Memory won't be weighed or measured

Fiftysomething:I recently accompanied my octogenarian mother to a medical assessment, where she was asked to perform a memory test. She scored eight out of 10. Counting backwards from 20, she only disregarded the number 11, and she opted for 1914 as the year of the Easter Rising. I could have told the nurse that my mother's flimsy grasp of Irish history had nothing to do with her age and was probably because she was looking out the convent window humming My Heart Belongs to Daddy when that particular chapter was being covered.

Eight out of 10 is fair enough.

The mind is a mysterious planet. Why do some minds endure and some shred? Why does memory ebb and flow like a coarse sea?

Driving home from the clinic, I was thinking about a friend of mine who is now quite elderly, although age and time no longer matter to her. She spent her life working in television and theatre, and, before her memory splintered and her words began to riot, before conversation with her felt like butterfly-catching without a net, she often spoke about her working life.

She told me of the industrial grind of English repertory, the haunted, cheerless and freezing digs, her break into television in the 1960s; the vagaries of an actor’s life that soared and dipped, from limousine rides in London, to praying for a vegetarian option in Mullingar.

I met her after she had moved back to Ireland more than 20 years ago. We were in a play together in the Peacock Theatre. She had to cry every night on stage and I would watch her, and on the same word, the same incline of her head, the tears would come, night after night.

“Is that a trick?” I asked her.

“No,” she replied. “It’s practice.”

She was the most diligent actor I ever met: the script was her bible, her dedication to her craft religious, and the work endured, right up to the first frost of her disease.

Fifteen years ago or so, we were rehearsing a different play, one that I had written. It was autobiographical, unrefined, still rough around the edges, despite a previous London production. My friend was playing the grandmother; her character was an irascible old bag, who wore man-sized slippers and carried a rifle.

We were rehearsing in a disused section of an old psychiatric hospital. The room we worked in was just about bright and airy enough to keep the company’s spirits up. Beyond our small republic, though, the damp corridors and disused rooms – some haunted by metal bed frames or hard-backed chairs – felt weighted with something like fear.

That hospital may have been a ghost but it hadn’t realised it was dead. Outside, an enclosed courtyard and rusting window grills added to a sense that we and our notions, our fripperies, our art, were unwelcome intruders. I could feel the brickwork’s mockery; it would take more than a two-act drama to shake its great institutional authority.

One lunchtime I returned from buying a sandwich and found my friend standing in the empty rehearsal room. We were nearing the first night of the production and she was wearing pieces of her costume: the slippers, a baggy washed-out cardigan. She looked shaken.

“I was walking along the corridor,” she explained, “running my lines to myself, and all of a sudden I wasn’t sure who I was. I had stepped outside of myself. I was looking at a woman in a baggy cardigan and ragged slippers pacing up and down a corridor, mumbling to herself, the same speech over and over. And the awful sadness was that the woman, the me, thought she was an actor rehearsing a play in a disused hospital. She thought that she could leave. And I didn’t know who I was. Was I me or was I her? We were indistinguishable.”

“You are an actor,” I told her. “You are rehearsing a play in a disused hospital. Those aren’t your slippers; they belong to wardrobe.”

She smiled at me, my old friend.

“You are you,” I reassured her.

When I last saw her, there was a moment when the skein of her disease evaporated. She looked at me with her penetratingly blue eyes and became, momentarily, entirely present.

“Were we marvellous friends?” she asked as I was leaving.

“Yes,” I answered, “we were. We are.”

How can you test memory? Memory won’t be corralled. Memory has no time for being weighed and measured. Memory is its own kingdom and if it feels like dancing on the table tops or disregarding the occasional number 11 or being a tad premature with a revolution, so what? Memory has got more important things to do than form-filling.

Hell, if the nurse had asked my mother what colour shoes she wore at a dinner dance in 1957, she could probably have recited the menu as well.