While my father loses his memories I crouch in his house, deciding which of mine to chuck out.
The attic room is large and low, overlooking the garden, with dust furzing the beams. There are half a dozen plastic crates on the carpet. I try to be methodical, and work through them one by one, but before long I am diving in randomly, making weird little noises as I haul my one-time preciouses into the grey afternoon light.
Look, my favorite T-shirt, with Mulder and Scully pouting beside the logo in absinthe green! And here, the trading cards, tucked into their special display binders like tiny scenes in an illuminated prayer book, page after gleaming page! Hey listen, the glow-in-the-dark watch is still ticking! And here, here, the homemade Special Agent Fox Mulder ID badge I used to pin onto my Next work-experience suit for hours of cosplay! (The cross-gendering was inevitable. I was 5’11 aged 13; my best geek-mate Natalie had tits).
There are board games, models, badges, and magazines. There are more T-shirts, on top of mugs and baseball caps. There are trivia books, quiz books, audiobooks, adult novels, graphic novels, and YA novels. Biographies authorized and un. There are two huge underbed storage units filled with videos: seven seasons home-recorded, every Scotch or JVC sleeve Pritt-sticked with a label meticulously typed out in 12-point Courier New (natch). In a shoebox, there are cassette tapes onto which I compiled favorite bits of dialogue (“They’re here, aren’t they?”) so I could listen to them on my Walkman the way other girls in my class would mainline Boyzone or Blur. At the bottom of one of the crates there’s a puffy white folder crammed with reams of fan fiction, the pages printed out and slotted into the plastic sleeves back to back (could our 90s printer not do double-sided, or had I not figured it out?) I skim the first story. It’s awful. It’s brilliant.
I rock back on my heels and look at the several hundred pounds of merch sprawled at my feet. Despite my seven-year stint of obsessive accumulation, I am not a natural hoarder, unlike my dad. It was his rotting cardboard boxes of used corks, yellowing piles of perfectly aligned, ancient papers, and spider-infested garageful of rusting tools that gifted me my adult urge to purge and slash. And now I now live with two kids in a ruthlessly Kondoed flat in the middle of London, and Dad has just moved into a small, calm, bright room in a specialist dementia care home, and we are selling the old rambling house I grew up in, and I only have an hour to decide what to do with all this… stuff.
It didn’t use to be stuff. It used to be the softly shimmering repository of all my adolescent yearnings. My passion for The X-Files was so strong that I have not rewatched a single episode in over 20 years, scared at what it might stir up.
Or perhaps what it might not.
Further Reading on X-Files Merch
X-Files Museum, Kids’ Books, and Other Weird Merch - At the height of its popularity, The X-Files saw episodes adapted for young readers, and a next-level point-and-click adventure game.
Every Monday, from September through March, starting in 1994 and ending in 2000 (when university ripped us apart, and the mania began to wane), Nat and I would spend the day at school picking over the story arc so far and speculating on what terrifying delights the next episode might hold. Come evening, I’d pretend to focus on my homework while experiencing a level of excitement that has only ever (and not quite) been matched by the first cup of tea after the birth of my second child. The watching itself, occurring by special parental dispensation at 9.30 pm, happened in a sort of orgasmic trance, my hands unconsciously ripping holes in my scratchy tights as I hoped against hope that our fuzzy BBC2 signal would hold out. And then, as soon as the credits appeared, offering up those familiar names on the monochrome screen (and we knew every single one of them, from minor cast members to assistant art directors – Kyle Klotz, you Anderson-spouse dream destroyer!) and the eerie whistle of Mark Snow’s brainworm theme burst forth, we would hit the phones.
I’d sit with my back to the wall on the cold floor of the hall, twisting the spiral cord of the landline around my fingers as we embarked on our tripartite analysis. First: forensic dissection of the episode. Second: earnest discussion of how it advanced the mythology. Third, and juiciest: slow savoring of even the tiniest hint of sexual tension between the stars. The closing scene of ‘Deep Throat’ (S1, Ep2), where a panting, sweat-beaded, post-run Mulder confronts the eponymous villain in a sleeveless Georgetown vest, provoked a sexual epiphany in my 12-year-old self that not even John Malkovich giving cunnilingus to Uma Thurman in Dangerous Liaisons could surpass.
Finally, before we were ordered into bed, it was time to fax. It only seemed right to honor the highlights of such sophisticated drama on similarly cutting-edge technology. As I scribbled down my quotes of the week, added a decorative border of aliens and manila folders, and attempted a quick biro sketch of The Lone Gunmen, I could almost hear the sound of Scully’s fingers clacking on the beige keyboard as her CRT monitor blinked out case reports in air-force blue. Just beginning to discover the joy of bulletin boards thanks to my parents’ early-adopter Gateway and blooping AOL dial-up, I reveled in the show’s tactile hardware. Although it featured plenty of muddy chases through Canadian redwoods and road trips to redneck backwaters, the show felt essentially urban, rooted in a glamorous world of takeaway coffee cups and wire-strewn warehouses, and big American cars. This was back when the States still felt like the future and, faxing away in an 18th-century house in a small English village with no shower and a coal-powered Aga, I longed to be a part of it.
And repeat (with interim top-ups of American Gothic and Space: Above and Beyond).
