I had just started looking for my pyjamas when the phone rang. It was Thomas.
‘Hey.’
‘Hey, what’s up?’
‘Oh . . . nothing.’ I didn’t want to admit how useless I was.
‘Well, I just got burgled. They took all the good stuff and trashed everything else. You don’t have to come around, but I’ve opened a bottle of Jameson’s.’
Of course I was coming around. I jumped in my car and drove straight to his house, fretting all the way. He’d only just moved in, it didn’t seem fair. Still, this was something that I’d heard happened: people moved into a new place and the boxes out the front tipped off would-be burglars that there might be new stuff inside. Thomas had moved in, plonked the packaging from his new entertainment system out on the nature strip and, two days later, arrived home to discover most of his major appliances and a great number of the smaller ones were missing.
When I got there he was all business, making an inventory of everything that had been stolen. Just as he’d said, the place was completely trashed. The TV and stereo were gone leaving nothing but a few wires hanging out of the walls. His wardrobes had been ransacked and what the thieves hadn’t wanted they’d dumped on the floor. They’d even used his suitcases to carry out his clothes. It was the disrespect that upset me the most, and if it had been my house, I would have been a wailing mess. Not Thomas—he was pouring whiskey, and as more friends turned up, he happily took them on a tour of the destruction.
To Thomas, stuff was just stuff. It came, it went and then you spent an enjoyable weekend wandering around appliance stores with your insurance payout replacing it all. As I walked through each room, I remembered when we had lived together and he had shown me all his childhood possessions. They all fitted in one child-sized toy suitcase—that was it. I can remember internally shuddering, not only at the horror of how much he must have thrown away, but at the envy I felt: looking at that case was like watching the devil do a sexy dance. Sure, throwing out my stuff would be like killing my own children, but looking at how little Thomas had kept, it was also deliciously tempting. He seemed so unencumbered.
Around midnight, slightly tipsy from the whiskey, I decided to leave my car where it was and take a taxi. My chin in my hand, I stared out the window the whole way home, watching the darkened houses slip by and pondering how different the pair of us were. Tom was braver than me. Lots braver. Perhaps I would be able to pack my flat if I had him beside me. I thought about it. Was it inappropriate to ask my ex-boyfriend to help me move? No. He’d asked me to come around when he needed help, it was perfectly reasonable for me to do the same. We were friends now, this was what friends did and besides, he was the only person who would know exactly how to fix everything for me. I couldn’t ask him right away though, he’d just been robbed, he needed some time to heal. I decided to leave it for a couple of days.
In the end, I left it until the day before I had to move out. I still hadn’t packed a thing. I was saucer-eyed by the time I called him.
‘Tom, I haven’t started. My flat . . . it’s . . . I know I should have, but I didn’t, I don’t know what to do. Could you—’
He offered to help before I even got the words out. I felt my lungs expand for the first time in a week. Then I started to feel like a drama queen. Other people could pack their houses without dragging their ex-boyfriends around to help; why couldn’t I? I hadn’t rung Adam because I knew that he would have told me to grow up and get on with it. I’d rung Thomas because I knew he’d come. What had I done?
Feeling guilty, I pulled myself together and started the work I should have already finished. By the time Thomas turned up a few hours later, I had managed to pack the bookcases and most of my clothes. I’d also attempted to pack away anything I was too embarrassed for him to see, such as the stuffed-toy collection and two broken computers, the necessity of which I had a feeling he wouldn’t understand. I didn’t have enough time to get to all of it though. Even if I’d started a month ago, I wouldn’t have had time to get to all of it.
When I heard his knock, I ran to the door and opened it nervously. Oddly enough, even though we were spending a lot of time together, this was the first time he had seen where I lived. I had been back to the place we had shared a few times; once he had rung me in a panic to say his trousers were too long and I needed to come around and take them up for him. We had been due at an awards ceremony in less than an hour and I stood at the kitchen bench in my formal frock and full hair and make-up, feverishly hemming as he stood in his underwear and watched out the door for the cab to arrive. As he made some joke about me looking like a housewife from the fifties, I couldn’t help thinking how lucky I was that we were still friends. I also couldn’t help thinking how much I wished I still lived somewhere this nice.
