The Marble Collector

Prologue

When it comes to my memory there are three categories: things I want to forget, things I can’t forget, and things I forgot I’d forgotten until I remember them.

My earliest memory is of my mum when I was three years old. We are in the kitchen, she picks up the teapot and launches it up at the ceiling. She holds it with two hands, one on the handle, one on the spout, and lobs it as though in a sheaf-toss competition, sending it up in the air where it cracks against the ceiling, and then falls straight back down to the table where it shatters in pieces, murky brown water and burst soggy teabags everywhere. I don’t know what preceded this act, or what came after, but I do know it was anger-motivated, and the anger was my-dad-motivated. This memory is not a good representation of my mum’s character; it doesn’t show her in a good light. To my knowledge she never behaved like that again, which I imagine is precisely the reason that I remember it.

As a six-year-old, I see my Aunt Anna being stopped at the door by Switzer’s security as we exit. The hairy-handed security guard goes through her shopping bag and retrieves a scarf with its price tags and a security tag still on it. I can’t remember what happened after that, Aunt Anna plied me with ice-cream sundaes in the Ilac Centre and watched with hope that every memory of the incident would die with each mouthful of sugar. The memory is vivid despite even to this day everyone believing I made it up.

I currently go to a dentist who I grew up with. We were never friends but we hung out in the same circles. He’s now a very serious man, a sensible man, a stern man. When he hovers above my open mouth, I see him as a fifteen-year-old pissing against the living room walls at a house party, shouting about Jesus being the original anarchist.

When I see my aged primary school teacher who was so softly spoken we almost couldn’t hear her, I see her throwing a banana at the class clown and shouting at him to leave me alone for God’s sake, just leave me alone, before bursting into tears and running from the classroom. I bumped into an old classmate recently and brought the incident up, but she didn’t remember.

It seems to me that when summoning up a person in my mind it is not the everyday person I think of, it is the more dramatic moments or the moments they showed a part of themselves that is usually hidden.

My mother says that I have a knack for remembering what others forget. Sometimes it’s a curse; nobody likes it when there’s somebody to remember what they’ve tried so hard to bury. I’m like the person who remembers everything after a drunken night out, who everyone wishes would keep their memories to themself.

I can only assume I remember these episodes because I have never behaved this way myself. I can’t think of a moment when I have broken form, become another version of myself that I want and need to forget. I am always the same. If you’ve met me you know me, there’s not much more to me. I follow the rules of who I know myself to be and can’t seem to be anything else, not even in moments of great stress when surely a meltdown would be acceptable. I think this is why I admire it so much in others and I remember what they choose to forget.

Out of character? No. I fully believe that even a sudden change in a person’s behaviour is within the confines of their nature. That part of us is present the whole time, lying dormant, just waiting for its moment to be revealed. Including me.