Everywhere I Look Read Free

complain, they began, in an extravagantly relaxed manner and refusing eye contact, to carry things out and arrange them roomily in the cavernous vehicle. Everything fitted, with space to spare.
    So they sank the knife when it came to collecting my dead father’s kitchen table from his empty house next door: apparently it was ‘too heavy’ and ‘wouldn’t fit through the door’.
    ‘How do you think it got in here?’ I said in a high-pitched voice.
    ‘Musta took it apart and then reassembled it,’ said one of them, fixing his gaze on the peeling lino. They closed up the truck and drove away, leaving me and the table standing in Dad’s bare kitchen.
    A week later, two men from my family tossed the table on to their flatbed truck and flipped it into my new house. They laughed. ‘You were ripped off.’
    Back in the big share houses of the ’70s, when group dynamics were shaky and we were always having to split and start anew, people used to pride themselves on being able to polish off the move in a day. ( Bin all chutneys and mustards .) The women, especially the single mothers, learnt how to set up a place at speed. You had to make things attractive and get the new household whirring along on its little rails so the kids could repose on a sense of order, and not be too sad about what they’d left behind.
    Somebody told me that when Mother Teresa died all she left behind was a bucket and a pair of sandals.
    I read in his obituary that in 1936, when the late Sir Ronald Wilson was fourteen, the bank foreclosed on his family’s home. Before the house was sold, young Ronald had to help bury his father’s law library in the backyard.
    A journalist fell in love and left his wife. Months later he went back to their house to pick up some things she had dumped for him outside the back door. Looking at the house, he realised he felt married to it , that it was his security, his only anchor. The place looked wild and out of control without his care. He wanted to clean it. He was suddenly very frightened: he would never have another like it. ‘I started to whistle,’ he told me, ‘in case she was in there. I drove away angry. I wanted to turn back and stand by my dog’s grave for a bit, but I was worried she might look out and see me standing there all sentimental.’
    How many pets, carriers of helpless and unquestioning love, lie rotting under the backyards of the world, as houses change hands and again change hands?
    ‘When you’re a student,’ said the teacher who had wanted her labour to stop, ‘you move into a primitive, clapped-out house quite happily. You fix it up—white paint and calico—and you get on with your life. But when you’re middle-aged you have a feeling that you should move into something better.’
    I’m embarrassed that my new house is less substantial than the old one. Its walls feel fragile, insecurely grounded, not quite vertical. If I stumble, my elbow might go through the plaster. I imagine that people will step in the front door, take a look around and start to pity me. ‘Well,’ they say, trying to brighten me, ‘at least you won’t have to move again.’ What—stay here till I die ? In their concern they are consigning me to old age, to death. Is this why I have always kept moving? Because to stay in one place is deathly?
    When I try to count the number of times I’ve moved, I start off confidently but conk out at about twenty-six. Everything starts to blur. My thoughts veer off to events and people connected to this house or that one, to the associated outrages and periods of fruitful calm. Old grievances, guilts and fits of self-righteousness fire up and smoulder again.
    A Californian told me she had changed her address so often that she looked like ‘a gun moll on the lam from the FBI’. Doesn’t anybody stay in one place any more? Did they ever? Not according to Bruce Chatwin, who maintains in The Songlines that humans are supposed to be nomads—a theory that has always