Now Thomas was standing in the middle of the mess that was my dank, smelly lounge room, staring wide-eyed and saying, ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph. If they had broken into your place instead of mine, how would you have been able to tell?’
We worked to a system; Thomas assembled the boxes, I chose what would go in each and then he packed it away. We had an enormous amount to get through, preferably before dawn. Ominously, he drew out a garbage bag, fluffed it open, then said casually, ‘And this one’s for the rubbish.’
A little trickle of sweat ran down my back. I needed Thomas to help me pack, not to throw things out. If the bursting garbage bag of clothes had taught me anything, it was that getting rid of stuff was not a decision that could be made rashly. I had that other bag of clothes waiting to go to charity in a year or so, that was more than enough for now. But from the look of determination on Thomas’ face, I had an awful feeling I was going to have to justify some of my belongings. I decided the best plan of action would be to explain each of the things as I handed them over, then he would understand why they couldn’t be thrown out. This is what I like to call ‘farm logic’: you can kill an unnamed chicken for your dinner, but you can’t kill a chicken called Betty. Who could? Betty probably had relatives that would miss her. I was going to ‘Betty-up’ my stuff. I laid my hands on a tattered old book and held it up enthusiastically, grinning like I was the host of a children’s show.
‘Oh! Would you look at that! This is the first cookbook I bought when I had just moved out of home. It had a recipe for a bean casserole that I cooked nearly every second night because I couldn’t figure out how the—’
‘Pass it to me so I can pack it, Corinne.’
‘Yes, of course. Sorry.’ He was right, I couldn’t carry on about everything I owned, we would be here all night. Maybe I only needed to Betty-up things that looked really borderline.
‘Oh look! This is the cassette-tape holder I made in year nine. I remember my woodwork teacher, Mr Tobin. He was a lovely man, he had a—’
‘Corinne, I need to put it in a box.’
‘Okay then, you do that.’ Jeez. I was just telling a little story that I thought might amuse him. He didn’t seem to care at all.
‘Hey! Here’s the Hello Kitty clock your parents gave me! Remember? I think it was for Christmas, or was it my birthday? No, wait, it might have been—’
‘Corinne, you’re not reminiscing, you’re packing. You can go through it all when you unpack tomorrow.’
Wow. I couldn’t believe he didn’t want to talk about the clock. I shut up and reminisced to myself instead. Here was the cheese grater that my grandmother used. It was all rusted around the bottom but as long as your tetanus shots were up to date, you could still grate with the top half of it. Oh! Here was the Noddy and Big Ears placemat that I had used every night at dinner when I was a little girl; there was Noddy having a cup of tea with Mr Tubby Bear, while Mr Wobbly Man stood in the foreground talking to Mrs Tubby Bear. Big Ears wasn’t in the picture at all. Odd. Why wouldn’t you—
‘Corinne, you going to pass me that?’
‘Sorry. Sure.’ I handed it over and started fondling my Days of Our Lives coffee mug. Everything held a memo
ry. Everything made me think of something else. The Bettying-up was backfiring.
‘This broken bread bin goes in the garbage bag, yes?’
He said it gently but even so, his tone indicated it wasn’t really a question. Before I could answer, he threw it out. I was shocked. Could he do that? I supposed he was right—it was broken—but it was also a bit wasteful. A broken bread bin could have been used as a window box for some geraniums. I would need to glue the crack in its side back together, drill some holes in the bottom and maybe see if I could extend it upwards so that it was deep enough to hold plants, but it could be done.
‘Umm . . . Thomas? That belonged to my mother.’
‘And now it’s broken and in the rubbish. Would you like to take it back out and post it to her?’
I couldn’t fault his logic, although I really wanted to—I remembered that bread bin from primary school. We always had Sunicrust bread sitting in it and every so often, on rare and beautiful days, Mum would reluctantly give in to my and Wendy’s pestering and make us jam sandwiches instead of ones with proper ingredients.
