trouble

This story begins 11 years ago. Three neat brick units are erected on the large strangely-shaped block behind my original 1920s wooden cottage. Unit 4 is Mike’s first investment property and he comes round to rig up a sprinkler system in our shared driveway, our common territory, our body corporate. He’s having a whale of a time with his new toy.

Gerry invests in Unit 2 right behind me and Jim in Unit 3 in the far back corner. Jim already has other investment properties. I’m the only owner occupier. Tenants move into the new brick units. Doing the dishes, I observe them all coming and going from my kitchen window. We never speak: we all mind our own business.

   

Our first body corporate meeting is at Jim’s manicured palace in the nouveau riche sector of Mooroolbark. Mike, Gerry and I want to self-manage but Jim bulldozes us into appointing a manager. He bluffs and blusters and hectors us into appointing his man, Brendan. We cave in to the strength of his conviction that proper property management is necessary.

Brendan turns out to be a pathetic manager, complying with almost no legal requirement: no common seal, no plaque at the entry to the property with our BC number and contact details, no annual meetings, and meagre financial accounting.

In time Dan and Joyce buy Unit 2 from Gerry and Fio and Alvena purchase Unit 4 from Mike, whose passion for investing in property has curdled. They live on site like me and we all want to self-manage. I am delegated to ring Brendan on our behalf with some curly questions. Before I get one out he offers to resign. His management fees barely cover his costs, he says.

I accept his resignation, but we don’t tell Jim because we know we’re in for a fight, and we want to fore-arm ourselves. But out of the blue Jim appears last evening. He calls first on a bewildered Fio who speaks little English. Then Jim and Dan almost come to blows: they hate each other. Dan claims Jim owes him money and won’t pay.

I know none of this until Jim rings my bell. It’s almost dark and I’m on the couch in just a sarong. Jim disparages my taste in evening wear before sounding off about ‘the mad old bastard’, saying he’ll ‘tip him up’ if Dan lays a hand on him again. I’m in the dark.

I detest this man and feel sullied for hours after he leaves.

Things are all out in open now and trouble is brewing.

Rock on.   

minutiae

Paul Keating’s lacerating wit and egomaniacal sense of his own unerring rightness remain intact. I have the book of his post-prime-ministerial essays and speeches. He is my favourite politician and prime minister, the only Australian prime minister driven by the bigger picture. History will rate him a giant among pygmies.

I admire him for splashing vivid colours on a huge canvas, in contrast my own square focus on life’s grey minutiae. At work I spend hours freeing up time for whatever big job is at hand by doing all the little jobs. I never get to the main game because small things, like fluff on a dark suit, go on forever.

The small things are often the routine things—tidy the desk, answer the emails, straighten the pencils, dust the monitor, make another cuppa. Meanwhile, that major report waits, and that big project lies dormant, then waits or lies some more. Dealing in detail is the stuff of procrastinators and perfectionists.

Daphne, the Publication Coach, sends me a weekly newsletter. She has two mantras—mind map before writing, and don’t edit as you write. I know she’s right, but I’d rather edit than write—writing is big picture stuff, the main game; editing is the details, the particulars, the intricacies. I feast on jots and tittles, on niceties.

Just as the saying goes—save the pennies and the pounds look after themselves—I expect that if I attend to the small things, each separate individuated piece of the puzzle, the big picture will fall into place. The big picture is an illusion, my attention to detail a delusion.

Do I have any Keating in me, or just admire him because his strength is my weakness? My politics and philosophy are big picture. I brought up my kids based on the big picture drawn for me by Atticus Finch. As a school principal I was a man of vision and let my deputy fiddle the nuts and bolts.

In my head I see the big picture, while my hands move in ever-decreasing circles.

Rock on.   

another country

The post-World-War-2 decade is a wasteland—a political wasteland under Robert Menzies, and an emotional wasteland. The 1950s is the decade John Howard wants to revisit when he says he wants Australians to feel relaxed and comfortable.

Nothing much happens in Australia in the 1950s. We’re suffering some sort of collective torpor, a communal passivity. We rebuild after the war, relationships bruised by long separations and what war does to men. Migrants are imported to dig a hole in the Snowy Mountains and make a river run backwards.

Everyone is numb after six years of war. No energy remains. No one has any passion and no one seems to care. We children of the 50s grow up in an emotional vacuum. We roam far and wide; as long as we appear at the dinner table just after six all is well.

Big Brendan drops in the books for our owners’ corporation and by chance we discover that we both grew up in Warrnambool. He recalls the time: his father works in the Kraft factory at Allansford and Brendan does as he pleases in the Hopkins River. No posse of protective mothers comes near the place. My friend Sandy tells me that as a small girl she knew every drain under Ballarat. Her parents know nothing of her subterranean wanderings.

I play on the railway tracks, unpeel chewing gum from the road and eat it, jump off the garage roof, and generally defy death to take me. I ride on the tray of Gus Kelly’s small truck—no sides. I regularly stub my big toes and rip the skin off them, but never break a bone. I get no diseases, meet with no disasters.

The past is indeed another country.

Rock on.   

boy

When I was a small boy in Warrnambool my father called me Buster and my sister Lulu. It was his only contribution to our early childhoods. To my mother were just plain Leigh and Lynne. There were no terms of endearment and no one told us we were loved. I would not have wanted that.

Recently my sister says she thinks our family was dysfunctional: that’s wishful thinking, an excuse for her own dysfunctional family. Dysfunctional didn’t exist back then. Our growing up lacked physical affection, but that seemed normal enough to me in the pre-TV 1950s. Lovey-dovey US sitcom families shamed us later in life.

