All That Happened At Number 26 Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1 First sighting of number 26

  Chapter 2 The phone call

  Chapter 3 A number of rash decisions

  Chapter 4 Normans to the rescue

  Chapter 5 Birthday parties: a cautionary tale

  Chapter 6 Cousin Gavin’s underpants

  Chapter 7 A new bed and a shocking nightmare

  Chapter 8 Head on

  Chapter 9 The war begins

  Chapter 10 Big Gig leads to big fear leads to big change leads to big top leads to … whatever it was, it was big

  Chapter 11 A bumpy ride into the eye of a storm

  Chapter 12 Pigs might fly

  Chapter 13 Giving up cigarettes

  Chapter 14 Back to the womb

  Chapter 15 Some important advice re: the parenting of adolescents that you may never hear anywhere else

  Chapter 16 Roxy Girl: a love story

  Chapter 17 Year 12, part one: the son

  Chapter 18 Year 12, part two: the daughter

  Chapter 19 Working with your offspring

  Chapter 20 Giving support: you can only do your best

  Chapter 21 In praise of doubt and the occasional bout of self-loathing

  Chapter 22 We all do it

  Chapter 23 As things currently stand

  The Allergy-Free Gum Arabic Rubber Birthday Cake

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  For

  John, Jordie and Bonnie

  with love, respect and the sincere hope they

  don’t sue.

  CHAPTER 1

  First sighting of number 26

  I’ll never forget the first time John and I saw number 26. We just knew it was going to be ours. It was so awful and ugly and repulsive in every way, not to mention being in a suburb I had sworn I’d rather die than live in, that we knew we had a great chance of getting it. To be honest, the first time we saw the house was about ten minutes before it was auctioned.

  The pressure was on. John’s dad had made the big announcement: ‘Now that you two have a baby, you can’t go on living in these … um … run-down cheap rental properties; you have to buy a house.’

  We were visiting John’s parents at the time, sitting around their beautiful Australian hardwood dining table, having just finished an entire slab of pork belly. Oh my God, the crackling. My chin was glistening with the fat and I felt a little self-conscious taking yet another handful but there isn’t much in life that gives me greater joy than crispy pig fat so I was determined to make the most of this rare opportunity; it surely beat the steamed vegies and rice John and I were used to. Meanwhile John polished off the remains of the gourmet salad that had featured such a variety of lettuce leaves that, quite frankly, I was taken by surprise: I had no idea there was more to life than iceberg. John’s dad had just returned from the downstairs cellar where he’d been sent by his wineloving wife to select another bottle of vintage red, which he then decanted into a crystal glass bottle. Out of the side of his mouth John quietly explained, ‘It’s so it can breathe, Scotty.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I replied, half-expecting to hear myself speaking with a cockney accent like Eliza in My Fair Lady when she’s being taught to sing ‘The Rain in Spain Stays Mainly in the Plain.’

  The wine was then poured into proper red wine glasses and we had to roll it around and sniff it and say stuff like, ‘Mmm, this one’s got a strong nose … a bit woody perhaps.’

  ‘What do you think, Scotty?’ John’s mum looked at me, eager to hear my opinion. ‘Mmm … well … mm … um … I think it smells … very … um, very … let’s see … very nice.’ Silence. Deafening silence.

  ‘Gee, look at the sunset,’ John piped up, coming to my rescue. We all turned our attention to the floor-to-ceiling windows. The clouds had cleared to reveal a rare and perfect view of Wilsons Promontory, looking for all the world as though it sat precariously balanced on the horizon.

  I couldn’t help but ponder the differences between John’s family home and the one I’d grown up in. Ours was a small war-service weatherboard in Greensborough. Well, it was weatherboard until the day I arrived home to find it had magically become brick. I’d always assumed it must have been Mum who insisted on the brick cladding but, as she explained years later, ‘A salesman knocked on the door one evening when your father was drunk, and before I knew anything about it he’d signed on the dotted line.’

  ‘The point is you need a house, John. You’re thirty years old now, and you’ve got a family.’

  ‘I agree, Dad.’

