finance

My good woman and I sit opposite the woman responsible for getting the ANZ bank to loan us more than half a million dollars. She’s Chinese, second generation for sure, her English unaccented, her command of her keyboard and numbers frightening.

Annette’s title is Home and Investment Lending Manager. My good woman and I bank with different banks but we can’t finance our auction purchase with loans from different banks. So I’m coming across. I won’t move my other accounts with Which Bank, but I like the thought of kicking them in pants this once just because they are a bank.

A contributing factor in my apostasy is that Annette explains things better than Kylie at Which Bank. And for someone whose knowledge of money is akin to a black hole, this is important. At our first meeting on the Monday before the auction, I sort of get it: essentially, I get that the bank will lend us enough to bid, and that we can pay them back. For a few weeks anyway.

Today, having done the auction deed, the whole thing gets a bit messy, but after many quizzical looks from my good woman and me, me in particular, Annette dumbs it down enough for me to understand for five minutes.

My lifelong aversion to anything to do with money is the trouble. I understand neither concepts concerning money, nor the language. Words like offset, dividend and accrual send me tailspinning into that black hole. I can’t even master a term as simple as ‘pay out’ in reference to my previous home loan, telling Annette I hope to kill it as soon as possible.

In the end we establish that my good woman will be party to four loans and I will have three. We will have a line of credit loan that will lie doggo, unless and until such time as we want to use it.

Annette asks about our solicitor, the legal person who will arrange all the legal stuff. Neither of us has a solicitor, but my sister has recommended someone. I ring her when I get home and she sends me a quote and questionnaire. That’ll do me. I don’t want to see any other quotes. They’ll only confuse me.

Rock on. 

guilt

Day Two of the Mind and its potential conference and our host is a serious male ABC reporter, balancing yesterday’s I-can’t-take-her-seriously-at-all newsreader from a commercial network.

The nine o’clock is a Canadian on passion who seems to think we’ll share his passion for basketball. Someone should have told him. Next is a professor from Wollongong with a remnant South African accent. He leans on the side of the lectern, tells us about historical figures with interesting brains, but neglects to leave enough time to tell us what distinguished the contents of their craniums.

Two speakers on the mind and education save my morning. Then a principal from a school boasting creative independent thinkers reads her boring speech, utterly undermining her school’s claim.

I’ve eaten shit takeaway food here in Sydney for two days so when we break for lunch I wander off on my own and order a seafood risotto from a harbourside restaurant. Just as it arrives I realise my wallet is in my backpack in a locker at the hotel with Comrade S’s airport case. She alone has the combination and I don’t know her whereabouts. No panic: I dial her mobile number. No answer.

It dawns on me that I have my work debit card in my briefcase. I breathe easy and eat better in that knowledge. Suddenly, doubt gnaws. I check. It’s not there. It’s in my wallet too. I finish the last grain of rice, summon the waitress, confess my sin, my stupidity, my I-don’t-what-to-do-nowness. She brings in the boss, a young Asian woman who weighs about 32 kgs.

I leave my briefcase and laptop with her, promise to return. Comrade S and the KM crew finally arrive at the conference late for the afternoon session. Comrade S spots me $25. I retrace guilty steps to the restaurant, hand over the notes. My embarrassment increases: the risotto is $26.5 not $23.5 as I thought.

All my reason tells me the whole thing is an honest mistake anyone might make. Nonetheless it’s one I’ve never made before: had a meal and forgotten my wallet. I’m scrupulously honest: why should I feel such shame?

I return to the conference but can face no more. I sit in the foyer and ruminate. I’ve wasted several hundred dollars by missing conference sessions, not to mention the air fare, the hotel room, taxi fares, just to be here. I think nothing of it.

So why am I fussed that a thriving restaurant is taking a loss of $1.50 because of me?

Rock on. 

conference

I make my way out of the hotel on a bright Sydney Monday, down several ramps and through a car park into the Harbourside Shopping Centre. Thence its two escalators, not side by side, and along a concourse before turning left along another concourse out into a vast open space in front of the Sydney Conference Centre. There are no straight lines in Sydney, no easy way anywhere.

Crowds of delegates mill—what else can a crowd do other than mill or surge? Registration is hassle-free, my name found under my first-name initial. A young bloke burdens me with a nylon satchel of promotional material. It’ll go in the first bin where no one can see my sacrilege.

Day one of the conference is hosted by a ditzy blond Channel Ten newsreader. She’s edited a book and no doubt wouldn’t think of herself as anything less than a major intellect. I see no signs of any intellect there of any size during the day.

The first two speakers are major intellects, indeed. Neurologists and brain scientists doing heavy duty brain work on neuroplasticity. Speaker One is the foremost researcher and thinker on phantom limbs. He starts and ends his presentation mid-sentence, like amputated limbs.

Speaker Two could be Mr Burns and we his audience of Homers, dull instruments before his craning neck, bulging cranium and hand gestures like something from a Kabuki play. Guy Three, another American, is more like a televangelist, gesticulating, arms wide in supplication. He tells us our brains get better with age, but I forget the rest of what he says.

The conference format is crap—one large dark room, hundreds of ‘delegates’, and endless speeches. No variety. No practising what is being preached.

After lunch there’s a discussion moderated by an ABC science show presenter with the first two speakers of the day. I confess that I understood not much of it. It is high-brow stuff and way beyond my neuroplasticity or neurogenesis.

