MY MOTHER

I blamed my mother — her behaviour — for being the catalyst of my illness. I don’t really believe that anymore. Things can’t have been easy for her. A single mother. Ill daughter. Shit-kicker job at the department store. And then she had to care for Nan and Pop when they moved into Broken River Road.

Mum used to make clothes for me. Not only because we couldn’t afford them, but also she liked to sew. When I was ten, Auntie Stella had taken me to see Flashdance at the cinema, and I’d dreamt of being a dancer. Mum made me an off-the-shoulder sweatshirt dress like Jennifer Beals’s, but white because they didn’t have any grey jersey material at the haberdashery shop. I nagged for dance lessons, but Mum never got around to organising any. I taught myself routines by watching the Flashdance video over and over on the VCR Auntie Stella and Uncle Colin had bought for us. I was good, obsessive anyway, but Mum never had time to watch, and nobody else ever saw.

A couple of years later, when my music tastes changed, I unpicked the pink Flashdance embroidered across the sweatdress-cum-T-shirt, and my routine morphed into freestyle dancing to KISS records. There was a song, ‘Shandi’, with a line about tonight having to last them forever and ever. I spent a lot of time contemplating what that meant. I should have asked Mum; she would have known very well. It was only one night — or afternoon or whatever — with my dad.

And the red dress Mum made — did she ever wonder what happened to that?

I remember being scared a lot at night-time, especially when I first started hearing Voices. Mum let me sleep in bed with her. Sometimes, when she’d had too much to drink, she called me names, or hit me. She denied all that. My illness was a scapegoat; she could pretend that I made things up or didn’t remember correctly. I did lose sections of my short-term memory due to the electroconvulsive therapy she consented to, but most of my long-term memory is intact. As intact as anybody’s, I imagine. I remember almost everything as it really happened, alongside things that could never have happened. I know what she did to me just as well as I know there were no monsters in the cupboard at Broken River Road, and Jesus didn’t live in the door.

I suppose there were many reasons (aside from my mother) why my mind broke, or maybe no reason at all. I’ve seen reports from my first time in hospital. The severe reactions I had to the meds. The muscle spasms. My tongue swollen and sticking out. My neck twisted around so far it was like my head was stuck on backwards. They had to inject another drug to counteract the side effects of the first. One report said I hit my head against the wall and rocked in the corner while I cried for my mother.

She pretended not to remember the nursing pads I had to put into my bras because the meds made me lactate. Or the rapid weight gain — I was so skinny, and then I blew up like a balloon. I was left with stretch marks all over my skin.

I don’t hate her anymore for putting me in there. But I was so young. And it was so scary — there were some crazy-crazy, not just depressed-crazy, people in there. There must have been some other way to help me.

I think Mum knew what happened to the red dress, what happened at Sandro D’Angelo’s party, and said nothing. She didn’t want anybody to know. She blamed me too. That’s why she exaggerated my illness and put me in hospital that first time.

Memory is like a camera — flashbulb moments illuminated while the rest remains in darkness. There are parts of my memory that are neither lucid nor dim. They are simply closed off because of trauma — packed away in my mind in a box marked ‘DO NOT OPEN’. Time is stretchy, like a rubber band; I can go forward, but only so far before being yanked back. I know that if I ever really want to move on — break the rubber band — I will have to open the box. I have tried, with my previous psychiatrist, but ended up back in hospital. Whether or not remembering was the reason, I’m not sure, but I don’t think I’ll ever be strong enough to try again. Sometimes, I lift the flaps on the box a crack, and peek. Inside, there’s something else too, buried deeper, even worse than what’s on the other side of the red bedroom door at Sandro D’Angelo’s house.

It’s not summer, or even autumn — it’s a winter night. A country road. Driving with Dean Cola. Not in the Cola Hardware pick-up truck, a different car. We must have seen each other again after the night he came into the pub where I used to work (that was two years after Sandro D’Angelo’s party). This is the part of the memory I must have saved inaccurately, changed or distorted — I would have been in hospital after the Broken River Road fire, and Christos and I were engaged. In the memory, I am driving — also impossible as I didn’t have a driver’s licence. Perhaps it is not a memory, but a dream I had sometime long ago.

Dark. Headlights illuminating a bubble of road and barren orchards. The softness of Dean’s flannelette shirt. His body, his mouth. Stories about his mad grandfather at a nature park in the Tasmanian wilderness. Rain on the road. Alcohol in my belly. Car heater blowing on my feet. Cold and warmth. Frost and fire. Skyline and stars. The smells — the colours — of metal, petrol, Fruit Tingles, and heaven. Silver, purple-bronze, pastels, and blue. And — true or false — that’s where it stops, where I wrench my hands from the wheel. Push the flaps back down hard on the box. Blocking mechanism in place. Oh, yes, I love a metaphor (and a simile). I have many for memory and time — rivers, cameras, boxes, rubber bands — but my favourite is this: something that can be folded like a blanket or piece of paper. Perhaps the inside of the fold is what Aimi means when she talks about forgotten or unknown memories with no pull or push from the future or past. Folded. If there was a way to unfold time, safely, I could remember what happened between driving in Dean Cola’s car and the fire at Broken River Road.

She deleted the last three paragraphs and replaced them with:

I would like to let my mum know that she was right: Christos is a good man. He’s taking care of me, as always. We’re thinking about starting a family. Better late than never.

And saved it as ‘Homework for Aimi’ on the desktop, so Christos wouldn’t have to search through her files to find it.