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Lindsay Johnstone's avatar

The DCM-5 classes hoarding as a mental illness. It’s described as a condition that exists in the same family as OCD. Unlike OCD, though, it’s invisible. Beyond their own four walls, a sufferer might go forever undetected.

After he died, the Council gave us a fortnight to return his one-bed maisonette. It was usually a week, they said, but because we’d had no warning of his death they would relax the rules. How hard could it be to clear the home of a single man in late midlife? A home he’d been in for only a decade following his accident in Spain and which was visited weekly by a local woman who did his “work”?

Was it that I didn’t know, or that I chose not to know? I didn’t go into his wee house much after the girls were born. We had other, more suitable meeting places. His sister, Ray’s – their second home. The Marks and Spencer café. The windfarm. I’d heard when he told me about bulk buying t-shirts, jars of coffee, bars of coal tar soup and pink toothpaste. But also, I hadn’t wanted to listen to what he was telling me.

The photo was taken at the windfarm on the 13th of July 2017. It was a Thursday in the middle of the summer holidays. Thursdays had always been the day we saw him. When Freya was an only child, she stayed at Ray’s every Wednesday night, dropped off at teatime and brought back to the halfway point of the Marks and Spencer café by the two of them. It was safer that way after one afternoon, when in sole charge of his two-year-old granddaughter, he’d fallen backwards down the escalator. He had done the right thing in letting go of her hand first, though the screams I heard from where I sat with my decaf flat white had told a different story.

On that Thursday a few years later, then, Freya stands in the centre of the frame. She’s wearing that soft pink sweatshirt with the textured metallic moon on it I loved. Pulling a face she often did at that age, too. The jumper would be passed down to Carys but the expression would remain her own.

She’s clutching a laminated A4 worksheet about birds in one hand and a monocular in the other. He’d brought her that from home since he’d heard she had a membership for the RSPB. He was like that; turning up with something he’d found in his house that bore a connection to a hobby or a pastime that he could understand. She never did get into birdwatching, and though he liked the idea of it, would never have sat with her to nurture the interest. He was good on the sidelines. Good at the gestures. It was as it had always been, but this time round without the alcohol. The rage.

The lemon curd yellow of his t-shirt stretched over his tight barrel of a belly. The identity bracelet he’s wearing. It’s far looser on his granddaughter’s wrist these days. She’s removed as many of the links as she could, but still it spins. He’d never have foreseen how a bracelet like that would become a covetable item for 2025’s teenagers. I’d been sceptical, too. I see it on her wrist and remember that accident in Spain that hadn’t been an accident at all, I always knew. Was that why I didn’t go to him then? He knew I would only “let” him go abroad again if he wore one with my name and mobile number on it.

But to be alone in a Spanish hospital in the days following life-altering surgery, your only visitors two English-speaking volunteers. Your only company other unfortunates who, for arguably more honourable reasons, found their time as a tourist cut short but mishap or misfortune. I justified my absence at the time. Feel differently, now.

The one-eyed binocular, as my five-year-old had called it. It's sticky, gathering dust behind the kitchen radio now. VisionKing.

Birdwatching a fad like the others. The meticulously-completed adult colouring in books I found in the cabinet when we cleared his flat. The press, stuffed with broken Roberts radios. The drawers with their t-shirts and chinos and jeans stacked in their plastic wrappers, tags still attached. The tall container in the bathroom with the coal tar soaps. The Mint and Teatree Original Source shower gels. The tubes of Euthymol toothpaste.

All of that could be taken to the food bank or the charity shop.

The pictures, though, in amongst the holiday snaps. Pictures of Ghanaian women. Nigerian women. Kenyan women. The careless evidence that, at one point, he could have been described as a sex tourist. I’d heard him when he told me about the safaris he took in the late 1990s and early 2000s but I hadn’t wanted to listen. He was lost to me then. A stranger, searching – too – for himself.

Hoarding is a mental illness. Is it about guarding against death? A refusal to admit our finitude?

“If I die, how will you know?”

I don't have a Will. I’m not so worried about the big stuff. The assets. But let it be said now I leave the contents of my bedside table to one particular friend. She will know what to do with it all. If the things that belong in the bedside table aren’t in it at the point of my sudden and untimely death, though, what should I do in those circumstances? Should everything that spiritually belongs in the bedside table have a red dot on it? Can I ask that she swoop in and comb my bags, sweep under the car seat, beneath the coffee table, scan my office for red stickered items like artworks in a gallery already claimed?

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Lindsay Johnstone's avatar

Right team. I've gone in for a second round. Make of this what you will... I was prompted this time by the idea of being with just one other person, no one else around. So very rare these days.

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In an unseasonably warm April, at the top of Paris’s Centre Pompidou, I ordered steak frites without so much as looking at the price. It was the last lunch of our honeymoon, and we had more Euros left than we knew how to spend. We took photos of one another across the table. Behind him, blue skies, rooftops and – when he moved his head to the right – La Tour Eiffel. Behind me, industrial pipework suspended above sparkling glasswear and shining silverware on starched white tablecloths. In the ones I remember most clearly, he has captured me with a certainty in my eyes that had been hard to see before the wedding. In his, I saw softness. We were having the best sex of our relationship and had been married for a week.

Even though we’re in a hot spell, I left the meat out on the counter for the usual hour. He comes into the kitchen to season it for the outdoor grill, tips a box of frozen chips into the airfryer and, too loudly, asks me to shake when I hear the beep before leaving the room. He’d been watching the tennis in the lounge but to do the dinner has switched to his phone and his earbuds. After the children left with their grandparents for a few days on the coast, I took my book for a walk. Came back full up with scenes of a midlife woman pursuing and achieving pleasure in post-lockdown Paris – yet stood at the island unit beside the meat and gorged on the last of the cherries, their sweet, dark juice seeping under my fingernails. Their thin skins catching between my teeth as I worked the flesh from the stones before spitting them into the food waste.

It arrived on a clean white plate just the right side of medium. The steak had caught on the flame and was blackened in places. The fat crisp and salty. There was more sauce than I’d need. More frites than I alone could manage. It was the slowest lunch. I crafted each mouthful on my fork with steak, fried potato and sauce. Placed my cutlery down between mouthfuls. Chewed my food for once.

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