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.