Lessons in Letting Go

by Corinne Grant

  The new desk was not really new at all, it belonged to my father, but since he and my mother were moving into a two-bedroom flat, they would not have room for it anymore. I had always coveted it. It was a beautiful roll-top with a wood veneer finish and it came with lockable drawers, an inlaid green leather work surface and a desk calendar from 1977. My crappy grey one paled in comparison. I put up a notice in the landing area of our block of flats advertising my wares. I was so proud of myself, I thought that this must be what it felt like to be a normal person, whatever normal was.

  It was weird when I thought about it; I couldn’t figure out how other people did it. How did everyone else survive without all of their stuff? I walked back from the landing into my apartment and looked around. Here was Thomas’ sofa, here were my grandmother’s saucepans, here were all my cassette tapes from when I was a teenager. Maybe it was because of all of this stuff that I was able to keep going forward. As much as my things annoyed me and took up room and left me with nowhere to sit, I doubted that I could have got by without them. Whenever I felt scared or lonely or unable to cope, there was a book from my childhood or a vase from my mother or an oil burner from an aunt to keep me company. And when even that didn’t work, I could distract myself from whatever painful situation I was in by rearranging things and pretending I was tidying up. When other people moved house, they threw things out, gave things away, left things behind. I didn’t. I couldn’t. When I moved house, I dragged everything along behind me like a snake that should have shed its skin but instead kept it hanging off the end of its tail. And without Thomas by my side, I wasn’t about to let go of it all now.

  It was the stuff that had got me through the emotional turmoil of the first few months in the new flat. There were so many things about this place that freaked me out. Every morning since moving in I’d been woken by an old man walking past my bedroom window muttering, ‘The bastards! The bloody bastards!’ He was also short of breath and it would take him upwards of ten minutes to wheeze his way up the two flights of stairs to his apartment every evening. I could hear him over the sound of my stereo, panting and puffing and stopping every now and then to grumble under his breath. His car was parked just near mine and it was impossible not to notice that the rear seats were hidden under a pile of beer cartons and empty wine bottles. I always wondered whether he drank in his car, or if he was just hopeless at getting rid of his recycling.

  At first the Bastard Man frightened me. What if he went crazy and started taking his aggression out on the other tenants, namely me? I didn’t want to be yelled at or run over by an angry, drunk old man, especially as I didn’t have Thomas to protect me. But then—like with the mouldy bathroom, the nicotine-stained walls, the fleas in the carpet and the drug lords next door—because I had my stuff to keep me company, I acclimatised. After coming home to find a police officer out the front of the apartment block yelling, ‘Nothing to see here, please move inside quickly’ on three separate occasions, an old man’s fruity language at 7.30 every morning stopped registering as anything more than a convenient alarm clock.

  Just as well.

  It was the Bastard Man who answered the advertisement for my desk.

  I didn’t know whether to celebrate or hide the breakables. I sat waiting for him in my lounge room nervously clenching and unclenching my fists and wondering if he would stomp in and start calling me a bastard as well.

  When I opened the door to his knock I saw an old man, tall, stooped, wearing a narrow-brimmed felt hat similar to the ones my uncles wore and exactly the same as the ones that old blokes have been wearing since the fifties. He had on a tweed jacket and grey pants and if I hadn’t known about his colourful language and boozy car, I would have said that he was a churchgoer. As it stood, I assumed he probably went to the races a lot.

  Thankfully, he turned out to be lovely, in a short-tempered, brusque, slightly addled kind of way, and the first thing he mentioned when he walked into my flat was that his wheezing was caused by emphysema. I hadn’t asked about it, I guess he just wanted to tell me so that I wouldn’t ask him to carry the desk up the stairs himself. We agreed on a price and he signed a cheque for me in his laborious old man’s handwriting, taking care to form each letter as clearly and accurately as he could. Without knowing how I would do it, I promised him that I would have his new purchase delivered.

