Nicholas Royle - Quilt

The house seems inconceivably full. Every room is a minefield of twilight, never enough light: the dust, the mouse-droppings, the spiderwebs, the sprawl and mounds of junk mail, pipesmoker’s paraphernalia, the little stackings and sub-piles, everything collectable collected, the free gifts, the mail order catalogues, the possibly some day reusable envelopes and plastic bags, the phones and TVs, watches and clocks, working or defunct, the habits of collecting keeping storing of a lifetime, the simplest word, a leaf tome. Put them together like chalk and cheese, not in our lifetime even more of a lunacy, as if synapothanumena were bread and butter, the height of fashion, the order and agreement of those that will die together, but life and time in truth never do. They are driving between, in transit perpetually between house and town, starting other collections, starting with all the paraphernalia with which to clean and remove (the cloths and sponges, scouring pads, rubber gloves, cleaning agents, refuse bags), and in transit too between the house and the local tip, day after day the transportation of black rubbish bags, black rubbish bag after black rubbish bag filled with anything and everything judged not to be indispensable. But how is that done?

It is not only the junk mail, which in its mounds is always on the verge of toppling if not toppled into another mound before you can straighten anything out, with all the envelopes that his father has marked as possibles by putting the word ‘interesting’ and a ‘?’ on the outside of the envelope, together with a date of when the announcement of the prize-winner itself arrived. It is also the presence amid all this junk mail of bills, letters and other documents of significance, bank statements, correspondence with the company that supplies heating-oil to the house, the man who deals with the upkeep of the ride-on mower, letters from himself and from his father’s brothers, letters of condolence concerning the death of his wife, the official documentation relating to her death, and then the surfaces such as shelves and mantelpiece piled and bureau-drawers and other cupboards crammed with the entirety of the family’s past: photographs and correspondence, but also bits of artwork, bric-a-brac, birthday and anniversary cards, souvenirs, mementos, knick-knacks and other bobs.

Side by side, perched between mounds, they feel their way, murmuring or silent, occasionally seeking advice from one another. Here is a letter congratulating his father on having won fifteen thousand pounds, and another on having won a free holiday to Cyprus, here a bank statement from a year previously and there an invoice for a spare part for the mower. There are notes to himself and letters from others and drafts or copies of letters from himself to others. She is more inclined to jettison, but she also has a sharper eye for sorting potentially significant correspondence or documentation. She maintains the steadier pace, slowly but surely filling the black rubbish bag at her side. For him it is all a haze, she notices, a miasma over his eyes descending with virtually every scrap. Destroy or retain? Why destroy? Why retain? The shores of junk mail lapping at their knees, they proceed envelope by envelope, she the bold pragmatist, he washed over with the impossibilities of decision at the very canuticles of his fingers. And pervading everything all the time, though neither mentions it to the other, is the smell. For her it is curious and alluring, unknown yet connected to him. For him, it recalls the love of life itself, this ceaseless smell of the house. Uncapturable but ubiquitous, on every surface, on every object are the residues, the residutiful, residentical odour that he recognises as not the father’s only but that of the house itself. He loves this signature of the house, an olfactory imprint different from anything else in the world, irreproducible and irreplaceable. He dreams of preserving it, bottling and selling it back to himself, privately, on a demented black-market of grief. In reality this smell, neither stench nor perfume, enveloping every object in the room, every item of their clothing, every inch of their hair and skin, endures scarcely longer than the time it takes to transport a car-load of rubbish bags to the tip.

They drive to the tip more times than they can think. In the unrelenting blazing heat of these uncountable, unaccountable days they drive to this place manned by whom or what? These men, what are they called, the workers at the municipal tip? His mother knew the name, he recalled, she would drop it into her conversation as something to be enjoyed by itself, like a mint. But it keeps defeating him, this word, never in his vicinity, repeatedly eluding him, as if with a mind of its own. Then finally, out of the heat and haze, like a little oasis in a mirage it shimmers into focus: the totter. He is the figure who attends a dump, who deals with refuse, the rag-and-bone man of the heart who tots, to totter the word, the tot to tot, to turn to itself, backwards and forwards, a stumbling, stuttering figure of refusal. There are two of them, in fact, every day one or the other and often both, always the same. One of them is a small frightening man, with vacuum eyes looking through your face as if nothing you could say or ask could ever register on his, as if your face were indeed already reduced to bone. They think of asking: Where do we put something like this old Swedish orthopaedic kneeling chair (bought from some mail order catalogue twenty-five or thirty years ago, unsat upon for all but two months of that time), made of steel and deckchair-style fabric? Does it go to metal recycling, or is it general household waste? But they know better. They learn very early on not to ask the tiny totter anything. One false move and he’ll melt your face off with a nice canister of stuff fit for purpose kept close in one of his numerous pockets, is how he makes them feel. But the other, oh yes, the other totter! What a brave and magnificent specimen, a totter to tot, a totter to take home to your parents and present saying: Look, I have never known whether I was gay or straight or what it meant to have a sexual identity, besides a fiction out now, as the hoax played day and night by the contemporary universal film company, but this man is a totter, folks! Just check him out — the height of the fellow, the flowing golden mane of hair, the stupendous beautiful dirtiness, mom, your tottering colossus roaming the refuse, the mounds, the tipping-effect, like a god to whom you could address any question, no matter how naïve or obvious, and he would tell you graciously, with simple but unfathomable courtesy, as if completely in your own shoes and in another world at the same time.

How to gauge this disappearance of themselves every time they ask the totter a question? In due course, after a dozen or so visits, they are both in love with him. He is a dreamy but inextinguishable part of their cryptic, shared biography. They pack the odoriferous refuse bags, having separated the rubbish into what can and cannot be recycled, and drive to the tip frankly yearning for a sight of this man, and find themselves deflated, absurdly down-at-mouth on leaving, on any occasion when he isn’t there (or is concealed in the totter’s marvellously mysterious hut, on a tea or lunch break), as if the tip were another home, a home-making possible thanks to the lion-man who doubtless quit the premises everyday at sundown or earlier but seemed nevertheless to be the very premise of the premises, the king they would like to have invited back to the house, wined and dined, twinned and dazzled, sinned and binned, idylled and idded in an impossible fantasy loved as no one had evidently ever loved him.