The cardigan with the paint stain on the elbow that she could never wash off: why had she kept it so long? She remembered touching up the sitting-room door, brush in one hand, Sylvie in the other, when a blob of gloss had attached itself to her sleeve almost as firmly as her baby’s fingers.
The uncomfortable wooden armchair that guests sat on, or rather, hovered above as though it were a large hedgehog. The enormous ghetto-blaster like a plastic-armoured beetle squatting on the windowsill. Rachel’s drum: memories of a small child marching around the sitting room like an infant platoon, noisier than a massed military band. She ought to let all this stuff go.
Sylvie had now followed Rachel’s footsteps down the road of independence. Her ex-husband had walked out and not returned, of course, five years previously. She had the house to herself now. How did she feel about this? Restless, actually. She had some sort of freedom, but all these remnants of something long gone, if it had ever been, tugged at her like chains.
Decision made! We will declutter. We’ll begin with those rows of Rachel’s unwanted books. Into bags for Oxfam with them, and look at all that dust like mole fur where the paperbacks had been. An empire of clutter all about her. Cleaning the house will be so much easier following the big tidy.
*
That evening, back home from the DVLA, sitting in the few square yards of sitting room emptiness that seemed as large as a football pitch, her mind was peppered with thoughts about her absent daughters. Lately she’d had a sense of herself as a terrestrial drifting in outer space, purposeless.
The next day she popped out during her lunch break to the charity shops on Morriston high street. In one she saw her grandparents’ cutlery-set in its box. Two months there, nobody had bought it nor wanted it. Eight lumpy knives, forks, spoons, refugees from an era of phony ideas of ostentation, always on display but probably never used. She bought it and put it back on her sideboard. It looked splendid there, the open case, the glint of steel. So what if she too never employed it? It was a link to the past she shouldn’t have sundered.
A day later she spotted the drum amongst cast-off junk in a dark corner of a different shop. She didn’t need it, surely? But you wouldn’t want another soul banging Rachel’s toy, would you? And next to it the ugly monster ghetto-arouser on which she’d played music tapes while holding a baby in one hand, and doing housework with the other.
*
She looked about her at all the belongings she’d retrieved, three quarters of them almost. She felt better now. Had her new freedom, post-daughters, come wrapped in loneliness? She had finally shed that garment, if so. She fingered the paint-blemished sleeve of the cardigan she was wearing. It was still a good fit.
