Broken is Beautiful

1

5 March 2020

Hello, I’m Julia and I am obsessed with broken things. Phew, it’s out there. I am breathing hard, my palms are sweaty, and I can’t raise my eyes to look around the circle of people. Is there a hush? Or are seconds pretending to be minutes, without giving time for people to react? Finally, Hello Julia, choruses back to me and I let myself relax.

Ten of us are seated in a circle of brightly coloured plastic chairs in the middle of the Sumner Surf Lifesaving Club common room. I should be listening to the next speaker, but I am so relieved to have completed my turn that I can’t hear a word and my eyes are drawn to the view outside the room. Small waves roll in from the ocean onto the sandy beach where silhouetted figures brave the water in the evening light. God-rays are illuminating the sea as it stretches away from us. I combine God-rays with rainbows in my head and imagine pots of gold where the rays touch the sea. I could do with a pot of gold right now.

By the time my concentration returns to the room, I have missed half the other introductions. I hope I said Hello to the other people in automaton fashion. When I raise my eyes above the parapet of my lap, no one appears to be staring at me so I can’t have behaved too badly in my lapse. The person opposite me in the circle is speaking.

Hello, I’m Matthew and I’m obsessed with tattoos.

I join in, Hello Matthew.

Genius is not required to detect that Matthew is obsessed with tattoos; tattoos cover all the visible parts of his body. It’s a good-looking body if you like a coating of ink. I estimate Matthew is in his early forties, with a physique suggesting exercise is a regular part of his life, along with tattooing. His shaven head allows an excellent view of the tattoos colouring his skull which extend over his face – the only exception being his eyeballs – and on under his black t-shirt. There are glimpses of tattoos between his t-shirt and blue jeans and above his Allbirds shoes. However, what is particularly noticeable about Matthew is that his tattoos are all brand names. I read Nike, Breville, Apple, Panasonic, Birkenstock, Red Band; there are brands I cannot make out from three metres across the circle. I realise I should stop staring and quickly turn my attention to the next participant.

Hello, I’m Monique and I’m obsessed with eating plasterboard.

Hello, Monique.

Monique is obsessed with eating plasterboard? Really? Is that a thing? Is eating plasterboard how Monique, who must be in her fifties, stays so slim? She has expertly dyed long blonde hair and is wearing it in plaits. Monique is one of those people who dress apparently effortlessly in a style you want to emulate. Her clothes are unusual, but they look perfect on her, like her plaits which would make me look like an ageing child. She is wearing long khaki shorts with knee-high cream socks and beautiful tan leather ankle boots which match her leather bomber jacket.

I look at the corners of Monique’s mouth to see if I can spot crumbs of plasterboard (yes, ridiculous, she would be on her best behaviour given this is our first group session). I scan the room for aspects vulnerable to a plasterboard addict and spot a few exposed corners on which one could have a quick nibble.

The last person in the circle is Greg. Hello, I’m Greg and I’m obsessed with collecting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle paraphernalia.

Hello Greg, we warble back. Everyone is now feeling more comfortable given Greg’s is the last introduction.

Greg is a guy you wouldn’t notice on the street, or anywhere else. He has mid-brown hair not yet markedly receding or greying and could be anywhere from mid-thirties to early fifties. He is wearing a brown t-shirt with a brown jacket and blue jeans. Greg’s only claim to noticeability is his footwear. He has Doc Martens adorned with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It seems inappropriate to flaunt your obsession. However, Matthew is flaunting his obsession, and could hardly help but do so.

Fran is the last person to introduce herself formally. Fran looks casually stylish in a turquoise shirt and jean jacket with dark curly hair cut at chin length. When we arrived, she welcomed us into the room, checked our names off her list and sat us all down. She explained this session would start with introductions which must include us stating our obsessions. We would then do a group trust exercise. Fran had sent out the emails letting me know the time and date of this session. How large is the bureaucracy behind Obsessives Associated, or ‘OA’ as it’s referred to in all the information she sent? Where in New Zealand might their central office be? How much information do OA already have about me, what additional information are they storing away, and how much of that information can my bank discover?

