Battic
In the twilight of the Saturday of the hottest Easter weekend anyone could remember, I set off for my grandparents’ house one-handed and bare-footed, bearing with me two cardboard fruit crates full of books and DVDs, three framed pictures, a set of surround sound speakers, a Calvin and Hobbes collection in three massive hard-back volumes, a ham kettle full of keepsakes, and a bathrobe.
This was all a prelude to moving house, from a modestly sized but well-appointed single bedroom flat on the second floor of a five year old housing development built on a demolished Pirelli factory, to a slightly older, decidedly more modest and vastly cheaper room in a houseshare in Winchester. The plan was to spend two months there until the contract ran out, three months somewhere similarly cheap and not too far away, and then use the money saved to move to London (that great attractor), which all told meant three moves in five months. I had no desire to move everything I owned all over hell and creation (or indeed Hampshire) multiple times, and a single room in a shared house would not be able to comfortably hold all of my worldly possessions anyway, so I decided to prevail upon my ageing grandmother (people are always ageing, but grandmothers doubly so) to let me deposit some things in the cavernous attic of the huge house near Watford that she has inhabited, along with my grandfather, for more than half a century.
On that Saturday I was one-handed thanks to a bicycle crash that two weeks previously had chipped one bone in my forearm and smashed the end of the other, and I was bare-footed because of the extraordinary and unseasonal heat. It was so hot in my over-windowed, brick-walled flat that I packed the things I had deemed attic-worthy at a languid pace, wandering in a shirtless sweaty daze from room to room, occasionally moving an object from shelf or drawer to box or bin-bag. The boxes had come from the Lidl supermarket down the road, where at eight in the morning the aisles are piled high with fruit crates in various stages of unpacking, and the staff are happy to let you take away as many empties as you can carry.
First to be interred in cardboard was the modest array of books I had gathered to myself over the years. Mostly gifts, some appropriated from the family stockpiles, and a few purchased of my own accord. All save a small stack of unread tomes were packed into the fruit crates in not-quite-tessellated layers, including many that I should probably have thrown away, like my old computing textbooks, and many that I know I will never throw away, like my really old computing textbooks, scores to choral pieces I once sung, and Tom Holland’s ‘Millenium’ (because I will never finish it).
On top of the books went my rather pathetic DVD ‘collection’, numbering barely in the double digits. I momentarily considered consigning them all to the rubbish, but timidity and pack-rat instinct prevailed. Not so with my dwindling and increasingly dusty set of PC game discs, which were nearly all thrown into black bags alongside a redundant bike helmet and a pair of football cleats that had been worn in anger on just three occasions. I encased three framed pictures in bubble-wrap and laid them on top of the fruit crates now full of fact and fiction. The images are all of Edinburgh, in one way or another: a painting of the front of my school, a photograph of friends sitting around the dining table in the house I grew up in, and a picture of my older sister and I at her wedding reception, taken with an antique camera by my younger sister.
Next came the speaker system, which had been a gift from my father in my first year of university. Disconnecting it from the television required a trip into the wire jungle that exists in some corner of every modern living room, and while I was trekking through the undergrowth towards the monolithic black cube of the sub-woofer I spotted my Calvin and Hobbes collection looming over me from the mantelpiece. It is a prized possession, but being both heavy, bulky and rarely used it perfectly fit my criteria for attic storage, and was duly added to the growing pile by the front door.
As the day wore on I took down from atop my fridge a big steel kettle purchased years earlier for boiling Christmas hams, and set off around my flat filling it with all the little things I could find that had no purpose other than to remind me of a time, or a place, or a person. Into the pot went two pieces of painted pottery from Downeast Maine, a set of miniature juggling balls that I never learned how to use, a carved wooden dish shaped like a pear, a passive-aggressive note from a neighbour complaining about noise, a metal slinky, a small oxygen mask attached to a short length of thin plastic tubing, a leaflet with a map of a walk in the New Forest, two grey silicone wrist bands (still in their wrapping), a notepad of scribblings from a music festival, and as much other gubbins as I could fit in and still close the lid.
Last to be placed by the door was a thick blue bath-robe, only a few months old and much-used, but deemed too bulky and embarrassing for my next home.
