Lessons in Letting Go

by Corinne Grant

  I walked back through the hall and into the bedroom. It was full of half-emptied-out boxes and every drawer and cupboard was open. Strewn across the bed were clothes, yet more paperwork, novelty tea towels and what I supposed was one of my wisdom teeth, wrapped in surgical packaging, the blood still adhering to its roots. Even I recognised that was disgusting.

  I felt like I was drowning. What I needed was a bit of control. I plonked down in my armchair and started making to-do lists. I made lists of each area that needed cleaning out. Then I made lists of each of those areas broken down into smaller sections. Then I made lists of those lists just in case they weren’t in the right order. I slowly started to feel better. I was doing something constructive, I was making lists. I was even using a real notepad I had found in the bottom of my wardrobe. It had Mr Men on it. Every now and then I would stop writing and look around my house, smiling proudly at the work I had not yet done. When I had finished writing out everything that needed to be completed—and had grouped and regrouped it all into themes and areas—I allotted estimations of how many hours it would take to do each bit, allowing sufficient time to reminisce, annotate and sit and stare out a window. It came to two years if I didn’t sleep. I wanted to scream.

  How had I let this happen? This was supposed to be my fresh start—I was supposed to move back into this flat and my life would instantly become brighter. Not only would my stuff no longer be a problem but my career would pick up, my stomach would become flatter and my hair would grow to be smoother and more manageable. I was supposed to move back into this flat and turn into Heidi Klum.

  I stormed into the bedroom and threw back the sliding door of the built-in robe. This was why I didn’t go through my stuff—because every time I did, something upset me or reminded me of what a failure I was. The first box I tried to shove back into the wardrobe proved unwieldy. I grunted and pushed and flapped at it uselessly, and when that didn’t work, I lost my temper and started yelling at it. I finally got it in and threw another one on top. The stack was sitting on a pile of old pillows and was therefore unstable but I was too mad to care. I picked up a third box and, attempting to reverse body-slam it into place, I lost my balance and fell sideways, just stopping myself from falling by grabbing hold of the sliding door. The box wasn’t so lucky. It tumbled back out, taking the other two with it and before I could catch them, they knocked over a full-length mirror. Broken glass splashed across the bedroom floor and into the hall.

  I stood very still, just in case something else was about to come crashing down. Then I looked at the carnage in front of me. That mirror had been my favourite possession. I had hidden it away in the bedroom specifically so that visitors couldn’t accidentally knock it over. It was my greatest fear that something would happen to it and now it had. I could feel my heart start to beat faster. Thomas had given the mirror to me the first Christmas we had spent together. It was an antique, its frame made out of beaten silvery stuff with little tulips carved all around it. I absolutely adored it. It was the one thing I owned that was worth something. And now I had destroyed it. My ears started buzzing and I could feel the sobs sitting in my chest. It didn’t feel like I’d lost the mirror; it felt like I’d lost Thomas.

  I looked down at the mess at my feet as the first tears started to fall. Then I stopped crying for a second. There was the photograph of Thomas and the sticks. I couldn’t deny it any longer. I was a hoarder.

  That should have been as bad as things got—except that I also found something else lying amongst the chaos: the Bastard Man’s book. I went cold.

  Had I really not returned that old man’s book? Obviously not, because it was here, lying in a pile of novelty handkerchiefs, magazines, disintegrating paper clips, candle stubs and shards of pointy glass. I had packed up and moved somewhere nice, with sunshine through the windows and white tiles in the bathroom and next-door neighbours who owned a cat and never cooked up amphetamines in their bathtub. I moved out and I left the Bastard Man behind in his dingy, mildewed hovel. Not only did I not return his book, I didn’t even say goodbye. Worse than that, I hadn’t even honoured my good fortune by treating the place I now lived in with respect. I’d just filled it up with crap like everywhere else I had ever lived. And, I realised, still holding the photo of Thomas and the sticks, if I did throw anything out, I behaved like a lunatic first.

