Lessons in Letting Go Read online

  I rolled my eyes and kept looking. People do house inspections in the same way they walk through art galleries. They stand thoughtfully in each room, murmuring sotto voce to their partners, their forefingers on their chins and glossy brochures in their hands. They don’t show emotion and they don’t reveal what they really think of the place. Adam took a different approach. We had already looked through two other houses that morning and he had caused a scene in both. At the first, he had walked into a house that had obviously once belonged to an old man and announced loudly, ‘Oh, luv, you can’t buy this! Someone’s grandad carked it in here!’ We left immediately.

  The second place we visited was a brand-new townhouse. Like so many others I had visited, it was mass-designed, ostentatious and at the same time cramped, impractical and devoid of personality. Someone had decided to lay a swirling green carpet in the living area, presumably in an attempt to give the place some kind of character. Looking at it gave me vertigo. Adam clutched at his head, loudly proclaimed, ‘This carpet is vomit,’ and staggered dramatically back out the front door. I quickly followed, avoiding the disapproving gaze of the real estate agent.

  When we got to the car I looked at him as sternly as I could.

  ‘Adam, we are inspecting houses, we are not touring a one-man show called “Attack of the Crazy Drunk Man”. Pull yourself together or I’m leaving you in the car.’

  He grinned lazily and looked mostly in my direction. ‘Okay, sweetpea. I’ll behave. Unless the next house is really shit and then I can’t be held responsible.’

  Thankfully, when we walked into the little Edwardian he kept his mouth shut and, apart from the odour and the swaying, he passed for almost normal. I walked through the whole house slowly and thoughtfully, trying to hide my excitement. It was gorgeous; there was even a cat flap in the back door. I didn’t own a cat but if I moved here, I would definitely get one. I wanted this house.

  On the way out, I asked the real estate agent a couple of questions about the price of other properties in the area and how much the rates were. In return, he asked me if I would be buying on my own. I looked at him, puzzled. I couldn’t see the relevance of the question until Adam answered, ‘Oh I’m not living here with her, I’m just her drunk friend.’ The agent looked relieved.

  Once again, I passed on all the details to my conveyancer, organised the building inspection and rang Julian to ask him if he was willing to try his hand at another auction. He told me he was going to be out of town. Now I was stuck. Even if I had been game enough to do the bidding myself, I wasn’t going to be here either. I had a job in Darwin and there was no way I could cancel with only a week’s notice. I sat down at my desk and tried to nut out a solution. Then I searched the internet looking for a buyer’s advocate. I found one called John. We met over coffee and he was so earnest and enthusiastic that I liked him instantly. Still, it felt wrong sending a stranger to handle such a big decision, so I asked my sister Wendy to go along as well.

  ‘I don’t have to bid, do I? You know I’ll go crazy and either buy the house for too much money or hit whoever wins.’

  ‘No! Good grief. John will be there, you just have to hand over my signed cheque as a deposit if I get it. Please don’t hit anyone.’

  Again, I felt a bit excited. Thanks to being a little further out of town, this house was way below my limit. Even if things went crazy, I would still be in the competition.

  The day of the auction came and I sat in a hotel room thousands of kilometres away, staring at my phone, waiting for John to call and tell me whether I’d got the house or not. Like Julian, he was only going to ring if it was getting close to my price and the bidding was still heated.

  The phone rang.

  It was Wendy. ‘Corinne, can you go another ten thousand?’

  I looked at the ceiling.

  ‘Corinne?’

  I was dithering. That would put me outside my limit.

  ‘Corinne!’

  ‘Oh god, okay, just ten.’

  ‘Too late, it’s just gone up another fifty. Some chick just won it. She’s jumping up and down. Do you want me to hit her?’

  ‘No!’

  I hung up and threw out the brochure of the pretty little house that I’d had sitting on my lap for the last hour. I couldn’t afford to live where I wanted, I couldn’t afford to live further out and I couldn’t afford to rent something decent. At this rate, I was going to have to move into a wheelie bin next door to a brothel.

  When I got back to Melbourne, Adam met me at the airport.

  ‘You’ll find something, honey. People spend years trying to find a house.’

  ‘Thanks, that helps a lot.’

  He laughed. ‘Look, maybe you should lower your expectations. Find something in a bad part of town, or something run down. It’s a better option than having to move further and further out. If you keep trying to find this imaginary perfect house you’ll be so far out of the city that you’ll be switching time zones every time you come back to visit.’

  Perhaps he was right. I’d lived in a hovel once before, maybe I could do it again. At least this time I would be closer to my friends and I could always renovate and get a guard dog. I started looking in my suburb again, but this time I focused on the places where there was a drug problem, high crime, or a footballer living next door.

  The next Saturday, before I started inspecting the run of local dumps I had found in my price bracket, I took myself out for breakfast. I was about to drag myself through four rundown houses: one that was situated next to an industrial estate, one that was partly demolished, one that was ominously described as ‘needing work’ and another that was beside a power plant that visibly shimmered with electromagnetism. Presumably the owners of that house had moved somewhere bigger to accommodate their ever-growing tumours. The hellhole was starting to look like a real estate gem. I needed some cheering up. I ordered eggs, bacon, hash browns, mushrooms, spinach, orange juice and hot chocolate, figuring if I’d missed anything on the menu I could always order seconds. I flicked through the paper as I waited for it all to arrive. John had told me there was a little house in my price bracket up for auction that day and I should swing by to see what it went for. I had looked it up that morning on the internet. It was recently renovated and in a street where houses often went for more than a million dollars. I scoffed at their ridiculously low asking price. I knew too much about auctions now to be fooled by that kind of rubbish. Still, it was going to be sold before my first inspection. There was no harm in dropping by and watching the drama unfold.

  I arrived at the house early and wandered through it to kill some time. As soon as I stepped inside I wished I hadn’t. The house was perfect, a tiny two-–bedroomer, just big enough for one person who wanted an office. There were skylights and purpose-built shelves tucked under the stairs. There was even a small courtyard out the back. I went out the front again and waited around, thinking I might not watch the auction after all. It would be too depressing to watch it sell for a thousand-million more dollars than I could afford.

  As I stood there daydreaming I realised that the auctioneer had already started to go through the formal proceedings. I was standing right beside him and I wasn’t dressed for the occasion. My unwashed hair was pulled back in a bun, I was wearing my worst tracksuit pants and sneakers, and there were at least fifty people staring in my direction. I’d dressed appropriately enough for inspecting slums; I hadn’t dressed at all suitably for a flashy auction on a flashy street. I panicked and immediately sat down where I was, which happened to be the edge of the gutter, at the auctioneer’s feet. At the time, it felt inconspicuous.

  The bidding started at the advertised price and no one raised their hand. I put my arms around my knees and leant back a little, getting comfortable. This always happened at auctions. Things started off slowly and then all of a sudden there would be three or four people bidding aggressively, eyeing each other off, talking on their mobile phones and whispering frantically behind their hands.
I looked around the crowd, trying to pick who those likely bidders would be. Time went by. And by. The auctioneer was about to pass in the property when a middle-aged man finally put up his hand. Another ten thousand dollars had been added to the price. Yet again there were no other bids. The auctioneer started to count down the first call, the second call and then, just as he was about to call out the third and final, I stuck up my hand and yelled ‘Ten!’

  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 ima
gined 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.