By the time all had been lugged down to my car (carefully, so as not to strain the injured arm) and stowed in the boot under a tablecloth (of which more later) dusk was approaching, but it was still hot enough that I took some time to recover before I could get behind the wheel and head off up the M3, with the sun setting behind me. Driving with a broken wrist turns out to be possible, if not very much fun. I had learned as much while (stupidly) driving myself to hospital after the accident, and now that the break was healing I could even work the handbrake, and shift into fifth gear with only the very smallest of winces.
As darkness fell I turned North on to the M25, and immediately drove into a storm. Rain pummelled the tarmac and made a mockery of my limp, twisted windscreen wipers. Lightning flashed overhead and briefly illuminated the clouds of spray thrown up by the never-ending convoys of articulated lorries that seem to orbit London. Visibility was so poor that I nearly missed my exit, and the off-ramp looked like a river.
I gingerly crawled through Rickmansworth, worried every time I touched my brakes that the heavy cargo behind me would pull my car into a spin and send horse, cart, rider, two cardboard fruit crates full of books and DVDs, three framed pictures, a set of surround sound speakers, a Calvin and Hobbes collection in three massive hard-back volumes, a ham kettle full of keepsakes, and a bathrobe hurtling off the road to sink in a storm-swollen stream and never be seen again.
As I pulled up in front of my grandparents’ house the storm abated, leaving the air a little cooler (if no less muggy). The windows were all dark: my grandfather was in a care home recovering from a fall, and my grandmother had been packed off by her daughters to her usual Easter retreat at the school she had sent her sons to. I stepped over the newly formed puddles in the road, opened the door with my mother’s keys and crept down the hall to turn off the alarm. Its chirping died down, and the only sound left was the ticking of a grandfather clock.
I disturbed the silence as I sweated and strained and swore my goods up the stairs, and then paused to steal a drink of apple juice from the fridge and consider my next move. The attic was divided in two: one half for humans, accessed by a book-lined staircase, sporting three beds for grandchildren and a studio for my grandmother’s painting, and one half for bats and forgotten possessions, accessed via a small hatch set low on the wall of the human half. On a day such as this bat country was roasting while the the realm of man was merely unbearably hot.
The bat section was lit by a single bare bulb, positioned just above the hatch so that when one stood up upon entering the entire space was suddenly cast into shadow. The floor was uneven boards thrown down haphazardly over ceiling joists, the claustrophobically close walls and ceiling were sloping roof beams, and all was covered in decades of dust and droppings.
The bats themselves kept mostly to the far end of the attic, where the crooked chimney stack rose through the house, but I must admit that the sound of their fluttering wings along with the leaping shadows, uncertain footing and baking, cloying, crushing heat served to put me very much on edge. I found a space between two piles of boxes that looked as though they had been left decades ago by some previous bachelor in the process of re-arranging his life, and laid newspaper on the filthy floor planks. I could just make out, from between piles of droppings, that there was a previous strata of newspaper there, long since faded to the same yellow-grey hue as the excrement.
Again and again I crawled backwards through the hatch from the world of humans to shit-floored oven-hot batspace, dragging each of the items I had brought behind me. One by one I heaved them across to the place I had prepared, growing sweatier and grubbier each time. After what felt like hours I stood next to my pile of possessions, heart hammering in my chest, half-healed wrist throbbing in its cast, filth sticking to my perspiration-soaked arms and legs, and did the best I could to roof the stack over with more newspaper and the tablecloth I had brought with me, hoping that it might preserve my treasures from the worst ravages of the attic’s denizens.
I bade the bats a rude farewell, turned off the light and crawled through the hatch to the bright, clean, art-strewn half of the attic. I headed straight down to the bathroom and washed the grime from my limbs, then bathed my head in the lukewarm water that poured from the cold tap. I let it cool me as I sat on the floor, composed myself, and dripped dry. Before I departed I made sure I was leaving the house as I found it, and left a polite note in the visitors book. I set the alarm, stole down the dark hallway, and, feeling like a departing thief, stepped out into the warm night. It was nearly Easter Sunday.
My car seemed happier without so much cargo, and I too felt like a weight had been lifted from me, although what it was I could not say. Perhaps I was just relieved that I would not have to return to the attic for at least another five months. I set off, bumping through the water-filled potholes, leaving behind me two cardboard fruit crates full of books and DVDs, three framed pictures, a set of surround sound speakers, a Calvin and Hobbes collection in three massive hard-back volumes, a ham kettle full of keepsakes, and a bathrobe, all covered in a tablecloth and guarded by bats.