Then we hear from the Young Australian of the Year, though I don’t know which year. He’s a one-armed guitar-playing Indian Scot from Tasmania who had a fearful car accident. He gets everyone on their feet singing that we are blessed, then blessed some more. Writing this I find it reads like shit but we’re all on our feet and tears are plentiful.

Other sessions—a woman doctor staving off the dementia that runs in her family, a nun who wants to change our minds about dying, a bloke examining our game plans for successful careers—go ahead without me. There’s a limit to how much time a bloke can spend in a dark room, awake. My limit is limited.   

I’ll try to take more in tomorrow.

Rock on. 

sydney

Now I own two properties in Melbourne, one shared with my good woman, the thought of travelling to Sydney is even less attractive. But go there I must, to the Mind and its potential conference. Like all conferences, its allure dims as the date approaches. But MM is footing the bill; indeed, I am an ‘endorsing body guest’, MM being one of 34 bodies with its logo on the back page of the program.

Even on a Sunday afternoon Croydon to the hotel lobby takes five hours, of which one is spent in an aeroplane. The rest is consumed getting to and from airports, queuing and waiting. Europcar provide a wonderful service, stowing my car and shuttling me to Qantas’s front door. When I return they’ll whisk me away and have my car idling on their tarmac ready to roll. All power to them.

The taxi rank in Sydney has a queue longer than at the check-in desk for an international flight. We shuffle left, turn the corner and shuffle right. A constant stream of white taxis surges to the kerb and surges away along the tunnel and into the night. My driver has bad body odour and I ride with the window down, wind in my face and rocketing up my tormented nostrils.

I nominate the Ibis at Darling Harbour as my destination. “Which Ibis would that be, sir?” he asks. “There are two.” The one nearer the Sydney Convention Centre is my best guess. He asks if I’d like to be surcharged for taking the freeway, on top of the airport surcharge and the this-and-that tunnel surcharge. Whatever. It’s on MM; they insist I take taxis rather than the train, bus or monorail.

On the forecourt of the Ibis he can’t get his Cabcharge card-reader to function. For ten minutes I sit, nose hung out the window, while he presses buttons, grumbles, apologises, stabs more buttons. At least five times the reader asks for his driver’s ID.

Finally I’m in the foyer. The reception woman is a robot, reeling off the does and don’ts, telling me my MM debit card has been declined. Whatever. I hand her my personal credit card. I hate it but can’t seem to live without it.

Room 1006 lives on the top floor, long grey passages, red-framed doors. I open mine and wonder where the room is. All I see is a short passage, but it opens into a small room, much smaller than the usual hotel room. But I like it. It has my one requirement—a bench under the window to set up the laptop and write on.

An appalling convenience store across the road sells me a muffin, my dinner on this first night in Sydney: it’s the worst muffin ever, the stink of some vile preservative steaming off it the moment I rip the cellophane from it. I bin it and consume a KitKat instead.

Is it travel? Is it Sydney? Is it me? It’s a horror show on wheels. Whatever.

Rock on. 

auction

It’s Super Saturday, the biggest real estate day of the year with 986 Melbourne houses and apartments going to auction, nine of them in Carnegie. My good woman and I have come to bid for just one. It goes under the hammer in half an hour.

My sister is parked in the street opposite the house. My good woman and I pull up on the stroke of 10:30. The auction is at 11. We get out of our cars and greet in the middle of the street. My good woman and my sister hug and touch cheeks. I have never hugged my sister in my whole entire life. My family doesn’t do this stuff.

My sister has a qualification of some sort in interior design. Her husband lectures in architecture at a large TAFE college. They love renovating houses: he does the macro and she the micro. On Thursday while I’m working in Newcastle, my sister drives from Emerald to Carnegie to look at the outside of this house.

She sends a text message to express her concern. The train line is too close. The townhouse going up next door will overshadow the house on the west side. She apologises for her doom and gloom. Don’t rush in, she says. The upside is that it looks sound and would tart up nicely. Today my sister gets to look inside.

We are the first potential buyers here this morning. We are here to bid, to buy this house if we can. We have been to the bank; we know our limit. We move through the rooms. Soon we are jostling our way against a tide of possible competitors. My sister seems more positive about the inside. My good woman is quiet, nervous. I am too.

Outside a single speaker is propped on the nature strip. A red auction flag billows in the wind. Cars are moved from in front of the house and 20 or so people stand under trees and across the street in the biting wind. Umbrellas go up; the rain threatens but never quite happens.

The auctioneer’s spiel is patently ridiculous, urging us to “unpack our lifestyle” in this “sensationally renovated” residence. I’d be laughing hysterically were I not about to bid for the place.

He calls for an opening bid, meets silence. He names a starting price: $480k. Someone under the tree beside him nods. The second bidder is a rotund bloke behind and to my left. He has three people with him. I’ve already guessed he will be our opponent. The price goes up to five-something. The first bidder declines further bids. The auctioneer gets to “third and final time”. I raise a finger.

Now the second bidder and I dook it out by fives and two and a halves. By the time we pass $550 he knows I mean business. There are no other bidders. Two more times the auctioneer gets to third and final time. I look at my good woman, up into a tree, but never at the other bidder.

I hold the bid. He is offered a last chance to bid, declines. This third-and-final-time seems to last forever, then “SOLD!” says the auctioneer. My good woman, my sister and I group hug. The other bidder comes to shake my hand. The auctioneer spins the red flag into a rope and ties a knot in it. The crowd disperses, disappears.

