guilt

Men are supposed to be desperate to have sons, but as a prospective parent I wanted a daughter. I have no explanation. When a boy child emerged I could not care less, but did hope that the second would be a daughter.

We have preferences, but the notion that a parent might love one child more than another is anathema. If they were honest, parents might agree that it is often so. Children themselves know it: “My sister was daddy’s favourite.” But a parent will never admit such favouritism.

 

A parent might get on better with one child than with others. A parent might have more in common with one child. My good woman says that we don’t love one child more; we love them differently because they are different people.

OK, so we love them differently, but that says nothing of the different quality of our different loves. Is this simply an easy out from admitting that we might love one child more?

What of the unlovable child, the child “only a mother could love”? (Why not “only a father could love”?) What of the child even a mother cannot love, the Kevins of this world? Working in schools with kids no other schools want, I meet a few kids nobody would want, mother or father.

I have a feeling, and only a feeling—it’s just there in my gut—that my son thinks I love his sister more than I love him. I can understand it. His sister and I get on better; that is, we have more in common. Our interests, our thinking, the way we do things, and our natures are more akin. She is the more intellectual of them.

My adolescent daughter has two difficult years and we struggle through them. (What’s the difference between an adolescent daughter and a vulture? The vulture waits till you’re dead before ripping your heart out.) Our relationship emerges much stronger.

My adolescent son struggles for years and I am oblivious. I argue that he gives me no sign that things are amiss, whereas his sister’s anguish is a beacon. At that time I am a school principal. My son resents it bitterly. Perhaps he hides his unhappiness rather than have me practice my professional skills on him.

Nonetheless I still feel guilty. If he thinks I should do better by him, he’s right. I am his father and I have the skills to see a young man struggling with his life.

Wiser teachers than I at Berengarra tell me, “Don’t teach at this school while your children are adolescents.” It makes perfect sense. Now.

   

Rock on.

city boy

My first train ride to the big city as someone who works there. It feels different: I tote a small laptop bag and an armful of MM stuff. I rock up to a swish business-house at 440 Collins Street and catch a lift to level 5. ESA houses the PAI staff and MM is a PAI program. I am a PAI employee: my first pay slaked my thirsty bank account the previous evening.

I ask the woman at reception for Viv or Sabrina and sign the visitors’ register while she consults her staff list. She can’t find either on the list. I inform her that I am in fact a new member of the MM team. I might as well be telling her I’m a dummy-half for the South Sydney Rabbitohs. She’s a temp.

I go stand by the window looking down Market Street. Viv and Sabrina and two others come down the white spiral staircase from a level above. I join them and we amble down Collins to another plush office tower between Elizabeth and Swanston. We ascend to the thirteenth floor where the our quarterly reference group meeting is to be in the boardroom of the Australian Psychological Society.

The glass wall overlooks the cathedral, Fed Square and Flinders Street. The Arts Centre spire pokes out of the background. It’s a far cry from the dingy offices of St Luke’s. Fifteen assorted educational officers assemble: the Catholics, the independents and the government schools are here. Most of the meeting is boring but I need to know these people to do my job.

Jill, the national MM manager, summons Viv and me to lunch. She’s keen to formulate strategic plans with us and we brandish diaries and wave dates at each other over roasted vegies, focaccia and spanakopita with green salad. It’s a working lunch and it’s on Jill.

At two o’clock I step back into the street, trying to decide which station is closest. A tram glides up to the corner and I leap on. It wheezes its way up the hill to Spring Street and I am escalatored into the bowels of Parliament Station. I hop on a Belgrave train, alight at Nunawading, then continue on a Lilydale.

My pants are too long, my shirt too thick for the humid late March weather. I open the front door and scramble out of everything. Sweat drips off my nakedness as I unlock the back door and usher the JRT inside. I’m not cut out for the CBD.

The lovely Nik of St Luke’s calls me City Boy now. And today I am.  

Rock on.

nicholson

I don’t know how old I am when we leave McConnell Street and move to 44 Nicholson Street, a fortress of white Mount Gambier stone on a steep service road above a cutting. My mother walks me to the kindergarten behind the famous Fletcher Jones factory. I remember making a daisy chain on the grass outside the kinder, but nothing else.

Prep, the grade before grade 1, is called Bubs at Warrnambool State School. I am nearly five and a half. My teacher is Miss Confeggi. My mother likes her and so do I. A naughty girl sits at her feet and picks at Miss Confeggi’s stockings. Her bad behaviour shocks me. In my last week in Bubs I get mumps and miss the end of the school year. My mother takes me to the Botanical Gardens. I have a sister but she is yet to figure in any memory.

Grumpy Lucas drives the school bus. He parps the horn in the cutting below the house when my mother has not got me ready for school on time. I make a shortcut by digging some steps into the cutting, my first sign of practicality.

The Kellys at number 52 are devout Catholics. Mrs Kelly wears a stained apron and smells warm and milky. Grattan Kelly is my best friend, using the Seinfeld criterion—he’s the only other boy in the street. Grattan attends the Christian Brothers College and complains of ‘the cuts’. He is eight.

A boy at school called Billy drags a calipered leg behind him. He has polio and I hope it doesn’t happen to me. I walk two miles across town rather than use the school toilet. I use my pants along the way.

A new school is built on the other side of Nicholson Street—Warrnambool East. I start grade 1 in Miss Lawry’s class. I am diligent about spelling. The schoolyard is a vast paddock pocked with sandstone. Boys lie on the ground and piss into cavities in the stone.

