6
Flinders
Nestled on the coast an hour out of Melbourne, the holiday house at Flinders represents probably my parents’ biggest regret. That is really something. These are people who, in the eighties, invested in the artificial insemination of designer goats—a scheme that went so badly that eventually the cost of one of these goats actually dipped below the cost of a .303 bullet to put the goat out of its misery. As a result, there are some very expensive feral goats currently calling the Dandenong Ranges home.
Bought in the early seventies and known to us only as Flinders, the house had a couple of bedrooms, a bathroom that looked dated the moment it was built and an open plan living/dining/kitchen/craft/rumpus room. The TV didn’t always work but it looked good sitting on top of a sideboard that housed puzzles, board games, totem-tennis bats, Uno cards and the numerous other things that the law requires you to keep at all holiday houses without exception. Flinders was proudly un-fancy and smelled like the beach twenty-four hours a day. It was the perfect example of a seaside shack, back when such things still existed. Today if you drive through Flinders there are very few shacks. They have been replaced with ‘summer houses’ which look remarkably like mansions and give you the feeling that you will never truly understand what it is like to be rich.
The reason Flinders is a regret is that my parents wished they had never sold it at the end of the 80s. Well, that and seagrass matting.
Some time in my early infancy, the floor of the holiday house was dilapidated, but to polish the floorboards would have been costly and there was a chance they wouldn’t withstand the buffing. A cheap floor covering was required.
Simultaneously, in a mysterious laboratory in places unknown, significant breakthroughs had been made in seagrass matting. Anyone who played table tennis anywhere near an ocean between 1977 and 1988 knows exactly what I’m talking about. The colour of straw, the consistency of rope, it sits on the floor-covering spectrum between tiles and debris and its price puts it well within reach of the average rumpus room decorator on a budget. Indeed, seagrass matting loves nothing more than rumpus. It is robust enough to withstand whatever level of rumpus you can throw at it, yet delicate enough to consistently fray around the edges. This gives the illusion of character without the hassle of genuine long-term rumpus.
But seagrass matting’s true genius is that it is segmented into squares, making bespoke flooring a breeze and giving the purchaser an inflated sense of handiness. This is definitely true of my dad who took the measurements and, once the matting was down, stood back to admire his work. And it was good. Except for the fact that the door to the toilet could not close.
It turned out that the exact level of clearance between the door and the existing floorboards was exactly one quarter of an inch less than the standard thickness of seagrass matting, as dictated by the faceless powerbrokers of the matting industry. This discrepancy was discovered when my father, after admiring his handiwork, headed to the smallest room in the house for a hard-earned wee. With the half-closed door wedged firm, Dad’s shoulders slumped and his head bowed. Relief was a long way off.
Now, of all the doors in the house, this is the one you most want to close. You can overlook an exposed pantry or even an ajar spare bedroom. But a toilet with an open door is the least-dignified throne in the world. There is little more demeaning than having to sit on a toilet with passers-by. Your only hope is to pretend to be thoroughly engrossed in National Geographic and permanently outraged by pedestrian traffic. But even this act can only be maintained for so long before you realise you’re just a person on a toilet with an audience.
This all happened when I was a baby, but according to my mother, a system of toilet warnings was implemented. An orange bicycle flag on a six-foot pole would point into the corridor, warning people that someone was mid-business in a highly exposed fashion. As I was still filling nappies at this stage, I was not party to this demeaning system. In fact, it is the only time ever that being prone to polluting a nappy had more dignity than being toilet trained.
As ingenious as this flag system was, it could not last long term. The agreed solution was that a small portion of the door would need to be removed. About half an inch. Just enough to allow clearance between the seagrass matting and the door. The door was removed from its hinges and placed in a makeshift vice in the back garden and a saw was fetched from the shed. My father is a meticulous man and if he is going to saw half an inch off a door, he is going to do it right. A ruler, a set square, a spirit level and a protractor were all used to rule a perfectly straight line. At around ten in the morning my father and grandfather commenced sawing.
The first difficulty came immediately. The door, it turned out, was solid oak and not easily intimidated by any saw man had yet devised. In fact, the door was so hard as to raise ontological questions about how the door was even sawed into a door in the first place.
To begin with the conversations were jovial. Some mention of recent sporting fixtures; a little talk of what they might do with their afternoon. This lasted approximately eight minutes. At that point they were both too exhausted to talk. Their work had yielded a small depression in the wood. Not quite a groove. But almost.
From there Dad and Grandpa had to work in ten-minute shifts. As the sun rose higher in the sky, the enormity of the challenge seemed to grow. While one was sawing the other would be resting in the shade and taking on fluids. My grandfather, a veteran of a world war, typhoid and open-heart surgery was an energetic worker and therefore a massive health concern to all around him.
After some hours, lunch was served. Cut sandwiches were eaten as the job so far was discussed. There was general consensus that the job was a goddamned pain in the arse and progress decidedly tits up. The saw remained frozen a quarter of the way through the door. It was stuck and couldn’t be removed. It was like Excalibur, if Arthur had to saw through solid rock to get his sword back. Destiny be screwed, this was going to take hard work.
