by Helen Brown
The brickwork ran in wavy lines and the grey stuff holding it together didn’t seem entirely committed to the job. The orange roof tiles looked like rows of broken biscuits, some of which appeared to be sliding earthwards. There was no reason to point any of that out to Philip. If we didn’t find a house we wanted to buy soon we’d have to rent, causing more uncertainty and disruption.
I’d thought finding a new place to live would be simple, yet we’d spent weeks looking at town houses and inner-city apartments; demolition jobs and building sites. They were either too cramped, stupidly expensive or spread over so many levels that abseiling gear should’ve been included in the price. We didn’t want to downsize, but a Brady Bunch house in the ’burbs wasn’t right either.
I’d always liked the raffish inner-city suburb of Prahran (an Aboriginal name pronounced ‘Pran’ by locals) so I’d been excited when I’d first spotted Shirley near the corner of an unpretentious cul-de-sac just off High Street. All the houses in Shirley’s street had been built between the wars, giving the neighbourhood a pleasing unity which is rare for Melbourne. Most were single-storeyed, semi-detached affairs. I liked their white picket fences and quirky gardens. There was something Alice in Wonderland-ish about them. Thanks to a preservation order, apartment blocks and modern buildings were banned.
Unlike our current neighbourhood, nobody living on Shirley’s street appeared to be afflicted with a lawn-mowing fetish. In fact, there seemed to be an ongoing competition to see who could let the grass outside their house grow the longest.
Shirley’s front garden, a rectangle of sandy soil alongside the double car pad, was technically a desert. Concrete paving stones masqueraded as a path to the front door. The only hint that Shirley might’ve once been a setting for family life was an ancient apple tree with a twisted trunk leaning against the verandah.
‘C’mon,’ I said to Philip, ‘let’s go inside.’
But my husband refused to budge. He was still glaring at Shirley’s brass rectangle nameplate, freshly polished for the open home inspection.
‘We could get rid of that,’ I said, grabbing his arm.
‘I don’t see how. It’s set in concrete.’
I dragged him over the wooden threshold, uneven from decades of foot traffic, into the hallway. High ceilings. Draughty. A shaft of dusty sunlight settled on a pyramid of cardboard boxes. But something about it felt like home.
‘Not exactly well presented,’ he observed.
‘Can’t blame the tenants,’ I replied. ‘They’re being kicked out.’
‘Who sleeps in here?’ he asked, inspecting a darkened room crammed with gym equipment and suitcases. ‘The Marquis de Sade?’
A real estate agent appeared like a spectre in the doorway.
‘This is the master bedroom, sir,’ the agent glowered, handing Philip a brochure and spinning on his heel.
‘Ah yes, the one with the torture rack and excellent view of the neighbour’s brick wall,’ Philip muttered.
Floorboards shrieked as we followed an aroma of mothballs across the hall to a smaller room with a boarded up fireplace. Circular stains on the ceiling hinted at roof leaks.
‘Looks like a baby’s room,’ he said examining peeling teddy bear wallpaper.
‘Or a study,’ I added, gazing out through a cracked pink and green leadlight window to the apple tree.
We squeaked down the hall to the kitchen/family room, our voices echoing in the empty space. Philip pointed out the bench top, yellow marble speckled with brown blotches. Unusual, admittedly. A phone off the hook emitted a constant beep, like a heart monitor recording the decline of a patient.
Though Shirley was neglected inside and out, she was speaking to me. Tired, big boned and possibly structurally unsound, we had a lot in common. It was like meeting a woman with sad, soft eyes – someone destined to be a friend for life.