  I looked up at John, who had produced his ukulele and was trying to work out the next chord in the Bushwackers’ version of the song, ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’. I had moved to a lounge chair so that I could sit somewhere comfortable and breastfeed our six-month-old son for the eighty-seventh time that day. My face was pale, my hair a dull mousey bob, and I had dark rings under my eyes. I was having a mild asthma attack, sneaking a quick puff of Ventolin when no one was looking. I didn’t want John’s parents to know about my wheezing as this may have led them to ask what might be causing it; I was reluctant to tell them that it was probably brought on by the conversation about John and me buying a house. And also that, tragically, it seemed I was allergic to their brand new, extremely expensive, 100 per cent Australian wool lounge chairs.

  In retrospect, I’m also pretty certain that the dress I was wearing could have easily induced my asthma attack. It was a fleecy-lined frock I’d bought at the op-shop where, post-children, I did all my clothes shopping. It was aqua in colour and shapeless until the hips, where it was gathered into a skirt that came to my knees. I bought it mainly because it had large silver buttons down the front, allowing me to easily provide milk on tap to my big, fat, healthy baby. The fact that I was wearing it with navy ribbed tights and my old brown walking boots – one of which was bound up with gaffer tape because it had come adrift at the sole – has since caused me to wonder whether I mightn’t have been suffering just a touch of postnatal depression.

  ‘Of course, interest rates are on the way up at the moment but there’s no point waiting for a better time. Houses only ever go up in value. You may as well do it now, John.’

  ‘Yeah, Dad, I think you’re right.’

  I had another squirt of Ventolin. I tried to eyeball John but he just kept looking down at his uke. I tried harder. I tried with all my might to will that man to look at my face and read it. Please, John, please, for Christ’s sake, please, please read my desperate face. Oh my godfather; it was hopeless. John had now moved on to an emotional rendition of Redgum’s ‘He Was Only Nineteen’. If he’d looked up he would’ve realised by my expression that I was silently screaming at him: ‘John, are you completely fucking insane? How can we buy a house? We haven’t got a single cent in the bank!’

  I come from a working-class background; my dad was a deliverer of small goods and my mum a nurses’ aide in a geriatric home. They bought their war-service, soon-tobe faux brick number in 1953 and never moved until Dad went to the afterlife and Mum to a dementia unit. I grew up with the strong belief that you did not even think about buying a house unless you had a job, money in the bank, or at the very least had risked your life in a world war and got a loan with really cheap repayments.

  We had no savings whatsoever and John had been just a bit young to fight in Vietnam – not that those poor bastards got special home loan deals; they didn’t even get a welcome home parade. But John did have a job. He was working with a street theatre group that required him to regularly dress up in full drag as a policewoman, play a trumpet and juggle three apples which, at the show’s climax, he would chop with a m
eat-cleaver mid-air. Sure, it was a great act and he loved the work but the hours were long and the pay was crap – close to, if not less than, the dole.

  As for me, I had stopped performing while I was pregnant. Soon after the birth, though, I did make an attempt to get back on the horse but my God, was it painful – and not because I’d had an episiotomy. I’d been asked to host a fundraiser trivia night for a group of social workers. For the gig I decided to resurrect a character I’d created called Babs Bluett, a tacky, wise-crackin’, gumchewing showbiz singer. I wasn’t completely naïve. I was well aware that trivia nights can become ugly affairs in which the nicest people turn into rude, obnoxious arseholes all in the name of raising money for a new set of chairs for a migrant learning centre or some equally deserving cause. The social workers were no exception. I clearly remember standing on the stage in the big echoey town hall asking the question: ‘What physical manoeuvre can kangaroos not perform that humans can?’ (This would have been about question number five, which meant I only had 995 to go.)

  The correct answer is, of course, that kangaroos can’t jump backwards. But I sincerely thought the suggestion from one team that kangaroos can’t perform oral sex was equally valid so I allowed them the point. All hell broke loose. By the time I got to reading out question number ten, things were getting personal.

  ‘Speak up!’

  ‘We can’t hear you!’

