As we headed back to the jetty an unkempt front garden reminded me of the one I used to pretend to be a gardener in as community service at school. We had a choice of cadets, scouts or gardening for an old person, and I’d love to say I wanted to help others much more than I wanted to learn how to hold a gun or discover the joys of knot-tying, but the real reason I picked community service was that it was a known soft option. Mrs Anderson was an 83-year-old widow who kept offering to pay me for my work, not because it was good but because she didn’t want to be a charity case. Every Sunday morning I’d visit her and prune and weed as directed. Sort of. My heart wasn’t in it, and she soon noticed. After my fifth Sunday she came out at the end of the hour, had a look around then said she thought it would be better if I didn’t come any more.
‘Why?’
‘Because you don’t do a proper job. You don’t care.’
The obvious truth of what she was saying didn’t prevent me from feeling outraged. I tried to persuade her that my attitude was fine, it was just that I was hopelessly incompetent, but she was adamant. And correct. I didn’t care. I had been doing some very poor gardening. As I rode my bike home I felt slightly guilty. And relieved that I didn’t have to go back. The next day I just felt relieved.
Rydalmere was the first place we’d been to that we had written off. As we got back on the ferry, once again I felt slightly guilty, but by the time we arrived back at Circular Quay I didn’t feel guilty anymore. I just felt relieved that I didn’t have to go back.
The trip back was, as it always is, not quite as good as the trip there, but because we were on a ferry it was still good. The Germans didn’t rejoin us at Homebush which worried me. Either the stadium suburb’s turbo-charged boredom had sapped their will and they were staring stupor-like at a velodrome, unable to summon the will to move, or perhaps, even more frighteningly, they had found Homebush interesting. I’m no fan of cultural stereotypes but if they had found it interesting, then surely the one about Germans being very dull had just been reinforced.
We made one mistake on the return trip. We bought the paper. And because we had it, I read it, and suddenly I didn’t feel like we were on holiday any more, looking out at whatever caught the eye, but as if we were commuting, using the time we needed to spend getting from A to B as efficiently as possible by sucking in all the news we could. It was a little thing, but it made a big difference.
My final word on ferries is this: catch one soon. I don’t care where. Please, you’ll enjoy it. Some people want to change the world. I just want to persuade you to catch a ferry to somewhere you don’t necessarily need to go. Just for the trip.
nine
chemicals
Unlike Ivan who was always fussing about at number eighteen, Alan and Sally on the other side had the good sense to stay out of the way of their builders. The labourer there was a big Eastern European man with curly black hair and a perpetually cheerful face.
‘How old you think I am?’ he asked me one morning as he was wheelbarrowing loads of dirt up a steeply-angled plank into a skip.
I hate being asked that. You always have to estimate, then subtract ten years so as not to offend. Unless the asker is under twenty-five-ish, in which case you have to add on two years so as not to offend.
‘Um . . . gee (sixty minus ten equals), fifty?’
‘Sixty-two,’ he said proudly, the pride I assumed coming from the fact that he thought he looked younger than he was, rather than from the fact that, nearing the end of his working life, he was still a builder’s labourer.
‘Gosh.’
‘Sixty-two.’
‘Gee.’
‘Ya. Sixty-two.’He kept looking expectantly at me, as if I was supposed to show how amazed I was at his youthfulness by doing something more dramatic, like fainting.
‘There you go, hey,’ I said.
‘Sixty-two. How old you are?’
‘Thirty-seven.’
‘Really!’
‘Yeah.’
‘You look older. A lot older.’
‘Ah,’ I said, which was far more polite than saying what I wanted to say. I only said that under my breath after I went inside.
