Maybe the neighbour was right and I was grieving for Cleo on some level. Come to think of it, bewildering ‘symptoms’ had set in around the time she died. Without going into detail, recent months had brought new meaning to words like flooding, leaking, flushing, chilling and sweating. I’d become a mini environmental disaster zone. But when I’d raised the subject with women friends a couple of times I’d regretted it almost immediately. Their suffering was infinitely greater. Some made it sound like they’d hurtled straight from adolescence to menopause, interrupted by a brief interval of blood-and-guts childbirth.
Still, I was going to have to stop talking to the Daphne bush. Word would get out. It wouldn’t be long before people crossed the road rather than run the risk of bumping into me. Not that it worried me. We’d always been the neighbourhood oddballs. Now every second house was being pulled down and replaced by a concrete monstrosity I felt even less at home. When Irene had shown me plans of her McMansion to be I’d struggled to conceal my horror. Not only was it going to overlook our back yard, its columns and porticos echoed several ancient cultures all at once.
The aspirational tone of the neighbourhood was wearing me down. I’d never be thin, young or fashion conscious enough to belong.
Changes needed to be made. Dramatic ones.
Another hibiscus flower fell, this time right into my coffee mug. That was it! So obvious, it was a wonder I hadn’t thought of it before.
I rescued the drowning hibiscus flower from the coffee, flung it into the shrubs and reached for the mobile phone in the pocket of my trackpants.
I’d escape the horror of watching Irene’s Grand Design loom over us and years of raking hibiscus flowers in one hit. Never again would I listen for Cleo’s paws padding across the floorboards. Or stumble over her discarded beanbags under the house. As for the Daphne bush, it could retire from cemetery plaque status and go back to being an ordinary shrub.
Philip’s pre-recorded voice said he was sorry he couldn’t get to the phone right now, but if I’d like to leave a message after the tone . . .
‘We’re moving house,’ I said, then pressed the off button with a satisfying click.
Arrival
A home is a second skin. A new one takes time to grow
‘Who’d live in a house called Shirley?’ asked Philip, peering at the brass plate beside the front door.
Honestly, he could be so annoying sometimes. Our old house had sold faster than expected. We had to move out in four weeks. And here he was quibbling over a name plaque.
‘Lots of houses had names in the old days,’ I said. ‘If you’re going to call a house anything it might as well be Shirley.’
It was clear he was unimpressed. Deep down, I knew he wanted to move into something white and modern, like a refrigerator. Instead, Shirley reared up over us in a children’s-home-meets-Colditz style. Built early in the twentieth century, its red bricks and tiled roof whispered of an era when mothers packed their sons off to war, and sex before marriage was unthinkable. Any glamour Shirley might’ve possessed had long since evaporated behind cracked bricks and unadorned windows.
The brickwork ran in wavy lines and the grey stuff holding it together didn’t seem entirely committed to the job. The orange roof tiles looked like rows of broken biscuits, some of which appeared to be sliding earthwards. There was no reason to point any of that out to Philip. If we didn’t find a house we wanted to buy soon we’d have to rent, causing more uncertainty and disruption.
I’d thought finding a new place to live would be simple, yet we’d spent weeks looking at town houses and inner-city apartments; demolition jobs and building sites. They were either too cramped, stupidly expensive or spread over so many levels that abseiling gear should’ve been included in the price. We didn’t want to downsize, but a Brady Bunch house in the ’burbs wasn’t right either.
I’d always liked the raffish inner-city suburb of Prahran (an Aboriginal name pronounced ‘Pran’ by locals) so I’d been excited when I’d first spotted Shirley near the corner of an unpretentious cul-de-sac just off High Street. All the houses in Shirley’s street had been built between the wars, giving the neighbourhood a pleasing unity which is rare for Melbourne. Most were single-storeyed, semi-detached affairs. I liked their white picket fences and quirky gardens. There was something Alice in Wonderland-ish about them. Thanks to a preservation order, apartment blocks and modern buildings were banned.
Unlike our current neighbourhood, nobody living on Shirley’s street appeared to be afflicted with a lawn-mowing fetish. In fact, there seemed to be an ongoing competition to see who could let the grass outside their house grow the longest.
Shirley’s front garden, a rectangle of sandy soil alongside the double car pad, was technically a desert. Concrete paving stones masqueraded as a path to the front door. The only hint that Shirley might’ve once been a setting for family life was an ancient apple tree with a twisted trunk leaning against the verandah.
‘C’mon,’ I said to Philip, ‘let’s go inside.’
But my husband refused to budge. He was still glaring at Shirley’s brass rectangle nameplate, freshly polished for the open home inspection.
‘We could get rid of that,’ I said, grabbing his arm.
‘I don’t see how. It’s set in concrete.’
I dragged him over the wooden threshold, uneven from decades of foot traffic, into the hallway. High ceilings. Draughty. A shaft of dusty sunlight settled on a pyramid of cardboard boxes. But something about it felt like home.
‘Not exactly well presented,’ he observed.
‘Can’t blame the tenants,’ I replied. ‘They’re being kicked out.’
‘Who sleeps in here?’ he asked, inspecting a darkened room crammed with gym equipment and suitcases. ‘The Marquis de Sade?’
A real estate agent appeared like a spectre in the doorway.
‘This is the master bedroom, sir,’ the agent glowered, handing Philip a brochure and spinning on his heel.
‘Ah yes, the one with the torture rack and excellent view of the neighbour’s brick wall,’ Philip muttered.
Floorboards shrieked as we followed an aroma of mothballs across the hall to a smaller room with a boarded up fireplace. Circular stains on the ceiling hinted at roof leaks.
‘Looks like a baby’s room,’ he said examining peeling teddy bear wallpaper.
‘Or a study,’ I added, gazing out through a cracked pink and green leadlight window to the apple tree.
We squeaked down the hall to the kitchen/family room, our voices echoing in the empty space. Philip pointed out the bench top, yellow marble speckled with brown blotches. Unusual, admittedly. A phone off the hook emitted a constant beep, like a heart monitor recording the decline of a patient.
Though Shirley was neglected inside and out, she was speaking to me. Tired, big boned and possibly structurally unsound, we had a lot in common. It was like meeting a woman with sad, soft eyes – someone destined to be a friend for life.
‘If the walls were a warmer colour and we put up a few prints . . . and look!’ I said, pointing out a whole wall of French doors. Unfortunately, they opened on to a patch of clay dominated by a single tree. I had to concede the back garden was even bleaker than the front. Roll-out instant lawn had worn through to dust. Melbourne had been in the grip of a drought, the Big Dry, for years. I’d read newspaper reports of small children who were so unfamiliar with rain they screamed on the rare occasions it hammered on their roofs. Water restrictions were so harsh, Melbourne households were back to 1950s’ consumption levels. Tooth brushing was a guilty necessity. We had a timer in the shower. Some people showered with a bucket, collecting grey water to fling over their gardens afterwards. Buckets full of water and human skin cells are heavier than they look. Friends had sprained their backs hurling them about.