  ‘Could you speak clearly?’

  ‘We can’t understand you!’

  At one point a guy from the audience grabbed my sheet of questions and said, ‘Oh, give me the mike, I’ll read them out.’ And everyone cheered! Maybe if my character hadn’t had a lisp …

  I left the gig and, in my extremely high-heeled shiny red shoes, walked the three kilometres home, tears flowing from my eyes and milk dripping from my breasts. That was it, I decided, I was never going to perform again.

  The point is, John was a juggler in drag and I was an unemployed breastfeeding mother who between us had no money and no financial prospects whatsoever. Yet still the Commonwealth Bank gave us a loan to buy a house. John’s parents also gave us some money towards the deposit and so our search began.

  On this particular Saturday morning we had one week to go before we had to get out of our rental house, no pressure or anything. We were on our way to look at another house when we passed a red Auction Here Today flag. We pulled up. We spent a couple of minutes walking through the house and came back out the front just as the auction was starting.

  ‘Should I bid?’ John asked me.

  ‘Sure,’ I replied.

  Ten minutes later we were first-time home-owners. We signed the papers, got back in our car and drove away. Barely a minute passed before I burst into tears. John pulled the car over.

  ‘Scotty, what’s the matter?’

  ‘I hate it.’

  ‘You hate what?’

  ‘The house. I absolutely hate it.’

  John looked shocked. ‘Well, why did you tell me to bid?’

  ‘Because we have to live somewhere and I knew all we could afford was some ugly, horrible, depressing piece of shit.’

  But you adapt; and for every negative there is a positive.

  Negative to positive number one

  We were so exhausted and emotionally drained from moving into a place that was so much worse than anything we’d ever rented that we became extremely accident-prone. On the positive side – and this is a big positive; in fact I would go so far as to say that this positive was in fact a blessed miracle – I became pregnant again and nine months later our daughter was born. All children like to believe they are conceived in loving circumstances and, as I once explained to Bonnie, ‘Of course you were conceived in love. It’s just that John and I have no recollection of where or when that loving event took place.’ It was indeed a complete mystery.

  ‘Scotty, do you think it could have happened when we were staying at my folks’ place, you know, when we were in between houses? Maybe we were that tired and had a bit to drink …’ ‘I don’t know, John, I just don’t know.’

  Negative to positive number two

  Our roof leaked. Badly. Very badly. On the positive side, our kids grew up believing that it was perfectly normal for a family to wear raincoats inside the house. An added bonus was that one day when John’s folks came to visit, there happened to be a terrible storm and water was flowing through our hallway. John’s mum, an independently wealthy woman, immediately offered us a no-interest loan of $5000 to get the roof fixed.

  Negative to positive number three

  We had an outdoor toilet situated at the furthest corner of the backyard. Our dismayed friends would carry on, ‘You’ve only got an outdoor toilet? What do you do when you need to do wee in the middle of the night?’ I would simply reply, ‘Well, that’s when having a bathtub comes in handy.’ On the positive side, the outside toilet was a God-given gift first thing in the morning, when John always displayed a very robust and, shall we say, free and relaxed attitude to releasing his bodily toxins.

  Negative to positive number four

  In one room the walls were covered in a thick, rough stucco plaster. One wall featured a massive crack that extended from floor to ceiling. The advantage was that this crack was in the shape of Africa, which made it very easy, when discussing Nelson Mandela and issues of apartheid for instance, to put the situation into a geographical context.

  Negative to positive number five

  Now that we had a mortgage and one income, we were broke. After paying the essential bills there was nothing left over, and I really do mean nothing. On the positive side, John and I came to appreciate things more – water, for instance. John’s sister Susan had come to stay with us for a few days. At the time she was a free-and-easy single woman, doing well as a psychologist. One night I was on my way to the shops to get some milk. Susan said, ‘Oh Scotty, while you’re there would you mind picking up a large bottle of fizzy mineral water?’

  ‘Sure, not a problem,’ I sang out. But it was a problem. A big problem. I only had enough money for a bottle of milk. Five minutes later John arrived home to find me on the front porch on my hands and knees, looking under our old couch. ‘Scotty, what are you doing?’