At number twenty-two they seemed to be doing almost all of their work on the common wall. They spent entire days bashing, belting and drilling into it, as if it had some vital information about where the gold was hidden and wouldn’t talk. What had the wall done to them? Before Dorothy died I had been inside her house and seen number twenty-two’s side of the wall and it had seemed to me to be a fine looking wall, a wall that other walls around the world could look up to and aspire to be like. There were no holes in it. It wasn’t falling apart. It wasn’t a spy. It may have needed a coat of paint but torturing it wasn’t going to achieve anything. Whenever they smashed at it my eyes would leap around the room looking for the builders, because the noise was so loud in our living room that surely they had to be inside our house doing it from this side. Then I’d go and grab Bibi because she would have started crying.
As they continued to bash away at the wall, and the wall continued bravely refusing to talk, cracks started to appear on our side of the wall near the roof, and the paint started to come off. I first noticed it when I was making a cup of tea and a line of fine white powder trickled into it from above. I looked up and saw the roof flaking. I stared at the wall, through it to the noise and the builders, and shouted.
‘I DON’T FUCKING TAKE FUCKING SUGAR.’
Then I felt embarrassed and hoped they hadn’t heard me.
The hypnotherapy, needless to say, didn’t work. Eventually I got around to wondering, since I was incredibly anxious almost all of the time, whether I might have an anxiety disorder. In early 1997, six months after I started to get anxious, I saw a doctor and got a referral to see a psychiatrist, to try to find out if I did.
I paced nervously up and down the street outside. To walk through the door into the office of a psychiatrist was to admit that I had a mental health problem. I didn’t have to admit that to see a hypnotherapist. I had friends who had seen hypnother-apists to help them give up smoking or to forget about a girlfriend who didn’t love them anymore. But I didn’t know anyone who said they had a mental health problem.
Things felt out of control. I was scared of not being able to control my continual worrying, which sounded to me like a mental health problem. So I went in.
Eventually I was shown into the doctor’s room. He instantly impressed me as being very, very smart. That was good. I answered all sorts of questions about my habits and thought patterns: did I do this? did I worry about that? I tried to answer as fully as I could, but in retrospect I realise that I slanted my answers to give the impression that my anxiety was a function of my job, when in reality it was a function of my mind.
The doctor eventually told me he didn’t think I had classic anxiety disorder. My problem was very specifically focused and I didn’t have the accompanying symptoms and behaviors usually associated with an anxiety disorder.
‘Really?’ I said, trying to sound calm. But I was devastated. If only I had run around the house continually re-checking that the windows were locked, and scrubbing already spotless cereal bowls, maybe I would have been in.
‘I do, however, think that you could benefit from antidepressants.’
WHAT!
So far I had managed to get through by clinging to the idea that I was a normal chap behaving very bravely in difficult circumstances. The idea that I might have an anxiety disorder was acceptable—barely—because an anxiety disorder was something unpleasant but eccentric, something that could be worked on and fixed, like a bad backhand, via exercises designed specifically to strengthen the mind.
When someone told me they had an anxiety disorder my eyebrows would go up, and then I’d look back at them and say, ‘Gosh. What’s that?’ But if they told me they were on antidepressants I’d look at the ground and wouldn’t quite know what to say.
Not that anyone would tell you. D
epression carried a big stigma that I didn’t want to go near.
‘But they’re chemicals,’ I said.
The doctor laughed. They probably don’t teach doctors to respond to questions from anxious and uncertain patients that way in medical school, but it worked. I like laughter, and I’d been missing it.
‘What do you think everything you eat is made of?’ he said. ‘Your lunch is chemicals.’
He persuaded me to give them a go. I was feeling so rundown and raw by this time it wasn’t hard. He sent me back to the GP, who sent me to the chemist. The anti-depressants helped a bit, I think, although it’s impossible to know. They certainly didn’t make my anxiety go away. That remained with me almost constantly, but the pills may have reduced its effect from really, really bad to really bad. And once I was taking them, I was too scared to stop taking them in case their absence made things worse.