  After two days of staring at the desk and still not figuring out how to get it up the stairs on my own, I hit upon the idea of getting one of the guys from the methamphetamine lab to help. Obviously they didn’t volunteer—they didn’t even answer the door when I knocked. Instead, I forced them into philanthropy via entrapment.

  It was a weekend and I didn’t have much on. Knowing I had hours to spare, I grabbed a magazine and dragged the desk out in front of their flat, blocking their doorway. I sat on it, flicking through pictures of celebrities without make-up, until one of them came out and discovered me, smiling politely and jamming their exit. Thankfully, the dopey-looking kid standing in front of me looked too wobbly on his feet to attempt an argument and so, his bloodshot eyes filled with resentment, he helped me carry the desk up the stairs. He disappeared wordlessly as I knocked on the Bastard Man’s door.

  Without my little meth friend to help me, I had to drag the desk into the flat on my own, backwards. When I had finished and turned around to face the interior of his apartment, it took me a moment to comprehend what I was looking at. I was in one of those places you only ever see on current affairs shows, the kind of story where the camera pans over a vast wasteland of junk and the voiceover says, sotto voce, ‘Somebody actually lives here.’ I had met my first Level Ten.

  There was not a spare surface in the flat. The kitchen tables were piled high with yellowing newspapers. The floors were covered in books and boxes and pots and pans and everything imaginable. Everywhere. There was stuff everywhere. The walls were mildewed and there were little insects circling above my head. We put the desk in the kitchen because it was the only place it would fit. He asked me to stay for a drink and I didn’t feel that I could say no. So we sat and drank some beers and watched a lifestyle programme that was not to his liking because, as he put it, all the ladies on the show were ‘large and horsey, like they should all be spending their time in paddocks rubbing up against tree stumps’. No doubt they were bastards too, he just didn’t say it out loud because there was a lady in the room.

  We talked about the war, the uselessness of young people, how the new skate park up the road was encouraging hooliganism and about his family. His grandfather had been the person responsible for introducing cane toads to Australia. Or prickly pear. Or some sort of spider. I was not listening as hard as I should have been as I was too busy concentrating on shallow breathing so that the mildew in the flat would not penetrate too deeply into my lungs.

  We sat and watched the TV in silence for a while. Some blond guy with big muscles was hammering together one of those useless things they make on those shows, like a rotating shoe rack or a cat massager. Then out of nowhere the Bastard Man told me that his children didn’t talk to him anymore. He hadn’t spoken to his son or grandchildren in years. He didn’t say why, he just said he wasn’t invited for Christmas. I felt awkward. Normally the person blathering on about their private life was me. I didn’t quite know what to do when a stranger started doing it, especially an old guy. I didn’t know if the rules were different. Should I give him advice? Or should I just sip my beer and point out that another horsey-looking woman was on the TV? I chose the latter. Poor old bugger, I thought. He’d probably bought the desk as an excuse to meet someone in the apartment block.

  I stayed for perhaps an hour. The Bastard Man owned a lot of books and as I went to leave, he lent me one about a woman who married a Tibetan nomad and went to live with his family on the plains of Tibet. I was touched. As someone who likes to hold on to their stuff, I realised what an honour it was to be lent something of his. I guessed it was his way of making sure that I visited again
: I would have to return the book when I finished reading it. To my way of thinking, you had to be pretty lonely to risk losing your stuff in return for a little company.

  I made my goodbyes, wandered down to my flat again, cleared some space on the coffee table and plonked the book down on top of a pile of local newspapers I had not yet got around to reading. I looked at the space where the desk used to be, imagining it filled with the new one, and thought about all the stuff I would be able to cram into its drawers and under its roll-top. I looked around at the walls I had laboriously scrubbed back to white. The fleas had long gone and the only insects that ever came into my flat now were little summertime flies. ‘See?’ I thought to myself. ‘I am nothing like the Bastard Man.’

