A Month of Sundays

by James O'Loghlin

  We pulled into an old wooden wharf and alighted. To our right was a beach, and in front of us a road led up a slight hill to a cluster of shops. We turned left to walk, also up hill, to Jibbon Beach, a few hundred metres further east towards the headland.

  From what I had heard about Bundeena, I expected to see plain cottages on big blocks with chooks running free in the yard and a man wearing overalls sitting on the front step playing folksongs while the kids ran round playing with homemade toys and their mum wore a smock and painted designs on home-woven t-shirts. But no. A walk around Bundeena quickly answers the question of whether it is a part of Sydney or near Sydney. It is definitely a part of Sydney, and in Sydney, land near the water is land near the water. The houses are big, built close together and every third block is a building or renovation site. On most corners was an arrowed real estate sign pointing to ‘A Fantastic Lifestyle Alternative’ or a place that could ‘Make Your Dreams Reality’ (a slogan also popular in the sex and gambling industries).

  A couple of old weatherboard places remain, I suspect for a limited time only. One had a caravan in the front yard. Well, if you lived somewhere as beautiful as Bundeena, why would you want to go anywhere else for your holidays. Just pack everything into the car, back down the driveway and there you are, at the caravan. Sure cuts down on travelling time.

  Next to each other were two front yards, almost exactly the same size and shape but as different as could be. One was pure Aussie suburbia, 100 per cent lawn mowed to within a quarter inch of its life. The other was filled with native plants and bark mulch. Not as good for a game of cricket, but much better for blending in.

  Further down the road was a huge, six-bedroom, two-storey mansion, built right to the fence, and next to it a tiny fibro shack with tatty curtains and long-neglected grass on a block the same size.

  We came to a dirt track and followed it a hundred metres to the beach. No more houses now; the bush came right to the beach and we had entered the national park. We didn’t enter it very far, though, as Lucy started to get stomach cramps. We slumped down on the sand and as Bibi and I flirted with the waves she tried to ride them out. She wasn’t pregnant, they weren’t period related, they were a mystery.

  Across the water we could see back to Sydney and make out the smokestacks of the Kurnell oil refinery. The beach faced land, not ocean, so the waves were tiny. A kid sprinted out of the water and dived face-down into the beach. He stood up looking like one of the Three Stooges with sand instead of cream pie smeared all over his face, then ran and jumped back into the water.

  As Bibi wandered about and Lucy moaned I dived in too, then sat at the edge of the water. I had put my hand down as I sat, and it, too, was covered in sand. A wave, bigger than the rest, made by a boat or a jetski minutes ago, washed up beyond the others, and came just far enough for me to be able to reach out and wash the sand off my hand. It was as if a waiter had offered a finger bowl.

  It was a perfect moment. And then it was gone, replaced by another.

  Bibi sat on the sand, slapping it with delight with a smile as wide as a baby can have. Meanwhile Lucy lay crouched, trying to find a position where her cramps were only horrible rather than agonising. So we decided to walk, or in her case hobble, back to the wharf. As we made our way back up the path, a barrel- and bare-chested bloke was coming our way.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said ‘are you a local?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Do you know if there’s a doctor around?’

  ‘Yes. Up on Liverpool Road.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘You know the shops. You go past there heading out of town, then take the first right and the next one is Liverpool. There’s a sign.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks.’

  ‘No worries. Don’t like your chances, but.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘He’s never there on a Saturday. You can knock on the door, but he won’t be there.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘See ya,’ he said cheerfully, and with a wave was off to the beach. Such a friendly mixture of helpfulness and unhelpfulness.

  We slowly made out way back to the shops where Lucy got a drink of dry ginger ale and collapsed on a seat in the park. Bibi investigated the playground while I rather uncertainly flitted between them, trying to work out who needed more attention. It was Bibi. All I could do for Lucy was stand about and say things like ‘Does it still hurt?’, which wasn’t really very helpful at all.

  She managed to stagger back to the ferry and collapse, lying face-down on my rucksack. People were staring and I felt like making a public announcement to all my fellow passengers that I was a nice guy and we hadn’t just had an argument or a fight, but something told me that might just draw more attention.

  Behind us two old ladies, once they realised they couldn’t talk about us because we were only a few inches away, complained about a woman smoking outside at the front of the ferry.

  ‘It’s blowing in all over me. You can hardly breathe,’ said one.

  It wasn’t and you could. I knew, because I was between the smoker and her and couldn’t smell a whiff.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said to the conductor, ‘that woman is smoking. You’re not allowed to smoke, are you?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure. I’ll just check the regulations,’ he said and looked up and around at the very large and prominent sign stuck on the ferry’s front wall, 2 metres in front of the old lady and directly in her line of sight. ‘It says “Smoking is permitted on the front deck”,’ he said.

  He smiled and moved on. Good on him. The woman looked pissed off.

  ‘Bundeena’s being ruined, you know,’ she went on to her companion. ‘Now there’s developers everywhere. Look!’ pointing to another huge house springing up on the hill. ‘There’s another one. Our neighbours are trying to build a McMansion. The plans are awful. Right to the fence. Looking in our bedroom window. Honestly. We’re not talking to them any more.’

  ‘In the old days people respected other people’s space,’ said her friend.

  ‘That’s right. We’re going to fight it, though. It’s wrong. I’ve a friend in Melbourne who fought and fought and she won in the end. Look at them all. All those huge houses with huge balconies and huge lawns, and there’s no one on any of them.’

  I looked up at the cliff and she was right. Eight houses in a row, with views on offer of a spectacular Sydney Saturday, in a million-dollar location, and not an occupant to be seen.

