That Ordinary House 19 Hopes and Lies

This is part 19 of a story following my brother and I as we try to sell our late parents house. We are do it yourself real estate agents. You can find the first 18 instalments under 'short stories - domestic' in the side bar. We've just spent quite a few instalments exploring the house and the memories it triggers as we escort this family through on our first open house afternoon..

Hopes and Lies

How big is the property again?

Sixteen perches I hear my brother reply.

We love the place.

We’d like to get a builder in to do some costing on a few extensions out the back.

I can’t believe my ears. “We love the place!” They’d even improve on the old cottage. Perhaps do the extension that my father had always refused to do. A strange sense of pride pulses through me. And hope. Maybe we’ve hooked a buyer on our first cast.

I could see what they could see. Push out the back wall a couple of metres to double the size of the kitchen and add an outdoor eating area, my mother’s dying wish. How ironic.

This could be a neat ending.

What are you asking, the elder enquired innocently. Four hundred to four twenty I said on a deep breath. The official valuation had been three forty to three sixty.

That sounds about our price said the younger.

We’ve got a couple of other people interested I lie. We’ll take the best offer.

I felt a surge of power. Wow! Could it be this easy? Maybe we should be asking for a bit more.

Then I see the message in my brother’s eyes. Steady. Play them gently he’s saying. He knows me too well. I’m ready to jump. Don’t want them to spook and throw the hook. Reel them in slowly. Our eyes meet over their heads. He’s right.

We’ll get our builder around here in the next couple of days.

We’re keen, so if he’s happy and the figures add up... the daughter proffers her hand confidently and grasps mine in a firm Germanic handshake.

Here’s my contact details says her blue eyed mother and hands me her card.

My heart sinks. She’s a bloody real estate agent. Cripes! We’re dealing with professionals. My bravado is shaken. My mind races back over the past thirty minutes. Had I missed a vital clue? Tracking back at high speed rewinding, I’m looking for clues. Are they really interested? Had I overplayed my hand.

Then my paranoia kicks in. It becomes clear. She’s been leading me around like a puppy. It’s been a great piece of team work. Two blue eyed women beguiling me while their husbands do the real inspection below decks.

They’re the ones who’ll make the decision. I still haven’t exchanged a word with them. The two women are just the decoys. The blokes talk to each other but in muted tones. Their words are coded. Full of builders terms and engineering references. I haven’t got a chance. I’m a public servant who manages feel-good community projects. I don’t know where the wheel jack is in my car to change a flat tyre. My brother is a soil scientist for god's sake.

Then like a school of fish they turn and head for the exit.

I shake their hands as we reach the front door but it’s not with any meaning. I may as well be the dignitary at a state function clasping anonymous hands. My heart’s not in it. It’s all formality. I fake a smile.

We’ll be in touch once we’ve done the figures, the real estate agent says from the bottom step.

I join my brother on the settee as the afternoon shadows fill the sun room.

We sit and wait.

That Ordinary House 18 TV Dinners

The Brillman’s had been rare visitors to our house. It was at their place that we seemed to find ourselves on Sunday evenings. Eight of us would squeeze into a TV room the size of a large bathroom. The Brillmans had two children who were of little interest to my brother and I. We didn’t remember their names, having to be rehearsed each visit on the sullen drive between Morningside and Camp Hill.

The TV was the magnet. My parents had decided that there would be no distractions in our house until our studies were finished. Despite the ten years of deprivation and the resultant experience of being unable to join in any of the popular theme songs sung in the playground, we never complained. There was always the holiday respite, where we became fixtures in the living room of our playmates over the back fence. As a result the Brillman’s on a Sunday night was bearable if not scintillating.

Mavis Brillman was not unattractive. Her husband Neil, on the other hand, was a man with a nose to rival Jimmy ‘snozzle’ Durante. Our own family was noted for its honkers or ‘roman nose’ as we chose to romanticise it, but Mr Brillman’s was of Pinocchio proportions. Perhaps Mrs Brillman had a fetish for honkers and took a fancy to my father’s to add to her collection of Italian beaks. Perhaps she subscribed to the theory of the nose as an indicator of size in other aspects of a man – his personality, his income, his …… well I was too young to imagine any connections at all. Perhaps she just took a fancy to my father.

We never found out.

The carving knife outburst was followed by lengthy hushed conversations between my parents interspersed with tears and angry outbursts accusing my father of things I didn’t understand and in a code I couldn’t decipher. Noses were never mentioned.

“How could you?” What about my feelings?” “What, in god’s name did you think was going to happen?”

There seemed no likely resolution to their pain or ours when, out of the blue my mother made the phone call. It turned out to be a brilliant tactical move. Consciously or unconsciously she managed to resolve each of the party’s positions. First she accused ‘the other woman’ of concocting the whole thing. In my mother’s version Mrs B had invented the story to humiliate her big nosed husband for some serious flaw in his personality or a major misdemeanour hinting that it was he who had strayed and Mrs B was using this story to punish him.

Father was off the hook since, in this version, he was the falsely accused. My mother, having convinced herself of Mrs B’s total lack of integrity could redirect her anger away from My father and towards her ‘not unattractive’ competitor. Mrs B could back down and withdraw her accusation against her husband’s smaller nosed work colleague and humbly forgive her husband for something he had never done. My father chose to say no more. Wisely.

And as to the ultimate fate of Mr B, who may have been the only innocent party in the whole fiasco, I can tell you no more.

We never enjoyed another Sunday night TV movie until, three years later, our year 12 studies completed, my father relented and TV came to our house.

It was soon after this that my father announced that he’d decided to move on from the stress and pressure of the travelling sales representative’s life and gently slipped off to join the PMG as a postman. For the last ten years of his working life he pedalled his red postie’s bike around the suburbs of Stones Corner chatting to his customers – a group of lovely ‘older’ ladies on his daily run.

