I remember my brother
Nick coming
home from the
hospital after he was born. He was howling his head off, and the
sound was
frightful. I ran from it to hide under the dining-table among the chairs. I was still
small enough that the dining-table was higher than me so I could stand upright under it. That spot was my
favorite place in the house.
A few years later, I remember, Nick and I and our teddy-bears had a tea-party in the garden. Spread out on a sheet on the grass were mud pies for cakes and water for tea, but the biscuits (from a tin of Jacobs' Assorted) were real. With Nick as my acolyte I improvised some kind of unholy ceremony and dedicated the feast to Satan.
I remember, when I was nine, our family leaving the country--cosmopolitan, multiracial, multilingual--in which I'd been born, to go live thousands of miles and an ocean away in an insular colonial outpost dominated by conservative monolingual Anglo-Saxons. Until then we'd spent school holidays, Christmas, New Year, and sometimes weekends with my cousins and aunts and uncles; often all of us would stay at my grandparents’ house for a week or two during the festive season: bunking down on mattresses on the floor, four or five to a room, was part of the pleasure of those times. The grown-ups would be at the dining-table for hours eating and drinking and talking, while we, the gang of cousins, would play at spies or rush about upstairs and downstairs in some violently physical game I cannot now recall. Or we'd play with the stink bombs and other devices ordered by our youngest uncle from one of those Acme-type companies advertised on the back of comic books. Or a couple of us would play "models" where one of my cousins would be Twiggy and I'd be the fashion photographer and pretend to take pictures of her. Sometimes the cousins would have secret midnight feasts of sweets and other junk bought without our parents' knowledge. Often everyone--grown-ups and children--would play Monopoly (forming syndicates and launching take-over bids) for hours, spend the day at the beach, or in the evenings stroll along the seafront where one could buy hydrogen-filled balloons or paper cones of roasted nuts, and where cannons dating from the Napoleonic Wars still faced out to sea. Idyllic days which ended when I was nine. In the next ten years, Nick and I saw our cousins only twice. More than this, though, moving to a new country seemed to be the catalyst for tragic events on an almost ridiculously-Shakespearean scale.
I remember being admitted to a hospital when I was 20 and not knowing how I'd gotten there or why, until a nurse told me some friends had brought me in after I'd apparently hopped on a bus and gone to visit them and had sat there in their house chatting sociably until they somehow figured out I'd only just woken up from three days of unconsciousness after a drug overdose of some sort--none of which I could remember. Better living through chemistry.
I remember the first time I ever saw X. Then two-and-a-half years of happiness. Then sometime afterwards, finding a photograph of X and staring at it for a long while. But I especially remember stepping out of the bathroom after a shower one night in April last year and seeing C lying on the bed looking at me; the sound of La Femme d'Argent is the sound of that time, of the two weeks that followed.