‘If the walls were a warmer colour and we put up a few prints . . . and look!’ I said, pointing out a whole wall of French doors. Unfortunately, they opened on to a patch of clay dominated by a single tree. I had to concede the back garden was even bleaker than the front. Roll-out instant lawn had worn through to dust. Melbourne had been in the grip of a drought, the Big Dry, for years. I’d read newspaper reports of small children who were so unfamiliar with rain they screamed on the rare occasions it hammered on their roofs. Water restrictions were so harsh, Melbourne households were back to 1950s’ consumption levels. Tooth brushing was a guilty necessity. We had a timer in the shower. Some people showered with a bucket, collecting grey water to fling over their gardens afterwards. Buckets full of water and human skin cells are heavier than they look. Friends had sprained their backs hurling them about.
I missed the smell of rain, its softness and life-giving coolness. My eyeballs itched in the moistureless air.
Continuing on through the house, for every feature I found in Shirley’s favour Philip found two against.
‘This family area’s a good size. The oak table could go here,’ I said, realising almost immediately that I’d made a mistake venturing into oak-table territory. A relic from my first marriage, the oak table still had grooves on the edges where Sam and Rob had attacked it with a hand saw when they were preschoolers. Though Philip hadn’t said anything, I was pretty sure he didn’t share my affection for the thing.
‘What if we get another cat?’ he said. ‘There are heaps of main roads around here . . .’
‘Come off it!’ I snapped, wishing people would stop banging on at me about getting another cat.
How could I possibly open my heart to another feline only to have it torn apart again? If any new cat lived as long as Cleo had, I’d be seventy-eight by the time it died. Besides, Philip was right: Shirley’s street looked like the Wild West, with every second lamppost featuring a REWARD poster with a photo of a lost cat.
He shrugged, went back down Shirley’s hallway and disappeared into another room. Sometimes I wished he was more malleable. Then again, if I’d wanted pliable I should have married a pot of Play-Doh.
I wandered back into the baby’s room and looked through the apple tree’s branches on to the street. A man was strolling along the footpath on the other side of the road. I squinted to make sure my eyes were working. He was wearing a blue checked dressing gown – and it was two in the afternoon. This was definitely my kind of place.
‘Look at this!’ Philip called from across the hall. ‘The living room walls are stucco!’
My heart plummeted as I followed his voice. With lumpy white concrete walls rising from fraying green carpet the room had the ambience of a polar bear enclosure. Approximately half the size of a basketball court, it was empty and freezing. Running a hand over the glacial concrete, I wondered what it would take to hang a few paintings in there – mining equipment?
‘Just look at those built-in mirrors over the fireplace and that carving above the windows,’ I said, quietly wondering how the living room could be made liveable. ‘You don’t get that sort of attention to detail these days.’
A stair rail of yellow wooden spindles led us up to a vast space opening on to two bedrooms and a bathroom. Some time in her recent history, Shirley had endured low-grade plastic surgery. A ‘teenagers’ retreat’ had been implanted in her roof on the cheap. It was an ideal set-up for two young women on the brink of independence, so Kath and Lydia would probably love it. We’d finally have room for sleepovers, and a few wedding guests for Rob and Chantelle’s Big Day in six months’ time. And who knows? Maybe even a grandchild or two.
Gazing out over the city through an upstairs window, I felt Shirley settling around me like an old friend. It reminded me of the old house I’d been raised in – a home full of laughter and secrets, with space for people to grow up in. It was the sort of house I’d always dreamed of buying. To top it off, my favourite cafe, Spoonful, was just across the road on High Street. It would be the equivalent of a cocaine addict living next door to his dealer.
I turned to Philip, who wa
s absentmindedly kicking a lump in the carpet. He looked exasperated. I hated it when we had battles of will like this. He’d go silent and stick his jaw out while I’d get argumentative and repetitive. I had no energy for a fight.
‘Don’t you love it?’ I asked. ‘It’s got all the rooms we need, we’ll give it character and you’ll get to work much quicker and . . .’
‘But the name . . .’ he said through gritted teeth.
‘There are some great Shirleys . . .’ I said. ‘Shirley Bassey, Shirley Valentine, Shirley Temple. And you’ve always been in love with Shirley MacLaine.’
Silence.
‘We don’t have to call the house anything if it bothers you.’
‘That plaque’s immovable.’
