The other masquerades that time resumes

I’ve had something on my mind (or in my mind?) for a long time now, but hesitated to write about it. But the time has come. Why? I don’t know. Maybe something a friend wrote to honour the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence Campaign. My previous post about the many deaths we die. Reading the latest saga in Bill Cosby’s case. The generally shitty state of the world. Maybe hearing “Memory” from Cats playing on the radio, and remembering snippets from Eliot’s “Preludes” ­–

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

…

The morning comes to consciousness

Of faint stale smells of beer.

…

The thousand sordid images

Of which your soul was constituted;

Maybe all of the above. In any case, I think the time has come to put something that has existed only ephemerally into a more substantive state, even if it is only in the form of dots on a screen.

Many years ago – as many as 20 years ago, or sometime back in my 30s – all of a sudden (and I do mean all of a sudden, out of the blue, out of nowhere, or any of the other clichés we use to express something completely unexpected or unanticipated) – a “memory” popped into my consciousness.

Completely unbidden.

But as vivid and real as the day “it happened”.

Since then I have learned a great deal about repressed memories, and about recovered memories, and how dangerous this whole thing can be (which is why I use scare quotes a lot). Innocent people have been falsely accused of heinous crimes because someone “recovered” a “memory”. Guilty people have got away with heinous crimes because clever attorneys have exploited the myriad weaknesses in human memory and how it manifests. It’s a minefield, memory is.

But usually such cases involve lawyers and psychologists and rather shady therapies specifically designed to “recover” memories of abuse and so on. Usually there is a court case, and money, involved, or the desire to get even, or send someone to prison.

None of those applied in my case.

I wasn’t in any form of therapy, never mind “memory recovery” therapy.

I don’t recall being stressed, beyond the usual stress that accompanies trying to raise three school-going children on your own with insufficient means and no support.

The point is, as I recall, it was just an ordinary day – and then wham! this “memory” materialised. It was as if a curtain just suddenly went up and stage lights came on in a part of my mind that had been shut off for a long, long time.

The scene was as follows.

I was maybe 4 or 5 years old. The location was a room in the house we lived in back then. We called it the “back room”, because it was closest to the back of the house, I suppose. It had twin single beds. It was night time. I was asleep on one of the beds, on my stomach, face down. I was awakened by the realisation that there was a very heavy weight bearing down on me. Someone was on top of me, an adult. There was the smell of alcohol and male sweat and the weight was groping and grinding and I was suffocating under it and I began to squirm and cry and then the man put his hand over my mouth but at some point he got off and started weeping and saying “sorry boy sorry boy sorry boy…” over and over while blocking my mouth with his hand and then he stumbled over to the other bed …

And that’s as far as I “remember”. I have forgotten (or repressed) the immediate aftermath. And continued, obviously, to do so until some thirty years later that scene came to me.

Unbidden as I say.

The man in question had died many years before.

There was no court case; there were no lawyers, no psychologists; there was no need for revenge, no looking for money, or justice, or anything. Just this memory that cropped up. And at the time it was like a light bulb went off in my head: “Holy shit! Uncle X [yes he was related; there were always uncles on both pater’s and mater’s side squatting about the place] tried to rape me!” I was truly stunned, and have mulled it over these many years. I don’t know if he succeeded or not. I don’t remember …

I know enough about “recovered memories” and all that stuff now to wonder if I made it up. I know enough to realise it is an allegation I could never “prove” in court. I am a decent enough human being to realise that I could never raise it because if I did make it up I’d ruin an innocent person’s life. What a nightmare.

But, truth be told, I have no doubt that it happened. I have no reason to believe I made it up. Why would I, so many years later, when the man was dead and I hadn’t even thought about him for years? No score to settle, no axe to grind.

Anyway, there you have it. I believe an uncle once tried to rape me (whether he succeeded or not I don’t know). It seems that for some 30 years I blocked out the memory. But in the years since the memory popped up, unbidden, I have thought about it often.

For the most part, thinking about it evokes a deep anger in me. Anger because he could do that and got away with it. Anger because the only recourse for me was to block out the memory rather than confront it. As a child I lacked the vocabulary to articulate the experience, and in any case there was no one I could have told, no one would have believed me. No one I trusted. Maybe my 4 or 5 year-old mind realised that, and I chose to just block it out instead, make like it never happened.

And mulling it over also leaves me very sad, because the reality is that incidents like that – and much worse – are still re-enacted in millions of women’s lives, and children’s lives, all over the world on a daily basis. Drunken bullies, and jealous husbands and boyfriends, and worthless fathers and uncles forcing violence, physical, sexual and emotional, on vulnerable people.

But it also makes me wonder: what the fuck else might have gone on in that house of horrors that I have “repressed” or chosen to forget?