We get a corgi and a duck. My sister and I teach Sammy to clamp his teeth into the washing on the rotary clothesline. We spin it, lifting the dog into mini-orbit. The dog is dispatched to a better home but the duck, Dabbity, shits on our back doorstep for ten years.

Warrnambool Football Club’s coach, Leo Turner from Geelong, lives next door. I kick a football of rolled up socks up and down our backyard, obsessed. When we get a leather football at school I lead the horde chasing it and kick it further than any other boy can.

One night we gather on our fortress’s upstairs balcony to see the lights of the Westralia, my father’s ship, pass on its way to be scuppered. I know nothing of the war, barely ten years past. A television aerial is erected in the front yard, the first in Warrnambool. I crane my neck to see the top of it. My parents watch the seven o’clock news and turn it off.

I watch the steam trains chuff along the embankment behind the school and over the Flaxman Street bridge. A diesel is a rare event. I play cowboys and Indians in the paddocks and crouch on a ledge in the railway cutting with sooty smoke billowing about me.

Suddenly, for no reason I understand, it ends and we move to Melbourne. I am seven and my halcyon days are over.

Rock on.

newcastle

The view from room 414 at the back of the Newcastle Travelodge takes in brickwork, fences and grilles, rusted car bodies, lurid graffiti, and over to the right between buildings, a gantry, masts and a silver sliver of mirrored harbour. The smell coming in the window is tinged with sulphur and coal gas.

I arrive the previous evening after Jetstar deposit me half an hour late at Williamtown airport. I step out onto the concourse to find a taxi. The rank is blank. A voice utters my name in surprise. I look at the woman standing beside me at the rank but nothing registers.

“Wendy,” she says. And indeed it is Wendy.

We spent four days riding together in the week before Christmas. She rows down the Yarra with Rock. We marvel at the coincidence of standing forlorn at a taxi rank at an air force runway 28 kilometres from Newcastle. She’s here to demonstrate some radiological equipment to a local hospital. I’m here to watch Tracy present MM Level 1.

“What hotel?” “The Travelodge.” “Me too.”

A taxi arrives and we hop in. The driver tells us only one or two taxis will come out here at this time of night. Outside the Travelodge we debate who will pay the driver. The private sector wins and her company foots the $65 bill. I stash my Cabcharge voucher for another time.

She’s in room 411 and I’m in 414. We bid each other good night and agree that we must have a pedal together soon.

Tracy arrives in the breakfast room as I finish my Weeties. She hands me a thick wad of material, all the level 1 and level 2 MM stuff. Without a cuppa we’re off to the venue, the Customs House. From 9 till 4 I watch and assist her in presenting the MM program to 23 teachers from seven schools from the Newcastle region.

As the day passes I know that I can do this. After the gig we sit barefoot on the colonnaded verandah looking over a manicured park and the entrance to the harbour and debrief. I feel very much at ease with the person who is pretty much the guru of MM.

I’m in the right place at the right time.

Rock on. 

cunt

An article about the word c*** appears in the weekend supplement of the big paper. But yes, it’s not about crap, or cock: it’s about cunt. The word troubles most people but I’m not sure why. We’re so hung up about simple unadorned words, like cunt: we’re just unable to accept the truth of them.

Take fuck for example. The common alternatives for the verb form are to sleep with, to make love, and a gamut of boganisms like bang, bonk and shag. To sleep with is just misleading. To make love is pleasantly romantic. But sometimes it’s about lust not love: you just want to fuck.

The same pussy-footing happens with cunt. Vagina is a perfectly good word, but it describes something a gynaecologist looks into. When I look at the same thing I see a cunt, not a quim or a slit or a gash, and pussy is best left curled up on the end of the bed.

I never use cunt as a term of abuse, the ultimate pejorative. Cunts are beautiful, glorious things that give the greatest pleasure. I won’t use cunt to describe someone I wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire. Should I be so moved, mean-spirited, evil bastard or bitch-hag from Hell will suffice.

American blacks have reclaimed nigger, and good for them. Some feminists are trying to reclaim slut, and good on them too. I doubt, though, that one feminist’s attempt to make cunty, as in “Wow, this is so cunty!”—cunty being an expression of approval—is going to cut the etymological mustard, although I once knew a cunty woman. We enjoyed rip-roaring sex and she rejoiced to think of herself as my cunt. That’s how to reclaim a word.

I warn my good woman that I call a cunt a cunt. Coming from Serbia, she says, the word holds no emotional charge for her, as it did for lexicographer Francis Grose in his Dictionary of the vulgar tongue in 1811. A cunt for him was “a nasty name for a nasty thing”. My bet is he never saw one.

In flight on my first trip to France I read Stephen Clarke’s Talk to the snail, an ironical guide to understanding the French. He observes that the French word con can be tricky: it has several meanings, one being cunt. Using con politely is all about context and inflection.

Outside a souvenir shop in Rue de Mouffetard last year I find a rack of small replicas of the distinctive blue Paris street signs with white borders. Place des Cons catches my eye. I like to think of it as the Gallic equivalent of the famous east London alley circa 1230 known as Gropecunt Lane.

It’s now attached to the wall next to my front doorbell and proudly affirms that my small weatherboard cottage is a place for cunts.

Rock on.

utility

I must attend Centrelink interviews an 13 and 26 March. At the 13 March interview I inform the interviewer that I have succeeded in getting a permanent part-time job and will no longer need income support after 26 March when I begin work. She congratulates me in a bored fashion.

Is informing her about finding work is all I need do, I ask. Apparently not. She tells me that I should inform them under Changed Circumstances when I next report online on 26 March.