  ‘I’m looking for some money. I remember dropping some coins here once and I thought there might still be twenty cents under the couch.’ I explained the pickle I was in.

  ‘Well, why don’t you just tell Susan?’ he asked me.

  ‘I can’t. I’m too embarrassed.’

  Even thick-skinned John agreed that having to admit you don’t have enough money for a bottle of water was a little humiliating and so he joined in the search. We went through the kids’ toy cupboard, the laundry baskets and my old handbag. Finally John found a fifty-cent piece under the passenger seat of the car. Eureka! It could have been a gold nugget the size of a softball we were that excited. Later that night when we were sipping on a glass of the precious water, John and I raved, ‘This water, isn’t it tasty? Mmmm …’

  One time our best friends Richard and Fran rang to invite us to a special dinner to celebrate Fran’s birthday; we were the only guests. They lived a couple of hours away, in the small country town of Loch. Richard was planning to drive to Melbourne to buy extravagant amounts of fresh, fabulous seafood at the Queen Vic Market. He’d been studying recipe books for a week beforehand and was getting ready to cook up an absolute feast of oysters, prawns, calamari and a whole baked fish. He’d already selected and bought the wines. We were to bring nothing but ourselves and our kids, and we would stay the night with them.

  On the day we were to leave for this special dinner, we realised we didn’t have enough petrol to get us as far as Loch. And we didn’t have the money to buy any. That’s when I felt as though I belonged in the novel Angela’s Ashes. I sat at our laminex kitchen table, put my head in my hands and I wept and wept and wept with self-pity. I felt pathetic. I felt ashamed. I was too embarrassed to tell my great friends that we coul
dn’t come to dinner because we couldn’t afford to put petrol in our car.

  So I didn’t tell them. Instead I went to our phone and, with a steely resolve, picked up the receiver. I dialled Richard and Fran’s place. Oh no. Oh my God, no. I couldn’t believe it. Our phone had been cut off because we hadn’t paid the bill. I fell to the floor in a kind of Bette Davis slump and really howled. Jordie and Bonnie stood nervously nearby and then Jordie quietly asked, ‘Are you alright, Mum?’ Continuing my Bette Davis performance, I swept them both into my arms, held them tight and whimpered, ‘It’s alright, kids. It’s just that we haven’t got any petrol and we haven’t got a phone so Mummy’s a bit upset, that’s all.’ I got them into the double pusher and we went to the phone box. (This was pre-mobile phone days.) I rang reverse charges. I spoke to Richard, who had just returned from his seafood shopping expedition in Melbourne.

  ‘Oh sorry, Richard, but we can’t come now. Yeah, um … I’m feeling a bit … tired, yeah. So we won’t be able to make it.’

  There was a dreadful silence as Richard absorbed this information. Frostily he said, ‘Oh, okay then.’ I came back home and continued to weep. Now my best friends thought I just couldn’t be bothered coming to their special birthday dinner!

  John arrived home. He went straight back to the phone box, rang Richard and Fran and told them the humiliating truth.

  ‘If only you’d told us earlier, we would’ve lent you the money,’ Richard said. I wept at their kindness.

  On a positive note, word of our predicament must have spread because soon after the Richard/Fran/nopetrol fiasco I went to our letterbox to find an envelope addressed to us; by its feel and shape it was obviously a card. This was intriguing as it wasn’t anyone’s birthday. I opened the envelope. The card was decorated with flowers. Inside I read the words, ‘Heard things were a bit tough. Hope this helps.’ Included was a cheque for $500.

  Negative to positive number six

  What actually started off as a positive did an about-face and became a clear negative the day it was officially declared a death trap. I loved our open fireplace, which was surrounded by a lovely wooden mantelpiece. Often on cold Melbourne winter nights the four of us would sit around it and freeze because it didn’t seem to radiate any heat nor, for that matter, did it burn particularly well (more like a dull, smoky, smouldering situation). But it was a symbol, if not a reality, of warmth and love and cosy family life.