"Tea's on the table." The aunt who said this to me had a wizened face with pointy ears. "What's that sprung over your head?"
"It's a present."
"Well, take it off, dear, while we have tea. You will not be able to hear us talk."
"It's switching off," I said. "The side has come to an end. I need to turn it over."
A squat half-brother tweaked the bra strap that must have showed clearly through the back of my blouse. I went to clout him around the ear but thought better of it. I would be blamed. Last time I had done it to one or other of the family, the ear had come off and spun across the room into the log fire - spitting and splattering for the length of tea-time. A heady aroma, along with the muffins. Something to remember when I next went to Confession. So, I closed my eyes upon them all, hearing the talk unwind - or the bleeps on the empty tape's progress towards the auto-stop.
Remembering was watching a film slowly running backwards - till the point in time one wished to recall and one stopped it and ran it forward again at normal speed. My uncle was on his knees praying. Tears weltering in the sunset's blood, he gazed up at me, propped up as I was in bed upon mounds of blue and white striped bolsters. I was dying from diphtheria. But nobody dies from diphtheria these days. I fast forward through the flickering images, only to pause now and again: to make sure I'm still alive. Then the snowstorm of pin-pricks. Finally, auto-stop. Nothing. Perhaps I never was. Never even half a woman. Simply a shaggy-chested man too mean to be me, undergrunting the opening bars of a famous Beethoven symphony beyond the perforated shower-curtain.
The two figures in the inglenook resumed their drinks, nodding blindly to the images from the juke-video box, lowered lashes sewn into their cheeks like dead insects.
(previously published in 'The Vinyl Elephant' 1994