‘It’s just that it reminds me of my childhood.’
‘So does every other thing we’ve packed. How many reminders do you need? You’ve got the pencils and the pencil cases, all the schoolwork, the school uniforms, the school photos. Unless you are about to tell me that you’ve got Alzheimer’s, surely you can remember your childhood without all of this.’
Maybe, maybe not. It would be too late to know after I’d thrown it all out. We worked on and on. Occasionally Thomas would throw something out and, even more occasionally, I would let it stay in the rubbish. If it wasn’t broken, I refused to let it stay there. As the hours passed I could see his jaw tightening and his teeth starting to grind. At around 2 a.m.—as I handed him what appeared to be a baby’s bath seat—he lost it.
‘What the hell is this?’
I shrugged. ‘How should I know?’
‘Then why are you keeping it? What the hell is half the stuff I’ve put in these boxes? Where did all this crap come from, Corinne? I’ve never seen it before.’
Well no, he hadn’t. I’d cleverly hidden it all away in storage when we were living together.
‘What the hell are you doing with a baby’s bath anyway?’
‘Um . . .’
‘Well then, I’m chucking it out.’
‘No! You can’t! It’s . . .’
‘It’s what? You don’t even know whose it is! Jesus. Were you auditioning for a role in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle? Get rid of it before I start thinking you’ve lost your mind.’
I sulkily threw it in the garbage bag in the kitchen that was steadily filling with my belongings. Or someone’s belongings. I had to admit that the baby’s bath seat was confusing, as was the yellow plastic dish drainer that we had found in the bathroom, hidden amongst the towels. I guess I had picked this stuff up from old share-houses when no one else claimed it. I was getting the uneasy feeling that perhaps I might have a few things in my possession that normal people did not. Still, I felt sick throwing them out. What if I remembered their significance tomorrow? Or the next day? It would be too late to retrieve them and they would be gone forever.
‘Corinne. What in Christ’s name am I holding?’
That’s when Thomas found the sticks. The rational part of my brain disappeared.
‘Please don’t make me throw them out.’
I was crying. These were real tears; I wasn’t Bettying-up my stuff now, I simply couldn’t bear to part with anything else. I felt utterly pathetic insisting on a photo of those sticks but I couldn’t stop myself. That’s the problem with addicts: if all it took for us to stop was knowing it was wrong, we wouldn’t have a problem in the first place. And like a true addict, doing the wrong thing instantly made me feel better. By taking that picture I got what I wanted: I got to avoid regret.
We finished packing around 4 a.m. and Thomas left cranky and exhausted. I only managed to get three hours’ sleep before the removalists arrived. It didn’t matter to me. I was packed, I had my photo of the sticks, I’d rescued most of my things from the garbage bag and I was going back to the sunshine flat. Everything was going to be okay.
I watched anxiously as every single box was carried out to the van. I irritated the removalists with all my questions: ‘Are you sure things won’t move around?’ ‘What if you go over a speed hump?’ ‘What about if you have to brake suddenly?’ ‘Or slowly? Will things move then?’ ‘On second thoughts, I’ll take that mirror back out of the truck and put it in my car instead. I wouldn’t cope if anything happened to it.’ ‘Okay. I’ll go back inside and check I haven’t forgotten anything.’ ‘Are you sure that I can’t—okay, I’m going.’
I drove behind the van the whole way to the new flat, keeping an eye on the back doors just in case one of them unexpectedly flew open.
I started unpacking in the new place as soon as the last removalist walked out the door. I ran around the little lounge room and bedroom like I was on speed. In less than a week there was not a thing out of place—nothing hidden under tables or chairs, nothing piled up on the coffee table or down the side of the fridge. There was even one whole cupboard above the European-style laundry that remained empty. I can remember thinking that the architect wouldn’t have included so many cupboards if that wasn’t the amount an everyday person needed. Clearly I did not have a problem at all. Never mind that it had taken the removalists nearly the whole day to move me in, never mind that it had cost me nearly one thousand dollars to do it, never mind that Thomas thought that I was certifiably nuts. The packing, the move, the money, it was all worth it because now I was living like a normal person.
