Lost in the Belongings

Of all the things that still remained in the house, why had the stupid spider plant been saved? It was a relic she had only ever fought with, carefully trying to hold back all the leaves so she could lock the bathroom door. Despite being one of the few rooms in this house she had ever visited, the place still felt achingly unfamiliar. It was a bathroom still living blissfully somewhere in 1975, with checkerboard lino and a knitted toilet roll holder. Why does one feel the need to conceal the toilet paper? We all know what that shape is, there’s no prettying it up with a crochet ball gown and a, no-doubt, germ-ridden doll.

On the stairs, the taxidermied song thrush was still there too. The thought of it had unsettled her as a girl, another ominous warning that she wasn’t welcome here. No lovely little fairytale cottages here, just a place where dead things peer from glass cases, and plants try to fight you. Everything in the house felt dangerously fragile and breakable. It had then, but now so much of the house had gone.

The living room was almost empty. There were no more ladies in the china cabinet, no more bulls on the mantelpiece. The armchairs had both gone, carried off like coffins by two men who didn’t understand their story. The sofa had gone, too. Quite the monster it had been: sickly green and slidy leather, prominent dark wood, not the warm embrace of the sofa at home. There had been cushions added once, white ones with tassels, but these were firm ans about as comfortable as sitting against a bag of compost. They rustled too. She convinced her whole family that they had been stuffed with plastic carrier bags. Now, she thinks they had just kept the plastic packaging on the padding inside. Even so, they’re gone now.

“If you want anything, just ask,” her dad said, shrugging as casually as he could manage. But there wasn’t anything she wanted. In some ways, she didn’t want anything because she had never belonged here. In others, she wanted to believe she could have been part of this place, even a part of its story now, instead of just a footnote. Nevertheless, the more objects that were removed from the house, the less it felt like she had any connection at all. Her dad handed her a picture which had been in the living room; it was of herself as a toddler. The removal of this picture lifted away all traces of her from this place.

“I thought you might want her wedding tea set?”

“Yeah, that would be nice, it’s good quality,” she muttered absent-mindedly.

“And there’s a jug like the one on Antiques Roadshow we saw last week you said you liked. The one shaped like a cow?”

“Mm, go on then.”

On the same shelf as the cow jug was a wrist watch. Minuscule, it was. Testament to the tiny, delicate frame which encased the iron will. Someone too far away to grasp, with incomprehensibly small wrists, someone too different to understand. Someone who interviewed, rather than chatted. She remembered visits to this house, perched on the slidy sofa, politely answering questions, sounding like the poshest little darling that ever lived. The woman opposite her would seem to forget her name at times, and take a second to remember it. This wasn’t a place where you hugged. Well, perhaps others did, but not on these visits, cursory ones, with weak orange squash and a packet of Fruit Pastilles from the plastic tub to sweeten the experience before leaving for home. No, nobody was ever quite who they seemed to be, in this house. She hated herself for being seen as an Enid Blyton character, just as much as her grandmother’s proclivity for stashing twenty pound notes between the pages of The People’s Friend baffled her.

Upstairs, in a bedroom she had never entered, her father had laid out a stack of family pictures he had found and was sorting for his siblings to take. They were all people, all lives with their own stories. He pointed to one, and mentioned who she was and who she was related to. This would be all very well and good if she knew anyone in her extended family, besides her grandmother and grandfather. There was a beautiful picture of a woman in her twenties, a black and white portrait which made her skin look as though it was glowing. There was something about her which stood out. It must have been from the fifties. She wore a string of pearls over a black jumper studded with beads and a jaunty bow on one shoulder. She was a vision of fifties glamour. There was something compelling about her. At last, an ancestor she longed to know more about.

“Well,” her dad began, “that’s Auntie Elizabeth. She wasn’t very nice. You know, there was a time when she took money from your grandmother which had been left to her when their mother died, and spent it on jewellery for herself.” His dismissiveness closed the door on the matter. Perhaps there was no sense in learning more about her distant relatives if they were all going to be terrible people. She laid out the picture of Elizabeth alongside a few photographs of her grandparents on the bed and took a picture on her phone, mostly for the outfits.

The more they went through things, the more she worried that she would regret not having anything for later after it was all scattered to the auction house, internet listings and the skip. She wanted things. Or rather, she wanted to want things. Her brother knew immediately what he wanted, snapping up a picture from the hallway and some old tools from the garage. Nothing of monetary value. In the end, she accumulated some things her dad had put in a box for her, stuff he’d pointed out on his way around the house. She figured it would be nice to have.

Soon, it was time to go. They trailed out through the hallway, through the porch with the tomato plants growing in bags, out into the garden. The garden was much brighter now. It had been the first thing she noticed when they pulled up in the van: the forest was gone. At first, she wasn’t sure if she had imagined it or not, but there was something wrong about it, like a lost tooth or a missing book on the shelf. The bodies of the skinnier, useless trees were still scattered about the ground. This and the empty vegetable patch gave the house a desolate feel. Though the sun shone, the place felt like the surface of the moon.

One of the few colourful things that remained amongst the dry grey earth was a border of forget-me-nots. She wanted so desperately to have a poignant moment with what was left of the house, and this felt like something she would read in a book. Carefully, she plucked some forget-me-nots and put them in the front pocket of her handbag to keep safe until she could go home and press it.

And now the chairs are gone. The photos are gone. The tomato plants are gone. The trees are gone. There is nothing left, every last tenuous connection gone. Not even stories. Not even grief. Everything dismantled and packed away like a film set.

Now, the walls are white. The rich red carpet has, thankfully, been replaced by some soft greige concoction. Someone else has dreams of planting up the vegetable garden. They’ve filed a mental note to fill the car pit in the garage. They say, “thank goodness the forest’s gone, it made the place so dark and gloomy!”

All that’s left is a frond of forget-me-not, pressed between the pages of a book she’ll never read.