I was starting to perspire by this time. I stared down at the escalator, desperate. If the clown on my jumper had been able to move, it would now have been doing an impression of Munch’s The Scream. I had to do this, I thought to myself. Nothing was going to expose me as a country bumpkin more than running away from fancy stair technology. I looked down again and forced myself to walk onto it. It was then I realised the escalator wasn’t moving. It was just sitting there, its vicious teenager-chewing teeth motionless. Even I could figure out that a stationary escalator was essentially the same as stairs, and stairs were something I was familiar with. Stairs I could do. My confidence returned. I was going to do this, I was really going to do this! I was going to walk down an escalator like it was something I did every day and then I was going to waltz into my first day of work experience, crack some terribly witty gag about technology and everyone would think I was so cool they’d invite me to a disco.
I started walking down, thinking to myself, ‘I’m fitting in, look at me fitting in!’ I looked up to see if other people were noticing me, heedless of the need to watch where I was going and heedless of the fact that I was wearing what were about to become death-trousers. The culotte is a wide-legged pant, and not an article of clothing made for young women with coordination issues and a slightly scatterbrained approach to walking. As I gaily skipped down the non-moving escalator, the heel of one little shoe got caught in the cuff of the other little trouser leg and I tripped. I managed to grab hold of the handrail, saving myself from smashing headfirst into the steps, but my feet were gone from underneath me. I fell down the rest of the escalator. Or, more correctly, I half slid, half fell as I held onto the railing the whole way, making a loud squeaking noise as the rubber and the skin of my wrist fought a battle to see who could handle friction best. The rubber won.
Not surprisingly I caused quite a scene. As I lay on the shopping centre floor a few feet from the escalator, staring at the ceiling two floors above me, with rubber burns on one wrist and bleeding from one ankle, a security guard ran over. He knelt beside me and asked if I was all right. My stockings were in tatters, my woolly, clowny friend was skewed around my little flat chest and all the fight had gone out of me. Everything I had been working so hard to conceal sprang back to the surface and I uttered the first words that came into my head.
‘I’m from the country.’
No one invited me to a disco that night, although they did let me pop out to buy a new pair of stockings to replace the ones shredded by the escalator. They also gave me some Bandaids.
Now, just a few years later and living in Melbourne permanently, the trauma of that incident was still fresh in my mind. Thank god I went to a university that didn’t have escalators. And thank god I still had that clown jumper with me. I didn’t wear it anymore, of course, but I’d brought it down to Melbourne as a keepsake. With everyone else so far away, the bits and pieces I’d brought from home were the only things that kept me company: that clown jumper knew what I had been through; it was my friend.
I should have known I was in trouble. Once you start thinking your belongings are companions, there’s really no going back. I’d moved to Melbourne but I was living inside my head. Goodness knows what would have become of me if I had not met Adam. Without him, I may well have ended up living in a house full of tin foil and cats, wandering through its rooms, forever murmuring softly to the pictures on my clothes.
Chapter Four
Adam became a solid part of my life towards the end of my first full year of living in Melbourne. We’d met on the set of a student production of Romeo and Juliet. I was helping out on the administrative side of things (I was too shy to tell anyone I wanted to be a performer) and Adam was playing the Friar. How anyone could manage to turn a character as pious and earnest as that into a cross between Mr Humphries from Are You Being Served? and Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show is anyone’s guess, but Adam did it. He was the loudest, brashest, bravest person I had ever met. I never had the courage to actively befriend him, I just hovered around him long enough that, by the time he noticed me, he simply assumed I was part of his entourage.
From that time on, we wasted enormous chunks of our lives together, watching cable TV, gossiping, window shopping and fighting over the last biscuit in the packet. It was Adam who helped me to acclimatise to life in the big smoke: talking me through the etiquette of nightclubs; teaching me how to ride a tram without falling over; helping me to tell the difference between gay men and straight men. Eventually, I was even confident enough to ride on escalators on my own. With Adam’s guiding hand and hilariously acerbic wit, I slowly came out of my shell. I even managed to find myself a boyfriend, much to my own surprise.
His name was Thomas and he was kind, compassionate and funny and he came complete with a broken-down old car he called Gertrude and an equally broken-down old cat he called Santa. I was in awe of him right from the start. He was the most competent person I had ever met and nothing ever frightened him. Any problem I had, he knew how to solve it.
And he loved me.
That, above all else, was the most amazing thing in the world. Here was I, this ridiculous little country bumpkin who hung off the coat-tails of her best friend like her life depended on it and this man loved me. With Thomas by my side, I finally felt like I had found a place in the world.
When I broke up with him three years later, I lost that place again. I was stunned. After three years of watching the way Thomas approached life I was sure that it had rubbed off on me. I was wrong; it turned out I was only confident when he was around. It was Adam who held my hand through the most emotional times and when I moved out of the flat Thomas and I had shared, it was Adam who helped me find a new place to live. Or tried to help. Even Adam couldn’t help me find a place big enough to store all of my stuff.
