by Nick Earls
I had misled him weeks before, I realised. I had misled both of us. I had said everything would be all right, that we would go on as usual, when perhaps that was never likely. It had seemed likely when I said it though — nothing had changed by then, nothing like this. I had said it because I needed to hear it, as much as because he needed to hear it. But we were past that once the decision about the house was made, and that old conversation was not to be talked about. Things were not all right, so we weren’t saying that now. My parents were talking about taking control, sounding out the positives in a situation that looked far from positive to me.
I got Andy to find his football and we kicked it around in the backyard until the Hartnetts heard us and called us over for a swim. We said nothing to them that afternoon about selling the house, since neither of us had a way of telling them, or neither of us wanted to. We could swim in the pool, play Marco Polo and make it all like the holidays, before our luck had changed. We threw a wet old tennis ball around, skimmed it off the surface at each other until it deflected from Katharine’s arm and was lost in the bushes. We swam until night came and our mother called over the fence to get us home for dinner.
The real estate agent’s sign went up the next day.
‘This place’ll go nicely,’ the agent said. ‘Don’t you worry.’
His hair was receding, with a prominent widow’s peak — he must have been about fifty — and he wore a white shirt with a singlet under it and a dark tie. His eyes tended to be down on his papers, which my mother had been looking at when Andy and I arrived from the bus stop. She introduced us to him, and his handshake wasn’t up to much, as though he wasn’t sure he should be shaking our hands at all. They were talking through the wording of the ad for the newspapers, so we left them to it and went through to the kitchen to get something to eat. I don’t know where my father was that afternoon, but he was nowhere to be seen.
At the end of his visit, with the right papers signed and the advertising wording agreed, the real estate agent went down to his car and took a mallet and a sign from the boot. He paced up and down the front of the garden until he had chosen the spot, and then he banged the sign into the ground, his cowlick of hair flopping down over his face. He pushed it back into place, straightened the sign a little and turned to wave to my mother on the front verandah before going back to his car and driving off.
I watched this from under the house, and I didn’t like it at all. It was momentous, and for him it was nothing. He did this kind of thing every day in these suburbs, but not in these circumstances, not for us. He had no idea what he was doing, other than banging in a sign. I wanted to stop him, to pull his sign out and tell him where to stick it until he looked me in the eye, until he said something right, owned up to what was really going on. Another part of our business was public now — we were selling, and all the world was to know.
‘It’s still fucking crooked,’ Andy said quietly. ‘We’ve got ourselves a real estate agent who can’t even hit a sign in right.’
We were getting a box of sausage rolls from the downstairs freezer, and we had stopped and watched through the slats as the sign had gone up.
‘Let’s eat,’ Andy said, as he brushed ice from the box and onto the concrete, and looked at the picture with its perfect golden pastry and steaming sausage meat. ‘I think I need about six of these.’
We went upstairs and watched the sausage rolls cook in the toaster oven. Andy poured tomato sauce onto a plate, then stuck his finger in the bottle and sucked it. My mother walked in with a handful of papers, and lined their edges up by tapping them on the counter. She talked about the real estate agent and his reputation with a forced kind of brightness that I tried to trust but couldn’t. She asked about school, but we didn’t have much to report so she told us about work instead. She was getting into the habit of comparing days when we all arrived home in the midafternoon.
‘A man came in with a garden fork through his foot,’ she said, smiling. ‘I nearly vomited. He was wearing sandshoes and it went right through. Why he didn’t go straight to hospital I don’t know. There was blood everywhere. Everywhere.’
When Katharine Hartnett saw the sign she said, ‘But why would you have to move just because of what’s going on? That’s like a Steinbeck novel. We’re doing one of those at school. People don’t have work and they have to move. It makes no sense that you would have to.’
I told her it was complicated.
It was late one afternoon and she was walking the dogs. I had been sent out to pick up poinciana seed pods before my father mowed the lawn. I had a bucket a third full with them when she came past, saw the sign and jolted to a stop. Jolted enough that one of the dogs yelped.
‘My parents are spinning out a bit,’ I told her. ‘But it’ll be okay.’
‘That’s in the Depression though, the Steinbeck novel,’ she said. She was wearing a singlet and shorts and big sunglasses, and had worked up quite a sweat. ‘They’re incredibly poor, the people who are moving. Have you read that stuff?’ I told her we hadn’t done Steinbeck yet and she looked at the words ‘For Sale’ again and said, ‘I can’t believe that sign. Surely there’s another way. Where are you going? You should stay. Think of us.’ She said it as a joke. ‘Think of the shitty new neighbours we might get. Don’t be so selfish.’
The dogs prowled around her ankles, wrapping their leads around her legs. She stepped free and tried to disentangle them. I laughed at what she had said and apologised. I told her we might win the Golden Casket lottery any week and change our minds. There was still time.
‘Sure,’ she said, ‘win the Casket. And your parents can hire pod-picker-uppers and be people of leisure.’
‘Because leisure so suits my father,’ I said, keeping the joke going, and regretting it as I said it.
