Our entire street – where we lived then – was built in 1924. I found this out for a school project, and it’s stuck in my mind: our street as the city’s northernmost frontier.
Really cool.
My street, my street, I thought to myself because at last we were somewhere for more than five minutes. I learned its history, and then I wore it.
Maybe in those olden days, I thought, you could see a dark line of wild bush and a couple of kangaroos from the back door. But then the surge of hammering and sawing and mud moved on, leaving my street like any other street: not quite two hundred Cal Bungs* each on a quarter of an acre with – because everyone wore hats and practical dark clothing and were frugal – fruit trees and chickens in the back yard. We had a couple of plum trees left over from those times but they were so old they dropped their fragile, rough branches in the wind. Besides, the plums were warped and more than we could eat, and fell on the ground and stank and bred European wasps one year.
My mum has never made jam.
Anyway, then a church was built, and a picture theatre. There was a little market and finally paving and bluestone kerbing and a tramline.
The Council had an aerial photo of my street from then too, from 1924. I could count up from the corner and find our house, a few more and find Mr and Mrs Sanchez’s. I found Ginnie’s place, and the one where The Dropkicks# lived. And of course there was Miss Gordon’s house, and Mrs Molly’s, though then it had no hedge. It takes a long time to grow a hedge like that.
We came to the street when I was ten. You’d think it was the moon, listening to my mum. She’d lived most of her life in the inner city, until she and Dad split up and we moved. Again and again, till we found a house that wasn’t too dark, or too damp, or too crumbly.
She wore black velvet and beads and looked a bit dazed when she saw the garden. We didn’t have a lawn-mower.
‘Still, there’s a lot of light. And there’s a tram,’ she said, in a bright tinkle she uses when she’s trying to persuade someone. ‘And a market,’ she said, though we were only to go a few times, traipsed back up the hill dragging the shopping trolley between us with her saying ‘Come on, Tania,’ very cranky because of the market crowd.
In the meantime, there was a lot of spring rain and the grass grew thick and long, until one pretty hot day my mum took hedge-clippers to the nature strip.
‘Good exercise’, she said but after a while it was all heavy breathing. I told her she was demented and she told me to piss off. I did, but she was taking so long I came back out every now and then to see how she was going. Finally, the nature strip was just about done and my mum was sitting, sweaty and red in the cheeks, when old Mr Sanchez came walking. He threw his hands in the air in the sort of pantomime people use when they don’t speak the other person’s language very well.
‘Señora! What are you doing!’ He went to get his machine.
He mowed the front lawn and the nature strip (which had only been hacked, really) while my mother went inside smiling, changed clothes and got herself a long, cool drink.
‘Thankyou, thankyou’, she said when he’d finished, and asked his name. She thought he said Victor, and that was great because then whenever he did our front lawn and the nature strip she called him Victor the Lawn Mower. Luckily, she never said that to his face because once he went away and sent us a postcard signed ‘Hector’.
Hector and Mrs Sanchez lived three doors up with a picket fence, lots of roses and a lawn where every blade of grass was strictly two centimetres long.
One day soon after we arrived they had their house painted. I think the idea was some sort of ochre to remember South America by, but it looked more like tuna and there was a lot of muttering from the neighbours. One by one or in little groups they’d slow to a stop and stare.
It gave me, at least, a really good look to see who they all were.
That’s when I found Ginnie, a year younger than me and sitting on the crossbar of her bike eating a Mars Bar. We were up to names when three boys from about twelve to fifteen came clacketing past on skateboards with a ratty-looking mongrel running behind them. They snatched the chocolate bar from Ginnie and clacketed on down the footpath calling back at us over their shoulders. We yelled too, and then she told me she called them The Dropkicks. That’s how we became friends, Ginnie and me.
Anyway, there were The Dropkicks clacketing and yelling until they got to the corner of the cross-street and the house with the hedge so old and muscly the fence wrapped around it had a big bulging wave to it.
Funny I’d never noticed Mrs Molly before. Ginnie said that was who it was standing there with her little creaky gate open in one gloved hand. A pale mauve glove, like her pale mauve handbag over her arm and the shoes, really well-made you could tell but very Minnie Mouse – boats on the ends of her thin, wasted, old-lady legs. She was taking note, you know, checking things were just right in her street; I could tell. She had a hat on, a deep blue kind of bouffant beret, brushed felt and worn a bit to the side. It went with the tweedy-blue suit. Her face had that all-purpose old-lady smile as she turned to watch The Dropkicks clacket around the corner with the dog in pursuit. Then she went through the gate and disappeared behind the hedge.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, mostly, I’d play with Ginnie after school. Hopscotch, TV, dressups. Sometimes it’d be the park, though with browning grass, spindly trees, one slide and two swings it was hardly worth it. When we were really, really bored we might spy on The Dropkicks, get caught and have a battle.
But I kept Mrs Molly to myself. I am good at meeting people. You just have to know where they’ll be to be met. It was my mum who thought Mrs Molly looked like a Church lady, and there she was when we went rummaging one curriculum day – that always made my mum laugh because the teachers called these ‘student-free’ days – at the Op Shop just behind the red-brick Anglican Church in the next street.