That Ordinary House 16 Lunch

It’s two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. It’s summer. It’s still and it’s stifling. There is no air conditioner, no fan, no breeze. Christmas is approaching.

The necessities for a Saturday lunch are in place. My father stands silently at the back door. His gaze is distant. The heat shimmers off the burnt-off lawn of the backyard.

Stephen. Michael. My mother calls our names. We’re downstairs playing under the house – the only possible escape from the oppressive heat.

Stephen. Michael. We hear our names again. There’s an edge to my mother’s voice that alerts me to danger. There’s something going on. It’s bubbling. The pressure cooker is getting ready to blow.

The table is set. A floral plastic tablecloth with mock embroidered edges covers the pine table. Four plates are set. China plates with a floral pattern which fights against the floral tablecloth. The plates mark the limits of the table. They surround the Saturday meal – cold corned meat, sliced tomato, tinned beetroot, iceberg lettuce, slices of block coon cheese and, for my father, slivers of raw onion. Every other space on the table is crowded with condiments and options from the fridge – bright yellow pickles, salt, pepper, fresh bread, a bottle of vinegar, mayonnaise, and a large jar of home-made pickled onions – my father’s only link to his Italian heritage. And in the wings – cake.

My mother has typically catered for all possibilities. Catering for her men is her forte. Over catering, her vice. Year’s later, family picnics became logistical nightmares where the venue was chosen to accommodate the team of pack horses required to ferry food from the car to the picnic blanket, where the limits of tables gave way to the acreage of picnics in parklands. Quiches, olives, ham and corned beef and occasionally a home made brawn fought for space beside bread and bread rolls, butter and margarine, scones and butter cake, tea and coffee.

Back in the kitchen it’s not just the weather which is bearing down on us. The atmosphere is thick with foreboding. Silence.

There is nothing more painful than a silent meal.

That Ordinary House 15 The Kitchen Again

We're in the kitchen. The men's footsteps are climbing towards us up the back steps. We will soon be six in this room designed for two. We've bypassed the second bedroom. My bedroom.

The pressure's mounting but this room is already too full . The carving knife, the fridge, my father in his Bond's Y fronts, feet up on the table greeting Mrs Hebley, the next door neighbour who's dropped in to get a cup of sugar on a Sunday morning, the pig's head, the family meals, the arguments, the love, the suppressed anger, the accusations, the reconciliations.

My history is in my head. My head is dealing with overlapping memories and our guests want to talk about real estate. I want to know more about that carving knife. Real estate will have to wait.

That Ordinary House 14 Secrets

For continuity purposes you'll need to go back to June 2009 for episodes 11, 12, 13 of 'This Ordinary House' - the story of a simple abode and the tale of two sons selling the family home.

14 Secrets

Standing there with my brother and two strangers felt odd. The room was empty. I was sure the four of us were seeing different things. There was no point in describing the once present furniture to the invaders. They were already filling it with new items, removing the Venetian blinds, repainting the walls in colours more a part of their world than that of my parents.

All I could see and smell was my childhood and the musky smell of my mother’s foundation. The secrets were safe. Safe with my mother and father, taken to the grave, converted to ashes. I could only guess.

And yet. I was still curious. I suspected that there were aspects of my family and my parents’ lives that I had no knowledge of. Conversations I had never been privy to. Tensions I had been protected from. Stories never shared.

To my friends our family was near perfect. A handsome caring and loyal husband married to a devoted wife. A family which was discrete but not secretive, open but not carelessly so, friendly without desperation. To my mother, especially, family was all important. For her family, there were no limits to her love. Friendships were, however, restrained. There was a reserve in her level of commitment; in the level of trust she invested in friends.

My father on the other hand was naturally gregarious. His great skill was his ability to listen. He drew people to him, both men and women. He was quiet, calm, focused and charming. A charming extroverted man married to a family focused and, at some level, shy woman. I suspected that here lay the germs of a secret life. Here lay the tension. My forensic tendencies scanned their fifty years of married life for clues.

My mother did not trust other women. What was that about I wondered? The mother of two boys, she was the lone woman in her household. Strangely, she had embraced the arrival of the young women her sons brought home as they grew older.. These young women were girls who had been educated through the prism of the feminism of the 60s and 70s. Family gatherings were joyful plain-sailing events until the topic of women’s rights was raised - as it was at every gathering through the 70s.

It was in these conversations that my mother’s inner life leaked through. She was of another generation, one which valued traditional values, where roles were clearly defined; where everyone knew their place; where women supported their husbands, no questions asked. The daughters in law to be, challenged her long held stable view of the world.

It was not that she resented their choices – to live in de facto relationships with her sons, to want to be mothers and have careers; she delighted in that. There was something deeper that she had never come to terms with. It gnawed at her.

She did not trust her own gender. There was reason for her to suspect other women’s motives. Her husband was unusually handsome; her husband was charming. And being my father’s son I recognised myself in him. My father was a flirt. But he was blameless. It was the women who were not to be trusted.

There were clues. There was the episode in my teenage years when the wife of one of my father’s work colleagues made certain claims about his relationship with her. This was the only time this secret part of their lives played out in my presence.
The scars on the cream enamel of the Kelvinator bore testament to this explosive episode.

That Ordinary House 13 Epicentre

A collision in the kitchen loomed ominously. Six adults in that kitchen would be disastrous. We’d end up wedged between the kitchen sink, the stove and the feature wall, spinning on the spot, multiple handshakes and cross conversations bumping into each other and accentuating the lack of, what every kitchen needs, space.

I headed off the big personalities in my company and steered them towards the cross roads, that tiny point in the house from which five of the six rooms could be viewed. The epicentre.

It was only a matter of two steps and we were in the main bedroom. In mum’s bedroom, now empty save for the oversized wardrobe with the dodgy sliding door which lined the southern wall. It had been assembled in this room and was now too big to remove.

