hillside

Rock picks me up from my parents’ caravan, takes me down to his red cedar shingled home at Blind Bight on the mozzie coast of Westernport Bay. He and his new wife Jenny help resurrect my sunken spirit. They arrange for Annie, single mother of six who lives at the corner of their street to take me home and fuck me. She’s great therapy. But I can’t live at Blind Bight.

My mate Robré suggests I occupy a room in his house at Hillside Road, Rosanna. My broken shoulder is functional again, I have a new bike, bigger, a CX650. My kids are in Tasmania, but Tassie’s been a disaster for me. I need a place to live, a base from which to rebuild my life. Hillside is the place.

Sharing the house is agonisingly depressed Erica, a nurse somewhere nearby. A failed relationship with an unfeeling boyfriend has unhinged her. One afternoon I come home, follow a bloody trail to her room, find her slashed behind the knees but alive. Her family pick her up, clear her room, and she never returns.

Her more upbeat sister Steph certainly does. She wants my cock in her but I don’t want to put it there. Give her marks for persistence, but not timing. She arrives while I’m making a leather bag in Rob’s wonderful shed and listening to a football semi-final, demands sex. Reluctantly I relent.

I have a job working with unemployed kids in Moorabbin. I alternate between riding the length of Burke Road or trains from Rosanna to Moorabbin. The train is my reading room.

Six months after I return from Tasmania so do Marilyn and my children. She’s never going to build on the land we own at Mt Cygnet. She moves into a communal-type house full of dope-smokers at Panton Hill, further north-east of the city than Rosanna, but a good run for me to see my kids. They are grubby urchins, like all the Panton Hill tribe, most with names more appropriate to weather forecasting.

Some time in the new year, 1984, Marilyn asks if I’ll have the children, tells me she’s not coping. I ask how long would they be with me. There is no room at Hillside; I would need to rent my own place close to work, organise child care for a one year-old and a three year-old. She can’t tell me how long; I tell her I can’t take the children.

She moves out of Panton Hill to share with a former nursing colleague and her criminal boyfriend at Kangaroo Ground. Soon Marilyn is not living in the house but in a tent five metres from the swift-flowing Yarra. She has lost her mind. In June she calls me, asks me to have the children. I specify one year minimum, the length of a lease, and pick them up as soon as I can.

Within days I rent a place in Gardenvale and 19 years of being a single parent begins.

Rock on.