nextMemoryIt is my birthday and once again, I have chosen to spend it with my favourite aunt, my godmother. My aunt's memory is failing after a stroke and now on this visit together we pick at its fabric, skirting the many holes that riddle it. She was not always like this, lying helpless, inert and expressionless on her bed, with only a brief and fugitive emotion sometimes appearing, so briefly, that it may well be only in my imagination. Dredging the past, seeking for some jeweled memory that may help to light up the dreary wastes of her mind, in my mind's eye I suddenly see again that long ago day when I was thirteen and she a beautiful young woman in her prime. Perhaps it is the salt tang of urine that hangs like a miasma in her room, despite the use of perfumed disinfectants, that causes my mind to go back to that day on the beach so long ago when I turned thirteen on the 13th of July and I begin to talk, picking the way through my memories.. In those days, thirteen was young; we had no television to broaden our horizons, we only saw those movies that were clearly intended for children and we had no boy friends on whom to practice the rituals of the grown-ups' mating game. Sex education in school in those days was a purely clinical affair of physiology which a modest female teacher taught with a disregard for emotion and only a token glance at the physical parts thereof, what one might call below the belt. She was much more at home in the complementary subject which was hygiene. Nevertheless, I was becoming uneasily aware that my physiology was changing, heralding new things that I was not comfortable with. It seemed to me that the world was suddenly becoming a more threatening place, more complicated and that, willy-nilly, I was being forced out into this unfamiliar new world. It all crystallized on my thirteenth birthday. My aunt, with whom I was staying during my school holidays, gave a little party to celebrate my birthday on the beach outside her home. She was my godmother and we had a time-honoured tradition that whenever I spent my birthday with her, she always made me thirteen of some favourite dish in honour of the date. This time she cooked thirteen parathas and made a lot of other goodies which we carried down to the beach at sunset. It was a long and lonely sandy beach on the west coast where the Indian Ocean came in and rolled and gamboled like a pet dog that fawns at your feet wanting its tummy scratched. There was no one else along that stretch of creamy white sand, because the natives were not given to disporting themselves in the sea and those who worked on the beach, the fisher folk, had long since gone home leaving only their nets stretched out to dry and their boats secured against the ocean's blandishments. We had it all entirely to ourselves and we watched as the sky turned red and orange and golden and then purpled into night. Dusk falls very rapidly and almost before the sun had sunk over the horizon, it was night. The sea darkened and grew mysterious as its innocent blue-green deepened and the blackness at the heart of each wave glinted enticingly in the moonlight, hinting at mysterious and dangerous depths. I did not know how to swim and although I had not told my aunt, I was a little afraid of water and I was also afraid of the dark. She always seemed so unafraid, so sure of herself in a world in which she had to make her own way. For my party, if you could call it that, there were only two guests. There was Sheeley who I supposed was about my age, although she seemed older, and she was accompanied by her father. He was a very tall man, well muscled, who looked to my adolescent and unaccustomed eye, aggressively masculine in his swimming trunks which revealed more than they concealed. I had never seen my father in such scanty wear and there were no other males in my family. My aunt was a beautiful young woman then with a face that I later recognized when I saw the Sistine Madonna. She was not married, although well beyond the age when girls got married, because my grandfather had a great many daughters and not enough dowries for all of them. So my aunt earned her own living and helped her younger sisters towards matrimony, her brothers up the ladder of life. After the thirteen parathas and meat curry and all the other delicious accompaniments had been demolished and before the ice cream was due to come out of its ice-filled churn and the birthday cake from its wrappings, my aunt decided that it was time for a walk along the beach. In the gathering gloom for it was not a full moon night, we set off and soon Sheeley's father and my aunt had outstripped us and were striding on ahead. Sheeley and I ambled along far behind, stopping now and then because I would halt to look up at the stars in the sky, brighter than they ever were in the city in which I lived and I watched for a shooting star upon which I might make a wish. Sheeley and I chatted together as children do who do not know each other very well, amiably enough, but with a certain reserve not unlike the way two dogs will size each other up, walking stiff legged around each other, advancing and retreating. "Do you really like my present?" Sheeley asked. She had given me a pink plastic bowl containing a highly scented powder with a great fluffy powder puff of the same baby pink. "I love it", I replied and eyed her covertly. Would she sense the artificiality in my voice and guess that I would have far preferred a book? I never used powder. "My mother chose it", said Sheeley and now it was she who gave me a strange look. "She thought it would be suitable." "Why did she not come also?" I asked, ignoring the question of the present's suitability, although my mind asked irrepressibly: scented pink powder for a little girl? "She does not go out like that", Sheeley answered. There was a pause while I considered the implications of what she had said; go out like what? Was there something not quite right about a thirteen year old's birthday party on the beach? It echoed something in my own mind, but I was not quite sure what, unless it was a sense of something inappropriate. I glanced ahead to where my aunt was walking with her escort and it seemed to me that the wind which blew in from the sea drew them together so that it briefly appeared as if their bodies fused into one. I shivered, for the breeze was cool and tangy, but it was within myself that I experienced a strange sensation as I looked at the two figures that seemed to lean towards one another. Sheeley continued her own train of thought. "My Mama is not like your aunty. She doesn't go out to work, she looks after her family. Your aunty works in my father's office. You know that, don't you?" A sidelong look accompanied her