  The house-pride continued. Fuelled by the Bastard Man’s beers, I felt brave enough to open a box labelled ‘miscellaneous’ and start sifting through it. I found a few blank sheets of paper and some old gift wrapping that, with much effort, I relinquished to the recycling bin. But then a crinkled pattern of little Holly Hobby faces stared mournfully up at me from amongst the newspapers and cardboard boxes and I couldn’t bear how lonely they looked. In the end I pulled the wrapping back out again and put it in a bag I labelled ‘Spare paper for wrapping presents when you can’t find where you’ve put the good paper’.

  The rest of the box mostly contained stuff from the early eighties. I spent the evening poring over my primary school-era handwriting, trying to pick out the words in drafts of letters to relatives that I must have written when I was eight years old. The handwriting was almost illegible and disturbingly identical to my handwriting now.

  I deciphered each note as best I could, then smoothed it out and put it in the ‘keeping’ pile. The pile for throwing out contained some rusty bobby pins. When I was done, I repacked the box. I guess it was at that point that I accidentally dropped the Bastard Man’s book in there as well. I taped the carton shut without realising and put it back in the wardrobe.

  Looking back, I can’t believe I didn’t miss that book. I didn’t miss it then and I didn’t miss it when I moved out. It just disappeared and never crossed my mind again.

  Until it was too late.

  Part 2

  Where It Became Unsteady

  Chapter Six

  Two days later I was back in Corryong sifting through my childhood. I’d left Melbourne that morning after an early breakfast with Adam and a warning from him not to bring too much back with me.

  ‘Here. This is to stop you from acting like an idiot.’

  He dropped a Saint Christopher’s medallion onto my plate of eggs and bacon. I picked it out and squinted at him suspiciously.

  ‘Adam, what’s this got to do with anything? For a start, you’re not Catholic, and for another thing, Saint Christopher is the patron saint of travellers. Besides, I’m pretty sure he was de-sainted, or whatever you call it, quite a while ago.’

  Adam rolled his eyes.

  ‘Jesus, all right Perry Mason, calm down. I was trying to find you a patron saint for possessions but there isn’t one. So then I thought I’d get you one of the Archangel Michael, but I couldn’t find one of those either, so—’ ‘What’s he got to do with anything?’

  ‘He’s the patron saint of the possessed.’

  ‘Oh, you’re hilarious. You’re truly, truly hilarious.’

  Adam flicked his wrist.

  ‘I know. So in the end I got you a Saint Christopher. He can look after your car and stop you filling it with crap.’

  ‘Except that he doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Well they shouldn’t keep selling his medallion then, should they? Stupid Catholic church. Well, actually, I got it in one of those two-dollar shops.’

  I slipped the little medallion into my purse.

  ‘You do realise you’ve completely blown your argument by giving me crap instead of telling me to get rid of what I’ve already got, don’t you?’

  ‘Haven’t you left yet?’

  I hugged him goodbye, left him to pay the bill as punishment for being a smartarse, and started the journey back home.

  Six hours later I was on my hands and knees on my bedroom floor in Corryong, contemplating a little ball of crumpled paper that, when unfolded, seemed to be a two-page essay titled ‘The first thing I am going to talk about is little sisters. Bad points and good’. It was dated to when I was ten years old.

  My sister Wendy is two years younger than me and whenever anyone asks (which isn’t all that often), I’ve always likened our childhood to that of Laura and Mary Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie. They lived in the country, so did we. They were sisters, so were we. They were partial to pinafores, so were we. We were exactly like them except for the fact that we had running water and an indoor toilet and virtually no trouble from wolves. And neither of us was blind. Like all siblings, we had our disagreements and there was one particularly heated exchange where I lost a chunk of hair, leaving a bald spot on my head about the size of a twenty-cent piece, but on the whole, we were very close. Or so I’d thought.

  The weird syntax of the essay—of putting ‘bad’ before ‘good’—gave me an indication that the list was going to be perhaps less than flattering to my sister. Another indication was that the ‘bad points’ list filled an entire page and the ‘good points’ list was blank. I started to read it with trepidation.