When Thomas and I broke up, I’d volunteered to move out. I felt it was the least I could do, considering I was the one who had ended things. I dragged Adam to countless house inspections until I finally found the only thing I could afford: a piece of crap located just the other side of where anyone would visit. A month later, I’d still not unpacked. I couldn’t unpack. There was nowhere to put everything.
One day, as we were sitting in our favourite café and I was complaining for the hundredth time about my lack of storage, Adam finally snapped.
‘If you didn’t have so much shit, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Again.’ Adam tapped his coffee spoon on the table impatiently.
‘You’ve got just as much crap as me, probably more,’ I countered.
‘That’s different.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t bang on about it constantly!’ He pursed his lips, added another sugar and stirred his coffee. ‘I quietly live in my filth and keep my mouth shut.’
The idea of Adam ever keeping his mouth shut made me laugh out loud. I had once witnessed him telling a famous Australian soap-star-turned-pop-star that he had her CD—and did she want it back?
‘Adam, I swear you couldn’t possibly live in my place either. There’s only one cupboard. One cupboard! You’d be in just as much trouble as me.’
‘There’s a wardrobe, there’s the drawers and cabinets in the kitchen, there’s under your bed.’ He put down his coffee spoon and looked at me seriously. ‘There’s plenty of room, Corinne. Maybe you should think about getting rid of some of your stuff.’
I looked at him like he’d just announced I should find a random puppy and have it put down.
Secretly, I had no idea if Adam had more stuff than me. Until I’d moved, I hadn’t realised how much stuff I had myself. It had built up so incrementally, starting way back when I was still at university. The little grains of my childhood had slowly, almost imperceptibly, migrated down to Melbourne like sand shifting from one beach to another. Every time I went home I’d spy knick-knacks, old clothes or mementos I couldn’t live without and I’d bring them back with me. More often than not they never left the box
in which I’d packed them for the journey. In the beginning there’d been enough room for all of it. Now, there was barely enough room for me.
When I had started looking for a new place, I had known exactly what I wanted: a big apartment so that I could get all of my things out of storage. Cupboards had been my only prerequisite—not dishwashers or courtyards or gas heating—just cupboards. Thomas had never really known how much I owned. The first place we’d shared was tiny, with barely enough room for a bed and even less for the couch. We’d rented a storage cage until we found somewhere bigger and I’d locked away a stack of boxes without telling him what was in them. Better he thought I had a lot of important documents and family heirlooms than ten-year-old newspapers, broken computers and all of my high-school science projects. Likewise, there was no need for him to know that I had kept all of my socks since primary school. When we finally did move somewhere bigger—a large, sunny one-bedroom flat with floor-to-ceiling storage and a massive, tri-door built-in robe—I still didn’t pull my things out of storage. I’d got used to hiding them.
Adam and I had looked at flats for weeks, slowly radiating further and further out from the inner suburbs, trying to find a place with enough storage that was within my budget. We found nothing suitable at all. In fact, even taking the cupboards out of the equation, there simply weren’t any flats I could afford on my own in the inner suburbs. I was getting desperate. Living with Thomas had become unbearable for both of us. There is nothing more distressing than having to share a bed with the person you have just broken up with, except for a Celine Dion concert. I would go to bed, hearing him breathe beside me, and it was like I had been knocked over the head with a dull object and stunned. I felt like a fish about to be gutted.
On many of those nights I would close my eyes and will myself not to think about anything. I was scared that if I started to think about what it would be like to live on my own for the first time in my life, I might chicken out and decide to stay. I also didn’t want to think about how much pain I was causing Thomas. I had been too cowardly to tell him my real reason for leaving, instead giving him some cliché about us being at different stages in our lives. I didn’t want to hurt him with the simple, brutal fact that sometimes it feels more lonely in a relationship than on your own. We’d grown apart and I couldn’t see a way to fix it.
Still, lying beside him every night, listening to him breathe and wondering if he was really sleeping or just lying there, stunned and aching like I was, none of it felt right. It felt like I was severing myself from the best thing in my life. Thanks to Thomas, I was financially stable for the first time ever. I had order and rhythm and someone who was there at the end of every day. I had someone who killed spiders for me and held me when I cried; Thomas had always fixed the things I couldn’t. I thought that I would be able to do those things for myself once I left, but now, whenever I thought about life on my own, I went numb with panic. So I thought about the new flat instead.
Thankfully Adam had been doing an excellent job of distracting me whenever I started to falter, mainly by saying something ridiculous and making me laugh, or by taking me out and plying me with ice-cream. However, he was not helping with the house-hunting in the way I had hoped he would. As it became more and more apparent that what I wanted and what I could afford did not share the same postcode—or possibly not even the same city—I had lowered my expectations. Then I lowered them again. And again. Adam thought I was being ridiculous; I was now inspecting places where the walls didn’t even meet the floors. We would walk into a place, I’d look hopefully at Adam and he would mutter ‘E.A.D.’ then turn around and walk out. The first time he said it, I grabbed him by the arm just before he reached the front door.
‘What’s E.A.D.?’
Adam looked at me over his shoulder, one eyebrow cocked.
‘It stands for “Eats A Dick”. My sister invented it. If you see something that’s shit, like, for example, your shoes or this house, then you say “E.A.D.” Got it?’
