Lessons in Letting Go (2 page)

We went to Albury–Wodonga every couple of months to see dentists or doctors and to buy all the things we couldn’t get in our own small town. Albury–Wodonga had fluorescent socks, hyper-colour T-shirts and shops that sold just one thing, like cassette tapes or underwear or ice-cream. In my town, we had a hairdresser that doubled as a trophy engraver and tripled as a gun dealer. (It was probably the only shop in the world where you could get a freshly shot duck not only professionally mounted but permed at the same time.) Albury–Wodonga had streets and streets and floors and floors of novelty and speciality and single-purpose stores. The fact that the townsfolk did not walk their own streets slack-jawed in wonder at the sheer amount on offer was very impressive and very cool. These people were way out of my league. They probably ate Chicken Maryland every night.

We would drive down to Albury–Wodonga in Nanna’s ’66 Holden Special. My grandmother didn’t drive so the car was rarely used and consequently, more than a decade after its purchase, still smelt new. The seats were leather, the little hand straps that hung from the roof in lieu of seatbelts smelt like leather, even the floor smelt like leather. It also had a white venetian blind on the rear windscreen that crinkled with a tinny sound every time I touched it.

Nanna used to pack a little waterproof purse with two wet face washers and it would sit on the sill behind the back seats, warming in the sun for the entire trip. When we got to the city we would use the cloths to wipe down our faces and hands and any detritus we had managed to spill on ourselves during the trip. The face washers were hot and sun-warmed and smelt like the inside of the purse. To this day, the slightly toxic and suffocating smell of hot plastic comforts me.

Halfway through our day trip we would inevitably wind up in Waltons department store for lunch. Waltons had automatic sliding doors that looked like real doors because they were made out of wood, which proved to me that it was definitely a posh shop. It sold everything, from clothes to furniture to appliances and it had a cafeteria on the top level overlooking the floors below. For some peculiar reason they did not have prawn cutlets on their menu, so I always ordered the second most sophisticated meal I could imagine: ham, cheese and pineapple on toast.

On the day that would turn out to be my last without regret, I was on tiptoes at the balustrade, looking straight down. Years later, Waltons would shut down, the toy section would become a nightclub and I would go there and consume vastly injurious quantities of raspberry-flavoured lemonade and vodka, but for now I was eight, looking at toys and wondering if I could convince my mother that we should go down the stairs for a closer look. As I was daydreaming, the little girl in the red pinafore came and stood beside me. Then she spoke to me. I froze. This city girl, this fancy city girl with her shops full of stuff and her traffic lights and cinemas and Daisy’s Baked Potatoes was actually standing right there and talking. To. Me.

A big part of me wanted to answer her—I was imagining the thrill of going to school the next day and announcing I had made a new friend
that
nobody else knew
—but an even bigger part of me was scared. I had no idea how to speak to someone I had never met. This girl was obviously worldly. One glance at the rakish angle of her scrunchie could have told you that. I twitched nervously. There was probably a protocol to answering her and if I got it wrong, I would make a fool of myself. It was a risk too big to take. So instead of replying I stared at her, gaping mutely. Then I ran away.

Almost immediately, I recognised my mistake. This was my first chance for an adventure and I had blown it. What had I done? I stopped running. I was pretty sure she had asked me if I liked the toys. I would go back and answer yes, yes I did like the toys; in fact, I was quite partial to a Strawberry Shortcake doll, followed closely by a Barbie doll and if forced into a corner, I would accept a Puggle. Yes, that was it, I would simply go back and strike up a conversation like nothing weird had happened, like I had never run away from her with my mouth hanging open and we would end up best friends. But when I returned to the spot where she had been, she had disappeared. Just like that, like she had never been there. She didn’t even leave a puff of smoke. It dawned on me that this was the first time in my life that I had met someone I would never see again. The idea that some people existed and then they didn’t and you could never go back and fix your mistakes was a new and not entirely pleasant concept.

