Ample Make This Bed

Dear Octopus,


When I was maybe seven or eight years old, our parents decided to sell our house. Good financial sense etc. On coming home from school I noticed the 'for sale' sign on a wooden pole standing forlornly outside, and on hearing from my mother what it was - and more importantly what it signified - I ran down the driveway, tore it from the ground and stamped it into a rather shabby and unwholesome condition, crying extensively. I don't know how your parents would have reacted to such a beastly display of selfishness and vanity, my dear Octopus, but mine just lead me back inside, and the next day my father quietly took the house off the market. Crazy really. I think of it sometimes even now, and cannot fail to reconcile these circumstances as anything but the best and most loving gesture anyone I know has ever made.


It was a penitent man then who returned to Devon on Friday night to help my parents move out, this time for good. For all twenty-six years of my life they have lived there, and endowed now as I am with some meagre semblances of rationality, there were to be no similar outbursts of sentimentalism or hurt. I did however expect a solemn and nostalgic process; poring morosely over old memories and packing them away....filing our childhoods and boxing up youth with a funereal reverence.


Not so. If anything yesterday was a cross between the opening scene from Home Alone and an ordinary day's work at Stalag Luft III.....with my older brother Party Squid screaming viciously in all of our faces to 'either work harder or curl up and fucking die....because houses don't fucking move themselves. If I come downstairs and find you without something in your hands I'm going to fucking remove them and then make you fucking carry them too.' So much for Railway-Children-style poignancy.


Essentially moving house is the same set of actions repeated over and over until you either die of exhaustion or from one of Party Squid's stinging verbal lobotomies. You go upstairs, pick up a box, take it downstairs, put it in the van (repeat x 20), drive to new house, take out box, take it upstairs, come back down again (repeat x20), then repeat the whole process ALL DAY. To say it was gruelling was an insult to other supposedly gruelling experiences. My left knee and right shoulder submitted their letters of resignation at about lunchtime, asking for an immediate transfer to a body more likely to spend its weekend relaxing in a Tuscan piazza with a nice beer and an expatriate edition of that week's Economist. I told them both that they were soon to be fired by Party Squid anyway, and in fact all of my mutinous joints, organs, cartilages and muscles were to be sold for kebab meat and shoe leather. So their current discontent was largely irrelevant.


The other thing I realised was how much utter crap we had. There were tennis racquets, fencing sabres, hockey sticks, pleated floral print skirts, blenders, juicers, remote controls to television sets long since descended to the pale fires of electrical hell, board games, action figures, family photo albums (for which I have a previously unconfessed love), scrapbooks, stamp collections, clothes, shoes, paint cans, stepladders and more than one bin bag full of cuddly toys (in one I fortuitously found Dogger; my best friend before I could say or spell best friend. I managed to smuggle him into my backback, having happily discovered that our separation of twenty or so years had not emotionally estranged us at all, and I was sure - if pressed - he would prefer residence in drab London to my parents' drabber new attic). It wasn't long before everything lost all meaning. By mid-afternoon my father discovered a mini-power drill in the depths of garage-junk and commented sagely, 'I've no fucking idea what this or what it does but it looks expensive, so pack it in with the others...'


I repeat: GRUELLING.


By evening we were all utterly shattered. The house in which we boys had been raised was more or less empty. It was such a lovely evening though that the five of us drifted into the garden and started laughingly reminiscing; the hideous gravestone Inky Squid made in his Design & Technology class for his dead hamster, Party Squid concentrating so hard on emulating Marc Overmars's dribbling technique that he ran into the side of the house and broke his collarbone, summer waterfights, drunken misadventure, family barbecues, a whole handful of summers with a handful of girlfriends all now long since departed....and of course the games of football. I smile at the thought even now, as I type. Since I can ever, ever, ever, ever remember: the same teams at the same ends (my father and younger brother playing from the back hedge, versus my older brother and I playing from the house), the same chairs for goalposts, the same furious arguments over disallowed goals and dubious penalties, the same agitated mother adjudicating from the sidelines. The same, our whole lives, since forever.


Before we knew it we were playing. And that's where I'll leave this story if I may; with my father shouting 'shooooot' in the way that only we do, my older brother still failing in his Overmars dribbling up the right wing, and our collective cheers, jeers and laughing echoing off into the past. You don't need to hear of empty rooms, or fingernails prying keys from their insolent rings. We played football in our garden for the last time, in the peachy and rose sunset. And that was that.


It's sad to lose the only house you've ever known; to where you would always instinctively fly if the world took a sour turn, and you were hurting. But it was wonderful to be there and preside over just a few of the shallow handful of memories of its great times, with those that made it so. Everything in me that is good, comes from them. As the car rolled down that long, infuriatingly potholed drive, I looked back over my shoulder for the last time, at all that once was. This time the 'for sale' sign stood unmolested. 


In the car to the station I said to Inky Squid, 'you don't seem sad mate, and I thought you'd be the worst. It's been everything to us, our whole lives. Aren't you going to miss it?'


He shrugged, in his apathetic way. 'I wasn't there for the bricks and fucking light fittings mate.'


'You fucking dick,' I laughed, and looked out the window for a while. There was something in my eye which was totally inconvenient for me.


Your loving friend,


Action Squid