'Muscle Memory' by Audrey Niven

There is a cine film of me, the overwhelming colour of which is orange. I am turning a cartwheel. Or maybe it’s someone else in the film. I don’t remember ever being able to turn a cartwheel and I’m not about to try it now, just to check if I have any muscle memory.

What I do remember is an orange glass dish. I am looking for it in the film when the cameraman, my mother’s uncle I think, sweeps round showing us the table and the picnic rug. There are Tupperware boxes of filled rolls and tinfoil parcels of cooked meat. You can’t see any of the vegetable salad but I know it was there because I can taste it, the orange and green and white of it, the bits and pieces squashed between teeth and tongue. There must have been lemonade. I want there to have been lemonade, but we were never allowed it.

The orange dish I am remembering had trifle in it; swiss roll, tinned fruit and jelly. It tasted of love.  It had no place at a picnic. I am probably remembering wrong, mixing up Christmas and cartwheels on the beach that actually might just be a back garden. I don’t know all the adults that were there.  One of them died not long after. One Aunt went back to Canada and we never saw her again. The other children, our cousins, grew up and away. 

There must be a video somewhere that isn’t orange, that has our children turning cartwheels too. And eating picnics on beaches that are gardens. I don’t know who has that old orange cine film now. I’d like to see it again, just to see if I am in it after all.