Home Truth

by HarperCollins Publishers

  It had been Dad’s home but to me Sunray was more like a vast cubby house, a place to explore. I used to love the shadows you could make when you put out all the lights and plugged an etched-glass lamp into one of the powerpoints which jutted out from the walls; they had been added after the house was built. Even in daylight, the house was dark, especially upstairs. Once, I got into trouble for blackening the wallpaper with the soot from a candle I had found. I was told not to burn the house down. Some of the doors were locked and we wondered what was behind them. One concealed the room where my grandmother slept until she went to Ben Boyd Nursing Home. It was off limits.

  Eventually, my grandmother died. Men came to the house with brown paper tags with numbers which they tied to all the furniture and paintings and crockery and everything else, including the rocking horse and the lawn roller. There were a lot of numbers. Then there was a day when bidders could come and inspect the offerings and finally the auction. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people turned up, including most of the extended family. Bidding was brisk and businesslike; there was a lot to get through. Over the course of a long day, Sunray was sold lot by lot and taken away in the cars and vans of strangers. We sat in the kitchen and ate meat pies which had been bought from the Cammeray Cake Shop until the auction moved like a mop through there as well. A chatty woman bought the coal scuttle and asked me what I thought she should do with it.

  ‘I’ve paid for it so I have to take it, I suppose.’

  I surprised people by knowing where every item had once belonged. Mum bought one or two pieces which she still has at home, including a day bed where she keeps her knitting. They are a tangible link to something intangible. Somehow or other, I ended up with Dad’s clothes brush. Benny asked me once if it had come from the op shop.

  By nightfall on the day of the clearance sale, Sunray was hollow. Noises rang louder than ever before. The original colour of the wallpaper showed where paintings had been removed. The auctioneers stood smoking in the vestibule like it was a public building.

  Sometime later, near the end of that year, we were driving along the freeway on our way to Christmas carols in the city, Mum at the wheel and the three children in our pyjamas in the back seat. Dad looked across to where Sunray was now standing empty, or supposed to be. He saw a couple of people slip in through the narrow front gate and head along the overgrown front path in the twilight. He was suspicious. Mum altered course and Dad went in to investigate. Before long, police were on the scene. There were squatters in the house, or vandals as we always called them, and it wasn’t clear how long it was since they had moved in. For quick cash, they had stripped the lead out of the roof and water had got in; it was now sitting in puddles on the parquetry floors. The wallpaper had discoloured and begun to peel, revealing the masonry beneath, which looked unseemly. The police told Dad there wasn’t much they could do other than get the intruders to move on. There was no guarantee they wouldn’t come back, and court action about the damage was bound to be drawn out. The squatters fled the scene, leaving blankets and bottles in the dining room.

  Dad was visibly distressed. His home was broken. Mum got into the garage at our place, found an old board and painted ‘trespassers will be prosecuted’ on it. Dad dictated the spelling and the letters barely fitted, the endings of the words having to scrunch up to find room on the board. I recognised the sign again years later when I was reading Winnie the Pooh to my own children: a damaged version of it hangs in the tree where Piglet lives. The trespassers returned to Sunray but there were never any prosecutions; Mum and Dad were pleased that the sign was clearly visible from the freeway where the whole of Sydney could read it.

  I am sure the squatters did something to Dad’s spirit. He had his shortcomings but he was a preposterously generous man; once he took us on a Sunday afternoon to the opening of renovations to the Matthew Talbot Hostel, which provided a roof for the homeless. This wasn’t the kind of outing most families went on but Dad supported these sorts of causes, especially if they sailed under a Catholic flag. But the vandals had never asked. Dad like to give, not be taken from. The strangers had helped themselves to a piece of Sunray, his childhood home.

  It wasn’t long before Sunray was on the market and our family was saying prayers that the council would approve the plans for it to be pulled down and for a hideous block of flats to be planted on the tennis court. Our prayers were answered. As the saying goes, you need to be careful with prayers.