  I bent down to pick up the book—trying to avoid looking under the bed where Brenda Dykgraaf was grinning demonically at me from the side of Le Marchepied’s box—then I picked my way out to the lounge room and sat down in my armchair. I was trying very hard not to cry. I promised the book I would return it to the Bastard Man as soon as possible, just like I would sort out the devastation I had created in my flat, just like I would figure out how to tell Thomas I had broken the mirror.

  Then I began to blubber uncontrollably. Snot ran down my face and because I was crying with my mouth hanging open, I dribbled. I had the book in my lap, petting it gently like it was a dying animal. I couldn’t believe that I’d let that old man down. I couldn’t even call him to tell him I was sorry because I’d lost my address book somewhere in the nest of crap that was my apartment. And I couldn’t bring myself to call Thomas and tell him about the mirror because I didn’t want to hurt him. Instead, I just sat there with the book in my lap and cried until the tears stopped and all I was doing was hiccupping. Then I made a decision; if I couldn’t get forgiveness from the Bastard Man or Thomas, I would get it from my father. I would call him, tell him how bad I felt about Le Marchepied and beg for his mercy.

  I started dialling Dad’s work number, imagining how happy he would be that we were finally acknowledging this awful, silent hurt that had been sitting between us for so long. I could almost hear the joy in his voice as his prodigal daughter finally made good. When he answered the phone, no words came out of my mouth, just a lot more blubbering.

  ‘Mate? Mate, is that you? What’s happened? Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m okay, Dad. I’m okay, I just need to tell you some-something.’

  ‘What? What’s wrong?’

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. He sounded really worried, like I was about to tell him I’d shot someone.

  ‘Do you remember that exercise stepper you gave me for Christmas when I was about fourteen?’

  ‘No. What? Mate, what’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong and then I can help you.’

  ‘I was mean to you. I didn’t say thank you and I didn’t . . . I didn’t . . .’

  Now I was doing that awful sobbing thing where the words only half came out. What I had tried to say was, ‘I should have said that I loved it, Dad. I should have said you were a good father.’ What he had probably heard was, ‘I shuh-uh-–suh-I-–luh-–ee-–dah-–guh . . . guh..guh-–faaaathahhhhh.’

  There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  Then Dad said, ‘What?’ again.

  I pulled myself together, took a deep breath and said, ‘I was mean to you, Dad, and I’m sorry.’

  Now he was laughing, and not in the way someone laughs when they’ve heard a good joke but in the way someone laughs when they think the other person has lost their wits.

  ‘I don’t remember it at all, mate. I suppose I gave it to you. Why are you worried about it now?’ He laughed again. Nervously.

  ‘Because it’s under my bed and I know it’s there and it reminds me of what a little bitch I was.’

  ‘It must have been over fifteen years ago.’ More laughing.

  ‘I just feel guilty. I’ve been an awful person, Dad, and I feel guilty.’

  ‘Never feel guilty. That’s my motto. Never feel guilty.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’ But I did. About everything.

  Months later, I was still finding tiny splinters of glass all over the flat, not just in the bedroom but in the kitchen, the lounge room and underneath my desk. It got into my feet if I walked around barefoot. I found splinters in my elbows and fingertips. The stack of paperwork was still under the de
sk and piles of stuff, like droppings, were all over the floor of every room. The Bastard Man’s book was still sitting on top of the coffee table and Le Marchepied was still underneath the bed. And sometimes I found myself sitting on the couch, staring at the space between the kitchen bench and the heater, twisting my hands together and telling the empty air how sorry I was.

  Chapter Ten

  With me, things always need to reach breaking point before I take action. I hadn’t done anything about the mess in my flat for a month, I’d just wandered around the house—yet again—looking at the piles I should have been be getting rid of and wishing I had never opened any of the boxes in the first place. The Bastard Man’s book was still sitting on the coffee table and every time I glanced at it a tingle of guilt shot up my spine.

