Lessons in Letting Go

by Corinne Grant

  ‘What do you mean it’s a radio? Everything’s a radio! My mobile phone is a radio! Your car is a radio!’

  ‘Yes, but this is an old-school radio. Some old bloke might want it for his shed.’ I was pleading. I knew how thin my argument was, but it was the only one I had.

  ‘Oh, brilliant idea, Corinne. And then his life is ruined the moment he tries out the tape deck and it chews his favourite Vera Lynn cassette.’

  ‘He’ll still be able to listen to the cricket.’

  ‘No one will want it! Throw it out!’ He was screeching, flapping the street directory around as if there were invisible bats trying to attack his bald head.

  ‘I can’t! It’s hard enough letting go as it is, I can’t just throw it out, this tape recorder means a lot to me.’

  I wasn’t lying, it did mean a lot to me. I had won it in a colouring competition when I was ten. We’d had to colour in a picture of a dragon in bed. His large, reptilian body was covered by a quilt and he was holding a lovely cup of tea whilst enjoying the view outside his bedroom window. What made my entry stand out from the others was that I’d used glitter pens, making first prize a virtual fait accompli in the pre-adolescent world of colouring competitions. I was so excited when I found out that I’d won that I temporarily let it go to my head. Being ten and not having a great grasp of electronics (a grasp that has continued to elude me to this day) I told everyone that I had won a stereo. My mother kept correcting me patiently, saying, ‘A tape recorder, Corinne, you won a tape recorder.’ I wasn’t deliberately exaggerating, I was just stupid.

  ‘So what you’re telling me is that this tape recorder is well over twenty years old.’

  ‘Well, yes.’ Damn. This wasn’t working out the way it was supposed to. ‘I won it when I was ten, so I suppose that’s about—’

  ‘Actually, it would be older than that. Everyone knows you never win anything good in colouring competitions, it was probably ten years old when you won it. So that makes it a thirty-four-year- old tape recorder. Perhaps we should take it to a museum instead.’

  I wasn’t ‘everybody’ but I had never heard that you only won old stuff in colouring competitions, and even if that was the case, it didn’t change anything. I had loved that tape recorder. I’d won it fair and square and it had been beside me for years. It had comforted me with familiar tapes from my childhood and hometown when the distance and the strangeness of the city overwhelmed me, and towards the end of its life, after Thomas and I had broken up and I had moved into the hellhole, it kept me company in the bathroom when I showered. Although the volume didn’t go loud enough to enable it to be heard over the running water, it still felt comforting to have it there. I couldn’t just throw it in a bin; it was family.

  ‘You, my friend, are a Hanrahan.’

  As far as retorts go, I was quite proud of that one.

  Not being as well versed in obscure turn-of-the-century Australian poetry as I was, Adam told me to shut up and stop being a wanker.

  I wouldn’t have known who Hanrahan was either except that I had a teacher at school whom all the others used to call by that name. The poem was about a farmer called Hanrahan who expects the worst out of every situation. If things are going badly, he sees them going worse. If things are looking good, he can see the bad just around the corner. Adam was being a Hanrahan and I wanted no part of it. Everything was going my way today; why ruin it with all this talk about the tape recorder being a dud and wrecking some imaginary old bloke’s life?

  We argued all the way to the Brotherhood of St Laurence, which was a half-hour drive. Because of the debacle with the garbage bag last time I’d gone to a Brotherhood, I’d insisted that this time we go to a different store. I was scared that if I went back to the same one, I’d be arrested when I walked in. This gave Adam even more to berate me about.

  ‘Corinne, they won’t even remember you!’ Adam took a slug from his water bottle and splashed a little on his neck, like it was eau de cologne. ‘It won’t be the same staff working there anyway,’ he continued. ‘Everyone knows you only volunteer in a charity shop when you’re a hundred and five years old. The bloke that thought you were shoplifting is probably in a nursing home by now.’

  I shot him a disapproving look and kept driving.

  When we finally arrived, we once again I got a park right out the front. We were so delighted, we actually stopped bickering long enough to marvel at our good fortune. Then we started unloading. Adam carried a box and the vacuum, I carried Le Marchepied.

