abode

I hang a u-turn, pull up behind my son’s work vehicle, twin-cab VW full of tools, canopied with ladders. He’s laying grey pavers from the deck to the clothesline at the side of my sister’s house in East Brighton. He levels dirt and brickie’s sand between the formwork he set up the previous weekend, his eye as meticulous as a taut string.

My second brother-in-law Tom, though I never think of him in this formal way, touches up new paths in the front yard. My sister paints picture rails in the storage room. Renovating houses is the thing they do best, the architect and the interior decorator. He has the grand designs, she paints and furnishes.

They are moving house, tidying and cleaning before tenants move in. I ring her between porridge and toast, just back from three days in Adelaide, no time to think about their move. I ask if I can help in any way, hope for a grateful refusal. Can I come down and acid wash the deck for them? Sounds like fun.

I mix a litre of concentrated oxalic acid with four parts water in a plastic bin. Thin pink latex gloves protect me from the acid. I sweep the dark, dirty boards, hose, brush off the excess, sweep on the acid, go down on my knees and scrub with a hand brush, section by section. It’s a shit job by anyone’s reckoning.

After the hosing off a smidge of the original cedar colour up comes through.

About two we shuffle through empty bookcases, cabinets and pulled-down furnishings to eat soup and toasted sandwiches from odd bowls, a plastic container and a mug; everything is in the Rubik’s cube of boxes snarling the living-room, the big move still two days away. Like all abodes, my sister’s house looks in need of renovation when empty.

After lunch my sister and I confabulate about our parents. I tell her about my good woman’s conversation with our mother, her admission that she bullies my father to keep him alive. My sister comments that he’s joined the queue. Tom nods at the things my sister disagrees with; my son in the prime of his life must wonder what he’s in for if I get to 87.

On Monday my sister moves from the bayside to the mountains, to a celebrated 1930s architectural masterpiece. In 90 days my son will move to a neat house in Somerville he signed the papers for two days ago. The excitement of owning a house is growing on him.

Moving house is hell on earth even when the reward is great. I’m wondering why I live in the outer suburbs and work a long tedious commute away. I plan to stick at this job for four years. Could I endure a move somewhere closer?   

Rock on.