I thought the voice had somehow been trapped back there in long-ago Virginney, a slave voice mourning in that alien place, and that I was briefly liberating it from the black bakelite to mourn and tremble in the afternoon stillness of a hall of a suburban house in Australia. A childhood caught in a clutter of memory-snapshots. Three years older than I, he had been from my first awareness my enemy, reasonably enough, being the supplanted knee-baby. Now we are friends, the only people alive in the world who know how it was with us once. But I did not question him.
Private memories are both the products and the possessions of the private self.
My brother's memories, like his experiences within our family household, are his. They will be quite unlike mine. Besides, it would only make trouble. We are notoriously dismissive of other people's recollections, and ferocious in defence of our own. Friendships, marriages, families, whole societies have foundered on contended accounts of the past.