  Inside, we dragged our stuff over to the donation bins. The shop was enormous. There were rows and rows of shoes and clothes, there was even a big bin full of socks. There were mannequins modelling outfits and the books were arranged as if in a mini-library. Everything looked cared for and appreciated and I felt like my belongings were going to a good home—better than the home I had provided for them. I carefully placed Le Marchepied into the donation bin, gave it a final, loving look, then went back out to the car. This felt good. Someone else would use that stepper now and love it in the way it deserved to be loved.

  Adam and I went back and forth to the car four times. On our fifth trip, Adam started fiddling with the passenger door as a signal for me to unlock it. I ignored him and opened the boot, pulling out the only thing still to be taken in. The tape recorder.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Adam squealed so high that dogs barked in response.

  ‘Don’t. Try. To. Stop. Me.’ And off I marched. Adam followed at a distance.

  ‘I’m not going to stop you. If you want to make an idiot of yourself, go ahead. I’ll be in the book section.’

  I gently placed the tape recorder on top of Le Marchepied. This was it, I was actually letting go. I shut the lid on Brenda Dykgraaf ’s smiling face before I thought too much about what I was doing and instead focused on what a good person I was for donating so much of my life to charity.

  Then I went and found Adam. He was in the electrical section.

  ‘Oooh, look at this one, it’s got four settings!’ He was fiddling with a hair-straightening iron.

  I reached out to pick up what looked like a salad spinner but before I could touch it Adam yelled, ‘It’s an op shop, not a swap meet!’ and slapped my wrist.

  This, coming from a man who owned the soundtrack to Doctor Who on cassette and a wind-up Jesus on wheels. I was just about to retort by asking what, exactly, a bald man was doing looking at a straightening iron, when a kid who looked about nineteen years old got in first.

  ‘You’re not going to find much use for that.’ He grinned at us both.

  He was just making conversation. A normal person would have laughed or rolled their eyes in a ‘Huh, aren’t I the crazy one?’ kind of way. Not Adam.

  Adam turned to him and said flirtatiously, ‘I’ve got some curly hair.’

  Before the guy could fully register what Adam was implying, I grabbed him by the waistband of his tracksuit pants and dragged him out of the shop. Adam sat in the passenger seat and giggled helplessly at himself. I was mortified.

  ‘You could get done for harassment or something, Adam! What were you thinking?’

  Adam flicked his wrist and said nonchalantly, ‘Oh please, in a Brotherhood? No one gets done for harassing young men in an op shop.’

  It seemed to me that Adam was confusing charity shops with foreign embassies, but I didn’t want to get into yet another argument. I bit my tongue and drove in silence. Adam hummed a show tune, belting out the lyrics when he could remember them.

  When we arrived at the glazier’s, we yet again got a park exactly opposite the shop on yet another busy road. I wasn’t questioning it anymore, this was simply my day. I carried the mirror into the work shed, past sheets of glass leaning against walls. My hands were slippery from the heat and I was so petrified I was going to cause a catastrophe that I walked through the place like I was a UN inspector in a Cambodian minefield. I gently placed the mirror frame in front of the glazier and, before I could say anythin
g, he took one look at it and said, ‘Easy job, mate. Come back tomorrow.’ Done.

  Now I was starting to believe that my name must have popped up on a celestial good-luck roster. Everything was pointing to this being a day when nothing could go wrong. It was probably because of this that I decided I would drop the book off to the Bastard Man.

  ‘Will you come?’ I asked Adam. He didn’t really have much choice, he was in my car.

  We drove the few minutes from where I had left the mirror to the block of flats I used to live in. I drove around the back to the parking area, looking for a space. Apart from the fact that it was full, it looked the same as always. The grass was overgrown, the roof of the parking area was rusting and the poles were bent where we had all run into them over and over again. I could see the back porch of my old flat. The new tenant had put out a pot of geraniums and there were real curtains on the kitchen window. Despite the improvements it still looked depressing.

