A Month of Sundays Read online

  a month

  of sundays

  JAMES O’LOGHLIN

  a month of sundays

  how to go travelling without leaving town

  First published in 2004

  Copyright © James O’Loghlin 2004

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  83 Alexander Street,

  Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  O’Loghlin, James.

  A Month of Sundays: how to go travelling without leaving town.

  ISBN 1 74114 367 5.

  1. Sydney (N. S. W. ) - Guidebooks. 2. Sydney (N. S. W. ) -Description and travel. I. Title

  919. 44104

  Set in 11/14 pt Minion by Midland Typesetters, Maryborough, Victoria Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In memory of my mother, Gillian,

  and to my father Graham.

  And to my companions, Lucy and Bibi.

  contents

  1 The invasion

  2 A bad place to busk

  3 Two jewels in Legoland

  4 The wild man of Manly

  5 Powerful Silvers

  6 A bit of east in the west

  7 Obsession

  8 A ferry to Rydalmere

  9 Chemicals

  10 Loudspeakers in paradise

  11 Sticking our necks out

  12 Storming The Battlement

  13 The dealer’s mum

  14 Trimmed sideburns

  15 Divided in death

  16 Goths in the sun

  17 The more you have . . .

  18 Empty balconies

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  one

  the invasion

  At 7 a.m. on Monday 1 September 2003, the day Lucy and I celebrated our eighth not-married-but-together anniversary, we were fast asleep in bed with our ten-month-old daughter Bibi lying chaperone between us when the crash of breaking glass startled us awake. Bibi wailed. I jumped out of bed and crept to our window. Three men were attacking the front of the house next door with sledgehammers and crowbars. They were crashing in windows and bashing through walls.

  I sighed. It had begun.

  As Lucy tried to comfort Bibi, I lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the racket and getting more depressed. The builders had arrived. It wasn’t a surprise. We’d known they were coming, we just hadn’t known when.

  Ten months earlier the house under assault, number eighteen, had sold for the third time in the two and a half years since we had moved into number twenty. It was a roomy, sunny three-bedroom house in good nick, but none of the people who had bought it in that time wanted to live in it until they had knocked it down and built something much, much bigger.

  It was a trend.

  More and more homes in North Bondi were beginning to look as if they were on steroids, with bits jutting up and out every possible which-way to fit as much house as possible onto the available land. Everyone thought themselves an expert on property and renovating and it was hard to have a neighbourhood conversation without the subject popping up. Everyone who moved in thought a house wasn’t really a house unless you had pulled it apart and put it back together again so that it had polished floorboards, aluminium-framed windows and more bedrooms than there were people living there. The big rich houses also had to have a pool, a home theatre and something called a void, a room-sized piece of nothing that proved you were so rich you could afford to waste space.

  This had led to the demise of the front garden. No one ever, ever had any trouble parking outside their home in North Bondi. It’s just far enough away from the beach to put it out of reach of visitors. Yet all over the place people were ripping up their gardens and putting in carports. They obviously thought that the security they got from having their car that extra two metres closer to the house at night and the importance of protecting its roof from rain far outweighed any pleasure you could get from plants, trees and grass.

  This meant there were two types of people in our street— those who had a front garden full of car and those who had a front garden full of front garden. The former usually had a front fence that wasn’t actually a fence at all, but was a concrete wall a metre and a half high, while the latter preferred a real fence of the old-style low-slung picket variety.

  Those with carports and walls would rarely be seen except through the window of their four-wheel-drive as it pulled in and out of their ex-front garden, whereas those with front gardens spent time in them and so met and talked to each other. We had a little front garden, and whenever I felt like a chat I’d go and sit on the front steps. Sooner or later one of the neighbours who also had a front garden would appear and we’d talk. No pressure, no commitment, just a friendly little chat about nothing in particular that either of us could pull the pin on as soon as we wanted.

  Sometimes I would see carport/garage/concrete wall-people squeezing past their car and then sort of milling around outside their wall and I’d wonder what they were doing. After a while I realised that they wanted to get in on the neighbourhood chat too, but it was harder for them because they’d buggered their house up by accidentally turning it into a fortress.

  The problem for each of the successive buyers of number eighteen was the vertical backyard. It was about 15 metres long and rose steeply from floor level at the rear of the house until, at the back of the block, it was at the same height as the top of the roof. Our house, a semi, had a similarly vertically challenged backyard. We had dug some of it out so that we now had what a real estate agent would describe as a ‘Three Level Multi Function Leisure Area’ and what anyone else would call a hill with three ledges cut into it.

