ROSE STREET ARCHEOLOGY
once inside the house i became a giant, looking down into a miniature world, for years i had stood across the street trying to see in through the blinds, but the interior of the house that i had been picturing was so much larger, not in my wildest thoughts had i imagined, that the environment would have changed at all & that i had changed so far beyond it was startling, i was now viewing the house through the eyes of an adult, & in order to get a sense of myself as belonging to this place, i had to get on my knees & crawl down the hallway, but the perspective had changed, i thought, i am crawling down the hallway of the house that has haunted me for fifteen years, then i thought, i am crawling down the hallway of a house, that is being rented to some vietnamese people who are sitting in the loungeroom, & this could be considered strange, the relationship between myself & the house had become inappropriate, but i was not prepared to accept this & began to fondle the light switches, the cupboard handles & the greasy glass door of the old oven, i pressed by cheek against the hard shower tiles in the bathroom & thought, please take me into you, but they remained hard & cold like tiles, that was their way of loving me, & still i loved those tiles leaving an imprint of my cheek on their surface, i dropped down in front of the bathroom mirror cabinet & almost wept, when i saw my adult face looking in, through those stains that had come from fifteen years ago, 'where have you been coral?', the mirror seemed to ask through its old brown marks, 'i want to come home', i said, in the cracked voice of a child that tried to struggle up through the broken chested adult, 'where have you been?', came the drier darker voice from inside the linen press', 'i want to come back,' i said, as i smelt the same scent from my child's past still waiting in there, as though for all these years it had been waiting for my lungs, to breathe it in, & how deeply i breathed that scent in, i took it into my whole body & every cell was bloated on it & i did not want to breathe back out, & almost wept when i had to breathe out & let that old scent go, i wanted to crawl in there & breathe in that scent but i was too big, inside my brothers' wardrobe i found the dark blue paint of rose street, the paint that had seen everything that happened to me & that had said 'hush' as i cried myself to sleep, that paint was still in there, still blue although a little marked & worse for wear, hushing the clothes around it, it was the only section of wall that hadn't been painted over, it was existing in its deep quiet space behind the clothes of the new people living here, 'i writing about my past', i told them & they nodded, receiving my book & polite conversation & even putting the kettle on, but inside i was unstable, collapsing, it was too small, miniature, i had expected a normal sized house to walk through, a normal sized house to love & for it to love me in return, in order for our relationship to work, in the way that i had expected it to work, but it had become a doll house & all i could do was walk through it like a giant, fumbling at the little plastic light switches, slim silver taps, light fittings, pieces of carpet & paint that still remained from my past with giant & clumsy fingers, trembling with desire & longing, through the odds & ends of drawers, along the distances of back door glass & across the pieces of speckled lino, that pushed up my own footsteps & the old footsteps of my family through them, so that i caught them in my chest as thuds, the tea towel hanger & safety chain where still nailed into the back door & would be nailed in there after i had gone, the cupboard in dad's room had been waiting patiently for my eyes upon it again, & once in the backyard my head shot up through the clothesline, & the blue light surrounding the wide backyard, held the same sky & clouds of my childhood, viewed from anywhere else it was a magnificent sky, viewed from the backyard it was a childhood sky, in the shed there were the things that dad had built like the shelves, badly built by his temper, sad hands & a lack of interest & equipment, built tackily & a long time ago, but they were still here hanging on, occasionally there were trees that were alien to my past & therefore unwanted by me, shocking me, as i followed the path of cracked concrete down to the shed with the tacky shelves, always the shadow of the house looming up behind me, the rheam hot water tank was whirring outside my bedroom window around the side trellis, outside the bedroom that had been unfilled by me for seventeen years, then a couple of almost grown kittens saw me from the verandah & rushed towards my ankles, let the ghosts have free reign i thought, & accepted that i was now sharing the house history with the newcomers & that the old ghosts of the first cats to live here, that were the pioneer cats of my childhood, were now a part of the archeology, as these new cats that ran towards my ankles were now contributing to this archeology, the house crumbling down in dilapidation & all the living things building up little layers of history into it, it had all happened so fast, the archeological history of this house, the child inside me stood there & watched forlornly, no adult world to move into & no childhood world to go back to, everything changing so fast that all i could do was just stand there bewildered & let it happen, i looked out of the windows into the frontyard & the backyard, & by doing so i captured an old perspective of angles & light & was grateful