  The Bastard Man’s car wasn’t in its usual spot. Normally he parked beneath my bedroom window and if that was taken he’d park around the back. He wasn’t there either. I was unperturbed. It was my day. His car was probably at the mechanic’s.

  I drove back around to the front and parked on the street. I sat and stared at the security entrance through the driver’s-side window. The door was chocked open, which was weird. That normally only happened when the couple in the third ground-floor flat were being arrested—which had happened three times when I lived there. There were no police in sight today.

  ‘Why do you think the door’s chocked open?’ I asked Adam.

  ‘Probably because it’s chocked open. Jesus. Get out of the car.’

  He started walking up the path. At least now I didn’t have to worry about using the intercom to get in. That had been one of my biggest fears, that I would call the Bastard Man up on the intercom and he wouldn’t remember me or, worse, he would remember me all too well and would start yelling, ‘Book bastard!’ and throw stuff from his second-floor window down on my head.

  We climbed the two flights of stairs and, as we approached his door, I could see that it was open. Now a sense of foreboding started to wheedle its way in. Two more steps and I was in front of the open doorway and everything was wrong. The flat was completely empty, painted white, and the only inhabitant was an electrician standing on a ladder in the entrance way, fitting some wires.

  I was still counting on this being my day. There was a chance—a slim one, but still a chance—that everything was all right. Maybe the Bastard Man was in a nursing home or maybe, I fantasised for one foolish moment, he was renovating. As pointless as it seemed, I asked the electrician if he knew what had happened to the old man who had lived in this flat. Maybe the Bastard Man had moved. I could ring around and find him. I could travel interstate. I could hire a private detective.

  ‘Yeah, didn’t you hear?’

  My god, the electrician did know. And it sounded exciting.

  ‘He shot himself in the head. Right here in the kitchen.’

  I blinked. Nothing else, I just blinked. I turned around to see if Adam was still there. He was. He was staring at me. This was utterly wrong. If I was going to be in one of those ‘it was just like something out of the movies’ moments then it should involve a tropical island, George Clooney and an inflatable pool pony. It should not involve some middle-aged bloke in a pair of overalls with a burnt patch near the crotch.

  I turned to Adam, horrified, and the first words out of my mouth were, ‘Why did I leave it so long? Why didn’t I come last week?’

  The electrician freaked out. ‘Oh shit, are you a family member? I’m so sorry. Shit.’ He was still standing on top of the ladder.

  ‘No,’ Adam said, ‘she used to be his neighbour. It’s just a bit of a shock for her.’ I was too stunned to notice that Adam was behaving like a normal person.

  Adam had once told me that men panic when women get teary and that the panic usually leads to them doing something inappropriate. In this case, the electrician offered to show us around the house. I was too shocked to refuse. It was just a white box now, with whitish carpet and whitish blinds and whitish walls. Gone were all the papers piled up to the ceiling, gone were the mildew and the television, my computer desk, the books and the empty bottles. Everything that the Bastard Man owned, everything that was him, had disappeared. A shiver ran through me as I realised that we are all only one trip to the dump away from being obliterated. None of us are permanent.

  The electrician said, ‘You should have seen the amount of blood on the walls in here.’

  I thought, ‘Yes, that’s a helpful thing to say. That’s completely distracted me from the violent death of an old man. Now I feel like having a good laugh and talking about stain removers. Oh, well done, my electrician buddy, you should drop this electrical gig and open up as a grief counsellor.’

  Adam dragged me out of the flat before I could kick the fool in his scorched groin. On the way back down the stairs we met each other’s eyes and from the look on his face, I knew what he was going to say.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ I said.

  ‘You’re thinking the same thing.’

  ‘I am not.’

  We got back in the car and drove. I stared at the road ahead. I didn’t want to look at him. The unsaid thing was hanging in the air and I knew if I looked at him he’d say it out loud. I wanted to pretend it didn’t exist. If we kept our mouths shut, we could continue as we were. We didn’t have to Hanrahan it.

  We got back to his place and I stopped the engine.

  ‘Do you want to come in?’ he asked.

