A Nest of Nightmares

She shook her head.

‘College?’

‘Montclair State.’ We had begun to walk together in search of a coffee shop, down the long, windowless, carpeted, white-lit corridor. It was like being inside a spaceship, I thought, or in an underground city of the distant, sterile future. We were in Houston, but we might as easily have been in New York, Los Angeles, or Atlanta for all the cues our surroundings gave us. It was a place set apart from the real world, untouched by time or season, unfettered by the laws of nature.

‘It’s like the future,’ I said.

Jane looked at the curving walls and indirect lighting and gave me an appreciative smile. ‘It is kind of Star Treky,’ she said.

We came to rest in a small, dim, overpriced restaurant which was almost empty, in contrast to the bar on one side and the fast-food cafeteria on the other. I saw by my watch that it was too late for lunch and too early for dinner. We ordered coffee, causing the middle-aged waitress to sigh heavily and stump away.

‘Actually, I’d rather have a shot of Tullamore Dew,’ said Jane. ‘Or a large snifter of brandy.’

‘Did you want – ’

She shook her head. ‘No, no. Better not. It’s just that the thought of seeing my mother again has me wanting reinforcement. But I’d be less capable of dealing with her drunk than I am sober.’

I looked at her curiously because she had struck me from the first as a capable, almost fearless person. ‘You don’t get along with your mother?’

‘Something like that. I moved out here to get away from her, and she still won’t let me be. She calls me every night. Sometimes she cries. She won’t believe that I’m grown up and that I have my own life to live, a life I’ve chosen. She’s still waiting for me to give up this silliness and move back home. My sisters got away because they got married. But in her eyes I’m still a child.’

The waitress returned, setting our coffees down before us with unnecessary emphasis. I watched the dark brown liquid slide over the rim of my cup, to be caught in the shallow white bowl of the saucer.

‘You’re lucky if you and your mother can relate to each other as people,’ Jane said.

I nodded, although I had never given the matter any thought; I’d simply taken it for granted. ‘We have disagreements, but we’re pretty polite about them,’ I said.

This made Jane laugh. ‘Polite,’ she said. ‘Oh, my.’ She peeled the foil top off a plastic container of coffee whitener. ‘You’re so lucky . . . to have had a happy childhood and a mother who knows how to let go.’

It seemed at first acceptable, the way she so calmly passed judgment on my life, as if she knew it; then, suddenly strange.

‘I think I had a fairly normal childhood,’ I said. ‘Very ordinary. At least, it always seemed that way to me.’ It had been suburban, middle-class, and sheltered. I saw my experiences reflected in the lives of my friends, and I found it hard to believe that Jane had come from a background terribly dissimilar. ‘You were unhappy as a child?’

Jane hesitated, stirring her coffee from black to brown. Then she said, ‘I don’t remember.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just that. I don’t remember my childhood. Most of it, anyway. It’s as if I went to sleep when I was five and didn’t wake up until I was twelve. The years in between are a blank.’

I stared at her, trying to understand. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t doubt that I had forgotten much of my own childhood, but there remained a satisfyingly large jumble of memories that I could rummage around in when the need arose. Some of the things that had happened to me remained as vivid in my imagination as if they had just happened: the day I had broken my bride doll, a rabbit-shaped cake my mother had baked one Easter, the taste of water warm from the garden hose at the height of summer, the Christmas when I had been ill, games of hide-and-seek, classroom embarrassments . . . I had only to let down the barriers to be flooded by memories, most of them far more intense than the recollections of anything that had happened to me as an adult. To be without such memories was to be without a childhood, to lack a certain identity.

‘I can remember a few things from when I was very young,’ Jane said into my stunned silence. ‘None of them pleasant. And my sisters have told me things . . . it’s just as well I don’t remember. The things I’ve forgotten can’t hurt me.’

‘But why? What happened to you? What was so terrible?’

‘I’m sure other kids survived a lot worse. In fact, I know that for certain. There’s no telling what will make one kid break and another survive, or what kind of defence mechanisms are needed. I work with emotionally disturbed children, and some of them have every right to be, given their backgrounds, while others come from loving families and just . . . crack over things that other kids take in their stride. All I can say about the things that happened to me – well, I had my way of dealing with them, whether it was a good way or not. Forgetting, blotting it out, was part of it.’