How much do you list memories for on ebay?
Narelle Roberts (Western Sydney University)
Sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor – in the dim light, dust collects on the strange sight of chaotic organisation I created in increasingly larger orbits.
This morning, I tugged at the six matching Kmart storage boxes, once oatmeal cream, now a speckled colour thanks to Bob’s black fur. Sneeze. Sneeze, and just for good measure – sneeze. I sat with the September sun warming my back, glass doors doing little to stifle the sound of Marrickville Road as I opened each box and made piles out of the assortment of oddities.
I hold two items, frowning and thinking, totally ignorant to the darkness and the numb sensation that has seeped through my legs. The grandmother clocks bellows at me six times – does it mean six o’clock, or half-past one, or one of the other eleven possibilities? I am reminded of counting her mournful song in the middle of the night as a child – always confused in the darkness as to whether it was 2 a.m. or half-past five. The latter meant I would soon hear Grandpa click the kettle on and I’d be free to escape the single bed I had to share with the little sister each time I visited Bradbury.
The first is obvious to me even through its brown paper wrapping and string – familiarly out of place. Fuchsias, stag horns, three precise rows of roses, tree ferns, and of course the seasonal vegetables – tomatoes, lettuce, and silver beet – all spring to mind, dancing across the different ages of my memories to alight here and now in the shadows of this spring evening. I can see the regularity of the mulching, the trimming, and then the securing to stakes with the same type of string that I now rub between my fingers. I can now also see how much love was poured into the clay suburban soil to permit the flowering and fruiting with such ferocious variety. Inside the paper, brittle with age, I recognise the straight razor carried through the Borneo jungle to make it home as safely as he did. I don’t know how or when it was wrapped and laid to rest in the recesses of the camphor wood chest I inherited not long after his ninety-fourth birthday.
The second should be preserved more carefully than to be scrunched inside a supermarket plastic bag. Its age should be tempered with the kindness of tissue paper, or perhaps a cloth shroud – something befitting a small girl’s dress that is now over seventy years old. Worn by a girl who came before me – made by hand, lovingly embroidered and smocked in a fibro house in Chester Hill, for a little girl lucky enough to have her father return from the war. I never wore it, yet I can remember barely daring to touch it when I saw it hanging in the spare room wardrobe at Bradbury. For the longest time I hoped it was for me, then I feared it was for my sister. Whether it was too soon, or (perhaps the more likely) was not trusted to our mother, knowing she had no tenderness for other people’s memories, eventually it was entrusted to me, for my own girls to wear, and only on the rarest special occasions. Except once, in a photo: the youngest of my own girls dressed carefully, her wispy hair refusing to do anything but stick out at right-angles as she giggles and squirms in his arms – clad of course in his grey cardigan, despite it being mid-March and sunny, an El-Nino year. The date stamp in the bottom corner of the photo (if I cared to look) would make me pause and think about how just a few months later I would be back at Bradbury preparing the house for sale, and trying ferociously to stop my sister from listing the grandmother clock on eBay.
I salvaged all the memories I could. Stored them in plastic tubs, added my own memories to the mix over time. Toted them from one rental to the next, only to now sit, with too many shadows on the floor, cataloguing my past so that no one ever tries to hurl them into a skip bin on the footpath.
Narelle Roberts is a high school English teacher turned creative writer and poet. She is currently undertaking a Master of Creative Writing at Western Sydney University, with plans to complete a Doctor of Creative Arts. Roberts is primarily focused on writing creative non-fiction, exploring ideas of family, memory and self-reflection. She is intrigued by the differences between the internal and external stories we tell ourselves and others.