I point out that I start my job on 26 March so I won’t be attending the interview that day. Perfectly reasonable and understandable, she says, and cancels the interview.

This morning I log in to Centrelink’s online services to complete my last income statement. Today’s appointment is still there, not cancelled at all. I go to Changed Circumstances. I can change my name, tell them I’m now a student, fallen pregnant, been naturalised, or sent to prison. But there is no way to tell them I have a job.

I know you don’t believe this, but it’s true.

The other day I call Origin, my electricity provider. They’ve increased my fortnightly direct debit from $50 to $98. I want to know what’s changed. My electricity use hasn’t. Well, says May, who’s being monitored for quality purposes, Origin averages my use over time and determines an appropriate fortnightly charge.

I tell her that I know and understand this, but it doesn’t explain a 96 per cent increase in my usage. She begs to differ—if I’m paying more then I must be using more—and repeats the party line. I repeat my point that something is amiss. She’s not buying and I listen to the company’s standard explanation a third time. I remain patient during this begging of the question.

I ask if the installation of a smart-meter might be the culprit, but she wouldn’t know. I ask for the name of the company that installed the smart-meter, suggesting that I’ll take the matter up with them. She has no idea who installs the meters but puts me on hold while she finds out.

I end the call by apologising for my frustration in not achieving an answer to my original query: it’s just that it happens every time I call a utility company. Magnanimous of me, I think. Happens to her too, she says.

Of course it does. The corporate world is all glossy brochures about improved service, but it’s all piss and wind. Service died years ago.

  

Rock on.

hero

A special six-page lift-out from the big paper is still spread on the island bench in my kitchen. A six-page obituary, a six-page eulogy run the day after the death. No king or statesman or prime minister died. Jim Stynes is a retired footballer, a social worker, but his dying last Tuesday is known to all Melburnians within an hour thanks to social media.

I hear the news at a supermarket check-out counter. We all know it’s coming—cancer—but still I am deeply saddened, as a whole community seems to be. The government offers a state funeral. Some twitterers ask why a sportsperson or social worker deserves a state funeral. There were better footballers, hundreds of deserving social workers. The Thomases are a tiny minority.

This death is like no other; so public—the cancer diagnosed in 2009; the man so stoic in the face of it; non-football people as moved as the diehards.

This man is like no other; a saint, according to one benediction. He has no detractors, no skeletons in his cupboard; only one radio narcissist utters a bad word.

The most common epithet is hero.

Is the man a hero? I ask if anyone is a hero. Author John Marsden avers that we should not have heroes, people we put on pedestals, believing they can do no wrong. No one is perfect, he says, and heroes always disappoint us when they fall from grace, mere mortals.

Jim Stynes, it seems, defies gravity.

     

Four years before his football club retired him from the game, he begins camps for adolescents who’ve lost their way, just as he did during adolescence. He went to a camp on his native Irish coast where a mentor challenged him to put a value on his life. He does that.

I don’t think Jim Stynes ever set out to be a hero to others. He set out from that camp on the coast to be a hero to himself, and only to himself, to prove that he could make something of himself. He does that. And in doing it he becomes a hero to so many.

Should he be? The journalist Martin Flanagan ends his piece on Jim Stynes with the line: “Your story’s bigger than you, Jimmy, but that was always going to happen.”

The man put a value on his life, a life that is a priceless example of how one might live.

   

Rock on.

birth

My mother tells me I was born early on a Monday morning. She should know. Nonetheless I check on one of those perpetual calendars. A Monday it is, then.

The traditional nursery rhyme has it that Monday’s child is fair of face. I don’t have it in me to argue.

Numerology would have something to say about the time of birth—5:20—but I don’t give a fig for numerology so I have no idea what significance such an early birth might have. Astrological implications depend on natal time too, but of these I could care less.

My own explanation is that I was keen to get up early and get on with the day and the week, a lark, an early riser. And so it is.

Exactly why my atheist—she prefers agnostic because she doesn’t like to commit—mother bore me at a Catholic hospital, the St John of God in Warrnambool, remains a mystery. It was established in 1939 so must have been quite ‘modern’ in 1951. Today it’s a 75-bed hospital, offering “patient-focused, values-based care”, whose satisfied patients rate it in the 96th percentile.

I’d have been taken home ten days later to 14 McConnell Street. I’m not sure if I remember my earliest memories or have mind-pictures of them from the stories my mother tells. I watch the bantams my mother keeps for hours. One, Brownie, lays her eggs on my bed after hopping in the open window. I can see the bed and the egg, or can I?

I climb the side fence and ask our 84 year-old neighbour, Mr Wallace, for an apple from his tree. “Akin, man,” I plead.

A notorious climber, I scale a 12-foot trellis just for fun. I climb out the front window and hightail it to the local milk bar, naked, and plead for lollies. Nothing changes.

I disappear one day while my mother prepares tea. I am located after dark in a small pond in a front yard a few houses up McConnell Street in a very wet sailor suit. I seriously burn my feet by stepping into the embers, hidden under silky ashes, of a fire left by workmen who boiled their billy in the gutter after repairing the road.

I watch my parents push a perspex-windowed Austin A40 up the street but it won’t start.

 Sex is on my mind. The strange smell from a bush in a driveway opposite ours stimulates my little libido, though I don’t know why. Smell remains a powerful arouser.

   

Rock on.

turds

Several million are produced each day: billions across the planet. Turds.