  Each time number eighteen had sold, the same thing had happened. A few weeks after the sale the new owner would appear in the vertical backyard with an experty-type person holding a folder. The new owner would outline his dream, pointing and drawing pictures in the air. We’d hear him say words like ‘pool’, ‘level’, ‘landscaped’ and ‘dream home’. Each time the experty person would look down at their folder, shake their head and utter words like ‘cliff ’, ‘joking’, ‘excavation’ and ‘millions’. The hill would smile smugly to itself and soon after the For Sale sign would go up again.

  Ivan, the latest owner, was different. It wasn’t the fact that he got rid of the tenants as soon as their lease was up that showed us he meant business, and it wasn’t the fact that we got his proposed plans from council in the mail so soon after he’d bought the place. It wasn’t even that he started to excavate the vertical backyard. What convinced us that Ivan meant business was how he excavated the vertical backyard. He didn’t use a bobcat, a labourer or a shovel. He did it himself and used a milk crate. It was midsummer, temperatures were in the high thirties, he was a thin, pale, bearded man over fifty and he spent days dragging dirt from the top of the backyard to the bottom, using as his sole tool a milk crate. It didn’t work very well. A milk crate is,
in fact, a pretty crap tool for large-scale soil excavation. Most of the dirt just fell through the holes—but he kept going.

  ‘How’s it going, Ivan?’ I’d say whenever I saw him over the back fence.

  He’d never reply. He wasn’t being rude, it was just that he was panting so hard he was physically unable to speak. He would just wave weakly, with an expression on his face that suggested death would be a relief.

  I’d then offer to call an ambulance, and he’d shake his head and sadly return to the hill in the same way that a torture victim might return to the rack after being given a five-minute breather. Ivan meant business. Even the hill started to look nervous.

  Ivan’s plans weren’t good. Actually, that’s not fair. If you wanted to buy a normal house, knock it down and build a mansion, they were good. Perfect, in fact. But they weren’t good for us. They showed a huge, two-storey, five-bedroom plus void house with a garage and big concrete wall 140 centimetres from our house.

  The house would block out most of our sun and substitute the pleasant view of rooftops we enjoyed from the top of our vertical backyard for one of just his roof. But what worried me most was the thought of living next to a building site.

  The three of us spent a lot of time at home. Some people say that having a baby prevents them going out, but one of the many things Bibi had given us was an excuse. We didn’t go out a lot before she arrived, and once she arrived we didn’t have to give reasons. I took a sort of pride in the fact that I shut down on weekends, lazed about, read books and watched the footy with the sound down and classical music playing. I’d regularly have weekends where I left the house only twice—on Saturday to play touch footy (badly, but with enthusiasm) and on Sunday to go for a walk along the beach (quite well, but it’s not a very hard thing to do). My idea of the perfect weekend was most other people’s idea of the most boring weekend in the world.

  I liked being at home. There were no hassles at home. I felt in control. I understood how home worked, I lived in it and, in combination with Lucy and the bank, I owned it. At home I didn’t need to be alert, I rarely got alarmed and I could do what I wanted when I wanted. I could forget about trying to be entertaining and interesting and just be me.

  When I was old enough for my parents to start leaving me home alone I used to feel an incredible sense of relief as their car drove off. Not because I didn’t like them—I did—but because I was alone and free. King of the castle. The desire to lock the world out for a day or two a week remained strong.

  Lucy wasn’t like that. She liked to get out and do things, and usually did. But I’d often find excuses to duck her suggestions that on weekends we drive to Palm Beach or Cronulla or even nearby Bronte because, quite frankly, I couldn’t be bothered.

  Central to the idea of home as a place to lock out, and find relief from, the world was that by shutting the door you could effectively say goodbye to it. But construction work happening six days a week for goodness knows how long—similar jobs in the area (and there were plenty of them) seemed to drag on forever—threatened that whole idea.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d worked normal hours. Usually if there’s a builder next door, they work when you work, but my job was hosting an evening radio show on the ABC, which meant I had my leisure time at the start of the day.

  This suited me. There was plenty of time to hang out with Bibi, and because there’s nothing good on television at that time of the day there was no risk of spending my free hours staring at the box. People would express sympathy for me because of my hours, saying that it must be terrible not to be free at nights. I’d nod solemnly, and keep to myself the joys of sleeping in and lazing around in the morning.

  I wouldn’t call it challenging, but it was certainly pleasant. We’d often talk about making more use of the time, but never really did. Sleeping in, brekky, playing with Bibi, then off to work became the routine.

  But when you have the sound of Johnno screaming at Bazza to ‘Grab some more of the fucking four inches!’ mixed in with some electrical drilly thing, set against the background of loud, loud, loud mobile phone ads broken up by non-stop blocks of whatever it is they play now on Triple M (provided by the radio in the truck parked right outside the front of our bedroom) it’s very hard to feel like you’re king of the castle. You feel like the castle is being invaded.

