Lessons in Letting Go (26 page)

Had I really just done that? Apparently I had. I’d just bid at an auction. I felt like I’d done the most powerful thing in the world and, now that I’d done it once, I didn’t seem able to stop. A red haze passed over me and before the other man finished calling out his next bid, I beat his offer with another ten thousand. I was well within my range; this little house was insanely underpriced. We kept going back and forth and I never let the other person get out a full bid before I interrupted him with mine. I’d never realised how aggressive I could be—that trip to the Middle East must have done me some good. I was having an enormous amount of fun. Then the other man pulled out. The bid was with me. The auctioneer looked around the group.

‘Are there any more bids at this moment, ladies and gentlemen?’

Everyone stayed silent.

‘Okay. I’ll just go inside and ask the owners if the property is on the market.’

Now I had a moment to think. If no one else made a bid, I was about to buy a house. I shook the idea out of my head. I had been to a bunch of auctions around this area now, trying to get a feel for the process, and this always happened. People like me splashed around in the puddles of our meagre savings until we ran out of cash, then the serious bidders swept in and, before you knew it, the property you thought was yours was now a hundred thousand dollars beyond your grasp.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, are there any further bids?’

No one moved.

‘Going once.’

This always,
always
happened. They waited until the last moment. I didn’t mind, I’d never expected to actually buy the house, I’d only been playing.

‘Going twice. Are there any more bids? Ladies and gentlemen, you won’t get a bigger bargain on this street any time soon, I assure you.’

I was getting impatient now and wished that whoever was going to put in the next bid would stop being so dramatic and just get on with it.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, as soon as this brochure hits my hand, the property will be sold. Going once, going twice . . .’

The blood drained from my head and pooled in my feet.

Slap!

‘Sold. To the lady sitting in the gutter.’

Everyone looked at me. I stood up slowly, thanking God that I was wearing sunglasses and no one on the street could see the terror in my eyes. I’d been wandering past. I’d been on my way to look at places I could afford. I wasn’t supposed to be here.

Inside the house, the owners and their parents were opening a bottle of champagne and I accepted a glass blindly. I had so much adrenalin coursing through my veins that I could have knocked back the entire bottle and still remained sober.

The real estate agent smiled and held out his pen.

‘Shall we sign the documents?’

I grabbed his sleeve and started babbling.

‘Idon’trememberseeingthehousewhat’sgoingonI’veneverbidatan-auction–beforeisthereatoilet? Is there a toilet?’

The real estate agent recoiled slightly. From his point of view, he was looking at a woman who had strolled up to a public sale in her tracksuit pants, plonked herself down in the gutter and proceeded to aggressively outbid the only other person interested. Now it seemed all that might have been a mistake. Perhaps all she’d wanted was to use the facilities.

I took a deep breath and asked if I could look around again, explaining that I’d only briefly looked through the place just before the auction started. I climbed the stairs. Yes, here were the two bedrooms. My bedrooms. I walked down again. Here was my stove. Here was my bath and shower and, thankfully, toilet. Here was my courtyard. I’d bought a house!

I had another glass of champagne and signed all the paperwork. An elderly lady, who I assumed was the grandmother of one of the owners, winked at me and said, ‘It’s a great party house.’ I smiled at her and told her that was wonderful as I loved entertaining. It was a complete lie. I didn’t know whether I liked entertaining or not. I’d never lived anywhere I could fit people.

‘Of course, on the downside,’ said the grandmother, ‘there’s a terrible lack of storage. Apart from what’s in the bedrooms and kitchen, there’s only this.’ She was pointing to the one cupboard and shelving under the stairs.

I smiled at her and held out my glass for a refill. ‘That won’t be a problem.’

Chapter Twenty

Once the initial excitement over buying a house wore off, I started to worry. Would all of my stuff fit inside it? I surveyed my apartment, trying to imagine everything packed into the other wardrobes and drawers, and couldn’t make up my mind. Instead, I decided it was better to be safe than sorry.

It was time for another cull.