  Houses may be brittle but homes are fragile. The difference is that brittle things break into chunks and can be carted away; fragile things rupture into tiny shards which then find their way everywhere. A broken home ends up in a hundred places, often in pieces so small that you can’t see what is cutting you.

  As a young adult, I worked among homeless people in Melbourne and belonged to a community called The Way, which welcomed men off the streets, mostly alcoholics, blokes familiar with compulsive behaviour and the demolition job it can do on any home. The characters I met freed me of clichés and stereotypes about life at the edge. I encountered a few squatters including one woman who said she had legally come to own her home in Collingwood because she had lived in it for fifteen years without challenge; the owners must have forgotten about it, she thought. She understood. She was a bit forgetful herself. I used to love the way the people of the streets built rafts out of stories.

  Years later, as a middle-aged father, I found myself teaching in a private boys’ school in Melbourne. On the Wednesday night after Len came in from next door with the book of letters from the Camberwell council, I was with a group of half-a-dozen of our final year students outside Flinders Street, the main railway station in the city. We were spending the night with Rosie’s, a community with a van where people in need can find tea, coffee and amiable conversation. The local football competition was due to start the following night so there was plenty to talk about. Football is handy for building enough trust with a stranger to wander on to other topics.

  A woman called Anne told us that she worked for seventeen years doing the rooms at one of the large city hotels, an experience that taught her more about the way people live than she ever needed to know. She then took seven years away from work to nurse her parents through cancer; they had come from Scotland and had nobody else. Now she was trying to find work again but it wasn’t easy. She was too old for making beds. A man called John sympathised. He had had some paid work lately cleaning for the Grand Prix which was coming up; this was his first job since he cleaned for the Spring Racing Carnival the previous November. Anne’s eyes lit up. She loved the horses and with that came another clue about why her life might have been so tough.

  Another man, Mark, didn’t want to talk at first but slowly opened up. He supported Carlton and hoped they would go OK but didn’t know if they would, a remark of such sage depth that others started nodding in appreciation. Mark lived in a boarding house in St Kilda where he paid $290 a fortnight for a room the size of a small van and had to share a bathroom and a kitchen, both of which he said were filthy so he spent too much eating out, junk food mainly. The other thing is that the lock on his room was easy to pick so in spite of having a place of his own, he had to carry his gear around all day. He pointed to it, everything of value hanging on a railing nearby.

  As the evening wore on, Mark told us about his battle with alcohol and how every time he had a chance to do something with his life, he chose the bottle.

  ‘I was always running away,’ he said. Ten years ago, Mark got baptised by full immersion but didn’t stay with the church. ‘What I can’t figure out is how God can forgive me when I can never forgive myself.’

  Before we left, the boys noticed some people having a drink on the parapet of a trendy loft-style apartment high above Flinders Street.

  ‘That’s where I’m going to live,’ said one of them, pointing upward.

  Mark followed his finger into the sky. Perhaps he thought he was pointing to heaven.

  ‘Not for me,’ he
said.

  The following day, having slept on the floor at school, we headed out to the Corpus Christi Community on the other side of Melbourne. I first came here at the end of 1980 when the area was semi-rural and the streetlight at the gate was the only one for miles. The place had been founded by Mother Teresa in 1975 as a home and refuge for elderly men who’d spent years on the streets. It has a remarkable history which isn’t told by the unprepossessing Besser Block buildings, most of which were flung up so cheaply that they’ve provided a few headaches since. The history of this place is one of profound humanity, of building a community and a home around damaged people. The place has been wonderful and sometimes scary because it has refused to fear human chaos and, with that, it has been a place of uncomfortable honesty.