I had no sense of family as a boy. I had a mother and a father and a sister. I ran about and played in the sun, happy as a sandboy, a favourite expression of my father. He and an older brother had a Warrnambool accountancy practice. When the partnership foundered, he worked in Melbourne for his father during the week and made the long drive home down the Princes Highway each Friday night.

My mother tells me that she was effectively a single parent when my sister and I were little. My father was either working or drinking, honing his snooker skills at the Warrnambool Club until early morning. It was an unhappy time for my parents but I knew none of that.

My good woman is a strongly-focused single parent. That I had brought my children up alone for 16 years was attractive to her when we started going out. She knew I would understand that our relationship came second.

I am like my mother, my sister like my father. My daughter is like me, my son like his mother. After meeting my daughter for the first time my good woman says she is my masterpiece. I agree that she’s an amazing young woman, but can take only partial credit. My son is a lovely young man.

My good woman often asks how I dealt with certain situations when bringing up my children but the details are a blur to me now. I gave them physical affection and they knew they were loved. Our little family was unconventional in many ways, and not easy for any of us, but never dysfunctional.

I’m happy with the results.

Rock on.   

family

January 2008. I move to Bendigo to be near my daughter. She is 27 years old and I am 57. I want to leave Melbourne; I am taking up a job in Bendigo; but more than that I resolved some time ago to be near my grandchildren. As a child I lived a long way from my grandparents and never formed the comfortable bond many children have with their extended families.

No grandchildren are on the agenda at the start of 2008, but my daughter is more likely to produce heirs. She has a partner, whereas my son has not had a girlfriend for nine years.

January 2010. My daughter summons her partner into the driveway when I pick her up to take her to Melbourne and they announce a pregnancy. Within weeks her partner leaves to work in a remote Aboriginal community as far away as you can be on the Australian mainland. My pregnant daughter stays on to organise their belongings, then drives herself and an embryo across the Nullabor in a small rusty car packed to the gunwales.

They love life on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert but her partner hates the job and they return to Bendigo seven months later. By now I have made plans to return to Melbourne; my work contract will soon end. I resolve to stop pursuing my children and do my own thing. If in the future we live close and I see my grandchild, I’ll count myself lucky.

January 2012. Nerri’s birth means that four generations of my family inhabit this place: my parents in their eighties, me at 60 and my sister at 58, my son and daughter, now 32 and 30, and one-year-old Nerri. Growing up without grandparents in my life, I knew only two generations, and gave neither any thought.

The birth and growing up of my sister’s and my children offers a new perspective; I can look both back and forward and observe family traits. The fourth generation will sharpen that perspective.

My mother’s family were well known to me. She and her three elderly sisters still get together regularly. Her brother died 30 years ago. My father’s brothers died long ago too and ostensibly he has no living relative, until I discover one.

An article on the Carlton Football Club website alerts me that the man my family knows as Uncle Charlie, five-time Carlton premiership champion, has a surviving daughter, my father’s cousin Olive, known as Ollie. She lives in a nursing home in Bendigo. I ring the home and speak to her. I want to give her a premiership medallion that her father gave to his sister, my grandmother, handed from her to my father and from him to me.

She tells me she is not well and I should talk to her son Geoff. We meet and he’s a champion bloke, my second cousin, if he’s correct. We organise for my father to catch the train with me to Bendigo to meet Ollie. My father, who never cared about family, is excited, but before we can make the connection, Ollie dies.

I commiserate with Geoff. He introduces me to his older brother Jim, the black sheep of their family. He’d gone his own way, made his own mistakes. I like him too. Now I’ve left Bendigo I doubt we’ll keep contact. I don’t see my daughter or grand-daughter often enough either.

Rock on.   

clubbing

Germaine Greer describes herself as unclubbable; someone not acceptable as a person with whom one can enjoy good fellowship; socially unappealing, according to those dictionaries that contain this unlikely word. The American literary critic Harold Bloom was labelled unclubbable; of himself he said, "I am a department of one". 

Groucho Marx said he wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would have him as a member.

I own to being unclubbable and blame Hitler and Lord Baden Powell. As a young nerd I delved into Alan Bullock’s seminal biography of der Führer. The mass hysteria of das Volk determined me to resist any movement or opinion held by any three or more people. I’m happily used to my asocial status.

At age 12 I graduated from cubs to scouts. The delight of the scoutmasters in the sexual high jinks involved in initiation practises perpetrated by older boys on younger boys prompted my first resignation from a group. Plenty more followed.

As a young teacher I spent a term as president of our school’s branch of the teachers’ union. But knee-jerk responses for the sake of industrial solidarity soon turned me into a heretic.

A diffident young man’s desire for solidarity inspired other joinings: I smoked a pipe at meetings of a minor political party in my early twenties and tried to look erudite at university film society screenings, but I quickly lost the sense of whatever made me join.

I was better at football clubs. As a teetotal vegetarian the Aussie Rules club should have been no place for me, but footy was my obsession and I was a skilled player and endearingly eccentric enough to win acceptance. Nonetheless, the piss-ups and pie nights went on without me.

Much later I found myself presiding over a staff association and its social activities, initiating and driving a staff book club and a film group. I managed to enjoy the company of a tiny core of diehards for a few years until I left the job.

So at 60 I’m again unclubbed, not interested in good fellowship, a department of one. I usually cycle alone, visit the gym but talk to no one, and regard humanity as an association of dubious repute. The society of dogs is preferable most of the time.