  ‘And it’s not just now,’ she went on. ‘You never see anyone on them. I don’t know why they build them.’

  I remembered how at council meetings people who were trying to add a balcony onto their house that would overlook another house often tried to justify it by saying, ‘But it won’t really affect them. We’ll hardly ever be on it.’ I always thought they were lying but perhaps they weren’t. Maybe they don’t use their balconies; they just want them, like a kid wants a shiny red toy.

  I remembered also, how during that period of my life which I had wasted in anxiety, it didn’t matter where I was. When I was in the grip of permanent fear, it didn’t matter if I was overlooking the harbour or locked in a cupboard, because whatever location I went to, my head and its problems came with me.

  I thought about our street, about how there was no correlation at all between how much money people seemed to have and how happy they appeared to be. The people in the big houses didn’t seem to be any happier than anyone else. In fact, they seemed less happy, more worried. The most cheerful bloke I knew in the street, Colin, was also the only person I knew who was renting in it. Someone once said that whoever dies with the most toys wins. Incorrect. Whoever dies having been the happiest for the longest wins.

  I also thought about how Bundeena hadn’t been the alternative paradise we had imagined, and how, with Lucy in such pain, the day hadn’t been the perfect end to our adventures that we’d hoped for.

  And about the fact that in my life there would probably be thousand
s of things that would go wrong in some way or other before I died, and that I couldn’t expect to have perfect moments like that one on Jibbon Beach all the time. But I also realised that a couple of years ago my thinking was so wrong that I couldn’t see a perfect moment anywhere, any time, and that in my time dominated by anxiety I might have wasted thousands of them because I wouldn’t let myself experience them.

  The memory of one returned, of a walk along Bondi Beach with Lucy when the pleasure I might have gained from experiencing the moment had been undermined by the onset of another anxiety attack that had my mind running in ridiculous circles, far away from the moment. It was gone now, wasted, and never to return.

  Now, at least, I was a bit more aware that it was up to me to determine how much of my life I made the most of, and how many moments, perfect or imperfect, I allowed myself to be ready for and to experience.

  It’s all that life gives us, a series of moments, and it’s everything it gives us, too.

  Moments like this one.

  When we got home from Bundeena, Ivan’s front wall was built. On either side, running perpendicular to the street, it was nearly 2 metres high, separating him from us and his other neighbours. But out the front, the wall was low, just half a metre off the ground. I was amazed. I had been sure that he would lock himself away, but he’d built a low front fence. Well done, man. There’s hope for us all.

  epilogue

  Lucy was okay. The stomach cramps disappeared as mysteriously as they had arrived and haven’t come back.

  The following week, Ivan concreted his front and back yards, and built his front fence up to the same height as the rest of it using wooden slatty things. But since they’ve moved in, Ivan and his wife have been quiet, considerate and friendly neighbours. For example, when I told Ivan his whiz-bang security light system was so sensitive that it was set off by anyone who walked on the footpath outside his house and was so bright that it was like someone shining a torch into our bedroom, he fixed it the next day.

  After Bundeena, things went quiet on both sides—the building was finished. Nothing woke us up anymore. There was still a building site over the road, but now it sounded a million miles away. Every so often they’d start up a drill to try and frighten us, but we’d just laugh. ‘You’ll have to do a bit better than that, pal,’ I’d think. ‘We copped it on both sides for months. We’re immune.’

  The other day I saw Mark outside Ivan’s house.

  ‘Finally finished, hey?’ I said. I’m great at witty banter.

  ‘Yes, my friend,’ he replied. ‘We have a break for a while.’

  ‘No jobs coming up?’

  ‘Oh yes, plenty of work. We’re very busy.’

  ‘So you’re going on holiday are you?’

  ‘No, my friend. Too busy for that.’

  ‘So, what do you mean, a break for a couple of months?’

  ‘A break here.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes, here. In a couple of months we need to put the pool in the back. So we have to excavate. To make it all level. Then reinforce. Oh yes, a big job. That hill, it’ll be very tricky. In a couple of months we start again.’

  You know that part at the end of the movie when you think everything’s been resolved and everyone is preparing to live happily ever after, then you find out that things aren’t quite as they seem and there’s still trouble afoot? That was that moment.

  So now we’re waiting for them to start again. Somehow, though, the fact that we know they will makes the relative quiet now all the more peaceful.

  This isn’t one of those books where the aim is to encourage you to go where the author went. In fact, if you do that you may be missing the point. But what you might want to do is have a think about whether, within an hour’s drive of where you live, there is somewhere you’ve never been before and you might enjoy spending a few hours looking around. I bet there is. And if you decide, on a Sunday or some other day, to go and have a look I’ll make another bet with you: I bet that when you get home you won’t think it was a day wasted.

  acknowledgements

  Thanks to Ian Bowring from Allen & Unwin who allowed me to put off writing a book about procrastination to write this book. And also for being so receptive to the idea, despite the fact it wasn’t quite one thing or the other. Karen Gee made the editing process enjoyable and satisfying, and without her diligence, fine judgement and patience this book would still just be a heap of jumbled words lying tangled on the floor—thanks.

  After we had had the idea of going on our little excursions, Susan Atkinson suggested I write them all down, so turning it all into a book was her idea and I thank her. And when I say ‘we’ had the idea, I really mean Lucy. Without her enthusiasm, support and general fun-to-be-aroundness not only would this book never have been written, but everything in my life would be a lot less good.

  Thanks to Bibi for coming. She didn’t really have a choice, but she did get into the whole thing.

  Finally, some names and street numbers have been changed to protect . . . well, me mainly. And in the interests of entertainment, good storytelling and cutting out the boring bits, some events have been described a bit differently to how they actually happened.