We go inside to sign contracts. I can’t till I’ve had a piss. The agent tells me I’ve earned one. We emerge 20 minutes later and I peel the back off a red SOLD sticker, press it onto the For Sale sign. My sister goes home; my good woman and I leave to take a victory walk among the Carnegie shops on Koornang Road.

My good woman and I own a small art deco semi-detached house in a quiet street—apart from the trains—in a sought-after south-eastern suburb.

Rock on. 

fish'n'chips

The humble milk bar is dying, but the fish’n’chippery lives. McDonalds has all but destroyed the real hamburger, replacing it with the soggy bun, a patty a third the size it ought be, and glossy pictures that seem to engender self-delusion in 99 per cent of the population, but the fish’n’chippery lives.

I don’t care about the death of the hamburger because I don’t eat meat. I did eat meat once and no better hamburger could be had than a Lucky burger from Lucky’s on Nepean Highway. Some proper burgers are attempting to find a place in the market—Healthy burgers, and Huxtaburgers in Collingwood.

But fish’n’chipperies survive almost unchanged from the day I was born right down to the jar of pickled onions on the counter and the contents of the menu board above the blue smoke rising off the vats of seething beef tallow.

Run almost exclusively for decades by Greek and Italian refugees, like the Demetrious of West Coburg, fish’n’chipperies are managed by Asian families now, Chinese in particular. Lyttleton Terrace fish’n’chippery in Bendigo is my favourite of recent times. Sometimes the entire family, eight Chinese of all ages, hold fort behind the formica. Dad takes the orders and the money.

Before I leave Croydon for Bendigo, the Grey Shark at East Ringwood is my preferred fish’n’chippery. A young Chinese couple, he as large as a Chinese can be, she tiny as a sly smile, produce the best chips around. They have no English but none is needed. They move on. It’s still the Grey Shark but the shop is painted orange now.

One shop in Croydon attracts couples: it was John and Loula’s, now it’s Monica and Eddie’s. The shop further down Main Street is run by two young Chinese blokes. It amuses me that so British a concept as fish and chips has always been dispensed in this country by anyone but.

For a while I frequent the Lincoln Road fish’n’chippery, seriously good greasies, but they stuff up my order so many times I have to ditch them. Nothing’s worse than finding a fried dim sim substituting for the potato cake you’re expecting and contaminating all the chips nearby.

I still see kids squatting in corners eating chips out of the bag. They taste better than unwrapped chips. How is this possible? What arcane chemistry takes place inside the butcher’s paper?

And here’s another mystery. Piled on a plate, one chip always looks better than the rest, must be eaten next, and when it’s in the mouth, the next best chip presents itself. How do they do that?

Rock on. 

swansea

Yesterday, for a second time this year, I find myself in Newcastle. Maps and advice are in short supply at the airport. Lizard and I must navigate our way in a hire car across town to Swansea, thirty-three kilometres south of the city.

In the absence of advice or map I use my smartphone to guide us through town, but can’t get enough of ‘town’ on screen to instruct Lizard, who’s behind the wheel. We end by going the long way round, but we get there.

We’re here to present two days of SKIPS training to 20 or so local school counsellors at Swansea RSL.

Our accommodation is Rafferty’s Resort at Cams Wharf, a hot deal Lizard has scored through Scoopon, including $50 off an evening meal and free continental breakfasts for four. The resort consists of 150 apartments on several acres on the shore of Lake Macquarie. The resort roads are corrugated with speed humps. Many apartments have For Sale signs in the windows.

Each apartment is a clone of every other, each as soulless as only a hotel, motel or resort can be. This one also lacks power points, has leaves piled at the door, a buggered television, lights too dim to read by.

We settle in, go through our plan for the next two days. We drive back to Swansea, visit the RSL, check the room for tomorrow, then tour Swansea, but find no decent place to eat. We return to the restaurant at the resort. The food is good.

For two days we train our counsellors; they love SKIPS, its simplicity, that it asks nothing of schools or teachers, gives them so much in understanding, confidence and strategies to work with families where a parent is mentally ill. Guest speaker Sandy, insanity consultant, lesbian with schizophrenia, makes them laugh, says she’s experienced more stigma from hating feta cheese than her illness.

Over dinner Sandy and I discover our mutual dislike for smelly cheese, water sports, and horses. We agree that gays and lesbians should have the same right to marry as hetero couples but marvel at the silliness of them wanting to get married at all. It seems only right to her to propose that she and I should marry.  

When it’s all over I’m incredibly tired but drive us by memory across Newcastle to the airport via Edith, Lorna and Maud Streets. Sandy thinks this a miracle. She’s right.

Rock on. 

milk bar

On the other side of the hill that the Nicholson Street cutting cuts through is a milk bar. They sell Regal Rockets and as a four-year-old that’s all I need to know. Every corner has a milk bar in 1955 and every milk bar is unique. Each has a contract to sell a particular brand of ice cream, usually Peters, Sennetts or Toppa. In Warrnambool it’s Regal. I love curling my tongue round a Regal Rocket.

In 1958 someone shoots a couple of bullet holes in the plate glass window of Murray Weideman’s milk bar in Heidelberg Road opposite my grandparents place. I go over while we live there to marvel at those little holes; it’s as close as I’ve got to crime in my short life.

In 1974 I live in a disused milk bar at the end of a dead-end street in Ringwood. The back gate of the primary school opposite and a laneway from the next street were its saving grace but it still died over 40 years ago.

