*Memory

I woke up in a strange bed and the room smelled funny. I could see the early morning sunlight slipping under the Venetian blinds at the window. The heavy curtains over the top of the blinds aren’t quite long enough and I can see speckles of dust dancing in the sliver of light. The bed is big, bigger than my bed at home and the pillow smells like Grandpapa, a combination of cigarette smoke and hair cream. I realise I am at my grandparents and throw back the heavy feather doona and climb out of the big bed, making my way down the hall to the kitchen.

My grandmother was in the kitchen making pancakes and she placed a plate in front of me as I climbed up to the kitchen table. The table was white Formica with silver flecks through it, very much the height of fashion with its metal legs and my grandmothers’ pride and joy. In the centre of the table was a green glass vase with roses from her front garden. I can still remember their heady perfume.

Grandpapa sprinkled sugar over my pancakes and then cut a home grown lemon in half and squeezed it over the top of the sugar, motioning me to roll the pancake up. From the kitchen my grandmother called for me to “Eat! Eat!” and with sugary fingers and lips I asked where mum and dad were.

“At the hospital getting your baby sister.” My grandmother stood behind me and stroked my hair.

My grandparents then talked over my head in words that I didn’t understand, words they used when they lived in another place, before they came here with my father and uncle. My grandfather always sounded angry when he spoke using these words. My grandmother wiped her hands in her apron and walked back to the kitchen calling “Eat! Eat!”

Next the memory skips forward a little bit to later the same day. I am sitting in the front room with my grandmother. She is embroidering a while linen outfit for me with flowers. The threads are so soft and silky. She has a metal tin with all the different threads in it wound onto bits of cardboard. I am playing with the threads and she keeps tutting at me and taking them from me. I think I am tangling them. She puts the outfit she is working on down and calls me over to the coffee table where there is a glass bowel of walnuts and a nut cracker.

“I need you to help me get the nuts out of the shell. I need them whole for a cake I am making. You do it like this.” She places a walnut in the nutcracker so that the cracker will squeeze on the seam of the walnut. She squeezes the handles together and I hear a small crack. “See not too hard and then you and pull the shell apart and get the nut out whole like this.” She shows me the nut in her hand, whole and wrinkly. She hands me the nut cracker. I remember I can’t get the nuts out whole but she has the outfit finished by the time my father arrives to take me to the hospital to see my sister.

Again the memory skips and I remember walking through the hospital car park holding my fathers hand knowing that I was going to see my mummy and sister. He told me her name was Elizabeth.

“Lilibet.” I repeated. It is a name that has stuck ever since for my sister.