Memory is a Bright, Sharp Knife
Saudade — thinking of time and people passed
In a house where I once lived with my young children, the scent of jasmine would creep over the hill behind my bedroom, bringing with it the wind and the air of sweet saudade. That house and marriage are lost to memory now.
Sometimes at night though, when the wind turns the corner of the eaves and second sleep refuses to find me, I am condemned to remember once again all the lost things.
You can fly across universes in an instant, when you have the cruel gift of memory.
My mother died at 69, my dad at 72. They’ve both been gone so long now.
A couple of weeks ago, at the local mall I was struck a terrible blow.
A woman was leaving as I was walking in, she was obscured behind the doors as they opened, and half turned away. Something about the turn of her head, the way she moved, her haircut, her clothes — for a brief instant tricked my mind.
The face indelibly imprinted on memory rose up before me, and for a joyous nanosecond my heart lifted, and though even knowing it was nonsense as I thought it into life, inside my mind I heard my voice cry out “Mum!”.
And then the bitter disappointment of knowing that no, of course that woman was not my mother, my long lost mother of the long cool fingers and the rare sunlight smile.
My mind plays unkind tricks sometimes, but this was a new cruelty. I had to sit down for a little while, and, sunglasses on, wait for my shaking hands and brimming tears to subside, for my breathing to compose itself again. Her bruising loss filling me up again, all these years and continents later.
And tonight, the wind is catching in the trees outside, and memory is a bright, sharp knife.
Sharon
One warm and gloriously mischievous afternoon, Sharon and I nipped indoors to her house for a drink of water, as she lived in the gas flats at ground level, and my house required a trip to the 5th floor in a juddery lift.
She, of the princess hair from which I loved to brush the tangles and matted lumps, gave me a drink of water from a ladle held under the tap, as there were no cups available.
Nevertheless, her mother, on the one occasion I went to “her bit” at dinner time, fed me a huge plate of chips. In retrospect they probably only had potatoes in the house and that was supposed to be someone’s dinner.
This was the same mother who once bashed Sharon’s brother over the head with a beer bottle for something or other.
And while I was on the other side of the world, obliviously roaming from Southern California to Australia, and starting on the next adventure of motherhood, the bright-eyed cheeky girl with startlingly thick, luxurious dark hair, the wee lassie who loved her few dollies and taught me how to play “tig on the pink squares,” was dying a filthy, lonely death from a heroin overdose, in a room somewhere in Scotland.
Andrea
One year of her ruinous version of friendship left an indelible mark.
I lived with her briefly, in her rundown flat in Crosshill, just off the Viccy Road. She was an agency nurse, committed to helping herself to drugs that weren’t nailed down in any of the wards she worked on, and she lived in exuberant chaos, an almost epic environment of disarray teetering on squalor.
So of course I moved in with her as soon as she asked.
During the Andrea months, I slept in a cupboard. A tiny room with no window, just large enough for one single bed, with the vague aroma of ancient patchouli. No matter how you widened your eyes, when the door was closed you could see nothing in the looming darkness. I rather liked it. I named my room Midnight.
At the time I had the starring role in a movie where the central character was living a moderately hedonistic lifestyle. I’d often awaken in the obsidian black groping blindly like a mole, never quite sure whether it was noon or dead of darkness, trying to find the damn digital clock poised on a precarious shelf above my head, its disturbing red digits pointed downward when I was sleeping, or unconscious.
Microwaved potatoes with tuna and salad cream — that plus alcohol was our staple diet.
Andrea, who in hindsight had a bewildering array of issues but at least was never boring, introduced me to D, who broke my heart, and Sharon, who drew me into a cult.
She really was the gift that kept on giving.
But she did also acquaint me with Terry Pratchett by pools of lamplight.
There was a period of time where we ditched the television. I think she gave it to her brother — the one with the “Harley Davidson Ride With Pride” tatt, who drove a Honda Melody. His name was David. He’s dead too, I hear.
The only show we missed was Black Adder.
In one gentle interlude in the hectic schedule we’d devised to try to do ourselves as much harm as humanly possible, she loaned me The Colour of Magic. I curled up on the couch, she on an armchair nearby. In the mellow silence broken by occasional giggles, we took turns to read aloud captivating passages to one another.
One afternoon, while I was out doing who knows what, the flat was burgled. Or so I believed at the time. I was still remarkably innocent and trusting all things considered. I daresay she lied for the insurance — any self-respecting burglar might have left her a donation, and possibly tidied up a bit.
The nice policeman dutifully came around to take a statement; he noted with raised eyebrows the undefined area next to the kitchen where Andrea dumped piles of clothes and whatever else she had no room or time for and declared “Man, they made a mess in here!”
To which Andrea somewhat sheepishly replied “Er no, it’s always like that”.
On the day I moved in, she warned me not to store perishables in the bottom cupboards, which should have been my first clue. Being a helpful sort, I thought I’d try to make some inroads on the pandemonium.
There was in the kitchen sink a well-established and rather rickety exhibit of unwashed dishes so colossal that, when I moved the crockery one piece at a time to try to access the sink for dishwashing purposes, I discovered some of the saucers at the bottom were actually cracked under the weight of those at the top.
I also discovered a dead mouse floating in a couple of inches of cold, greasy water as I reached the bottom. At which I bought paper plates and gave up.
I’ve known many nurses. When I hear the profession painted as angelic, or even hygienic, I snicker. If the nurses I knew were angels, they were definitely the fallen variety.
Andrea, I am told, drank herself to death last year — another consequence of The Glasgow Effect.
All the Lost Things
The sound of a now brutally dismantled piano, once played in the living room of that lost house, the ghost notes drifting down the hallway that another family now occupies.
Lip prints on the mirrored doors at the height of my toddler daughter, now fully grown and away from my protection.
All the laughter I will never hear again.
Alison Smith, lying in the cold earth all alone for nigh on 40 years.
All the goodbyes I didn’t know I was making.
Time rushes in with a banshee wail, and all that you love will be carried away.
A carousel of memories, turning relentlessly, because tonight the sound of the wind in the tall trees is soft and yearning. My heart longs for the morning light to dazzle away the faces and the long lost places.
But tonight is for loss and sweet saudade.
And memory, is a bright, sharp, knife - turning.