Rock on.   

a living

My visit to Centrelink turns my mind to the question that assails me each time I am ‘between jobs’. What duty does a government have to its citizens who are down on their luck? Conversely, what duty does each and every man have to earn his own living, make his own way?

I ask my good woman what happens in Serbia when someone is unemployed, though I already know the answer. The State offers scant support and the family looks after its own. The modern welfare state is only on the first world’s agenda. The second and third worlds must make do.

Billions of people around the planet graft out a daily income by whatever means: begging, rat-scrounging through rubbish tips, wheeling and dealing in whatever commodity is at hand—your sex, your children, your mean but honest labour.

It means being at the mercy of fire, famine and flood in a way no subsidised, whining Australian farmer ever contemplates. It means populate or perish; pro-choice feminism is an exclusive privilege of the developed world.

Contrast this to the callowness of my early adulthood: I thought the state could afford to provide even for those who didn’t want to work because they were just plain lazy, wondering no doubt, if I was one of them. I wasn’t.

So when I had children of my own I told them that life is not fair, that luck, good looks and money are not doled out equally, or at all, to each person. I wanted them to understand that life owed them nothing. When they were little this stopped squabbles over who would sit in the front seat of the car with me; later it helped them to grow into independent young adults.

Young Aussies grow softer by the generation in this country. Two radio presenters talk about their late-teenage sons’ attitudes to work. One sees no need to work at anything before leaving university. Then he’ll get a job. The other’s sons are happy for their father to shell out for more and more education as they postpone any entry to real life.

My good woman, the good Serb, has kittens at the start of the school holidays because her son has no work. He will eat himself to death at home out of boredom and inability to entertain himself with anything but a screen and a fridgeful of food. She makes him walk the streets, CV in hand, and he lands two jobs.

Her children earn good holiday money. I ask if they pay any board. She is surprised to hear that I paid board from the first dollar I earned a in the school holidays after year nine. I was paid a pittance but dutifully handed 25 per cent of it to my mother to contribute to the food I ate. It was my introduction to learning to pay my way. My own children saw no great need for holiday jobs, but resentfully paid board like I did when they finally earned money.

I emerge from Centrelink having proved my eligibility for income support but contemplating the welfare state, my part in it, my right or otherwise to money from the public purse. Should I feel at least relieved or elated? I feel neither, but rather something I can’t put my finger on.

The whole business of dealing with Centrelink is hard work, a challenge at every level. The small amount of the Newstart allowance (by modern Australian standards—even employer groups say it’s too low—could be seen as compensation for having to endure Centrelink.

Still, I’m troubled, trying to express how I feel. The closest I get is inadequate. This is not good, so I determine simply to put it out of mind and get on with the gardening, the writing, the riding, and the templates project.

Experience tells me that no matter how earnestly I look for work, it is much more likely that work will find me.

Rock on.   

woe

Thoughts of Centrelink wake me at 3:39. It’s a tad early for breakfast but I crack three oranges and pour their juice down my parched gullet. Over Weeties I read Ci003.1107—Centrelink’s Information you need to know about your claim for (nominate an allowance).

It’s chockers with stuff like the definition of a partner, the Widow Allowance, the personal income test, working credit, deeming, proof and use of identity, and the employment pathway plan. By far the largest section of its 26 pages is devoted to the Activity Test—proving that you’re genuinely looking for work.

The activity test suggests at one point that a person, sorry, job seeker, might need to apply for 10 jobs in a fortnight. The job seeker is required to be ‘willing to take any suitable job’ they are ‘capable of doing’ and go on approved training courses. My Weeties never tasted so good.

Next course is a quick revisit of the requirements of Mod F which wants all the details of my one-person business. I don’t have the requested profit and loss statements or an asset depreciation register. I spend time online with my bank. I rat in my filing cabinet and print documents that prove that I’m me, that I have no aliases, don’t run a fleet of vehicles or own an apartment tower, have no gold bullion or de facto wife, and bank statements that prove I’ll be down to a brass razoo by next Monday. I doubt it will satisfy them.

All this is complete by 5:35 and I’m free to have a cuppa, walk the JRT, take a dump, load the Red Rocket into the car and drive it to the car dealer that sold it to me four and a half years ago for a major service. The service manager tells me the service is going to sting me for about $650. The blood rushes to my feet.

I leave it with them at 8:30. My Centrelink appointment is at 9:10. I pedal over via the Blood Bank where I make an appointment to donate plasma in a fortnight. I enter Centrelink 25 minutes early which is just as well because a snaky line backs up to the door and along the front wall. Eventually I make the waiting area.

“Leigh.” Ah, I am the chosen one. Another Leigh rises from his chair and follows the Centrelink employee who called his name, my name. And indeed, it is me being summoned.

   

Rock on.   

garden

In recent days I’ve watered the garden with perspiration. I lay paths, massaging bricks into curves, and swing the mattock at the uneven earth and roots that break the surface looking for the water they can’t find deeper down.

My son occupied my house during my three and a half years in Bendigo. He planted turf after I had expunged every blade of grass over the preceding eight years, then sold my mower in a gesture of faith. During my absence and my son’s non-ownership of a mower, the turf morphs into an extra-terrestrial species whose tenacious tentacles penetrate everything.

For seven months after returning I stare at it glumly. Finally I begin pulling it out in clumps by hand, but make little progress. I have at it with the mattock, but it’s so densely packed the mattock blade can’t cut it. I swamp it with the bricks reserved for the paths, but it lives on. I chuck a mat of hardenbergia hacked off the rear of the carport onto it, but it fights its way to the surface. Against all that I hold holy, I spray it with deadly toxins, and reluctantly it relinquishes its grip on my yard.

