There was a sign above the hole: ‘You are now entering Sydney Harbour National Park. No defined tracks exist beyond this point. Dangerous cliffs and gullies.’ Underneath was a picture of a man falling off a cliff. I looked closer. No one I knew, thank God.
I crawled through the hole and walked on but my momentum had slowed. A drop of rain fell on my head. It was all very well to disappear into nature and become an enigma, but I should have brought a raincoat. And a good book to read. I slowed and stopped. I wasn’t really cut out to be the wild man of Manly, and I didn’t want to fall off a cliff. And if I did disappear into the bush never to be seen again, one day Bibi would find out that the last time I had been seen was just after she had started crying after I caused a branch to smack her in the face. She’d think it was all her fault and grow up wracked by guilt until one day it would all get too much for her and she’d run away into the bush to look for me and she’d get lost and it would all end in tears. I turned around, feeling noble. I may not need them, I thought, but they sure need me. I started walking back, secretly knowing that in fact it was the other way around.
five
powerful silvers
When we got home, next door was completely gone, carted away in skips. Ivan was sitting cross-legged on top of the final one, looking exhausted but vaguely satisfied. I wondered if we could ask him in for a cup of tea and a biscuit and persuade him to put in some grass, a swing, a slippery-dip and leave it at that.
Now at least things would be quieter. Building is a slower and more deliberate process than demolishing. Given that the demolishing had begun 3 metres from our bedroom, surely nothing to follow could match its noise. Week one was over. Things would now begin to improve.
I was wrong.
On Monday morning at 7 a.m. we were woken by smashing glass and bashing bricks. How the . . . what? Bibi wailed. What could they be knocking down? There was nothing left. The din seemed even closer and louder than before—but that was impossible because it had started right outside our window. The only way they could be closer was if . . . WAS IF THEY HAD STARTED ON OUR HOUSE! THE FIENDS! I leapt out of bed and raced to the window. Outside was . . . no one. Next door at number eighteen was a solitary labourer having a smoke. That couldn’t be it, surely. Say what you like about cigarettes, but at least they’re quiet.
Had I gone mad? Had I already become so conditioned to being woken by noise at 7 a.m. that even when it didn’t happen my mind thought it had? Could you get conditioned to do that? In just a week? And not just me, but Bibi and Lucy too, because Lucy was staring about and Bibi was wailing again.
I heard another smash. The labourer took another puff. I staggered out the front door. Outside was a skip, a building truck and builders. Not outside number eighteen. Outside number twenty-two, the other half of our semi. They were at it too, and their first task, it seemed, was to start smashing away at our common wall.
We’d known it was coming. We just hadn’t known when.
The owners were a thirty-something couple who’d bought the place after Dorothy died a few months before. Dorothy had lived in number twenty-two from age seven until her death at 84. Seventy-seven years. Since 1925. We had got to know her well, and she had told us stories about what Bondi used to be like: open spaces, big blocks, a quarry up the road and not a developer to be seen. She had lived with her parents and four siblings in the two-bedroom semi. In summer, two of the boys would sleep on the porch and in winter they would move into the lounge room. Now she was alone, long ago widowed and with no kids. Whenever she needed something she would rap on the common wall with her walking stick. She often called me in to replace light bulbs for her. Invariably, when I turned on the one she pointed out to test it, it would work perfectly. Dorothy would look at it in confusion as if it was playing a trick on her, but also with fear because she knew her mind was failing. It couldn’t be a good grey zone to be in, being aware enough to know you were losing it.
She died in hospital quickly and left half her house to a distant relative and the other half to the church. That’s right, the church. Who does that anymore? When the house was sold, Alan and Sarah moved in and it was obvious they were going to renovate. Dorothy’s house looked like someone had lived in it for 77 years.
