Building a house is very much like a jigsaw puzzle, or playing with Lego. It’s simply a matter of finishing one stage at a time, one on top of the other.
The concrete block was completed in one afternoon, with the help of friends and a concrete mixer. There’s nothing exciting about concreting, so I won’t go into any further details. Except to add that I’m a great believer in contributing some natural ingredients. Concrete is, after all, just artificial stone, so why not add some of the real thing? It not only saves time and effort, but money as well.
Then it was onto the piles. Piling is very much like amateur Caber Tossing, especially when you’re doing it by yourself. Lifting a 150mm wide by 2880mm long tree trunk into a 300mm wide hole by yourself, isn’t for the faint-hearted (or the splinter-shy, for that matter). It’s all a question of balance (which allows you to quickly determine the point at which the pile will maintain its trembling equilibrium until you’ve managed to sufficiently brace it), nimble-footedness (which allows you to avoid being crushed beneath a pile you thought would maintain its trembling equilibrium) and perseverance (which stops you from simply strapping all your piles together into a makeshift raft and floating away down the river). Unfortunately, I’m not overly endowed with the first two of these attributes, so they were often replaced by simple brute force and a lot of hectic scampering from side-to-side.
But every pile has to stand up eventually ... one way or another. Once it’s in and sitting nicely, it can then be gently nudged into alignment - the centre of the pile should correspond exactly to the corner of the house (at the intersection of two strings) or some other marker along the string; it should be vertical (though it’s often a question of guesswork since most piles aren’t very straight); and the top of each pile should be level with the string (though a few swipes of the saw can make any pile level). Then it has to be securely braced so that it will remain in perfect alignment until the concrete sets.
Once the concrete has set, it’s time for the bearers. As the name suggests, their main function is to bear the weight of the house. So they’re reasonably heavy. Running across the bearers, were rows of joists which create the framework upon which to eventually attach the floor. In no time at all, the foundations were complete.
But rather than feeling satisfied with my physical efforts and motivated by the progress we were making, I began to become increasingly depressed and withdrawn, though I explained it away with faithful standbys - “I’m just tired” and “I’m just thinking”. We’d embarked on one of the most important journeys of our shared lives, yet neither of us were feeling fulfilled or content. What was going wrong?
It was a bewildering time.
For me, it stemmed from the simple fact that it wasn’t us making progress, it was me. I’d taken the plunge in good faith, but now that I was in it up to my eyeballs, I’d suddenly discovered I was swimming alone. I was doing all the work. I was doing all the planning and dreaming and deciding. And, on the one hand, I was happy to do it. I was willing to shoulder the burden if, in the end, our life together could be perfect. I began to suspect all my efforts would ultimately prove futile, because there wasn’t going to be any us.
For Marion, it stemmed from the fact that the whole project was simply too big for her, too scary. She didn’t understand building because she didn’t want to understand, so she didn’t believe we could do it. Now that we’d started, she’d again begun to suspect she didn’t want to even be here. We hadn’t resolved the issue, we’d just buried it beneath hopes and dreams. So she’d responded by escaping into meaningless work. As long as she didn’t see the house, she didn’t have to think about the house. As long as she was meeting new people, she didn’t have to face the fear that being alone with me wasn’t enough.
I imagined the marriage test dummies recreating our relationship. Unlike their counterparts in the accident prevention branch, it’s the absence of momentum which is fatal. Crashing into inertia is far more deadly than the speed wobbles. Momentum, in any direction, is vital. The relationship must be getting somewhere - developing, moving forward, deepening, enriching itself.
For the last year (perhaps longer), our relationship had stopped developing. We’d fooled ourselves into thinking we were getting somewhere simply by virtue of the number of miles we’d travelled, by the things we were doing. We’d kept moving, filling our lives with plans, filling our future with dreams, and we hadn’t taken the time to look at ourselves, or each other, afresh. We’d made decisions based on what we believed each other wanted, without deciding what we each wanted as individuals.
Eery new decision, every well-meaning but false decision we’d made had simply made things worse. We’d found a home, when we really just needed a place to stand still for a while. We were locals in a place where we never wanted to be locals. We were living in the country, not because we were country people, but because we each thought that was where the other wanted to live. We were building an entire future without knowing whether we had a future... together.
Now we seemed locked on a course which neither of us wanted, but from which neither of us could deviate.
I was determined to finish the house. I convinced myself that if I just kept going, if we could just hold on long enough to be able to see our future, things would work out. It all sounded very noble. But in reality, it was pure stubbornness. I’m a compulsive finisher. Once I start, I’ll push on to the end, whether it’s eating a packet of chips or building a house. To not finish was to fail. It didn’t matter how I finished, as long as I did finish. We would sort our lives out after the house was finished. Until then, I would simply ignore our problems, and maybe they’d go away ...
But they didn’t go away.
Marion did.
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