That Warrnambool milk bar is now just a sore thumb stuck on the front of a house. Most milk bars are these days. The pristine white convenience store and the supermarket have killed the hard-working family business where every family member did their turn behind the counter.

The Hungry Wombat milk bar six doors away up my current street is under new management. The sign in the window has been there every day for the thirteen years I’ve lived here. The installation of vats of sizzling beef fat to cook fish and chips will stave off its demise by about five minutes. Like every surviving milk bar it gets tattier by the month.

Some places I’ve lived have the milk bar as general store—Chum Creek, Menzies Creek, Clematis. These stores are hubs of local life. Faded notices for private hairdressing or the disposal of unwanted kittens flap on boards by the door. Dead flies pile up along the windowsills inaccessible behind old hoardings, racks of broom handles, shelves of fluffed up sliced white bread.

These days only migrant Asian families are prepared to do the hours a milk bar demands. No Dave or Madge rises from a battered stool in the corner to take your milk money any more. That’s just the way it is. Modernity.

Rock on.

ana

Ana Radidovich is a Russian Jew come to Australia to teach the Hoffmann Process. According to the Hoffman Process website it’s an intensive eight-day residential retreat at Byron Bay—where-else?—that reduces self-defeating behaviours, allowing access previously untapped resources of inner strength, self-awareness, compassion and love. New Agey bullshit.

Highly trained and experienced psychotherapists guide acolytes through the process. Ana Radidovich is one of them but in order to stay in Australia when her visa expires she needs a husband.

It's 2000 and I'm 48 when a former lover, Ruth, rings me at work out of the blue. We’ve lost contact but she’s found me courtesy of the interweb and a newsletter I publish as part of my job. She asks if I’d consider marrying Ana Radidovich for ten thousand dollars. It’s a lot of money to a man of meagre means.

A meeting is arranged. Ruth arrives at my door at 11am, sunny morning, Ana Radidovich with her. I shake Ana’s hand, a beautiful silky hand whose tactile quality is like none I’ve felt before. Although she grips my hand, her handshake is more like a caress. She has black hair, come-hither eyes and a voice to charm the spots off a toadstool.

Marrying this woman seems eminently sensible to me immediately.

We sit at my dining table and Ana and I parlay the terms of the possible marital arrangement right down to who has what in whose wardrobe and for how long. For $10k I have to be prepared to perjure myself by telling the Immigration Department, should they ask, that our marriage is a genuine and wonderful thing.

Ruth, who says nothing during the meeting, rings me next day, tells me she never witnessed anything like it in her life, the strange mixture of practical directness imbued with genuine warmth for each other.

Over the next week I learn from a number of sources that these visa-marriages are quite common; that the going rate is about $27k. I ring Ruth, tell her I can’t marry Ana. I’m relieved, but not because my principles would have been compromised. It’s all about the risk, the legal risk.

On the other hand I learn that every man has his price, and mine is the going rate. For $27k I’d’ve been in like Flynn.

Rock on.

green

Comrade P works in the KM program, mid to late thirties, balding to bald, always ready with a quip, hard to imagine him having an enemy. His desk is as far from mine as is possible in our small office. We feel a rapport because we both cycle, to work and elsewhere, and need a cupboard at work for our stinky stuff.

Being incurably curious—some call it nosey—I find out that he and his wife have taken a vow, not of chastity, but fossil fuel chastity. They’ve checked the car into a neighbourhood car hire and won’t drive it for twelve months, although Comrade P may travel in a car driven by someone else or hired for work purposes where no alternative transport exists.

Earlier in the year he shows me an article in his local rag about his family home. Photos show Comrade P and spouse’s water tanks, vegie garden, and solar panels. Comrade P himself shows me photos of the kids in the box at the front of the cargo bike he and his wife use to transport the family on shorter trips.

In November when the MM and KM teams meet for three days in Sydney, project officers will fly in from around the nation. Except Comrade P: he’s coming by train, overnight, in a sleeper. While not treading as lightly as he does, and hating air travel, I’m considering joining him, not in the sleeper, but certainly on the train.

Pretty much every aspect of air travel pisses me off, especially the massive carbon footprint I contribute to. Today I fly to Newcastle; on Friday I fly back again. On Sunday I fly to Sydney for a conference, and on Tuesday I fly home. On Friday next week I fly to Canberra and back in the day for an award ceremony I heartily don’t want to know about.

I’d like to be as green as Comrade P, or as green as my own daughter. Saving energy has always been my thing. I turn off lights, drive the smallest car as little and as slowly as I can, turn off my monitor every night as I leave work. I won’t buy over-packaged goods and I’ve carried a basket to the supermarket for 40 years.

The time has come to use alternative travel to aeroplanes if it is possible and practicable. Overnight to Sydney is a good start.

Rock on.

up the chum

In September 1986 I move to Chum Creek. Carol and I have four kids between us. Six of us squash into her small mud-brick house on an acre of scrub at the top of a no through road up the valley of the Chum Creek seven kilometres out of Healesville.

The kids walk through the bush to school each day, my daughter included. She should be at kinder but the kinder won’t accept her; the school does. Living together means we’re no longer single parents. I clean windows on Fridays, otherwise I’m unemployed.

During the day we equip Carol’s house to accommodate us all. I build a shed and a tree-house for the kids and we plan an extension on her house. Days are regularly interrupted as we fuck in the kitchen, the shed, the tree-house, and pinned to the wall while standing on the back of the couch.

