Eddie

Eddie

AND SO, WE come to the end.

The remnants of a life don’t add up to much, really. Not once the big things – the fridge freezer, the three-piece suite, the body – are all boxed up and gone.

What remain are the little things. Odd bits and pieces. Books and records and jumpers and wellies, rusted jewellery all a-tangle. Cards and letters and Snakes and Ladders games where the dice have gone missing and the snakes are shedding a skin. Pyjamas and photographs and seashells and postcards.

Life in all its mundane glory.

The trouble with all of these objects from all of these moments in all of these lives is that they arrive all at once. Packed together in a bin bag. And there is no telling if the shoe brush (￡3) or the pink enamel mirror (￡7.50) are pieces of historical importance, of meaning and metaphor, or if they are just bits of old junk. Things picked on whims that eventually become the bones of a house. Maybe it is in fact the game of Mouse Trap (50p, missing its boot piece) that is

the thing that this poor deceased person treasured so dearly. And yet, here in the back room, sitting on my floor cushion because the chair hurts my knee, my hands ensconced in the gardening gloves that Marjie has made me wear since the Incident with the Human Tooth (root hanging off it, covered in crusted blood, ￡0), I sort through the donations made by the living and the dead and I put a price tag on the souvenirs of someone else’s life.