‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
‘Um . . . where is it?’
‘Somewhere around.’
‘Right. Maybe we should check. Like, what if you can’t find it?’
‘I’ll find it.’
‘But can you check before they go because if you can’t find it then . . .’
‘All right!
’ ‘Thanks.’
. . .
‘Their place has got an alarm, hasn’t it?’
‘Hey?’
‘Your parents. They’ve got an alarm?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you know how to turn it off and on?’
‘There’s a code.’
‘Right.’
. . .
‘You know the code for your parents’ place? Do you know what it is?’
‘They’ll tell me before they go.’
‘But maybe we should find out now, just in case . . . don’t you think . . . we should get it before they go? . . . Lucy? . . . don’t you think we should . . . Where are you going? Why are you running . . . I’m just trying to make sure . . . LUCY . . . DON’T PULL YOUR HAIR . . . COME BACK.’
. . .
‘Lucy.’
‘Mmm.’
‘I think I’m coping with the builders a bit better now.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Do you think that?’
‘Yes. I’m coping better.’
‘No, I meant do you think I’m coping better.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do you?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘But I’m less stressed about it. Apart from when they use that big drill at number eighteen, or they do something on the adjoining wall at number twenty-two. Which they do quite a bit, actually. That still makes me stressed.’Cos it’s loud. And getting woken up by them. That still makes me stressed. But apart from that I’m more relaxed, don’t you think? Mainly anyway. Not all the time but often. More than I was anyway. A bit. Don’t you think, Luce? Lucy? . . . Lucy? Bibi? Are you awake? How do you think I’m coping?’
While our efforts to see bits of Sydney had begun as a desperate ploy to escape the builders, we were gradually getting used to them. The building wasn’t any quieter, drilling and crashing noises were still our constant companions, and in fact now there was a third site, directly across the road. This lot had obviously discovered that about every fourth day we got a moment or two of silence when both number eighteen and number twenty-two were between crashes, and had started up a second-storey balcony-addition thingy to fill the hole in the noise market. But we had reached an accommodation with number eighteen about their radio, whereby they kept it up the back of their site away from our bedroom and so only flooded our living area with that variety of noise. That wasn’t as bad because we had a stereo there and could fight back. It made it a fairer contest.
One morning there was a knock on the door. I opened it to see the foreman, blond-haired with a matching goatee and, like most of number eighteen’s builders, a Kiwi. I knew his name was Johno because when you have lots of builders over the fence shouting at each other all day you soon learn their names.
‘Hi. Sorry to disturb you, but I just wanted to know if you’d mind if we swept up the mess on your deck. Sorry, some stuff came over your fence yesterday and I would have come over and cleaned it up then, but you weren’t here and I didn’t want to come onto your property without your permission. So if it’s okay we can clean it up now, or if not just let us know when’s a convenient time.’
Holy shit. Was he naturally this nice or did every foreman have to do a course in ‘sucking up to the neighbours after you trash their property’ before they got their certificate?
‘Now’s fine. Thanks,’ was all I could get out.
‘Okay. Sorry to disturb you.’
As I shut the door, I wondered if he would have been that polite if we hadn’t lodged an objection with council to the positioning of their big airconditioner. With that outstanding, they had an interest in keeping us onside. Or was I getting paranoid? Maybe he was just nice.
But if he was, that wasn’t all good. Sure, if he was nice it would be easier to ask him not to drill outside our bedroom window at seven in the morning but the downside was that it made it more difficult to view the builders as a pack of devils who’d come to ruin our lives, and I found viewing them that way sort of comforting. It allowed me to feel it was all unfair and I was a poor helpless victim and one day they’d all be sorry. It was hard to maintain that view when, just as I was getting a good head of isn’t-it-all-unfair steam up over the concrete they had splattered on the side of our house, Johno would appear and courteously ask whether it was okay if he washed it off now, or if I’d prefer that he did it tomorrow.
At number twenty-two the builders didn’t even have a radio! I looked them up in the Guinness Book of World Records and sure enough there they were: Only Builders in the World Not to Work With a Radio On.
As we came to the end of September, we looked forward to and savoured the quiet weekends, or more usually just the quiet Sundays as they often worked Saturdays, but after a few weeks we didn’t feel we needed to escape the house every single morning. Sometimes we’d just sit tight, turn the stereo up and pretend they weren’t there. As September drew to an end I wondered if we’d really get around to moving to the in-laws.
Then, at the start of October, we bought a house.
We knew we wanted to move someday. A three-level backyard with sixteen possible things to fall off was fine for a crawling baby but would be tempting fate with a walking toddler. When the building started it had motivated us to have a bit of a look around. We saw a house in the same street that was a bit bigger and had a horizontal backyard, talked to the bank and realised that we couldn’t really afford it. Still, we may as well go to the auction as practice, for when we were serious.