Hello, I’m Fran and I’m obsessed with helping people in need.

Hello, Fran.

What, are we all here to feed Fran’s addiction? Could Fran be the entire bureaucracy of Obsessives Associated? Has she set up OA to get an obsession kick together with an income? Surely my bank, who required me to attend a support group as a condition of extending my home loan, will have investigated the background of the entity offering the services? It must be time to get on with the trust exercise, but I am not feeling very trusting.

Fran says we will have a social break first. She has brought vegan, sugar-free, gluten-free, additive-free cookies for us to have with a drink. It’s hard to imagine what ingredients might be in such an everything-free cookie, spinach? However, the cookies taste remarkably good, so I eat three with my cup of peppermint tea, because I forgot to eat lunch in my anticipation of the meeting.

Fran tells us we bring snacks on a roster, in reverse order of our first names. J is in the middle of the alphabet so I know I will come after Monique and Matthew, and I still have three names to learn so my turn might be further delayed. That’s a relief because I have little idea how to bake anything edible that apparently has almost no content of interest.

Fran lays out the exercise. I fear a group exercise will try to trick us into revealing something about ourselves we don’t want to share. However, it turns out this exercise won’t challenge me too greatly on an interpersonal level. We have to build the tallest possible tower out of spaghetti strands, some tape, some string, scissors, and a marshmallow to be placed at the top of the tower. To create a sense of competition, we are divided into two groups, and I am with Matthew, Monique, Greg, and an older guy called Barry. I’m going to have to discover Barry’s obsession next week as he spoke before me, when I wasn’t listening.

Fran starts an egg timer, and we have fifteen minutes in which to complete the tallest possible freestanding tower.

Barry is a man in a suit and tie who likes to be in charge. The rest of us are happy for him to take the leading role. Barry announces we should make an inventory of our construction materials. He grabs all the pieces of spaghetti to count them whereupon two pieces crumble. Barry puts on a ‘doesn’t matter’ face and says with emphasis that we now have sixteen pieces of spaghetti where, seconds ago, we had ten.

Monique fiddles with the tape. I hope she won’t accidentally stick bits of tape together, so they are no longer useful. It’s green masking tape which is good for creating sharp paint lines when painting trim, but it isn’t strong.

I pick up the string, which is old-fashioned brown twine, like Gran used to tie up plants. While I ignore Barry, who is telling us to brainstorm, I break a fingernail trying to straighten the string out where I have accidentally knotted it.

Telling people to brainstorm is as sensible as telling cats to sit. People’s brains immediately do something other than the mandated brainstorming. We look at the fifty-centimetre tower the other group have already created, then Fran appears from behind us to redirect our attention to our own non-tower, as we guiltily return the things we’ve been engaging ourselves with.

Greg says, Just a possibility, we could make triangles out of spaghetti and tape because triangles are strong. But it might be a bad idea.

What should we do with the string? asks Barry.

We don’t have to use everything. The string could be a deliberate distraction, says Monique.

Could we use it to hang the marshmallow? suggests Matthew. He tries to poke a hole in the marshmallow with a spaghetti strand which breaks into tiny fragments. I sit quietly, picturing my garden with its wild profusion of flowers and leaves and considering the pointlessness of spaghetti towers.

As the last grains of sand fall, we accomplish a ten-centimetre teepee of taped-together spaghetti pieces, collectively poked into the marshmallow. Our teepee wavers, then crumbles into a heap as we enviously observe the fine construction of our opposition. Their tower stands proud and tall with a pink marshmallow balanced upon its apex. Our group of four look like losers. Is the point of the exercise to make us feel like four losers in a losing alliance, rather than the individual losers who entered the room? This strategy is not making me look forward to next week.

Fran asks us to return to our circle and participate in a karakia prior to departure. I am dubious about prayers so am happy to find this karakia bears more resemblance to gardening than church.

