Everywhere I Look Read Free Page A

irritated me.
    I heard somewhere of a woman who had moved forty times in ten years. After a short time in a place she would be filled with despair and overwhelmed by the urge to find a new house. Her dream was to have a home on wheels.
    But how would it help, to live on wheels? Wouldn’t her discomfort transfer itself to the landscape outside the caravan window? Wouldn’t the sun be always slanting the wrong way, the trees casting a mistaken shade, the train roaring too close at night, the rubbish collected on the wrong day, the corner shop situated too far away and in the wrong direction?
    A member of the original Circus Oz recalled her years on the road. ‘At every stop,’ she said, ‘we would establish the caravans in a compound, and do the show in the big top each night. Then in a week we’d pull it all down again and move on. But the next time we parked the caravans, they’d be in a different relationship to each other. I was always very distressed until we got them hooked up to power and water. And the constant changes were very disturbing to the brain. By the end of the tour I would be so confused that I’d often mistake people I knew well for others in the group.’
    Marcel Proust loved to write about the human need to subdue the unfamiliar and dull the pain it causes. He composed ironic hymns to ‘habit! That skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.’
    And yet those blissful Jungian dreams that everyone has, of finding in the house another room that you didn’t know was there, high up under the roof, an extra storey, unused or neglected, but with more windows, sunshine pouring in, a glorious view, and more space than you’ve ever had before or imagined you deserved. You can’t wait to sweep it out and furnish it and begin to inhabit it—to expand into it.
    A house can be domineering, though. You have to get into the driver’s seat. Sometimes it’s only the light fittings that you need to subdue, but the task can seem beyond you. A screenwriter woke up on his first morning in a house he had bought, saw the ostentatious white and gold baubles dangling on long, marble-green rods from the bedroom ceiling, and began to weep: ‘What have I done?’
    There was something else too—he was grieving the death of his mother. The world won’t slow down to give you time and space for moving house. It has to be done on top of everything else that’s going on in your life. This must be why people like to recite the statistic that moving house is up there at the top of the stress list, after death and divorce—which, when you think about it, are just different forms of the same phenomenon.
    When our mother died in her nursing home, and my father at eighty-nine moved into the cottage next door to me in Fitzroy, he bluntly refused to let his children sort through the stuff in the apartment that he was leaving. He made us pack the lot and bring it all along. At the time we were concentrating so hard on setting up his new house that we didn’t notice how devastated he was by the move. He claimed as always to be feeling nothing, but roared a lot and waved his arms. His thin white hair, which he usually combed down flat with Listerine, stood up in a fluff, and his eyes were wild; but we just kept boring onward with the domestic tasks.
    I hate now to think of that look on his face, both furious and desperately trusting, for he looked up at me the same way from his armchair on the summer morning, two years later, when I came in with my granddaughter to take him out for a coffee and he told me he’d stepped out of the shower and couldn’t get his breath. By the time the sun had set that day, he was dead.
    The house I’ve moved into is very similar in floor plan and orientation