When you live next to a building site you know that it’s going to be noisy, but you also know that it’s not going to be noisy all the time. Building is a linear process; things have to be done in a particular order. Once demolition is complete, the footings have to be measured and dug. Then the bricks, scaffolding and sand have to arrive, then the bricklayers have to be ready. Along the way are all sorts of other jobs requiring various specialists that have have to be done in precisely the right order. Every contractor is juggling five different jobs and any delay by one of them stops the whole process. So we knew that the noise next door wouldn’t be continuous. We’d get the odd day off. But two sites going, one either side, changed that. As I lay in bed staring at the ceiling and listening to the new builders smash away, I sort of knew that on any day when one site had a delay, the other would be going flat out.
We didn’t just want to go to the places people usually go on Sundays, like Manly and Darling Harbour. We also wanted to explore suburbs we didn’t know.
Haberfield is an inner-west suburb between Leichhardt, Five Dock and the harbour. It is full of lovely old free-standing Federation-style homes that reminded me of Adelaide, where my grandparents used to live. No semis, no flats, lots of verandahs. And it’s quiet. There are the planes—it’s under the flight path—but other than that, and despite being bounded by two of Sydney’s busiest roads, Parramatta Road and Wattle Street, it’s a bubble of quiet.
One reason it was quiet was that there was no building going on. In Bondi there were eight building sites within 100 metres of our home. In Haberfield we saw just one in three hours of wandering round, and even on that one no one was actually doing anything. It’s a Federation suburb, which means that no one can alter the exterior of their house without the council being convinced that the changes will be in keeping with the character of the suburb. So you can’t bung on a second storey or extend out the back unless the new bit is going to look as though it’s been there from the start. In fact, you can’t even paint your house without approval. In Haberfield a major development is putting a new flyscreen on the kitchen window.
The council also requires that a reasonable ratio is maintained between the size of the house and the total size of the block, which prevents the creation of the squashed look so common in Sydney. The suburb feels like a protected pocket from the fifties, a throwback to when men wore ties on the weekend and everyone on TV and radio spoke with those clipped, fake-sounding English accents. It’s a suburb from a bygone era, from the deep distant past before everyone was obsessed with building. I bet all those TV shows about renovating rate badly in Haberfield. Jamie Durie could wander around unnoticed.
Haberfield is an architectural feast for the eyes and I was looking hard. Not the way you look about when you’re walking on streets you’ve walked down hundreds of times before, but really looking, and really listening, like you do when you are overseas. Being in a suburb of Sydney you haven’t visited before isn’t as exciting as being in Paris, but it can still provoke curiosity, and even excitement.
The first person we met was a seventy-something lady standing out the front of her gnome-filled front garden. She was wearing a windcheater with a big ‘Australia’ on it which matched the flag in her front yard. The gnomes were obviously Australian gnomes.
As we wandered by she spied Bibi sitting on my shoulders.
‘Ohhh! I could eat him,’ she said.
We said ‘Hello’ but I kept a firm grip of Bibi’s ankles in case she meant it.
‘You’re not from here, are you? Have you walked far?’
‘No, we’re just having a look around. We’re from Bondi,’ said Lucy.
‘Ohhh!’ she said as if Lucy’s final word had been ‘Saturn’.
<
br /> She looked up at Bibi again. ‘I could eat him.’
I know it doesn’t matter if someone mistakes the sex of your child, especially if the child is under one. It’s hard to tell from looks and Bibi was wearing a blue top. It’s a perfectly understandable mistake. But I had to correct her.
‘She,’ I said, ‘she’s a she.’
‘Oh well,’ she said, smiling all the wider, ‘he’s lovely anyway.’ She looked up at Bibi. ‘I want to gobble you up.’
Bibi apparently loved this idea, giggling hysterically. I made a mental note that at some point we’d have to explain to her to just say ‘no’ to cannibals.
Lucy also took the gender-bending to heart. Later that day, after I’d gone to work, she dressed Bibi up in knee-high pink socks so that no one could possibly fail to get the message she was a girl. The two of them hopped on a bus to Bondi Junction and the man in the next seat gave Bibi a huge smile then said, ‘Hello, Mister Pink Socks!’