Human shit comes in steaming piles and pellets like rabbit droppings. But mostly it comes in discrete portions known as turds. If a turd doesn’t achieve a certain consistency, its existence as a turd is unlikely: a cowpat-like pile of shit is not a turd. However, they can be small and loosely packed, especially underwater. Such turds are known as squits.

My friend Rock and I have reported the vagaries of our bowel activities to each other over 40 years. We focus on urgency, not dimension. He refers to shitting as taking a dump, though years ago his favourite term was borry. It appears in no dictionary. I suspect a borry is interchangeable for either a shit or a turd.

Excited cries echo through the dark from under the cliffs near Du Cane Hut. “Check this, will ya?” It’s February, early 1970s. Three lads are walking Tasmania’s Overland Track—it had no name then—from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair. One has unloaded a huge turd. All three gather and illuminate it with torches. They estimate it at over a foot long.

Turds fascinate young men. And they fascinate me. Turds are rarely examined, which is a shame: our own deserve examination as indicators of our health. Curiously, the forensic examination of animal scat has been the generator of auguries for millennia: a complete waste of time.

Scatology, unfortunately, refers to bad language and not to the study of turds. Some turds, a dangerous breed, float, obviously unable to displace their own weight in water. Do they contain hidden air pockets? Are vegetarian turds more likely to be floaters? Who is doing the research?

After school one afternoon in 1977 I leave a small but incredibly persistent floater in the bowl of the staff toilet at Trafalgar High School. No amount of flushing can either break it up or coax it round the S-bend. I slink from the cubicle in shame.

The no-go syndrome is an anxiety I bear with me to every public toilet. The men’s toilet in the side passage of the Bendigo Library flushes reservoirs of ineffective water around the bowl. Three and sometimes four swirling deluges are required to achieve clearance.

This morning I deposit a corker—I’ve missed a day—in the bowl of the toilet in Room 209 at Rydges South Park Hotel in Adelaide. I flush. The bowl clears, but then, like a mouse peering round a corner, the turd sticks its nose out from the S-Bend. The cistern fills and I flush again. For ten seconds the bowl is clear and then an inch of the turd sneaks out from its hiding-place again.

Four times I press and hold the button and four times that turd disappears, waits ten seconds till the coast is likely to be clear, then peeks out again. The thing is so friendly I leave it to say hello to the maid later in the morning.   

     

Rock on.

adelaide

Once upon a time it only happened once. Now it happens half a dozen times for most people: that first day in a new job. Once a career lasted forever: you worked in the bank, or the school, or on the farm, and finished there 40 years later. Of those half dozen careers our first job not only ends, it disappears, and our last is yet to be invented.

My new employer hires me because they think I know something. But on this first day I know nothing. I’ve met two people in the organisation, the two who interview me, one from Adelaide and the other from Sydney.

Corporate social policy dictates that I not refer to my employer in casual blogs, so they are now just PAI, and I work in the MM program. When I accept the job I also accept that my very first day is to be PAI’s national one-day staff conference in Adelaide.

People ask when I begin work. I tell them at 4:10pm yesterday. That was when my plane touched off at Tullamarine for Adelaide.

I dose myself with anti-cold pills and throat gargle and cart my sick self into the hotel dining-room for breakfast. I make to sequester myself at a corner table, but Tracy, my Adelaide connection, summons me to the most populated table in the room. I plead contagion but she’ll have none of that and urges me to come and meet everyone.

And so it begins. I put on the professional hat of sociability; its personal counterpart has never sat comfortably. I chat and well-wish, even schmooze.

We ascend to the conference room on the sixth floor where I seek refuge at a table of unknown faces. Over 120 PAI staff assemble and the show gets under way. Jo, our MC, is a local, big, blowsy, boozy by her own admission, and full of good cheer and wit. The in-jokes scud over my head.

Some major player is introduced. She busts into tears. She’s a stand-in for the CEO who fell out with the board and departed only hours ago. The first hour’s reporting on finances, board decisions and the impact of government decision-making is a blur.

We break into smaller workshops, then morning tea, then more small workshops. I go to Tracy’s and start to feel at ease. I chat with Maryanne, my New South Welsh counterpart, who’s been in the job four years. It’s her dream job; I tell her it’s mine too.

After lunch MC Jo asks me judge a best ideas competition, seeing it’s my first day and I’m untainted. She announces my judge-hood to the room and suddenly I’m known to everyone and required to not only sit in judgment but present my rationale and the award. Mr Anonymity is dead.

The MM team finish the day together and six of us go out for dinner. I like them. I’m a lucky bastard. 

   

Rock on.

dawn

I’m up at three, a victim of the disease gradually invading my body. A dry cough jolts me around under the doona. If I sit too long the head clogs so I keep moving to keep it at arm’s length. I pack and repack my small case for Adelaide several times. It keeps me pacing round the house through the wee hours. At six I summon the JRT out into the pitch dark for a pre-dawn walk.

Were he not predominantly white, I’d have no idea where he is. The sky is black and starless; the trees thrash in the gusty northerly. The traffic lights at the highway hundreds of metres up the road are the only lights to pierce the dark. 

I stand stump-still in the dead centre of a huge park; four football rectangles occupy it in winter. A fingernail moon reclines on the silhouetted treetops in a blank expanse of greying sky below fire-tinged clouds. Shepherds’ warning. It’s 23 degrees, a cold change and rain still hours away.

The JRT buzzes round checking smells, occasionally entering the periphery of my night vision.

We continue our diagonal way to the far corner of the park. A six-car caterpillar of square lights containing heads bent over books, papers and screens races past behind the trees and I hear the clanging of the crossing bells up near the station. The dog disappears up a driveway on the tail of an early-morning cat.