The sun has set upon our gathering for the day.

The birds are silent.

The worms are still.The world is at rest.

The night has arrived my friends.

So, tie up the waka.

Have we landed?

We have landed.

I shoot a glance at Matthew’s broad shoulders and Monique’s bony knees as they exit onto the wooden deck, chatting animatedly, and pick up my handsewn shoulder bag to make my solitary way home.

2

My home is twenty minutes of relaxed walking from the Sumner Surf Club. I prefer the route by the sea, rather than through Sumner Village, enjoying the sounds and smells as the waves hit the stone armouring in front of the pavement. Longboarders and paddleboarders play on the waves and there is a holiday feel, although the summer holidays are long gone by March. Dreadlocked Europeans in wetsuits scurry back and forth with surfboards or carry bags of rubbish to sneak into the spilling bins along the street. Wafts of conversation fuelled by beer and coffee drift past. Backpacker vans lining the street are a new normal over the last few years as tourists look for free places to stay. A few vans were bearable, but the constant hordes now impact on my quiet enjoyment of the sea.

I turn away from the sea down Head Street, only two blocks to home now. My home is my haven, left to me by Gran when she died two decades ago. While I took care of Gran at home for the five years prior to her death, I got to know and love her house even more than I had as a small child. Gran’s house was a refuge when our fey mother forgot to put food in the cupboards or the fridge.

Mum always had something to do that she regarded as more interesting than looking after children. She had many groups she loved attending more than she appeared to love us – pottery, book reading, Buddhism, Baha’i, Quakers (she was agnostic about religion), yoga, meditation, macramé, weaving, welding, EST (an awful group that occasionally met at home and who yelled out all the things they didn’t like about each other), Save the Whales, Save Lake Manapouri. Mum didn’t attend any group for long and flowed between them in loose, colourful caftans and scarves. She generally didn’t wear shoes because she said shoes are bad for feet – did I know how many women need their feet operated on because they wore high-heeled shoes?

Our mother claimed she wanted to be a flower child but came to the party late, therefore she had lots of parties at our house to make up for that late arrival. When Johnno and I came home from school and there was a large bowl of brown and effervescent liquid on the table, referred to as ‘punch’, it was time to head to Gran’s if we wanted to get any sleep. Guests would come and go, eat, drink, shout at each other, start kissing on the sofa, get pushed off the sofa by someone else who wanted to sit there, have a little sleep on the floor, and then start eating and drinking again. There were generally a few guests scattered around the house in the morning if we crept in to retrieve a forgotten piece of school uniform.

If there was one thing I was sure about as a child, it was that when I grew up, I wasn’t having a house full of coming and going people. My house would be mine and it would be a lucky and worthy person who came over my doorstep.

Gran allowed my dream of a home of my own to come true. Gran always knew what we wanted and tried to make it happen, within her means. She inherited her house from her parents, who built it in the early 1900s. Her parents, Ma and Pa Stout, moved from Christchurch City to Sumner Village, which was growing in popularity as rich Christchurch people built mansions near the beach. Gran never said how they got the land; perhaps someone gave them their scrubby patch of low-lying sand, which appeared undesirable in comparison with the sun-drenched slopes of Scarborough and Clifton Hill with views of the Pacific Ocean and Southern Alps.

Pa Stout was a carpenter and Ma Stout cleaned and cooked. When they first moved out of town, Ma Stout got a job at the Café Continental, but it burned down after only three years. After the fire, she found work in the houses of the people she had served in the café. Pa Stout built new houses for the rich while the two of them lived in a canvas tent on their section. He slowly built their own house from construction scraps he scavenged at the end of his building jobs. As a result, Gran’s house has always looked slightly askew, built with different weatherboard shapes on different aspects and windows at different heights because there wasn’t a plan, just a flowing creation. The oddity never bothered Gran, and it hasn’t bothered me either; 29 Head Street is mine and that’s what makes it the best place in the world.