Close up, Mrs Molly’s smile was a peach colour, and her face was all soft creases with powder and a tiny bit of blue over her eyes. Her smile said she knew whatever it was she knew, and that she might not tell it or she might to someone specially chosen. Of course, she didn’t have her gloves on then, and when she handed over the old tray my mum was buying, Mrs Molly’s hands were knobbly with arthritis and her two rings a bit loose between the knuckles.
I gave her a big smile, just to begin with.
Fridays were Mrs Molly’s Op Shop days, and she’d be finished a bit after I normally got home from school. I met her ‘accidentally’ just as she was reaching her gate. She said, ‘You’re the little girl who came to buy a tray with her mum,’ so I knew she really remembered me, and soon I was walking up the short curved path with her, dragging my backpack between dainty garden beds of hydrangeas and two patches of lawn with the hedge all around and the street nowhere to be seen except for through the gate if you looked back, and every noise muffled.
I’d sit in her kitchen with the old Kooka stove and frilly curtains and the fading spotless lino and the Formica table. I’d watch her take her hat, her jacket and the handbag through to her bedroom. She’d come back and say, ‘A glass of lemonade, dear, and some Anzac biscuits?’ and of course I’d say yes, and she’d get them for me while the kettle boiled for her tea.
She’d ask me about school first, and maybe my mum, and then I’d start with questions. Her family, she said, had lived in this house since it was built and her father had planted the hedge. That was a picture of her father and her mother when they got married – veil clamped just above the eyebrows by a ring of rosettes, and him strangling in a tall collar and tie. Over there was a picture of Mrs Molly’s brother in uniform; he never came back from New Guinea in The War. Here was Mr Molly in a silver frame; he died and they didn’t have children though there was a grandnephew who had Mrs Molly over for Christmasses and sometimes for tea. He had kids a bit older than me.
Sometimes, if I asked, she’d talk about some of the people in the street: Mr and Mrs Sanchez were refugees and had walked over mountains to escape a lot of killing; Mr Papadopoulos was a builder, so the enormous house built from fence to fence with the two-story columns out the front wasn’t as expensive as it looked; The Dropkicks’ dad worked two jobs and had a good singing voice. She called the boys Wayne and Gary and Tim and I kept my mouth shut.
Me and Mrs Molly discussing the street.
I met Mrs Molly’s doll Phoebe, who had been Mrs Molly’s mother’s and lived in the bedroom in whispery gloom from the half-drawn blind behind the floral curtains, sitting on the pillow on the flounced floral bedcover. Porcelain Phoebe waited in there forever, mouth parted, full and red, and her eyes rich and blue and haughty under real-hair lashes. She had copper-blond hair thick with ringlets and wore complicated lace and frills spread in a complete circle, and her tiny feet peeked out the bottom in white stockings and bone satin shoes with heels.
On Fridays, I would live for just an hour or so in this old lady’s house sat inside the thickening hedge snug and smug since 1924 and imprinted maybe ever since then with the scent of lavender and face powder and lilac talcum.
Then I’d go home and give Mum the silent treatment if she said anything about visiting ‘Good Golly.’
There were two Miss Gordons then, but you could tell only one was important. It was in the way she walked: Mrs Molly said this Miss Gordon had been a model a long time ago. The other Miss Gordon had wanted to be one too, but hadn’t made it. They’d lived in the street for maybe forty years.
That was all Mrs Molly would tell me, because, mostly, she didn’t gossip. That’s what she said.
The important Miss Gordon was too important to notice little girls. She would erupt from her house on the corner opposite Mrs Molly’s: very tall and thin, black-dyed hair teased into froth on top of her head well back from a very high or possibly balding forehead, with lots of space for two spindly eyebrows drawn high over her bright blue and black artistic eyes. She wore a red mouth and her own little all-purpose smile, and a lot of heavy powdering a bit too brown, and always had on something wide that rustled with petticoats and a big, patent-leather belt tight in the middle and maybe a bolero top with an embroidered edge. She held a leash always, with a graying Scottish terrier square and patient at the end of it.
They would go for a very important walk, and the other Miss Gordon – smaller, fairer, pinker and rounder in a soft kind of way – would close the gate behind her sister and blink at the garden, in her apron and gardening gloves and a pair of secateurs in one hand.
Sometimes you get a snapshot, you know, that you never forget. Something that happens before you blink and then it’s gone. I was too young to wish I had a camera, but it’s stuck there in my head anyway.
That was a day when Ginnie did piano, so I was by myself throwing a stone and teetering at hopscotch. Throw, hop, hop, hop.
And I looked up.
There was Mrs Molly at her gate, with the hat, gloves, suit, and the little smile, looking over at the Miss Gordons’s; there was the important Miss Gordon just swishing up to her own gate; and there was, all long-legged and in black, a young guy with the most enormous and totally perfect rainbow mohawk, hands in his pockets, walking down the footpath and past Miss Gordon just coming out.
So cool. What a trio: like some movie. You have no idea – these things don’t happen often, but more often than you’d think, if you look.
