Words by Emma Espiner, photos by Jane Ussher
Six months after separating from my husband, I’m in love again. The object of my affection is a 7m2 storage unit in a semi-industrial part of Grey Lynn.
The process of selling a house is hellish at any time, but when you layer a broken relationship and severed family onto it, participating in every administrative decision is like being at the base of an open wound, with a Stanley knife pushing into your wrecked tissue.
“How did you pick the real estate agent,” I asked one day. He told me that he went to the website for the real estate firm with the largest market share in Auckland, and selected the guy who looked like the biggest asshole. We laughed grimly at that, one of our few remaining points of convergence being our shared loathing of real estate agents.
My darling is about the size of a walk-in wardrobe. Perhaps this is no coincidence, as I have lusted for a walk-in wardrobe since I was old enough to hang my own clothes on plastic hangers, arranged in order of colour. Sadly, I have managed to get to the age of 39 without ever having lived with a walk-in wardrobe of my own. With this history of longing, I was vulnerable to being swept off my feet as soon as Raj from Storage King handed me the access card to my storage unit.
The yellow card has a handsome black stripe on the back. It slides through the fissure in the security panel like a sigh. The door rumbles on its wheels and opens into an area where the big storage units are housed. These are far too big for my needs, but reassuringly solid, mini Atlases, here at the end of the world, carrying the weight of a family’s possessions, or a small, privately-run business’s personnel files. There are some quite specific declarations leaseholders must make about the legality of items stored here, so it’s unlikely that stolen goods or drugs lurk behind those impassive facades but you never really know what’s going on in somebody else’s home, do you?
The rows of battered wooden doors, stacked one on top of the other, dressed with heavy metal locks, are orderly stacks, the whole facility hushed like a library as my footsteps echo into the emptiness. I follow Raj’s instructions, turning left and then right and there it is: my storage unit. The only one without a padlock, conveniently located at ground level, swinging open at my touch, invitingly. The interior is cool, like the inside of a tomb.
I lay a stiff mat embroidered with a townscape on the floor, tracing streets and topography across the primary colours, remembering Nico as a toddler, briefly engaged in racing blocky yellow cars around this tiny universe. I stack the boxes along one side, the satisfaction of arranging the Tetris blocks of my past in tidy rows feeling almost erotic. Next, the old dining table, tipped on its head. A little unwieldy and, now, the storage unit is feeling cramped. The soft landing of the dining chairs cushions the discomfort, seat to seat on top of each other, filling the negative space of the underside of the table where we ate meals as a family.
When I’ve packed in all the remnants of my life that I’ve driven here in a borrowed Subaru Legacy, I stand in the doorway of my storage unit and briefly consider putting a little bed in the corner. I’m an only child, still, making forts on her own on the weekends.
I think it’s a shame that there are no clothes racks or bookcases in my storage unit. When I drove away for the last time from the only home my daughter has ever known, my clothes and books filled the boot and the entire back seat. Winter coats from the years in Wellington grazed the ceiling, juxtaposed awkwardly with the gauzy Auckland summer dresses that would never have maintained their dignity in the wind of our capital city, even on a good day. Anatomy textbooks, Deborah Levy and Stephen King novels lurched around corners from their piles on the floor. A full size model of a human skeleton was buckled into the passenger seat.
“I think you were hoarding your essentials unconsciously, in anticipation of this outcome,” a perceptive friend observed. The frivolities I guiltily amassed, using Afterpay and Laybuy and my secret credit card – the dresses and shoes now jammed into my single wardrobe, and the towers of books that line the walls of my rented two-bedroom box. I have always been haunted by the mental calculation of what you’d take with you if your home was burning. What do you really need, to carry on living?
The new memoir There’s a Cure for This by Emma Espiner (Penguin Random House, $35) is available in bookstores nationwide.