Absent was the nuptial bed of fifty years. The bed on which, presumably, I’d been conceived and the bed on which I’d inadvertently seen as a seven year old, what I realised years later was my father’s old fella in a pose I didn’t recognise. Every night for my whole life the door to this room had been shut tight from ‘kiss goodnight’ time; not available again until the house stirred at dawn to prepare for dad’s early morning start at the smallgoods factory and the quiet voices of my parents drifted into my consciousness alongside sounds of prebreakfast ablutions and the crackling of frying bacon.

I don’t know how I came to enter the private chamber that day but it was an afternoon and I’d interrupted preparations for a Sunday ritual that I was not part of - except as an outcome many years previously in 1949. My catholic mother and less committed catholic father had practiced the sin of ‘coitus interruptus’ on hundreds of occasions in that room only allowing the passion to overwhelm the pragmatics a half a dozen times. Once each for my brother and myself and the others following a sad pattern of miscarriages - one of which came close to term.

’Little Albury”, as he became known to us, had a deep effect on my mother and it was my first encounter with real pain, deeper and more enduring than any thrashing I got from my father in punishment for my serious misdeeds of insolence or disobedience.

This was also the bedroom and bed in which my mother had died, nursed to her last breath by my father. Her final weeks in this room were marked by a stream of visitors, old friends, relatives, her sons, their wives, her grandchildren and the Blue Nurses on their daily visit to minister their palliative care. Only the latter had any real understanding of how quickly the end was rushing towards us all.

Only once did I cry. Only once did I share the name of death in her presence.

While my mother had always been a non stop talker, this was one topic which was never mentioned. Was it stoicism or stubbornness? I never fully understood, as my need to bring it into the open welled deep within me and was everywhere shared except on entering that room.

And now here we were, four intruders in this private space inspecting the ceiling, with its 1960s light shade, fancy cornice and off white stain, the walls, the dusty corners, the stuck windows, the empty wardrobe, the polished wooden floor.

The secret room.

That Ordinary House 12 Invaders

Voices in the front yard alerted us to the arrivees. My heart quickened. I checked that the feature wall was intact, rearranged the papers on the table and headed for the front door.

There were two broad inquisitive faces on the second step of the front porch. Both were blonde, one much younger than the other and both sporting broad smiles displaying Sunday teeth and hungry eyes. At the same time male voices boomed from the driveway, then from under the house. It was a pincer attack. The women were at the front door, the men circling around to take us unexpectedly from the back.

I had a moment of resentment. How dare they presume to go under the house without my permission or me as an escort. The comments of an older voice were sharply critical, fault finding. He was already building his armoury of negotiating points.

He’d found the front stump which stood unattached to the house. He observed that the driveway, with its concrete strips leading down from the front gate, kinked at the last moment before it found its way under the house. There were concrete gaps beside the concrete stumps. Gaps never repaired after the old timber stumps had been replaced. I hadn’t yet sighted him, but already I didn’t like him.

The hungry eyes and smiles full of teeth stepped towards the sun room reaching out hands as if they were old friends. I extended my hand, clasped theirs, one then the other, and smiled with my mouth. Behind my eyes, wariness whispered stories to me of caution - beware of blustering blondes.

I was acutely aware of the fact that the last time, to my knowledge, that the timber veneer walls of the room had been French polished was in the mid sixties by Uncle Phil, who was not my uncle, but a relative of my fathers and as I recall not his uncle either. The smell of linseed oil and a fog of toxic fumes leapfrogged over more relevant thoughts into the front of my consciousness. Luckily the fumes had dissipated after forty odd years.

The louvres, which had a habit of rasping and sticking at the half open stage, had been preset to avoid the need to demonstrate their finer points. The sun streamed into this aptly named room and I began to relax.

Joyce, the older blonde, had eyes like a hawk and the nose of a spaniel. Everything visible and invisible was captured on her radar. Yes, the two fat, flame shaped chandeliers were indeed original, and yes the plaster wall had been recently repaired. I breathed a sigh of relief as all six bulbs came to life as she flicked the light switch at each end of the room – testing testing testing!

The lounge room looked good. The recently added wooden blinds framed the old casement windows nicely and the room, which had a north-easterly aspect, felt clear and light and cool. The afternoon sea breeze had kicked in, having arrived after its journey from Moreton Bay, up the river, and then slipping over and around the gentle hills of Murarrie and Cannon Hill. The atmosphere was thawing.

I began to shift my attention back to the task at hand. Get a sale. Get a good price. Split the money with my brother. Retire early.

Motivation returned. The younger woman, the daughter, Jackie, was the prospective buyer. She was married to one of the male invaders. He was lurking below us somewhere, but in some convoluted way she was intending to invest independently in, extend, and live in a cottage very similar to this. Perhaps even this very one. Her husband, ‘invader the younger’s’ story remained a mystery.

I was tempted to share the image of my mother on her knees waxing the floorboards each week by hand, her skirt tucked high into her large nylon undies, showing off her jelly thighs, but decided to relegate that story to the vault with Uncle Phil.

Today the floor gleamed, all thanks to a coat of two part epoxy, a bucket of water and a dash of methylated spirits. My mother would be turning in her grave. Twenty years on her hands and knees polishing, followed by twenty years of carpet to avoid polishing and now we’d gone and ripped up the carpet and returned to the beginning – minus the wax.

The male war party was now at the bottom of the back stairs engrossed in talk of structures, bearers, beams and concrete cancer. They’d discovered the concrete stump which had chosen this year to start to pop and fart.

We’d begun to win the war upstairs but we hadn’t even begun the battle below.

