In the forbidden dusk of our lounge stood a dresser, tenderly carved from perfect wood. Where the sun slithered through the gap in the brocade curtains, the wood glowed deep gold, streaked with chestnut from the history of its years in some tropical forest. I held my breath that summer morning and pushed at the door, fearful of the timeless vacuum sucking the air from my lungs and leaving me to drown in the stillness. Time hung, refusing to keep tempo with the restless traffic along our suburban street. Even the shrill voices of my brother and sister arguing in the garden merged and soaked into the heat rippling off the white patio stones.
The carpet was an ugly gold with a pattern that never resolved itself into any meaning, although I had sat on it often enough, trying to trace one into the brown and cream interlocking blocks. The curtains were too heavy for their own strength and bent the plastic curtain rail where they met, twisting the hooks sideways to display their faded cream lining. It was into this gap that the sun urged itself when it had climbed high enough to launch its daily assault. The dust danced and slid down the threads of light, burrowing into the heavy pile of the carpet, until my footsteps ruffled it into luminous clouds, to slide down the threads again.
The most pleasing thing about the dresser was the way the doors opened. The catches clung to their metal facings as I tugged, before giving way with a soft click. The doors tipped smoothly to the horizontal and lay placidly, waiting for me to tiptoe and peep inside. I always released the highest door first, like a child illicitly opening the last window on her advent calendar. Inside stood a sherry bottle, filled with a mysterious, dark green liquid that I knew from past Christmases was a disappointing brown when it slipped into the glasses. The sherry fumes had permeated the wood and I pushed my face as far into the space as I dared, inhaling the lingering, spicy sweetness. It was the aroma that the adults breathed out on their hushed ‘Amen’ when we knelt in a row at the altar and I flinched at the priest’s heavy hand on my head.
Next to the bottle were six upturned glasses. They were the most exquisite things I had ever seen, with fragile stems and delicate, frosted leaves twisting round the rims. My fingers, usually so quick to poke themselves into anything that interested them, stayed firmly inside my clenched fists, fearful of their solid inflexibility.
After the first moment of hushed communion, I closed the cabinet and knelt at the lower door, the carpet prickling my bare knees. My fingers slid assuredly under the hidden catch and tugged until the flap drifted down on a pillow of air. The lower compartment was musty with the redolence of what felt to me great swathes of time, although my parents would hardly have agreed. On the left hand side stood three photograph albums. The largest had originally boasted a white, cushioned cover, now matured to a buttery cream and etched with silvery letters announcing, ‘Our Wedding’. I leafed through this book at every stolen opportunity, gazing admiringly at my mother as she danced up the church path beside my grandfather, swishing her white ballerina dress into a tulip. I wondered every time that I saw her how she moved through that day on those delicate, white heels, far higher than anything I had ever seen her wear as I toddled after her to the shops or around the garden.
The next two albums had pedestrian, black card covers. The first opened to scores of photographs of my sister as a newborn with brilliant red curls, lying on a succession of rugs in various rooms and chuckling fatly. After the endless stream of baby pictures - unnecessarily numerous in my opinion - she began to appear as a toddler, hair gradually growing fairer, gazing solemnly at my brother as he kicked and squealed in his turn on the rugs. There were rather fewer pictures of him. I always held my breath as I turned over the last page to see myself first appear on life’s stage, startled, with a mop of dark, damp hair falling in my eyes, hair almost as black as my brother’s. There were only three pictures of me as a baby, one on the obligatory rug and two in a pram. Perhaps only the wonder of that first new life had to be pinned down in shiny Kodachrome before anyone could truly believe in it.
The final album contained a record of all our school days. My sister, as ever, looked serious about the whole business, with her tidy, blond plaits and white socks pulled up to the correct length, no matter what she was doing. My brother was usually in the background, kicking footballs at walls or bushes and I made most of my appearances perched in our apple tree, half-hidden behind the covers of various books. I asked my mother once why there were so few pictures of me during my toddler years, while my sister filled half the pages of an album, and she told me she and my father had hardly ever found time for photos with three young children to care for. I thought it careless of them to deprive me of that whole slice of life which takes place before any real memories emerge, at least any that are in colour.
To me, the most interesting thing about this last album was that it was only half full. The most recent picture was of my sister giving the leaving speech in her capacity as head girl of our Junior School. She stood on the stage, neat as ever, with the air of one who has already moved into her future and has little regret for those things she leaves behind. I, on the other hand, clung to every passing phase of life until it was wrested from me, and wasted much of the new stage in yearning for the old. On that summer’s day, this was the final picture and stretching ahead of it were eleven empty pages. Our futures would be written there but the grey pages gave no hint of what they might one day contain - a thought that both charmed and frightened me.
Generally I closed this last album with regret and tiptoed to the door, pausing behind it long enough to feel the whereabouts of everyone else in the house before I slid out and down the hall. On this particular day my mother was still in the kitchen and I knew I would be seen unless I waited for her to leave. I replaced the three albums carefully. On their right was a long row of National Geographic maganes, all dating from two decades back and of no previous interest to me. During my enforced penance today they looked more appealing so I tugged at the most protruding one. As I did so, an envelope slid from between its pages and flopped onto the dresser door. It was not the business-like envelope that demands a renewed subscription, promising a free gift in return for promptness. It was a translucent rectangle with the flap tucked in rather than sealed.
My fingers knew what they would do even before my mind complied and I felt them run beneath the delicate flap and ease it back. There were a few faded photographs inside and I held the first one by the corner as I studied it, careful to leave no fingerprints. My mother was propped against the pillows in a bed I didn’t recognise, certainly not in our current house, cradling a tiny baby protectively in her arms. She was shielding her face from the camera as she looked helplessly down at him, her finger just touching the waxy cheek beneath the closed, blue-veined eyelids. He had the faintest wisp of fair hair on his head. I looked at him – I was sure it was a boy – for a long moment, then slid the photograph back into the envelope without removing the others.
I think that I sat for a long time on the thick carpet. Certainly I never heard my mother finish her work and go upstairs. Gradually, the creaking of the boards as she moved around the room above me and the thud of my brother’s ball on the garden fence, brought me from a past that for once I had no wish to explore and back into our living room. I slipped the envelope between the pages again and forced the magazine as hard as I dared back into its space. The dresser door rose smoothly and clicked shut and I stood behind the lounge door for the last time, hoping for once to hear the noises of the day. But the hall was deserted and there was no-one around even to hear the door close.
