GUN ‘N’ ROSES ‘N’ FAST CARS

Or, MEMORY MUSIC

My brother was driving very fast on a flat grey racetrack, whizzing around. I was watching. I could hear the roar of the wheels and the motors, the squeals of sirens… The car somersaulted. I jerked out of my nightmare. But the wailing squeal was still there – the sound of the door buzzer squealing through my head. It was still dark, perhaps 2 in the morning. I stumbled to the door. I was not surprised to find my brother, with a scar on his face.

He had smashed up my father’s government car, while joy-riding with his friends. And instead of facing my father’s gentle sorrow and my mother’s hysterics, he had came to our house to lay low for a while until the storm blew over. Apart from his scratched face, no-one else was hurt.

I can’t remember much else of that particular episode- I can’t remember whether I had children? Was pregnant? It was many years ago. But I can remember the music. One bizarre consequence of it was that for one week or so afterwards my brother, accompanied by my husband, went out at 12:00 midnight every night to go and find a certain police officer, to bribe him in order to get back the car documents. I don’t know why they had to go out at midnight to meet the officer? 

And while they were waiting for midnight to go and catch the officer, they would watch Guns N’ Roses clips,  with the music very loud, in the living room.

With the result that, perhaps ten, or eight years later, whenever I hear the wail of Axel, or catch a glimpse of his pretty face with the red headband, or Slash with the  snakes, or two very pretty girls fighting in a bar, or a drowning green-eyed baby, or a wedding dress short in the front  and long and puffy in the back, on some tv or monitor screen, I am jerked back to that night, that dream, my brother coming up the stairs looking as if he is coming up from hell, vomiting with stress and worry, calling my parents and hearing my mother’s screams and sobs, eating factory-made creme-caramels at 2:30 in the morning and then having diarrhea…

And becasue I listen mainly to rock stations, I get to hear Guns almost every other day.

But of course, it is not just Guns.

As I rapidly approach my 35th birthday, I realise that almost all the music I actually like to listen to is deeply, deeply evocative of memories with my family… Nirvana: my father-in-law’s funeral. My sister lip-synching. Smooth: cooking in my mother’s kitchen while they were away to Mecca, for a month-long pilgrimage. And so on, and so on.

I need some new music. I need some new memories. But somehow, I think all the best songs have already been played. And I can have no more memories in this land of fog and distance.

Tags: families, family, life stories, memories, personal, random