I felt sick with each bid that Andrew made and, when the auctioneer raised the gavel on the third and final call – the house was gone, sold to the man in the red jumper – I hoped that someone else would leap in at the last minute. No one did.
Seconds later, Nancy collapsed. It was a mistake, she cried. She had not meant to agree to the price, she didn’t want to sell, and as her friends tried to help her up, the real estate agent quickly ushered us into the kitchen to sign the contract.
‘She’s lived here for thirty years,’ the agent and the auctioneer explained. ‘She’s bound to be emotional.’
‘That’s not true,’ Nancy called out from another room. ‘I cry because I have been cheated.’
Her husband took a beer from the fridge and shrugged his shoulders, while we sat at the table, not knowing what to do.
The auctioneer took charge. We had to sign each page of the contract, just there, at the bottom. Nancy called out again. She wouldn’t be putting her name to any agreement. She had been robbed, and she sobbed loudly.
Neighbours walked in and out again. They looked at us briefly, helped themselves to a drink and then returned to the room in which Nancy was being consoled. A man with a stubbie of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other asked us how much we had paid.
We told him.
‘I’ll pay two hundred thousand more,’ and he leant against the table in an attempt to stand up straight.
‘I want to sell it to him,’ Nancy called out.
‘She can if she wants to,’ I whispered to Andrew, and I looked at the broken kitchen window while overhead a plane roared low.
He agreed.
The agent was exasperated now. ‘You can’t do that,’ she said. ‘It’s been sold. It’s the law.’
We put our signatures on the paper and were assured that Nancy would also sign. ‘She has to,’ the agent said, and she led us to the front door, promising she would call and let us know when everything was finalised.
Like all people who look for a house, we had a mental list of what we wanted. Our list was not particularly long, and included many items on which we were prepared to compromise. But for me, there was one essential, and that was a room in which I could work. Nancy’s house, unlike many we had looked at, had a small sunroom, wedged between the kitchen and the bathroom.
Eight years ago, when I was finising my first novel, I simply set up a table in the lounge room of the flat in which Andrew and I lived. Terrified at the prospect of being so close to completing what I had always wanted to do, I didn’t really want a workroom – that would only add pressure. But as the years passed and I began to accept that this was what I did, I needed a room in which I could write.
With each open house inspection, I would try to convince myself that we had found the house that was right for us. I could cope with the busy road, I would tell Andrew. The lack of light was okay. We didn’t really need a garden. I wanted a home, and the urge was so strong that I lied frequently, desperate to believe that we could make each place our own. But I never lied about my need for a workroom. This was the first thing I looked for each time we joined the queue of people eager to inspect, and if it wasn’t there, I was not so forgiving – the noise, lack of space and light no longer bearable. We couldn’t live there, I would say. It simply wouldn’t work.
On the morning that we were given the keys to our new house, Nancy met us at the front door.
She was sorry, she said. She had behaved badly. She wanted us to like it here.
‘See.’ She pointed to the old tin shed at the end of the yard. ‘I have left it for you. It was not in the contract, but I have left it.’
She opened the sliding door. ‘This is where I sewed,’ she said. ‘It is a good room.’
The floor was concrete, and with no windows, the only light came from the single fluorescent beam overhead. Power had been rigged up from the laundry, a long cord draped along the rusting tin fence and poked through a hole in the wall. The room was barely a room, but it had been Nancy’s own and she looked around it fondly.
She gave us a tour of the garden. With a concrete path up the centre, it was divided into two beds. Dark green leaves grew in clumps throughout the stony soil. I did not know if they were weeds, and I bent down to look more closely.
She pulled one up. ‘You cook them,’ she instructed, ‘then throw out the water. Boil them again. Then eat.’
‘Do they taste all right?’ I asked.
She screwed up her mouth. ‘But very good for you.’
Inside, she looked at each room one last time. ‘My sons painted for me,’ she told us. ‘They are good boys.’
The rooms were predominantly brown with grey feature walls. The lines between the two hues were hopelessly crooked and the colours depressing, but we told her how much we liked it. The kitchen and the bathroom had also been built by her sons; the tiles didn’t match, the plumbing didn’t work and the cupboards didn’t open, but she was proud of their handiwork.
‘They were only thirteen,’ she told us as she waved her arm around the tiny space where she had cooked for the last thirty years. ‘They built in the holidays. It kept them out of trouble.’
We took her to the door and she hugged us. ‘Be happy,’ she said. ‘It is a good house.’
Sitting under the tin awning that Nancy’s sons had erected out the back, Andrew and I drank a bottle of champagne and made plans. We would paint, fix up the garden, and try to put a kitchen in. Looking out across the patch of dirt to the shed, we talked about what we could do. It seemed a shame to pull it down. Perhaps we could turn it into a proper workroom. It shouldn’t be that hard, we both said. The foundations are there. And we agreed to leave it, despite how ugly it was; the studio to be, we told friends as we showed them around our new house, keeping our words vague. There was no need to say whose studio it would be. The plan was still in its early stages. Yet our care in circling the question of ownership only highlighted what we tried to hide, because each of us had our eye on that shed. Each of us knew that the other wanted to call it their own.