Sawing continued through the afternoon and into dusk. A beer was had and sawing went on. The sun went down, the sawing continued. An ad hoc spotlight was erected, sawing continued. Some time around ten-thirty, half an inch of door fell to the ground, as did the saw and my sweat-drenched father. There was a smattering of applause from the patient but altogether over it crowd.
My triumphant father and wheezing grandfather hoisted the conquered door aloft and headed for the toilet.
There was some quiet chat and jokes made as the door was screwed back into place. It is the kind of talk you can imagine at sundown after the taking of Normandy. Too exhausted to speak, too relieved to not. ‘Well, we won’t be doing that again anytime soon.’
The final hinge was attached and, with an announcement of, ‘I’ve been waiting all day for this wee,’ my father attempted to close the door. It wouldn’t budge. The harder he tried, the harder it wedged on the seagrass matting.
My father swore. My grandfather swore. The door was inspected. They both swore. Loudly.
One initial theory for the door not closing was that they hadn’t sawn off enough of the wood. The subsequent and significantly more correct theory was that, over the space of eleven hours, they had sawed a perfectly aligned, expertly measured, half-inch strip of wood off the top of the door, leaving the bottom intact.
An awkward night was had by all; a meal in silence and the then-working television watched without laughter. That night, no matter how funny John Blackman’s ripostes, how suggestive Dickie Knee’s antics or how abrasive Red Symon’s barbs, Hey Hey It’s Saturday was considered neither light nor entertainment.
It was decided that the men needed some time away from the door, so the following day was spent at the beach.
Day three involved a lot of sawing; very little talking.
By nightfall, the men of the house were the proud owners of one solid oak door and two half-inch strips of solid oak door. One strip was glued back onto the top of the door and the door was re-hinged. It opened
. It closed.
My dad opened and closed the door a few times to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. And, with a call for privacy, he took one of the most hard-earned wees in history.
The lasting memorial to three days of struggle was a line at the top of the door where the strip had been glued on again. Every time my dad sat on that toilet, it would mock him.
The seagrass matting itself was a short-lived success. At first everyone agreed it had been worth the trouble, but three months later they changed their minds. Suzie, then aged three had woken up at the crack of dawn. Not wanting to wake anyone, she set about occupying her busy mind with household chores. She tidied up toys, folded some linen and then came to check on me in my cot. She noticed that my nappy was full and decided, having seen Mum and Dad change me countless times, she would give it a shot. Mum and Dad walked in to check on us at seven and what they saw when they opened the door was something that will stay with them for life.
It was clear from the state of the room that Suzie had no trouble taking my nappy off. What happened after that was pretty much up for grabs. There were clear signs of a struggle, evidence of confusion and frustration and an overall sense that what had gone on in this room was not the happiest of times. The other conclusion that was drawn from forensic inspection was that while the papered walls had been of little use to my sister for removing nappy contents from her hands, seagrass matting had worked a treat. Not a single swirling gap in the seagrass weave went unfilled. Every square would need to be cut out, removed and, I dare say, incinerated.
The room was repaired, but never felt the same. We would continue to go to Flinders, but somehow the magic had worn off. You can burn all the nag champa you like, but you’ll never deodorise a memory. Deep down I’m pretty sure that’s why they sold the house.
7
Misinformation, Disinformation
and Goddamned Lies
Back to 1987 and we returned home from our trip to Flinders to find that Richard had put our house on the market.
It was late at night, dark, and we were tired from the journey. We pulled into our driveway and the headlights hit the front gate only to find it chained shut and adorned with a real estate agent’s sign that read:
MORTGAGEES’ AUCTION:
DUE TO DISASTROUS BUSINESS PRACTICES AND PENDING LEGAL ACTION FOR MEDICAL NEGLIGENCE, ALL PROPERTY OF RONNIE ‘THE BASTARD’ PICKERING IS TO BE SOLD FORTHWITH.
My sister and I were confused. My mum was beside herself. This was a public relations disaster. Upon seeing the sign, Mum immediately assumed that everyone in the street had been talking about her behind her back.
‘Did you hear about the Pickerings?’
‘Didn’t they go belly-up?’
‘Yes. I hear it was gambling.’
‘Well I hear it was drugs.’
‘Well I hear they gambled on drugs.’
‘You don’t say?’
‘Yes. They’d get hopped up on goof-pills that Ron made in the pharmacy and then hit the craps tables at the casino.’
‘Well I’m glad they’ve had to sell up. It’s a danger having those sorts of people living in our street.’
This may sound ridiculous, but I think it is a fairly accurate transcript of what was going through my mother’s head at the time. She had always aimed for our family to have a good ‘street reputation’; a goal that flew in the face of any rational assessment of our street community.
When my parents first moved in they made a grand overture to the neighbourhood: the first (and only) ever ‘Get To Know Your Street Barbecue’. They figured they would start a tradition. Twenty years on people would spend their year looking forward to the street barbecue. ‘Remember the first one of these we had?’ people would say. ‘Yes,’ other people would reply. ‘It was the Pickerings that started all this. They held the first ever Get To Know Your Street Barbecue, and haven’t we all just been the best of friends since?’