Shapes emerge from the murk. The greys lighten and the cracks in the footpath become visible. Colours seep out of the grey. The wind slackens. Tradies’ vans and utes dominate the main road; the side streets are vacant. Silent pedestrians materialise around the station.

Soon I’ll be catching the 7:25 to the inner city three days a week. I wonder when the dog will get his walk. Today or tomorrow is the autumn equinox: the days will shorten more rapidly now. I’ll depart home in the dark and arrive home in darkness too.

The compensation is to see the dawn each day.  

Rock on.

gambling

My former team-mate Gunna emails that a nag called Candy Rain—my family name is Candy—went round in Race 1 at Hamilton yesterday. He plunges $1 on it each way at good odds and collects $45. I’m glad that my name inspires a windfall for a friend at the gee-gees, although Gunna doesn’t say he risked a dollar because of my name. I’m presuming that.

I’ve never risked a zack betting on anything in my life. I’ve got that sixpence in my hand and the prospect of having two sixpences is no lure. I understand the reasons for my antipathy to alcohol, but not for my opposition to gambling. It just came naturally.

The May races are huge in my home town Warrnambool, especially the Grand Annual Steeplechase. It’s inordinately long and exhausting. Horses regularly stumble to their deaths and the anti-jumps lobby champs and foams at the bit.

One windy May afternoon in the 1950s my mother drives her small son out on a back road behind the racecourse. The Grand Annual Steeplechasers thunder through a paddock and blunder over the steeple built into the roadside fence. Hooves clatter across the bitumen and jouncing rumps disappear on their journey back to the course proper.

One sunny Sunday morning my accountant father takes me to the deserted track. It’s his job to empty the tickets from the ticket booths and audit them against the gate takings. The redolence of cut grass rushes into the nostrils and the white rails stretch away to places a four-year-old can’t guess at.

    

Captivating as they might be, neither the track’s sensuality nor the pounding horseflesh inspire anything in me. Meanwhile a cousin succumbs to the lure of the track and alcohol and is expelled from Wesley for running a book in the boarding-house.

From ages eight to twelve my father rings the TAB and places his bets each Saturday morning before he takes me to Carlton games. Sometimes I look at the turf guide over his shoulder and suggest horses whose names appeal to me. He underlines my choices.

Through the smoke haze at Princes Park, the Lake Oval or Glenferrie he suspends his interest in Carlton when each race result is slotted onto the scoreboard. One afternoon at Footscray my first three picks salute the judge and my father disappears to place bets on the others. None even places.

    

Life, of course, is a gamble. Our parents randomly pool their genes to create us. Later, on spec, we pick and apply for life-defining jobs out of the Saturday classifieds. The job interviewers gamble on who is the best candidate. It’s a raffle.

Every time I throw a leg over the top bar I gamble on every driver coming up behind me having their wits about them and their mobile phone in their pocket not their hand.

My good woman is a psychologist. Her job is to counsel problem gamblers. I don’t bet but I hang on her every word about living life.

Rock on.

symptoms

I’m under the weather. My throat is scummy and my head aches, a dull ache that shoots knives into the inside of my skull when I cough. I try not to cough but sometimes the throat dries suddenly and an involuntary reflex kicks in.

Yesterday Nicky and I ride up the Tourist Road to Olinda. I lead, but only because if she goes to the front I won’t see her again. I tell her that pride is all that’s keeping me in front of her. I’m working on cadence, sticking near or above 70 rpm.

My strength is fine but my cardio fitness is down and I huff and puff when the gradient nudges five per cent and beyond. Foolishly I suggest Ridge Road just for variety. Nicky’s never ridden Ridge Road: the grade arcs up to double figures for 700 metres as soon as you veer right off the Tourist Road. Wisely she says she’s not ready yet.

My health is mostly a source of pride: it’s robust and fights germs off without much fuss. Many times I sense something coming on but 24 hours later it’s gone. That’s what I hope for yesterday after riding when my throat feels a little odd and clearing it frequently develops into an irregular dry cough.

This morning in 6:15 pump class my lower back is grabby and doesn’t respond to the gentle stretches I try to placate it with. Still I hope that the signs mean nothing, but as the day moves into late afternoon I know things are bad.

For a five-year spell I have not so much as a cold. Then last year I have two, three months apart. Even then I can console myself, pride myself, that unlike the month-long grips others suffer, I’m all but over mine in seven days, although days three to five are tough going when the sinuses saturate then inundate.

So I wait to see what will come now, knowing that in 48 hours I’ll be on a plane to Adelaide to meet the national MindMatters team I’m about to join. Nice look, the wet hanky hanging out of a pocket, turning away from conversations to hack up a lung, gasping for air between sentences with a bung up each nostril. Makes a fine first impression.

“Leigh. Yes, I think he’s the pasty-looking guy slumped over there behind that potted palm. I’d stay well clear of him if I were you.”

  

Rock on.

shopping

I have a love-hate relationship with shopping. I hate consumer megaplexes with food courts full of people with obese wallets and waistlines. I like sauntering along mean strips of shops on Main Street. I hate shopping for others and love shopping for myself. Today I shop with gusto. It’s all about me.

My son Mo and his partner Katie return from their round-Australia trip before Christmas. They live with his mother while looking for a place to rent. Now they have that place. Sometime this week a truck will remove the furniture they left here when they headed north last May and I moved back here from Bendigo.