‘Nothing a pneumatic drill wouldn’t fix.’
‘You love it that much?’ he asked, defeated.
Love was hardly the word for it. As auction day drew closer, I became obsessed. Shirley was my soul home. Every day I invented excuses to drive past her. One evening I saw neighbourhood kids playing cricket on the street. The scene was straight out of my childhood. In my dreams at night I roamed through Shirley’s rooms, transforming them into House & Garden centrefolds. To my shame, I attended every open home inspection. The gleam in the agent’s eye shone brighter each time I stumbled over the doorstep.
We ordered a building inspector’s report which concluded that Shirley had a few issues but was basically sound. On the understanding it might be possible to paint over the name plaque, Philip and I agreed on a price that would be our absolute limit for the auction in a few weeks’ time.
I stay away from auctions due to twitchy arm syndrome. Whenever people start bidding, my hand leaps uncontrollably into the air. So on the day of Shirley’s auction I hid around the corner clutching a takeaway coffee while Philip joined the throng of buyers and nosy neighbours gathering on the street outside Shirley.
After fifteen minutes or so, I assumed it would all be over and that it was safe to show up. But the crowd was still there, clustered in a knot. The atmosphere was grim, the way it must be toward the end of a bullfight. Philip was sitting on his hands on a concrete wall across the road from Shirley. To my disappointment, he was in observer mode.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
‘It’s . . . it’s . . .’
He was too engrossed in the drama to reply.
‘Did you put in a bid?’
‘Right at the beginning, but these two guys have gone way above our limit,’ he said, nodding in the direction of two men locked in a gladiatorial bidding war. The sum had reached a ridiculous price but the auctioneer kept goading them up and up. Onlookers were mesmerised by the brutal spectacle.
Finally one of the men pulled a face, swatted an imaginary fly and walked away. Electricity crackled across the crowd. Flushed with triumph, his opponent straightened, readying himself to declare victory. I secretly said goodbye to Shirley and steeled myself for a winter of renting.
Next to me, Philip shifted his weight, almost imperceptibly at first, then I watched open-mouthed as he slid his right hand out from under his thigh and slowly lifted it. Rising to his feet, he shouted a bid that was simultaneously terrifying and thrilling.
An outrageous amount. Where on earth would we find the money?
We both knew this could be our only offer, and one we couldn’t afford in the first place. Insanity. But it was also one of the reasons I’d fallen in love with this man God knows how many years ago. On several occasions during our marriage when I’d gone beyond despair and given up on a dream, he’d done something breathtaking that had changed our lives. But never anything as wonderful and potentially disastrous as paying too much money for a house he didn’t really like simply because he understood how much I wanted it.
Silence fell as the crowd – a many-headed monster – turned as one and focused its attention on Philip. Anyone who didn’t know him would think he was standing there in a state of perfect calm. He hadn’t changed colour. His breathing was regular. He wasn’t trembling or twitching.
I was the only one who knew what signs to look for. There they were – fiery blue flames in his eyes. The auctioneer tried to prod the red-faced man into upping his bid by $500. Another 50 cents and we’d be in the gutter.
‘Once . . .’ bellowed the auctioneer and we waited for the enemy to swoop. ‘Twice . . .’ Time stretched like a rubber band as we watched the hammer sail in slow motion through the air and . . .
The house was sold.
Unbelievably, to us.
Mystery
A cat never leaves you completely
As the auction crowd dispersed, the agent invited us up the path into Shirley’s family room, where the phone still bleated like a lost lamb.
All teeth and aftershave, the agent wrapped his hand around mine and congratulated us. He said the vendors would be pleased at getting such a good price for a house that was basically tainted.
Tainted? Like a Victorian maiden? The agent confessed that several months earlier Shirley had been passed in at auction. It’d lingered on the market ever since. I waited for Philip to shoot me a withering look, but he pretended to be engrossed in the agent’s documents.
‘You are a wonderful man,’ I sighed as we drove away, my hands still trembling from signing papers with so many zeros on them. ‘Are you sure we can afford it?’
