House Mind
By Peter Searles
This piece is a preview of the upcoming book ‘Unearthed,’ this year’s edition of the UC FIRST Anthology, which launches on the 16th of October 2024.
At the house in Lyneham the leaves started falling in late April. They fell heavy, up past your knees. They fell so thick it stopped being fun to walk through them and got a little scary. Mrs Moran wouldn’t recognise her own front lawn. Those leaves might make her nervous. She might think it’s not a lawn anymore when it’s all buried in leaves like that. And if she might think that, you might think that I should clear them. But that’s not one of the things I’m supposed to do.
Leaves assault all of the front lawns in Lyneham. Front lawn after front lawn. I took photos of them and got funny looks. Then I lost the photos between the cut and paste commands on my old laptop. No one can imagine the enormous chasm they cross between cut and paste. But I can. I cut myself from Lyneham and pasted in Pearce, jumping the lake and some straight and curved roads and the people at work and landed without a serpentine belt. I holed up in McLaren Crescent in an old house with two cats that were dying to get out. They only needed the smallest crack between your heel and the door and they’d bolt across the yard. Imagine being that desperate to get out of your own house. I don’t have to imagine it. But cats are better than dogs or birds. Dogs and birds are bad luck for different reasons. Because dogs are just confused enough not to love you and they get stuck staring at you from the effort. And birds in cages never promise to live through the day or the night. They’re perched to fall. Imagine that, if you have to. Dogs are better than birds and cats are better than dogs. Rabbits are better than cats. But you don’t get to choose and you always gotta have at least one.
Pearce without a serpentine belt is a simple little life. It’s about a 25 minute walk to Better Music where you can look at the rows and rows of beautiful instruments you can’t play. Guitars are popular. The cheap ones actually sell. If you spend long enough at Better Music you get to know which guitars sell and it’s the cheap ones, along with the books about learning guitar for beginners. From beginner to expert the books take you. Which might be why they never come back. Those books and guitars sell, the rest seems to be for looking at. They’re good for looking at though. I like the glossy keys, balanced by weights that make pressing them so sweet. I can do it without making a sound. I press lightly past the weight and land silently on the cushiony felt. But my favourite are the banjos. Like elaborate pendulums without clocks. Comically askew. One day I’ll learn the banjo, from beginner to expert, and maybe then I’ll never come back.
The Davis’s did come back, to Pearce that is. They were kind enough to let me leave my car there. But their kindness ran out after a few weeks and I had to finally get it fixed, which cost so much that my life in Reid was just as restricted as my life in Pearce had been.
In Reid there was a washing machine that clattered when it spun, like there were coins bound up in the bottom of the barrel. The one time I met him, Mr Graham told me that just means it’s working. You always knew when the machine was running, wherever you were in the house, by the clattering and grinding of coins. I like it when the machine is running. It’s a reminder that even though your neck is aching from the cushion underneath it, not that much time has really passed. There’ll still be daylight left to check the mail without tripping over the jagged driveway and it’s not time yet to feed the dog.
I could spend all day in that Reid house, and I usually did. Mr Graham had a cupboard full of old jars and they all had lids that fit. A whole cupboard full of jars that were empty and nowhere in the house were any jars with stuff in them. No full jars of jam or screws or spare buttons. I started cleaning them, which wasn’t one of the things I was supposed to do. It took a lot of rinsing for the water to fill them up without making suds, but I took the time. That’s when I found out those lids didn’t fit that well after all. The water always leaked out.
I wasn’t ok with the jars being empty in the cupboard, so I put inside them handfuls of dog biscuits and leaves from the yard and dead batteries and bits of paper. I made strips of the envelopes that the mail came in. There were clean bits of envelope and bits that were ragged and thin from being glued together, and there were bits with writing on them and plastic from the windows. This also wasn’t one of the things I was supposed to do. But I think Mr Graham would be pleased to come home to find his mail stacked up neatly, ready to read, and his jars all full. He struck me as a man who’s not afraid of a house full of things as long as they’re orderly, and I’m guessing he just couldn’t figure out a use for those jars.
It wasn’t until later, in Melba or Hackett or Amaroo – one of those – that I thought about those jars again and decided I really had done the proper thing. Because to tell you the truth, it wasn’t right when they lived in that cupboard and nothing lived in them. They couldn’t be left like that. Like a house can’t stay empty either. Something has to fill it to kind of keep it working. Keep it doing what it’s supposed to do. People need their houses full and houses need their jars full or else everything will just freeze to stillness over the winter. These things have a way of happening without any effort, which is lucky for me, I guess.