by Tony Birch
I took my usual short cut down Young Street, past where I had seen the bulldozer earlier that day. I walked on the opposite side of the street to where the woman and her kids had stood. I looked across to where she had confronted the workmen, and then over at the house. It was gone.
Nothing more than a shadow now hung where it had stood. I walked across the road and headed towards the empty block. I heard a noise and looked at the block. I could see that there was somebody in the shadows of the terrace next door, staggering around and stumbling over the remnants of broken bricks and slate tiles. I looked closer. It was my father. He was obviously drunk. I tried to walk away before he was able to spot me, but I was too late.
‘Michael, Michael? That you? Hey?’
He fell forward onto his hands and knees as he walked towards me. He tried to get up but fell over again.
‘Michael. Give us a hand up here, mate, will you?’
I walked over and looked down at him as he crawled across the rubble on his hands and knees.
I kept some distance between us as I spoke to him. ‘What are you doing here, dad? How did you get here?’
He looked up at me. I offered him my hand. As he took hold of it and attempted to pull himself to his feet he let out a cry, let go of my hand and fell backwards. I felt something warm against my skin. It was blood. He had cut himself.
My father sat in the rubble and watched as the blood ran down his arm. He looked around and waved his hands in the air.
‘Look what they done here. Look what they fucken done. Fucken bastards.’
He looked around again before waving me over to him. ‘Come on, Michael. Help me up. Help me here, mate.’
I took a hold of his hands and pulled him towards me. He got to his feet and brushed the dust from his overalls. He then staggered over to the dividing wall of the terrace next door, leaned forward and vomited. He took his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped both his mouth and eyes. He then furiously kicked a piece of galvanised pipe across the street. He spat on the ground.
‘Fuck the Commission. Fuck them.’
We walked down to the corner together. I wanted him to come home with me, for my mother’s sake, although I could not understand why she would want him home anyway. For a long time I had been thinking that we would be better off with him gone.
‘Come on, dad. You coming home? Let’s go.’
He glared at me accusingly now and suddenly turned on me.
‘I’m not going fucken home. Not going. I’m going to the sly grog.’
With that he turned around and staggered across another vacant allotment, heading for a local sly grog that many years earlier had been named The House of Wax — because, people said, it was ‘full of stiffs’.
I stood watching him until he got to the next street corner. The buildings that had until recently occupied that crossroad were now all gone. My father stood on the corner spinning in clumsy circles and scratching his head in an attempt to regain his bearings. He finally stuck an arm out and pointed himself in the direction he needed to go. He continued on his way. I watched him for a while and thought about going home myself. I was hungry and it was getting colder.
I had only taken a couple of steps towards home before changing my mind and heading back up the street to the spot where dad’s house should have been. I stood on the footpath for some time, staring into the dark hole before walking onto the block and feeling the soles of my shoes scrunch against the rubble and fragments of broken glass and wood. An old fireplace, set in a bluestone foundation and red brick base towards the back of the block had remained relatively intact. As I kicked around in the rubble the rays of the corner streetlight picked up the reflection of something metal lying amongst the rubble. I bent forward and picked it up. It was an old tea-strainer, a brass tea-strainer. I put it in my jeans pocket and walked back down to the corner where I had left my father.
I walked away, in the opposite direction from him, towards home. As I walked along the street I looked down into the gutter, at each and every bluestone pitcher lining the edge of the footpath, knowing that within a few months even these will have vanished.
As I lay in bed reading into the early hours of the next morning I listened to the quiet of the house and the silence of the street. The bulldozers had stopped for the day, the drunks of the street were asleep, and the last tram had rung out its bell as it sped down Brunswick Street on its way home to the depot.
Both the house and the street were at their best during the night, when little was happening, when none of us had anywhere to go, when there were no street battles to fight, and no pasts to confront.
Katie, mum and I were at the table the next morning having breakfast when my dad came out into the kitchen. He was hung-over. He opened the back door and stuck his head under the tap over the gully-trap. After dampening his hair he scrubbed his face with the ice-cold water and put his mouth to the tap, taking a long full drink.
When he came back into the kitchen he sat at the table and let the water run down his head of curls, onto his bare shoulders and over his chest. Without any need to be asked, mum got up from the table to make him a cup of tea. He looked across to the sideboard, and at the brass tea-strainer that I had found the night before. He leaned across and picked it up and studied it closely before placing it on the table.
‘Who does this belong to?’
I was not sure if he would even remember our meeting and conversation from the night before.
‘I found it, last night. It was there, where your old place used to be. The one they knocked down yesterday.’
He ran a finger across the deep gash on his palm, looking to it to return him to the previous night. He picked up the strainer again and held it in his hand. He commenced rubbing the brass between his thumb and forefinger. He looked down at the strainer as he spoke, more to himself than to us.
‘When I was a kid I lived in that house with my mum, my grandmother, two cousins and two of my aunties. Six women. Six beautiful women. We used to sit around the kitchen table of a night, drinking cups of tea, listening to my granny tell us stories about the old days.’
