Morning in Melbourne

by Nicole Taylor

  “What are you watching?” Camille settled herself beside her mother in front of the television. Louise was watching a Golden Girls dvd.

  “I thought I heard Dorothy’s voice!” James came into the room and smiled at the familiar show. “I remember this from when I was a baby,” he said.

  Even Peter came out to join them and they all laughed at some embarrassing comment Ma made to one of Blanche’s admirers.

  When the show was over, James turned to her. “That reminds me of when I was really little, and we had that flat with the big balcony and I had a peddle car.” He was smiling as he remembered.

  Louise smiled too. “Yes, weren’t they happy days?” she agreed. And she kissed her kids good night and rounded them all off to bed.

  Louise tucked herself in and reached for a thick Maeve Binchy book which she had read at least 3 times previously over the past 12 years. Re-reading a Maeve Binchy book was like meeting old neighbours for coffee. There was so much that was familiar and enjoyable; there were no surprises – and if there were any parts you had forgotten, it didn’t change the outcome because you already knew the ending; not that Maeve Binchy stories really had ‘endings’. The books stopped but the story continued.

  Peter came in to give his mother a final goodnight kiss. He often did that and Louise was glad, because he was entering the age when he found his mother quite frustratingly stupid, yet he still had some affection for her.

  “Mum, you should read Terry Pratchett.” Peter had discovered James’ stash of his favourite and prolific writer. “You’d really like them. They aren’t just kid’s books.”

  “Even if they were – that wouldn’t be a bad thing. I love kids’ books!” said Louise. “I still read a lot of my old books from when I was a kid.”

  “I know, but you have never read a Terry Pratchett and I think you should. Here,” he offered her one entitled ‘The amazing Maurice and his educated rodents’. “This is a good one to begin with. Give it a go.” Peter looked at her seriously like a teacher trying to encourage a student to do a hard sum. “I bet you’ll like it.”

  Louise smiled at her son. She took the book and flipped the pages. One day she would read it, but not now. It was new to her. It didn’t take her to a place where she felt safe; where she knew what would happen next; where she could predict the outcome. The book was part of all the places she had to go in the future; places she was afraid of because they might include advancing age and sickness and kids who don’t need you and married couples her own age going off on trips around Australia together because their kids have left home and as yet don’t have babies of their own who need their Nana. The unknown time that loomed ahead when the savings you had set aside for your retirement were inadequate to the task and no one in your street spoke English at home anymore and that was the only language you could speak. What would she do if she forgot her password or the computer crashed or her identity was stolen by a marauding internet raider and one day she found she no longer owned the house she had spent her working life paying off because her identity had been stolen?

  Louise shook herself slightly and smiled at her young son. “Thanks Peter,” she said softly. “Thanks, darling.”

  *

  Louise worked in town, and took two trains to get to work each day. She got the 7.20 train in, and got home at 6.20 each night. The younger two kids refused point blank to go to after-school care, so walked to and from school each day. James took the train.

  When he had stopped working, Jeff began cooking dinner each night. Lou had still done all the shopping and housework and washing and made the lunches. Now that Jeff was gone, she didn’t mind cooking when she got home, but she was tired a lot and the days were very long. She found herself screaming at the kids too much because she was tired, and she realised that she had to do something to change things.

  She applied for a teaching job at the local Institute of TAFE. She’d done similar work for a couple of years when James was born, which was what gave her the idea. No position had been advertised, but Louise thought that might be an advantage – no competition if a job did come up and her resume was on file. Recruiting staff was a costly exercise, so she was really saving them time and money, she assured herself.

  “So, this will be a real change for you!” Joe Gardiner, one of the senior educators at the Box Hill Institute was reading Louise’s resume. They sat in his 3rd floor cubicle, ignored by the other inhabitants of the open-plan office area who scurried to and fro, in varying states of mental pre-occupation or single-mindedness.

  “I’ve taught in a tertiary college before,” started Louise.

  “Yes, Canberra Institute of Technology – I see that. How long ago was that?” Joe smiled at her as he invited Louise to make his point.

  Louise smiled back. She liked Joe. He had an old, kind, crumpled face. An honest face.

  “I taught there for two and a half years, from 1989 to 1992.”

  Joe chuckled. “Two and a half years, eh?” He acknowledged that she had trumped his reference to the many years since her previous teaching experience by stating the length of time she had spent teaching. “Well, it will be interesting to see how much things have changed in the intervening 15 years, then, won’t it?”

  Lou raised her eyes hopefully. “Does that mean you have a job for me here?”

  “Louise, Louise, Louise!” Joe lolled his head from side to side and leaned back in his chair. “Of course we have a job here for you! Do you know many university educated, fully qualified CPA’s with 25 years of professional experience we get walking into this institute asking if they can teach day-time classes in Accounting, Economics, Commercial Law, Financial Maths, and Tax?” Joe stopped reading the subjects from her resume and laughed. “We get a lot of people wanting night time work teaching one or two subjects; you know: accountants who have just started their own small firm but want a regular cash flow; or married men whose wives have recently left work to have a baby. But most of our accounting and business students want day-time classes.” He paused and smiled at Lou. “You are in a group numbering exactly one! Welcome!” He laughed again and shook her hand. “Of course,” he continued, “You won’t start till next semester; and we can’t tell you what your timetable will look like; but I think we can guarantee you a point five position at least, and possibly more.” Joe closed her resume and stood, indicating that the “interview” was over. As he ushered Lou out of his cluttered cubicle, he added, “You’ll have to do a Certificate IV in Training & Assessment, but you can do that here while you are working, and we will pay for it.”

