Fiction lightly fed by fact…
The declutterer
THERE IS no surfcam at Park Beach. Locals are happy about that. A surfcam is the last thing they want. Think of all the people it would attract. The break would be crowded, the beach destroyed, the place trashed.
No surfcam means you have to go to the beach to check out conditions. That’s what I’m doing as I slouch against the front of my van looking out nonchalant and watching a mediocre two foot swell push lazily into the bay.
My mind is focused on the important questions of life this morning, by which I mean nothing very much as all, when a blue station wagon pulls in next to me. Two women and a man get out. Two of them are already in wetsuits and pull up their zips, retrieve a couple shortboards from the roof rack and jog down to the break.
She’s mimicking me, the other woman, leaning against the front of the car, one foot on the bumper. She watches her friends paddle out. I watch her, surreptitiously, from the corner of my eye as the saying goes. She doesn’t quite fit the type around here. She wears a fitted and feminine button-up blouse and a pair of light green slacks that end just below the knee. The sartorial elegance of most of my female friends extends little further than Tshirts and jeans or board shorts. She wears pastel colours. Most of my female friends, the males too, go for bright coloured Tshirts. Or black. Or white. With maybe a Rip Curl of Patagonia logo splashed over it. She wears sandals with thin straps that might be fashionable, though I wouldn’t know if they are or not because I don’t know what counts as fashionable. Most of my friends wear thongs, either the cheap flimsy kind with the straps that pull out of the sole after a couple months or the more durable and expensive Reefs from some surf shop. Her friends are probably locals. She is not. That’s for sure.
Long hair a blend of blonde tones, though which are real is impossible to tell because her styled ripples reveal that she sees a hairdresser. Those people are known for making their clients appear different than they really are. Most of the women I know around here go for simple hair styles that avoid hairdressers whose styles would simply wash out in saltwater. Long, sometimes unkempt, easily brushable, that’s the local style. I think they call it natural. Nope, she is not a local.
Fine facial features, slim nose that turns up at its end. Green eyes. Her skin is that rare milky-white paleness. Alabaster? Is that the term? No sun glitches. No tan. The beach is not her home. She is wearing makeup though just a little, and tastefully applied. Definitely not a local.
Her woman friend catches one of the piddlingly small swells and rides it until it dissipates what little energy it carried. I’m not in the habit of speaking to random women at the beach. But I speak anyway, venturing the thought that maybe her friends should have brought longboards because they would provide more floatation in these conditions.
You going out?
Going out where?
Out. Out into the break. Out there I say, pointing seawards.
No. Not me. I don’t surf. I’m just staying with my friends for the weekend while I am running my workshops.
Your workshops… do you work in IT?
That’s a gambit I use to provoke a response from people so they reveal what sort of work they do when they might be hesitant about revealing it. Sneaky and backhanded for sure, but it sounds casual and innocent enough, not nosy or interrogating. It works because for a great many people IT is either a mystery or is disliked or they find it so boring they will quickly deny any involvement with it and in doing so reveal what it is they do for a living. Occasionally you find someone who actually works in IT and is prepared to admit it, and you risk a hellish descent into indecipherable jargon, like with Perry, Steve’s partner who is a coderunner but who is handy when your laptop starts to do unintelligible things.
No. Not IT. I teach people how to organise their household interiors, she responds.
I’m silent for a moment as I try to comprehend this revelation.
I help people declutter their homes, she adds on seeing my puzzled expression.
I’m still puzzled.
You mean… people pay good money just to learn how to toss stuff out?
She’s looking at me sideways as if I’m some kind of acidian, some kind of sea squirt the waves have washed up.
Weelll… she drags it out… it’s a bit more complex that that. People need help. People have emotional attachment even to stuff they haven’t used for a long time. It’s hard for them to let go.
Really?
Yes, really. Things have meaning for people. They are part of their story. To remove things from their homes can be like ripping a chapter out of their biography and burning it.
I’m sure she reading my skeptical expression. Wouldn’t people so-afflicted need a psychologist or medication rather than a decluttering expert?
She tilts her head as she looks at me with an enquiring gaze. Her coiffured hair moves to frame her fine-featured face. Don’t you have stuff you don’t use but wouldn’t toss out?
Uhhh… not really, I say. When you live in a shack you don’t really accumulate stuff because there’s nowhere to put it. I keep possessions to a minimum.
Like? She holds her enquiring gaze as she tilts her head the other way.
