Home truths - Page 3

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Kate Fitzpatrick

On the first bus ride to school, we were joined by half a dozen fourteen-year-old Paris Hiltons, wearing variations of the same uniform. Their long golden hair and equally lengthy brown legs were headed in the same direction as my little boy. Joe was transfixed. Girls! Homesick memories of his Melbourne private school, paper round and blood brothers were erased in an instant.

One morning I noticed a magpie sitting at the end of the street. The following day, armed with a small ball of preservative-free mince, I held my hand up in his direction. He zoomed in, ate the meat and flew off. The next morning he brought three friends. Twice a day, four of them would swoop to the curb and walk across the lawn. If the door wasn't open, they'd knock like woodpeckers, line up like chorus boys and chortle their heads off.

Suddenly the air seemed thick with fabulous birds: kookaburras, parrots, finches and some we'd never seen before. I bought a terracotta birdbath on a pedestal, put it in some dappled shade, hung seed balls from the trees and waited for them to call. They came in waves. Small squadrons of different groups flew in at particular times, from dawn until dusk. I changed the bath water five or six times a day and fed the kookaburras in the backyard.

They were endlessly fascinating and beautiful. Joe said I had become ‘a crazed bird lady'.

Eventually I even grew to tolerate the local ibis. He'd turn up every afternoon and shove his enormous, dirty body into the bath. After a few weeks, he started to look a lot cleaner and slightly more attractive. The Gold Coast council was obsessed with the ibis ‘infestation' and their low-rent appearance. I decided they should fill shallow pools with water dyed bright pink and transform the subsequently tinted birds into a tourist attraction, rivaling the flamingos in that other glitzy beachside paradise near Cuba.

On the first of February, I started writing my second book.

THE HUMAN NEIGHBOURS were invisible except for four small boys aged from six to ten who kicked a footy up and down the street, before and after school. Their parents peered through blinds, or zoomed off, eyes averted, in metallic green utes, or backfiring Toranas.

One evening, I overheard the two old bats next door discussing the would-be football stars. ‘Those effing kids, they're gunna break a winda. Remember those effing boongs kick, kick, kick – non-stop – and the effing slopes up the shop, just the same?'

The following morning we invited the boys to kick their ball up against our garage doors whenever they wanted. They'd already made friends with Mum's pug Stella, who was finally living up to her name. A true ‘star', she was the only dog for miles.

The Test cricket season was in full swing so I suggested the boys might like to swap the footy for tennis balls and take turns with Joe's extensive collection of bats and ‘essential' equipment.

They would visit before and after school every day and at weekends. We quickly got used to the incessant, rhythmic, banging, the triumphant shouts of ‘six' and ‘four' and the yells of dissent. I made them sandwiches and stocked fruit juice iceblocks, provided Band-Aids, comforting words and cold water. They sat on the couch and asked about writing. The only books I'd manage to retrieve from the boxes in the garage were both volumes of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. The boys brought word lists from school and we'd look them up. They took my first book to school for ‘show and tell'. Sometimes they'd just sit and watch without speaking. They were great company. One day, one of them arrived with a small book on local birds. He'd noticed it in the bookshop at Southport and saved up. We started bird spotting.

I never met their parents. Some worked very long hours. Most tried to survive on various forms of government help. In our tiny economic ghetto, this ranged from allowances for parenting to invalidity and age. My family's position wasn't much better. We didn't rent like everyone else, but there was no possibility of even menial paid work. Centrelink told me not to bother. I joined the single mums and we lived on the fortnightly payments.

The boys didn't have to be told to go to school, or home to dinner. No one seemed to care that they spent so much time with us. Our houses faced each other and if the mothers had been concerned, all they had to do was look out of their kitchen windows and call.

Within weeks, it was clear we lived in a gardener's paradise. The mandevillas had covered our small house with massed white, yellow-throated, bell shaped flowers. The gardenias had quadrupled in size and their magnificent scented flowers were the size of side plates. The stephanotis had snaked itself around every upright post like an enormous white flowering garland smelling of heaven. The bougainvillea looked as if it was covered in a huge dump of snow and the garden was full of butterflies.

The boys said our house smelt good and that they came out some nights just to look. ‘You can see inside and all the lamps and flowers and stuff make it beautiful.' They couldn't see it was identical to every other place in the street.

My book was in the shops on my birthday, the first of October. The kids loved being driven around the block in the hire cars sent by my publisher. They felt they deserved a bit of spoiling as they'd been part of the process.

A year passed. Mum sold the units. As promised, she'd doubled her money, which set her on the path to financial recovery.

We were off. When the removalists arrived, the boys stood in a line and cried. I gave them Joe's outgrown bike, books, Xbox, toys, shoes, cricket stuff and clothing. I donated the birdbath, six months' supply of seed and frozen balls of mince to my bird-watching friend. The gigantic white flowering vines were carefully detached and reapplied to his house. Three boys were given a gardenia each and the fourth the bougainvillea. They shared the orchids. They knew how to look after them.

IT HAD BEEN A STRANGE, simple year. It reminded me of my childhood in a similar suburb. We had a happy time, despite money being tight. Life was a lot less complicated. Dad was a geologist and spent nine months of the year in the bush. Mum was an artist who raised the five of us as a married single parent. The neighbours must have thought she was an alien. She had a six-foot pink brick wall built around our place and covered the small house with rampant roses. Several local kids used to scale the wall and join us as we watched her paint and draw. This year reminded me of all that and ‘some' very simple truths: if you are defined by your possessions, you don't really exist; where there is life there is genuine hope; and you are never too old – or too young – to do anything.

We returned to Sydney after an absence of seven years. The local birds are wary. The shops are great. But I miss the boys. ♦