I spent the rest of the day hoping I would find her. I looked for her in the supermarket, in Lincraft, in Darrell Smailes Audio, in Darrell Lea. I even hoped to see her in the dentist’s waiting room and hope was not a feeling I normally had there.

For months after the encounter with the girl in the red pinafore I would wake in the middle of the night with an overwhelming feeling of dread. It was so strong it would make it hard for me to breathe. I was tortured by the belief that I had hurt the girl’s feelings and, worse, that this could have been my first big adventure and I had run away from it. It felt like the biggest mistake of my life. It probably was. I was only eight.

Each night I lay in bed and replayed the memory over and over in my head and then, because I couldn’t stop myself, I would start imagining what had happened to her after I left. A mutated version of a Hans Christian Andersen favourite would play out behind my eyelids: my little Waltons girl, filled with sorrow and a sense of abandonment, ends up homeless, wearing a tattered shawl and selling matches on a street corner until one freezing New Year’s Eve, so cold she can barely breathe, she lights her final match to keep herself warm. Then she dies of hypothermia. Heartbroken, cold and alone, her final vision is of me running away from her.

It did not occur to me until years later that she probably just shrugged it off and went back to looking at the toys. Even if I had hurt her feelings, I am sure her mother would have given her an ice-cream and everything would have been set right. Until that day, ice-cream would have fixed things for me also but now everything was tinged with guilt. I would eat an ice-cream and feel sad for all the starving African babies who would never know what it was like. I desperately needed to redeem myself and there seemed to be only one way to do that: I would finger-knit my school a new volleyball net.

Every lunchtime and recess, after school, before school, during school, I finger-knitted. I would sit, huddled over my own hands, carefully winding the wool around my finger, sliding loops through loops, creating a little chain of woolly deliverance. Whenever anyone asked me what I was doing, I would announce proudly: ‘I’m making us a new volleyball net.’ I had grand visions of an unveiling involving the town mayor, a plaque and possibly an engraved cup—with or without a freshly shot duck. I also had grand visions of once again getting a full night’s sleep, unhaunted by visions of the little girl in Waltons.

Understandably, my mother baulked at my request for enough wool to finger-knit a volleyball net and I was instead pilfering little scraps from art classes and from cupboards at home. I became furtive and obsessed, scrabbling for any bits I could, regardless of length, colour or quality. It was hard, slow work and after a month I had only managed to make a line of knitting that stretched twice across the lounge-room floor. It would have taken five hundred times that amount to make a volleyball net. Miserable, I gave up. Who was I kidding? I wasn’t cut out to be a martyr, I didn’t have the sticking power. I put the finger-knitting in a cupboard. One day, I would return to it. One day, I would set things right again.

What had started as an attempt to right a wrong had now turned into something far more irrational. I was a child; I believed in fairies and dragons and princesses and witches. I believed in happily-ever-–afters and now, after the little girl in Waltons, I’d started to believe that if I threw away my stuff, I’d never be able to fix the things I’d broken. It didn’t matter if the stuff in question had nothing to do with the thing I’d damaged or hurt or wrecked in the first place—I simply, magically, believed that if I kept it all I would never have to experience sadness, regret or guilt again.

Everything went into the cupboard after that. Broken dolls, old pencil cases, posters and stamps and stickers still in their packaging. I kept Christmas presents I had barely touched, thinking I would play with them one day and allay the guilt I felt on account of all the poor children who had nothing. I kept a lidless toy teapot because throwing it out would have forced me to accept that I’d lost the lid and it was never coming back. When the cupboard was full, I started on a drawer. I carefully stacked away all my birthday cards, the stubs of pencils, bits of eraser, lone buttons and broken necklaces. When the drawer was filled, I found another and another, and then I used the wardrobe and under my bed and the spare room and then the tops of dressers and drawers and desks. It started when I was eight and it never, ever stopped.

Chapter Two

Still, life was far from dire; I had a best friend. Her name was Katie and she was a free spirit, skipping through life with lopsided pigtails and a crooked grin. I ran panting and sweating along behind her, worried that my dress might get dirty, that my shoes might get ruined or that I might step on an ant and ruin an entire insect community’s reason for existing. Katie just laughed and ran. She was fearless in the face of regret. With her red hair, freckles and novelty socks, she was partly my best friend and partly my god.

