For more than twenty years after I left school, I put up a shield against memory.
I couldn’t bear to listen to certain music: The Beatles; Beethoven’s Symphony Number 6; Christmas carols sung by a choir.
If I brushed against a cluster of star-jasmine flowers, I inhaled with the scent an unblemished, forgotten bliss, and I was no longer on a Melbourne footpath but beside Delia in the line of boarders, waiting to go in to mass at the convent in Cumberland, the air sweetly spiced from the old jasmine vine arching on the cloister: beyond it the chapel’s shadow lay blue-green on the lawn, the garden was golden in the early morning sun. Or if I heard the shrill, ratcheting sounds of plovers, I was in the bottom paddock with Delia after school, talking in the peaceful air, she eating her orange and I my apple, blameless and content.
Other times, I heard the querulous calls of doves outside my window in the morning, and I was in the room in Abernant I shared with Anne, waking to the cold stone of dread in my chest, fumbling beneath my pillow for my book.
And for years I couldn’t sleep in a motel.
But it was the memories of my years at the convent before I met Lloyd that left me winded, stranded in the space between present and past…
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