  BAD POINTS

  Mess up bedroom

  Hang around you

  Hang around your friends

  Take your things without asking

  Then break the things

  Say embarrassing things about you

  Never get into trouble

  Get what they want all the time

  Don’t feed the cat

  Annoy you on purpose

  Take all the good posters out of TV Week.

  In my defence, I hadn’t made a single spelling mistake.

  Instead of ringing Adam (who no doubt would have told me to throw it out), I rang Thomas. He laughed when I read the list out to him.

  ‘The good posters out of TV Week? I’ve seen your childhood bedroom, remember; neither of you had any good posters.’

  ‘I think she took the one of Bros that I wanted.’

  He laughed again. ‘Where’d you find it?’

  ‘The list? In a drawer. It just fell out of an old diary.’

  I was lying. I had found it beneath a pile of training bras, old copies of Dolly and what appeared to be disintegrating hair bobbles, all of which I had carefully put in my ‘keeping’ pile.

  ‘Hey, guess what? I forgot to tell you, Mum and Dad are selling the house. I’m up in Corryong right now.’

  ‘Really? Wow. Cleaning out that bedroom is going to be a nightmare.’

  The first time I had taken Thomas home to meet my family had not gone well. I was nervous about taking him to the country, I was nervous about him meeting my parents for the first time and I was nervous about him seeing my childhood bedroom. To mitigate things I had taken Adam along too, as well as another friend named Jamie. Jamie and I were doing a show together and I was using the trip as an excuse for us to film some footage to use in a sketch. Jamie was a country boy himself, so I thought he could help smooth the way.

  The boys were all staying at the local caravan park, but on our first night in town, my fancy new city boyfriend was coming to meet my family on his own. Mum had whipped up a roast and her famous pavlova. We were even using the dining room, the good cutlery and the good tablecloth, all of which were normally reserved for Christmas Day. At the age of twenty-four, this was the first time I had brought a boy home and no one really knew how to react. I am sure that as we were waiting for him to arrive, a small part of my parents wondered whether he might turn out to be imaginary.

  Thomas pulled into our driveway exactly on time and the introductions went well. Then Dad and Thomas went out into the backyard for a chat. My sister, my mother and I set the table, smoothed our skirts and generally tried to ignore the fact that I had grown up and w
as very clearly having sex with someone.

  No matter how nervous Thomas had told me he was feeling before he turned up, I knew I was feeling worse. He would eventually want a tour of our house and my childhood bedroom. It still looked the same as the day I had left, complete with the beds made in case we ever needed them. Even our childhood cot was ready to be slept in, presumably in case either of us shrunk. All our toys were still in the toy box and all the ornaments covering our dressing table sat there gathering dust. Piles of my old schoolwork covered the tops of the drawers, posters spilled out of containers and an Itty Bitty Bin full of erasers sat at the foot of my bed. If Dickens’ Miss Havisham had grown up a teenager in the eighties and shared a bedroom with her sister, this is what it would have looked like. When Thomas opened the door, I lied and told him that most of the stuff belonged to Wendy.

  We sat down to dinner and Dad carved the roast. My father is a very traditional man with some very strong, albeit unusual, rules: shoes should always be shined, men do not swear in front of women, and under no circumstances should fruit ever be put in a savoury dish. Thomas had good shoes and had never shown a penchant for apricot chicken but he came from the city and had a lot of Scottish friends; swearing was like breathing to him. Sure enough, somewhere between the lamb being served and the gravy being poured, Thomas took a call on his mobile at the dinner table and said ‘Fuck.’ Loudly. Then he said it again. My sister, my mother and I all stared at our plates, hoping that if we did not look up, then the world would conveniently stand still and my father would somehow suffer a very specific form of amnesia, wiping the last ten seconds from his memory. When I eventually did look at my father it was obvious that was not the case. He was still passing around the gravy but he looked like he was passing a stone. Thomas continued his phone call, oblivious to the silent, slow-motion mayhem unfolding around him. I can only imagine that my father decided not to haul Thomas outside and run him down with the rotary hoe because he didn’t want his dinner to go cold.