A new backyard garden emerges. It’s organic in the sense that I simply lay the bricks for paths around the edge of where the turf was. No bed of sand, nothing straight, no strings guide the layout and no level ensures its evenness. Then a low border of basalt boulders is dug out and repositioned. I churn the earth that grew the turf and painstakingly pick the roots out of each clump.

Daily Bunnings visits fill my car with bags of cow manure, seedlings, pots and saucers. A time-lapse camera would capture me clocking up the kilometres in every part of the yard, tacking mesh onto fences, filling pots with soil, hosing, raking, sweeping, pulling weeds out of cracks, a one-man ant colony formicating over everything.

The garden is enormously enjoyable and therapeutic.

      

Rock on.   

beach

The heat makes the roof creak. On such days my good woman goes to the beach. She invites me along but the beach is the last place I ever frequent: sand, flies and the hordes deter me. It’s not a bad place in mid-winter. I tell her I need to ride and might pedal to the beach and join her later. This is a one in twenty shot, but this outsider gets up.

I drive to her place late in the afternoon and pull the Cervélo from the back of the car. The heat bounces off the road but I generate my own breeze with the rate of my two-wheeled progress. Springvale Road is a direct line from the eastern suburbs to the littoral at Edithvale but it’s not bicycle-friendly even late on a Sunday afternoon.

I zigzag across town to the south-eastern part of the city, replicating my route to my dentist’s surgery down by the sea at Sandringham. Vermont sits 130 metres above sea level—high or low tide?—so the uphills, Highbury Road past the cemetery and a couple of minor bumps, are overcompensated with downhill glides.

I pass landmarks but always on lesser roads: the warehouses of Holmesglen TAFE, Chadstone's shopping shrine. At Highett I duck into side streets and follow my nose to Beaumaris and Beach Road, the great cycling mecca for Melburnians. Cyclists swarm the road most days, especially early. Only I am heading south late this Sunday with a stiff southerly beating me backwards. A few whistle past, heading back to the inner city, the southerly up their arses blasting them home.

  

As I slog my way around the bay, lying on the beach becomes seriously attractive. An endless line of departing beach-goers oozes along the other side of the road and I have to force my way through to the side street that leads to Edithvale beach.

My good woman greets me at the top of the sand. I assure her that a bike chain, sand and a stiff breeze are all incompatible, borrow her car keys and stow the Cervélo in the boot. I peel sweaty bike knicks off under a sarong and wrestle my way into black dick-togs. The water is cold and we are the only two people in it as the sun singes the horizon then sinks into the grey-green.

We noodle around, oblique wavelets smacking into the sides of our heads. The refreshment is tempered by grit in every bodily crevice, a salt-crust on every square inch of skin, and a dry gulch for a gullet. I’m ready for more bitumen.  

Rock on.   

big paper

The big paper—broadsheet, literary, slightly left of centre—can’t compete with the small paper—tabloid, populist, right of Tony Abbott for numbers. Stuck-up little elitist that I’ve always been, I’ve only read the big paper from the age of about ten. The small paper sucks; it gives bad journalism a bad name.

The big paper doesn’t always impress: it does bad journalism all too often, but then bad reporting is de rigeur as part of the zeitgeist. Reporting is not factual; it’s spun by the use of emotive and value-laden words that try to tell us how we should think or feel. No politician today has a difficult task: they are embattled; no sportsperson loses a contest: they are bundled out of the tournament.

Only BBC World gives the public unvarnished facts using mostly unvarnished language. Everywhere else our intellects are disenfranchised. The media narrows debate as much as politicians’ slogans. The media set their own agendas, pursue populist causes rather than just causes, and give voice through talkback and comment columns to uninformed public idiocy. Just because someone has an opinion does not justify printing or broadcasting it.

What should be reporting now often becomes commentary. Commentary is fine in itself when contained in those pages dedicated to commentary and opinion pieces. The big paper provides plenty but confines it, appropriately, to pages 10 and 11.

The big paper’s Saturday edition is chockfull of fine writing on all manner of topics and themes. That so much good writing is possible is both marvellous and daunting. The ideas and intellectual discussion humbles a mere scribbler and lays bare the paucity of one’s own thinking, but offers the constant challenge to think harder and deeper.

Rock on.   

the third age

My good woman thinks I’ve not been myself for a little while now. But if I’m not me, who is? I feel sort of like the usual me: lacking confidence, direction and motivation. But she’s right. Something else is going on, underneath the bluster about … well, nothing really.

She’s right, of course, because she’s a psychologist. (Joke.) She’s right because she’s both smart and wise. What life stage is left after retirement but death, she argues. She’s noted that in talking about retirement, I’m really fixating on death. A newspaper article about a home for the aged, beautifully written and containing some moving stories, fascinates me.

I am thinking more about the deaths of my parents—86 and 84 years old—and my role in their final years. They’re well enough for now, but at this age one fall can snuff you out pretty quick. My father is visibly winding down; I doubt he’ll get to 90. A daily crossword is not enough to sustain a body and mind in decline.

I look at them and ponder my body’s inability to do the things it once did. Bits drop off, organs lose their vitality. I cough more—things stick in a less supple throat; I forget things—dementia, oh please, not that; I don’t do or deal with stress any longer—I bolt at the mere whiff of a hassle.  