Wednesday nights we shuttle kids to gym classes into Healesville. In the new year I have classes of my own, relief teaching physical education at Berengarra three days a week. It’s a small independent school for kids other schools refuse, a tough gig that becomes permanent at the end of term one.

Chum Creek to Box Hill is a long commute on the CX650 or in an old split-window Kombi bought at a Healesville car yard. Carol cooks at a nursing home for people with alcohol-induced dementia. Life develops a rhythm. Dope is plentiful and so is the sex. What else is there in your mid-thirties?

I meet her Chum Creek friends, people who all helped each other build their muddies. By September 1987 the extension to the house is under construction. I sell my beloved cottage in Menzies Creek to pay for it and kill what’s left of Carol’s mortgage.

The kids get on well: hers are twelve and ten, mine are eight and six. But there are other players. Carol’s jealous of two of my school colleagues, one I travel with , the other I share a home group with. I’m suspicious of her relationship with the builder, a former(?) lover. She comes home at all hours after visiting him over at Don Valley.

Berengarra is good: I start to thrive there. My colleagues think I’m a natural at working with difficult kids. I’m at my best in a small school with only twelve teachers. Rock is the principal and I absorb from him the strange art of running a school like this.

Marilyn turns up in our driveway. Carol has never met her before. She has two more kids now, half-brothers to my children. She’s deranged, starts living in our tree-house. Carol thinks she can talk sense into Marilyn but comes away wondering which of them is crazy. After a couple of weeks Marilyn is given an ultimatum and disappears.

Carol and my relationship grows fractious through 1988: endless recriminations. Only the sex holds it together. In January 1989 I pack up my kids and me and rent a house in Emerald.

Rock on. 

purpose

Sunday last I have tea with my good woman. We acknowledge that whatever it is we have between us is too good to let die. On Wednesday we eat Thai together in Collingwood after wandering along Gertrude Street. She is relieved, in a good mood after presenting a paper on transcultural psychology at St Vincent’s Hospital.

After pushing our plates away we talk about what we did during those weeks when we dared not see each other for fear of making a bad situation worse. We both desperately wanted to create completely new lives, me in the inner city, my good woman by any means at all. I tell her about the Richmond auction where I made one futile bid on a tiny apartment.

We relax into each other’s company. This is the woman I always thought of as my soul mate. After two months apart we talk about being very much together, giving our shared lives the purpose they didn’t have before, perhaps buying and owning a house that is ours. I marvel that the Earth can tilt on its axis in so short a time.   

Next day at work I type Carnegie and my price limit into a real estate search engine. Up comes a small house midway between Carnegie and Murrumbeena stations, railway line running behind the back fence. This morning we inspect it along with a few others.

The interweb photos don’t do it justice: it’s not as big and bright as fisheye photography and overexposure suggests. But it’s solid brick and has a certain art deco charm that can be optimised. My good woman and I swap real estate platitudes about location, location, location and buying the worst house in the best neighbourhood.

This place is not quite the worst house in the best location; its semidetached mirror image is. So it’s the second worst house in the perfect location. After the inspection my good woman and I wander local streets, walk to two stations, get a snack at the local shopping strip.

Back at her place we have a cuppa in the sun, do sums together, coming from diametrically opposed mathematical theories, and arrive at the same place. Even at ten per cent more than the agent’s suggested selling price, we think we can afford it. It’s definitely do-able.

We are excited. Each of us will visit the bank on Monday. Saturday next we go to auction. We have a limit and won’t go beyond it. It might be enough.

Rock on. 

deeper water

A morning at home, cooking, ironing, vacuuming, music all through the house.

National treasure Paul Kelly sings Deeper water and a tear leaks down my right cheek. Gets me every time, hundreds of times, the bastard. A psychologist might say that the song resonates with me. Resonates be fucked: it hits me smack in my core.  

It’s the simple story of a boy becoming a man and a father. The mother dies, and finally

On a distant beach lonely and wild
At a later time see a man and a child
And the man takes the child up into his arms
Takes her over the breakers
To where the water is calm
Deeper water, deeper water,
Deeper water, calling them on

Every Kelly song has a back story. I’ve no clue what’s behind this one. Neither is it my story: I’ve not lost a wife, been groped by a knowing young woman in the back of a car. But I am that father alone on the that beach for 18 years, taking two children over the breakers. Now the deeper water calls them on, my daughter to a second child, my son to life with Katie from Christchurch.

Today I rejoice, a religiously-fraught word for an atheist. I rejoice because it would seem that my good woman and I have come through. I can’t name what we’ve come through, or how we did it, but the anguish and the pain are over. The journey we thought is over is not.

Earlier doing the housework, it’s Roxette’s Listen to your heart. More resonating. My good woman and I built a love but that love fell apart. I wondered if it was all worthwhile, the precious moments all lost in the tide. I don't know where I went, and I don't know why, but I listened to my heart and couldn’t tell her goodbye.

We listened to a couples counsellor, to friends, no doubt, to ourselves telling of our confusion and our pain. In the end we seem to have listened to our hearts. Now deeper water is calling us on.

Rock on. 

another country

My mother has a cup she won at school. Best sprinter, Preston Girls High School. Maybe 1942. She left school that year but had aspirations to go further. School was easy for her, in the top two or three in every class. But the government turned the school into a hospital for returned soldiers that year and my mother went out to work in a Collingwood boot factory.