words. I did not know it then but I would learn the pejorative nature of the phrase 'working woman' that hovered unspoken on Sheeley's lips. Respectable women married and married young. I looked again along the never ending expanse of beach and saw the two figures of my aunt and Sheeley's father rapidly dwindling in the distance. What were they talking about? Earlier, before the distance between us had grown, I had heard their murmured voices and my aunt's low melodious laugh but now they were silenced by the roar and explosive plash of the ocean rolling in and out so relentlessly. I skipped out of the reach of an insidious wave that had crept up the sand and now seemed to leap up like a pouncing animal. "Are you afraid of the sea?" asked Sheeley and I sensed a faint derision in her voice. Something told me that she did not like me, that there was something she was angry about. I could not imagine what it might be, it could not be anything I had done, for I had done nothing. I had thanked her for the pink powder puff in its bowl with, I was sure, appropriate gratitude. She had taken off her frock and under it she wore a swimsuit in what I thought of as mermaid green. She danced in and out among the waves. Her body was wet for she had allowed the sea to play with her as I had not. Her swimsuit clung to her and I noticed that she had breasts, that her body was not flat and straight and thin like mine. "I do not know how to swim", I replied, "I have only been to the seaside about twice in my life." "My father is a very good swimmer, he can swim far out", and Sheeley threw out her arm across the darkening expanse of water that glimmered before us. For some strange reason I did not ask whether her mother also swam, but Sheeley volunteered that information. "My mother swims very well, everybody who lives on this coast does, but she is not like your aunty, she does not swim with outsiders." She gave me a sly sideways look and added: "Do you think he is handsome? Your aunty certainly does." Pretending not to hear, I stopped walking and tucked my pretty taffeta frock that my aunt had made for me firmly into my knickers. I thought about a whole race of people who lived by the sea and learned their skills from it; where did that leave us, people like me, landlubbers, with none of those skills? Well, as I pulled up my knickers, I said to myself, I might be no swimmer but I was a very good runner and I was not to be outdone. "Race you to the other end of the beach", I challenged her. But: "Oh no", she responded, "I don't feel like doing things like that. It's too childish." I caught her look and saw myself in it, my long and skinny legs sticking out of my home made cotton knickers, my dress bunched up. Looking along the beach I saw with a sense of alarm that my aunt and Sheeley's father had vanished from view. Where could they have gone? It was not right of my aunt to have left me alone like this on my birthday, I felt tears brimming in my eyes and knuckled them angrily away. "There they are", cried Sheeley, "look, way out there". I followed the direction of her arm and out amid the pounding surf I saw two heads bobbing like seals among the waves. Every time the sea crested into a huge wave they seemed to vanish beneath it and then rose triumphant within it. They seemed such a very long and dangerous way away, in an element that filled me with dread. Then they turned and made their way to land and as they came out of the water and walked towards us, they were laughing. My aunt's breasts rose out of her swimming costume and the sand patterned her wet legs; there was about her the look of a creature that had come out of its element and I felt an inarticulate and aching sadness come over me. I experienced a great sense of isolation as I stood there and watched. I felt as if enfolded in the wing of a great black bird and I realized that I stood on the brink of something I did not comprehend. Suddenly I felt like one of those huge rocks that stood on the beach, the one that had a hole right through the middle of it; my lovely clear bright day had turned black like a film negative, everything reversed, the images a harsh white at its edges. I was aware, dimly, of unhappiness, loneliness, frustration... a feeling, barely apprehended, that this was what lay ahead in the grown up world that I was entering. As the sea lapped about my feet and almost seemed to rub around my legs like a caressing cat, I thought (or I think I thought it then, it might in fact, be a later thought) that the sea, churning and foaming so seductively, was like life, prettied up to deceive you. Then, pouncing, it drenched you and left you soaked and shivering. I knew somehow, that none of us were happy....not Sheeley, her father, or my aunt. My world was changing. "Time for ice cream and cake", my aunt called out and her voice was ordinary and reassuring, "have you and Sheeley been enjoying yourselves?" I caught the look Sheeley exchanged with her father as she proffered him the towel she had worn around her shoulders. There was in that look complicity and contrition and something else. Could it have been dislike? There was certainly pride in his appearance. He was, as his daughter had said, handsome and there was an overpowering maleness about him as he stood there laughing, flicking the end of the towel at Sheeley. One end of that towel smacked her rather hard on the face and I saw tears well in her eyes before she turned and made a playful grab at the towel. I did not look at him then because he made me feel shy, there seemed so much of him and almost all of it undressed, and so when I run that scene in my memory, I still do not know everything that went into that tableau. It all dissolved as he seized the towel and began to dry my aunt with it. She sat there in the sand like a Madonna with her long hair loose on her shoulders and a half smile that I recognized later on the Mona Lisa...secretive, sensual, she was suddenly a stranger. There was a great deal more laughter as they rubbed each other dry and then we sat down to the cake and ice cream and in my mouth was the taste of sand and salt and the sea salt tang in the air. My aunt lies there supine and looks up at me as I reminisce, my narrative of necessity nuanced and oblique. "Do you remember?" I ask eagerly, hoping I saw a flash of some expression illumine her eyes. A look that might be pain crosses her face momentarily, a face where now the remnants of beauty may be discerned only by those who remember her as she was. "I remember nothing", she says blankly, "I do not remember your birthday...or mine." Then, after a pause, she adds, her voice tentative, struggling against the stroke that has her in its iron grip: "I am not sure who you are." next |