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.