Katie and her family had moved to our town because of her father’s job and although Katie had originally been an outsider, it didn’t really count as she’d arrived when we were all too young to realise the importance of her foreignness. I am sure it had been different for her parents. A strict protocol came into play whenever there were new people in our town. First, you sat back, watched and listened. There was no initial contact. Instead, you would ask the shopkeepers what the new person was like, you would check out what they bought in the supermarket, you would talk to their work colleagues, you would find out what church they attended and how often. You would find out whether they were Top Pub or Bottom Pub folk. Eventually, after fifty or sixty years, someone would approach them on the street and call them by their first name.

Katie’s father never went to the pub at all. This was unheard of in my world. Until I met Katie, I had no idea there were people like her family, people who had chosen to live their own lives, heedless of the need to fit in. When I first met them, I didn’t know whether to be awestruck or to report them to the police. For a start, they were the only people I’d come across who didn’t mind unexpected visitors. This was shocking. One of our biggest social rules was that no one dropped in unannounced. You couldn’t just knock on someone’s back door and yoo-–hoo your way into their kitchen. What if they were cleaning the stove? How were you supposed to carry on a civilised conversation with someone when their head was in the oven and you were conversing with their apron-covered arse? The casual drop-in was only acceptable if you were absolute best friends, sisters or, in some circumstances, a spouse. Everyone else rang, arranged it at church, or met on neutral territory, such as a fête or funeral.

In our house, unannounced visitors were our greatest fear. Growing up I assumed we were the only house that had to do last-minute cleaning before visitors arrived. That assumption was based on the fact that every other house I knew was showroom-tidy when we went to visit. It never occurred to me that everyone else might be exactly the same as us, running around the house at ten o’clock the night before, cleaning and shoving things in cupboards and under beds. Country people are house proud. Gleaming silver, polished furniture and starched doilies are part of what makes us who we are; it’s a tradition that connects us to each other and to our past. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does make it hard to have company.

None of these rules existed at Katie’s house. Not only were unexpected visitors never a problem, cleaning was never a problem either. It didn’t matter to them that there were unwashed dishes in the sink, undusted ornaments on the mantelpiece and toys on the front lawn. It was shocking, exotic and somewhat unnerving. Walking into their house was like accidentally seeing them nude.

Katie’s house had one sitting room at the front which was relatively tidy and then a bunch of unkempt rooms that were adventures on a Narnia-like scale. They even had a chook shed and an out-of-control passionfruit vine that we picked the fruit from in summer. We were allowed to cook in the kitchen unsupervised. We would boil tins of condensed milk, forgetting about them until they exploded. I don’t remember ever getting into trouble. I also don’t remember ever cleaning up the mess.

Katie’s bedroom was nothing like mine. It was messy like mine, but it was the mess of living. Clothes and well-loved toys and dress-ups littered her room. My room was full of broken and half-finished things, long-forgotten craft projects, domino sets missing half the dominoes and deflated balloons. Whenever my poor, exasperated mother insisted that I clean up, I would listlessly move things around, incapable of making a decision to throw something out. I just kept rearranging things and carefully finding hidey-holes for them in the already full cupboards and wardrobes. I was an eight-year-old curator of crap.

Katie was completely different. She would play with things and then throw them out when their usefulness had passed. I couldn’t do that at home. For god’s sake, I didn’t
want
to do that at home. But at Katie’s house I could. The first time I ripped up one of her old skirts to make a curtain for a cubby-house window, I was a goner. I was wound up so tightly that I came undone with the centrifugal force of a small tornado. I spun through Katie’s lounge room, slightly breathless and high-pitched. ‘Can I touch this?’ ‘Can we cook this?’ ‘Can I throw this over the fence and listen to next-door’s dog rip it up?’ I forgot that I needed redemption. At Katie’s house, I discovered I could be temporarily unburdened from my conscience.