Ode to a bag of books

My visits home to Australia are always accompanied by a peculiar urge. I have this big collection of books I read as a kid, all that 90s pre-teen horror stuff, and every time I go, I want to see them again.

Packed in cardboard boxes and stashed away in my older brother’s garage, I’ve never actually followed through with hunting them down and taking them out. I ask Simon where they are, he tells me again like he told me last time, and I say absent-mindedly that I might go and have a look at them. 

Before flying out to Australia this year, I mentioned to my girlfriend that we might take those books out and look at them. 

Rosie was about to meet my family, fly further than she’s ever been in the world, and ignore everything she’d heard about Australia’s population of murderous fauna. Far from thinking about books, she nonetheless humoured me with a good-natured ‘Sure!’ 

Despite the relative obscurity of my bookish reunion in comparison to everything else awaiting us on the trip, I still held onto this image: sitting on the garage floor, the books spread out around me, picking up and reading blurbs, looking at cover art, remembering the ones with the covers ripped off, the ones I’d never read, the ones I refused to read more than once, the ones I read until I memorised them at a sentence-by-sentence level. 

We accumulated these books driving all around Australia and living out of a camper trailer. I was ten, Simon eleven. We travelled for a year with a brief break back home so we could rub our good fortune in everyone’s faces before we left again. Ever since, we’ve referred to it as ‘the Big Holiday’. This helped distinguish it from littler, less significant holidays when reminiscing in conversation: ‘Did that happen on The Big Holiday or just a camping trip?’ 

Every time we pulled into a new town, usually after a six to eight hour stretch of highway across desert, we had a few things to look out for: laundromat, caravan park, servo, and—just for me, the local second hand bookshop.

The spoils of my nation-wide book hunt were deposited into a large, plastic laundry bag that sat between my brother and me in the backseat. Pregnant with paperbacks, it was bursting at the seams, spilling out from all around. Its thin handles and once functional zipper had become vestigial in its metamorphosis and it would bottom out if we tried to move it. From its bloated body a Goosebumps had burst its way out of one side, a couple of Graveyard Schools were teetering from a wound on the other side, and a few Doomsday Malls pressed up through the top.

These books are all in Simon’s garage because Mum and Dad’s house (the home we grew up in) was destroyed by a storm in 2021. Unprecedented winds tore across the Mornington Peninsula, ripping up and tossing trees about, blowing down shop front signs—generally having a rollicking good time turning coastal towns inside out. Included in the storm’s plunder was the roof under which my parents and their two dogs had always slept. 

They awoke to hellish winds—a sound Mum has told me she hopes never to hear again—and managed to run downstairs under the house where they took refuge until the deafening noise died down. Since that night, they’ve lived in four different houses on the Peninsula, waiting two years for the house to be rebuilt. Before the Big Storm, they hadn’t lived anywhere else in 40 years.

Our house stood on stilts, which might have contributed to the damage it suffered when compared with our surrounding neighbours. I remember on windy nights the house would groan as it teetered and rocked on those stilts, but we were safe. It was our home.

There was no way my books weren’t coming back with me from the Big Holiday. I’d throw a tantrum if it was suggested we trade in a few, sell some, or throw away the ones that were barely holding themselves together, as though I were being asked to extract treasured memories from my brain. 

For two decades they sat on shelves in a room underneath the house. Just a wall away from the spot where Mum, Dad, Jed, and elderly Bella hid until the storm had finished ruining their lives. 

In those years, my books witnessed the evolution of that room from their vantage point on the back wall shelving. 

My earliest recollection is also the strangest. Dad had all these foam cubes he’d cut from some larger structure he was using for a job, and he threw all the cubes into the room, piling them high so that Simon and I could invite friends over to jump around: a respiratory nightmare and a makeshift bouncy castle. We called it the Foam Room. 

After that, the room once housed a half-size pool table. Covered in ripped fabric and chalk spots we retired the table and ended the room’s iteration as the Pool Room. We soon put a projector in there and turned it into the Cinema Room. I was a teenager then, smoking weed and inviting my friends around to sit slack-jawed watching The Matrix or, once on Mushrooms, the Windows Media Player visualiser. When my brother moved back from Canada after a snow season it became Simon’s Room where he paid rent and never removed my books from the shelves, as if doing so would be disturbing an exhibit. 

After Simon moved out and up until the Big Storm, that room was just a place we’d stay in when we visited, a place my Dad said was reserved for ‘international visitors’. Ironic I turned out to be the first of such visitors, when the room was no longer usable. I’d have stayed there if the pandemic didn’t delay my visit by an extra two years. Had I gotten to, I would have perused my books on their rightful shelf, in their rightful room, under the house where my parents should still rightfully be living. 

During my first visit back, we went to the house. On a once-lonely road now festering with million-dollar holiday homes, our place was one of the few originals left. My parents bought it in the 1970s for around 60k. They’re probably sitting on a million now.

Atop a steep driveway leading down onto that road where two of our dogs were killed on separate occasions, the deck overlooks a gravel courtyard. Here I used to shoot hoops with a soccer ball, Simon and I used to spray Dad with water pistols, and it’s where Mum, Simon, and I cried over a bloodied blanket with Rusty wrapped inside.

Now, the courtyard was strewn with odds and ends from Dad’s workshop. The roof of the house sunk deep over the backyard, leaving a gaping maw to greet us as we arrived. We spent that summer day in the heat picking through the refuse of Dad’s gutted workshop. What we thought we could sell we stacked on and around a large table. There was a skip for the rest. 

The house from the backyard, with dining room views.

The roof, ripped and thrown from the house, in the front yard.

Aside from Dad, we all worked quickly. Mum didn’t want to spend too much on the skip hire, while Simon, his mate Ethan, and I wanted to hit the beach later. For us this was a lousy job with an important payoff; for Dad it was something else—the exhumation of the stuff that made up his life.

At the beginning of the covid pandemic, Dad was diagnosed with something called Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA). It’s a poorly researched disease that may or may not be a variant of Alzheimers. PCA takes effect at an earlier stage in life than regular Alzheimers and, from what I understand, it affects Dad’s ability to see things. He’s not going blind, the connection is severing between what he sees, and what he once knew.

Dad wandered around the courtyard picking up things and staring at them. Mostly tools, some he’d fashioned himself, repaired, or modified to improve their suitability for a task. He’d pick up a small, rusted spade with a taped-on foam handle and say ‘I know this is something’ or ‘I used to use this somehow.’ 

He was distraught, watching us toss away or sell off what he’d spent decades building, retooling, keeping safe. He’d say to us ‘This is my life, okay?’ and we’d ignore him with a sick feeling in our stomachs, knowing we just had to get the task done and get out of there. 

I went inside the room that day to see it in its final form. Water damage had caused the roof to cave in. Stained insulation roll had spilled out onto the ground, rusted pipes hung down, and sat amongst it all was a huge, mummified rat, its mouth open as if screaming. The shelves that housed my books were crushed and rotted. The books, rescued and safe before the room collapsed, were packed away and ready for Simon’s garage. 

Like my Dad’s tools, those books hold more than memories for me. Even if I could no longer remember that I broke my speed reading record with One Day at Horrorland, or that I had a crush on the main character in Scared Stiff, I still wouldn’t want anyone to throw those books away. When the memories fade in our heads, we store them in things and we hold onto those things. One day, we always think, I’ll get them out and look at them again. 

I’ll remember everything if I still have my things.