Moving In TogetherAndy Hudson She was, she thought, at twenty rather young to have, in the back of her mind, such a long list of pet hates. A list so long that it would probably take her the rest of her life to enumerate it. Not that "the rest of her life" was identifiable to her as any given length of time - she was not one to look far beyond the next day. But far enough to muse that, once a more concerned thirty - weighed down by all the pressures that are set upon us to "be an adult", and a husband and children (in that order) needing so much to be cared for - that the list would be long enough to take two lifetimes to write down. She fully expected that then - at the age of 30, or perhaps even two lifetimes down the cosmic road - right there at the top of the list, at the tip of her pen hovering over the blank sheet of paper (apart, of course, from men who think they are God’s gift to women and men who are drunk - but these can be assumed to be on any woman’s list, you can look at the list and they are there even if they have not been written) would be people who are compulsive tidiers. More accurately, compulsive cleaners. You know the type. There you are, fork at the ready, eyeing up the last pea, when suddenly your plate is whisked away from in front of you, is hurtling into the kitchen, the pea brushed down into the bin and the plate washed before your brain has had time to register that the plate, complete with pea, is no longer there. All this mentation had been encouraged - no, inspired - by the almost magical "now you see it, now you don’t" sleight of hand which had removed her coffee mug from right in front of her before she had had any chance to react, to point out that she always liked that last bit of coffee the best. Cold and ready to stain the mug for life (the life of her mugs being very short). That is the time to finish your coffee. The whole flavour has changed. Unknown chemical processes taking place to enrich it. More easily tasted because no longer hot. And now, still hot, it was gone, rushing down pipes with the rest of the liquid debris of life to whatever sewer it was going to. A sad day, and ominous. An unidentifiable age - barring some man-made or supernatural changing of life as we know it - sharing a house with Jane. Lucky it was a house - a nice house at that, with 2 1/2 bedrooms - so that one could have friends to stay - if one had any friends that wanted to - for no more (well, little more) than it would have cost for some cramped flat. OK, it was rather a long way out, but not far from a station on the Central Line, so they could get in to town easily. Moving down to London was never an easy business, and finding a flat on your own impossible. So luckily - or what she had thought was lucky at the time - she had found a friend of a friend of a friend who was also planning to move down to London at the same time. In fact this friend of a etc., already had a job set up there and had already started looking for somewhere to live. So she, this friend of a etc., Jane, already knew that it would be easier to find somewhere if you had someone to share with. They’d got along, not like a house on fire, but they wanted somewhere to live, not somewhere on fire. And whilst Jane did seem to be keen on taking notes and drawing maps and maybe had some spreadsheet somewhere to track their home-hunting progress, it didn’t get in the way of them getting on, not then, and didn’t twig her to the promise (if that could possibly be the right word - weren’t promises good things?) of Jane’s compulsive tidying. Did Freud have a word for it? Jung? Sandra had a word a phrase, hovering (not hoovering) in her mind right now. Not very technical, but very apt: "A Living Hell". She had an idea that the only way of putting all the religions together - those that believed in heaven and hell and those that believed in reincarnation - was to say that this, this earth plane, is hell. And judging by the disappearance of her not-yet-cold-enough coffee it was true. A year of hoarding all her possessions in her bedroom for fear that they would otherwise have their way found for them to sensible but unlocateable places, following some impenetrable system incurring searches far more desperate than those amongst random piles of this and that (she was not even tidy in her thoughts). A year of the sound of continual hoovering - more terrible than violent bursts of bad music played loudly. The constant fear that any spot added to the imposed spotlessness would add to an ever-increasing, unexpressed (except in huffs and sighs whilst wielding the duster over the aforementioned spot) hostility and resentment that would be just there whenever she and Jane were both in the house. But if Jane really had to tidy all the time, surely she should be happy with, surely she needed, someone to be there to disturb the order? She began to play with a grain of sugar which had miraculously survived the wipe the table had received during the magic act with the coffee mug. Perhaps it could blip in and out of existence and just happened to blip out before the wipe came. Or a quantum grain, whose behaviour is altered not by being observed, but by being wiped. Behaving as any Newtonian scientist would expect and then suddenly blip! into a different dimension. Or, perhaps, somewhere else in the same dimension. Wipe, wipe, wipe. The cloth has gone, and suddenly, again blip! - the sugar grain has returned. God’s gift to compulsive cleaners - their work is never done thanks to the unpredictable nature of the universe. All the dust - Blip! Wipe, wipe, wipe. Again Blip! Maybe Jane was compelled to wipe at that time because of the sugar grain’s transdimensional shift. There was less chance of Sandra ever knowing what it is like to be inside the mind of a compulsive tidier than her being inside the mind of a transdimensional grain of sugar, but maybe that is how they see the world. Cloth. Blip. Wipe, wipe, wipe. Blip! And as that is how they see the world that is how it is (as Sandra’s philosophy told her). Sandra - now you have been introduced. Another of her pet hates - being introduced at the very first moment of meeting someone. Then, when your name is introduced into someone’s mental filing system it is attached only to external appearances. Perhaps her red hair. Or her relative shortness of stature (but 5’1 isn’t that short). "Sandra? Oh! yes, that short girl with the red hair". Ugh! Far rather, for instance "Jane? Oh! yes, the one whose house is so clean you couldn’t eat off the kitchen floor because she would have cleaned it up already". Sandra licked her finger so that the grain would stick to it, and brought it to her mouth. No taste. Perhaps it has blip!ped again. A grain of sugar with transdimensional shift capabilities and a strong survival instinct. Visions of the coming age of starvation - how could she ever find another place in London, finding this one had taken such luck? - of a fork desperately hovering over a freshly wiped table, too slow to dig into a plate full of food now binned in the kitchen. The plate now gleaming and "lemon-fresh". In a moment of clarity Sandra had once realised that the secret of happiness is this: if you imagine that life is going to be a torment, then anything less, even if only for a moment, is a flowering rose of joy. But now the rose had been cleared and chucked, condemned to serving its days in a plastic bin-liner. Sandra, once excited at the prospect of moving to London, now wondered if her own future would fare any better.
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© 1999 Westminster Writers' Group. Last updated 02/07/99.