  To make matters worse, Melbourne was experiencing one of its hottest summers on record. Day after relentless day the temperature soared close to forty degrees and, as my flat had no insulation, inside was even hotter. The air conditioner was virtually useless, puffing out tepid air with the approximate force of an asthmatic. I strung blankets across the windows to block out the sun, and when that didn’t work, I covered them in tin foil. From the outside it looked like a child had tried to turn the flat into a spaceship. For days on end I was barely capable of moving and I only got dressed if I needed to leave the house. Most of the time I spent in my underwear, skulking around the place slack-jawed with a little moustache of sweat on my upper lip. I made sure I avoided mirrors.

  As it was too hot to do anything—least of all clean up—I was manoeuvring over and around little mounds of magazines, clothes, books, paperwork and broken what-–nots whenever I needed to get somewhere in the flat. The hotter I became, the more those piles started to annoy me. Eventually, after yet another sweaty, sleepless night, things came to a head. Climbing over a mountain of crap in an effort to get to the kitchen, I tripped over a stack of magazines and fell to the floor, smashing the teacup I was holding. That was it.

  ‘Fuck you!’

  I was screaming at Bananarama who were staring moodily up at me from the now tea-splattered front cover of a Smash Hits magazine, circa 1987.

  ‘You did that on purpose you frickin’ piece of frickin’ shitty crappy . . .’

  And then, because I had ran out of words, I stamped on the magazine. Sara Dallin’s black and white crop-top scrunched under my foot. Sara remained unfazed, arms still folded across her chest. This just made me even more angry. So I punched a wall. Then I stomped out of the kitchen and into the bedroom, picked up whatever clothes were nearest and put them on. I was dressed for the first time in two days. As I made my way back towards the lounge room I started picking things up. I didn’t put them back in their boxes, however; I took them straight out to the car. To my heat-addled way of thinking, my possessions were trying to kill me. It was time for them to go.

  I loaded the car with old bits of electrical equipment, as much of the clothing as I could fit, some jewellery, an old tape recorder and Le Marchepied #1 Step! Then I had the brilliant idea of taking the mirror to a glazier to be fixed. I couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t thought of that before. Glass is just glass, I hadn’t damaged the frame. I felt like an idiot for overreacting the way I had. I searched the phone book, found a glazier and hauled the frame out to the boot. I immediately felt more calm. I could see the floor again. I could get to the kitchen. The coffee table was clear. I didn’t stop and pat myself on the back, though; I was worried that if I hesitated for even one second, the impetus to get rid of everything would evaporate in the heat and I would simply leave everything in the car.

  I called Adam.

  ‘Hello, sweetpea!’

  ‘My stuff just tried to kill me. Do you want to come to the op shop with me?’

  ‘Sure! I’m ready now.’

  It’s hard to find someone to accompany you on an errand run. No sensible person enjoys watching someone else drop off their dry cleaning or deposit a cheque. Adam is different. He loves being a passenger because it means he has a captive audience. Short of leaping out at the traffic lights, the driver is trapped beside him while he sings Christina Aguilera’s entire back catalogue, screams at pedestrians to do something about their hair or moons a bus full of schoolchildren. Still, a small part of me wished he wasn’t available so immediately. I had been hoping he would say ‘tomorrow’ or ‘next week’ so that I could put the goodbyes off just a little longer. Instead, he’d said ‘Give me five minutes to find some pants without holes in the crotch.’

  Good. Okay. Good. I was finally doing something . . . good.

  Just before I walked out the door, I grabbed the Bastard Man’s book. He lived in the same suburb as the glazier. It was unlikely, but with Adam beside me I might just work up the courage to visit him.

  I arrived at Adam’s house and he greeted me in a pair of velour tracksuit pants and a T-shirt that read: ‘I ate all the pies’.

  ‘Today, I am Mariah Carey,’ he announced. ‘You can be Bette Midler.’

  I didn’t think he meant it as a compliment to any of us. We got out the street directory to plan the trip. We decided on a big circle heading west, coming back via the op shop and ending up in the east to drop off the mirror before returning home.

