Chapter 29
Before
In the first few weeks of living together, Kasie and I argued more than we had in our entire friendship prior.
The main cause of these arguments was stuff.
Kasie had so much of it. Clothes, crockery, pencil cases, cosmetics, things from childhood.
Her primary school class photos, an autograph book with signatures of soap stars neither of us remembered, chintzy magnets, which she spread over the fridge, a large rotating spice rack, muffin tins. it was endless.
‘What do you think?’ she asked as she balanced a large frame on the mantle. ‘I’ll get some picture hooks to hang it.’
I grimaced at the piece, which seemed to be of a shredded red cabbage.
‘I want to do a picture wall,’ she said. ‘Going to get some frames when I next get paid. This place is going to be so cosy.’
‘Cosy,’ I repeated flatly. Cosy was the reason behind each candle, blanket and incense stick, cosy was the reason I saw Kasie ending up on a TV show about hoarders one day.
‘We should get one of those shelving units from IKEA,’ she said, ‘then we can display things properly.’
‘More stuff, exactly what we need.’ My voice was suffused with annoyance at the sheer amount of crap filling up our relatively small flat. It was beginning to feel cluttered.
Kasie turned away from me and put the framed print on the floor. ‘Fine. I’ll stop trying to make it nice. We can just live in it as a shit hole.’
‘Bit of a dramatic reaction,’ I fired back, then felt bad, because Kasie had been a bit up and down mood-wise that week.
She’d broken up with Ross two months earlier after discovering he wasn’t as special as she thought he was.
It was odd; she didn’t seem upset about it, more frustrated and annoyed that she’d wasted her time on him.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Put up what you want.’
‘It’s not about the picture,’ she grumbled. ‘It’s your comments.’
‘What comments?’
‘I like cosy,’ she said. ‘This is not a new personality trait.’
The print, which was all dark reds and deep purples, wasn’t, on second look, cosy at all. ‘This is a heart.’
She wide-eyed me as if surprised I was able to see it. I stood back to take it in. ‘Is this about Ross?’
‘It is a heart and it’s beautiful. They come in a set of three.’
A set of three? A red flag for more stuff. ‘It’s a lot, Kasie. I mean, it’s good having a nice place, but this is a rental. It’s not ours.’
Kasie had lived at home all through university and now, at twenty-seven, she had finally moved out.
Whereas I had left home at eighteen, and had lost count of how many places I’d stayed in.
I didn’t have a great deal of my own stuff, bar clothes, and when my parents downsized to their flat, I happily chucked away most things from childhood.
‘I’m still surprised you moved everything here,’ I said. ‘Like, why did you bring your uni textbooks? More to the point, why do you still have your uni textbooks?’
‘I might need them for reference,’ she said, her voice trilling because she knew she was being ridiculous.
‘And what do you mean, this place isn’t ours?
We pay rent, we live here, that makes it ours.
My plan is to live here until you get itchy feet and go off abroad again, or I meet someone and get married. ’
‘You mean you’re not marrying me? Kasie, you should have made your intentions clearer before we took this step.’
‘Stop talking. And stop bringing up Ross. I can’t believe I lost so much time with him. I’m giving it another month before I jump back into online dating.’
‘?’
She ignored me and busied herself popping tealights into candle holders on the mantle.
‘Am I allowed to ask what’s in those?’ I gestured towards the two blue IKEA bags she had brought from her family home.
‘This flat is so bare,’ she said. ‘Where are all your things?’
‘Things?’
‘The stuff you’ve collected through your life. Your parents’ place is tiny, so where did your stuff go?’
‘I don’t know. The bin. There’s no point in keeping hold of everything.’
‘How can you not be sentimental about anything?’
‘I am. It’s just that I confine all my memory stuff to one shoebox like you’re supposed to.’ I peeked in one of the blue bags and lifted out a green Tamagotchi. ‘Give me a solid reason why you kept this?’
Kasie burst into giggles.
I dug more into the bag. ‘You have two,’ I cried.
‘They’re a pair,’ she insisted. ‘They go together.’ She wrestled them from my hands and pressed the buttons. One made a slight fizzing noise and Kasie’s bottom lip tripped.
‘You’re a loser,’ I said, as she tried to nudge me into the sofa with her side. ‘Throw them out.’
‘If I get them working again, do you want one?’
‘No,’ I said petulantly.
Kasie stood uber focused on the pointless mini gadgets. ‘Okay,’ she admitted, ‘these can be binned.’
‘You know what’s funny?’
‘You not having any stuff?’
‘The people who invented Tamagotchis got an Ig Nobel Prize.’
‘Thank you, Wikipedia,’ she said, throwing one onto my lap. ‘As if anyone but you knows what an Ig Nobel Prize is.’
‘Realistically, if there was a fire, what would you save?’
She answered straight away, ‘Nothing. I like stuff, though none of it is worth my life. If I lost everything in a fire, I’d just buy all new stuff.’ She went back to the sofa where she rearranged one of the many new throw cushions. ‘Why, what would you save?’
I replied without thinking: ‘You.’