Memory has always been a particular obsession of mine, even before I wrote Coolamon Girl, the reason I wrote it, I guess: I wanted to corral the pieces into a whole. I hang onto things – every knick-knack and wall adornment holds a memory and books stay on my shelf because of the memories they evoke. I hang onto friends too: I enjoy the swirl of the past as we discuss the weighty and trivial matters of the present. It fascinates me how our memories can be the same and different.
Memory also provided food for thought and content for discussion when I worked at the Rape Crisis Centre. It was the late 1980s, 1990s, and I went into the work expecting to be supporting women who had just been raped (we didn’t use the term sexually assaulted then). Instead, while we were certainly doing this, the majority of the women who came to us had been raped/sexually assaulted years before, usually when they were children and, as we know, usually by someone close to them. At that time, there was quite a bit of debate and writings in the public sphere about trauma and memory, and particularly about recovered memories and whether practitioners who facilitated these were charlatans etc. At the Rape Crisis Centre we followed the lead of the women who came to talk to us. Sometimes we helped them unhook details of a memory by listening to them and asking questions but mostly we talked with them about getting through each day.
Working in a feminist collective, we felt an obligation to be self-reflective and self-aware. So, in that vein….
I had always remembered the episode which opens Coolamon Girl - Johnny and I getting caught with our pants down - and I had told the story occasionally over the years. When it sprang to mind again, during an exercise in self-reflection, I realised my words were always the same and the story always ended with me realising the toilet door didn’t lock from the inside, and took up again when I was getting bruise ointment rubbed into my legs and back a few days later. I’d never told the story of what happened in between and, in fact, I didn’t even remember. I thought that maybe I should try and remember, that it might be the key to a well-adjusted, unencumbered future. No more ghosts nipping at my heels. The counsellor I was seeing suggested I could try writing the story down to see if that helped.
So, on an auspicious day - no kids, no work, no gnawing anxieties - I settled into my newly-acquired second-hand chair at my lovingly-restored public service desk in my upstairs bedroom, a cup of tea at my side, and booted up the boxy Mac Classic, the first computer I’d ever owned. Its starting up routine, with its chirrups and burrs, seemed to take forever and my stomach fluttered in anticipation, not just for what I might uncover but because I felt like I could be a proper writer. For the first time I was going to make a record of my earliest traumatic memory, the one that I blamed for all the shame and terror that came after.
It was morning, another balmy day; a dog barking in a nearby yard; the domestic sounds of the neighbour in the next guvvy townhouse, doors opening and shutting, then the screech of her carport gate; Northbourne Avenue traffic sounds waxing and waning as cars zipped past. The computer finally settled. I opened a blank page, and the words started flowing. The flutterings moved into my chest. I hardly breathed as my fingers flew.
…Johnny and I staring at each other’s bottoms; my mother in full voice and full flight; my own flight, up the street, around the corner, flinging around the next corner, down the back lane, panting, gasping, crying, one big heartbeat, and into the back gate; the ivy-covered screen in front of the dunny; the smooth round handle at just my height; the dark, space with the cracked wooden-seated toilet; the concrete floor; turning around and looking at the back of the door, my stomach churning liquid as I realised the door couldn’t be locked, then ….
… BANG, an explosive crack erupted from the creamy box in front of me, a lightning flash from its insides, the screen suddenly black with a pinpoint of light fading out in its centre. Smoke seeped from the orifices, a burning smell in my nostrils. I watched open-mouthed, pressing buttons frantically, indiscriminately. It didn’t help. I watched incredulously as the smoke curled upwards. Tears of rage and frustration spurted from my eyes and nose. I was no closer to understanding what had happened to me between the memories. Why couldn’t I remember?
Suddenly there was another bang and flash but this time it was in my head and it was me that was rebooted. No chirruping or burring, I saw clearly that it was a message to wake me up, to put me back on track: I didn’t need to know what had happened in the in-between. Why would I want to know? Surely, the fact of the bruise ointment was enough. And it has been enough, for all these years since the day the computer died. We don’t need to know everything, to remember every detail. It doesn’t provide more legitimacy. It may just provide more heartache. It’s the feelings now that matter. You can’t change what happened then, only how you deal with it now. And, as Johnny said, I wonder who’ll they’ll get to play us in the movie.
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