  By 9 a.m. the dust from the demolition was drifting through our windows and Bibi was rubbing her eyes. We decided there was only one thing to do. Run away. Or at least walk. We went down to the beach and had breakfast in a café. We talked about renting, we talked about selling, we talked about house-minding, we talked about buying a giant mansion-sized soundproof box and asking them to work inside it.

  ‘We could sleep in the car,’ I said. ‘We could drive to a park and sleep there under the stars and if it rains get in the car and then at least we won’t get woken up at seven by jackhammers. I mean, I never get to sleep before one because you just can’t come home from work and go straight to sleep and I’m going to get overtired and grumpy and fall asleep at the wheel and have a car crash and . . .’

  ‘Calm down,’ said Lucy.

  She was right. I was losing it. But it felt good.

  ‘What if we bought something even louder than the drills and the smashing and the Triple M combined, something like . . . a Concorde, but a stationary one, and we turned that on? Maybe then they’d hate it so much they’d leave.’

  This time she just looked at me. So did Bibi.

  ‘We can either move out or we can stay,’ Lucy said. Totally ridiculous. Or was it? I looked at her through narrowed eyes. She seemed remarkably together, but then again I was only comparing her to me.

  ‘We can’t stay. How can we stay?’ I said quickly. Too quickly, but I couldn’t help it.

  ‘We could stay,’ she said extra calmly, which was good. If she’d let the panic I was feeling get to her too, we’d have been doomed. One of us had to stay calm, and I was glad it was her. It meant I could go on running down the road to hysteria.

  ‘How can we stay? We can’t stay, because if we stay it’ll all be bad and worse and everything and . . .’

  ‘We could stay,’ she repeated firmly and slowly, ‘and we could go as well.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘We don’t need to be in the house when they’re there.’

  ‘But it’ll be from dawn to dusk five days a week. Six! They’ll work Saturdays.’

  ‘We can go and do things. In the morning. All the things we don’t usually do.’

  I was suspicious. ‘What “things”?’

  ‘Go to the park. Go to the zoo. The aquarium. Explore Sydney. I’ve lived here for 34 years, you for . . . how many?’

  ‘Eighteen. I moved here in 1985.’

  ‘And Bibi one. Between us, that’s, um . . .’

  ‘Fifty-three years.’

  ‘Exactly. Think of all the things we haven’t done or seen. We could go to Lakemba.’

  ‘What’s at Lakemba?’

  ‘Exactly. We won’t know unless we go.’

  ‘Um . . .’ I was playing for time. This felt like a threat to the way I did things. ‘Aren’t your parents going away to Turkey? Maybe we could go and stay at their place.’ It was just up the road at Bondi Junction.

  ‘We could, but they’re not going until October.’

  ‘So we’ve got a month till then.’

  ‘A month. A month to do things and see things, the things that most people can only do on weekends,’ said Lucy. ‘We’ve got a month of Sundays.’

  I suppose it was one way of looking at it.

  two

  a bad place to busk

  Our plan was to do all those things that you were supposed to do on Sundays, but which we never got around to doing. The sort of things we used to do on Sundays when we were kids. Both Lucy and I had memories of Sundays being about packing the car and going somewhere new. For me in Canberra, it was often into the bush for a walk, or a picnic near a river. I would a
lways take a book to read on the way there, but never quite get around to opening it because I wanted to see what was around the next corner. Then there was the anticipation of arriving and exploring, poking about down the river or seeing where a bush track led. My favourite places were those where there was no one else in sight, and I would imagine we were discovering the place for the first time. That, in the old days, was a Sunday.

  That sense of discovery was what we wanted to recapture, but how could we in a city we had both lived in for so long? The answer was to start thinking like tourists. Whenever I visited somewhere new, whether it was Paris or Parkes, I’d spend a couple of hours wandering about trying to get a feel for the place. But I never did that in Sydney. Everywhere I went was for a purpose. I’d go, do what I had to do, then come home. If I went to a friend’s house in a part of town I’d never been to before, I’d go straight there and come straight back. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that there were all sorts of places within a hour’s drive of home that I had no idea about.

  Sitting on the train on the way to work that day, I realised that the pattern of my life had become entirely predictable. I woke up, I hung out, I went to work, I came home and I went to sleep again. Sometimes I’d go to the movies or to one of six parks or three beaches, or to visit one or two of a couple of dozen friends.

  My life wasn’t boring. I liked most of it and it was all pretty comfortable, but I clung to my patterns. Pretty much all my life occurred at home or at work, or at a few other places within 10 kilometres of where I lived. If anyone ever wanted to assassinate me it’d be easy. They’d know exactly where I was going to be pretty much any time, any day.

  And the day after I got assassinated, when I was having my exit interview and it was put to me that for years and years I had spent week after week after week doing pretty much exactly the same thing and following pretty much exactly the same not-all-that-challenging routine, how would I feel?

  Slightly embarrassed, I think.