units

Things are pretty quiet here at Number 96. Unit 4 is on the market. New tenants are in at Unit 3. The cold, wet and windy season has driven Dan indoors at Unit 2. I’m so busy that just being here feels like a privilege.

In January and February our owners corporation is trying to decide how to conduct its affairs. Eventually we settle on running our own show and sack our paid property manager.

Bullyboy Jim, owner of Unit 3, is neutered by research and diplomacy. I learn all about owners corporations and Jim can’t bluff us any more. I also keep our antagonists—Dan and Jim hate each other—apart.

Feo and Alvena in Unit 4 have a son a little over two years old. He’s been in China with grandparents for almost a year. Alvena is pregnant again, about seven months. I haven’t seen her in the driveway for months. Sightings of Feo are few. I see him this morning for the first time in months.

Dan has told me many times—he tells me many things, many times, most unreliable—how hard Feo and Alvena work, how their shopping centre coffee and patisserie franchise is struggling. So I’m surprised when Feo tells me they’re looking at more expensive units closer to work.

Dan and Joyce have a huge DVD movie library. I guess the DVD player is getting a pounding. I can see Dan nodding off in his chair—he’s 82—so why not? Joyce must be cooking because English-style winter cooking smells waft over the fence most afternoons.

Jim has axed the Liberians in Unit 3, gave them notice to quit in May. The black teenage daughters no longer laugh in the driveway, the long line of extended family and friends no longer troop up and down it. Chester and his missus no longer rumble up and down in their tinted-windowed four-wheel drives. The new tenants are a young couple. I’ve yet to encounter them.

Every couple of weeks I fire up the owners corporation lawnmower, clip the two little triangles in front of Units 2 and 4, suck up the weeds, leaves and loose gravel that’s our nature strip. I pay our owners corp insurance and electricity bills online. We have a cheque-book, a debit credit card, and a small surplus in our bank account.

Twelve years after their erection the units show signs of deterioration. The front fence, my responsibility, needs painting. My house, our face to the world, needs painting too.   

I reckon I’ll be out of here in five years. But where to?

Rock on.