Lessons in Letting Go (6 page)

Now I had my opportunity. I could rush to Shane’s aid and save him from certain pain and humiliation by offering him a steady and skilled hand. But in my haste, I came at him too quickly and for some reason, as he saw me coming, he started trying to slide himself around to the opposite side of the pylon. I changed direction to get at him, he changed direction to get away from me, and we crashed into each other. As he went down, I grabbed one of his arms to pull him up, but to no avail. He crashed heavily on his free arm. He looked bewildered, sort of stunned. He seemed not to notice that I was there at all. His mouth kept opening and closing but no sound came out. And then teachers started running onto the rink. The arm I was holding was fine. But the one on the ground was bent in a decidedly un-arm-like fashion. As Shane didn’t seem to notice my presence any longer—no doubt retreating into a world of severe pain—I skated away and left it to the professionals.

In the ensuing mayhem of teachers yelling and ambulances being called, everyone forgot about the part I had played. And later, when the excitement died down and we all got on the bus to go home (leaving Shane at the local hospital), everyone assured me that it wasn’t my fault and that I was only trying to help and honestly, if he couldn’t skate, why did he go out there in the first place? It was a good point.

I didn’t feel much in love with Shane Doltrey after that. A boy who couldn’t rollerskate and didn’t like the Village People just didn’t seem masculine enough.

‘Hello?
Hello?
Corinne, are you there? So, what are you going to do? Are you coming out with me on the weekend, or are you going to a party with your ex-boyfriend’s family?’

I snapped back to the present. Adam wasn’t going to let up. I kicked the skates under the coffee table.

‘I’m going to the birthday party.’

Now was not the time to be making rash determinations about the state of my relationship with Thomas. The skates were there to remind me that I was not qualified to make such a decision.

I ended the phone call with Adam, chewed at a fingernail and forced the Thomas problem to the back of my brain. I reasoned that I didn’t have time to confront that right now, there was work to be done in the flat, pressing work. My parents had decided to sell the family home (news I had greeted with all the enthusiasm of someone who had just been told they’d contracted plague) and I would have to go home and clear out my childhood bedroom.

It was obvious that I would have to find room in my flat for all the stuff from home, but so far, I hadn’t been able to find anything that I wanted to part with. Today would be a perfect time to start looking again. I got up from the couch and wandered around, fingering things and finding reasons to keep them all. The broken cassette holder I made in year nine? Obviously that couldn’t go. You can’t throw out something you made yourself, everyone knows that. The collection of half-burnt candles given to me as Christmas gifts by friends I no longer saw? Of course not, they were a testament to the love they had once felt for me; I couldn’t heartlessly dump them in a bin. The bubble-gum jeans and lolly-pink cable-knit jumper I wore on the day I went roller–skating with Shane Doltrey? Why was I even asking myself that question? I couldn’t even bring myself to throw out the old kitchen curtains from the family home in Corryong. I didn’t even realise I had them until I opened a musty box in the back of the wardrobe and there they were, resting on top of a stack of
Smash Hits
magazines. All my childhood memories of that kitchen came slithering out of their bright orange floral print and brought tears to my eyes.

Forgetting that I was supposed to be clearing out, I pulled the curtains from the box, smoothed them out and carried them into the kitchen. I was going to give them a new life. I didn’t have curtain rods, so I taped them to the windows. They were full of holes, and because they were taped up instead of hung, they made the kitchen look a little like a shanty town. However, I had made a bit of room in the box. I had somewhere to put the rollerskates now. I smiled. See? I was making progress.

Something vaguely akin to house-pride flared up for the first time since I had moved in. I looked around the lounge room. I owned a cheap second-hand computer desk. It was ugly and I had only bought it as a temporary measure anyway. It held no specific memories. This was something I could easily relinquish and besides, I had another desk on the way. I did not need two desks. It felt very mature coming to that realisation.

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’.