I counter my good woman’s argument by saying that I have no intention of sitting around waiting for the reaper. I want to get on with myriad things: living like a Serbian peasant, training to be an Olympic cyclist, being an award-winning onion-grower, loving better than Casanova, and penning a major best-selling novel/memoir/guide-to before I cark it.

She repeats that after retirement comes death. And yes, since not having a job and deciding I didn’t want to work any longer, I’ve been paralysed. I’ve not got on with the templates project, she postulates, because I am grimly hanging on to a job role, to an identity as a worker.  So I avoid finishing the job, she says.

And she’s right. Since discarding the idea of being a paid volunteer on the Newstart allowance, the crippling inertia is lifting. I am looking for jobs, I am back on the bike with purpose and vigour, and I’m banging away at those templates.

Rock on.   

strength

Nicky and I pedal to the bottom of the One in Twenty. During the ten kilometres to the bottom of the climb at The Basin I tell her I’m going to try to sit on her back wheel up to Sassafras. The last time we rode together, we didn’t: I lost her wheel about 50 metres after passing the bakery at The Basin, my marker for starting the stop-watch and the serious work.

Two days ago I wheezed up to Olinda, sitting on 13.5kph, keeping a cadence of about 65. I lead off from the bakery. Nicky can pass me whenever she likes. I set out a gear bigger and keep a cadence around 70. In that instant I reset my goal and proceed to stick at it all the way to the top with Nicky on my wheel.

Suddenly today I feel strong in the legs. Is as little as a week’s regular training starting to pay? Or am I just having a good day? It’s hard to measure these things but it gives me confidence and motivation to stick at a resolve to be on the road at least every second day and a cycle session at the gym every other day.

It seems to me that some cycle class instructors have never been on any bike other than one rooted to the floor. It’s a cardio class, I know, not cycle training, but their simulated road commentaries miss the mark by miles. James gets it—he’s a triathlete—though few benefit from his crack-of-dawn Wednesday session.

The stationary bike at the gym has one great advantage over the home trainer: my honour is at stake. For those 45 minutes I push myself just a little bit more, as Johnny Green says, because there’s no hiding in the cycle studio surrounded by mirrors and other furious spinners and grinders. I sweat buckets; no road-wind here to evaporate the dew and cool the core.

The more cycle classes I do, the more I learn to simulate the things I do on the road—seated climbing, taking a gear and upping the tempo, an extended sprint, or just rolling along. The gearing is unsophisticated and lacks the nuance of even the crappest groupset. I park my arse on the same BodyBike every session and try to plumb its idiosyncrasies.

Rock on.   

hoops

Today I meet Bethany, a plain Jane young woman who is a Job Seeker Solutions Manager at Mission Australia. I arrive just before nine and take a seat. A skinny girl and her mother sit opposite. So does a bloke named Thomas. All look slightly disconcerted.

Centrelink made the appointment for me during my 'virtual seminar'. Mission Oz lives around the corner from Centrelink in an ugly brown-bread building. Their glossy strategic plan lies on a bench beside me. It’s peppered with motherhood statements and quotes from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, not your average job seekers, in small print at the bottom of each page.

Bethany conducts me through a passage and up a flight of stairs. As we ascend I break the ice by referring to the biblical references and asking what denomination the Mission is. They’re all about community welfare, she tells me. (Oh, that denomination.)

In her drab office she asks the usual questions, emails me the link to a useful federal government job seeker website, and tells me I’m on my own—job hunting—for 13 weeks. If I’m still unemployed then, they’ll call me back and assist me some more.

She escorts me back to reception where I’m obliged to complete an online profile. The receptionist takes three minutes to log me in and I finish the profile in a minute and a half. None of this is informative or useful. It’s all about going through the motions, jumping through Centrelink’s hoops. Do as we say or no Newstart allowance for you.

Back home I open Bethany’s email, keen to explore the useful government website. It’s a French farce of spiralling links that disappear up its own fundament. One takes me to a multi-coloured little program titled my future (lower case). It features a condescending demo and another profile. Would I rather be a pilot or a landscape gardener, a bus driver or an actor, a sports coach or a journalist?

Sixty or more of these snap decisions allows the program to inform me that I really want to drive trucks, be a farmhand or a scuba diver, all planets away from blipping my radar. I abandon my future and return to my present. I have to complete form Mod F before my Centrelink appointment next Tuesday.

Mod F is all about my one-person business, Plain Taking. I write stuff, edit stuff, train people to be mentors or to have a better understanding of mental illness. Centrelink can't wait to hear all about it. They want to see a balance sheet, a profit and loss statement, a depreciation schedule, a register of assets and liabilities, and my accountant’s details.

I don’t, of course, have an accountant or any of these documents. I’ve never given them a thought since the business began on 27 January 2005. They want to check out my latest tax return too. I don’t have one: it was lodged online and I didn’t bother with a print-out.

Rock on.   

rhythm

I rise to piss at 4:45. At 4:57 I rise and begin the day.

I squeeze fresh orange juice and gulp it down, as always. I fire up the computer and write: 512 words tumble out. I’d like to do this every morning but five o’clock is bit beyond me most days. I leave my 512 words for editing later in the day.

I cruise into the garden before six, water everything and pull down the blinds. I shut up the house, trapping any overnight cool, knowing it will only fend off 35 degrees and a strong gusty northerly until early afternoon. Then I’m at the mercy of a cheap pedestal fan, gyrating and whirring its way to a slow death.