It was at a posh hotel in the eastern suburbs, on the second floor in a plush conference room. All the people from the real estate agents were in black tie. Auctions, like golf, apparently have dress codes. They were trying to create a sense of occasion. We shuffled in and I thought I was being clever picking a seat up the back, so we’d get a view of everything and know exactly what was going on. But we had no idea what was going on. The people in black tie knew what was going on. The house we were interested in was second on a list of eighteen. It took a long time to get a first bid which, when it came from the other side of the room, was only about $30,000 under our limit. We thought we were gone, but Lucy found a voice and threw a bid in. Just for practice. The other side popped another $10,000 without hesitation. We were $10,000 away from our limit. Lucy looked at me. I shrugged. I didn’t know what to do. She bid. We waited for the other side to respond. They didn’t. For anyone to respond. No one did. I started to sweat. I sat there calmly, which wasn’t what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was to get up and run screaming out of the room, but I thought that might be interpreted as another bid. Auctioneers call bids on nasal hairs rustling in the wind. We waited. So did the auctioneer. He waited a very long time. Nothing. He passed the house in. It hadn’t reached its reserve price. The agent approached and beckoned us outside.
He was a kind, gentle shark with a limp. In black tie. He told us that he liked us, that we seemed nice. He said he didn’t want to sell it to the other people who had bid, because he didn’t like them. They were playing silly buggers. He’d much prefer it if we got the house because we were nice.
He was warm. The fact that he liked us made me feel warm. We didn’t know what was going on and here was this seasoned pro who said he liked us and wanted to help us. How lucky was that?
We had to help him to help us, though. Of course. That made sense. If we could stretch a bit more, make an offer a bit more than our final bid, it would just give him something to go back to the owner with and then everything would be all right and the house would be ours.
I told him we’d love to but we’d reached our l
imit.
‘Limits,’ he said, nodding his head. He understood. He knew about limits. When I bought my first house, he said, I had a limit and you know what? I went way over it. It was scary, he said, but it was the best move I ever made. Limits are things that hold scared people back from achieving their dreams, he said. If only we could stretch a bit, he said, just a bit, then the house would be ours. That. House. Would. Be. Ours. And we would live happily ever after. And the other couple wouldn’t live happily ever after. We would win and they would lose. And he wanted us to win because he liked us. But we had to help him. If only we could just stretch a bit.
We stretched a bit.
‘Just a bit more,’ he said, ‘and they’ll grab it, I’m sure.’
I shook my head.
‘Come on, James,’ he said, ‘what’s wrong with you?’ Was that a hint of contempt in his voice? He sounded like an exasperated abseiling instructor who couldn’t quite persuade a student to go over the edge. He knew it was for the best, he knew things would turn out okay, but we were frustrating him with our lack of nerve. I could tell he was disappointed in me. I’d let him down. He liked us, he was trying to help us, and here we were throwing it all back in his face. Maybe soon he wouldn’t like us any more and he’d offer the house to the other couple and they’d be the ones who got to live happily ever after.
What was I, a wimp? Wouldn’t we regret letting this go for the rest of our lives? Were we the sort of timid, terrified people who were too scared to ever do anything? No. God-dammit we weren’t.
We stretched a bit more.
Then he looked earnest, impressed. He knew it was a big step. It had taken nerve but we hadn’t failed him. We had come through.
‘I think we’ve got a shot at it,’ he said, softly, intensely, like you might, in war, say, ‘I’ll circle round the back and attack from the rear.’ He said ‘we’, not ‘you’ because he was on our side. He turned, still looking earnest, but as he walked over to the owner I bet he was smiling.
So we bought the house.
He returned with the owners and there were smiles and handshakes all round. The owners were smiling hard to hide their disappointment at not getting as much money as they wanted, and we were smiling hard to hide our fear at suddenly plunging deep into debt. Only the real estate agent’s smile was genuine—he was on commission.
The catch, and the only reason we had been able to afford the house, was that there were tenants with a lease in place for another year. So even buying a house didn’t give us an escape from the builders.
That night, 3 a. m.
‘Lucy?’
‘Yes.’
‘You awake?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you been awake all night thinking, “What have we done”?’
‘Yes.’
‘What have we done?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Can we afford it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you scared?’
‘Yes. Are you scared?’
‘No.’
. . .
‘Lucy?’
‘Yes?’
‘I am scared, really.’
‘I know.’
‘Oh.’
. . .
‘Lucy?’
‘Mmmm?’
‘I’m really scared.’
‘Mmmm.’
I kept trying to tell myself how clever we’d been. In the middle of a property boom it was smart, wasn’t it, to borrow a heap, buy a tenanted house and then in a year’s time sell our original house because in the meantime our original house would have appreciated by so much that we’d end up owing not all that much.
Unfortunately, pretty much the day after we bought the house the property bubble burst and our strategy of buying before we sold started to look shithouse. My estimates of what we could sell our current house for went from looking conservative to frighteningly optimistic very quickly. I started to panic and found out that instead of using spare mental space to plan places to go and things to do, I spent the day doing maths— endless financial calculations involving interest rates, capital gains tax, agent’s commission, land tax, rent, stamp duty, salary, income tax and lawyers’ fees whirled around in my mind again and again.