That Ordinary House 11 Dawn

One o’clock came and went. The street was empty. The sun beamed down its February rays from a clear sky. Neighbourhood motor mowers sputtered and roared in the distance. The giant eucalypt stood silently in the backyard waiting for an unsuspecting victim to stand too ong under one of its over-extended branches. No breeze. No voices. No visitors.

Tired of guarding the front louvres, my brother joined me in the kitchen. We stood surrounded by ghosts.

The neighbourhood was changing. On the surface things gave the appearance of being the same. Only one of the neighbours bordering this sixteen perch block remained. As if to reward my patience Mrs Balcock made an appearance at her rotary clothesline. I had an urge to make my way to the back fence to resume a twenty year long conversation between she and my mother, but I hadn’t spoken to her in thirty-five years and the once bare fence was now overgrown with creepers and wild undergrowth. What once had been a connecting point between neighbours had become a barrier.

She looked the same and I could hear her strange nasally voice repeating familiar phrases in my head. And then she disappeared.

The Hebleys and the Bubblers had gone. As had my beloved Dawn, the blonde girl of my childhood dreams. Dawn, my siren. Dawn who had seduced me at the age of five with a game of ‘you show me yours and I’ll show you mine’ in her mother’s bed one night during a sleepover while my parents went to a wedding.

That was my one and only sleepover. But it had worked its magic. Perhaps my parents saw something different in my preschool eyes the next morning and knew that I was hooked. For it was then I suspect that they put in place a subtle management plan for I rarely ever ventured over that side fence again -though I hurdled the back fence to wrestle with the Balcock boys every day for the next decade.

Dawn, my blonde siren, representing all women, had me mesmerised. My sexual orientation was defined. My secret ten year infatuation had begun.

From time to time I would find an excuse to play with her in her backyard. Occasionally on a lay day in our backyard test series cricket there she’d be bouncing a tennis ball off the side of the house nearest ours, clapping once, twice, three, times and so on between each throw and catch; her bouncing pony tail flicking and challenging me to match her skill.

Invisibly, silently, I’d climb the fence and join in. Words were not necessary. The mere sharing of a concrete path and a mouldy tennis ball satisfied my longing.

Of course eventually my brother or the Balcock boys would emerge calling for me to come and play. Sometimes, hidden from their view, I would guiltily choose Dawn ahead of the bike ride and momentarily be overwhelmed with a sense of guilt and then one of immense pleasure at the audacity of my choice.

It was the beginning of my fascination with women. Still fifty years later I reluctantly admit that no game of cricket, no bike ride, no wrestling match has ever quite measured up to that game of catch and clap.

Dawn was older by eighteen months and as time passed she showed no interest in my puppy love, no acknowledgement of our almost consummated night as five and six year olds. She was always a step ahead. Just out of reach.

She grew to be a tall blonde beauty who fell pregnant (much to the shock of the neighbourhood) at the age of seventeen and disappeared from my world. Sadly I knew that, deep down, my love for her could have saved her from teenage parenthood. My love, while carnal, was ultimately of a much higher order.

Abruptly my brother interrupted my dream. ‘Someone’s here’ he said.

The invaders had arrived.

That Ordinary House 10 Open House

After months of research, conversations, phone calls to the public trustee, mail-boxfuls of real estate agents glossy offerings we bit the bullet and made a decision.

We’d sell the house and we’d do it ourselves. Capelin and Capelin Real Estate Rookies - Come see us and if we like you, we might sell the family home to you for a song.

We put a notice in the Courier Mail advertising an open house for the following Sunday (1-3pm). With our extensive experience we chose to ignore the fact that everyone else was having their open days on the Saturday. We’ll have ours on a Sunday we decided. We figured that the market would be less crowded and we’d be able to spend the Saturday doing what we loved – sailing our 14 foot dingy on the Brisbane River at South Brisbane. It was February after all. No point in wasting the best month of the year.

Sunday reminded me of the drives we used to take as a family in the 1960s, when a great afternoon out was driving around the city visiting the Mater Prize Home and staring at brand new houses in suburbs we never knew existed. We were not inconspicuous in Dad’s latest toy, a brand new canary yellow Vdub.

Surely people still did that.

On the Sunday we agreed to meet at 12:00. We needed to put a sign on the fence and check that all the little repair jobs we’d made were still holding together. They were only minor. We weren’t going to try and fleece anyone. We didn’t want to be real real estate agents.

My brother was late. I was nervous. He had the sign, newly printed from his work computer. A3 and wrapped in a storm proof plastic sleeve. Inside in the kitchen I’d blutacked some information about the house to the feature wall – the flimsy masonite wall behind which lurked the bedroom my brother and I had shared for sixteen years. This wall had always elicited the liveliest debate between my parents when kitchen repainting time came around. Unfortunately my mother always won and had a terrible sense of colour. Today one of her worst design decisions stared at me and challenged my imagination as to how I was going to put a positive ‘real estate’ spin on a tiny cream kitchen with a dozen out of proportion orange door knobs which screamed HELLLLP! LOOK AT ME! ‘Original condition’, ‘renovate to your tast’ were the best I would be able to do.

Today the wall featured a display of maps and property details, recent sales in the area and a description of the house inviting offers around the $400 000 mark.

I’d opened all the blinds and windows. Light flooded into the living room where the Grundig stereo and minimalist record collection had held pride of place for twenty years. My parents had reaped the benefits of the post-war economic boom in terms of full employment and rising living conditions but they still lived as if they were in the thirties. There were no frivolous purchases in that house. The record collection was a symbol of that. It was all of ten records. About one purchase every two years. The Beatles and Tijuana Brass sat beside Paul Robertson and blues singer Juanita Hall, a little known but original Bloody Mary character from the musical South Pacific. My father’s fascination with ‘Bloody Mary” totally flummoxed me. What he saw in this raging version of Gimme A Pig Foot which he played at every opportunity I could never understand.

Gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beerSend me a gate I don't carefeel just like I wanna clownGive the piano player a drinkBecause he's bringing me downHe's got rhythm yeah, when he stomps his feet.

Despite my father’s love of opera and southern American 1930s blues he never owned more than one record in any genre.

Back in the kitchen I tried to relax. I became acutely aware of how small this room was. I could almost stretch out my arms and span the room from wall to wall in either direction. Apart from the orange orbs staring at me it was original. Every element was in the identical position they had been in 1949 when my parents moved in. The fridge, the predecessor of which was an ice chest, was tucked into a tiny space between the sink (original single stainless steel model) and the pantry.

The pantry I assessed, had been made by my father, judging by the old unpainted unsealed tongue and groove off cuts which constituted the flooring of each shelf. The latches were intact – cute sprung devices which clasped and unclasped the mechanism behind the door on pressing the metal button. The pantry was located in a tiny alcove which also housed the stand alone gas cooker and stove. This housed a relatively new appliance, being a late 1960s replacement for the wonderful cream enamel Kooka stove which would be an heirloom if it had survived.

Somehow we had eaten meals every night for over twenty years in this tiny room on this tiny table while mum had dished up Sunday roasts and a moderate range of traditional English meals. Sausage casserole being one of my favourites but which, with its sickly pale casseroled sausages, was true to my mother’s preference for practical over aesthetic. Later, the 3m by 3m room had accommodated families and grandchildren totalling up to 11 people. On those nights we ate in shifts.

My father’s Italian heritage combined with the austerity of the thirties was also a feature of this room. The sight of the snout of a pig’s head poking above the rim of a giant cooking pot was not uncommon and the ensuing stripping of the meat and the savouring of the delicacies which I rarely tried but which my father swore were food from heaven (tongue, cheek, eye) was part of the ritual. The stink was overwhelming, and for dad intoxicating, and the resulting brawn his favourite meat. He never ventured down the path of cured meats which his father, the failed farmer but brilliant smallgoods man, was renowned for. We had so smoking room, no curing room for fat Italian salamis. Sad how quickly these crafts get lost.

So there I was in the kitchen. My brother had secured the sign to the front fence and, with me dreaming at the back of the house, him keeping guard in the front sunroom, peering through the half opened louvres in a pose reminiscent of my mother, we waited.

We hadn’t baked a cake nor taken to baking a loaf of bread in the oven. We were going for the real homespun feel. No frills.

That Ordinary House 9 Onions

Onions. The classic layered metaphor. On the outside the brown skin protects, flakes, peels, layer by layer the flesh falling away to reveal another and then another skin, working towards the centre until finally revealing, not a Chinese fortune message or a pearl but a void.

This house was like that. It was my home for over twenty years but there was a strange feeling of disassociation. The physical structure was as familiar as my own onion peel skin and triggered stories from the past but it had no value in itself. My parents had lived here for over fifty years and yet all that seemed to be left were memories. The spirits had fled. They existed only in my head.

My parents lived with very simple expectations. There was an austerity to their lives. They were working class, uncomplicated people with little ambition for worldly possessions or status. One was the daughter of a Sydney public servant, the other the son of an Italian immigrant fruit and vegetable merchant and failed farmer. They were content. Content with what they had, which in turn was all they needed.

Except. Except for my father’s love affair with driving and cars. And the occasional investment in something which, in retrospect seems odd, but which, at the time was about making life even more secure and content.

They decided to wrap this lovely little post war weather board cottage in aluminium.

As a sailor I myself have a fascination with this metal. A metal which is the most abundant in the earth’s crust. When in its industrialised form it is lighter than timber, impervious to weather, rust, water and decay. And it shines. It’s a magic product. Could it be related to uranium with a half life of thousands of years? Archaeologists in post apocryphal millenniums digging in coastal regions will unearth forests of aluminium masts, intact fishing tinnies and miles of salt resistant balustrading. And my parent’s house.

It could have been a wonderful experiment. Behold this shimmering vision in sensible brushed silver. Such a house would have made the family name notorious in Morningside circles. It would have been a brave statement about the glory of extruded metals and the place of the reflective war service cottage in the annals of architecture. My life would have become unbearably public as the son of this oversized silver cigarette box. Only in my confident middle years and in my eccentric dotage would I have reaped the rewards of this event. Infamy would have been my glorious inheritance and my father’s contribution to the world.

Sadly my father missed this opportunity and chose cream over silver. At that time aluminium cladding came in at least four colours – grey, blue, brick red and cream and was guaranteed for a lifetime. My father, who was committed to DIY projects, single handedly mixed and poured the concrete which created the mismatched patchwork under the house on which we chalked our hand tennis courts and was also the house painter.

Every five years he would spend his precious four weeks annual leave balancing and bouncing on five metre long timber planks stretched between cast iron trestles stalking the sides of the stilted house. This was all before power tools. Sanding a house was a manual task. I can still see him in his army shorts and navy singlet, a long cleaning rag hanging from his waist and on his head his trusty slouch hat – a remnant of the war.

After twenty years of painting he had succumbed to the door to door sales pitch of the man from Alcan. The idea of never having to paint the house again overwhelmed his better judgement.

Now twenty years later (as per the guarantee) this dusty cream aluminium mock weatherboard house sat defying time and the elements. The temptation to remove the wraps and expose the original weatherboards was tempting but my brother and I resisted. At one point we considered the price of aluminium on the stock market and dreamed of the wealth we might acquire by trading in this layer of the inheritance as scrap metal. But as with many of our good ideas it was discarded as impractical and ultimately a waste of time.

That Ordinary House 8 The Thunderbox

Ouch! Just the mention of toilets in that pre sewered era fills my nostrils with a pungent burning smell. No ordinary smell. A smell that didn’t invade the whole house but waited to catch you as you entered the bathroom. An acrid ambush which took your breath away.

