The Prop Man

My mother warned me this would happen but I didn’t listen and before I knew it, the term crept up on me. I didn’t see its tendrils wrapping around my torso, my legs or my neck; the touch was faint like the warmth of a scarf on a breezy autumn day about which you forget until suddenly your body is being yanked back when the scarf’s woolly tassels get stuck in the bus’ door. You are being strangled in front of the commuters’ eye audience before somehow you manage to pull the tassels out and you scramble out onto the sidewalk, pretending the last fifteen seconds never happened. When I realised the word fit me, it was too late - red marks were already etched into the skin of my neck, too bright to attempt to hide under my flatmate's concealer and I cursed my mother for always having to be right.

I have been told that I was a recluse or a synonym of the word, a handful of times, most of them in jest and each time I shrugged. I wholeheartedly believed that people would go on spewing out words as if they were feathers, not bricks that could make someone sink to the end of times, and so the business of ignoring them didn’t come too hard, especially as I knew they couldn’t be more wrong. I was out of the flat, meeting them in the din of the pub after all with my shoes sticking to the linoleum floor - a feat no recluse would attempt. The remark caused lips to curl up in amusement; a free pass of sorts for the nastiness it was concealing and the ‘hermit’ became my second name. I thought it to be simultaneously sharp and saccharine - ‘Look, Herbert, the Hermit made it tonight!”. I smiled, nodded, and hoped my blotchy red face didn’t make the yellow of my shirt look too much like a custard next to ketchup sauce like in the sandwiches I tended to consume.

But please don’t think I was completely without a backbone. For the longest time, I did think to voice out the reasons that would render such association to my image as wrong. I imagined clearing my voice and telling them their recountings of my failures to live up to their extrovert sensibilities didn’t render me fit to become their entertainment for the night. The thought became less demanding with time and in the end, I never did. I doubted the words would cut through the roar of laughter that echoed and shook the very core of my being. Later, as I lay in the warehouse I very much wished I had the will to stand up for myself and voice my hurt.

But, I’m skipping too far ahead.

In the end, I felt less inclined to join them and my ventures to the pub became more sparse until I stopped going at all. A few months later, I had enough savings and bought what I’ve been saving for the last few years. It was a sizable warehouse at the edge of the city, and I started filling it with miscellaneous items that drew my eye - mostly vintage, rare, limited edition finds. I started to advertise them online for rental, and when I started to garner enough interest, I quit my office job and became ‘the man who rents props’ full time.

Coincidently, my recluse ways got worse. Coffee dates and browsing book store displays were swapped for brushing up on HTML coding, roaming auction sites, creating one-line-long catalogue descriptions and for an occasional drive to a flea market to break up the monotony.

With time my name grew to mean the prop-man in the show-biz. I was proud. I imagined going to the weekly pub catch-up and letting them know but the idea dampened my spirits and instead, I turned up the dial of the radio and listened to music bounce against the thin corrugated walls.

Not many things in life were a given, but as weeks progressed, I developed a new routine. Typically before noon, every working week I would talk to a courier and it would almost certainly be George, a gregarious man with a round belly who smelled of cigarette smoke and coffee. His gruff voice sometimes was the only one that spoke back to me for long enough to ask how I was. He never called me anything other than ‘Herbert, buddy.’ My heart felt lighter and I began to look forward to our chats.

Despite living with flatmates, our schedules hardly aligned and I suspected that neither had our personalities. They liked to talk too loudly on the phone and left dried pasta sauce on the kitchen counters and owned a collection of impractical heels on which I would trip up on in the corridor when I walked in after dark. We muttered hellos and goodbyes and left each other stick-it notes if we needed anything else. Sometimes, I would catch myself thinking that the paper-thin walls separating our bedrooms might as well have been continents, for how little we actually interacted.

Now, I realise the only interaction other than that with George and the customers, was through the mindless clicking of the heart shape button under the too frequent social media updates of the people who named me ‘hermit’. It should have rang a bell I suppose, but my lone existence didn’t feel wrong, that’s the funniest part. I assumed losing friends was a natural part of growing up and didn’t give it any further thought. I was a free and independent man with a business and it would be greedy to ask for more.

