We all make mistakes in our lives.
An unkind word spoken in anger, or a lack of judgement concerning financial matters; seemingly simple mistakes can have wide-reaching consequences that we never anticipated. A late rent payment means the landlord doesn’t have the funds to fix the water cylinder at another property and a family of six has to go without showers for a week. The father loses his job, one of the children gets an infection – and the tired and distracted mother encounters some hapless pedestrian who tries to cross a busy road without waiting for the lights; hitting them with her car and killing them.
One small mistake can lead to catastrophic consequences for a completely unrelated party.
Observing the patterns of these events, you begin to see connected threads, and a bigger picture forms. Deliberate choices are the things with the most massive repercussions, each one containing the ability to make or break lives without most of us even knowing.
I suppose you could call me a sort of ‘master’ of predicting the outcomes of choices.
Growing up, reading was one of the few luxuries that I was allowed, since it kept me quiet, still and docile. I would read anything, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Anne McCaffrey, so long as it was fictional. One day I stumbled across a Nicholas Fisk book – science fiction – and in it I found a concept that deeply disturbed me.
What if none of your memories are real?
The book explored the lives of a family, cloned from the graves of long dead people, who had implanted memories of their daily activities outside the house, even though they never actually left the house. Curiously, they began to feel their confinement, even though they remembered running through open fields just hours before. It was as if some primitive part of their brains were still aware what had actually happened, and what was fake.
But the idea of not knowing which memories were real frightened me intensely. What if my entire life up until this point was all fantasy? What if I had been freshly grown from a vat, and this car trip was the first real memory of my life?
It was then that I resolved to burn that memory into my mind, to recall holding that book, on the grey pleather back seat, with houses and trees crawling past as the car drove home. I memorised the smell of the air, the curve of the metal window frame and the pinch of the seatbelt.
Most of all, I sought to capture that moment of feeling everything was real, the feeling that I was aware and knew that this wasn’t an implanted memory.
As the days and weeks passed, my fears about the concept of false memories faded away, replaced by worries about aliens invading Earth and global nuclear war.
But the memory itself did not fade with the fear, and I recalled it often.
If I were to rate, on a scale of one to ten, how good my life was, originally I think I would have said about a three. My father was in prison for sexual assault of a minor by the time I was fourteen, and shortly after that my mother was put into psychiatric care.
As for me? I was too old to adapt to the life of a foster child, and too damaged to be adopted.
Where once I sought surcease from reality in books, I now found that they couldn’t block out the moil of emotions bubbling near the surface at all times.
So I turned first to alcohol, then to drugs.
I coped for a little while like that, trying to at least be a little smart. I got a job at a fast food place and tried to get a degree through correspondence courses. When I fell pregnant, then needed to drive halfway across the country three times to access the convoluted public abortion services, I took too much unauthorised time off work and lost my shitty job.
Unable to pay my drug debts, or afford the final trip to the clinic, I ended up having my first baby at eighteen. Life took a predictably miserable turn from there; two more kids, at nineteen and twenty-one – the second from a rape at the hands of my dealer – then depression, which led to obesity and undiagnosed diabetes. That culminated in the loss of my left foot.
When they took my kids away from me, I almost cried with relief.
At the tender age of twenty-three, pregnant with my fourth child and sleeping on a flea-infested mattress in the back of a garage, I decided to end it all.
This was a hole there was no climbing out of. Short of some stranger putting me through detox, a miracle curing my hepatitis, and the sudden appearance of a functional support network of friends and family, the best years of my life were already gone.
I remember staring into the mirror of a public bathroom, aghast at my reflection. My once-olive skin was pocked and cratered, my eyes pouchy and my cheeks flabby with fatigue and stress. Every part of me wobbled as I limped away from the reflection with the lank, filthy brown hair.
In a toilet cubicle, with a plastic bottle filled with dirty tap water, I choked down the pills I’d stolen from the supermarket.
And so ended my first life.