He let out a sigh before continuing.
‘That was a beautiful place, that house they just knocked over. It was a house of love.’
When he looked up at us we could see that his eyes were full of tears. Mum was standing next to the table with a mug of tea in her hand. She was in shock. We all were. And not because he was crying, but for the words that he had spoken: a house of love.
When he saw us looking at him, he threw the tea-strainer onto the laminex tabletop, pushed his chair away from the table, and left the room. A few minutes later we heard the front door slam as he left the house.
Our street was the last to go. The same bulldozers that had finished everything off around us eventually flanked the street, waiting to move in. And then they did it, reducing everything in their path to rubble, crushing brick, iron and wood as they advanced. Our house, the red house, which had once been packed with the other terraces into these narrow streets and lanes, was quickly reduced to a speck on the landscape as the houses around it disappeared. And then, it went too. Finally, there was nothing left but the vast emptiness. It was as if we had never existed.
The Return
We always received our first Christmas card of the year from my mother’s Aunt Billie, sometimes as early as the middle of October — so that she could get it out of the way, Billie would explain to us if asked why the card had arrived so early.
Billie had many eccentric habits, such as turning her hearing aid off whenever she did not want to listen to what was being said to her, although she never informed those who were having a one-way conversation with her of this. Billie would simply nod her head up and down to simulate listening and reply ‘yeah, yeah, me too, me too’ repeatedly, regardless of what had been said to her.
She also had peculiar dress sense, particularly in relation to the positioning of underwear. Billie would often turn up at the house on a Sunday afternoon wearing a motley fur coat that had been given to her by a bookie boyfriend, many years earlier. We would sit at the table and wait in anticipation as Billie removed the coat, never entirely sure how she had arranged her clothing for the day, although we could be certain that she would be wearing her bra over the top of one of a variety of turtleneck sweaters that she favoured, regardless of the weather.
The rationale for the reverse order of Billie’s clothing had not been questioned for many years. Her initial explanation — that it was ‘more comfortable and practical’ — was a sufficient response, as far as Billie was concerned. She would become angry whenever the matter was pursued further, so people stopped asking her, although none of us really got used to it.
After Billie’s Christmas card arrived and had taken prime position on the mantle that would eventually overflow with cards, I would know that Christmas Day was not too far away.
And once we got into December my grandmother would come and visit us and take Katie and me into town to look at the decorations in the Myer windows, along with thousands of other kids. It was during one of those early trips that I first spotted him. It was a day that I would not forget.
My grandmother had wheeled Katie into town in the pram. She tried to hurry me along as I daydreamed my way along the street in her wake. Before we were taken to see the window decorations we stopped at the Ladies’ underground toilets outside the Post Office, on Elizabeth Street. One of my grandmother’s closest friends, Jean Lambert, worked there cleaning the floors, toilets and hand basins, while keeping up a ready supply of paper, clean towels and soap.
Jean had her own small room in one corner. It contained a small fridge and electric jug, as well as a mantle-radio. She had decorated the walls with magazine posters of movie stars and racehorses. Whenever she got the chance for a break, Jean would sit in that room, drinking tea and listening to the races.
Nan and Jean chatted to each other while Katie’s bottle was heated in the jug. Jean had raised six kids of her own, and even more grandchildren. And it showed. She managed to nurse Katie with one hand, smoke a cigarette and drink tea with the other, while listening to the race scratchings on the radio at the same time.
While Katie sucked ferociously at her bottle, the women talked together, picking up the threads of a conversation that they had left off several weeks ago. As they spoke I wandered out to the porcelain hand basins and started playing with the taps. I could both hear and feel the deep rumble of the trams in the street above me.
I adjusted the hot and cold taps until I had a steady stream of warm water running through my fingers. I looked over my shoulder, back towards Nan. The warm water reminded me of an occasion when Nan told me that her deepest wish in life was to spend a whole weekend in a beautiful deep bath, occasionally topping it up with hot water that never ran out. She would have nowhere else to go, and would rest in that big bath all day, playing with the taps. It did not seem like much of a wish at the time, but as I enjoyed the feeling of the warm water against my skin and slipping between my fingertips, I understood what she meant.
I stood at the basin and looked into the large mirror in front of me. I pretended that I was studying my own face while actually looking at the women pursing their lips and combing their hair in the line of mirrors either side of me.
These women had come seeking sanctuary from the bustling streets above. Some had their arms loaded up with shopping bags, and just wanted a toilet break. Others, particularly the younger women, went straight for the mirrors with their make-up cases, oblivious to my presence. I watched with fascination as they applied bright red lipstick, rouged their cheeks, darkened their eyelashes, and brushed their hair.
They were beautiful, those women. They sounded beautiful. As they spoke to each other at the hand basins their voices echoed off the tiled walls with a richness that I had not heard before — more a song than the spoken word.