Then the day arrived that made me doubt my own sanity. Had I really been content with my life or was it all a farce; a big lie I sold myself to cope with my own reality? It was a humid Saturday in the second week of August. I stayed late to finish fixing a hundred-something-year-old sewing machine that’d arrived the previous day; some of the parts were loose and the wheel that one turned to make the needle bob up and down was rigid and stubborn. I ignored the clock ticking and my stomach moaning. My hands itched in anticipation. I imagined standing back and admiring the working machine in all its glory. At a quarter to eleven, the work was complete. I pulled back the creaky chair and stretched my limbs and rotated my head and my bones squeaked. I looked down at the iron object decorated in gold flourishes and let my hand stroke it as if it were a beloved cat. I pushed the wheeled table with the machine, my gait slow. The night was dark and the pebbly ground between the office and the warehouse made the wheels protest and the machine tremble. I opened the door and felt the rough wall around for the light switch, flicked it on and the intrusion of light made me temporarily blind.

I walked through the aisles until I reached the back of the warehouse, and stood in front of the empty space on the rack shelf, where the machine was to go. I lifted the machine and my matchstick thin arms shook and I pushed them higher until I felt the metal edge hit the shelf.

I slid it back further until it sat neatly in its place and then my vision swam. I remember thinking that it was probably low blood sugar. I reached out for the edge of the rack to cling on and then the rack groaned.

I woke up with a heavyweight pressing on my body, constricting, suffocating. When I think back to the incident, I like to imagine I let out an ugly roar filled with unbelief, but in reality, it was probably no more than a weak whimper. The rack was on top of me, compressing my chest and my breath hitched and I tried to move to get it off but I couldn’t. I focused my eyes and saw the sewing machine had landed not too far from my left arm and forced myself to look away; my body from elbows to the toes drowned under the skeleton of the rack and all that it once held.

I felt beads of sweat form on my brow. That was a lot of things, heavy things, and I started to realise I might be in trouble and tasted a tang of fear on my tongue.

Time passed. I watched the dust particles dance and float above me. The panic had ebbed away and a strange calm took over the reins. I was morbidly curious, was this the end of me? Whilst sprawled on the ground, I came to be aware of the three facts:

Nobody would look for me. Nobody would realise for a long while that I was gone. Nobody would miss me.

People were right. I was a recluse, a hermit, a loner and while there, alone with my flesh being squeezed and squashed under the props I spent my days collecting, I had wished I’d at least tried leading a less solitary existence.

The light blinked.

“Herbert?” a voice hollered. “Are you in there, mate?”

At first I blinked and then blinked again, not sure if I was imagining the raspy voice.

“George?!”

I realised then that I had been happy, but my happiness hadn’t been complete. The joy of finding myself no longer alone, in that critical moment of my life, was the purest feeling I had experienced. It was brought on by the concern of another human being looking out for me and the moment when George found under the pile of rubble and held my hand until the ambulance arrived, I too discovered something I had been missing all that time.

My body was a canvas of bruises, my tibia was broken and my big toe had fractured. I spent three days in the hospital and then a few weeks recovering at home. I used the time, hesitatingly at first, to look for an assistant. It was high time for me to have a second pair of hands to help me run the business and if things went well, maybe I would even hire a third. I felt excited as if I had just caught a rare butterfly and its wings were fluttering against the palms of my hands waiting for me to release it. I squished the urge to contact the people I used to call friends because I realised people who are mean to you and too blind or busy to see they’re hurting you along the way, don’t deserve to remain in your life. So I started making new ones. I joined a reading group and took pottery classes that I always wanted to try and joined a local running club when my leg healed. I made an effort to get to know my flatmates and found we actually had things in common and every now and then we see art exhibitions together and drink wine together in the evenings. George stood by my side during the recovery and we grew close. Ten months after the incident, I asked him out on a date and he said yes. In the months that followed, I realised I began to change.

I laughed easier and harder.

I talked so much more.

It finally dawned on me that I finally wasn’t afraid to be who I am and life became easier. I didn’t need to push people away to hide the real me.

I imagined the butterfly in my hand taking off.