Being on anti-depressants changed my view of the world. Not the drugs themselves. I didn’t notice any real effect on my thinking, and neither did Lucy, who I asked to assess whether I was changing in any way. I had visions of the drugs doing what they did in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, draining my brain of power and taking the edge off my thinking, but that didn’t happen. In fact, while I was on them I was as productive as I had ever been in my life. I wrote and performed a one-hour, one-man comedy show, did a lot of stand-up, worked as a lawyer three days a week, wrote five days a week for a breakfast radio show and did bits and pieces of TV and radio. Ironically, in my time of chronic anxiety when nothing was funny, my comedy career took off.
It wasn’t what the drugs did, it was the fact of being on them that changed my view of the world. The world had been something I had been pretty confident about up until September 1996. Since I had started to try and take control of what I was doing five years earlier things had turned out pretty well. Whereas most people I knew complained about their one job, I had two I enjoyed. Being a legal aid criminal lawyer had great cred in a way that being a corporate lawyer didn’t; I loved the way people’s reaction would turn 180 degrees after their second question.
‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a lawyer.’
‘Oh (how boring), what sort?’
‘Criminal.’
‘Really? (suddenly interested).’
Add on the cred provided by stand-up comedy and I, who had always found the approval of others very important (why else would you do stand-up comedy?), was perceived as a pretty interesting guy. I also had the additional confidence that comes with being in a good, secure relationship. All up, prior to September 1996 things were tickety-boo. After years of not really being sure why I was here, I was beginning to feel the world was my oyster.
I didn’t feel like that when I was on anti-depressants. The confidence I had was undermined by the fact that I knew I needed medication to look the world in the eye; that I couldn’t do it on my own. Ironically, one of the things that made me depressed was the very fact that I was on anti-depressants.
Eventually the anxiety ended. It just sort of faded away. There was no miracle cure, no moment of enlightenment or realisation, but one day I felt secure enough to start tentatively reducing my medication. A couple of months later, the idea that I had been on anti-depressants at all seemed ridiculous. I was back to normal—completely. While the anxiety I had experienced had been huge and horrible, I hadn’t been changed by it. It was as if I’d had a cold and now it was gone. I wasn’t damaged by what had happened, I wasn’t wiser because of it, I didn’t appreciate the everyday pleasures of life any more or less as a result, it was just over.
ten
loudspeakers in paradise
Ivan was hands-on at his new house. Literally. He didn’t just appear to watch and fuss and make unhelpful suggestions and try to hurry the builders up, like most owners. Ivan came to the site to work. Every day. There’s a hierarchy on building sites. It varies a bit around the top and middle but the labourers are always at the bottom. They are those without a trade, who haven’t done an apprenticeship, whose job it is to carry and dig. The carpenters, plumbers, electricians and tilers do their specialty bits, but the beating heart of a building site is the worker bees, the labourers. They do the hardest work and get paid the least and hence their status is the lowest. When Ivan came to work he did not come with the status of an owner. He did not come with the status of a labourer. He came in at a new level never before seen on a building site—below the labourers.
Ivan wanted to learn how to build a house and this was how he was going to do it. He would start, not at the bottom but one step below the bottom, and he would do all the jobs that the labourers, who got all the shitty jobs, found the most shitty and wanted to off-load. I had to admire his commitment.
The labourers had never had anyone to order around before, much less the guy who was paying their wages, and at first they found it hard.
‘Joe. Can you dig those footings out?’
‘Yeah. Fuckin’, um . . . Ivan . . . would you, . . . fuckin’ . . . um . . . if you like you can help me dig these footings out a bit. Would that be all right?’
And Ivan would look like he’d just been asked if he’d like some free gold. He’d dive in. Keen as. Awkward as, too (although no more than I would have been), but he was as enthusiastic as a property developer after a playground up for re-zoning. The shittier the job the more eagerly Ivan responded. It seemed that for him, after digging away a hill with a milk crate, anything was a step up. He never said no. He never complained. He would emerge at the end of the day with beard covered in dust, concrete through his hair, clothes filthy, cuts on his elbows, his big glasses hanging crooked and covered in smudged mud so that he had to peer over them to see, the smallest by 15 kilos and the oldest by twenty years, looking near death, but also proud. He was building his big house himself. The bigger it got, the prouder he looked.
