Demolition.

I spent that year removing seventy years’ worth of flashbacks from the house in gaffer-taped or open-top boxes, and black plastic garbage bags half-filled like under-inflated giant balloons. The flashbacks - old teapots, Leon Uris novels, a pressure cooker, an A-line dress in yellow and orange polished cotton that still had some 1950s sunshine stuck to it, a Gem razor, a wooden-handled chisel - trooped gaily to the car and got in like children going off to a summer camp; rattling and shushing and flipping and clunking on their way to the opportunity shop.

Then it was done. Three fourths of a century of junk, each piece with its own little micro-climate of memories, gone. Freed from driving endless boxes of ornaments to second-hand shops (the provenance of much of the junk, it should be pointed out; my mother was an incorrigible collector and hoarder), I relished the freedom of being on foot, diverting the route of my occasional runs to pass the house while it was unoccupied but still under our ownership, and stopping to place the flyers spilling from the letterbox into the bin inside the gate.

The diverted run came out of the valley, directly south of the house by an exact mile, and proceeded up a road from the river steep enough that early vehicles were unable to negotiate its once-gravelled surface. They spun their wheels and drifted sidewards, backwards, passengers shrieking. Now, running, you look vainly for the top of the hill, but it arcs humpbacked over the landscape, flattening out in its own good time. In climbing this impossible hill I was shadowing the ghost of a teenage me, who used to run carelessly to the river and back again, obsessively singing a song in his head the seasons go so quickly/you don’t know where you are/I said I’m sorry/don’t you know I tried/everybody’s watching/and it makes me cry. Now you cross Buckley Street and there’s a fickle momentary downhill, but then the cruel topography rises again all the way to the house. I used to sprint the last block.

*

The last time I passed the house, a few weeks ago, it was an afternoon in early spring; sunny, still. The driveway was a sea of yellow-tinged pink flowers from the neighbour’s enormous overhanging camellia, seventy years old, at least. My mother used to pick up the freshly fallen buds - yes, off the ground - and put them all around the house, in vases, jars, saucers, anything that would hold water, and they would last no more than a day before browning and I would gather them and throw them in the compost and the next day she would fill the house with them again.

If, on these runs after title had passed to the house’s new owners, I was subconsciously waiting to witness its inevitable demolition, or to be the first to report on, the load of doing so was lightened a day or so later. A friend told me she had driven past the house - and it was no longer there. She had noticed because, apart from the ice-cube of light where the house had stood, she had always turned her eyes towards it in a kind of silent reverential appreciation: decades ago, at a party in its overgrown garden in the innocent late 1980s of Cheap Trick, Rick Astley and INXS, she had been a guest and had met someone whom she had eventually married. 

You can’t mourn a house; it is nothing but a skeleton whose skin and innards and hair and soul and once-alive mannerisms have long departed, like the cats that roved its pathways and sat in its trees and were buried in its garden beds. Despite that I can still see the fretted patterns of afternoon sun projecting through a western window and onto a kitchen wall, sliding down across the hair and face and burnishing the ginger eyelashes of my father sitting hunched at the table.