my private property

Samantha McCulloch 

I sit out on the deck and watch the city lights. Around me, the garden and the house appear strange. I can’t say what makes the strangeness – the gradual recognition of an outside within an inside. The wind dies down temporarily, bringing with it a stillness full of motion, a stirring unquiet, a ceasing that takes hold of me. I look closer at the garden, the grasses like paint brushes made of horsehair, the fynbos like coral. Behind me looms the house, its large glass windows putting us on display while stubbornly preserving our opacity. 

Since we moved into the house, these episodes of estrangement have only become more frequent, though I’m not new to them. Since childhood, I’ve experienced them. Walking in the bush with my father or suddenly at dusk while lying by the poolside, the bricks still holding the afternoon heat, the sky dimming to grainy mauve. Everything is fine, my mother or father would say, and I’d take comfort in their nonchalance, but I never believed them entirely. 

—— 

When I first laid eyes on the house I was struck by its imperviousness. The foundations seemed to have taken root in the mountain landscape, as if reaching into the belly of the embattled ground. 

The house is yours, the real estate agent said, when he handed us the keys. He wore a grey suit, and his hair was all slicked back with gel. He repeated this phrase like an incantation. As if to make it so. The house is yours, the house is yours. 

To enter the dwelling, one must disarm the house with the buzzer and push open the heavy metal door. The full-height windows let in the blue air, the penetrating light, the picking wind. The wind cries around the edges of the house, colliding with its windows. But the house does not look struck. It presents itself as inevitable, as if it had always stood where it now stands, much like the cable car that shuttles tourists up and down the mountain, like the passes forged into the sheer coastline. The exotic pine and eucalyptus trees planted by early foresters for logging. The squat garrison watching over the entrance to land and sea. The network of tunnels lost below the city. 

—— 

On weekends, my husband Anders sits on the armchair that stands beside the bookshelf and reads voraciously. He takes joy in the austere aesthetics of the house, and I suspect too, in the ways in which it resists excess. 

My possessions heave at the drawers and cupboards. At night, the piles I make seem to grow to mountainous heights in our dimly lit room. Before I fall asleep, I apologize profusely for my mess, for the ways in which I can’t seem to be contained. Anders says I’ve no need to apologize but then makes offhanded comments about the correlation between a clear house and a clear mind. The truth is that my possessions don’t suit the house – the salvaged children’s drawings from car boot sales, the awkwardly shaped handmade ceramics with finger-like protrusions, the unravelling tapestries of dogs below the moon. 

Ornament is crime, Anders says, echoing the sentiment of the modernist architect Adolf Loos. 

Our dog Greta sheds her hair all over the pristine stone floors of the house, gathering against the skirting like snowdrift. Anders swoops down and collects the hair, sometimes sighing to indicate his displeasure. 

On weekdays, I wait for him to return from work. I consider whether to go out to the shops. Often, I opt not to go because I don’t want to do the wrong kind of shop. Forgotten paper towels. A cleaning detergent of excessive fragrance. Eggplants when we already have three wizened in the fridge. Anders is particular about groceries and admittedly, this gives me an excuse to avoid the mall, its glittering unreality so encouraging of my episodes, my proclivity for observing its faux marble columns and rows of tawdry shops as if I were on the other side of a cloudy glass window, longingly peering in. 

Instead, I sit on the deck with a book. I’ve always read to relax. Just the act of passing my eyes over the sentences while I feel the wind stir up around me is calming enough, slows me, reassures me. There is here. There is now. The intent is not to understand and comprehend everything I read, but to allow the words to wash over me, to allow them to move through me like water passing through netting. Not that I don’t enjoy close reading but reading from afar also has its pleasures, its particular appeal. 

The wind stirs the pages of my copy of A Room of One’s Own, old and shabby with a block- printed cover. In my mind’s eye, Judith Shakespeare paces the interior of the house. I watch her write in the long light of the candle that sits on the dining table. Woolf makes it clear that in order to write, a woman must have independence, that only through a room of one’s own, however afforded, can one even begin to write incandescently. Perhaps then the task is to conceive of writing as the public, reliant, dependent act that it is, rather than a private one? But when I consider going out to write on a bench or down on the rocks or beside the tidal pools, I feel suddenly guarded, defensive of my privacy, protective of the intimate space that buffets and cushions me. 