As we got nearer the centre of Haberfield it became clear that Joan of Arc is very big there. She has a church, a school and a retirement village all named after her. Why a retirement village? Surely the last thing you want as you near the end of your life, and look back at what you have and have not achieved, is to be constantly reminded of someone who changed the world before she turned nineteen. What a way to feel inadequate.
Perhaps the idea is to remind those occupants who otherwise might be tempted to feel sorry for themselves, as they witness the gradual decay of their minds and bodies, that they ought to at least be grateful they weren’t burnt at the stake in their teens.
Despite all the beautiful Federation stuff, the architectural highlight of Haberfield is undoubtedly a house with a pillar on either side of the driveway connected by a miniature, to scale Sydney Harbour bridge. What a pleasure it would be to drive your car under the bridge each night. You’d feel like you were the captain of the Fairstar.
There are a lot of churches in Haberfield. Saint Joan’s was the Catholic one and within 200 metres there were also Baptist, Anglican and Uniting, plus the Shalom Community Church, the name of which completely confused us. They were all lined up in a row like varieties of apple in a greengrocer’s.
St Oswald’s Anglican church had a sign outside it. There were ten lines in Korean, then two words in English: ‘Young Couples’, followed by a few more lines in Korean then two more English words: ‘Powerful Silvers’. We guessed they were classes. Who ‘Young Couples’ were was obvious, but ‘Powerful Silvers’? Presumably they are retirement village members trying to find their inner Joan of Arc. Silver is the new grey.
There weren’t many people on the streets of Haberfield. I was used to the busy streets of Bondi filled with backpackers trying to work out the best way to waste the day, and unemployed actors, either alone checking their mobiles every 14 seconds to see if their agent had rung with the Big Offer or clustering in groups to reassure themselves that they weren’t the only ones feeling desperate and alone. Pretty much everyone I had seen so far in Haberfield was old enough to live at the retirement village arm of Joan of Arc’s Haberfield empire. I did spot one twenty-something bloke with a skateboard, but he seemed to know riding it outside the Baptist church would unleash Footloose-style reprisals and was carrying it as inconspicuously as he could. As soon as he crossed the suburb boundary at Parramatta Road he’d breathe a sigh of relief and jump on again.
It was only when we got onto the main drag, Ramsay Street, that the Italian presence in Haberfield became obvious and the place developed a bit of a buzz. Ramsay Street is full of cafés, barbers, real estate agents and cake shops.
We walked past the Quality Butcher (I always wonder if that’s like when people say ‘Okay, I’m going to tell you the truth now’, protesting a bit too much) and a bit further on a jeweller’s shop offering a Genuine Sale, presumably to differentiate it from all the other jewellers with fake sales on.
There was Ed Wilson Electrical, and right above it Ron Wilson Discounts. If the stuff Ron was discounting were the same electrical products Ed was selling, they’d have some frosty Christmases.
In the barber shop was a man being shaved with a cutthroat. A delightful relic of an era gone by, or just very lazy on the customer’s part and a way of showing passers-by he had a bit too much time and money?
The chocolate shop was a world of its own, boasting work by talented choc-sculptors. The highlight was a chocolate toolkit, with a four-inch long chocolate screwdriver, pliers, spanner and hammer. It was beautiful in the way that normal screwdrivers, pliers, spanners and hammers aren’t. The dilemma would be whether or not you could bring yourself to destroy the beauty by eating them. As if eating chocolate doesn’t create enough guilt as it is, with these the eater would have to cope with the additional burden of destroying great art.
Atmosphere is a strange thing. You can break it down into components—appearance and number of buildings, landscape and people, friendliness of people, smiles per hectare—but in the end it’s just there. Haberfield’s atmosphere was friendly and unthreatening. It wasn’t that of a suburb barely holding in check a manic exuberance and energy that could explode onto the streets at any moment (although I don’t want to underestimate the excitement that the forthcoming St Joan of Arc’s school fete, featuring ‘pass the footy’, a basket stall and jams was generating, and who knows what crazy things might happen if some of those powerful silvers turned up), but it felt nice to be there.
