Person Unknown by Rhona Gorringe
“It’s a deceased estate. Complete clearance. See what’s there. Shouldn’t take very long,” my boss said handing me a key, “Solicitors say there are no traceable relatives. Apparently the villagers considered the occupant a hermit!”
Not knowing what to expect, I cautiously entered the first room off the hall and gasped. It was a large room with a door at one end opening onto a cracked terrace with several bird tables. Above the door hung a sombrero with a faded ribbon. To the right of this door was a large upright piano with a tottering pile of sheet music on the top, weighted down with a small glass case of stuffed tropical birds.
There was barely an inch of wall that did not have a picture. Gloomy oils of misty bog-stuck Highland cattle hung crookedly next to eye-smartingly bright acrylic Mediterranean seascapes. Botanical prints of tropical plants jostled for space next to snarling leopards and snowy landscapes.
On my extreme left floor to ceiling shelves held books. Where there were gaps the space was taken up with sea shells, fossils, creeping indoor plants and juvenilia soft, plush, cuddly toys. I searched for a light switch to look closely at the books hoping to get an indication of the character of this magpie for surely he – or she must be one, judging by the clutter everywhere. But there didn’t seem to be one, just lots of brass and porcelain candlesticks and a couple of oil lamps. The books were just as jumbled as the pictures: art, travel, philosophy, erotica, historical memoirs, crime, classics and more. In fact the assortment could have been a job lot from a defunct library.
Like Alice I found the room curiouser and curiouser and half expected to see a white rabbit or dormouse but there was a dozing cat on a footstool, or was it dozing? I nervously prodded it with a billiard cue and to my relief, realised it was stuffed. Obviously there was furniture in the room but whatever chairs or tables there may have been were covered in piles of yellowing magazines, patchworks, oriental rugs, khilims and tapestry pieces. The room could have been a studio setting for a period drama. But this was a real and far different, richer and more exotic world than the one I knew.
By contrast though was a very high tech-looking black box with several leads trailing the floor. Ah, I thought, so there is electricity here – somewhere! I scanned a pile of CDs and videos, mainly orchestral and operatic but then astonishingly, Scottish jigs and reels, military marches, blues, twenties jazz and a boxed set of the Carry On films!
I couldn’t decide if the hermit had been an eccentric and dilettante, male or female and a magpie with a low boredom threshold. It was organised chaos .
Undoubtedly this was the treasure trove of a connoisseur. I could hardly wait to report back to the office.
Jackie says: As Rhona writes- this is a person whose motivation for hoarding seems unknowable. She said in her email that this was a real story, and it’s an excellent description of a room. But I’m not sure Rhona has led us with her to the conclusion that this was the room of a connoisseur. An artistic, eclectic magpie, maybe. Mind you, I had a friend whose uncle was a renowned drunk. When they finally raided his room to raise money for his hospital fees, he had hoarded until the stuff reached the ceiling. But they found a pair of candelabras that had belonged to Marie Antoinette which he’d drilled to make electric lights, and a small Picasso. Fetched 140,000 grand.
This piece does exactly what the task demanded. It explores the character of the person who inhabited the space – and is made more immediate by the fact that it is written in the first person and narrated by someone whose job is to undertake just that kind of exploration. The fact that the owner of the room is dead adds another dimension. What makes the piece particularly effective is the unpredictability of the juxtapositions. ‘Gloomy oils of misty bog-stuck Highland cattle’ raise one kind of expectation, which is instantly qualified by ‘eye-smartingly bright acrylic Mediterranean seascape.’ And at the end of the piece, there is no easy conclusion. We don’t know exactly the character of the person who lived there, but we do know that he – or she – lived in the kind of chaos of different and unfinished projects which most of us inhabit.