A couple saucepans for cooking noodles or potatoes and veges, a frypan for frying fish, some books, my cameras and laptop, some clothes, wetsuits, surfboard, boogie board, bushwalking stuff… that’s the main things. Nothing I’d toss out.
It’s more than tossing out. I use a Japanese aesthetic to declutter and organise kitchens and bathrooms and other rooms, even inside their refrigerators, she says as if I should know what a Japanese whats-it is.
Refrigerators? This is getting weird. It was only last month I cleaned out the small refrigerator in my shack. Even this woman would approve now that it is mostly empty after discarding all the out of date stuff.
It’s about function more than appearance, she goes on, but it is about appearance too and the psychology that comes with that. Things in their place are things used and an uncluttered house is pleasant to live in. She patiently tells me this in the way someone might explain to some politician how the world really works.
She’s looking at me. If your house interior is organised and things stored properly you can find things easily, she adds as if she needs to convince a disbeliever who might be just a little sceptical of the value of decluttering, her strange profession. Haven’t you wasted time looking for something… like your car keys?
Is she reading the embarrassed expression on my face?
Is this conversation really happening? She’s convincing… but is she just a clever con artist?
A week goes by. I do her workshop for reasons that still elude me other than I was just plain curious. I was significantly outnumbered by eager females ready to lap up what she said and transform their abodes without telling their partners who will end up thoroughly flummoxed when they start looking for the whatever-it-is that was where they thought they maybe put it last week, perhaps.
As for my shack, it is now super-organised, my few books arranged according to size and the rooms freshly-cleaned. That was something else she was big on, and I admit out of fairness to this woman it really was something that makes me feel good now that I’ve done it. Not that I will tell anyone. Not for the moment, anyway. Probably never. My fridge, already sparsely occupied, is now sparser. And cleaner. I did give it a thorough clean when I acquired it from Tim, but that was… well… let’s not bother to put a date on it. Doing all this might be good organisationally but I’m not so sure about psychologically because the fridge just looks empty.
After going through the stress and turmoil of decluttering and organising the shack I couldn’t help but notice how disgustingly disorganised my van was. It was on cleaning it out that this flurry of insane decluttering and organising would pay off.
Late afternoon, Park Beach.
There’s something in the water! I look at the middle aged man then to where he points. Where? What? There’s nothing there. Oh wait! Yes. A fin. A black triangular fin, a shape sure to stimulate the interest of the wetsuit-clad figures bobbing about out beyond the break. It disappears but the young guy on the boogie board close by has noticed it. He starts to paddle like mad. A larger set comes in and dislodges him from his board. Is he losing it? Where’s his leash? It’s come free of his arm.
He doesn’t chase the board which is now being carried away from him. He’s in the water with a finned creature that is now out of sight. There’s nothing worse that seeing that dark triangle in the water than not seeing it anymore. He swims towards the closest land, knowing that he and the finned creature in the same ocean is one fish too many. It not far but it’s a rock shelf backed by a cliff he’s heading for. He makes it and clambers out as I see the creature break the surface some distance along. The dolphin dives and surfaces oblivious to the panic its mistaken identity has caused.
A guy in a wetsuit jogs up to me. He’s gone into that rocky cove, he says. We run to the headland and look down. There he is. He’s okay. The guy with me calls down. The stranded guy calls back that he can’t climb up the cliff. Too steep. Loose rocks. And he’s bumped his knee getting out of the water and it hurts.
Wait, I call and run back to the van. Retrieving the 20 metre length of 10mm Bluewater abseiling rope, I rush back. There’s a tree stump. I look at it dubiously. Should hold. Tie off on it. Do a classic abseil down to the guy on the rock shelf. Yeah, I say as a swell breaks around us, I know how to get up. Been down here before to help a friend recover his kayak that washed up here. He was dislodged from it by a big wave. I’ll help you up, I say as I help him get up. Let’s go.
Our route involves scrambling and limping up the cliff along what could realistically be called a very steep goat track, were there goats anywhere near here. I help him over the steeper parts. His knee doesn’t seem to be too bad. Probably just bruised.
That woman. Her workshop. Organising. The decluttering obsession. My burst of enthusiasm cleaning out the van. That’s when I found the Bluewater. I’d forgotten it was there in the bottom of the storage box.
I guess it goes to show the value of decluttering combined with a little disorganisation and forgetfulness. The guy on the rock shelf was probably happy about that. I was. And all the doing of a well-coiffured woman who wasn’t even a local.
Fictional encounters on PacificEdge…