  Our first port of call was an electrical shop that specialised in the type of battery-operated vacuum cleaner I had owned for years but no longer used because first, the battery needed replacing, and second—now that I lived in a place with floorboards—a vacuum cleaner was redundant. I had tried to palm it off on a number of friends as a sort of permanent loan, but as soon as they found out it didn’t work, my offer seemed less generous. Now I was finally going to get it a battery and give it to charity.

  It was a twenty-minute drive and along the way Adam interrogated me as to what exactly I was getting rid of today.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘there’s the vacuum cleaner, there’s a bunch of bags and boxes for the op shop, there’s a piece of exercise equipment I’ve never used, there’s the broken mirror to be fixed and there’s an old tape recorder.’

  ‘An old tape recorder?’ There was an accusatory tone to Adam’s voice that made me feel uneasy.

  ‘Yes. A tape recorder.’

  ‘Who wants a tape recorder?’

  This was exactly the kind of questioning I had wanted to avoid and was why I had put him in charge of navigation.

  ‘Shhhh. Watch the street signs, Adam. If we miss the turn-off, we’ll be stuck all day trying to turn around.’

  I was only partly trying to distract him. The battery shop was situated in one of those nightmare shopping strips that not only has a lot of traffic, but also a pedestrian crossing and a train line. If you over-shot it, it might take you the best part of the rest of your life to find a turning point to get back again. Thanks to Adam’s map-reading skills, not only did we find the place without difficulty, there was a parking space right outside the front door. I felt a little bit excited; it always augurs well when a day starts off with the perfect park.

  We went inside. There wasn’t much to the shop, just a bench and a few batteries hanging on the wall behind it. It had that smell about it that workshops get when they are hot, as if the dust was sweating. Behind the bench stood a dour-looking man who was obviously not interested in Adam’s suggestive comments regarding possible uses for the larger batteries. He perfunctorily took my vacuum, found the appropriate battery, fitted it and charged me half the price I was expecting.

  I understand that in the greater scheme of exciting things that can happen on any given day this would rank fairly low compared with, for example, the love of your life proposing to you, or giving birth, or winning lotto, or finding indisputable proof that aliens live amongst us, but in the day of a hoarder—in the day of someone who has held on to something for years, subconsciously believing they would never part with it, that they would always be a bit hopeless, and that if they did finally let it go, it would either be unfixable or expensive to fix—in the gre
ater scheme of things, something that I had always envisaged ending badly was instead turning out unexpectedly and joyously for the best. We went into the milk bar next door to buy chocolate and celebrate.

  And then it started.

  ‘Why are you giving away an old tape recorder?’

  Damn, I thought we had moved past this.

  ‘Because someone might want it.’

  ‘Who’s going to want an old tape recorder? Why can’t I find anything in this shop? Where’s the bottled water? Why can’t I find the bottled water?’

  Adam can get very high-pitched when he is overheated and I worried that the glass in the shopfront might shatter if we didn’t get him hydrated quickly.

  I shoved a bottle of water into his hand and said, ‘Well, it’s not really an old tape recorder, it’s more of a radio.’

  ‘What?’ Water nearly came out his nose.

  Now I knew I was in trouble. Even as the words were forming in my head, I knew I could not win this argument.

  ‘The tape recorder doesn’t actually work. Neither does the battery compartment. But if you plug it into a power source, you’ve got a wonderful radio.’ I was like Sir Edmund Hillary, struggling up an Everest made entirely of my own spurious arguments.

  Adam pursed his lips, paid for his already half-empty bottle of water and walked out of the shop. This was a bad sign. Silence always means an eruption with Adam. He wasn’t being quiet because the argument was over, he was conserving his energy so that he could turn into a great big hairy Krakatoa the moment I joined him in the car.

  I took a long time paying, fiddling around with bits of change, hoping he would forget the whole thing in the seconds it took me to follow him. I dawdled out of the shop, slid back into the driver’s seat and started the ignition, all the while avoiding making eye contact with the seething ball of velour-encased incredulity sitting beside me. It didn’t help.