‘We’ll work something out,’ he replied in the reassuring tone he’d used with customers when he’d been working at the bank. ‘We have some savings and I should get a pay rise at the end of the year with any luck. And who knows? Maybe you’ll write a bestseller.’
I squirmed in the passenger seat. His faith in my writing ability verged on pitiful. Supermodels would be size 18 before I produced anything like a bestseller.
After weeks of packing and planning, moving day finally arrived. I walked out the door of the mercifully never-named house we’d spent the last six years living in and said goodbye to Cleo and the Daphne bush, promising I’d drive past every now and then to pay my respects. Removal men heaved the semicircular seat into their truck and rattled off down the road. Melbourne’s trees were dressed in autumn reds and golds as we drove to our new home, where the apple tree spread its branches in woody welcome.
Shirley’s insides were cold and echoey. The oak table was dwarfed in its new family room, where the phone still bleated even with the receiver down. Some of our furniture fitted in better than others. The green couches looked good at the other end of the family room and the stone Buddha statue that’d sat on a window ledge in our old house settled comfortably in the alcove beside the couches. As I dusted it off, I remembered the day I’d bought it in a garden centre – not for religious reasons but because I was struck by the tranquillity of the statue’s expression and hoped some of it might rub off on me.
As it turned out, I needed all the serenity I could get. Every house has a secret or two. Shirley had been hiding the fact she was a maternity ward for moths. Clouds of them flew out of every room, patting our faces with their soft brown wings. Alfred Hitchcock had missed a horror movie opportunity.
Watching the removal men plonk the semicircular seat in plumes of dust under the tree in the back desert, I hoped we hadn’t made a mistake.
Philip and I wondered aloud if we shouldn’t have claimed the upstairs ‘apartment’ for ourselves. The two bedrooms in it (one of which would’ve made a very nice study) were surprisingly spacious, each with a charming outlook over treetops and gardens, and the living area had views toward the city’s skyscrapers, often outlined in tangerine sunsets. Instead, we moved our king-sized bed and snore-proof pillows into a room across the hall from the Marquis de Sade. With a disused fireplace, plain white walls and no wardrobes, our new bedroom was stark but sunny. I placed our wedding photo on the mantelpiece and hoped we’d get around to giving the room a personality boost. We decided to use the wardrobes in the Marquis’ gloomy chamber, which would also accommodate our chests of drawers, my step
per and Philip’s bike machine.
I cleaned out what had been the baby’s room, painted the walls red and claimed it as a writing space. My first ‘study’ had been the oak table in the kitchen. I’d then graduated to a desk in the corner of a bedroom. This was by far the best work environment I’d had in thirty years of writing. It lured me away from The Weakest Link and helped me keep up with deadlines for the magazine and newspaper columns I’d been churning out for decades. I’d also recently embarked on a book about Cleo.
One of the reasons I didn’t feel we needed a new cat was that as I wrote about her, Cleo seemed more alive than ever. Nestled in front of the computer in my new study, I could almost feel her coiling around my ankles. Nevertheless, my professional confidence as a writer was at an all-time low. Though I’d sent drafts of the Cleo manuscript to various agents and publishers, none had shown interest in the book. I decided I’d sign up for a weekend writers’ workshop, hoping that might help.
During that weekend I was so impressed by the talent of the other students, all of them amateur, I was reduced to silence most of the time. At the end of the programme we were invited to read our book ideas aloud. I scribbled a few paragraphs about Cleo and gave the last presentation. The room fell silent when I’d finished. Then people started asking questions. They wanted to know what had happened to the cat, and to our family. Several said they’d buy it if it was a book. That was when I began to realise Cleo and Sam’s story had legs.
The course co-ordinator told me about Friday Pitch, run by Sydney publishers Allen & Unwin. Writers could email their book proposals in on any Friday with the promise of a response the following week. It was for fiction writers but I thought I could be cheeky and send them a memoir.