  And Louise left, smiling at her new boss, and wondering what a ‘point five position’ was.

  *

  The house was still a work in progress. It was wonderful to have had the kitchen replaced before they even moved in, but the bathrooms were badly in need of replacement. All the walls of both bathrooms and the toilet closets were floor to ceiling 2cm ivory porcelain tiles, circa 1966. 40 years later, they looked like the decaying teeth of a heavy smoker.

  Louise costed out the project. It wasn’t difficult to find out how much hand basins, shower recesses and toilets cost. Then she had to add the paint, and the cost of floor coverings. The labour required a bit of imagination – how long would it take?

  Julia provided the answer. “It took the team a week to do our bathroom and toilet,” she said. So Louise doubled that, then charged the labourer’s out at $100,000 per annum, which is $50 an hour, then doubled that to account for two workers. She arrived at a number that seemed sensible, and started getting bathroom renovators to give her quotes.

  Of the three written quotes she got, only one was within coo-ee of her own estimate; and this one was almost exactly what she had calculated.

  Within weeks, both bathrooms and toilet rooms were sparkling with new, white porcelain fixtures; freshly painted walls; and matching new linoleum.

  Of course, no sooner had she had the bathrooms renovated than the dark brown artificial wood clos
ets in the laundry room glared out at her through the connecting kitchen door…..

  *

  The builder she employed to fix the laundry and powder room was about 30 years old. He was tall and golden limbed and had thick, wavy, blonde hair. His short, short shorts were a neat fit and sat just below his slim hips, from which hung a hammer and a metallic tape measure. He had green eyes rimmed with grey lashes, and his name was…it was…

  “Mark,” his hand was outstretched. “You must be Louise.” Louise looked at his hand. It was the hand of a poet, not a builder. There were no fractured cuticles or chipped nails. Louise couldn’t speak, so she gently put her hand in his and he shook it while the electric shock travelled up her arm, rivetting her to the floor.

  Mark dropped her hand casually and smiled, showing perfect teeth. He looked like a Camberwell Grammar school boy.

  “So,” he began, “You’d like your laundry and powder room rebuilt?”

  “Yes,” said Louise.

  “Have you ordered the porcelain fittings?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great, we can get started, then.” He took out his mobile phone and said to Louise and he punched in a number. “The first job will be to remove all this tiled walling, and the old fittings. It’ll get pretty messy,” he warned.

  “Yes,” was all Louise could think or say.

  *

  “Wanna come out for a coffee?” It was Diana calling.

  “I can’t,” answered Louise.

  “Why not?”

  “The builder is here,” Louise explained.

  “So?” said Diana.

  “Well, I need to watch him.”

  “Why? Don’t you trust him?”

  “No – I mean, yes, I trust him; it’s just that I want to watch him.”

  “You want to watch him?” Diana was confused. “What for?”

  “Come over,” said Louise. “You’ll see.”

  So, Diana arrived ten minutes later and sat with Louise in the kitchen. They watched Mark, and his twin brother Leon, dismantle the powder room wall by wall.

  “Wow,” said Diana.

  “I know,” said Louise. They were watching the men bend and struggle with the walls; their shorts straining against their muscular thighs. Would the shorts be able to contain the force?

  Mark smiled at them. “Good to see them come down, isn’t it?”

  Diana and Louise stared at his hot, dust smeared face, looking like a pair of rabbits caught in the headlights.

  *

  “Stephanie’s going to England for a month when she finishes school,” James told his mother.

  “Oh?” Lou was interested. Stephanie was James’ “true love”. They had been dating for six months and Stephanie, who was a year older that James, would be studying for her final exams this year. “Is this a reward for finishing school?” she asked.

  “I think it is a reward for getting into medicine,” James smiled at his mother.

  “What if she doesn’t get in?” Lou asked. “Will she still get the trip?”

  “She’ll get in,” answered James.

  Lou laughed. “Yes, she probably will. So, are her parents taking her?”

  “No,” said James. “She is being sent on her own, straight after Christmas. Her father is paying for her ticket with frequent flyer miles, and there is only enough for one ticket.”

  “I’m sure they can afford to pay for tickets, James. They are well off; MacRob is a government school and Steph is their only child.”

  James shrugged. “I’m just telling you what they told me.”

  “Where is she staying?” Louise asked. “Does she have family there?”

  “No. Her mother thinks it will be a good experience for her.”

  “On her own, in the U.K. in January? It will be freezing and all the tourist amenities will be closed! Who would want to go to Europe in January? I can’t believe that they would send their 18 year old daughter away, alone!”

  “Well, I could always go with her,” James smiled at his mother.

