Amy said, ‘Mum’s not convinced that she should sell. All her memories are here.’
Roger said, ‘I can understand that. This is a beautiful home. But it’s wearing down and it’s going to require more maintenance as time goes on. And the new places for over-fifty-fives – you are over fifty-five, I hope? – are so fantastic, with pools and gyms, a new lease on life, a whole new set of friends.’
Amy said, ‘We’re concerned about how difficult it will be to sell, with the real estate market, it’s a bit uncertain?’
Roger had said, ‘Not for a home of this quality. Do you mind if we take a look around?’ and he’d set forth, striding through the house, saying, ‘Oh, yes, a young couple is going to love this; they’ll be able to see their kids tearing around the backyard,’ and ‘The kitchen is the heart of the home, you’ve made sure of that,’ but also, ‘I see what you mean about the garden: it’s beautiful but it’s going to take a lot of maintenance,’ and ‘It’s difficult to feel safe in a big place like this. That’s the bonus of downsizing: you’re in an estate, an apartment, and you’ve got that flexibility; you can just lock up and go on your travels and not worry.’
And with that, the deal was done.
Chapter Twenty-five
There are two sides to selling a property: getting the seller to sell is just as important as getting the buyer to buy. Roger had smooth-talked his way around Amy’s mum in order to list her property on his books; now it was time to smooth-talk a young couple into buying.
The pitch for that was quite different. To Amy’s mum, he’d cooed about the loveliness of the home, the heart she’d put into it. To buyers, he’d say something else entirely: there was only one bathroom, and apparently that’s now unacceptable. The back of the house hadn’t been opened out. There was just a back door leading to the garden. But that was good: it could be ‘improved’ in time, and ‘that’s going to add to the value, down the track’.
There was no dishwasher – Amy’s mum had been the type to handwash with rubber gloves. Every time Roger arrived for an open-for-inspection, he’d see a pair drying out over the kitchen tap, next to the Steelo and the detergent, and he’d have to shove the lot under the sink, with the Ajax, the ammonia and the pure soap for rubbing into her late husband’s shirt collars.
Potential buyers would arrive and wander around with pamphlets in their hands. They would look down at floors and up at the ceilings and they would count the rooms, but never test anything that might actually need fixing: the hot water service, for example. They’d say, ‘How much do you think they want?’ which often struck Roger as a stupid question since they usually wanted what he’d already told them they could get.
He’d always quote two prices: a low one and a high one. The low one would be the one that would stick in their mind. The high one was the one he’d remind them about when auction day rolled round. Not that he always worked hard to get that higher price. Roger was on commission. It might be a big deal to the vendor to have to accept $20,000 less than the asking price but it was no big deal to Roger. In terms of commission, that worked out to a few hundred bucks.
On the other hand, when he really wanted to impress somebody, or maybe even test himself, to see if he still had it, he’d try to get the price up by something like $50,000 just for the hell of it: playing one bidder off another, having junior employees in the crowd whispering in their ears, telling them the other bidders were near the end of their budget; another $5000 might just do it; another $10,000, definitely.
That’s what he did for Amy’s mum or, more accurately, for Amy. He’d quite liked the look of her, that day they’d met on the couch. She was pretty but not flashy and, having seen her mum, he could tell that she’d hold her looks well into her forties, by which time he’d probably be ready to trade her in. She had what he called a ‘pretend job’ that she was probably desperate to quit so she could start a family, although not immediately. Those girls always liked to pretend to be serious about their careers. In approaching the sale of her mum’s house, she’d proven herself to be quite organised, which was also good, since he’d have no intention of running the household once they got married. That would be Amy’s job.
Having landed the deal to sell her childhood home, Roger was now intent on landing Amy.
He’d done similar things before: met women during the course of his job that he’d ended up shagging. Some were single but most were married, and that was fine; everyone knew the rules of the game – no promises, no commitment, it’s all just a bit of fun – and there had only been a couple of bunny boilers along the way, women he couldn’t shake, women he’d had to cut loose, often coldly, to get them out of his life again.
Amy wasn’t in that category. He was quite sure she was a keeper.
Roger turned up for the auction in his best suit, gave his best pitch, used his best jokes – and the first person he looked at when the hammer came down at a great price wasn’t Amy’s mum but Amy, and he made sure the look he gave her was the right one: it wasn’t a smart-arse, ‘Aren’t I great?’ look. It was, ‘You’ve been brave, and you’ve done the right thing, and now your mum will be safe and you will be happy.’
He could see that she had gone soft with gratitude and he knew that he was nearly home, but still, there would be wooing to do. You chase them until they catch you, as his mates would say. Roger set about winning Amy with the same strategies he used to win the rights to sell her mother’s house: he never allowed a hint of longing to enter his voice. It’s death to plead, when seeking to either buy or sell. He stayed in control, and played it smooth. First date, second date, third date – he didn’t even try to take her to bed.
Fourth date, bam.
