Memories as ‘brain tattoos’, Siri Hustvedt

I remember when you called me lizard and looked into my face as though I was anything but. 

I remember when pies were sixpence and we used to swim in dams.

I remember when the Camberwell pool was shaped like a blue oasis, wide at the shallow end and narrow at the deep.

I remember when you stole lollies from my Lenten collection and imagined I would not notice.

I remember when your baby smiles melted my heart as though I could see nothing more enticing ever.

I remember when the house we lived in seemed as big as a church.

I remember when my mother replaced butter with Daffodil margarine because it was cheaper, she said, and better for us.

I remember when my father brought home a microscope and lined up the slides with ancient images etched onto each plate.

I remember when I looked through the microscope and saw strange shapes like a Rorschach ink blot, only I did not know this them.

I remember when the image on the microscope slide, a hair follicle, looked like my sister’s braided plait.

I remember when we ate maizena pop for breakfast and my mother promised it would fill us even when she made it with water.

I remember when I bought a sticky red toffee apple at the Xavier Maytime Fair and my tooth wobbled out of its socket.

I remember when my little sister fell on a dog bone in the back yard and it shot through her open fist right through to the other side.

I remember when a car collided with me on the zebra crossing on Canterbury Road and I was knocked out cold.

I remember coming to on the butcher’s shop floor, sawdust in my hair.

I remember the scream of the ambulance as it screeched its way to the Box Hill Hospital.

I remember my mother telling me I’d needed to stay overnight and I was scared.

I remember a nurse next day, who came to my bedside, took one look at me and asked as though I was an imposter, ‘What are you doing here?’

I remember when my brother’s bantams, housed in a makeshift shed in our back yard, burned down. 

I remember when our dog got hold of one of the bantam carcases and ran with it between its jaws down the lane.

I remember when night felt like bowl of thick soup I could not swim my way out of.

I remember when my father roamed the house at night and stood in the doorway in search of female children.

I remember the sensation of his brandy breath on my skin even as I turned away.

I remember the last time I saw him in hospital when he visited after my first daughter was born.

I remember his long slow trek up the corridor ahead of my mother.  Breathless with emphysema.

The last time I saw him. 

On poetry and culture

When I was twenty-two I took the photos of my ex-boyfriend Paul and cut him out of the frame then set a match to the amputated pile in the kitchen sink.

Smoke curled . To my mother, Paul, as an Australian lack culture

She said it often enough in my childhood to believe she was onto something. 

What’s culture? My mind ricocheted to the men working on building sites in the suburbs erecting yet another AV Jennings special on the back blocks of Cheltenham. 

I did not ask her to elaborate on the word culture, but my mind shot off to my father’s art books with all those images inside, mainly of half or fully naked women leaning on one another or draped across beds with one flopping to the floor as if they had lost all ability to hold themselves together. 

Was this culture?

This was not Australian. Not like the scenes of the bush by Hans Heysen, another European, who like my mother, likely longed for home. 

Home was a long way off and this place where I was born felt foreign from the get-go. While our name attracted derision for its foreignness. The difficulty of Schooneveldt. 

Was this culture? 

Surely culture was a good thing because my mother used the word ‘lack’, and in her choice she hinted at loss and sorrow. As if culture rested elsewhere, in Europe, her home. 

Did I have culture? 

Was culture a skill or was it more an aptitude for fitting in? 

When I was in my final year of school the nuns awarded me a book for what they called academic excellence. Not because I was an extraordinarily gifted child, as I saw many others around me, but because I was conscientious, handed in my homework on time and knew how to string polite words together. 

My mother loved the beach and on weekdays during holidays when we took the blue bus to Mentone and staked out our yellow piece of sand, sandwiched between all the heaving bodies that came in view on hot summer days, my mother looked across the still waters and pined for home. 

There over the sea is my home. My family. 

I knew then these people way away over the water were the people who oozed culture from their fingertips. While I simply clumped through life carelessly, whose BBC English voice cultivated under the care of Catholic nuns in a blue stone boarding school and by listening to the announcers on the ABC whose rounded vowels reminded me of the late queen, the plum in the mouth, pomposity of the regal family. 

Only later I developed the clang and nasal twang of the inveterate Australian and lost all sense of culture. 

When I revisit the land of my birth after a trip away over the seas and look at the colour of the sky, those luminescent blues. I think of poetry.

But I do not know this thing called poetry 

The way people find words and convert them into shapes with meanings that fly off the page. 

In every word ,a lifetime. 

In every image, a universe. 

In every cloud, the promise of what lies behind. 

I do not know how to write a poem. 

I tried when I was young seated under the Lombardy poplars 

on the abandoned Farm Road estate of my childhood. 

I was Elizabeth Barret Browning with her list of ways to love.

My pencil and notebook in my lap.

I looked to the blue above for inspiration but found none. 

I cannot write a poem, not like the poets.

They have a way with words and images, 

cadences and syntax, 

of summers and snow, 

of frosts 

To settle on the ground of our minds.