We moved often in the years that followed the publication of my first novel. After Odessa was born, our needs changed; a bedroom for us, one for her, and with both of us wanting a workroom, it became clear that our requirements outstripped what we could afford. And so we were forced to share, usually a small sunroom off the front bedroom. It wasn’t an arrangement that worked. We battled over whose turn it was to have the room, about leaving it tidy, about working late, neither of us feeling we had what we wanted.
Eventually Andrew took a job at a university. Most days I had the sunroom to myself, and I continued to write. Books that dealt with fictional families dealing with fictional dilemmas. I wrote and I wrote.
In the front room of her house, my mother was also writing. She had never really called herself a writer, and this was a product of the hierarchy to which she subscribed. Novelists were writers. She wrote about her own life. This was something else, a lesser art form that did not deserve the tag of author. But now she had finally decided to try what she had always wanted to do. She was going to attempt fiction.
Her book was about a woman who travelled, as she herself had travelled, to Third World nations in crisis. She drew on the diaries she had kept, memories, notes she had made. She found it much more difficult than she had expected. ‘I keep slipping into reportage,’ she told me, convinced that there was something wrong with this.
As I listened to her talk about the book, about the character she was creating, I could see that she was writing about herself, just as she had done in the past, and because of this she felt she was failing. A novel demanded something more. She should be able to kick herself free from the confines of her own life.
It was hard to let go, she said.
I knew what she meant.
I, too, was struggling with my work. No matter what story I made up, I was still writing from within my own skin. It was inescapable. And with this realisation, I had begu
n to toy with the idea of a change of form, with seeing if I could speak as myself. I was working on these pieces, taking moments in my life and holding them up to the light, turning them over and over, trying to tease them out, still uncertain as to whether I would have the courage to continue.
We had switched places, my mother and I. And we looked at each other. Both mothers. Both writers. Both trying on each other’s shoes, taking a few steps back, eyes on our feet, before we glanced across once again, curious as to how this had happened.
Before we moved in, Andrew and I painted. Each weekend we went over to the house, sometimes with Odessa, sometimes on our own. We took a radio and listened to the AFL matches, we bought lunch from the Greek deli at the top of the road, we sat out the front in the northerly sun and looked across the street that was to become home.
We had soon covered each of Nancy’s sons’ walls with the cheapest white paint we could buy. Months later, I wish we had spent a little more. The paint has begun to peel back, revealing the grey and brown once again. We pulled up the carpet, only to find layers of old lino, glued and tacked to the floor. On his hands and knees, Andrew scraped it all up, while I carted it out to the nature strip at the front.
One afternoon, I tackled the garden beneath the verandah, picking out each of Nancy’s husband’s cigarette butts and old tins in the glaring midday sun. There was no end to the task. I moved to the back, trying to clear broken glass, rusted tools, more butts and tins; there were years and years of their lives buried only just underneath the surface of the dirt. As I tried to clear the rubbish, I also pulled up each of the bitter greens that Nancy had shown us on the day she gave us the keys. Their roots were tougher than I had expected, the job harder than I had anticipated.
I stood up and looked across the dirt that was supposed to be a garden, and down to where Andrew stood at the back door of the house. ‘I like it here,’ I told him, as we sat on the ground drinking Vietnamese soup, the smell of mint and coriander mingling with the freshness of the new paint. He felt the same. It was becoming our own, and it was good.
The day after we moved in, I set up the small sunroom to work in. It is a bright space, with light from the north. I hung curtains like the ones my mother had once had in her study, heavy cotton with brilliant orange and pink flowers. I put down seagrass matting to cover the last remaining square of old lino on the floor, and with the desk looking in towards the kitchen, I began to work again. To write about us.
‘Play with me,’ Odessa would say whenever she came home from school.
‘When will you be finished?’ she would ask.
‘Just a couple more minutes.’ And I would continue typing, the keys clattering softly as I tried to get to the end of the sentence.
Sighing in exasperation, she would try to keep quiet, but it was too hard.
‘Is a couple of minutes finished now?’
It was hard to concentrate, and usually I just gave in.
‘I need somewhere separate,’ I said to Andrew.
He agreed. The room didn’t work.
We sat under the awning and looked out towards the shed.
It took a month to complete. Ray, a builder who had done work for my mother, came with his brother. They examined the structure and told us we should use what we had. There was no need to pull it down. Why not hoist it up, they suggested, clad it in gyprock? And that is what they did, finishing it off with windows and a door, a ceiling, skirts and architraves.
As we moved closer to completion, the unanswered question began to rise to the surface.
It wasn’t fair, Andrew told me. He hadn’t wanted to teach. He still wanted to work on his own projects, and he saw giving up any claim on the room as inextricably linked to the fact that he had to give up what he wanted to do.
But I was the one who mainly worked from home.
I remembered my parents; my father, who didn’t have to prepare programs and write columns at home, in the cool of the study at the front of the house. With the French doors closed to the verandah, it was peaceful; a perfect place to work. Meanwhile my mother, who actually did need an office, was wedged between the kitchen and bathroom, the room barely large enough for a desk, the family traffic constant. I didn’t want a relationship like the one she had, and my battle for the shed became part of my constant desire to assert myself in ways I felt my mother had not.