just for this, the boys' wardrobe & the fluorescent light tube were still there, the blue tiles with peacocks on them were drying in the shower, the blue carpet was still hushing up from the floor in mum's room, it remained there, sullenly under the new beds, the carpet that her tears had fallen into & that i had drowned in, i asked myself the repetitive questions of what still lives? what was still the same? the stained kitchen cupboards still hung in there, terribly in grief of my absence, the child that used to open them & bump her head on them, & the toilet door was the same & the lock, so i locked myself in there, to remember how i had locked myself in, a moment before my expected death, against the threat of my father, but i was now so big that i knew i could have opened that toilet door & pushed my father down, & i said to him 'you are a weak, insecure, sad & angry man, but a father looks so huge to a frightened child, & it is so very easy to knock a child down, for moments at a time i felt joy & pain, then nothing, the fence was the same, the frontyard tap, i had outgrown my bedroom, i was too big & it too small, some kids had push bikes stored in the old aviary, that still stunk of those sad imprisoned birds, where all those diseased budgies & finches had lived & squabbled, where the seedbox & cuttlefish had lived & the rabbit & where the pain still lived in the wood inside the weevils & webs, then i knew it was time to go, i had retraced my steps, i had tried not to get too comfortable, yet i knew i had become comfortable back in the arms of the old lover, of the old family member, it was something i had to do alone, to find out what could be salvaged & held onto some more, before i leave, i investigate, lines of inquiry, structure, habitation, restoration, touch to uncover deep maps, turned door handles, felt the wood in the linen press, the bathroom rails, slid my fingers along them, the dusty powdery light, the still cold tiles for kissing, switched the taps on & off to hear the water rush onto the skin the way it had before, that rush of water into the sink satisfied me that it was still the same & that even in my absence it would sound the same each time it was switched on, it was like a dollhouse that i had grown out of, all the dimensions the same but smaller, i realised that i had been dreaming in the house, in an adult body with the perception of a child, i had been dreaming about the angles & colours of the place with the mind of a child, when i got into it i was a giant & had to crouch down low & understand my past, but at every turn i had outgrown the shape of it, but the blinds were still the same & when i reached out to turn on the tap on, it held my hand & my heart in its gaze, as the water gushed out it sounded the same, the bloodrush in my ears & my mind were the same, & as i've already said, some of that deep blue carpet was still in my mother's room, & in my brother's room down the other end of the house, just a few short footsteps away for a giant, the paint inside the wardrobe was even a darker shade than i had remembered it, the cupboard doors were the same & made the same noise to open & close, then there were those pretty blue peacock tiles in the chocolate bathroom, of which i hadn't remembered at all & suddenly with a feeling of panic i wondered what else i had forgotten, what else i was unable to hang onto, i was only a few feet taller but i had outgrown the house by miles, it was like growing out of a teapot, that had furniture inside, it was like finding the straw pram you used to push around, or the dragster bike you sat in, or the tiny purple wooden table & chairs & trying to squash your body back into them, but you never fitting & knowing they would break & splinter before they would take you back, or the infants lunch seats & the tiny toilets from your earliest days at school, the archeology of the house was like this, & so it was time to salvage the remains & make my mental notes, it was time to say good-bye & to shut the door behind me, not a matter of my leaving one hundred percent, but of the house trying to send me away, all right you win now good-bye, but still 'i love you,' i wept inside & still its deep old back was turned from me & i knew that if it had turned around, the whole house would say, 'i love you too coral, but i am too small & you have grown too big', i hugged that house to my chest like a doll house & wept viciously & desperately into it, my tears flooding down the tiny wire chimney, & i knew how my salty tears were useless & strangely inappropriate, but i could not help but cry them, & i knew how they washed through those large rooms of my past & that i was crying the big lonely tears of a child, but know that i had held them inside like i now held the doll house, choppy & disturbed, & know that i had to face the world around me alone & holding that house with its tiny fixtures in a protective fashion, because i could not creep back inside it, i had finally come home, it is this love that cannot be fulfilled that is the hardest love, the love of what could have been, it is that fantastic love that is the love of perfection, where nothing can go wrong because no risks were taken & nothing had a chance to go wrong, it is the love that is most attractive, the most desirous, it the love of golden suns & timelessness, of lost opportunities & wasted time, for a while i felt betrayed & that the house had turned its back on me, then i found that the house had saved some of these small treasures for me to uncover upon my return, i wanted more than anything