| Clearance Ask me, I've seen everything - I've changed the blown-out lightbulbs of ghosts, emptied the ashtrays of the dead. I've rifled through drawers, funeral party in the other room - collected enough pin numbers to pay off a mortgage. I've found the stashes of secret porn, stuffed in envelopes with a lock of baby's hair - the daily train tickets, each one saved for sixty years. I know the thrill of a bankroll under a deathbed mattress, the smell of old lace and gin and the underwear of grandmothers. I know to shake out each book, raise dust, find the pressed-flower keepsakes, the erotic epistles of old. I know that if an old drawer sticks, something incendiary is taped underneath - treasure maps, wraps of coke, the birth-certificate of a bastard son, a bomb plot. They are so keen to cut and run, to cremate - to make a sepulchre of these dust-sheeted homes. All the shiny things go, tucked into pockets; they squabble like magpies for cut glass and tin. I know their secrets, their dynamite and their dead, and don't care. I am a cat-burglar, with my copied keys; clearing. Claire Askew |
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