There was a resident bucket in our bathroom every night for twelve or thirteen years until the city was sewered in 1962. I presumed every house had one but perhaps this was an old country solution to night relief which my father had brought from the farm. I never undertook a local survey.

Our’s was a fading yellow bucket with a white plastic handle and each morning it was my father’s task (later delegated to his sons) to empty the contents. A bucketful of urine. How it filled every night and by whom I’m not sure. My contribution was never a full quarter bucket.

In this modern era it’s unimaginable that you’d be greeted by such a sight and smell every morning. But there it was. The bladders of two adults and two children captured in a nine litre bucket.

Of course it had to go somewhere. Not in the storm-water drain and not down the sink. It made a journey through the kitchen down the 15 back steps and up the yard to join its cousins at the outdoor dunny. Not into the can sitting inside but behind the structure. It was poured, undiluted, onto the grass around the base of the structure, behind and out of sight. The scorched grass patch marked out the extent of the pour. It never occurred to us that this was anything other than routine. It never interrupted our games of cricket or caused us pause when taking cover behind the outhouse in games of tiggy or cowboys and Indians. It just sat there and fertilised the top of the yard and perhaps kept the termites at bay.

Of greater concern and interest was stepping inside this private space, the outdoor dunny. This was to enter a common but mysterious world. For a start it was dark no matter what time of day or night. There was no natural light entering this intimate space and it always took a moment to adjust and get one’s bearings. Of course, in a rush, it was amazing how automatic and complete was the blind knowledge of the mechanics of this place.

The large black, tar covered can sat concealed beneath the timber box designed to house it and designed into the box was a sturdy timber lid which flipped up to reveal the drop off point for number ones and number twos and flipped down to create a booming echo within that chamber of timber, tin and empty space. And thus its local name – the thunder box. On the left hand side another open box contained wood shavings which were used to cover the deposits after each visit, and attached to the wall was a thick wad of newspaper pieces – the Telegraph or Courier-Mail, torn into six inch squares and threaded onto a piece of wire which in turn was attached to the inside of the outside wall. Newsprint is not the most forgiving and pampering of materials to wipe one’s backside with but better than a handful of grass or the leaf from the closest tree – the staple of the bushwalker or bushman.

The worst moments were those which involved moonless nights or the dreaded maggots.

Night trips to the thunderbox were always challenging . On the nights when the sky was lit by the full moon there was a level of trepidation for a seven year old in crossing the 20 metres of no mans land. Once there, with the door held open by an outstretched foot, the dunny bathed in cool blue light and the night sky bisected by the foggy milky way, there was a sense of calm and of the world being a balanced and friendly place for a young tyke whose connection with nature was limited to annual camping trips to the beach.

On the other hand, on black black nights, the twenty metre dash to the safety of the cold wooden seat seemed like crossing through a world occupied by demons and creatures intent on the kidnapping and obliteration of young children. It was a fearful experience only undertaken when no other option was available. The twenty metres dash from the bottom of the back stairs was made only after a series of deep breaths and serious mental preparation to get the timing right for the race at full pelt towards the shadowed building at the top of the yard. Finally, when the inevitable could no longer be avoided it was on and with arms flailing to ward off the evil ones and with a prayer on my breath I ran the gauntlet. On arriving at the toilet, the door was bashed open and then violently flung shut to keep at bay the demons on my tail. Unfortunately this resulted in complete isolation in a pitch black hole with no escape. There was no time to be wasted and rather than my fear causing constipation, the opposite was achieved and if record books were kept I would be held in high esteem for my lighting fast process. The trousers were dropped before the door was shut; all muscle systems were released as my bum approached the seat and before I could tear a piece of the Telegraph from the wad at my side I was back on my feet and preparing for the return dash.

The only rival to this was the maggot infestation. This situation came randomly and always seemed to present itself on my more urgent visits to the dunny. Day was bad, night was unbearable. Always intent on play rather than purpose, I would be in a rush to beat the approaching bowel explosion. On pushing through the door, there, crawling over every inch of the place my feet needed to be, were hundreds of squirming, wriggling, rolling, fat, legless maggots. There was no option but to go on, so suspending my belief in gravity I would launch myself towards the seat seemingly taking flight. My one and only essential step would be taken, ballet fashion, with only the tip of my big toe making contact with the floor. Once on the throne my feet had to remain in mid air. From that vantage point I sat in panic watching this moving world below me. Every crevice seemed like a source of even more of the creatures. Moment by agonising moment more and more of them appeared from beneath the wooden box on which I sat, having made their escape from the can below me. I had the dread that any moment I would feel one on my backside, the intelligent one who had mastered the ability to cross the gap between can and seat or, the one who was not intent on escaping to daylight as were his brothers and sisters, but focused seriously on warm seats and human contact. Finally, and as quickly as possible, refusing to look back or down, gagging and in a panic, I would again launch myself into flight and regain the safety of terra firma.

At night, by torchlight, the experience was magnified ten times by the isolation and lack of visibility. There was no knowing how far this army of white wrigglers had spread.

I never shared my fears with my brother or my parents. This, I understood, was one of the fundamentals of human life and something which was meant to be confronted and survived. It was an essential step towards adulthood and the toughness necessary to triumph in the adult world.

That Ordinary House 7 Verandah

Standing on the tiny back verandah (1m x 1.5 m) overlooking the yard I marvelled at how small it looked. How did it ever accommodate two cricket teams in summer and the gladiatorial football games of winter?

The cricket pitch ran downhill a decent 30 degree slope. It began at the top of the yard beside the weatherboard, gable roofed outdoor dunny and ran down beneath the wire clothes line, the four strands of which were attached at each end to an adjustable timber bar bolted to a vertical post. The effect was of a double crucifixion with adjustable arms - though we only ever thought of it as a secular nuisance. We were a catholic family so crucifixes were a dime a dozen and of such familiarity as to be invisible. At the bottom of the slope sat a concrete stormwater channel a metre wide running across the yard from west to east. This path carried fabulous raging torrents of water in wild tropical storms and cyclonic weather, threatening to inundate under the house or back up and fill the whole back yard.