I gulp down a bowl of Weeties dotted with sliced banana and a cup of Irish Breakfast, eagerly pump up bike tyres and pedal off just after seven. I don’t struggle up to Mt Dandenong; the rhythm is strong and the cadence regular, but the pace is slow, slower by about four kilometres per hour than I’d like to be, than I used to be.

Reasons? I haven’t ridden enough or regularly enough. I’m getting older, slowing down. I’m carrying five kilos more than I should but can’t stay out of the fridge. I’m always going to eat less tomorrow. Mañana banana.

I’m home again shortly after nine. The JRT gets his walk, off-lead, along the cracked and rutted bike path that wends through the gum trees lining the upper side of my road. He ferrets in the rough bush behind the school’s little oval, then camps under a tree while I shop.

Crossing the primary school oval on our way home, the JRT finds some shit to roll in while I’m looking at a cloud. Another bath is his reward. I chuck him out the back door and he goes berserk. I edit this morning’s 512 words, shower, and start on the templates. About midday I take a siesta and wake at one.

About four in the afternoon I open the house and let the outside heat push out the inside heat. At least the new air is moving air. At six thirty I lock the screen doors but leave everything else open and drive to my good woman’s house. I help her move furniture; she’s setting up a small guest room.

Days like this have a rhythm, and sometimes a melody.

Rock on.   

demands

My good woman comes over about nine. I’m actually working on the templates project. I employ her favourite three words: “Just a second,” I say. “I’ve got to finish this paragraph.” She lies on the couch, says nothing. I grapple with words and meaning for a few more minutes then consider her lying on the couch.

She wears a knee-length red skirt I’ve not seen before and a black singlet top. Her legs always get me, athletic and strong. Her torso is perhaps a little thick—she’d say that. She has what her children call her pillow, a soft padding on her stomach. She refers to my Buddha belly, something no amount of exercise, gym or Pilates eliminates on men beyond 60.

Anyway, she looks good. In the kitchen she perches on a tall chair at my island bench. She hoicks up her skirt, an innocent-seeming gesture, to allow me to walk in between her legs and kiss her. I do, but feel way less than innocent. She asks after my lower back, wraps her arms around it.

“You get sore in your lower back,” she says, “and I get it in the upper back,” referring to the tension ache she has between the shoulder blades. I offer to go to work on her ache, but first I slump across the bench and she inspects my back for unwanted guests: blackheads, pimples, melanomas.  Grooming, an intimacy I love her for.

She tells me she is inviting herself to have sex with me and I agree to her request. She knows her mind, and her body, and I’m not about to gainsay its demands. I have my own demands. She doesn’t know them yet. We need to talk. Maybe after sex the words I’ve tried to get right in my mind will come easier, more naturally, and won’t sound like demands.

I have no right to make demands her. I admire her more than any woman I ever met. She is a single parent since her divorce eight years ago. She works full-time as a clinical psychologist and supervises her team. She cooks every meal that is placed on her table; that’s about 15 meals a day for a 17 year-old son. She needs no further demands on her.

She came to Australia against her will—her husband, a pilot, wanted out of war-torn Serbia; she didn’t. She landed here with no money and no English, a one year-old and eight months pregnant. She worked in a servo on the till. She brought up her kids while her husband jetted around the world, living where his employer had its home base—Egypt, Japan, India. Eventually she bought a small house and kicked him out of it.

I have no right to make demands, but things about our relationship are on my mind and forming into something that cannot remain unsaid too much longer.

We lie perspiring and she asks the time: 10:57. I ask if she has to pick up her kids from the academic book warehouse where they are working the late afternoon shift packing boxes for the new school year. They finish at 11:30.

She puts on a navy blue bra with small white spots that that stirred my libido an hour before and pads to the bathroom. Five minutes later she is gone. The things I need to say remain with me.

Rock on.   

environment

It surprises me that as a lifelong social phobic I once organised a party. Or a sort of a party. I remember where it was—the old farmhouse in Bemboka Road—but not why. Maybe just an excuse to smoke some dope. I was 23 or 24 and I say ‘sort of a party’ because I think about four people attended. I tidied up before they left.

“Ah,” says Draff, catching me polishing glasses with a tea-towel. “Re-establishing your environment.”

Seems I’m always establishing or re-establishing my environment. Even as a small boy everything in my room had its place. Still does, except I have a whole house now. It’s not obsessive, although a dog-sitter’s dinner guest refers to my place as the OCD house: it’s orderly.

Leaving my home four years ago to live and work in Bendigo meant leaving the environment I’d painstakingly perfected over eight years at my son’s mercy. Then my son’s and a negligent tenant’s mercy. Then my son’s and his much-younger girlfriend’s mercy. Then my son’s, his girlfriend’s and her sloppy sister’s mercy.

Seven months ago I return to stained and grubby carpets, a hole in the ceiling, mould growing on windows, every surface in the kitchen greasy, rank weeds for a garden, scuff marks in places no shoe could reach, and paint blotches covering a multitude of sins. I heave a leaden heart over the threshold.

A month later I’m glad to be home and seven months later I enjoy every moment here. Rain comes in the hole in the ceiling, but it’s my ceiling and my rain. I steam-clean carpets, scour the windows, acid-wash the kitchen, yank the weeds, buff the walls, and pretend not to see the paint blobs.

  

I resurrect garden beds and plant vegetables. I topiarise the rampant lemon tree to a manageable size and shape and install lime trees to boot. I hack the hardenbergias off my carport and bang it back into shape with a rubber mallet.

