Bless This House

‘Its still the same old place, I guess, but you’ll spin out. Its an old lady house now.’ Jeremy and I are crawling along Old Windsor road. Its unbearably bright and hot – my sweaty back sticks to the vinyl seating of the Camry. I sink as far into the seat I can and am powerless to dozing off. I loathe this drive. The sun and heat are making me feel drunk and my head aches.  I’ve closed my eyes but all I can smell are petrol fumes and tar roads bubbling in the heat. All I can hear are the invasive noises of cars, in the thousands, the sounds of one obsolete road to lead them all home. Locals praise the M2 for its ability to get you into the city quickly. The airport is about thirty kilometres away and the M2 can sometimes get you there inside forty-five minutes. Sometimes – like in the middle of the night when there’s no traffic. But I’m a country boy. This doesn’t seem like much of a deal to me. Paying fifteen bucks for a round trip on the toll roads is ridiculous.

The Hills area is one of the safest federal and state Liberal areas in Australia. It’s also the heartland of evangelical Christian worship. Baulkham Hills is ‘The Garden Shire’. People around here like to hose the lawn clippings from their driveways. ‘The Garden Shire’ slogan suggests some attractiveness, but I see no pleasant gardens or pretty houses. As we turn down Seven Hills Road I see trees and driveways that look exactly the same. For miles and miles.

But I should not be so cynical. This is where my best friend grew up. His house provided me its comfort as a drop in centre for years, a replacement for my own family’s home five hours drive away. The old red brick place on Seven Hills Road is now for sale and the end of an era is fast approaching and will arrive without fanfare. When it does I’ll have no reason to come back to the hills again.

Ms Walsh moved her family in the late eighties. After a messy divorce she settled for a house a little less than adequate. She had a rough trot. Within a couple of years she was diagnosed with breast cancer and I remember the sense of chaos embedded deep within the walls of the house. She beat the cancer, emerging on the other side with a deeper understanding of the bigger picture. She simply couldn’t be fucked stressing about the house and its failings and flaws. She would deal with it in her own time.

It was hardly surprising, given the strange new emptiness of the place, that the first thing I notice is space. A new sense of air it was never able to show. Jeremy and his siblings are now gone, Jeremy hanging on the longest. They took with them as they left the clutter of their own objects and things. The house was breathing by itself. The walls are fresh and white, not hidden by rundown shelves and musty, stained wallpaper. ‘I painted them all myself,’ says Jeremy as he guides me around the renovations. ‘I did a little bit every weekend for fucking months. Looks good but, and kept me out of trouble.’

There are five houses for sale on this street. And to my cynical eyes they all look exactly the same. ‘It looks like mum’s gonna’ get boned again. Just when we think she’s ok, some shit thing happens. It really gets me down, man.’

‘How much does she want for it?’ I ask Jez. ‘I reckon she’d get at least four fifty. More. Four bedrooms. Two bathrooms. Ideal first family home.’

‘No chance. The real estate reckon three fifty. Maybe three seventy if she’s lucky. Any more and she’ll price herself out and no one will buy it.’

The median for a house around here is $535 thousand dollars. If there is any person on earth who deserves a real estate windfall it’s Ms Walsh and she ain’t gonna’ get one. ‘I wish I’d become a rock star,’ said Jeremy, with smoke drifting out his nostrils. ‘I’d have bought her a pad in Kirribilli by now.’ We drink some coffee and talk more about Sydney’s unhealthy obsession with real estate. To my right, alongside the red brick wall of the outside kitchen is a rose bed. We’ve been using it as an ashtray for ten years and the butts are all still there, randomly poking through the soil. With them I smell a hundred other memories.

*            *            *

Jeremy did some kind of deal with his mum and he got the master bedroom. Ms Walsh took the room at the far end of the house. She could pull the sliding doors of the hallway and shut herself off clean from the mayhem. I’ve been visiting this place for over a decade and I’ve never once seen inside her room. I poke my head in and it’s as I expected – an oasis of order, cleanliness and clarity, defying an interesting description on the strength of its ordinariness.