On one side of the yard grew an ever expanding mulberry tree while the rest of the yard was bare of foliage. Grass was king except in dry seasons where it turned into a brown and dusty expanse and became rock hard.

In cricket season we belted down our best fast bowling efforts or tweaked the worn-out tennis ball with our nimble under developed fingers, coaxing it to spin and mesmerise the batter (batsman in those days).

Three stumps were banged in the grass just short of the storm water channel, bails gently set across their tips. A single stump was located between the loo and the top clothsline upright. The wicket keeper located himself behind the stumps on the concrete path and the clothesline was managed into an acute angle by adjusting the horizontal crucifixion arms.

The spin bowler’s run up was a simple one or two steps but the fast bowlers often commenced their approach out of sight behind the loo. They’d appear at the last moment, a flurry of arms and legs ready to let fly with their best, hoping to intimidate the batsman with their wild demeanour.

Over the fence on the full was six and out. The back fence was worth four and the side fences two. To speed up the game we often made up a new rule to suit the mood. Score twenty (thirty, fifty) runs and you had to retire; tip and run, where any contact with the ball required you to go for a run no matter what; stumps were live at both ends so you could be run out no matter which end you were running to; one hand one bounce catch was out; and maximum scores set for any side. There were lots of fights, regular pick up your bat and ball and go home scenarios, and some fabulous tantrums. But most of all it was hour after hour day after day of bowling and batting and running and drinking cordial and eating vegemite sandwiches. It was a great place to rehearse your silly walk or your wobbly run up or use any distraction possible to put the opposition off their game. The sun poured relentlessly down from the high Brisbane sky, the cricket pitch would be denuded of grass from the constant pounding of bare feet; the games would only end with sunset and often went after that, usually ending with a mother’s cry from the neighbour’s dark yard “Allen, Norman dinner”

We’d have spent much of the day on our backs rolling round laughing as much as scoring a century or even finishing a game.

This picture was vivid despite the overgrown expanse I now faced. Large trees dominated the top of the yard, a bougainvillea crawled and spiked its way along the eastern boundary and a sad vege patch sat where the mulberry tree once stood.

The dunny and the thunderbox had disappeared – physically at least. In my mind they were all still there.

That Ordinary House 6 'Sadness'

Indecision doesn’t totally absolve one from responsibility. And so my brother and I would, from time to time, arrange to visit Moolabar Street together.

The grass still grew, the gutters still filled with leaves. Under the house was still an unfinished masterpiece of cracked, patched and mismatched concrete sections. Plumbing struggled to pretend it was from the current century. The collection of screws and tools from the 1950s still lined the back of the work bench recovering from the job for which they had once been indispensable. There was a sadness to them. Once caressed by hardworking hands they now looked neglected and forlorn.

Those days weren’t particularly productive but as we mowed the lawn and trimmed and dragged limbs from trees and rampant shrubs to the bin or the box trailer memories were being gently evoked. Each visit, each walk through the empty house brought back long forgotten images and more stories.

That Ordinary House 5 'Decisions'

Too much time on your hands can be dangerous. The wise decision you made on day one begins to slip away as new options emerge – each one of which deserves serious examination and each examination reveals still further and multiple layers, each of which constitutes another possibility to be carefully considered. Of course none of these is ever written down. Eventually my brain becomes clotted with all these double cream possibilities until I begin to reinvent previously discarded options which again become possibilities – strangely familiar but not fully recognisable.

One of these options was for me to buy my brother’s share in the house. This would constitute both a broadening of my retirement investment portfolio and securing the family home for future generations.

But what, I thought, if my brother wanted to buy my half share. How would we negotiate that? Toss a coin? And what would constitute a fair price? Neither of us would want to pay too much. Neither of us would want to dud the other by paying too little. This circular thinking became ever more convoluted and unresolvable. My beloved was fully supportive of my thinking and yet, the mere conversation about the topic seemed to have the power to create tension and argument between us.

I felt pressured by my own arguments coming from her mouth and then felt aggrieved that it was not her place to agree with me or even dare have an opinion even if I did recognise it as mine from five minutes previously.
“I love my brother” I declared in a voice rather too loud than seemed warranted. She stepped back, confused, then fell into a silence – feeling excluded from my family business. What was happening? It was a most mysterious experience.

Possessions, greed, love, hurt, hate, anger.
This simple scenario wasn’t going as smoothly as I’d hoped.

Muriel, from the Public Trustee’s Office, saw her opportunity and asserted that they could sell the house for us. She had, after all, set in motion a valuation in order to establish a capital gains base-value in case we never made up our mind and our children inherited this whole disaster.

She’d arranged the valuation. Why shouldn’t it follow that she would arrange the sale. Wasn’t that why we’d gone to the Public Trustee in the first place? To minimise complexity? To make the decisions for us!

That Ordinary House 4 'Quagmire'

Not greedy but not stupid. We weren’t going to give the house away. This was the balance we were seeking. Twelve months earlier, in March 2007, we’d put dad’s affairs in the hands of the State Government Public Trustee. This was with the naïve belief that spending a few dollars of the inheritance would relieve us of the stress of decision making and the likelihood of chasing our tails. We didn’t want to be travelling down unknown paths into unpredictable dead-ends with the constant risk of becoming entangled in the undergrowth. That and the desire to avoid conflict..

My brother and I get on very well, but my assumption was that any family business involving money had the potential to become a quagmire. I didn’t relish the thought of coming face to face with my sibling charging headlong and at high speed down one of those jungle tracks in the opposite direction to me, papers in hand and a different set of assumptions fuelling his engine. Besides he’s bigger than me.