And I hadn’t had to throw out any of my precious belongings to do it.
Part 3
Where It Collapsed
Chapter Nine
I can’t put a finger on the exact date when it fell apart. It probably started the day after I moved in and I didn’t notice because I was so busy with the rest of my life. Things must have imperceptibly shifted themselves from the outside world into my house. It wasn’t as if I actively went out and gathered possessions—I didn’t buy unnecessary clothes or books or knick-knacks—it was just that if something entered my house, it never left again. I wasn’t so much a consumer as a hostage taker.
Over time, I got myself into a beautiful rhythm. Adam would come around every Monday night and we would sit on the balcony and gossip until the wine ran out. (The wine bottles were stacked up in the kitchen, waiting to be turned into candle-holders like I’d seen in French cafés.) Thomas, myself and a bunch of friends would catch up every weekend and occasionally we would go away on trips together. (There were photos and souvenirs from these trips somewhere in the flat, I just didn’t know where.) I even managed to get myself into a hopeless relationship with a musician that was so tenuous as to almost not exist. (There were letters from him stashed in a drawer, I just wasn’t sure which one.) My life had gone on as usual; the stuff must have crept in when I wasn’t looking.
The only real change had been to Thomas’ love life. He had met a beautiful woman called Sarah and it was obvious this was going to be a long-term thing. I surprised Adam by being thrilled when I heard the news. I didn’t want to explain it to him, but the guilt over breaking up with Tom had never left me. It was the most hurt I had ever inflicted on another person, and the look on his face when I had said I was leaving was something I couldn’t forget. It was even worse now I was back in our old flat. Often when I closed my eyes at night I could still see him—standing in the kitchen, right between the kitchen bench and the wall heater—his whole body seeming to shrink as he realised that I was really going. Ever since moving back I had not been able to sit on my couch because, if I did, I was staring straight at that spot and the whole awful thing would come back to me. It was the little girl in Waltons magnified to the power of infinity. But now Thomas had Sarah. Maybe my guilt would finally pack its bags and go.
; The stuff, however, would not. The whole apartment was a catastrophe. It seemed like it hadn’t taken any time at all for the cupboards to fill up (including the one above the laundry) and I had resorted to hiding things on the dining chairs, stacking things against walls and hiding bits and pieces under the couch cushions. I was back at Level Seven and I knew I had to do something about it. So once again, I decided to make a start.
Things did not go to plan.
Every box I pulled out was too hard to deal with, so instead of going through it, I pulled out another one hoping to find that holy grail: the box that held nothing I wanted to keep. All I found were a lot of old memories—and not all of them were good. In one box I found the order of service from every funeral I had ever been to. In another, I found a letter I had written and never sent to some boy who had broken my heart in the early nineties. This was not like the time I had gone through my clothes; these were not the time machines I was hoping to find at all. It was like I had psychologically booby-trapped my own house. I carefully re-folded everything and put it back in the box, ready to be pulled out in another few years to distress me all over again.
I abandoned the box idea and homed in on the paperwork. It had managed to infiltrate the entire flat. Every cupboard was stacked with files and folders and plastic sleeves of god knew what. There was even paperwork in the wardrobe and the linen closet. I’d never kept a diary, I’d just written on whatever piece of blank paper I could lay my hands on at the time. I employed the same method for joke or story ideas, shopping lists, recipes, people’s addresses and phone numbers. As a result, I had stacks of scribbled-on envelopes, notepads, post-it notes and paper bags. I even once found half an idea for a play written on a sandwich wrapper. None of this stuff was filed together. It had snuck into every drawer and shelf and was stashed in piles artfully concealed by a sarong. I had created a paper-based diaspora.
I rounded up as much as I could and started sorting through it. It was imperative that I read every note, every script, every list; I might have unknowingly written a Nobel Prize–winning thought on a supermarket docket. There was so much of it that I soon realised I’d be applying for the pension before I finished. I jumbled it together and shoved it under my desk in the space where the office chair was supposed to fit.
Lessons in Letting Go Page 8