I arrive at my poppy-coloured front door, guarded by a central brass knocker with a lion’s head, and feel happy before I even get inside. The door is painted with leftovers from a can one of my clients gave me. It’s the only part of the house exterior that is currently well covered with paint. I have been meaning to paint the outside but it’s a big job and not an appealing one. How would I avoid standing on the plants? I don’t think painting is that important. Gran’s house survived the Canterbury earthquakes, and it isn’t going to fall down now for lack of paint on the walls.

I am craving a cup of tea that doesn’t taste like a peppermint postage stamp, so I head straight to the kitchen. To be truthful, I can’t head straight to the kitchen because there are a number of boxes to negotiate along the hallway. I notice one box has acquired five friends above it and the top box towers over my head, so I move the top box sideways to join a two-box-high pile.

I turn on the gas and put my burgundy kettle on the stove. I’ve always had gas and it served me well in the earthquakes when power went out for months at a time. The push button sparker on the stove stopped working years ago so I light the gas with a match. I pull out my cloisonné jar of Kenya Bold tea, lift the lid and inhale joyously. It is possible I am obsessed with Kenya Bold tea, but this is not an obsession the bank knows anything about, and I am not telling them. The worst thing about liking Kenya Bold is that the nearest place stocking Kenya Bold leaf is a nine-kilometre cycle ride away.

I make my tea in Gran’s brown and cream Temuka pottery teapot with a matching cream and brown tea cosy. This tea cosy was the first knitting project I remember undertaking. Gran taught me how to knit and I find it peaceful. I can completely lose myself sitting in my garden and knitting for hours. Gran was very proud when I knitted a tea cosy that more or less fitted the teapot.

Johnno tried knitting too and cried because he’d dropped too many stitches, so his tea cosy unravelled when he attempted to pull it into shape. Johnno threw the cosy on the ground, stamped on it, and said it was a stupid activity for girls. Gran got cross with Johnno. She told him off for suggesting girls are inferior to boys and pointed out where his dinner had come from that evening.

I take my tea into the corner of the sitting room to drink it, weaving my way back between the hallway boxes. I carry the teapot, and my gold filigree bone china teacup on its matching saucer, on my Indian inlaid wooden tray. This is my favourite tea-drinking set, the set with which Gran and I drank tea. We had two filigree teacups then and it is possible I still have two, but I only need one at present given my lack of visitors.

I drink tea in the corner of the sitting room because my little problem now occupies most of my sitting room. Not that the room is large, but all the space is taken up with … well … with … things … broken things. That’s my problem, you see. As I said in the meeting tonight for the first time ever, I can’t let go of broken things.

Broken things make me sad. I want broken things to be fixed. I believe I am the person who can fix broken things. Gran taught me a lot about fixing and I have subsequently had plenty more practice. However, I have discovered there are many broken things needing fixing in this world, even in this city. After a series of earthquakes Christchurch was full of broken things requiring repair. These broken things are accumulating in my house, and they appear to be getting the upper hand.

I read a good simile for my feelings about broken things in a book about a girl who lived in the frozen north of Canada. She found a lost mitten and felt absolute empathetic despair with the mitten. There was a terrible sadness in the loneliness of the knitted mitten that would never be reunited with its fellow mitten. It had been a singular pair of mittens, knitted by hand by someone’s loved parent, or grandparent, or child. No other mitten could be a replacement, that particular pair of mittens uniquely belonged together. The mittens had kept the loved one’s hands warm, until a forgetful moment meant there was only one mittened hand, one cold hand, and a lonely red mitten abandoned out in the snow.

3

12 March 2020

Today is important because I have a potential client coming to visit, the first for many weeks. I haven’t been welcoming of late when people have expressed interest in my services. Most clients come through word of mouth, although I do keep flyers on the notice boards at the Sumner Supervalue, by the Bohemian Bakery, and at the Woolston New World. However, my bank now requires me to attend my weekly Thursday OA group and demonstrate I am increasing my income.