In the afternoon when I travel from Collingwood to Parliament Station girls from PGHS are on the number 86 tram, Muslim girls with head scarves and dresses down to their ankles. Black girls. My mother could never imagine her school populated by black Muslims.

The primary schools I attend in the fifties in Warrnambool, Fairfield, Bentleigh and Glenhuntly are attended by kids exclusively of European stock, mostly British. No Asians, no Africans, no Jews, no Aboriginals. Neither were there integration aids, or ancillary staff. The past is another country.

I have a photo of my grade 4 class at Glenhuntly. I count 46 kids in that class. French girl Dominique Rouvet is by far the most exotic creature I’ve encountered to this point in my life. In our classroom on the third floor we listen to the tortured howling of a stray dog the headmaster has caught in the grounds. It’s no coincidence that Mr Tyrrell and tyrant share their first three letters.

Bottled milk in steel crates curdles in the summer sun. Each student is obliged to down a third of a pint of the stuff each morning recess before being released for play. We boys play cricket in the public park behind the school and neither yard duty teacher nor paedophile ever bothers us. At Fairfield we walk along the railway line to school and come to no harm.

On Monday mornings we salute the flag and each week we practise marching. On Wednesdays we do folk dancing, though I never heard the name of any country mentioned. Boys play in the boys’ playground, girls in their playground. The shelter shed behind the incinerators is the only common ground.

The steel climbing tower at the farthest end of the yard is high enough to fall off and break your neck. No one does.

Half way through grade 4 Gordon Williams comes to our school. He’s from India and bowls faster than any of us white boys. I get on well with him, not because he’s from another country, but because he’s good at cricket.

Rock on. 

dominatrix

This morning I resume my on-again-off-again relationship with Madame M, my Polish dentist and dominatrix. Once again she’ll lodge an imposing left breast on my forehead as she nails me to the leather recliner. She’ll insert her instruments in my mouth, jiggle the biggest around, and another tooth will be gone. Farewell upper right five.

I fear nothing will save it. Three weeks ago the rear of the tooth falls out in two brown stained pieces. Late last week during flossing, what remains hits the bottom teeth with a metallic clunk. Finally, two transparent shards of enamel peel away. A Niagara-sized hole remains with a French alp either side. There’s not enough there to construct a new tooth-like structure on.

I can hear Madame M tut-tutting as she peers into the ruins. She’ll put several or no alternatives to me in her lisping Slavic English and I’ll take a punt at what’s to come and grant her carte blanche with my oral needs.

In fact she informs me I’ve lost one and a half teeth. The half she can save, the other she will build up with a temporary filling. She won’t guarantee its life beyond 24 hours. And this she does after an hour’s painstaking work. Then she puts the real alternatives to me.

My upper jaw needs a total overhaul—six teeth need to be removed, four on the right, two on the left. I will have a temporary plastic plate till the sockets heal over, the swollen gums recede, the jaw shrinks into the empty sockets. Then, a permanent denture. This is the cheap option. For $30k I can have six implants, no denture. My compromised lower denture will be replaced too.

In all I will be minus a dozen teeth, four each upper and lower on the right, two each upper and lower on the left. For thirty years I have known this is how it would end, though not the exact numbers of teeth or their exact locations.

I have already guessed and she affirms my supposition that I have them out at the start of at least a month’s holiday from work. I will live on soup, then, and maybe thereafter. I can kiss next year’s cycling in France good-bye.

Who can argue with a dentist? Especially an imposing creature from Krakow who wields her instruments like a medieval torture-master. I am in her hands.

Rock on. 

menzies creek

In June 1984 my three year-old daughter, nearly five year-old son and I move to Menzies Creek. The rest of my family are already in residence, my retired parents in a rebuilt house on the south side heading down to Cardinia, my sister and her family a little further down toward the lake.

My house, the first I ever own, is on Menzies Road, the Clematis end. It’s an old fibro fruit pickers’ hut on a north-east slope, one acre, down the bottom, unseen from the road. Real estate agents would advertise it as renovate or detonate; quaint is the nicest thing to be said of it. But it’s mine. The twenty or so—I never count, just guess—mountain ash at the front of the block are prime.

My kids get to see their grandparents, their aunt, their cousins. I stop racing from kindergarten to day care and to work. I visit Centrelink, become a supporting parent, supplement that pittance by cleaning shop windows in Berwick every Friday. I walk my son to kinder up the road, walk the dog along the Puffing Billy line. I watch Play School, Kimba and Astroboy.

I paint the outside of the house, dig a trench further than I can roost a torpedo punt, and have the water connected. I wrestle the blackberries from the garden, build a chook yard and a tiny pond. The hens don’t lay many eggs, but the Indian runner ducks lift my spirits. I hitch a rusty trailer to The Barge and go hunting firewood—I have a fireplace and a stove to feed—anywhere I find it.

On Saturdays I play cricket with the Creekers, try out a pre-season with Emerald footy club but at 33 with two little kids to look after, it’s too much. The neighbours are kind and I meet a single mother, a long-plaited Englishwoman with a killer smile whose son is at kinder with my son. We end up in bed together.

I have no money but life has meaning and bringing up my kids on my own is not to be missed, especially after thinking I had lost them. Their mother turns up occasionally, unexpected, out of her head. She’s moved to a commune-type place in Montrose. The kids come home from visits underfed and grubby.

