our internal world. Without them we become shells of who we were once were. The hapless person stricken with Alzheimer’s becomes someone else, someone we do not recognise.
My Volvo-driving brother died a year ago and I am sad he has gone. He stopped telling me what to do years ago but my memory of his fathering stays with me, albeit in condensed form.
Memory is indeed an inconsistent measurement.