I thought hard. Lissanne and I had eliminated a staggering amount from my desk in a very short time; there were probably similar opportunities to be found everywhere else. I went into the bathroom and checked the cupboards. Nope. I’d already been through here and all that was left were the lotions and potions that I actually used. I picked up some clothes lying on the bathmat, walked back out again and opened the door to the European laundry. Sitting on top of the washing basket was an inflatable exercise ball that I never used. Every time I wanted to put something in, I had to lift the ball up with my free arm, steady it with my head and quickly throw the washing into the basket underneath it. I’d been doing this for three years. I shook my head in disbelief at how daft I was. How, after all that I had thrown out, had I missed something so big? I must have had some sort of hoarder’s blindness. I pulled it out, released its valve and watched it shrink as the air hissed out. When it got to the point where there was not enough internal pressure left to force out the remaining air, I lay down on it and rolled back and forth to squeeze it flat. It was the most exercise I’d ever done on the thing.

Next, I stood back and stared at my linen cupboard. It was crammed full of towels, sheets, pillow cases and face cloths. I hadn’t gone through any of it. I only used about a third of what was in there. There were sheets for a single bed that I had slept in when I’d first moved to Melbourne. There were pillow cases old enough to qualify for carbon dating. I even had one towel I’d bought in a charity shop because it reminded me of when I was little. In effect, I was storing someone else’s childhood in my wardrobe. That was probably the kind of thing serial killers did. I kept the best linen and fluffiest towels and put the rest on the start of another pile for charity.

Then I remembered that not all of the linen was stored here, some of it was in a chest at the end of my bed and there was another little pile in the wardrobe. This was a hoarder’s trick I had completely forgotten about: if someone came around and only looked in the wardrobe, the neat little stack of towels and face cloths resting there looked perfectly normal. Likewise, if a visitor only looked in the chest at the foot of my bed, or only in my linen cupboard, then there didn’t appear to be a problem. But when you added it all together (as even I had never done) it looked like I had robbed a Kmart. When I located them all and counted them, I discovered I owned thirty-two face washers. No wonder it had taken so long for me to realise how big my hoarding problem was—I’d been hiding my stuff from myself.

I went over the entire house like I was a detective, inspecting every single space I could think of. I filled another two garbage bags with linen, clothes, books and the exercise ball. There was now not one cupboard, one box, one drawer, chest or basket that had not been thoroughly examined and purged.

I was done. I was really and truly done.

And yet, I didn’t feel a sense of elation or achievement. I huffed in exasperation. I had always imagined this moment would be stupendous, that I’d be standing on a mountain top like Julie Andrews, spinning in circles and warbling some celebratory tune. Instead, I felt vaguely dissatisfied.

I sat down and tried to work out how much stuff I thought I had abolished from my life. This, I thought, would give me that longed-for sense of accomplishment. I stretched my memory back a year, to the day Adam and I had done our big charity shop run, the same day we had found out about the Bastard Man’s death. I counted everything I could remember discarding from that point on: I had given piles of stuff to charity, to other people and to the rubbish bin. I sat down with a notepad and pen and wrote it all down. There was
Le Marchepied
, bags and bags of old clothes, books and CDs, numerous knick-knacks and ornaments, all the Thomas stuff, and there was probably enough paperwork, magazines and newspapers to papier mâché an elephant. When I added it all up, I estimated I had eliminated the equivalent of twenty moving boxes. Twenty moving boxes!

I looked around the apartment. It was still six weeks until settlement on the new place but I couldn’t bear the wait; I wanted to know how many boxes it would take to pack everything that was left. I put on my most comfortable clothes, slid the Jackson Five into the stereo and started packing.

For the first time in my life, getting ready to move was not only easy, it was fun. Once upon a time, if I’d had skeletons in my closet, I would have had to move three old doonas, a moth-eaten blanket and a taffeta ballgown from the mid-eighties just to get a glimpse of their bony faces. Now, not only the stuff was gone, but the skeletons as well. There wasn’t a single psychological booby-trap waiting to spring out at me. I danced around the house, wrapping vases and crockery in my remaining towels and sheets. I packed up photo frames and prints, cooking utensils, books, underwear, socks, jewellery, shoes, belts, the lot. Everything I pulled out was either useful or had tangible value. It was like I’d put all of my possessions in a giant gold-pan and sifted away the dirt.