We entered a café at the corner of Ramsay and Dalhousie and it was Italian splendour. A glass counter full of cakes, the smell of coffee and a friendly bustle that was at odds with the quiet of the back streets. It could have been there unchanged for 50 years, apart from the television screen in the corner playing video hits. No one was looking at the screen, except in that zombie way you do when a television screen catches your eye. Why was it on? Why was it there? I feel the same way in train stations. Maybe I’ll become a selective Amish, stringently opposed to not all but just some technological developments— public video screens, property development, concrete front fence/walls, leafblowers and car alarms.
I ordered the two unhealthiest-looking biscuity-cake things I could find and my first cup of coffee in ten months. I love coffee but have to give it up every year or so because I keep needing to increase my dosage to get the hit. I start by having one a day but inevitably soon get to the stage where if I don’t have one by 11. 07 a.m., another by 2. 17 p.m. and a third by 5. 45 p.m. the wheels fall off the wagon, and I become a headachy grump who can only think about where my next cup is coming from. It’s sort of like being a heroin addict except nowhere near as inconvenient, illegal, hard to give up or expensive. And you don’t end up knicking your parents’ DVD player.
My first cup in ten months was everything I had been dreaming about. Each sip seemed to increase tenfold my power to be exuberant, joyful, kind, compassionate, strong, loving and determined. Coffee is, however, a tragic example of the diminishing power of repetition. The first one in ten months makes me feel like Superman, the second like Batman and the third like only a slightly better version of myself. Before you know it, all that having one does is to allow me to stop thinking Man, I need a coffee, for a while. But for the time being I was riding the wave.
‘It feels like being on holidays,’ said Lucy.
It seemed ridiculous. We had driven for half an hour to a place we’d passed hundreds of times before and all we had done was walk around. What’s more, my next stop was work. But Lucy was right. It was new, it was unfamiliar and we were exploring. While it would be wonderful to be exploring somewhere exotic like Rome or the Borneo jungle, the best part of exploring isn’t being somewhere exotic, it’s being somewhere new. New places pull you in through your senses, through your eyes and ears so that you become aware and alive. And we were somewhere new, even if it was only 10 kilometres from home.
I wondered if the secret to creating enjoyment was as simple as trying to ensure you continually had new ex
periences? Could feeding the senses a new dish of sights, smells and sounds each day be all that was needed to content and stimulate us? It couldn’t be that easy. What if searching for new experiences itself became a habit? Would the fun wear off? Could going to new places and seeing new things become as routine as catching the bus to work? I once met an American in Indonesia who boasted that he had been travelling for eighteen months. He seemed cocky about it, but also bored. I told him I was going to see Mount Bromo, an active volcano, and asked if he wanted to come.
‘Another active volcano? No thanks, I’ve seen plenty.’
I took another sip of my perfect, powerful coffee. Was it just the addictive stuff that got less fun the more you did it, or was it everything? Would the wonderful effect of the fish at the aquarium wear off if you worked there? Another day, another Snub-nosed Dartfish? Was anything exempt from this cruel law of diminishing returns?
Our month of Sundays was ostensibly about escaping the builders. But it seemed to me, as I sipped my coffee and felt my mind racing with nearly forgotten caffeine-induced power, that it might also serve another purpose—to try to learn how to enjoy each day as much as I could, to try to figure out how to be able to suck as much happiness out of each 24-hour period as there was on offer. It sounded simple, but I wasn’t sure that it was.
At high school I had a friend called Matt who was a superman. He was in the first eight at rowing, the first fifteen at footy, he was the lead in the school play, captain of the debating team, tall, strong, in the top English and Maths sets, and a smart, funny, interested guy who hadn’t let his success go to his head. Naturally he became school captain. At university he was a member of all the societies, still a super-sportsman, and was elected to the students’ representative council. A lot of us wanted to be him.
A Month of Sundays Page 4