My sister’s best friend, another single parent, asks me to build a bench in the bathroom of her raw new mud-brick house at Chum Creek. She has designs on me I don’t even suspect and soon has her wicked way with me. In the end it’s not hard; she wears her sex on the outside, has big breasts.

For a while I don’t know which way to turn, but opt for the Englishwoman. She lives just up the road and also has big breasts. But her gay lodger stuffs things up by getting jealous and working out that maybe he’s a bit bi. I never liked complications, leave them to figure it out themselves.

In late September 1986 I rent out my cottage among the mountain ash and my kids and I move 60 kilometres away to Chum Creek to become part of a blended family. And I can get my hands on those big tits day and night.

Rock on. 

privacy

When Bob Hawke—remember him?—decided we should each have a personal identity card, the Australia Card, the bleeding hearts frothed at the mouth. Other orifices too. I didn’t join them on that occasion. I might have things to hide from my friends, but not from government. I’m pretty sure they know everything they want to know about me anyway.

At work we’re assaulted daily by the Privacy Act. Confidentiality I respect but things done by the letter of the law and in the name of privacy border on lunacy.

Gen Y and Gen Z couldn’t give a hoot about privacy, sexting their private parts on smartphones and boring the rest of us with the minutiae of their lives. People’s private lives are usually boring beyond belief. Or is it just teenagers’ lives?

There are things I’d like to keep private, personal habits—picking my nose, pissing in the shower, writing sentence fragments—but it’s those close to me I’m protecting from this knowledge.

The things we older generations were instructed to keep private by our parents and betters—never talk about politics, sex or religion—are the very things I love to gab about and let everyone know my opinion. I don’t give a fig who knows where I live, how much I earn, who I vote for, or the state of my health.

Writing this blog is a test. I can’t always keep my children nameless, although I’ve never outed my good woman. People who once lived in Iron Curtain countries view privacy differently.

I’ve worked as an artist’s model, posed naked in front of the rigidly regimented girls of Luther College and the more relaxed kids at Yarra Valley Grammar. The door might be locked and the windows shuttered, but life modelling is warts, pot belly, saggy private bits and all.

If I need to change my pants after a long bike ride, I can’t be bothered with privacy. I peel off in car parks, whip on clean shorts, and people rarely notice because I don’t make a big deal of it. How the human animal came to think of some particular parts of their anatomies as private is beyond me.

I guess it’s what separates us from the (other) animals.

Rock on. 

scammers

The Nigerian scammers, whatever they’re up to, have missed me, but everyone else has had a crack.

I love the letter with a zack/sixpence/five cent piece attached. The letter instructs me to send a zack, or is five dollars, I forget, to ten other people and within weeks money will rain down upon me. I never part with a zack, so figure I am probably five cents to the good.

My then 86 year-old father won second prize, $110k, in a Malaysian mystery raffle. This scam comes with bogus website and pretty girls—they sound pretty on the phone—to give your bank details to. He thinks email, a website and phone number is rather convincing. I do a web search for him and uncover scores of other second prize winners all for the same amount, $110k.

I’m hooked for a while by the Windows technician who rings to walk “people in your area” through a Windows glitch backstage in my computer. Highly plausible before informing me that my operating system is no longer under warranty. I can purchase an extension from him and he’ll debug me. Goes ape-shit when I decline his kind offer.

Last night I get a text message offer for my car, advertised on carsales.dot.com.

i will like to by your car listed for sale, pls get back to me now with the lowest price and condition on my email address: ryanrobb1407@yahoo.com  

Well Shazam! Is it phoney or some dumb Subcontinental—you can hear the written accent—who’d buy a car sight unseen? I email a civil reply at 1.17am, expecting an instant formulaic reply. At 4:08am:  

ok no problem i will be paying you $11,500 with my PayPal account because it's attached to my bank account and its safe and very secure way to make payment. If my mode of payment is accepted just send me your paypal email address or send me paypal payment request so i can pay in right away. Make sure you get back to me so that i can make the payment. I have a private courier agent that will handle the shipping after payments has been made, so no shipping included. OR better still you can just send me your bank account details and the payment will be made into your bank account asap. And if you dont have a paypal account, you can easily go to www.paypal.com and sign up. its very easy. i will call you later I await your reply asap.

Due to the nature of my job and my location i will not be able to come for inspection am a very busy type as i work long hours everyday,i don't really think i need to come for a look, because i have gone through your advertisement and i am satisfied with it so i will call you when  am chanced from work but as of now we can be chatting online or sending emails.

So preposterous. I’d laugh if not desperate to sell the car. And knowing that scammers wouldn’t be doing this if some people weren’t sucked in. What a world.

Rock on. 

grief

The phone rings late Saturday night. I’m sitting on the couch, hot wheat-bag at my lower back, watching with grim satisfaction as my team is spiflicated five-nil. It’s my good woman.

 

During the week we have exchanged emails.

Me: Hello to a good woman. I can't call you my good woman now. I sent a cheque to [the couples counsellor] and her receipt came in today's mail. I have just got home from Shepparton. Hurt my back getting out of the car. Can't stand up or walk. Pain! Life's a shit sandwich sometimes. I hope you are well.

My good woman: Hi. I am sorry to hear you are hurting. I hope good afternoon sleep will help. Am I well? I am not sure; last night I was thinking about you and I was very sad, and today sadness just doesn't want to go away. I expected to be stronger, but ... life happens. How do you want me to pay you?