  I wasn’t sure. Part of me wanted the company, the other part of me felt like we had committed a crime and I wanted to get as far away from my accomplice as possible. I said I thought I’d just keep going. He opened the car door and as he turned to get out he said, ‘You’ve got to admit though . . .’

  ‘Don’t, Adam.’

  ‘You are never going to let go of that book now.’

  I drove off. I felt sick and ashamed and sad and angry. What happens to an old man, a man who has made it into his eighties, who has been to war, who has raised a family, who has lived on his own for years, what happens after all of that to push him too far?

  Maybe he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and decided he didn’t want to go through with the treatment. Maybe his emphysema had got so bad they wanted to put him into a nursing home and he didn’t want to go. Maybe he’d had a fight with his son. Maybe he’d just got drunk and it was a rash decision. Maybe he looked around him and saw nothing but rotting junk and decided he’d already died anyway. I felt cold inside when I thought about it.

  It had been such a good day. It had ended so badly.

  Of course I didn’t get rid of the book; I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. If I could think of something meaningful, then I would have done it, but what’s meaningful about an old book? It wasn’t important to anyone now except me. He was a lonely old man. Someone had to care that he was gone.

  That night I checked the Brotherhood of St Laurence website to see if I could track where the things I’d donated had wound up. It was a stupid idea, I knew that, but I just wanted to feel like I was in control of something. The information wasn’t there. The only thing I did find out was something I should have checked before I left home that morning—they didn’t accept exercise equipment. Which meant that Le Marchepied had been thrown out.

  None of us are permanent.

  Chapter Eleven

  Thomas was angry with me and I didn’t know why. I had called to tell him about the Bastard Man but the conversation was not going the way I had expected. In all the years I had known him, he’d never, ever got angry with me when I was upset.

  ‘He was an old man, Corinne, you barely knew him.’

  ‘I know that, Tom, but it was my worst fear that he would be dead. And he was. Is. It’s . . . I don’t know . . . I can’t help thinking it was my fault.’

  I he
ard him sigh.

  ‘Hey, I got your mirror repaired. You know the one you gave me? I broke it, but I got new glass put in it. You can’t even tell anything happened.’

  I had no idea why I was telling him this. Was I trying to unburden myself?

  ‘Okay, so you got it repaired.’ He sighed again. ‘It’s just a mirror.’

  ‘I can’t repair what I did to the Bastard Man though.’

  My voice sounded tiny. His came back at me at full volume.

  ‘Well, I can’t help you with that, can I? I can’t fix everything for you.’

  I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at it incredulously. What was going on? Thomas liked fixing things, that was what he did. If he didn’t, then why did he offer all the time? I started to feel a little indignant. It wasn’t as if I didn’t pay him back; I was always there when he needed me. Wasn’t I? Well, apart from the time I’d dumped him, but that was different. The rest of the time I was there for him; I listened when he needed to talk, I kept him company when he was worried, I helped him in his garden, cleaned up after his parties, I’d even gone to a family funeral with him. Our friendship had never been a one-way deal.

  ‘Corinne, I’m busy, okay? You’re going to have to deal with this yourself for a change.’

  Stung, I hung up the phone. For a while now he had sounded irritated whenever I spoke to him. What was up with him? If I had done something wrong, I needed to know what it was. I cleared a pile of paperwork off my computer, sat down at my desk and wrote him an email. I told him that he was hurting me, that he was being childish and that I deserved better treatment. As I wrote, the email got angrier and angrier. I ended it by telling him that I deserved a hell of a lot more respect than he was currently showing me. Then, without even bothering to reread it, I sent it.

  An hour later, I wished I hadn’t. My mother had always told me, ‘Never send a letter when you are upset.’ She was right, and now that I had calmed down, the situation didn’t seem so bad. Maybe Thomas wasn’t angry with me at all, maybe he was just busy and I’d called him at a bad time. I inwardly cringed at what I’d written. I pulled the email back up and reread it. Yep. I really should have sat on it. I sounded strident and adolescent and if there was a way to make an email sound high-pitched, I’d found it. Any moment now Thomas would write back telling me to stop being such a drama queen. Or worse, he’d ring me and tell me to grow up. I promised myself I would show emotional restraint from here on in.