I had visions of the property market turning sour, of our place depreciating 20 per cent and being left having bought a new place when everything was expensive and having to sell our old place when everything was cheap, resulting in a debt that was way too big. We would be the only couple in town to have lost money in the property boom. Those idiots who had bought at the top of bubble, and sold after it popped. Middle-class morons.
Or even worse, what if no one wanted to buy our house? No one at all. Ever. How could I ever have thought it was worth that much? It’s got a vertical backyard. Our house could be on the market forever. It could be the one house in Sydney that will never ever sell. Never ever. It would be famous. ‘Look,’ the tourist guides would say as their bus drove past, ‘that’s the house that will never sell.’
For the first time ever I read the financial pages. Every day in every paper there was a different expert opinion about what would happen, just as at the casino at every table there is a different expert who can tell you which way the cards are running or the dice are rolling. And while just like at the casino all the experts confidently and adamantly disagreed, somehow it was reassuring to read a convincing and well-written analysis, because it suggested that there was some science to it all, that we weren’t just playing a giant game of roulette.
I could feel that old, gnawing, anxious feeling beginning to eat into my days again.
We decided the only safe thing to do was to sell number twenty as soon as we could and rent somewhere until the tenants’ lease was up. Out the window went our plans of staying at Lucy’s parents’ house while they were away and out went our morning adventures. Instead, the next month was spent scraping and spac-fillering and painting and fixing and polishing and weeding and sweeping and lugging dirt and chucking out crap and hiding the rest of the crap that we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to chuck out in the roof, and trying to work out what optical tricks we could play to make our house look bigger, our garden flatter and the building sites next door less like building sites next door.
By the end of the month the house looked really nice. Funny how you only get it looking good when you’re about to leave. You know how it is. You move in with big plans, you have an initial burst then one day you get sick of it and leave the rest until later. We had left plenty until later.
We talked to real estate agents. It’s a waste of time asking a real estate agent advice about when’s the best time to sell. Whatever the circumstances, their answer will be ‘Now’, because they want your money now. If you have ugly building sites either side of your house they will say ‘Sell Now’. If a law was passed saying that in two months’ time every house will treble in value and anyone who sells before then will be put to death they will still look you sincerely in the eye and tell you that it is in your best interests to ‘Sell Now’. They want your money now.
So we spruced our place up, put it on the market and even had people through a couple of times. But then interest rates went up and no one seemed to want to buy anywhere anymore, much less a semi with a sloped backyard next to constant drilling. We pulled the pin and decided to wait.
It was only when we made this decision that I thought about how different my October had been to my September. In September we had gone exploring and discovering. In October we had been sensible, played it safe and learnt little. September had been about going out and looking. During October we stayed in and painted. September was about parks, streets and faces we had never seen before, and October was about interest rates, scrubbing walls and meeting real estate agents we never wanted to see again. September was about enjoying being somewhere unfamiliar, October was about trying to get secure at home. September was broadening, October was narrowing. September had b
een about the moment, about now, October was about the future. In the end, September was fun and October wasn’t.
The difference in what we did in those two months had a big effect on me. September had been interesting, exciting and stimulating. Empowering too, in that we had worked out how not to let the builders make us miserable. But in October I became so preoccupied with doing the right thing financially and improving the value of our prime asset that the simple enjoyment I had derived from our expeditions ebbed away. I went back to plotting and planning.
I fell back into the bad habit of worrying; worrying about the money, worrying about getting the house fixed up in time, worrying about whether buying the other house had been a mistake. I worried about whether I’d have time to go and buy more paint and finish doing the bathroom door before I had to go to work, and about whether the paint tin would have one of those really difficult-to-open lids that took twenty minutes’ levering with a screwdriver to open. I worried about whether I’d even be able to find the screwdriver to lever the tin open with, and about what, if I couldn’t find the screwdriver, I’d be able to find to use instead. I worried about everything.
Once again, I worried to try to convince myself I had things under control. And the more I worried about one thing, the more I found others to worry about. So in September I didn’t worry at all about my radio ratings going down and getting the sack, or about checking that my fly was done up five times before I got on the bus, or about whether any more Robbie Williams songs would be added to our play list, and if they were whether I would take a stand and refuse to play them. But in October, because I had all my worry synapses revved up and looking for action, I worried about all those things.
Toward the end of October I began to wonder why, having just in September discovered a great way to have fun, I had let it slip away. I realised how much time I’d spent thinking about things that gave me no pleasure—money, property and interest rates—and how far I’d drifted away from going out each morning and enjoying myself.
So in November we decided to get into it again. We weren’t going to sell our house until next year, it had had its lick of paint, the building all around was still way too loud, so off we went.
A Month of Sundays Page 11