After we had finished with Jean, Nan carried the pram up the stairs and into the sunlight. She propped Katie up in the pram so that she could take it all in. I walked on ahead of them. We turned into Bourke Street and towards the Myer windows. It appeared that half of Melbourne was pushing and shoving for a glimpse of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The crowd overflowed from the footpath onto the roadway. Passing drivers were yelling and abusing people while slamming a hand down on a car horn. A couple of kids looked as if they were about to be run over for Christmas.
Nan took one look. ‘Jesus, it’s a madhouse.’
She tried to push the pram through the crowd, without success. She encouraged me to slip between the legs of the adults and get a closer look, but it was clear that this approach would only result in me getting trampled.
She peered over the shoulders of the crowd before deciding that we should retreat across the road. Nan had had enough of Christmas for one day, or maybe even for another year.
We walked up Bourke Street on the opposite footpath to Myer and headed for home. It was then that I saw him. Although the Woolworth’s building stood seven storeys high, he managed to cover every inch of its height. His black boots rested comfortably above the ground-floor verandah. They ended between the first and second storeys. His red trousers were held up by a black belt, around the height of the fourth floor. A long white beard fell to meet the belt and stretched back up over a barrelled chest and wide shoulders. A strong and gentle face smiled down at me from the rooftop. His left hand rested at his side, while the index finger of his right hand beckoned me to him.
I stood on the footpath watching that finger as it moved back and forth. I began walking towards him, hypnotised, all the way up Bourke Street, bumping into shoppers as I went.
Nan had not seen what I had.
‘Michael! Michael! Where are you going?’
I did not hear her. She walked alongside me, pushing Katie in front of her. She tried grabbing me by the arm.
‘Michael, what are you doing? Where do you think you’re going?’
I pointed along the street to the Woolworth’s building.
‘I’m going to see Father Christmas.’
Throughout that Christmas season of our first meeting I continually pestered my grandmother to take me to the Woolworth’s corner. Each time that I got there I would stand on the adjacent corner, outside the Leviathan Building, watching as his finger coaxed children into the store.
My grandmother was reasonably patient with me, although following our third visit into town prior to Christmas she’d had just about enough of me. ‘Michael, haven’t you had enough of this? You’ve seen the show, now let’s get going.’
On the day that I went into town following the New Year, the giant Father Christmas had left. After visiting Jean at the Ladies’ toilets again we turned into Bourke Street. I looked towards his corner and lifted my head in anticipation, but he was gone. I stopped in the street and stared up at seven storeys of blank brick wall.
I raised my hand as I pointed upward. ‘He’s gone. He’s gone, Nan.’
‘Who’s gone?’ She looked around, all worried, with confusion on her face.
‘The Father Christmas, he’s gone?’
Nan could only laugh at me. ‘Yeah, I know he has, love, to the North Pole. You know the story. Don’t think he’d hang around here all year. He’d get sick of the heat and noise. Don’t worry. He’ll be back next year. It’s the only job he can get.’
Nan thought that was funny and started to chuckle to herself, although I did not think there was anything to laugh about. But she was right. He did come back, the very next year, and for years after that. Once Billie’s Christmas card had arrived I would know that it was again time to lobby for a trip into town.
‘Come on, Nan, let’s go and see if he
’s back,’ I would plead with her.
She would curse Billie for being so early. When we got into town there would be nothing to look at but a blank wall.
‘Looks great,’ Nan would say.
But each year there would come the day when I would turn the corner at Elizabeth Street and he would be there, where he would stay until the end of the season. We never missed our visits to him, until we moved away and did not know how to get back there, to that street corner.
One day I was walking home from school to the house with Katie and the next we were leaving the street for the final time, in the back of a furniture van, along with the few possessions that my mother had decided were in good- enough condition to take with us.
None of us dared look back — not me, not Katie, and not mum, who stared blankly down at a box that she was nursing on her lap. The three-mile drive to the public housing estate at Richmond might just as well have been three thousand. We knew nobody there and nobody seemed to want to know us.
Each of us gradually went our separate ways in order to survive the move. The old man went to the pub, Katie retreated to her room, and my mum went to work night shift in a local factory, baking crumpets, of all things. And I ventured downstairs and onto the basketball court in the middle of the estate. I did not play basketball, but then, nobody else around there did either. The basketball court was where most of the older kids hung out — and where most of the fights took place.
It was when our first Christmas on the estate approached that I fully realised that nothing would be as it had been before. My grandmother’s house in Carlton seemed so far away from us now. It felt like we had not seen her in months. Aunt Billie had not visited, and if she had our address, she had not bothered to send a card, as yet.
Mum decided to decorate the Christmas tree early that first year but it failed to lift us. I sulked around the flat most of the time. Katie was just as bored as I was and did little more than sit around on the new lounge scuffing her shoes back and forth on the floor tiles. But at least she tried to motivate the two of us into doing something to somehow relocate ourselves.