  *

  Stephanie attended MacRob’, the sister-school to Melbourne High. If she hadn’t been academically capable, she might easily have gone in for modelling or something similar because she was, without doubt, a beauty of the proportion of Elizabeth Taylor in her prime. Funnily, Stephanie behaved and spoke like a much older woman; her self-assuredness and confidence belied her youth and dependent status. Louise thought her confidence was unbecoming in such a young woman. There was no fragility in her beauty and it was missed. Stephanie’s assuredness in all matters detracted from her likeability quotient. She looked like an exotic flower and spoke like a hardened cynic.

  Steph was the only child of her father, who was a city solicitor with his own firm, and her mother, herself a beauty of Brazilian extraction. No expense had been spared in nurturing Stephanie’s scholastic ability, and privately Lou wondered how she would cope without all the propping up. She had tutors every afternoon of the week for each of the VCE subjects she had chosen. These subjects had been selected in light of the “mark-up” allocated to them because they were more difficult and therefore less popular. So Steph studied Latin, chemistry, biology and specialist maths in addition to the compulsory English. This was her VCE year, and if Steph got nervous, tired or upset, a car would arrive and James would be whisked off to provide support.

  “What about your studies, James?” His mother once asked in the presence of Stephanie’s statuesque mother, Brihony. “You are doing VCE subjects now, too, you know.”

  Brihony had turned on Lou with flashing eyes. “You would stand in the way of Stephanie’s success?” She flung her glare towards James. “Stephanie needs you, James. You can’t desert her now. You know that she would never desert you.” James looked ashamed and avoided his mother eye as he followed Brihony to her car. Lou shook her head and went inside.

  *

  They’d been living at the new address for about three months when a letter arrived from the body corporate, saying that the painting contract had been finalised and now each owner had to contribute $5,200 towards the exterior painting of the townhouses. It also declared that a meeting would be held at Number 3, the home of Julia and Jack White. Julia and Jack were, Louise discovered, the joint presidents of the owners’ association.

  The meeting was on a Wednesday night so, after feeding the kids and settling the younger two at the dining table with their homework, Louise walked across the driveway and down two houses to arrive at the door of Number 3.

  The door was ajar, but Lou knocked anyway. “Come in!” called a voice, so she entered the house.

  Each townhouse had exactly the same floorplan. The only difference was that instead of having the driveway behind the townhouse, the ten units along the pipestem driveway had theirs beside the house. Consequently, their French windows opened onto the yard at the rear of the townhouse, where a large deck provided the private outdoor area Louise’s own townhouse enjoyed in her courtyard.

  This had the effect of enlarging the lounge room. The owners of Number 3 had painted this room a dramatic burgundy, and the walls were adorned with Asian wood carvings and enormous paintings of tropical Asian scenes.

  “Wow!” Lou could not have been more surprised by the difference in the feel of this room to her own living area in Number 12, which was a uniform white.

  “Hello,” a tall, smiling woman greeted her. “I’m Julia – you must be Louise.”

  “Yes, hello,” Louise smiled her response. “I love this room.”

  “Do you like it?” Julia asked unnecessarily. “We are happy with it.”

  At that moment, the tall, bald man she had seen previously entered the room from the deck. “So!” he exclaimed. “We meet at last!” He grinned a greeting to Louise. They exchanged names.

  “Look, the meeting’s been cancelled due to lack of interest,” explained Jack.

  “And no one wants to pay up for the painting until they absolutely have to,” added Julia.

/>   Jack laughed and continued. “We would have called you, but we thought this was probably a good opportunity to get to know you, so let’s have dinner instead.”

  “What nice people!” Louise thought.

  Louise had lived in Melbourne for two years, and in that time had developed an impression of the city and its people. They had moved to Melbourne from Sydney, but were not originally from that sunniest of cities. After three years in Sydney, though, they must have become “Sydney-fied” because it was a bit of a culture shock when they got to Melbourne.

  For one thing, a far greater proportion of the population had dark hair and eyes. Since Lou had been born in Brisbane, worked in Canberra and moved to Sydney after marrying and only arrived in Melbourne a few years ago, this was a trend she had noticed. As she moved – slid – down the east coast of Australia, the average colouring went from being generally fair-skinned and blue-eyed in Brisbane, to olive-skinned and brown eyed in Melbourne, with the accompanying gradations along the way.

  It should have been the opposite. Normally, equatorial people had the darker colouring to cope with the extended exposure to sunlight. The Aborigines had the right colouring for the climate and accurately reflected racial evolution in response to climate. It was just another piece of evidence that Australia was a patchwork of international immigrants who ignored their genetic manifestations in order to follow their intellectual beliefs: their dreams.

  Whatever the reason, this darker countenance was almost a reflection of the overcast skies. And Melbournians didn’t smile unnecessarily. They did smile, of course, but only for a reason. A smile was not the starting point on a Melbourne face.

  As if to nail down the point, it seemed that everyone wore black. But Louise didn’t see new black fabrics in funky styles; just tired, pilled, shapeless black pants and flat, comfortable black loafers. During the winter, this ensemble was worn under a shapeless, much-worn, black coat. In the summer, the only variation was that they lost the black coat, while the black top worn underneath now had short sleeves.