for our sizes to fit together snugly, but i was all grown up & walking like a giant, my touch was inappropriate to the house that still had my child inside it, & i realised that for seventeen years i had not left this place & had viewed it from the outside with hope, with inappropriate longing, with the mind of a child, knowing little of the minute furniture & angles that had waited inside to be discovered, if only i had known how small it all was & how big i had become, i've never loved anything so much in all my life as i loved rose street, i felt my blood temperature drop & the numb slide into shock, i picked a bit of tree that had hung on through the seventeen years to take with me, but left it behind accidentally, & that was the last blow in leaving that house, in leaving that little piece of tree behind to be eaten up by the front lawn, but i knew that as i left, the dimensions of the house were already settling in me & that the haunting inside had begun to shift & become more appropriate, for the first time i was forced to come to terms with my own moderness or growth, the house was tacky, outdated & small, but still it whispered up to me from every crack, crevice & fixture that was the same & how i wished this was true, as i went from room to room with wonder, in awe & in search of familiarity & in a light-hearted fashion told the new occupants, of what was still here & what was gone, but i felt desperate with loss inside & horribly lovesick, like i had come home after all these years to kiss the doormat of the old house & how it must have waited a little more battered away & wearing thin inside itself by new tenants, who live inside it in a space so intimate to me, that it was obscene to have them living there, & it killed me for many years to know how they lived inside it, & slept in my rooms & how the blue walls would have hushed & surrounded them, all those years that i had loved my house, the house that they lived in, the house belonging to me, me belonging to it & both of us knowing & the gulf of a street between us & the few hundred thousand dollars that kept us apart, & know i scavenged around for the remains beneath the new things of others, that had been slapped on top like paint, i said to the house, 'no one would love you like i have,' 'i know,' it said, as if it had saved these few small fixtures for my hands to be tender & trembling upon them, like my fingers curling around the taps in a loving way, 'i love you,' i crackled inside like the taps, my own built up & rusty waters trying to seep through, but they were silent & how they loved me back, i was totally fulfilled inside the house & the house was fulfilled by me, we loved each other in the same way we had for seventeen years & it was as simple as that, it's just that other people lived here now & perhaps they loved the house in a different way, in their own rented accommodation & financial investment way, & who is to say that that way is any less than my way?, but already i was judging them for the way they loved my house, already i was hating them for it, but to be fair, i will also acknowledge that the house was now also adding to their own life history & there was also an exchange going on between the two, as the house was pampered & modified in small ways, but i knew that nothing could love a house like the heart of a child that turned jealous inside me, i thought of the new children that were growing up there now, & trusted those new children with my old house, & trusted that the old house would love them like it had loved me, & this is the only thing that made me happy & able to leave for now, & in our own sad ways the house & i were explaining this to one another, we were meant to be saying good-bye but the house just sat in the sun, glad that i had come back, a little older & more dilapidated, i was meant to be turning away for good, full of all these resolutions & going on into my life, & in a way i had come to an understanding that the house was small & i was a giant, & to love it in this way with the mind of a child, or to see it in this way was no longer appropriate, so it was time to say good-bye to a house that was the same size as me & the bench that was level with my forehead, it was time to say good-bye to some ideas i had been holding onto about the house, but as far as my love is concerned i could not let that go completely, & knew i would return & made this silent promise to us both, even if i didn't & was able to move on, i will carry my love for this house always with me & will be broken-hearted, always willing to return, sometimes my days will be filled with this longing, other times the house will hardly mean anything & i will find it easier to live, sometimes i will dream of going back & other times the house will not feature, 'you know i will always love you,' i said to the house, with tears that the house fully acknowledged, making me feel less alone in the rainy world my grief, 'when i leave my love will be with you,' i said, with tears down my cheeks, watched by the house that was to be left, the house that lived behind its tired old blinds, these tears i was crying seemed like a sensible resolution, or the coming to terms with adulthood, but they were really saying, 'i would do anything to be with you again', they said 'my life means nothing without you', they said 'good-bye & hello forever', they said, 'i will carry you inside until the death of my consciousness, & that my lovely old house, who lives on the only street I really lived on, & who is the first love of my earliest life, is the best i can do.' |