—— 

We were previously living in a European city that left me just as bewildered and disorientated as the house, no matter that I made a concerted effort to study the history of its watery logic, the customs of its people. My bewilderment was about the fact that I couldn’t speak the language well, but it was also about something else, some aspect of place that resisted me, and that I, in turn, resisted. A kind of symbiosis of refusal. I see now that I was not seeing the place on its own terms. I longed for it to be otherwise, to be more like home. I’d spend the evenings walking along the canals, the twilight making the world around me into gauzy unreality. 

Anders didn’t have to convince me much to move back. I was ready for a homecoming. I pictured it. A lone figure rich in experience abroad, while others leave in droves, charging to the airport to flee the disintegrating state of things. A struggling economy. Incompetent government. Violent crime. I’d buck the trend, I told myself. 

The packing was interminable. I packed for weeks. Anders packed for a few days. He had only two bags. I wrapped my tokens in tissue paper, one by one, but not before I’d gotten distracted by them, spending the hours that I should’ve been packing perusing a box of letters from an old lover or rearranging my stationery according to colour or repairing a tapestry I’d woven from old silk. I invited friends over while packing and gifted them those belongings that were too difficult or cumbersome to move. A large pear made of glazed blue stone. A chest of teak drawers stained with rings from coffee mugs. 

I began packing up all my books and became anxious. I worried about the weight of the books. I worried in general about weight. I’ve always favoured lightness but have never been able to resist accumulation, so attached to every little gift card or trinket. 

And then there was Greta who was a rescue dog and didn’t take well to instability. How would Greta cope, I agonized. She whined in the crate that came to take her away and looked at me with brown, imploring eyes. I received updates from the company that was managing the relocation. Her image arrived on my phone. Greta in a kennel, her paws tucked beneath her, her gaze averted from the camera. Typed below the image were the words, Greta is in safe hands. She can’t wait to see you at the other end. 

—— 

Each morning before he goes to work, Anders brings me a cup of coffee in bed, kisses me softly on the cheek and wishes me luck for my day of work. Greta lies beside me on the bed. She nudges my hands from the laptop keyboard, eventually pushing the device from my lap with her nose. In this way she forces me to pay attention to her. I stroke her nose and speak to her with a gentle voice. 

I tell her elaborate stories about her past spent on the outskirts of Zagreb. We hadn’t been given Greta’s backstory on adoption. The foundation had only scant information. She’d been brought to a shelter in Croatia and was then transported by truck to the Netherlands. In the months after her arrival, I’d had a strong desire to learn more about her past. I hoped to put together a picture of her life before she came to us. But all I had to go on was her passport and a forlorn looking stuffed llama. What perils had she known? 

The long sunlight comes in through the window and warms my face. I’m working on the final chapter of my long-suffering dissertation, which focuses on the oeuvre of a lesser-known writer. But I find myself unable to construct sound argumentation. My sentences are clumsy, my paragraphs littered with errors of logic. I undermine my own argument, frustrated with the simultaneous slowness and nervosity of my thinking. I find myself too close to the subjects at hand, wondering if the writer and I are more intimately connected than I know. I google her birthdate and place, hoping that this affinity I feel will be confirmed by the stars. It is not. 

I study and annotate her dreams and allegories. Her descriptions of the wreathing of smoke, of a child protagonist who makes a curtain from wild asparagus are so beautiful and tender. But I’ve no immediately lucid observations as to the manner in which the author understands questions of subjectivity, of ownership, of the inalienable rights of humans and non-humans alike. The only thing I know is that I am moved by her sentences, that they stir and bring me closer to something in and outside of myself. 

—— 

The house is often swept up in darkness. The rolling blackouts are so long-standing that they warrant no comment – the regular fact of them becoming ambient rather than punctuating. I spend hours below the skylight at my desk, studying the allegory of the winged butterfly or the dreams of souls in heaven who shine so brightly they grow gardens. 

The frond of a palm tree taps the windowpane in an overwrought fashion and a rock pigeon struggles the gust, nonetheless building an impressive nest in the pergola. Greta lies at my feet and sighs, her breath waves over my bare skin. From the kitchen, I hear the cycle of the tumble dryer and dishwasher coming to an end, along with the opening and closing of cupboard doors. Anders, always fastidious, keeps the house spotless. He won’t employ anybody to do the housework for us, refusing complicity in an organisation of labour and class relations he finds abhorrent. I try to remain upright while he tends to the house, even as I feel the inevitable lethargy of the afternoon. More often than not, I give in to my exhaustion and go to bed to nap just after noon, my hands and feet purple and icy, my head cloudy. Just before I fall asleep, a blazing green current of light courses from the base of my spine and settles, burning around my eyes. 