  

I replicate, repair, replace and replenish. I rescue, restock, restore and resign myself to what cannot be undone. Ideally I would restump, rewire, and rip out some walls. I would insulate, install rainwater tanks and solar panels, and build a deck with French doors opening onto it. But not while I have a mortgage and no job.

I shuffle furniture every couple of days instead, sometimes setting off chain-reactions. Every couple of days each item is closer to being where it belongs.

Rock on.   

thud

The thud of the big paper landing in the driveway between five thirty and six on a Saturday morning usually knocks any remaining sleep out of me. Today I wake at 9:07. Rare.

My virtual seminar with Centrelink dismissed the notion that I might semi-retire and do voluntary work. I’m so unknowledgeable and unworldly that I have no idea, other than Saturday’s big paper, where to look for a job. Milk spatters from my Weeties onto the job section. Its skimpiness says that most people look elsewhere for work these days.

Community Appointments, Education, and Local Government, are the only areas I know. I rectangle two ads with green highlighter, cut them out and stick them on an A4 sheet. One is for a family services mental health worker, the other for an administrator with a not-for-profit that does police checks for the community sector. Nineteen hours a week, days negotiable—perfect.

I lose interest and ring Rock to check on his post-accident health. He’s recovering well. I tell him I updated my résumé but doubt it captures my abilities. My diffidence overwhelms me. He sympathises: with our years and experience, he says, we understand the nuances of language, read people astutely, know how to react to any situation, and grasp new things instinctively. CVs and the ridiculously-titled skill-sets don’t capture these qualities.

I fire up the interweb, trawl employment sites for hours, and bookmark two jobs. I download PDs. The mental health worker position in this morning’s paper doesn’t suit. A vacancy for a Rail Trail and Recreation Project Officer appeals, but I’m not after full-time work in the CBD. An association for children with a disability is looking for a sibling worker, but it’s only one day a week.

I scan hundreds of education and training positions I am unsuited for are listed. In desperation I check the category labelled Other, but no. It’s all faintly discouraging, but I expected no less.

When I attend my appointment with the employment agency on Wednesday I can at least report ‘activity’. Until then …

Rock on.   

stay upright

Yesterday Rock rings. He offers no greeting or preliminaries and says in a strangled voice: “Can’t ride with you tomorrow. Fell off my mountain bike. Ribs, neck, shoulder. Going to hospital.”

“Where? What happened?”

“Can’t talk. Can’t breathe.”

“Which hospital? Box Hill?”

“Yeah.”

“Look, I’ll call you later.”

Before Christmas six of Rock’s friends and relatives ride from Khancoban to Mansfield over four days. It’s broiling but his brother-in-law wears two layers of clothing. I ask him why. If he comes off the bike, the damage is lessened, he says. Rock and I report to him that our strategy is to never come off the bike. We know that’s impossible.

Rock seems better when I speak to him in the evening. He has a broken rib, painful scapula, bruises and abrasions, looks lop-sided in the mirror, but talks normally. He was riding Lysterfield with friends. The boys with him are taking a jump and urge him to have a shot at it. He thinks better of it, changes his mind at the last second, and crashes. The front wheel digs in and over the bars he goes.

“Sixty-one and a half years and 93 kilos,” he says. “You’re going to hurt.”

When you’re young you bounce; at our age you hit the deck like a sack of shit. I feel for my friend but there’s nothing I can do. I think about my mountain bike, hanging on a rack in the bike room. I should get rid of it, I think. I hardly ever ride it. My last serious get-off is on that bike on the bushland trail around Bendigo. I land on a stump and damage ribs.

At 8:13 this morning I text Nicky and postpone today’s ride. A thick wetting drizzle settles over Croydon. The Dandenongs are lost in cloud and mist. The Bureau predicts it’ll be clear in the late afternoon. At six I throw a leg over the Cervélo. It rains gently as I pedal through Kilsyth and Montrose. I can see the squalls brushing over the face of the hills.

Up the Tourist Road I chug. At Kalorama I attach a rear light. It blinks brightly in the murk. The rain starts again and I curse the Bureau. Water drips off my helmet; my glasses fog up. At Olinda I wrestle myself into my windproof jacket and turn back down the Tourist Road. I reach home on slushy roads, wet through but upright.

Rock on.

seminar

The letter from Centrelink informs me that I have a ‘virtual seminar’ at 2pm today with a Senior Customer Services Adviser. A virtual seminar is a telephone call. (How many people will be on the line?) The letter tells me I can request an interpreter. It also says that this is a voluntary ‘program’—it never names the program—and I’m under no obligation to attend. Attend a telephone call?

The appointment is made nine days ago and I am advised to have my phone fully charged. I’m ready. Two o’clock passes, then two ten, two twenty, half past, and two forty-five. I stop waiting and move on to other things.

At 2:57 my mobile buzzes. A very young woman at the other end invites me to answer some questions. Is this the ‘program’? I tell her I have been ready to answer questions since 2pm and she tells me that they call any time “within the hour”, the hour being two till three. My hoped-for belief in Centrelink’s user-friendliness since I last dealt with them in 1998 shatters.

I answer the questions about who I am and what assets I have. The questions aren’t funny but I find myself laughing. Do I have over $500,000 invested in anything? No. (I laugh.) How much do I have in my bank account? I have two accounts, one with about $400 and the other about $100. These are my assets. No, I don’t own any boats, shares or securities, and so on.

I am never invited to ask the questions I have, but I butt in and ask them anyway. Would sacrificing some of my superannuation to have a small transition-to-retirement pension affect the meagre income support Centrelink provides? Yes; I can earn $60 before I lose income support incrementally.

