My mother’s pride and joy is a shining, miniature figurine of a showpony which stands on the mantelpiece. It looks like a much smaller and more kitsch version of one of Jeff Koons’ blow up balloon animals, complete with a frilly mane and that proud pose horses make with one front leg curled up in the air. The seams where the material meets itself again around the stubby body are wrinkled and creased like a balloon that’s been blown up too much, as if the artist’s own breath is about to pop the pony or send it flying and whistling into the air. But I’m told that this illusion has been created by a small industrial water pump. Standing on the mantelpiece, when the metallic sheen glints in the slowly turning sun, I think that the showpony would make the perfect, plastic bauble to hang on the Christmas tree.
My mother is what you might call a collector, but not in the conventional sense of collecting precious books or watches or artworks. She is a collector in the pursuit of an endless accumulation of objects and more objects, until there’s no place left in which to collect them. Her house is small, with few rooms and rectangular windows. From the outside, looking through the rectangular windows and leafy hedges, it mustn’t seem like there is anything wrong. But inside there is a growing pile of stuff. Stuff like pots and pans, tins, shoes, coat hangers, candle holders, lego sets, coffee cups, nail polish and so forth. Stuff that’s on the floor and practically climbing up the walls looking for an inch of spare surface. Some of the stuff isn’t, but most of it is made from cheap plastic, the kind that is meant to be durable but breaks all the time into little pieces in your hands.
Every time I arrive back at the house, my mother looking not in the slightest bit sheepish, the pile of stuff has gotten bigger. That’s the thing about stuff, it comes in any number of colours, varieties, models and makes. Department stores, then, are the equivalent of a limitless, all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast for stuff. The best is that one on Elizabeth Street with huge glass windows that jut out onto the pavement and whisk you away from the sticky Sydney sun into an air-conditioned, chandelier-studded winter wonderland, like the magical wardrobe in Narnia. The last time my mother and I went, she bought two, portable, mechanical fans for us to brave the heat outside, and we walked side by side with our arms outstretched and fans held to our faces, buzzing slightly.
The giant pile of stuff forms a trail around the house, leaving discarded or broken bits in its wake and stopping only at the entrance to my room, making it somewhat hard to avoid. Looking at my fingers, a thin layer of plastic has hardened underneath my fingernails like dirt. I think that the plastic is starting to seep into my skin, into my pores. It’s making me itch. I told my mother this one morning as I scrubbed my hands together under warm soapy water but she just looked at me funny and self prescribed me a sugary syrup like from when I was a child. The syrup was so sticky and thick with the flavour of blackcurrant that it coated my teeth in a layer of purple. I’ve heard of those studies that say microplastics have gotten into every part of the human body, even
testicles. I wonder if all this stuff is actually trying to kill me.
The more ferocious the pile of stuff becomes, along with my mother’s conviction to buy more stuff, the more my skin starts to itch. The itch crawls just below the surface of the skin, lost in space, so that I can’t quite pinpoint its exact location. It likes to come out at night, crawling slowly and tentative at first, then at all at once. I scratch and scratch in the dark until there’s nothing left to scratch, so then I’m forced to lay very still, willing for the itch to go away with my eyes shut tightly. Other times, I creep down the stairs and find my mother scrolling on her laptop, just visible through the crack in the door. Her back is turned away from me, but I can make out the dim, white light from the computer screen lighting up her face.
Here, in the dark, she spends hours on the internet scrolling through pages of fancy online auction houses with spruced-up departments like ‘Fine & Estate Furniture,’ ‘Decorative arts and objects,’ and ‘Fine wines and spirits.’ She’s never bought anything —stuff on auction is far too expensive, being of a too far gone era — but routinely places items in her cart. This entails a long and laborious process of refining her cart with a ruthless pointer arrow that hovers and deliberates carefully over each image until only a few are left. I’m not sure what to make of this, other than it being some perverted fantasy where my mother can pretend she belongs to a social class above her own, one filled with nice stuff like wooden chairs and porcelain plates that don’t break all the time into little pieces of plastic that seep into your fingertips and make you itch.
I do wish my mother would stop buying so much stuff, and fantasizing about buying stuff, but today she brought home a frilly silicone cup to poach my eggs in. In four minutes I had a perfectly poached egg which was so delightful that for a second I forgot how itchy I was and saw myself in a silicone shaped world full of lazy, yolky breakfasts. But afterwards I started to itch, all over my arms and down my chest from where the egg slid down my throat. I used to think of the pile of stuff as a tumour growing on the walls of the house, upwards and sideways, in all directions. A cheap, plastic tumour the colour of fuchsia, the colour of loud commercials. But now that the tumour is growing on me, underneath my skin, under my nails, it seems to have taken on a life of its own. It’s like this heavy, breathing thing that’s eating me from the inside, while I’m scratching at my skin from the outside, until the two of us eventually meet in the middle and there’s nothing left but bone.
There is a pharmacy close by, which I eventually decide that I should visit. The pharmacy is tucked away in the corner of a shopping centre about three levels up, so I catch the escalator for what seems like an eternity floating by rows and store fronts of brightly coloured plastic stuff. Inside, the room is well lit with white lights that bear down on me from all sorts of oppressive angles, making me suddenly conscious of my bare reddened arms and the scratches over my body. I ask a man in a white shirt with a little name tag if he can help me, and he navigates me through the maze of pharmaceutical stuff. I leave with a sheet of tablets packed tightly in plastic cases that are meant to dissolve in your stomach and a cream to apply on my skin in pea-sized amounts.
When I get home, I turn on the tv and silently flick through channels on the remote before finding nothing and hoping I doze off to the sound of chatter in the background, scratching myself to sleep. When I close my eyes, fluttering with sleep or drowsiness or both, I dream that I am in a giant melting pot of stuff.