I’m about to be without shelves for my bed linen—none of which is linen—and a television and a microwave. The good vacuum cleaner goes; it’ll be sorely missed. Sundry items, like a flowery wall-clock, won’t be missed at all.

Until eight days ago I dare not contemplate replacing these things. I have no job and no bank balance. But a healthy income stream starts on Thursday, so today I’m maxing the credit card in anticipation.

I wake at half five. Damn, the shops aren’t open. I pedal to the gym but the pool is out of order and the swimmers have migrated to the cycle room and all the bikes are taken. I pedal home and start shuffling clothes in the built-in cupboards in the two front rooms to accommodate towels and sheets and doona covers. I unplug the microwave and lug it out to the carport.

    

My good woman is along for the ride. First, the television. I’ve contemplated not having one for about eight and a half seconds. A known brand is clearing stock from its Nunawading outlet where my good woman bought a telly two months ago. I buttonhole a small Filipino salesman at the door and buy the same model: no discussion, no fuss.

I can’t go to my first day on the job in Adelaide with my grubby backpack, so we visit a luggage showroom in a converted service station and each emerge with a lightweight case on wheels that satisfies the carry-on dimensions for 90 per cent of the world’s airlines. My good woman’s is solid silver, mine black with orange trim.

I score two fine shirts and pair of strides for $15 all up at the Lutheran op shop in the square near my good woman’s place. All appear to be new. I’ll wow them in Adelaide at the national staff conference.

“Over there, in front of the potted palm, with the CEO. Who’s the spiffy dude in the zany pink business shirt?”

“Think he’s the new Victorian state project officer. Class act, eh?”

  

Rock on.

induction

The JRT goes nuts when an Australia Post van rolls into my driveway a couple of minutes after seven. I gallop up the hall, bowl of Weeties in hand, to receive not one, but two parcels—a box and a large envelope. I should be more excited about the unexpected parcels than the Weeties, but hey, Weeties are the food of the gods.

The box holds five books, ordered online, and delivered 36 hours after clicking Submit on my order. The young atheist’s handbook feels lovely in my hand. Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with birds has rave reviews. Alain de Botton I will give to my mother. Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is thick enough for countless train journeys to and from the inner suburbs.

  

The sender’s details on the large envelope bear my new employer’s name. A clear folder cover with a broken clip spills the contents of a fat induction package over my breakfast table. On top are two copies of the employment contract I must sign and return.

I read the contract, careful not to smear it with the butter dripping from my toast. The only surprise is the salary, which I’m much too modest, and embarrassed, to disclose. Even at three days a week it’s $20k larger than my previous salary. I’m accustomed to working for a pittance after 12 years in the community sector.

I’m unsure what sector I’m about to work in; education, I guess. The contrast with my previous working life could not be starker. In community welfare I received no package and no induction. I signed a contract and got on with the job. I salary packaged more than 50 per cent of my salary to pay my mortgage.

Among the forms in my induction pack are sign-ups for Cabcharge, two car hire companies and an accommodation booking service, luxuries never contemplated in the community sector. I liked that lean and mean organisation and prided myself on costing it little more than my salary.

I check the staff list in the induction pack; what do all those admin support people do all day? Well, they send emails lodge to me with details of my travel to Adelaide and accommodation at an exclusive hotel. My night in the Sealake Hotel at $35 seems like something out of Dickens. It was.

I’m nervous enough about starting a new job, meeting new colleagues, finding my way to an office in Collingwood. But this excess of administrative and corporate wealth is freakin’ me out, man!

Rock on.      

addresses (2)

Against my better judgment I marry the mother of my child on 5 November 1980. The second attends in utero. My marriage ends one day short of two years later—I am left without wife, children, home, job or wheels. I am hollow. I try to cry but can’t.

I resume life at the home of a friend at 5 Hillside Road, Rosanna, and get a job in Moorabbin. Six months later my children come to live with me, aged three and one. I rent 16 St James Parade, Gardenvale, before quitting work and buying 65 Menzies Road in Menzies Creek, the first house I own. My parents and sister now live in Menzies Creek. It is our village.

That house in Menzies Creek remains a favourite. I live on a pension and raise two small children. My self-esteem plummets but life never has more meaning. I move to 17 Arthurs Road, Chum Creek, and blend my family with Carol’s. I sell my house and we extend her mud-brick house. It can’t last and doesn’t.

After two and a half years I return to the other end of the Dandenongs. First I rent 14 Crichton Road, Emerald, then a pine box in Moroney Crescent, Menzies Creek. I buy my second house at 7 Church Road, not the house I would choose. My father wants to invest in it so I relent from my initial opposition and live in a house I don’t like for nine years. Never again.

Just before my forty-eighth birthday I move to Croydon, number 96. For one night I think I own number 39 but the sale falls through. I love 96 but every day I pass 39 and regret surges through me. I would love it more.

A job comes up in Bendigo where my daughter lives so for three and half years I rent 83 Baxter Street, a terrace of the sort I have wanted to occupy since student days when so many others did and I did not. My son and his partner live at 96 until I return and must start again with the garden and the maintenance.

This is where I live.

I have gazed upon the house in Warrnambool where I began life. Nothing stirs. Nor at Two Sixty-five. I pass 7 Church Road without a glance, yet my children grew up there. The bricks and mortar don’t move me.

But when I pause to reflect on each house I have lived in, each town or place I have called home, each has particular memories. Important events in my life happened at each one. Each deserves a bit more space and time.