I got it. Every house I looked at ate a dick. Some of them ate three or four dicks and looked like they were suffering not only from the threat of demolition but also dick-based indigestion. I applied for all of them. I was always surprised and a little insulted when my application was turned down. When a real estate agent decides you’re not good enough to rent a slum, it’s hard not to take it personally.
Eventually, after four weeks of solid disappointment, rejection and sleeping in the same bed as my heartbreakingly patient ex-boyfriend, I found a real estate agency that was willing to rent me one of their finest hovels. When I had inspected it, it was full of broken furniture, a broken shower screen and a bathroom so mouldy it was like walking into the Little Mermaid’s grotto—if the Little Mermaid had been a sloppy old tart with scant regard for legionnaires’ disease. The sinking feeling in my chest told me this was going to be my new home even before I handed in the application form.
The landlord apologised profusely and told me that of course it would be cleaned before I took up tenancy. It wasn’t. Two days after moving in I discovered it was also infested with fleas and what I had thought was yellow paint on the walls was really white paint stained yellow with nicotine. As exciting as it was to realise I was living in Hell, nothing compared to then discovering that the five men who lived in the one-bedroom flat next door were running what I strongly suspected was a methamphetamine lab. If I hadn’t been so depressed, I probably would have rung the landlord and complained. Instead, I lay down on the old futon that was the only useful thing I had found in the storage cage and stayed there for two days.
And worse than all this, worse than not having Thomas and being covered in flea bites and living in what now appeared to be the inspiration for the television show CSI, my new flat had only one cupboard. I spent days just staring at all of the boxes. It never occurred to me to go through them or to throw anything out, instead I hoped that by staring at them and doing nothing that they would . . . I would . . . that maybe . . . I don’t know. I was just hoping the problem would disappear.
On one of those miserable days, in a desperate attempt to distract myself from everything, I decided to invent a sliding scale of hoarding. I was procrastinating, I knew that, but I didn’t know what else to do. Maybe if I wrote it all down, I’d be able to see where I fitted in the greater scheme of things. Maybe I’d see that things weren’t so bad after all.
This is what I came up with:
LEVEL 1: These people are so neat and tidy, it’s terrifying. They are possibly aliens. Not only are they not hoarders themselves, they have probably never even met a hoarder. They live in houses that look like they have come straight from the pages of Vogue Living. A quick check of their linen cupboard would reveal that all their towels are the same colour and are all folded exactly the same. There is nothing on the kitchen benches—in fact, there is nothing on any of their surfaces except bowls of fruit or flower arrangements or perhaps some kind of weird African artefact reminiscent of something you’d expect to see being used as a murder weapon in a TV crime show. They have a special cupboard just for their kettle. The coffee table holds nothing but one magazine, probably the latest edition of Vogue Living.
LEVEL 2: As above but they have bookshelves. It is just possible to discern that the people living here have personalities.
LEVEL 3: Everything is still neat and tidy but a bit more quirky. There is a collection of something—perhaps antique toy cars—displayed in a wooden box with little compartments for each car. There are mixed cushions and throws and framed prints, each accompanied by an anecdote about where it was found or who gifted it. There might be an artfully arranged collection of hardcover books, stacked one on top of the other with a lamp resting on top.
LEVEL 4: Some of the more quirky pieces are starting to look a lot less like artistic statements and more like twenty-first birthday presents the owners do not have the heart to throw out. There is just a little too much furniture in each room and there is stuff hidden u
nder the bed. If there is a copy of Vogue Living on the coffee table, it’s been there for six months.
LEVEL 5: The pile of books with the lamp on top looks unstable and is in addition to a real lampstand. There are cushions that match nothing and some of them are hideous. One has a picture of cats on it. There is a pile of magazines, various bits of mail and unpaid bills on the coffee table. There is a bowl of random ‘things to be fixed’ on the kitchen bench. There are magnets smothering the door of the refrigerator holding letters, old cartoons from the back page of the newspaper and out-of-date council notices about hard rubbish collection. There is another refrigerator in the shed.
The only note stuck to it reads: ‘To be fixed.’
LEVEL 6: To the untrained eye, these houses may not look much worse than the average, slightly untidy suburban home. Just don’t open the cupboards or try to put something in the boot of their car. These people have been known to fill their saucepans and casserole dishes with old letters and postcards, pop the lids back on and shove them in a cupboard. The bookshelves contain not only books but paperwork, folders, boxes, ornaments and novelty coffee mugs. There are throws placed over desks and occasional tables to camouflage the piles of paperwork hidden underneath. Opening a cupboard normally involves using a free hand to stop everything falling out. There is a room that no one goes into and no one talks about.
LEVEL 7: One or more family members have had to move out or die to make room for the stuff. Most rooms in the house are unusable and moving around or sitting down involves shifting things. Even the dining chairs are piled with an assortment of crap and the tablecloth is spread in such a fashion as to hide it. There are rusting and broken bits of things in the yard. There is no hiding this amount of stuff and even the neighbours can tell that a hoarder lives next door.
Lessons in Letting Go Page 3