Hilary Fannin: ‘Memory cannot be abolished in a referendum’

My friend came home from London for the weekend. I picked up her and her young son from Dublin Airport. She was looking spiffing in a velvet jacket. She’d been working that morning, and hadn’t had time to change.

She has an air of professionalism. You would confidently buy a second-hand car from her, not that she’s in the automobile industry. Her work concerns itself instead with the spluttering engine of the mind.

The three of us drove off in my smelly car, her son and I debating whether the olfactory assault that clasps you like a friendly drunk as soon as you open the door was the result of a forgotten cod fillet, left to moulder in the boot, or maybe cat pee, or maybe – and I strongly suspect this is the culprit – milk. Old milk. (I spend half my life driving members of my family around while they sit in the passenger seat wincing at the sunlight, drinking mugs of coffee and imploring me to slow down over the speed bumps.)

“I think it is shark poo,” her sweetly precise little boy suggested, which seemed like a reasonable conclusion.

When my friend and I met in 1981, things in this country felt bleak. Our contemporaries were seeping away through the woodwork, to London and Boston and Sydney, in search of jobs. My friend had just finished college. She drove a Henkel motorcycle, and wore biker boots and bits of antique lace. She rolled her own cigarettes and knew about music.

She remained optimistic about staying in Ireland for a while, promoting bands to the few remaining stragglers among our cohort who hadn’t yet emigrated. (Or maybe she was just sitting around, late into those 1980s nights, with a lot of baggy-eyed drummers, asking them if percussion was an effective way of dealing with aggression.)

Anyway, she was cool and intense and rangy and fun, and anxious and generous and compelling, and when she too eventually followed the hordes to London, I missed her, hugely.

She works hard in her adoptive city. A respected mechanic of the mind, she has spent 30 years finding therapeutic ways to replace blown gaskets.

It came home to me during her visit that it has been 36 years since we became friends. So much water under the bridge. So many memories, so many snapshots from shared pasts, in America and London and Dublin.

We walked along a crowded Dublin beach on a luminous day last weekend, before she headed back to London, excavating some of those memories from the wet sand.

I caught a glimpse of us as we must have looked to the school of paddle-boarders floating past in wetsuits, or to the young parents anxiously applying sunscreen, sandwiches and sun hats to impatient toddlers who wanted to dig in the sand like puppies: two middle-aged women making stately progress along the shoreline.

Where did all the years go? What happened that other century we used to inhabit, that one so lightly abandoned? (That century I never did say a proper goodbye to, so busy my worrying that my cumbersome computer would snort a line of Y2K and implode.)

I hope I'll never have to call on her again to carry me over the broken glass of heartbreak

Rationally, I know that time passes; I know she and I are nearly four decades older. But when I look, I don’t see what the paddle-boarders see. I don’t see what is in front of my eyes. My gaze, refracted through memory, is awry.

I know it’s unlikely that I’m going to catch her pogoing around a dance floor in an antique nightdress and a pair of motorcycle boots again.

I doubt we’ll slump over another kitchen table on a wet afternoon, staring at the tea stain of unrequited love, or greet the dawn with a couple of empty bottles of Black Tower after deciphering our futures under the gaze of an Aubrey Beardsley poster. I hope I’ll never have to call on her again to carry me over the broken glass of heartbreak.

We left the beach, went back to my messy house, made coffee and toasted sandwiches, sat in the sun for a bit, before we braved the mephitic car back to the airport.

The past doesn’t recede. Memory is not biodegradable. It won’t be corseted or tucked away, or unknotted, or blotted, or abolished in a referendum. Memory is inconvenient and non-compliant and gregarious and fecund, and sometimes it is terrifying.

“The past never relinquishes us, does it?” I asked her well-trained mind.

She closed her eyes, lifted her face to the warmth.

“No,” she said quietly. “I don’t think it does.”