The Hoarder

I have a photo of a man whose name I don’t know. I’m a hoarder, a magpie; I collect things I don’t need. It started with something I heard on the radio; a familiar voice explained how she was unable to walk past a discarded scratch-card on the ground, just in case it was a winning ticket that had been overlooked. And once I’d mimicked this, triggered the avalanche, I couldn’t stop. I also couldn’t bring myself to throw the scratch-cards away. I pinned them over each other on my noticeboard until the pin wasn’t long enough and I had to start a new pile.

Receipts came next. I didn’t need them, but I couldn’t bin them, just in case they would be of some use some day. Consequently I’ve kept every receipt for everything I’ve bought in the last five years. I have thousands, tens of thousands maybe; more than I could count, I know that. So it escalated, the snow kept falling, until I was keeping and collecting just about everything.

There’s always that temptation, but I’d never outright steal. But when the opportunity is there, I just can’t turn it down. It began on a bus; a woman bent down before me, picked up a shiny silver key and held it out in front of me. She asked me if it was mine, but it wasn’t. My mind said no, but my lips released the affirmative. I had no use for this little key, but I slid it into my pocket after thanking her and later blu-tacked it to my bedroom wall.

In this way I’ve gained a mobile phone, three wallets, four umbrellas and twenty eight train tickets, amongst other obscure objects. Piles of jewellery crowd my bedside table, and I've accumulated enough scarves to wear a different one every day for a month. But I have a photo of a man whose name I don’t know and it’s the most prized possession I’ve unearthed in all these years. I found him in a wallet, nestled between bank notes, removed him and sat him behind the transparent window in my purse.

It’s a lonely life as a magpie; everyone knows it's one for sorrow, two for joy. I’ve accumulated many beautiful things but my own beauty remains untouched. I’m well into my thirties, no longer young and promiscuous, and the dreaded question never gets easier to hear. “Have you found yourself a man yet?” Aunties and grannies and long-lost cousins twice removed never tire of asking that one. And I was tired of letting them down. So I lied. It was only an insignificant, tiny white lie to begin with. I said yes, and opened my purse to show him off. He attracted a lot of attention; they told me over and over that I’d caught a good one, reeled in something really tasty. But somehow even the fishing analogies didn’t deter me.

It rocketed out of control, just like the hoarding had done. I named him Ethan, and told my family that he was a soldier in Afghanistan, that we’d met whilst he was on leave but that he was back on the front line now and that was why they couldn’t meet him. Sometimes I’d find myself with a glass of wine in one hand, television remote in the other, scouring the news channels for his face, convincing even myself that he was real.

I became devoted to this imaginary character, writing unsent letters to him, addressed to the army barracks I’d told myself he was serving at. It scared me how attached I was. At times I’d try to remind myself of the reality; I even thought about offering the photograph to strangers on public transport, in the hopes he’d fall into the hands of another hoarder. But I could never bring myself to go through with it.

After an exhausting day at work one Friday evening, I breathed a sigh of relief as my train finally pulled into the platform. I fought my way into the busy carriage, squeezing through a mass of business people to a space by the window. Gripping onto the handrail as the train began to move, I caught sight of my pea-green handbag, lying unaccompanied on the bench I’d sat on for the last half hour. It was too late to get off; it was too late to do anything. I clapped a hand to my mouth as I watched my possessions fade further and further into the distance. My phone, my purse, my umbrella, my train ticket, gone, forever. And the photo of a man whose name I didn’t know.