  I can recall when I worked here as a nineteen-year-old Jesuit novice that I used to borrow a decrepit bike and ride miles to a truckstop on the Hume Highway, the closest place to buy anything, so I could get a cup of coffee. I really wanted to get away from the place. It threatened me deeply. I tried to remember that first impact when I pulled up with my students twenty-nine years later. Corpus Christi now sits in the middle of well-established suburbs with plenty of shops across the road. But it still smells the same. Smell is the memory sense. No one forgets the smell of home.

  We don’t bring students here because Corpus Christi needs extra help. Far from it. We come here in the hope that the boys might catch a glimpse of something that can be fatally obscured by success. This something is an essence of humanity stripped of its pretensions and of the delusion that we can entirely control our own lives. I tell the boys that if you want to travel to the heart of the human experience, you’ll find the road is pretty rough. I tell them about humility. It is just a word, but Corpus Christi can start to get it out of the dictionary for them.

  As the students headed off to help with various chores around the place, I sat quietly for half an hour in the chapel, a modest structure built entirely with donated goods and labour. In the chapel, there is a stand with a book which honours members of the community who have died. The community makes remarkable efforts to remember people whom most others would choose to forget. I read the entry for that day, 26 March. It was the anniversary of a man, Kevin, whom I knew slightly and who, some eighteen years earlier, had been hit by a car not far from where I now live:

  Kevin, on a road in your beloved Footscray you were struck down. The streets, parks and railway stations were your home. You were a sight to make us turn our eyes and look the other way. A real mess. Who knows what drove you on. Your face did your speaking, lighting up into a smile that melted our hearts and let you get away with anything. Thank you Kevin and pray for us as we now pray that your restless spirit is at peace.

  I started browsing and found the entries for men who used to be part of our lives at The Way, a community which has had a close connection with Corpus Christi. Faces and voices returned to me from twenty years or more before:

  Ted, you were part of this community for so long but you were a very private person and we knew little of your early days in Warrnambool. We knew you as a gentle man and a gentle person who never said an unkind word about anyone. It was a sadness that you didn’t die at home but on the streets. But the God in whom you had a simple deep faith was never far from you. Your wanderings are over now, Ted, and you are truly home at last.

  Tom, you were man of the streets and a prince of the park: there was no room to hold you. Your court was the garden until the accident that plunged your life into haunted torment and agitation. Your simple acceptance of things as they were was a great leveller for many of us. Rest peacefully, Tom, in the garden of the Lord.

  Finally, I found words about a man who had appeared out of nowhere at the back gate of The Way on one of my first afternoons there. His nose pointed in several directions; his face was a map of the dark places he had travelled. He steadied himself on his legs and held the fingers of both his hands across his throat like a pair of knives and announced in a voice that could stand above the racket of an Irish pub:

  ‘I’m gonna…I’m gonna…I’m gonna kill you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Did you hear me? I said, I’m gonna keeeeellll you.’

  I slammed the gate and rushed inside for advice. A genteel, hilarious, wonderful woman called Maidie was volunteering at the time. Maidie’s journey from the leafy suburbs to The Way was a story in itself. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘He says that to everyone. It’s his way of showing affection.’

  You did your best, Bill, to convince us you were a cynic but the truth is that you had a soft and sensitive heart. Small in stature, you took on the world. You knew deeply the heart of things. You embodied the paradoxes at the heart of our community. You’re home now.

  In the chapel at Corpus Christi is the same crucifix I used to sit under as a lost and lonely nineteen-year-old in a strange city among strange men. I enjoy the fact that it has been waiting patiently for me and I put my teacher’s business aside for a moment to remember the kid who used to pray here far from home. The leg of the crucifix is broken. It has never been fixed because it is one of those things that only works when broken. Above it are two stark words which speak not just to alcoholics. They simply say ‘I thirst’. Perhaps this is the most profound thing Jesus ever said. For me, the cross is still a sign that points the way home.

  Start With the Tulip Carmel Bird

  High up in the mountains of Kurdistan, where the crow roams free and where the snow meets the sun, this is where the story sleeps.

