The Bedroom on the Lawn

There was a girl down the road and we used to take the furniture out of her bedroom and set it up on the lawn.

Not all of it. Not the bed. But the chest of drawers, the small bookshelf, the chair. We'd carry them out the back door and arrange them on the grass and then play house with our dolls in this open-air reconstruction of her room. The room we had just been in. The room we could have stayed in.

I've never understood why we did it outside. The room was right there. We had the room. But somehow the room on the lawn was more real than the room in the house. Maybe because we'd built it.

I hope we always put it back. I think we did. But I also think about her mum, and whether carrying a chest of drawers across a lawn and back again was the kind of productive exhaustion a parent quietly engineers. Keep them busy. Keep them lifting things. Tire them out by teatime.

The whole thing reminds me of something I can't quite place. There's a novel — Remainder, Tom McCarthy — where a man obsessively reconstructs scenes from his life in real space. And there's that thing on television where they build physical recreations of events before they happen. Not reconstructions ... preconstructions. Rehearsals for situations that haven't occurred yet.

Maybe that's what we were doing on the lawn. Rehearsing. Practising at being people who had a home and arranged it the way they wanted and could move the furniture if they didn't like where it was.