So, like all fights, the truth of the struggle lay somewhere beneath the surface. We both knew this. The challenge was in finding a resolution.
When the building was complete, I stood at the doorway and looked down across the garden to the house. The lemon trees formed a row on one side. Nancy had planted them when she first moved in. ‘They are good trees,’ she had told us, and one had lived up to her promise, overloaded with lemons clustering at the end of every branch. The other, closest to the shed, was sickly. Covered in vicious spikes and oozing amber sap, there were always trails of ants scurrying up and down the trunk.
We had dug up her concrete path and planted grass over her vegetable garden. It had grown, except in the place where the path once was, a line still dividing the space into two separate areas, just as it had been when Nancy lived here, with the vegetables now in the side beds. Bitter greens still sprung up amongst the broccoli, herbs and rocket I had planted. No matter how often I pulled them out, it seemed that more kept growing.
I turned now to take in the completed room itself. The walls were clean white. I had hung no pictures as yet, and it was monastic in its pristine emptiness. My desk was bare and the rug had a tinge of grey to it I hadn’t noticed before.
‘Do you like it?’ Andrew asked.
We had begun to work towards a compromise, a new sharing arrangement that was yet to be tested, one that we didn’t even like to articulate for fear of the friction that would rise to the surface. But for now, the room was to be mine. When he took his leave from the university, it would be his.
It took me several days before I actually started to write out here. Yesterday, I carried out my new computer and sat at the trestle table for the first time. The northerly sun filled the room with light. It was quiet. I wondered whether the phone was ringing and whether I would hear it if it did. I went back inside to bring it out with me. A few minutes later I returned to the house to make a cup of coffee.
Eventually I sat at my new desk. With the doors wide open, I could hear the birds. I watched them pecking at the dirt. As the day progressed, a few became brave enough to venture into the room. They perched at the entrance, heads cocked, bright eyes fixed on me as I tried to write.
At three-thirty Andrew brought Odessa and two of her friends, Sam and Ned, home.
‘Look at the new shed.’ She showed them the room with pride.
‘It’s lovely,’ Sam said to me, taking my hand and speaking with a sincerity that made me smile.
Andrew told them that they had to leave me alone; I was trying to work.
‘What are you doing?’ Ned asked.
‘I’m writing,’ I explained.
‘What are you writing?’ Sam stood next to me, leaning against the computer keyboard.
‘She writes books,’ Odessa told him.
Andrew called them from the house; afternoon tea was ready. They ran to the kitchen, but five minutes later they were all outside in the garden, bouncing on the trampoline, the springs squeaking, their voices squealing, high pitched, as they jumped up into the sky over and over again. I packed up my computer and went back into the sunroom. I would do what I had always done at the end of the day – answer emails, get the dinner on; the chores that required little or no concentration.
The evening was descending, the sky a soft purple, the air cool now. Andrew had gone to a movie and the house was peaceful. I looked out the back door and saw them all, Sam, Ned and Odessa, up in the room that had once been a tin shed and was now, for the time being, my workroom.
‘What are you doing?’ I called out to them and they didn’t look up.
I wa
lked up the line that had once been the path and stood at the doorway. They were all on the floor, Textas scattered like pick-up sticks across the rug.
‘Do you want to see my book?’ Ned asked, and he held up a piece of paper covered in squares of bright colour, a stick figure standing in the middle, hands out as he gazed up at a cobalt sky.
‘We’re all doing books,’ Odessa told me, her mouth smeared in Texta colour, her hands patterned with a confetti of brilliant dots. ‘But I need you to write the words.’
I would, I told her, but later. It was getting cold and they had to come inside. ‘And your parents will be here soon,’ I said to Ned and Sam.
I kept my promise. After the others had gone, after we had eaten dinner, we sat at the kitchen table and I wrote the story Odessa dictated to me. A tale that blended witches, princesses, friends and superheroes, interweaving them all with complete and utter freedom.
‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘The end.’
I wrote the words as she instructed, telling her to brush her teeth as I did so.
‘Now bed.’
Back in my old room, the sunroom that is wedged between the kitchen and bathroom, I would be able to hear her if she cried out, I would hear the phone if it rang, and I would hear Andrew when he came home from the movies. I leant back in my chair and I began to read what I had been writing. The night air lifted the curtains, the brilliant orange and pink flowers danced against the wall, and a branch from the lemon tree scraped on the tin awning outside. In the distance the goods train screeched as it came to a halt on the tracks. Otherwise, all was still. I was reaching the conclusion of this project, this attempt to try to capture moments in my life, and it was a sense of the whole that I wanted, but the words that I needed eluded me.
Outside I could hear the shift in the breeze, and the first of the rain. There were storms coming, and I wondered briefly about working in the shed tomorrow, carrying my computer across the garden, the umbrella I would need to go back and forth between the room and the house. If it poured I would stay inside. I could choose, I realised. There was no need to worry about it now.
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