The wardrobe.

This old house has no built-in wardrobes, so we ordered a new freestanding one from the furniture store to replace an old one that was too small for a teenager's fashion ambitions. The new wardrobe came flat-packed in three huge packages, like the monoliths in 2001:A Space Odyssey. The monolith packages contained innumerable pieces of particleboard, some main strut-type wooden beams, scores of shiny metal items that looked like pieces of hinge, and hundreds of tiny metallic screw-like objects. Attached, and nicely protected inside a ziploc plastic bag, was an authorless book entitled—I think—Instructions: The Sequel. I might have embellished that last bit, but the book is gone; it could have been A Long Day’s Journey into Night or Ulysses.

There was an option. By paying an extra fee you could have the million pieces magically transmogrified into an actual wardrobe, 'magically' because the assembler would not need to read Instructions: The Sequel or A Long Day’s Journey into Night or whatever it was. He would do it transcendentally. By sheer mind power.

The wardrobe in its three flat-packed monoliths arrived on Monday, and Tom Waits arrived on Tuesday. I opened the door, and he stood there, downcast, mumbling about still being half asleep. He was a thin-faced, shambling, sandy-haired man with pinched features and a wispy chin-beard. I judged by the way he spoke—nonchalance is so often a giveaway for mastery—he would do a proper job of the installation and assembly. I was right. Tom Waits and I discussed placement of the wardrobe, given door-opening tolerances, projecting window sills, the fall of light into the shelves, and all that technical kind of stuff you need to know about—although most people just shove their new wardrobe into a corner—and then I left him to it. He told me he'd be about an hour. I expected to hear Downtown Train creeping out of the room while he worked but all I got was the buzzing of a battery-powered screwdriver. Before he left, Tom Waits told me his next job had been cancelled so he was going home for two beers. I love the exactitude of people's conversations.

I had to take out the old wardrobe that had sat in a different part of the room, after its contents had been transferred to the new one; and its mirror crack'd from side to side when I tried to take it off first. It was one of those Kmart stick-on ones in a white plastic frame. The teenager threw out some of the clothes that were too small, and kept some of the ones she couldn’t part with; the crimson horse-riding shirt with the pearlescent stud buttons that she wore when she was ten, and a few other precious shards of a child’s history. It was a shame about the old wardrobe: it was a 1940s solid timber style with chromed-metal filigree handles finished with ivory trimlines, art-deco style, and a kind of raised white Bakelite grip.