I stopped having clients come into my house some years ago. People were tripping over my boxes, and I don’t want the contents scattered all over the floor. The simple solution was to have clients visit in my garden. My garden is a wild thing I have let run deliberately loose. Many of the flowers which now cover the paths remind me of Gran. I have no issue with plants growing on paths as long as they don’t complain when I walk on them. We have reached a reasonable accord, primroses, poppies and petunias, granny’s bonnets and gerberas, marigolds and marguerite daisies, nasturtiums and nigella, all frolic together in a riot of colour in the spring and summer. Jasmine and honeysuckle scent the air while disguising the fence, and clematis and wisteria climb over the veranda.

Gran’s house is unusual for its era in that Pa Stout built a veranda on its north side to keep the house cool in summer. The house is on a corner with roads to the west and south sides, so the norm would have been to build the veranda facing the long southern axis. Pa Stout wasn’t wealthy, but he was smart and brought Gran up to be smart too.

My vegetables grow happily between the flowers. Rocket and sprouting broccoli seed themselves. Potatoes I miss at harvest time provide the next year’s crop. Pumpkins sprout up from the compost piled by the fence. Bean plants grow from old pods. At this point in late summer, vegetables are outcompeting the flowers.

I move some pumpkin vines off the mosaic sofa seat I designed with my china, which shattered in the February 2011 earthquake. Almost everything breakable broke, so I had plenty of scope to adorn a concrete sofa. It’s a mosaic of a taniwha, fish, sea, and seaweed, swirling blues and greens and creams, with bright rays of mirror sun glinting through the water. My sofa is the perfect art piece to give clients confidence that ‘Broken is Beautiful’ can do something special with their offerings.

‘Broken is Beautiful’ is the name of my business. In my twenties I prosaically named it ‘Julia’s Repairs’, when I was more focused on fixing things than on creative reconstruction. I never had a ‘normal’ job – I liked the look of Gran’s life. Gran worked hard for other people but always called her own shots because she never worked more than a day a week for any one client. Gran would say she couldn’t clean today because she had a meeting to attend when her meeting was with her own garden. Why is my garden less important than their dirty toilet? was her catch phrase.

Gran taught Johnno and me how to fix and make things, from those days of knitting tea cosies and before. On rainy days when we were little, we would make pictures to put on our dressers by cutting images out of magazines, melting a layer of candle wax into the bottom of one of Pa Stout’s old tobacco tins, carefully placing the image onto the warm wax and then melting another layer of wax on top. If you weren’t careful the image would go askew in the wax and stick out the side. Then you would have to heat the tin up so the wax would melt and start the process over again.

We tried everything we could to find materials to make and improved our skills over time. We folded hundreds of origami paper cranes to hang in our windows to remember the people of Hiroshima. We embroidered samplers for our rooms with our birth dates and city, although Johnno took his down just before his tenth birthday party, in case his mates deduced he had done the embroidery rather than his sister. There were pieces of Pa Stout’s wood stacked in the corner of the property which I used to make a kindling box for the fire and Johnno made into a beautiful ladder for climbing into the roof space.

We darned our socks and sewed buttons on our school uniforms, put up hems and lengthened them again, as fashions changed. We rewired light switches and plugs. We moved on to repairing appliances, carefully disassembling then reconstructing them. It was so exciting when the appliances functioned. Before he left home, Johnno took a whole car engine apart and put it back together. Gran was annoyed because some parts lived in the sitting room for several months. Almost all the parts went back in; the three left over can’t have been important as the engine worked well. Gran was over her crossness once the engine was refurbished because there was no more mess in the sitting room. We were exceptionally proud of Johnno and toasted him with spiced tomato juice made of tomatoes harvested from our garden.

By the time we were close to finishing high school, Mum took herself out of our picture. She headed north to Takaka, or thereabouts, with a new boyfriend who was running a yoga school somewhere in Golden Bay, in the northwest corner of the South Island. Mum asked us what we would like to do, go with her,