Everyone warned me about the dust and the cost and how long it takes. But no one mentioned that for as much as you change the room, the room changes you.
I am still decorating. The conservatory was supposed to be the whole job. One room, a few weeks, done. It wasn’t. The conservatory led to the bedroom, and the bedroom led to the room that will one day be a library, and that led to the hallway, and there is still a pink wall in the kitchen that should have been repainted months ago. Nothing in this house stops at itself. Every job I finish is standing next to one I haven’t started. It’s the way these things are, and I am still at it, still working it out as I go.
Lately that has meant removing wallpaper. I know I can paint over it, but I’ve learned that the past always seems to find its way through. So the old paper has to come off. And that is how I’ve been spending my days, scraper in hand, layer by layer, in rooms that are all middle and no end.
The paper rarely comes off clean. Sure, some of it lifts away whole, slow and satisfying. And for a moment I think it will be easy, that maybe the whole wall will go that way. But most of it tears, and feathers, clings. I can’t tell by looking. It holds on in places I have no reason to suspect. In others, it gives way slowly, if it gives way at all, and what it has been covering is not always something I am ready to see.
Every layer of paint and paper was put up by someone else, to suit a life I know nothing about. Somebody loved this shade of green. Somebody stood in this room and decided it should look a particular way, and it did, for twenty years or more. Some of it was done beautifully. Some of it was patched by someone who meant well and did not quite have the tools. And some of it was started and abandoned halfway. That is the hardest of all, because now I am the one standing in front of it, holding the blade, finishing something I did not begin.
One sheet came away in my hands leaving half of itself behind, feathered thin at the edges, glued down so hard I could feel the hours it would take to coax it off. Where the paper had lifted, there was paint. Someone had started to strip it once. They had got partway, and then stopped and covered the whole thing over. There was glue laid on with no rhyme or reason. Holes left open. Gashes never filled. Marks where something had been pulled out and nothing put back. All of it, left exactly as it was, because papering over it was easier than making it good.
It’s slow, and quiet, and mostly a matter of not pressing too hard. I feel the damage before I see it. Every ridge and dip under my fingers is something somebody did and then covered up. And while my hands are busy tracing scars on the wall, my mind starts doing the same to me.
People come into our lives the way they come into a room. They arrive with opinions. They put something up, or take something down, or move a thing to where they think it ought to sit. Some of the people in my life did it with great care, and I can still tell, years later, that they did. Some of them covered a thing over quickly because looking at it was more than they could manage. Some stayed long enough to change the shape of me. And some got halfway through and left me to finish it.
Every opinion carried in, I kept. That is what rises and falls under my fingers as they move across the wall. Nobody held me down and did it. I stood still for it. I handed over the brush, and then the paste, and turned so they could reach. When they were finished I looked at what they had made of me and said, “Yes, that’s better. Thank you.” I have been painted and papered over for most of my life, and I never once questioned who chose any of it, because I was too busy being grateful for the help.
It held for years, until it didn’t. I couldn’t carry it, and I couldn’t be all the versions of myself I was supposed to be. Everyone said how well I was doing, but they were only looking at the paper. It took constant work to keep a thing like that from showing. Patching, touching up, going round again before anyone got close enough to see. I wasn’t happy inside any of them, and not one of them looked like me.
So I started taking it off. It’s not nice work, and I didn’t go looking for it. I never know what’s under a layer until it’s off. Sometimes the question is how it got there, sometimes when, and sometimes I’m just trying to understand what it even is. Often there’s a “somebody” in the answer. Just as often there’s nobody at all, only what I’d been told about how a woman’s life was meant to go and who she was meant to be. And underneath all of it, me, letting it happen. Most of it isn’t there because I agreed to it. It’s there because I never once said no. Some of it has come away. The rest has feathered and stuck, and left me standing there wondering how much glue one belief can hold.
Every bit that comes off leaves a mark. There is no version of this where it doesn’t.
The sensible thing would be to stop here and put something new over the top. I could even choose it myself this time, which would almost count for something. Fill what shows, cover what doesn’t, and be done by the weekend. I’ve done it before. But I have seen behind it now. I would know.
So I will keep working down through other people’s preferences until I reach the skim, the bare wall that was there before anyone had an opinion about it. Cracked and scarred, it is covered in the marks of carelessness and best intentions. None of that can be undone. All of it can be mended.
Not restored. Not returned to what it was before anyone touched it, because there is no going back to what once was. On a certain kind of afternoon, in a certain light, I will still be able to see where the damage was. But it can be filled. It can finally be made good by the only person who was ever going to.
So I fill, and sand, and fill again. And one day soon, when it is ready, I will put up something that is all my own. Everything that happened will still be underneath it, every gouge, and patch, and good intention that didn’t quite work out, each mended by my own hands and now strong enough to hold the life I chose.