Rock on.

addresses (1)

I’m reading Jane Clifton’s The address book. It’s a memoir about all 32 houses she’s lived in since her birth in Gibraltar in 1949. She embarks on this journey after hearing Clive James remark that: “We carry with us the sensory impression of every house we ever lived in.”

She contends, conversely, that we leave a sensory layer in each house we inhabit, like the flakes of human skin and hair we leave behind as dust, the walls “stained with our breath, our farts, our coughs and sneezes … walls [that] have witnessed our most intimate secrets … heard our moans of love, seen our tears of frustration … ”

I count the places I have lived in. I cannot match Clifton’s 32, but 27 is good for a bloke only two years her junior lacking a father in the military posted all over the globe.

Life for me begins at 14 McConnell Street in Warrnambool before moving to 44 Nicholson Street. Returning to Melbourne, we occupy my father’s parents’ house at 551 Heidelberg Road, Alphington, for three months while they buy trinkets in the Orient.

While looking for a house to buy we rent 31 Marston Street, Bentleigh. I am now eight years old. The place I think of as the home I grew up in is at 265 Grange Road, Ormond. We refer to it simply as Two Sixty-five.

The numbers of all those early houses are indelibly imprinted on my psyche; later numbers have been deleted from memory’s hard-drive.

My first year home away from home is the Caulfield Grammar boarding-house at 217 Glen Eira Road in St Kilda East as a ‘resident master’ while studying to be a teacher. Then comes a rash of share-houses: 34 Kendall Street, Ringwood, and Bemboka Road, Warranwood, the first house whose number is gone. So too is the house.

Now I am a teacher in country Victoria, sharing with other teachers at Golden Point, Elphinstone and Childers at Dr Danger’s place, where my son is conceived, but another house that is no more. The addresses are roadside delivery or mailbox, RSD or RMB.

I migrate with a pregnant woman to Littlehampton in South Australia to do a bit of communal living on the now-bypassed highway to Melbourne. Women fight over who will cook porridge and we leave. My son is born at home at 11 Pine Grove, Belair, overlooking the lights of Adelaide. Immediately we decamp for country Victoria, to a house called Mayfield on an unnamed road at Greta.

Doctor Will’s house at Eldorado is where my daughter is born, McGregors Road, another RMB. A year later we take our children to Tasmania where the marriage comes unstuck in The Convent at Lymington and at Petcheys Bay on the Huon estuary. Road names and numbers mean nothing.

I tumble from my motorbike and smash my shoulder. The children and their mother stay in Tasmania and I return to Victoria to convalesce in a caravan in my parents’ driveway at Menzies Creek. I have lost my children, their mother, a place to live and a job. I have no wheels: I am going nowhere. Life can only get better.

  

Rock on.

coincidence

I’m at my fourth and final training session as an AMES volunteer English tutor. All 22 of us already meet and work with our refugee or migrant ‘students’. I’ll miss the final session and graduation next week because I’ll be in Adelaide on other business.

I’m the oldest of three male volunteers. Robert would be mid-50s and Raymond mid-30s. There are four young women in their 20s, one around 40, and fourteen women from 50 to over 70 with names like Dot and Hazel. We’re all nice middle-class folk, fuzzy-hearted softies who want to welcome people to a new life rather than send them back to brutality and persecution.

I’m fresh from my second meeting with TZ. I tell him I want to find out about his knowledge of English at this session. He knows numbers and dates and weather and can speak about how he gets to work. His reading and writing is not bad, self-taught from a book during years in an Indian refugee camp outside Delhi. Listening and speaking is not so easy.

A small boy appears in the room. TZ tells me this is his nephew, his sister’s son. The child climbs onto TZ’s lap and stares at me from the security of TZ’s chest. I extend a finger but no child’s finger meets it. TZ’s wife and a small female enter. The child returns to the small female who I guess to be TZ’s sister. She is small enough to be a 13 year-old.

I ask how old the little boy is. He was born on 3 September 2010, the same date as Nerri, my grand-daughter. I introduce the word coincidence and try to explain its meaning. I find coincidence in his battered English-Chin dictionary but still he looks blank.

TZ shows me the classwork he is doing at Box Hill TAFE on Monday and Wednesday evenings. I read an essay he presented to his class about Chinland. He says he misses it so much, his home city Hakha, the lakes, the birds.

Most Chin are Baptist. American Baptist missionaries, the Reverend Arthur Carson and his wife Laura Hardin Carson, converted the Chin from 1899 onwards. On the wall is a framed oval picture of a bleeding-hearted Jesus, Catholic iconography. TZ tells me a local op shop gave it to him when he asked to buy it.

I ask about Chin cooking. Rice is the staple, of course. TZ’s wife cannot work because of her health so she cooks. Unlike African men, TZ can cook. I look forward to the day when we share a meal.

He shows me to the door where I put on my thongs. We are laughing.

Rock on.

the killing fields

8:00. First call: the blood bank, the home of all sorts of Aussies. No Australians of foreign extraction—no Asians, no blackfellers—donate blood. I’m sure the Red Cross would welcome them. But giving blood is a peculiarly white Caucasian behaviour. I’m giving 902mgs of plasma.

9:40. Second call: Centrelink. They remove blood by other means. Their clientele are not exclusively white. The Asians in the waiting area with me are neat and clean, the Africans braided and colourful. The white Australians are something to behold.

Call me elitist, arrogant, whatever. I’m out of place here among the shaved heads, both male and female, bellies sagging over belts, tattoos, baseball caps, blonde tips, girls in tattered jeans, and squealing babies from dubious gene pools. Seated to my right this morning are two overweight mute lesbians with a squalling boy child. No doubt he has no other language.