As it turned out the Public Trustee gave us plenty of time to consider our options.

The Public Trustee appeared to work on a failed sweatshop manufacturing model. It looked good from the outside. Lots of bolts of cloth on display in the busy front office gave it the impression of it being a hive of activity. Behind the scenes it was chaos. There seemed to be plenty of workers but no one quite had the full set of skills necessary to complete any one garment.

It felt like they only had one sewing machine which was constantly being used by different people, each resetting it to a new task – now overlocker, now button-holeing, now embroidery. Each required that the part-finished garment on the machine be dumped in the unfinished bin to wait until it emerged from beneath the growing pile of crap for its next addition.

The words prick and pin come to mind but they weren’t pricks though they did respond to pins. Every time I began to run out of patience I’d make a phone call. And hey presto there appeared a result. More often than not my query about progress was met with:
‘Funny you should call today Mr Capelin (deferentially offered) but I just happen to have your father’s file on my desk and was about to call you…..’
Miraculously, paperwork would arrive within days requiring yet another signature.

I am much too accommodating and the intervals between my pin pricking phone calls allowed the process to drag on and on and on.

Meanwhile the property market in Brisbane was raging. Raging towards the edge of an abyss as it turned out. Though we were as unsuspecting as every other punter.

That Ordinary House 3 'Romance'

The glossy representations from the local real estate agents sit beside my bed in a pile - alongside my collection of unread books of poetry, two novels for getting me to sleep, thus never to be finished, an assortment of well thumbed magazines, the weekend papers and a purple ceramic aroma therapy gizmo. I fill this with fragrent oil occasionally as my attempt to set a romantic scene for seduction.

My wife rarely approaches this side of the room for fear of catching some newsprint born disease and when I do, secretly, light up the tea candle to vaporise the oil of seduction, rather than swoon and begin my hoped for scenario of a slow striptease she instead asks in an indignant tone: 'what's that smell?'
and goes on reading her book, and the moment is lost. My offering burnt off by her allergy to unidentified airborne aromas.

To console myself I sit up in bed with a pen and scrap paper and make a list of recent sales which are in the same street or which seem like a close match to the Moolabar Street cottage. I do some dodgy maths, guessing at inflation rates, property sales trends and a bit of wishful thinking, given that some of these sales happened over eight months previously. My mumbling, fidgeting with my calculator and scribbling do nothing for romance only adding another opportunity for my beloved to turn her back on me and demand:
'Do you have to do that now? For god's sake turn the light off and go to sleep.'

If this is my reverse psychology romance strategy it fails miserably.

In my twisted mind I had been hoping for
'Darling, if you turn off the light and put away your calculator we could ...................................'

But no. Scribbling in bed is no substitute for candles, a bottle of wine and those other ingredients which have always remained a mystery to me. Something about timing and creating the mood.
I have, however, succeeded in developing a pretty good picture of what I think the cottage is worth, give or take thirty to forty thousand. I will sleep peacefully knowing I can call my brother the next day to reveal my brilliant work.

That Ordinary House 2 'Mishka'

My brother and I are considering a DIY sale as the way to go. The decision is a combination of wanting to save real estate agent's fees and a nostalgic wish to hold on until the last possible moment. To be the last link between the family home and the new owner. We want it to go to a good family.

We've done our homework. We've got enough estimates of its value to thoroughly confuse us. They range from what seems like a very low price by a registered valuer to what seems like fanciful instant wealth scenarios provided by the more adventurous of the local real estate agents.

One in particular, a woman with a Europen accent, phones me constantly. I seem to have become her best friend, or her ticket to dreams unheard of. She has mailed me a dossier the size of a small phone book giving me an extensive list of recent sales, only a few of which are in any way comparable to our modest little two bedroom plus sleepout war service cottage. She follows this up with phone calls verging on harrassment. She is very insistent. It feels desperate. I imagine that this desperation might be driven by a difficult life in a dark, cold corner of Eastern Europe complete with low slung sky, faulty plumbing, erratic electricity supply and days spent trudging through unforgiving grey streets (filled with pre-war Russian cars). I picture her desperately looking for work, anything to allow her the luxury of a next meal. Oh, and by the way, her aged mother also lives with her, wrapped in a dark shawl sitting silently beside the gas heater beside the window looking down on a rubbish filled laneway (from the third floor of their walk up tenement).

On the other hand, Mishka, as I dub her, may very well be phoning me dressed in high heels, a sleek Italian, linen designer suit and jewellery which sets off her dark eyes which peer at me from behind Gucci framed glasses.

She may have done well but she's not doing a great job of winning my heart in business. I'm looking for a homely, honest real estate agent with country charm and a low key lifestyle. Someone like my mum or the sister I never had.

That Ordinary House 1 'That House'

That house. That ordinary house. Oh how ordinary that house was. Its normalness, its story, could be told in about one hundred words:
"Young married couple buy two bedroom war service cottage in Brisbane; two sons are born eighteen months apart; both attend the local parish school at the end of the street and then spend eleven more years at a Christian Brothers school a bus ride away. Father works in smallgoods and later as a travelling salesman fininshing his working life as a postie. Mother stays at home, looks after the kids; later she works part time as an accounting machinist. Holidays are spent at the beach. Kids leave home. Retirement for the ageing couple is fullfilling and busy. Wife dies. Husband continues to live in the war service home until he suffers a stroke. He sees his days out in an aged care home. The house lies empty. Much loved father dies of old age. The sons inherit the house."

And now, here I am sitting on the front step of the Moolabar Street home waiting for a prospective buyer to turn up to look through this ordinary house and make me an offer.
One owner, one family, one lifetime; a store of stories waiting for the next generation of lives to be lived under this roof.