‘It wouldn’t suit mine, either.’ One of the dogs barked at something across the road that the rest of us couldn’t see. ‘I should get going or they’ll start chewing my shoes.’
‘Not so good with your feet in,’ I said. She went off down the road, and something on the dogs’ collars caught the sunlight and glittered.
They had been bought new collars with some kind of stones set in them. Dogs that would eat shoes and tennis balls and would happily shit where they stood were getting jewels now in our neighbourhood. Katharine, the Hartnetts, this Hamilton hill — none of them, I thought, would grasp our move. None of them could understand a world without an abundance of money. They had only Steinbeck to help them, and he couldn’t help them much because his world was an ocean away, and two generations, and therefore some kind of make-believe. But the twins were still my friends, and I was glad of that.
As I stood there with a bucket in one hand and a seed pod in the other I realised that I was also glad that Katharine didn’t get it, and hadn’t tried to get it. That she had got on with the conversation in the way she would have any other day. That was better. That was normal.
The house was open for inspection the following Saturday, which meant we all had to go through the stresses that were part of bringing it to an unusual state of tidiness. I was used to being told to tidy my room and making half an attempt at it — that was all that was called for when it was tidiness for its own sake. This was different.
My father focused on the outside, mowing the lawn that I had cleared of pods days before and pulling weeds out of the garden beds. My mother went out to fetch the dry laundry in, and I heard him talking to her as he stood on a patch of bare ground under the poinciana tree, scraping at it with the toe of his shoe.
‘We should get some fertiliser,’ he said. ‘Before the next one. Before the auction.’
Some more clothes pegs landed in their basket and my mother said, ‘Good idea,’ but the way she would have done regardless of what he had been talking about.
There was a gap between them then, at that time in our lives, or at least I sensed there was.
I told myself we were focused on the task. The open-for-inspection
was almost upon us. I made my bed, I returned my books to their shelves, I put my homework into something like a neat pile.
They used to talk more. My father’s bad jokes had dried up, and he seemed to get through the day simply moving from one vague thought to the next. He was having ‘down time’, he said. He had worked for almost twenty-five years and he was having down time. He was recharging his batteries.
My mother came into the house with her arms full of dry sheets, and the screen door slapped shut behind her. ‘How do you feel about vacuuming?’ she said to me from the hallway. ‘You could start with the dining room and lounge.’
The real estate agent arrived at 11.45, fifteen minutes before the open-for-inspection was due to begin. We’d spent all morning getting the house right, and I didn’t like the feeling that we were answering to him about it. But he said it looked good, just right — tidy and well-presented, but like a house a family would live in.
I imagined the next family taking their place here. I couldn’t know who they might be, but this would be theirs soon and someone I had never met would be sleeping in my room, playing tennis with the Hartnett twins and swimming in their pool. We weren’t necessarily much alike, the Hartnetts and me, but suddenly I found myself putting a value on all our common ground and wanting not an inch of it taken from me.
They had welcomed us when we arrived, invited us over as a family for a barbecue and a swim, and they would welcome their next neighbours too. I could see my place here going, ending up in someone else’s hands out of simple politeness while we lived who knows where.
I think I was wary of the twins the day we moved in — confident city girls that they were, at home in the big house on the hill — but it wasn’t their style to have any part of that. They told me a few things about my new school. We talked about music. Soon enough we were hitting balls on their tennis court and agreeing we’d go to each other’s formals if we didn’t have partner possibilities when the time came. I didn’t know if that deal would hold if my family moved out with the formal six months away. Was our common ground just on this hill? Perhaps it was. I didn’t want to think that.
We were at least the third family to live in our house since it was built in the twenties, and the fourth would be here soon enough. Our turn rushed to its end. It had gone from being a house our family lived in to a house a family would live in, a house on the market and we were there to keep it neat for selling. There would be people through it any minute, feet on our carpets, eyes on our business.
That was the day I realised we were moving. The sign in the front yard had looked like an accident until then, or like a decision that could easily be reversed. I had been waiting for my parents to change their minds, to look at their finances again and laugh at the mistake they had made and tell us we were staying.
The agent had told us days before that we should leave for the open-for-inspection, and my mother had decided that we would go to the Bonanza Steakhouse.
As we backed out of the driveway, I saw that a car had pulled up at our mailbox and that a man was standing next to it with his hands on his hips. He was looking up at our house, at the roof line, the gutters, the windows. He glanced over our way, and nodded and gave a small wave. My mother lifted her hand to wave back, but my father kept his eyes on the driveway and his mirrors, and turned the rear end of the car into the street.
‘I wonder how many people we’ll have through,’ my mother said as we drove away, but none of us replied. I wanted to, but I had no idea how it worked when you sold a house, no idea how many people might come and what they would do when they got there.
I imagined them in my room, taking a look at my things, though I can’t see why they would have. And I imagined them seeing some sign that told them who the house belonged to, and why we were moving. I imagined that the man near our mailbox had looked our way longer than he did, had recognised my father and would go home with a story to tell. ‘You’ll never guess whose house I looked at today. Could be a bargain.’ And Andy and I sat in the back seat of the car and in the shadows of that story, carried along by it and the shame that ran through our days. I thought of people talking about us, stories being told and truncated and wrongly remembered, the conjecture I had heard once or twice at school but that I knew went on much more. About my father’s role, about what really happened, all of that.