Since my last resort to Centrelink’s support in 1999, they’ve tried to make their service customer-friendly. But every stratagem backfires because their heart isn’t really in it. And the heart is absent because governments make it impossible for Centrelink to have one. An icy undertone flows through the veins of every Centrelink document. Each is bloated with reminders to do certain things, or else. No uncertainties are possible.

Centrelink gets everything wrong. A customer liaison officer greets every person to add ‘a personal touch’ and direct customers to appropriate counters or waiting areas. But all this person does is slow the process. Queues back up and extend out the door. Better to take a number and a seat than shuffle along for 20 minutes to be directed to a chair one might have sat in from the off.

Centrelink offers online services—log in, fill out the requisite forms and all’s well. Nice theory, but they don’t quite trust you, so I still have to front in person each fortnight so they can verify my online form. The online service is just one more dehumanising process in the process.

And that’s Centrelink—process, process, process, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. No real help is offered. Whether I sit opposite Angus, Lorae or Christine, they’re going through the motions. The job seeker process is a joke for professionals. It’s designed for pregnant 19 year-olds and obsolete boilermakers.

For all its efforts to present itself as something else, Centrelink remains the last refuge of the desperate, the dispirited, the downtrodden and depressed.

I don’t need them any more. 

Rock on.

holiday

Apparently it’s a public holiday. What would I know of that? I’m hardly Joe Public and the unemployed know nothing of holidays.

My good woman is on holiday. She’s with me in the Jazz on the way to Wonthaggi to ride our bikes on the Bass Coast rail trail. The trip down is easy enough. I fill the vehicle with petrol and my good woman provides lunch: burek—cheese, cheese and spinach, and cherry, bananas and vegetable juice.

I unload the bikes at Anderson just as the V/line bus pulls in. I re-attach pedals and front wheels and away we go. At Kilcunda the trail crosses Bourne Creek on a marvellous old trestle bridge pretty much on the beach. The 12 kilometres from here to Wonthaggi are flat and there’s not much to see but six wind turbines whirling in the easterly breeze.

Wonthaggi is shut for the holiday. My good woman wants to walk on a beach so we pedal back to Kilcunda. A metre of gloriously coppery snake freaks her out as it slithers across the trail. She can’t even look at it. I stand between it and her as she pedals gingerly past. It nudges my front tyre before crossing the track.

We lock the bikes to a sturdy bench, descend rickety wooden stairs to the beach, and wriggle out of bike clothes and into gear appropriate for beach-combing.

Surf fishing is big today and two surfers brave to pounding waves. We see neither a fish nor a wave caught. The spray crusts my glasses and I stumble through the coarse sand in a fog. My good woman collects beach ephemera and stares out to sea. I wonder how I’ll get the sand off my feet before putting my bikes shoes on again.

Back at Anderson I stow the bikes in the car and we polish off the last slices of burek. An unbroken stream of traffic trickles down the road from Phillip Island and onto the South Gippsland Highhway. At times it simply stops. I consider taking back roads through the Gippsland hills but decide that road works near Bass are causing the delay and once past we’ll scoot along. And so it is.

Just before six we’re home, tired, sunburnt, and sleepy. A cup of tea goes down a treat before we say our goodbyes for today and retreat to our respective worlds; hers will be catching up with her children and cooking, mine catching up with three programs of football highlights and feeding the dog and cat.

Late at night I go online to report my work and job-seeking activity to Centrelink. I tell them nothing, especially that I’m on holiday.

     

Rock on.

locals

Although thousands of folk reside in my suburb, we encounter few, me and the JRT, when we walk the local streets.

People like Fio and Alvena in Unit 4 drive to work and occupy their house. The only time either walks out the front gate is on bin night. Dan from Unit 2 shambles to the milk bar 100 metres away in the morning to get the small paper but otherwise ventures no further than the bus stop out front. The adult Liberians in Unit 3 only leave the property in cars.

Various dog-walkers pound the pavement at different times. Don we encounter irregularly—perhaps on three consecutive days, then not for a month. I speculate: has the booze got the better of him? Has he just dropped dead? A tall older woman—Dutch?—who leans forward from the waist stalks along with two golden retrievers and a black lab on leads. She looks neither left nor right, says nothing.

   

Nobody beats the mystery woman from a big block of units up the road for regularity. At 8:08 every week morning she steps onto the footpath and sets a brisk pace for the station. Her return is less regular, somewhere between half six and half seven.

She is about my age, perfectly coiffed, elegant like no one else in this part of town. She drapes a swanky bag from a shoulder and carries a more substantial bag by hand. Her clacking heels announce her coming and she leaves a perfume trail the dullest-nosed human could track ten minutes after her passing.

I concoct her story: owns a swish boutique of high class women’s fashions on the upper deck of a large shopping complex, husband confined to a wheelchair in their cosy unit.

This afternoon the JRT and I wander off on a long mid-afternoon ramble. I stop at the top of Mystery Woman’s drive to whistle up the JRT who’s sniffing every blade of grass, lagging badly. And here she is. It might be Sunday but she’s immaculate. We exchange hellos as we do when we pass in the street. She moves off.

“Excuse me. I hope you’ll pardon my curiosity. You leave here at the same time every morning. What do you do?”

She catches the train to the city, the 8:25—“You can always get a seat”—works in sustainability, training people. She goes to the gym on her way home.

I thank her for enlightening me and ask her again to excuse my nosiness. Having got my story so wrong, I decide not to ask after the crippled husband.

  

Rock on.