The wedding took place in September of the following year at the chapel of the school that both Amy and her sister had attended. (Elizabeth came home from London to be bridesmaid. When Roger saw her, he gave himself a bit of a pat on the back; she was sexier than Amy, but not as wifely.) They had the reception at Ripponlea, with Amy wearing a dress that looked to Roger to have been made of doilies and curtains and bits and pieces of string but which he happened to know had cost a fortune.
As is custom in her social milieu, Amy did not speak at the wedding. Roger gave the speech and was careful to mention her father, departed, earning kudos from his new mother-in-law, who was smitten.
‘It’s what you want for your daughter, isn’t it?’ she’d said. ‘Somebody who loves her so much, who is going to take care of her.’
I don’t have a daughter but I don’t mind telling you that if I did, I’d hope she’d grow up able to take care of herself.
They honeymooned in Europe. Roger thought they’d get straight down to baby-making since that had been the point of getting married in the first place – to start to look more respectable and grown-up than he had five minutes before the service – but Amy thought it would look ‘tacky’ to come home pregnant, and besides, she felt at age twenty-nine that she had a bit of time up her sleeve, so she continued to work at what Roger called her ‘little job’ for two years.
They bought a family home in Malvern that wasn’t at all dated: it was immaculate, but still, Amy found things that needed to be done. Her ability to spend money came as a bit of a surprise. Roger was the type to blow money. He’d blown it on cars, on girls and cigars, for years, but compared to Amy, he was a novice.
Amy wanted what wives want: she’d liked the house when they bought it but then decided that it didn’t have enough light, so she hired an architect to knock all the windows out and put in new glass with new, white-painted sills.
She lifted the old floor in the kitchen and replaced it with bamboo; remodelled the kitchen to include a fridge that was so well hidden behind a door that nobody who visited could ever find it; replaced all the drawers with ones with ‘soft-close’ hinges; installed a stainless-steel benchtop that had to be cleaned with special cloths; ordered gas-lift bar stools; and put heating under the bathroom tiles, which necessitated repla
cing the tiles, too.
She took out all the hot and cold water taps and replaced them with Flickmixers; added a Zip mixer for instant hot water and instant iced water; and had a coffee machine built in to one of the kitchen cabinets because the benchtop ones are fine, but take up bench space.
She threw out all of Roger’s sheets and manchester – probably a good thing – and replaced it all with 1000-thread-count Frette linen, over a $5000 Sealy mattress, and bought four outdoor chairs that were shaped like orange quarters and cost $1200 each.
She put under-bench lighting in the kitchen and in-the-ceiling speakers in all the living rooms, and had the whole place rewired to allow for blinds that closed themselves with the touch of a button, and only when all that was done did she declare herself, at age thirty-one, to be ready to be a mum.
She timed her first pregnancy around the school year, so their little boy or little girl, whatever they were having, would be one of the oldest in his or her class, and therefore likely to have an advantage when the time came to send them to school.
As it turned out the first baby was a boy. They called him Oscar, which never would have happened when I was a child because Oscar in those days was a grouch who lived in a garbage bin. Now there are five in every school. I must have baptised ten of them.
The baby required a new car – a Volvo – so he could be carted to all his activities, and it was just as well they got the big car (not for Roger – he kept his own sports car – Amy drove the Volvo) because within eighteen months, Amy was pregnant again, this time with Milo, and then, just two years later, she finally got her girl, Isabella.
Lest there be any doubt as to how Roger’s home life was organised, it was straightforward and traditional: Amy managed everything, and Roger made the money. As such, Roger could not have told you what the names of any of his children’s teachers were, mainly because he’d never been to any of their schools, except to the enrolment interview.
He did not know what they had in their lunchbox or that the school was peanut free; that Oscar didn’t eat crusts, that Milo ate everything, that Isabella would only eat strawberries if the green bit was cut off; that watermelon was essential for the school lunch but had to be cut into chunks; and that sushi was their favourite takeaway, provided it was tuna and cucumber and no other fish.
Amy, on the other hand, knew all of that, plus she knew when Roger’s birthday was, when his mother’s birthday was, when his brothers’ birthdays were, the names of their wives, how many children they had and when they were born, what kind of gifts would be appropriate to give them for their next birthdays, the schools they attended and whether they had allergies.
She knew when it was their turn to host a family dinner, and what to cook; whether any glasses had broken last time and would need to be replaced; where the proper, linen napkins were kept, and whether they needed to be ironed.
She knew the names of Oscar’s friends, and their parents’ names, and when Oscar had sport, and when he had clarinet, and where those lessons were taken, and how to get there, and the routes to avoid in the after-school traffic. She knew whether Milo needed a new music sheet, where the concert was, and whether they had tickets or even needed them.
She did not know – but Roger did – that she spent far more than Roger earned, including on the cleaner, the gardener, the part-time nanny and the lady who ironed Oscar’s little school shirts (but not Roger’s shirts, because he had those laundered). Also, following the birth of her third child she had ordered Roger to ‘get the snip’ and had meanwhile been rebuilding what she called her ‘post-baby body’ – changing the whole family’s diet to organics, which again cost a fortune, but also signing up for yoga and Pilates and something she called Reiki.
