Catherine Street

This house saw all of me at almost my worst. Adultery, drunkenness, crying sprawled on the floor of the shower, screaming, sighing, watching Elliot as he began again his life’s work of drinking himself to death while two hours out of the city, in my home, my partner went mad and jumped straight out of reality into psychosis.

The whole house felt blue, like its dull-skied harbour-blue exterior, sunken and rusting. A whale fall of a house making food for hagfish. Mr X tells me the inside was white and mouldy, threaded with cobwebs and dust, there was no sunlight and it was unclean. But it all felt blue to me.

Yesterday at the hardware shop I stared at samples of blue paint to try and remember. It could have been any one of six or seven of them but the names uncomfortably incorrect. Snap-shot, Regatta Bay, Galaxy Blue, Integrity. I remember not in house paints but as an artist’s palette. Payne’s Grey, Phthalo, Prussian, Indigo, Cobalt. I suppose I’m just trying to elevate tragedy to grandeur.

The front door gawped open like a mouth onto a hallway strewn with clothes and shoes and guitars. Widened out into a lounge room like a crawled-to cave. Nothing but filtered elsewhere-light lending dull shimmers to glass fishing floats suspended in nets. I wanted to trail up a stretched out set of fingertips but Elliot was always pouring a drink, crying about having drunk one, or vomiting them back up again.

I first came to the house because Elliot rang me, he’d quit his sobriety and called from inside a bottle of vodka. I’d only know him sober so I believed the urgency of his words. Only knew his hands as steady back then. I drove from two-thirds sky in the country to the fouled yellow-city night on Catherine Street. Less than three hours later Elliot had extinguished anything good in my life and I was standing on the front porch wearing someone else’s clothes swaying in the wind in sympathy with the cobwebbed ceilings.

Elliot’s housemate Mr X came home while I was swaying. I had no idea they were his clothes. I pulled on the shirt and slippers in the hallway while I was fumbling with a pack of cigarettes and the front door. The front path was short, terminated in a creaking gate I don’t remember ever walking through, like I was transported suddenly and against my will.

Mr X. walked up that garden path tall menace and shadow. I didn’t know him them, still not sure if I know him now. Panic came with his shadow. He stooped, staring down at me like he was kicking tyres, I remember his half-drunk growl, “You’re wearing my clothes”. Half a thought skipped like a stone, I could marry this man, but he was gone, sunk like a stone from sight. The matt-flat dusted deep blue pushed the night into new blackness but the house held me up all the same. I lit another cigarette and let the thought go.

Elliot turned like a slow-motion corkscrew in his alcoholic sleep. The room expanding with every unconscious breath, rushing back in with inhalation. There were doors in there I never opened. A room off the room, cupboards taller than anyone could ever reach. One small front window, the single invisible eye at the front of the house where rain always snarled and the weak light made fat drops on a streaked pane.

The house ran backwards from the street like a mare’s tail blown out in high wind. Kitchen reeked of empty tins of dog food, cigarettes and vodka. Somewhere in a back room a piano waited and beyond that a paved yard lousy with dog shit and small dogs grinning and scratching.

The bathroom seemed to have a wall of translucent glass, exemplary vision of a side-of-house pathway. The shower floor was vast and flat. Room enough for two people to lie side by side and cry and push vomit down the drain.

No other house is so slippery in memory as this one. Details emerge and blur back into silence before I can see what was really there. I remember hazed moments, naked, drunk, high, always sliding across the bed into gin-soaked arms. The clanking of empty of vodka bottles piling higher and higher underneath the bed. Mr X appearing as if from nowhere then vanishing again. I have no idea where he slept, where the other rooms were.

This house pulls at me still, if I happen to pass by. It’s sunk-harbour flat blue burns against the green park next door. It has an extra storey now. Rises high and angular from the grass. Elliot has gone, come out of rehab and gone back again. He sent an email three months ago saying he was up north holding planes in the sky. I’m almost beginning to count Mr X as a friend and most of the time I forget how he growled at me, drunk and looming like a dark star on the front porch at Catherine Street. But I’ll never shake how the house itself sucked me down that hallway and flumed my existence from the ordinary into disaster.

Frogs and a magnolia tree

I remember this house differently, painfully, like an awkward stumble in a crucial moment. One day I will write about this house but not today. Today you should read Ben Rumble’s writing about this house.

I have no idea how the inside would make me feel

The house on the corner of Alma Avenue is set square and terrifying, the drop from the rooftop enough to reconfigure your idea of broken bones. A vase in the front window displaying a bunch of artificial hydrangeas in white. No furniture is immediately visible from street level. Through one of two narrow side windows, found before a heavily secured door and situated several metres down Alma Avenue, a print of Wheelflower by Margaret Preston can be seen if you stand on your toes. It is an ordinary print and not grand in size or frame. All lights on the upper levels burn bright. Rendered in wedding cake cream and sculpted with plaster replicas of I know not what plants a decorative bas relief spreads above the large front window. The window itself draped with a perfectly white sweep of evenly parted curtains. The function of this house remains unclear.

On the corner of Phillip and Charles streets, as ordinary as ice cream, stands a single-story miniature of the monolothic sculpted cream and coffee terrace. This house appears to be lived in.

Moomin Street

It used to be the palest green. Fibro, jointed and raised on brick pillars three steps above the ground. A single garage separate from the house, driveway in twin concrete strips grass, mown, edged and free of weeds in between.  A thigh-high English box hedge across the front and a tall row of poplars bordering the right front garden. It was dark underneath the poplars but this is of no consequence. They were planted menacingly close with only one place close to the fence line wide enough to slip through onto the neighbour’s driveway.

There were two sets of right hand neighbours but only one set on the left. They are still there, the parents of twin boys who grew identically from primary school through middle age, losing their hair and elasticising their waistlines with synchronised precision. A feeling of failed marriages and white vans with company logos. Every day at sunset the mother presses a button and metal shutters, operated by an electric motor, roll down. The noise produced by the shutters increases at a rate of fourteen percent per annum.

The first set of right hand neighbours were called Clark, or something quite like it. The boy once threw me like a beach ball in the circular above ground pool that was erected for two summers enjoyment and twenty years lament about the foul and yellowed earth it left underneath. The grass grew, without hesitation, across the fouled earth, the difference in the patch of lawn undetectable to all but one. The second set of right hand neighbours were called something other than Clark, the boy closest to my age than any other neighbour. He worked part-time at the supermarket after school. The girl was older and shorter, once came over to use the video player to press pause, rewind then pause so she could copy a cartoon dog onto her sketch pad. The boy once cried every time he coughed because he had a broken rib but the girl was in and out of hospital with asthma, without complaint, until she one day died in a shopping centre close to Canberra. I heard she was married by then.
Between the garage and the house a wooden gate, latched but easily opened from one side or the other. Sometime in the eighties a paved path was laid, and a place for the rubbish bins. The path splits in two, to the left and to the right. Look straight ahead. Immaculate lawn interrupted by round garden beds, each bed circling the base of a fruit tree, pruned, aged and bearing fruit or leaves or flowers or standing bare in winter like sculptures. I have no memory of the trees being planted. They are always trees. A three metre deep garden bed runs the length of the back fence. Flowers, shadow from an enormous gum struck once by lightning, no trace of the house once built for chickens or my tiny fear at their hard pecking beaks. I have sketched over the disappearance of the chickens with grapefruit. A morning table idea of scooping the bitter centres one handed, cold spoon and swinging feet.