  A stonecutter named Farhad loved the princess Shirin, and Shirin was pining away for love of him. Shirin’s father the Shah agreed that if Farhad would hew a vast staircase into the side of the mountain, he would receive Shirin as his bride. So for many years Farhad laboured alone, cutting the steps into the mountainside, and carving the likeness of Shirin into every hundredth step. When the Shah learned that Farhad had almost completed his task, he became deeply worried and so he sent a messenger to tell Farhad a lie, to tell him Shirin had died. In a passion of sorrow and despair Farhad fell upon the blade of his shovel, splitting his head in two. His blood flowed in a bright river that cascaded down the vast stone staircase.

  When Shirin heard that her beloved was no more, she fled to the place high up in the mountains where he lay. Taking the shovel in her pale and delicate hands, she too fell upon the blade, splitting her own head in two. Her blood joined the blood of Farhad, and in time there sprang from beneath the snowy earth the cup of a brilliant scarlet flower which spoke forever after of their love.

  On a bookshelf in the house where I grew up, that story slept in a book of Persian tales which was one of the volumes in a set of books containing the legends of different lands. The real significance of the narrative to me was possibly the fact that it explained the origin of the tulip, a flower with which I became fascinated when I was six. I had a colouring book that consisted of delicate full-colour prints of old botanical illustrations of tulips, some with insects or shells alongside, giving not only atmosphere but also scale. These pictures were on the left-hand page while on the right-hand page there was a black-and-white outline waiting to be coloured in. My aim was to reproduce the exquisite image on the left with my Derwent pencils. The results, I seem to recall, were not too bad, but I was always in despair since my pictures were not perfect replicas. I know now that some of the pictures were by artists such as Jacob Marrel and Johann Jakob Walther and Judith Leyster. In 1999 Anna Pavord published The Tulip and this book is one of the great delights of my library. I can just open it and gaze at the four tulips reproduced on the endpapers to experience some vestige of the rapture I knew when I was colouring in, some inkling of the joy and wholeness I knew when I was at home in my own childhood. The four tulips on the endpapers seem to have leaped there from my colouring book. Images of an ideal Holland were very popular in the 1930s and 40s, and I was very attracted to them. I cannot explain why this was so.

  The fi
rst things I remember planting, as a child, were the bulbs of red tulips. My father gave me a garden bed of my own for the purpose. The bed was under a nectarine tree, a place that seems now to be unpromising, but it must have received enough light and nourishment, for the planting was very successful. I cannot name my bulbs, but I know the flowers were full-blooded shiny-satin-scarlet with a regular star of butter-yellow in the bottom of the bowl, and quivering black anthers. The process of their development was to me a miraculous unfolding of a mystery.

  The fat little bulbs were covered in a skin resembling fine brown tissue paper, which fitted nicely round them, holding the secret of the life within. Over time and one by one the pale green tips broke the surface of the earth. I paid eager attention to their progress, since these tulips were in my care, and I was responsible for their wellbeing. As I write this I feel a storyteller’s urge to move toward a crisis, a tragedy, but I must report the ending was a happy one, and the tulips finally bloomed. The only sad part was when I put them in a vase and watched as they dropped their petals onto the mantelpiece. The stalks were eventually thrown out, but I pressed the petals in books. They turned to flat semi-transparent tissue, dark and dirty orange. I still occasionally find one of them dreaming away between the foxed leaves of old books, and I found one in a round yellow china box for face-powder. It is marvellously dusted with the remnants of the powder. I was sometimes chastised for pressing flowers in books, and the stains I made are still present; I still slip petals into my books even though I do own a flower press. The practice of trying to preserve the shape and colour and texture of a flower by squashing the petals until they become ghosts, skeletons and whispers is a means of attempting to carry the beauty of the past into the present. Beauty is there in the dried pieces, but it has changed, so the effect is not so much on the eye as on the memory and the heart.