Roger would occasionally get grumpy about Amy’s spending, but mostly he ignored it because he had purchased eight Hugo Boss suits, average price $3500, and forty plain white shirts, average price $180, and a fast car, a set of top-of-the-line golf clubs, and that was just in one year.
Also, spending aside, Amy was the perfect wife.
She knew what to wear around town – ballet flats and cropped pants with a sailor top, and her hair in a ponytail – and what to wear when they went out to a work function (something that didn’t make her look like a tart), and she knew what he should wear, too.
She knew what the children should wear, and whether they needed braces and whether it was good for them to go to pony club or to play touch, depending on who else in the neighbourhood was doing what.
She knew where everyone was going for holidays so they could go there, too.
Roger was conscious of the fact that some of his friends had wives who worked, and that their husbands had to do quite a bit around the house: shopping, and maybe even cleaning. He didn’t want to do any of that. Occasionally, Amy would say, look, this is silly. I’ve got somebody to do the cleaning, to do the ironing, maybe when all the kids are in school I could go back to the agency, maybe just part-time, make a little pocket money, but Roger would immediately put the kybosh on it.
‘I make enough money,’ he’d say, and for a while there, he was right.
Chapter Twenty-six
I don’t pretend to know a lot about real estate. I was given the only property I’ve ever owned by a sister who thought I might be making a mistake committing myself to promises I probably couldn’t keep.
As it turned out, she was right.
What I do know about real estate is that when the going’s good, it’s very good for estate agents, and when it’s bad, well, you can figure out the rest.
Roger Callaghan was lucky. He started his career at the beginning of a boom. For a while there, he must have felt like he was driving – or not even driving – a runaway train. Prices went up, then they went up again, and again, and they kept on going up, and when that goes on for twenty years, it can feel like there’s only one direction prices can go.
I know that when Ruth left her apartment to me, it wasn’t like anyone thought I’d won the jackpot. It was worth something like $55,000, not that anyone thought I’d ever be able to sell it because it was in Bondi Beach, where there were floaters in the water and New Zealanders in the pubs, and it was hard to tell which of those was considered the biggest turn-off.
I’ve never had the flat valued. What on earth would be the point? From time to time a real estate agent will put a card under the door or in the letterbox, saying a flat in a building nearby has just ‘traded’ – their word – for $800,000, and I think, you’ve got to be kidding. In the back of my mind, I know I’ve got a nest egg. It made leaving the priesthood easier, when the time came to do that, but that’s because I’ve never owed a cent on the place.
I don’t know if Roger saw the crash coming. He used to tell people that he did. He’d say that he felt in his bones that the bubble was going to burst and then, one morning late in the spring selling cycle, 2010, he felt it happen.
He was standing outside a pretty terrace in Armadale with every desirable feature – pressed ceilings, polished boards, original fittings – and he was calling for bids in the high 900s, thinking that was not a bad place to start, and no bids came.
No bids. Not one, and that was that; it was like a click of the fingers, and the boom was over. People who had been so hungry to know what their house was worth – now they just weren’t interested in having Roger come over for a market appraisal.
‘Happy to sit for a while,’ they’d say. The greed had gone from their eyes.
That was just the vendors. The sellers were gone, too. Roger might want to list a house in Brighton – nice suburb, by the sea. He’d know in his bones that it would be worth seven figures but he could not get the vendors to sell. He’d stand in front of the mirror in his office, telling himself it was nothing, absolutely nothing to do with technique; it was a blip in the market and it would soon come good.
He knew in his heart that it wasn’t true. Fear had gripped the market and home owners could smell it, too.
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br /> For a while there, he continued to tell people, ‘You should definitely go to market. We’re selling plenty! I’m pretty sure I can get you the price you’re after,’ and then, six weeks later, at auction, he’d be saying, ‘Look, I know it’s less than you expected but you’ve got to be prepared to meet the market,’ or ‘You’ve got to lower your expectations,’ both of which are real estate speak for, ‘Cut your price! I need my commission!’
He’d call up buyers, people who had been begging him, throughout the boom, to find them something, anything, for under $1.5 million in a decent street in a half-decent neighbourhood near a good school; people he’d had to brush off because there just wasn’t anything at that price – he was calling these same people to say, you wouldn’t believe the bargain I’ve got for you, and these same people wouldn’t return his calls.
So, business was grim but that was not all.
Like a lot of estate agents, Roger had a lot of money tied up in property, most of which he had bought cheap, usually from vendors who didn’t know any better or people who were selling an old relative’s house who didn’t much care if it went for $1.1 million or $1.2 million because, really, it was a jackpot either way.
He knew quite a few plumbers and sparkies and tilers and painters, because he sent all his rental repairs and maintenance their way, so he could easily organise a cheap renovation on his own places and quickly sell them for profit.
He’d gotten greedy and, ultimately, in over his head. A year, not more, before the crash, Roger had borrowed heavily to buy a couple of old red-brick warehouses, with the aim of jazzing them up and putting them back on the market. He’d chased the tenants out – one old Hungarian couple had been there for twenty-five years – and set about ripping out the kitchens.
No Place Like Home Page 19