Initial disappointment came with the underwhelming level of RSVPs. When final numbers were tallied in order to calculate supplies, it was agreed that a more accurate name for the event would have been the ‘Get To Know Upwards Of A Quarter But Definitely No More Than A Third Of Your Street Barbecue’.
By midway through the event my parents began to wish the attendance had been poorer. It became apparent there were some seriously long-running feuds in operation in our leafy street. The evidence for this included the numerous people making vigorous, pointed attempts to be seen to be not talking to other people, or making a noteworthy exit upon the arrival of a neighbourhood nemesis. That kind of behaviour and the one woman who actually said, ‘I have some seriously long-running feuds in operation.’
By the end of the barbecue my parents concluded that there was one person in particular that everybody had a problem with but, apart from him eating most of the pigs in blankets, they couldn’t see why. They also concluded that this would be the last ever ‘Get To Know Your Street Barbecue’ and it would be best for everyone to henceforth keep a low profile and try not to start any feuds.
So, feuds aside, our street was about as far from a gossip factory as you could imagine. Some of our neighbours had passing conversations with our other neighbours, but on the whole most people kept to themselves. A reality lost on my mother in this time of shock, as her fantasy continued.
‘So they lost everything?’
‘Yes, everything. One night the children had to eat dog food.’
‘Well, I blame the mother.’
‘Of course you do. It’s the only logical conclusion. The mother is definitely to blame.’
‘I’d go so far as to say she is the worst mother in the world.’
‘Without a doubt. Pamela Pickering is the worst mother in the entire world. And that includes those ones who sell their daughters into sex slavery in South-East Asia.’ ‘They’re saints compared to Pamela Pickering.’
But while Mum came to terms with a P.R. disaster that didn’t exist, my dad’s reaction was very different.
‘Brilliant! This is bloody brilliant!’
‘It’s not brilliant, Ronnie. It’s embarrassing.’
‘No, Pammy. This is brilliant.’
‘Why is it so bloody brilliant, Ronnie?’
‘The rules of engagement have changed, Pammy. It’s about signs now!’
On a Saturday morning in September my dad woke me around five o’clock. He’d spent a sleepless night mulling over ideas and had finally come up with a plan.
‘Come with me, son. We’re going to have some fun.’
This was a very important moment. It was the first time my father had included me in one of his schemes and I was giddy with excitement. I had always been a keen and admiring observer of my father’s shenanigans, building a checklist for the things that one does when one becomes a man. First on the list was ‘hilarious retribution’. Dad’s war with Richard, in particular, would become the yardstick against which all of my future comedic ventures would be measured. To be included, nay conscripted, into Dad’s retributive plans meant something else altogether. Clearly now I had come of age and was ready for active deployment. I was the general’s new lieutenant. He was taking me under his wing and was going to teach me what it meant to be an adult.
So to speak.
But there was another reason why his call-up was such a big deal and that was closeness. My father and I had always been very close, but in a way that we never vocalised. He taught me how to kick a footy, ride a bike, hammer a nail, swear after hitting your thumb with a hammer and all of the other important things that a boy needs to know. But we never spoke about what we, as men, had in common. This really is the Australian version of menschkeit—it is that which exists between men, but dare not speak its name. Sure you might have a few too many schooners at the pub and tell a mate that you love him enough to give him your golf clubs, but it’s never taken seriously, and if you ever said something like that sober things would get very uncomfortable.
I could only recall o
ne prior moment, when I was about six, that Dad and I truly related to each other on a man-level. It was a Sunday afternoon in summer and, as was our Sunday afternoon habit, we were watching Solid Gold. If memory serves, Billy Ocean was really letting rip with a power lip sync of ‘Caribbean Queen’. As if the audio feast wasn’t enough, the Solid Gold Dancers were doing what they do best. Dancing. Dancing in tiny costumes. Spandex had only just been invented and the world was beginning to see why. Even at the age of six there was something about the scene that caught my eye, and I felt that I had to share it with my father. I turned to him and said, ‘Those girls have big boobs, don’t they, Dad?’ With all the beautiful simplicity of bread and butter pudding or a drop punt, my father replied, ‘They sure do, son. They sure do.’
This was our Wonder Years moment. An unlikely connection that passed as swiftly as it arrived but would not be forgotten. Much like my childhood and the relevance of Billy Ocean, the Solid Gold Dancers are now long gone. Some of the greatest things in life, it seems, have a built-in use-by date.
And so it was, nearly five years later that we were about to bond again. As the sun was rising and rubbing the last remnants of celestial sleep from its eyes, my dad and I were hard at work. We had twenty-three large sheets of cardboard and some fat smelly textas. We were making signs. I was using my neatest handwriting and only messed up two signs by trying to fit too many words into a line so that the last three letters were all skinny and unreadable. Dad said that was ok, that was exactly why he bought spare cardboard. After a half-hour craft session we had a stack of twenty signs that read:
Impractical Jokes Page 6