In two days I was finished. I counted the number of boxes it had taken me to pack, then punched the air and whooped. There were twenty-four of them. If I’d already rid myself of twenty boxes, that meant I’d nearly halved my worldly possessions. It was an incredible feeling. I spun around the lounge room in circles, singing off key and generally behaving like an idiot.

A little less than a year ago, I’d been standing in my bedroom surrounded by broken glass, crying my eyes out, convinced that I was useless and worthless. Since then I’d travelled halfway around the world, met incredible people, learnt to stand up for myself and bought a house. It was hard to believe that I’d ever thought I was unable to cope on my own.

I admired the neat stack of twenty-four boxes again. I’d never felt so good about being brought down to size.

A week later I was sitting on Adam’s kitchen bench, swinging my legs back and forth and showing off.

‘What do you mean you’ve finished packing?’ Adam was standing at the stove, stirring something that he insisted was going to be a roux. I had expected him to be overcome with admiration when I told him that five weeks out from settlement on my new house I was living with just one set of sheets and one bath towel. I was expecting the usual ‘Good girl!’, which he said in the same way most people praised a dog that had finally learnt how to sit on command.

‘How are you living? What are you washing with? Why did you pack away your towels?’ Maybe he was just miffed because I hadn’t asked him to help.

‘I didn’t pack the towels on purpose, I just needed them to put around the breakables. I kept out some of my clothes and my toiletries.’

He made some kind of sniffing noise and kept stirring.

‘When are we going shopping then?’

I stared at him in amazement.

‘I don’t need to buy anything, Adam, I’m a reformed hoarder. If I was an alcoholic would you be offering me a drink?’

‘So you’re going to drag the old chair of Thomas’ and the old coffee table of Thomas’ and the old rug of Thomas’ and you’re going to set them all up in your new house, are you? You’re going to keep dragging him around with you? Good girrrrrrl.’

There was a buzzing in my ears. I couldn’t believe I still had stuff that belonged to Thomas. How had I missed that? Perhaps I was suffering from hoarder’s blindness again. It hadn’t occurred to me that those things had originally belonged to him—in fact, they almost seemed to belong to the apartment, not to Thomas—that was the only reason I could fathom for having kept such obvious reminders of him in the house. Not willing to keep those things for even a second longer, I pulled out my mobile phone, rang the Brotherhood of St Laurence and arranged a home pick-up to take the furniture away the next day.

‘Done!’ I smiled smugly.

‘You realise that means you’re going to be living without a coffee table for the next month and a half?’

I stopped swinging my legs. ‘ . . . yes.’ I faltered. ‘I did it on purpose.’

For the next five weeks I ate my dinner off my lap and fantasised about how I was going to set up the new place: all my CDs and DVDs would go in the drawers beneath the stairs; I no longer needed the big entertainment unit I had stored them in because I’d given half of them away. The towels would fit in the little space below the wash basin in the bathroom; they didn’t need a whole shelf in a wardrobe anymore. The cupboard downstairs would hold my ladder, brooms, suitcases and other big things. Everything else would fit in the built-ins in the two bedrooms. I clapped my hands excitedly and counted down the days until I left this apartment and its ghosts behind forever.

On a warm day in late summer I sat out on the balcony, killing time until the removalists arrived. I wandered around aimlessly, picking buds off the bougainvillea spilling over the railings and scuffing little bits of dirt through the cracks in the decking. Normally I spent the morning of a move cramming my car with ‘special things’ that I was scared the removalists might break. This time, I’d carefully placed a few delicate vases and framed photos in the boot and that was all. I was done. I looked at my watch. I even had enough time spare to make one final trip to the op shop.

This was a job I had been saving for a few days. It was something that I’d wanted to do on my last day in this flat, if I had enough time, to really signify that I was ending one thing and beginning another. I’d received a flyer in the mail earlier in the week from the Brotherhood of St Laurence. They were starting up a second-hand bookstore to help fund their work. It was perfect timing: I had one more possession that needed to go.