Me: I am feeling very sad too. Thought about you all weekend. I don't know how to deal with this. Part of me just can't accept or believe that our journey is over. Just put money in my account if have the details.

My good woman: I struggle to explain to myself why, and how this is better for me. I don't have your bank details.

Me: Me2.

My good woman: I will go to the bank tomorrow. Do you need anything? Can I help somehow?

Back to the phone call. I ask if I can maybe see her tomorrow. She is free in the morning, I am not. Rock, arm in a sling after having his bicep pinned back onto the bone, needs my help. I tell her about his injury, how we have just compared notes on hating the stress our jobs bring to our lives. Maybe it’s an age thing.

I tell her about my stress. We both know it can’t be helped: I have to work, need the income. She tells me her friend remarked early in our relationship that I am obviously a home person, would make a good house husband. If we ever live together, her friend observes, I can look after the home while my good woman works.

During the week this is exactly what I have been thinking. I say nothing.

I will visit my good woman tomorrow for tea.

Rock on. 

glum

Half past seven, driving peak traffic, hire car full of MM boxes, dodgy back, guts roiling. I’m about to present six hours of professional learning to eight people, not one a secondary teacher the presentation is designed for.

My mind should be rehearsing the tricky parts of the day. Instead I feel depressed, inadequate, my mind focused on anything but the odious task I confront. I’ve lost my passion for a my job. Much of the professional learning I present now seems embarrassingly crass. MM has great intentions but is badly conceived and written, twelve years old, in need of total overhaul. Like me.

On 1 January this blog is about plotting my pursuit of meaning in a year starting with me aged sixty and jobless, recording events and circumstances as they unfold, their effect on me. I want to reflect on the changes in me over a year. I totally underestimate what life has in store for me.

Now, on the twelfth day of the tenth month, life has  become a very thick shit sandwich. I fell completely out of kilter, my life utterly awry. I work too hard, barely ride at all, my back is wrecked, and I have lost my good woman, my best friend, the person I want to tell when I have news.

I feel dejected and depressed, not lie-down-and-do-nothing depressed—I’m busy as—but incapable of finding the upside of anything. I’m glum; the mask of a frown shades the inquisitive look I always wore. How the fuck did this happen?

I think about my mother telling me my father retired too early, has had little meaning in his life since. She’s delighted when I get the MM job, the ‘dream’ job I struggle to find any passion for six months later.

I seem to be out of step with colleagues. I’m too frank, too old to be bothered to toe the line, to buy into the political correctness demanded by managers, government funders, and partners. Am I imagining things, being paranoid, when I feel I’ve become an inconvenience to my colleagues? I think it is better that I do nothing than open my mouth or make a decision.

 

Work equals stress. I wonder why I’m separated from my best friend. I should live with her, write and edit for my business, maintain ‘our’ house, clean, cook, garden, attend to my health and fitness. I want the world of work behind me.

This is what occupies my mind on the way to the professional learning. I arrive, unload, set up, run my session, eight punters, four primary teachers who have enrolled by mistake—they think it’s KM, not MM. I modify the whole learning module on the run.

The punters do their best to get something out of it. To me it’s the worst PD I’ve ever presented. Several times my back grabs and I gasp in pain. I’m unable to sit down for six hours. Sometimes the pain concentrates me on the task; at others I have no idea what I’m doing.

Rock on. Not.

wrangling

Three weeks ago my interweb connection suddenly dies. No symptoms, no warning. My wireless router-modem lights up all the right green lights—Power, LANs, DSL—but no green for go on Internet. Diagnostics tells me a cable is not connected. I know that every one of a Medusa’s-head of cables is connected.

I call Telstra’s support line to no avail. So for three weeks I use my MM dongle, shuffle documents and blog posts between my off-line desktop and the MM laptop in the dining-room. The time has come to get this sorted. I stab at the buttons for the Telstra support line one last time.

A syrupy Samuel Johnson sound-alike voice assures me he’ll get me sorted, leads me through all manner of tests, eliminating possible causes of my problem. Have I installed a new phone recently? How many outlets are there in the house? Is there a Telstra-approved splitter on each phone? “When you’re ready, say Continue.” Continue, continue, continue I bellow at my phone.

He sounds as perplexed as an automated voice can when nothing sorts my problem. Between continues I’m climbing under my desk to check cable connections, disconnecting each phone outlet in each of for rooms, grappling behind my monitor to find the serial number on the underside of my modem. All this while moaning with back spasm.

After 48 minutes Mr Automaton gives up and connects me to a flesh-and-blood technician. He runs more tests on my line, my modem, guides me through tests I run in the black config section of my computer. He despairs and connects me to Cisco in America, the manufacturers of my modem. A disembodied American woman says my modem is just out of its 12-month warranty; would I like to pay or tear my hair out?

I thank her and hang up. I pull out some drawers, find my old modem. Under the desk I go again, blinking torch leaving me blacked and snarled in cables under there. More groping across the desk feeding cords through the hole in the farthest corner behind the monitor. I fire the old girl up.

The Macbook Air remembers the old modem, has memorised the password—ten dots—and I’m online. The desktop PC asks for the password. Ten dots won’t cut it. Somewhere from the depths of my cranium comes a wild guess: the street where I lived in Bendigo and a year. No go. I try the previous year. Well now, would you believe it?

Fifteen minutes later I’ve trained two smartphones and the iPad to switch onto the new-old Wi-Fi connection. I’m an IT wizard. Fuck Telstra. Fuck you, Samuel.

Rock on.