—— 

One evening we go for an early dinner with friends, Ellie and Lu. Ellie and Lu live with their daughter Clementine in a pale blue clapboard down on the rocks. The house is decorated with Lu’s artworks. Lu makes sculptures presented in a state of unravelling and woven with detritus she’s collected on the beach. She’s interested in the littoral, as a space and metaphor for thinking about identity, aesthetics, and history. Ellie is an academic whose research focuses on the relationship between personhood and the elements. 

Clementine sings and performs for us while we eat perlemoen doused in butter. We take turns storytelling around the table as the waves beat against the rocks outside. 

The sea will take the house one day, Lu says in a playful voice that delights Clem. 

And we’ll go with the house into the sea. We’ll be old before we’re young and starfish will take over the walls, until no surface of the house is left exposed. 

Ellie interjects. 

But then the starfish house will turn into a horse and the horse will gallop from the waves. The clapboard walls will be warm to the touch and the house will smell of wet hide. 

It's my turn and I stammer over my words, unable to think clearly, to picture any particularly vivid image in my mind. I’ve only a nervous overlay of imagery, each vaguely, feebly reminiscent of Lu and Ellie’s words. I’m disappointed, even ashamed by the failure of my imagination under pressure and I can see that Clementine is disappointed that I have nothing to add. I have an inkling that my imagination is something inherently mimetic, that as much as I want it to blaze, to astound, it can only recycle, repurpose what already exists. 

Clementine climbs onto Lu’s lap and buries her face into her mother’s chest. Lu holds the stem of her wine glass gracefully and gestures to the waves as she speaks about the horse. Clem wriggles off Lu’s lap and onto Ellie’s. She takes Ellie’s short, curly hair and winds tendrils between her fingers. Clem looks at me over her mother’s shoulder, still fidgeting with her hair. 

You must think of a story to tell about the house, she says to me.  

Clem, Ellie says, don’t be so bossy. 

We drive home after dinner and I watch the streetlamps go by, softened into the night by the movement of the car. 

I wish I’d been able to think of a contribution to the story, I say to Anders, barely audibly. 

Warm air comes in through the open window, and on the beach, people sit in the burning wake of the sunset. 

—— 

It’s as if the internal architecture of the house has been transplanted onto the architecture of my soul. The line comes to me in a dream. All the angles and partitions and divisions wrenching something boundless into geometry. But every time I feel the architecture press upon me, I feel too some inchoate voice beyond myself, childlike and wise and recalcitrant. 

—— 

Ellie, Lu and Clementine come over for tea. I put out a platter. Segments of citrus fruit, olives, loquats, lemon curd. Clementine is full of energy. She wants to build a shelter. I go down to the storage room and find an old tent that belonged to my father. We assemble the tent with some difficulty before decorating the interior with dreamcatchers that we make from an old fishing net strung with feathers and shells that I collected on the beach. 

We pick vines from the garden with which we make a curtain, and we hang little bronze suns from tassels above the soft window frame of the tent. I’ve kept the suns for years, convinced that someday they’ll find their place. We set up a fold-out table and chair near the tent’s entrance, a spot to sit out and watch the stars. 

In order to enter you have to know the secret password, Clementine says. 

Dewback is the password, the name of her toy unicorn. 

After they all leave, Anders immediately begins dismantling the tent. I ask him to stop. 

Let’s leave it up for a while. I’m sure they’ll be back soon. 

That night, I take a blanket from the closet in the bedroom. I disarm the house before exiting through the sliding glass doors onto the deck. I unzip the entrance to the tent and curl up on the camping mattress, beneath the blanket, listening to the sound of crickets, feeling a kind of easing, a yielding to the night. The wind moves the tent, comes in through the netting. But this porosity is comforting rather than disconcerting. The next morning I wake, already hot in the tent but with a sense that the night outside of the house was in some way palliative. 

I spend the next few nights sleeping in the tent. Anders is encouraging of my decision to spend my nights outside. He believes I am, in some admittedly naïve way, trying to connect the theoretical concerns of my academic work with the material conditions of my existence. 

During my time in the tent, the rolling blackouts increase in frequency. I watch the house from outside, radiant and humming, the sounds of appliances turning on and off. I covet these periods of darkness, watching the house from outside. What is it I covet? A reminder, a rejoinder, a refrain? 

And then, one morning, a sense of possibility embroidered in the air. A golden light along with various birds. I take off the old t-shirt I’ve been wearing along with my underwear, and lie naked on the deck, the sun sweeping my body with its long and gentle hand. It’s a clear day, so clear that I can see the island out at sea. Up and over the walls is that space beyond the property, that space where illegible things may be tended to. Today, I will leave the house.