Remnant House
Created: 2023-05-26 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-01 (11:26:02)Status: completed
The house I grew up in, and only left well into my twenties, was a worker’s cottage, mysterious and decrepit, a palimpsest of all the successive families that had lived there. It had originally been built in the nineteen-twenties by a family employed in the construction of the neighbouring capital, one of a row of three that used the same set of plans. (Our town had been there already three-quarters of a century, long enough to have overflowed its elegant, Georgian grid layout, and formed pools and hidden channels up and down the length of its central road.)
Its art-deco stained glass windows and bulbshaped light fixtures had survived from that time into the present day. Its beige carpeting and pastel pink and green interior wallpanels, on the other hand, had crept in sometime in the nineteen-sixties or nineteen-seventies. Likewise the sunroom, which had originally been the front porch before someone had put up the wooden scaffold around it and walled it in. And likewise the laundry at the other end, which along with the toilet had presumably been off in its own separate annexe. The shed though had made it through the century without even being repainted. It was a timber structure at the bottom of the yard, with great double barn doors that had rotted off their hinges and had to be fastened shut with rope, a bare earth floor covered in uneven masonite boards and a hanging loft in which possums and rats and cats fought for ownership.
My parents, on moving in, set about correcting the more dubious improvements, but in the process introduced new idiosyncracies all their own. They pulled up the carpeting to reveal the original floorboards which had turned (or had maybe always been) rich black and brown, speckled with decades of paint, filled with grooves and pits and cracks that left splinters in your feet. They chose not to repaint the pastel pink and green wallpanels, which had anyway acquired over the last few decades a gloomy patina. Instead, they hammered timber boards over the top. The structure had settled and shifted, so that none of its corners met at a right angle anymore. The boards had to be shaved or cut short to fit the space. Nothing could be introduced into the house without undergoing some transformation.
The house had been sold as a fixerupper. There were always two or three renovations underway. There are still renovations underway. These didn’t follow any considered plan, but were adhoc, seasonal, aleatory and so liable to be leftoff halfdone if a spell of unfavourable weather lingered around too long. One year, the grand project was to paint the exterior brightwarm yellow with blue accents. A celebratory kind of mood carried us through the planning, the acquisition of supplies, the first brushstrokes, but stalled out around the three-quarters mark. By the time we returned to it, our earlier work had turned pale under several droughty summers, besides which manufacture of the original yellow had been discontinued. In the meantime though, the unfinished work had inspired one or two bright imitations, up and down the adjacent streets.
Being that it was a heritage building, there were ostensibly council restrictions on the type of improvements that we could make to it. That did not stop the holey redtin roof being replaced, the picket fence being torn down and tall blue colourbond being put up in its place, the chimney flue being boarded up and the garden allowed to ramify into a jungle of cocos palms and cypress and planetrees and plums with small tartsweet fruits, wisteria and ivy overtaking the rotted trellises, and in a rocky corner where nothing else could grow, a decorative quincebush that so anchored itself into the soil, nothing short of total excavation will ever uproot it. Really, the council heritage restrictions were too late to halt the tides of change. The house would grow and contract following its own kind of logic regardless.
With things being boarded over, walled off, paths cleared and others left for the jungle to reclaim, mysterious hidden spaces were always appearing around the place. Reorganising VHS tapes in one of the living room cupboards, I discovered a narrow half-height passage, one you would have to crawl through, that led into into the back of the kitchen fireplace. I discovered a wooden trapdoor in the greenhouse by the shed, buried under mulch and dirt and which opened into a shallow pit filled with more dirt. I climbed into the roofspace through a ceiling hatch and saw that up here was its own labyrinth of loadbearing beams and partitions, which in no way matched up to the configuration of rooms below.
I remember one summer, my preferred place to sit was in the front garden under the cedars and at a small iron table. The afternoon sunlight fell through the trees into this corner and a section of the street all the way up to the building that had once been a milkbar was visible from here, but the understorey was so screened off by fencing and ivy and the drooping cedar foliage that nobody passing on the footpath could see in. Sometime after that the undergrowth was cut back. I moved to the disused alleyway between our house and the neighbour’s, where decades ago several large white stone tiles had been laid down. Being screened off from the sun, it remained cool in summer. But the neighborhood cats peed there and it had a lingering ammonian scent. I didn’t remain for long.
There were so many of these spaces around the house. I can half-remember, or maybe had dreamed, that there were others too. When very young, the area outside my bedroom window seemed overgrown like a rainforest, full of ferns and moist decayed soil, protected by green netting and trellises. It was infested with mosquitos and centipedes even during winter. But this is difficult to reconcile with the airy outdoor patio it has since become. I was for a time also sure there were hidden rooms which had been walled off, or had never been connected to the rest of the house in the first place. I dreamed about all sorts of landscapes starting just past the boundaries of the garden, behind the shed, Siberian tundra or Kamchatka volcanics or a vast plain of industrial works.
Looking through council records one afternoon for something else entirely, I came across our address and those of the other two houses up the street, and the description next to it, Remnant House. Not that the council out of anyone could have known, but it seemed an apt way to describe the place, by that point one-hundred years old, transformed and decayed and overbuilt and threatening to collapse at multiple stresspoints, not least the plane tree in the front garden lifting that side of the house out of its foundations, but still full of people and cats, possums, lizards and birds, inhabiting all different rooms and hollows half-connected to one another, a ruin in motion.
Endmatter
Tags: @completed @reflections @real-spaces
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