A woman's home is her castle, so the adage goes.
And to ensure that I don't have a home to return to in after this year ahead, to ensure that I keep travelling, I've just sold my most recent one. I move out in three weeks. When New Year 2011 arrives, I also must not have any furniture left. My mother had some wise sayings: if you haven't sat on it, read it, worn it, eaten it, listened to it, used it or talked about it, slept in it, on it, or with it for six months, get rid of it.
Inside, they were lovingly adorned with treaasures collected as I roamed, from forays into musty shops and skirmishes in markets to tiny precious gifts. Buddhas from Bali, from Burma, from Thailand and India. Korean chests with delicate flaking rice paper inside, used to store my rolls of precious silks that I intend to use one day. Every boarding pass of every plane I've ever flown in. So many books with personal inscriptions from thoughful lovers and magical people I've met along the way. Oils and potions and paintings on silks and marble from India. Gold leaf apothecary bottles. Painted chairs of prancing elephants and bejewelled bosomy princesses from Rajasthan. A Moroccan yellow table with hand painted flowers and bobbles. A meditation stool from Persia. A gold leaf screen from Asia. Lacquer ware from Vietnam. Jewels and jewelery by the casket. Piles of Thai silk cushions. An ammunition oak box from somewhere; twin of one that belongs to my lifelong friend Gail. An Idea knock up console that changed nationality overnight when I decoupaged it in yellow and red and added erotic prints of Japanese women at their toilette. An eyewatering collection of Turkish and Indian erotic miniature paintings, on marble, bone and silk. Carpets, oh, the carpets. Kelims, Boharas, Chinese silks, a Dobag from Turkey, bought up in a forest in the Anatolian mountains while I was on assignment there. Paintings: oils, watercolours, gauche, acrylics, lithographs. Bowls from Japan, porcelain from China, earthenware from Africa. A marble carving from the Colosseum (stolen). A cobble from Wenceslas Square (stolen). A stone earlobe from a Buddha graveyard in Chiang Mai. (I just found it in my hand) A chunk from Angkor Wat. (bought it at a souvenir stall). Fossils from the Thar desert. Pebbles from Patagonia. Each piece a reminder of where and who I'd been at the time.
The only way I could be free was to be free of all of them.
My daughter Liza so often reminds me of the many times I wailed "Help me Pack, Please!" as I moved from home to home, in search of - well, I didn't know then. I was done with packing and storing. So I have to own nothing. The evening gown I wore when I danced with despot President Mugabe - out! The black sequins that slithered over me when I attended the premiere of Lord of the Rings with Orlando, the brother-not brother - out! The mirror that has seen me wailing with grief over some misfortune I've forgotten about - out! All my sheets - Pink! Green! Purple UGH! Out! Two dollar shop soup cups! Out! Mismatched socks by the million - out! Who needs scarves in Moroccoo? OUT! Will I ever read Salman Rushdie again? I don't need battles, even the literary sort. The Japanese cedar wood shoe box, Balinese spice cupboard, Chinese Tiffin carrier, fifty silver smelling salts bottles from Russia, England, France and Germany ... out, out, out, out damned spot!
My mother left me few things when she died: but I had to ship them from Cape Town to Sydney. Organising this ordeal was another nightmare. I didn't want her stuff after I'd found her secrets and lies. The one piece I really wanted went to my brother, instead. She'd left me a life size Burmese buddha, but it had stared down at me for those long months I'd slept on the floor, nursing her, and it reminded me too much of those long, ugly nights when both of us were frightened and only one of us was to live through it. She'd left me a wooden box and in it I found the secrets. She'd left me a carpet she valued so highly I wasn't ever to walk on it, and a Persian wall hanging, just silken threads after so many years in her boudoir.
"You can have my amber!" she said, lovingly fingering the warm orange beads. "Take it now!" I did, and the next day she shouted "You thief! Give it back". I did. "But you can have my pearls!" she smiled sweetly. "But not now!"
When all these things arrived in my apartment in Sydney, when the crates were prised open, and the butcher paper removed, the smell of my mother invaded my apartment. There were gardenias bursting in my garden, and sandalwood incense was burning, but my mother's smell stuck to everything. A mixture of Madame Rochas, Red Door and dust. With just a touch of meanness and madness and sadness. I looked around at these remnants of a long and interesting life, filled with secrets and madness and meanness and sadness. And I wondered on the meaning of all these things. Do they really have any attachment to a life now gone? There were so many memories, but the items themselves seemed to have lost their soul when they'd been transplanted, much as I had when I emigrated from the rich, vibrant, culturally diverse country of Africa to what for a long time I considered the dessicated wasteland of Australia.
They squatted and stood and leaned uneasily in my apartment, like a gathering of unexpected guests turned up for dinner on the wrong night. They'd meant so much to her, and they'd been bequeathed and argued over and notated and valued and devalued. But now, in my apartment in Sydney, competing with the gardenias and the Turkish erotic miniatures, they were just a motley collection of wood and wool. I couldn't wait for them to leave.
I carted them off to the auctioneer, and each kilometer further away from my home, I felt lighter. I knew I was chopping off pieces of that life. I handed them over like I was handing over someone else's child I'd been babysitting who had been annoying me and touching my stuff. When the post-auction cheque arrived, I laughed, as it was less than the cost of shipping all that useless wood and wool to Australia.
The smell of sadness and madness and meanness lingered; so I fertilised my gardenias to within an inch of their lives and the sandalwood burned in defiance. There is still much more to do.
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