Soon the labourers got used to ordering Ivan around. They had worked out he never said no and never complained, and that no matter what they asked him to do, he never pulled rank. They realised they didn’t have to treat him like an owner. When he arrived in the morning they started to greet him with a chorus of fake Russian accents.
‘Ivan!’
‘Ivan!’
‘Ivan!’
Their attitude towards him was basically one of acceptance, but they knew he wasn’t really one of them. They did this work because they had to. For Ivan, it was just his new hobby.
They also worked out that Ivan was not exactly Nureyev with workboots. No wonder, he’d never done it before. But the deferential tone that had initially been used to address him slowly disappeared, as did the question mark at the end of their invitations to work. The ‘fuckin’s’, always present somewhere in any next-door labourer sentence, changed in tone from friendly to businesslike.
‘Ivan, dig out those fuckin’ footings, okay.’
‘No, Ivan. Deeper. Fuck. And squared off at the end.’
‘Ivan, get the electric paint stripper and strip all the paint of that outside wall. Fuck.’
‘Ivan. You have to go quicker. The fuckin’ renderers are coming fuckin’ tomorrow.’
‘Watch it, Ivan! Fuck. You can’t put beams there! One could slip off and scone someone! Jesus!’
‘Fuck! Ivan!’
But he kept coming back for more. He was determination. Whatever work he was doing, carrying or paint-stripping or digging, he had the same look on his face, the one I’d first seen when he was milk-crating away the hill, the one that suggested that while what he was doing was not pleasant, he was damn well going to keep on until it was done. But I don’t think that meant he hated what he was doing. I think that’s just how he looked. Even when they all had a beer after work he looked like that.
At the end of each day, however, his look seemed to fractionally subside into something resembling satisfaction. It was the look of a kid who is finally allowed to join the cricket game. Status, in Sydney, is not just about where you live. But it is
mostly about where you live. The most important indicators of status, of the extent to which it appears from the outside that you have made it in Sydney, are, in descending order of importance:
1. Where you live.
Palm Beach is best (but only if it’s a weekend retreat) followed by east on the coast, east slightly inland, then the North Shore. After that, generally the further away a suburb is from the city and the beach the less status living there has, subject to the fact that being near any naturally occurring body of water (except a gutter stream after a storm) significantly ups status. There are, however, some rogue suburbs that break all the rules. For example, Strathfield, the Vaucluse of the west, is not near the beach, the city or water and yet if you say you live there people will think you’ve made it (unless you’re under 30, in which case they’ll think you’re old before your time).
Beach suburbs are, of course, high status and follow a rule. The status attached to Sydney’s southern beach suburbs increases the nearer you are to Bronte Beach. On the north side, the gradual decline in status north from Manly begins to reverse around Narrabeen. North of Narrabeen status rises steeply again through Bilgola to Avalon and Whale Beach until it peaks at Palm Beach.
Having a water view attracts huge points. But water views are so ridiculously rare and expensive in Sydney that it is enough to have a view of a house that has a water view because then you can say, ‘You can’t quite see the water from here, but see that house over there. They can see it . . . so yeah, we’re pretty close.’
It’s not just about the area you live in; the name of the suburb is important, too. Potts Point and Kings Cross are right next to each other just east of the city, but while Potts Point has high status, Kings Cross doesn’t (unless you’re a junkie, in which case it’s close to everything, that is, supply and places to shoot up).
Also in the east, Paddington and Woollahra are adjacent, but if you had two identical houses 10 metres apart, one either side of the dividing line, the Woollahra one would be worth substantially more.
A Month of Sundays Page 9