I ask about the irregular earnings of my one-person writing and editing business. I ask about receiving Newstart allowance for doing voluntary work in lieu of actually seeking paid employment. The young woman gives me no definitive answers to these questions. All will be revealed by the employment agency, she assures me.

   

Two further appointments are made, one with said employment agency and another with Centrelink. I will need to provide proof of my identity, my assets or lack of, bank statements, and a résumé. I put the appointments in my Google diary. Without consciously considering my situation one thing is obvious: I cannot afford to do voluntary work and not have some sort of job.

Rock on.

discipline

Rain plops on the roof during the night. The alarm wakes me at 5:45. Puddles mirror the dawn sky. I slide the bike knicks up my calves and snug them to my thighs. A wife-beater completes the ensemble. I mudguard the Red Rocket: the Bureau predicts a rare January day of lashing squalls and Antarctic winds.

I pedal to the gym—sorry, leisure centre—to ride a stationary bike for 45 minutes. Ten of us brave the elements to get to the first 6:15 cycle class of the new year. James mikes up, turns up the beat and leads us on a gentle ride over a few hills with plenty of short sprints. At 6:56 we dismount, stretch, wipe down the bikes and disappear about our daily business.

    

For years I walked the Jack Russell past a local fitness centre and guffawed at people on treadmills watching televisions bolted to the wall above them. Although the Jack Russell gets a walk nearly every day, walking and cycling do nothing for the upper body. I swallowed my pride and bought a gym membership.

  

The discipline of regular gym attendance—forking out $75 a month gets me off my arse—works for me. The personal fitness program is not my thing. I’ll never pound the treadmill or simulate Nordic skiing. I don’t go near the weights room.

The group timetable is cause for breathless exhaustion. Tri-Class, Circuit and Cycle are all about sweating buckets and gasping for oxygen. Supa Sculpt and THT (tummy, hips and thighs) are no-bloke zones. My unyielding body won’t assume even the starting postures for Yoga or Body Balance.

If water was my medium—it isn’t—I could take the plunge and drown myself in Athletic Aqua or Aqua Power. My pacifism precludes Body Attack and Body Combat. My body is not limber enough for Body Step, Cardio Beat or Zumba, nor wrinkled enough for Move and Groove, Lite Pace or Young at Heart.

My chosen regime demands exertion in two Body Pump sessions a week—repeated exercise sets with light weights to develop endurance, body tone and change body shape. Unfortunately, opening the fridge door has greater effect on my body shape. The endurance allows me to replicate this action repeatedly and the skin-sack that keeps my insides in is as tight as a tick.

Cycle is a poor substitute for being on the road, but if the weather is shite, it’s a passable alternative. Pilates and Stretch are two classes I’ve yet to broach but the time is nigh.

The other aspect of gym life that blows my skirts up is the music. If gym-pop is not a genre in its own right, it should be.  

  

Rock on.

aversion

These are some of my avoidance strategies. I clean the top of the fridge. I wash not only the dog but his three beds. I degrunge the washing machine. I dust skirting boards. Nearly a month passes and I do anything but sit down and open the documents.

I might be officially unemployed, but I have a job to do. It’s a contract job for my one-man business, writing template documents for youth mentoring programs. I can’t explain the aversion to getting on with it. It’s irrational, perverse, and a big worry. I need the money and I don’t need the daily stress I heap on myself.

Part of my aversion is that I am no longer the regional expert on all things to do with youth mentoring—my position for four years that recently ended—that landed me the template-writing job. I’m over it. My good woman sees far deeper meaning here. She thinks I can’t let go: that in not completing the templates I’m hanging on to a shred of who I was and what defined me.

The reason matters not: I must do this job. And do it now. The hardest part is simply opening the last document I worked on and starting again. When I do, it will be all right. It will all fall into place. I will even enjoy the wordcraft, and wonder what held me up.

Rock on.   

the endless conversation

“Where to?” A rhetorical question because we both know that we will ride up to Mt Dandenong. The only issue is whether to ride the loop clockwise or anticlockwise.

“The north end?” The Tourist Road is a harder climb than Mountain Highway, but the highway is a more technical and exhilarating descent.

“Sure.”

We wheel our machines past Rock’s big brute of a ute in my driveway, click in, and sidle down my road through Croydon to Kilsyth. Conversation is one-liners as we pull up at traffic lights or I pass him on the downhill.

“What will your daughter do this year after her VCE?” “Forgot to oil my chain, damn it.” “I think I’d like to fuck a black woman.” “I’ve got some nice cantaloupe when we get back.” “What do think about the Roebuck thing?”

We warm up our legs pushing up to Montrose, then the serious climb begins. I find a rhythm quickly and keep it all the way to the top at Olinda. When Rock catches up I propose that we go straight over: clouds now obscure the sun, and I don’t want my back cooling down.

  

We set no records; neither of us is in good shape or good form. We aren’t pedalling often enough. The cantaloupe is good. Rock knocks over the teapot. “I’m losing it,” he says. No other word is needed. When you’re young such a thing is just an accident. After 60 every such event is liable to be seen as another sign of mental and physical deterioration.

The kitchen conversation is about what it is to be human, as it always is. After midday Rock slings his bike into the ute and goes.

 

Brendan, the property manager, rings me. I tell him I’d like to meet. He doesn’t want that. He asks if we want to manage the place yourselves: thinks it’s a good way to go. He doesn’t make anything out of managing our owners’ corporation. He’ll happily hand over the books and bank account.

Rock on.