Jeremy’s room was seedy and contrary to his mother’s room in every way. A dark, mouldy, dingy, smelly pit of a space. A room jammed tight with all things dishevelled and rock and roll. Full ashtrays everywhere. Old records and CD sleeves always empty. The house had a habit of stealing albums! Fucked up old guitars and electric pianos in pieces, bottles of wine half drunk weeks ago, old candelabras and wax stains on the carpet and a layer of the finest dust over everything. ‘Fuck! I don’t believe your mum lets you live like this?’ I exclaimed ten years ago. Jezza just shrugged his shoulders. Ms Walsh refused to come in here. If she wanted her son she’d bang loudly on the door until he appeared.

The ensuite was the room’s beating heart. As a shower and toilet it was functional, but this was its trick. There was a kick ass stereo in the corner and a practice marshall in the other corner. A couple of stools and the toilet seat allowed the whole band to practice in here. It was a tight fit, but it was never really for practice, more for talking and stoney discussions on music and drugs and shit in general. Girls were welcome in here, but they rarely found it comfortable. The walls were raw and unfinished and became a time capsule as we stuck pages of current Rolling Stone and Drum Media onto the gyprock. The bare patches of the walls became a notepad for song lyrics and poetry written with whatever pen was within grasp, by whoever was present in the room at the time and suitably stoned. Someone had scrawled on the ceiling in black marker: ‘TAKING DRUGS TO MAKE MUSIC TO TAKE DRUGS TO.’ This room constantly evolved. It was the most organic room I’d ever been inside.

Jeremy held the door open for me. ‘You’re not gonna believe this.’ I stepped inside and was met by a sparkling tiled facility, full of chrome and white plaster. It seemed smaller, so much smaller. ‘It took me a while to scrape all that shit off the walls.’ I fingered for a cigarette but was tapped by Jeremy in the process of lighting it. ‘Can’t smoke in here anymore mate. Mum’ll kill me.’

‘This room still smells like you,’ I say.

‘Hey?’

‘I’m serious. I mean it looks different, but it stinks like you. It’s still got your smell.’

I was never quite sure if it was the room that smelled that way or Jeremy himself – the two were intertwined. I could smell that horrid mix of stale bong and cigarette smoke, steam and aftershave permeating through the pores of the new cement and grouting. The first time I experienced this smell I very nearly threw up. I’d spent the night sleeping drunkenly on the floor and awoke to Jeremy showering and shaving on the other side of the door. It was an evil mist masquerading as shower steam. I could see it slowly creeping toward me, its tentacles reaching for me through the crack between the bottom of the door and the floor. It hit me in the back of the throat so hard I gagged and choked and that was it for me and sleeping in Jeremy’s Room.

The house had many other important smells that left when the fresh paint went on. The absence of these smells made the house seem like someone else’s. Smells like exotic curry pastes in mortars that had gone crusty over weeks, old coffee in one of the several plungers teetering on a windowsill on any given day, the ageing fir tree and the fire-bin underneath it, and that annoying little cat. The cat had its own room. It was a prissy little shit named ‘Tuesday’, and was generally too scared to go outside. So it had this room and it crapped there in a little tray of kitty litter that no one ever changed, because no one went inside the room except for the cat. One night my girlfriend and I had the pleasure of sleeping in the cats’ room. She wasn’t impressed. I should have said the lounge was fine, but at that point I wasn’t to know the smell of the cat.

*            *            *

I feel this house deserves a worthy farewell, so we have a final coffee and cigarette outside as the sun goes down. Jeremy tells me a story of his mother and I know I’ll miss this house, but not Baulkham Hills.

‘So mum’s done all this work, you know, thousands of bucks and it looks like the place is finally ready to sell, and a month ago she gets one of those inspectors to come and evaluate the place for market, and he does his evaluation and low and behold there’s a problem, I mean, there was always going to be a problem wasn’t there, with this place, this family, you’d expect it.

‘But it’s not any little problem, I mean its fucking massive, this problem, and I come home and I see my mum and she’s there at the table with her head in her hands, like she’s just lost it, and my mum never loses it, ever, and she’s crying, and I’m like, what’s up? And she’s just over it, you know, saying ‘Termites Jezza, bloody termites. He reckons ten grand at least to fix it. Ten fucking grand.’ Its structural, She’s gotta do it, and I’ve never heard my mum swear before, I’m like fuck, I wish I had ten grand and I’d give it to you right away, and it was the most fucking depressing thing ever, Ben, I really mean it, and it was then I knew it was over and I had to leave this house, otherwise I’d lose it completely.’

Ben Rumble 12/07