I had always been told to stand up to injustice, and here we were leaving our house to skulk across town while people walked among our things and formed uncontested opinions from very little. Surely that was an injustice, and the kind we should be standing up to. I wanted to fight with my father about his weakness in the face of all this, and then I was just sad for him. I looked at the back of his head as he checked his mirrors again, and glanced across at my mother, who was staring straight ahead. I had once, when I was much younger, thought he had all the strength anyone could ever need. Andy and I would wrestle with him, and he would lift us each with one arm, as if we weighed nothing. He was a giant then, when we wrestled.
He reached down to the radio, and tuned it to another station, one that was stuck in 1963 and was playing Neil Sedaka’s ‘Oh What a Night’. I watched his hands on the wheel as he drove. I would be seventeen in a while, and he had always told me he would teach me to drive as soon as I had my learner’s. I told myself to think about that. I wanted to drive the way he did, with certainty and comfort, his large hands making smooth fine-tuning movements with the wheel and making them by instinct so that we cruised along. When I watched my father drive, I couldn’t understand how people had accidents.
The Bonanza Steakhouse was on Gympie Road, on the way to the north coast. It was a brown timber-fronted building, built to look as if it was made of logs and with a sign that suggested the name had been branded into the wood. The TV ad went ‘Come on out to the flamin’ B Bonanza’ in a way that probably borrowed heavily from the theme song from the long-gone TV series. It was big and noisy and, for our family, an alternative to the Boot Factory Spaghetti Emporium for dinner when someone had a birthday. This was the first time we had gone there without an occasion.
‘Well, this is good,’ my mother said as we stood waiting to be shown to our table.
The smell of cooking made me hungry, and one of the staff came past us with meals on a tray — steaks and chips and salads. My father stood behind my mother, his car keys still in his hand, as if he hadn’t yet settled in to the idea of eating, while she organised a booth for us near a window. It looked out to a car park and a Dollar Curtains shop.
My mother ordered Cokes for Andy and me as soon as we sat down, as well as a glass of moselle for herself. ‘You should have a beer,’ she said to my father, and he said, ‘All right,’ and then talked about the prices once the waiter had left.
‘I might have to have a second glass of moselle,’ my mother said, and then she held the laminated menu in front of her face as though it needed her close attention.
‘All right,’ my father said again. And then he smiled, set his menu down on the table and folded his hands over it. ‘All right. Well, since we’re here I suppose I should have a steak.’
He did, and for a while the day was different. It was as if we had stolen a birthday when there wasn’t one around. We were taking the chance to step away from the tidied house at Hamilton and celebrate nothing at all. My mother did have a second glass of moselle, and my father a second beer and, when the meal was done, she paid while he went to the toilet, and she folded the receipt up and put it in her purse.
Four people came through the house that day, but the real estate agent said that was no failure if they were genuine buyers, which he assured us at least two of them were. He had their phone numbers and would be following them up.
My mother said ‘Hmmm’ to this and my father said nothing.
The agent picked up the clipboard with the two numbers, so that my parents could see them. Real numbers, real names. ‘This isn’t a bad start,’ he said, but not like someone who was conv
inced of it. ‘We’ll build the interest over the next two weeks. That’s the plan.’
It sounded as if he should be saying more — as if we should hear other parts of the plan — but he was already putting his clipboard back in his briefcase, and his pen in his pocket. He reached for my father’s hand and shook it, while looking beyond his shoulder, and he turned past Andy and me without acknowledging us, and went to the door.
He never struck me as much of a real estate agent. To me he seemed more like a funeral director. I had never met one, but he seemed like the kind of man you might want to have around if there was a coffin involved. He would seem measured and reserved then, though he would still simply be dull and poor at eye contact. But maybe I just hated him because he was selling our house. Perhaps those characteristics are perfect in a real estate agent, and steered him away from anything that looked like a hard sell.
Or maybe he was more perceptive than we ever realised, and could sense the anger Andy and I had in us, and knew there was no real need for it to become his business. My mother might have said something, I don’t know. I imagine we all thought then that the world was taking things away from us, one after the other, but it’s not something we talked about. I had a new sense of impermanence, and sometimes had the idea that one of us might get sick soon and die. There was nothing going on to make me think that, but I thought it anyway because this was the first time in my life when it seemed possible.
One day, when we arrived home from school, my mother told us she had some news about the surgery. She had made a chocolate cake, and she cut us each a large slice. The main receptionist — the only full-timer — was going on a long holiday to Europe, and the doctors had asked my mother to relieve her. She would go full-time for two months.
I asked her how the other part-timers felt, the ones who had been there longer, and she said, ‘They’re just going to have to deal with it. I’m in charge now.’ And she put on a cartoon character’s evil power-hungry laugh and rubbed her hands together. ‘No, really,’ she said, stopping the laugh and becoming more like our mother again. ‘They’re fine about it. They’ve got young children who need picking up from school, things like that.’