Lessons in Letting Go (12 page)

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 greater 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.

‘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
.