Then Mrs Molly noticed me and gave a little wave before she turned and disappeared into her hedge. Mr Mohawk walked past Miss Gordon and she unlatched her gate and followed the dog out.
I called him Mr Mohawk for a while. He must have just moved in somewhere nearby because now he was often in the window of the little coffee-shop-milkbar down the road. His girlfriend usually sat there with him. She had pink hair in a fairyfloss cloud, a really white face and freaky-dark eyes and mouth, and she’d wear long crushed-velvet dresses in electric blue or algae green all pulled together with safety pins. Lots of beads and rings. They’d just sit and chat and drink coffee, like couples do, and share a paper with the employment pages open making circles with a felt-tip pen.
I told Mrs Molly about Mr Mohawk and his girlfriend and she just looked at me and said, ‘His name is Ken, and that’s Rosie,’ so I went a bit hot around the face and Ken and Rosie it was from then on.
She knew everything about everyone, that woman. Like when Ginnie and I had a war with The Dropkicks that we thought no-one knew about and Mrs Molly said: ‘You should be careful how you play rough with boys, Tania’, and I went home early.
Anyway, one holiday I went to check the milkbar and Ken was there with Rosie, but I almost missed that it was her because she’d flattened her pink hair and brushed it behind her ears and her face was normal colour – her eyes were quite small and pale – and she was wearing a plain blue dress with short sleeves and no beads. She even had a shoulder bag. They didn’t look happy. Ken’s mohawk was flopped like a wilted thing to one side. He had his coffee in front of him, and the paper open, and Rosie pointed at something in it but he shook his head and the top bit of mohawk swayed over his eye. Rosie looked at him for a moment and then got up and left the shop. In a minute she was at the bus stop over the road, glancing over at Ken sometimes until the bus came.
‘Rosie’s got a job, but Ken can’t get one with a mohawk,’ I told Mrs Molly. She looked at me and I noticed old-lady pinkness around her eyes as well as the mind behind them.
‘That’s clever, Tania.’ We smiled at each other.
School went back, but I knew that Rosie was only at the milkbar at weekends now, because Mrs Molly told me. At weekends, the mohawk was proud and erect, but now often during the week it was limp. The paper was in front of him, but mostly Ken just stared out of the window.
In the meantime the not important Miss Gordon died. An ambulance went clanging down the street, so huge close up as it passed me, and the light flashed and a guy and a chick in uniform moved quickly with a stretcher with a person on it and the important Miss Gordon made little worried paces backwards and forwards, hands up to her face. Mrs Molly was at her gate by then, and called something out so Miss Gordon went inside and got the dog and handed the leash with the dog to Mrs Molly before the ambulance chick helped Miss Gordon into the back of the ambulance to be with her sister. They all drove off.
For weeks then, even though Miss Gordon still went for walks with the dog, the Gordon garden began to fade. There were big fleshy weeds. Rose petals dropped to the ground and left red hips that went brown and dry. The grass grew. Even I could see the little almond trees that were sprouting all around the big tree in the middle, a dozen little accidents from all the dropped nuts.
I had an idea. ‘Mr Sanchez does our grass. He could do Miss Gordon’s,’ I said to Mrs Molly. But she shook her head. ‘Doing an entire garden is not the same as running the mower over some grass as a favour,’ she said, slowly blowing steam off her tea. She went quiet, so I asked if I could visit Phoebe.
By Monday, everything had changed. I got off the bus coming back from school, and glanced up at the milkbar while I shifted the backpack around for comfort. That always took a bit because it was like it was full of rocks and maybe the odd brick, you’d think, rather than books.
Ken wasn’t in the milkbar window like he had been later and later in the day recently, with his mohawk either sad and dangling or standing up while he stared proud and lonely into the street. So I started the walk up my street until I got to Miss Gordon’s, and there he was, with the dead Miss Gordon’s secateurs and a pile of weeds on the garden path because he’d obviously been there for a while.
I was so surprised I said ‘hi’ and then he looked surprised because as far as he knew we hadn’t met at all. He said ‘hi’ back and I walked on until I got to my place and looked around and there was another one of those moments: Mrs Molly with her shopping trolley coming home to her gate, with her hand up to wave at Ken; Ken straightening up and greeting her back, and Miss Gordon swishing out, maybe sadder and not as grand as usual, with a mug in her hand. Which he took and sipped, and Miss Gordon looked up at Mrs Molly and I guess there was a little smile between them though I couldn’t see from there, before they each went inside.
Time went on. Ken turned up in more and more gardens. The mohawk got shorter and then grew out; the hair took on various shapes that needed less glue and finally ended up in a ponytail. Everyone got older except Phoebe.
What had seemed to have been forever blue sky grew grey clouds and wind sometimes, other times growled with thunder. I wanted something to happen. I wanted to flex every muscle and stretch every tendon and feel a screaming wind in my hair. My mum took me to Myers and looked away so she wouldn’t laugh when the lady placed me into my first bra as though she were the whispering High Priestess of the Temple of the Virgins. Ginnie would be impatient to bike it to the park or squeal over nothing much in the cubby-house her dad built, but I’d find myself wanting to walk past The Dropkicks’, see if they were around and have a good shout if they were. A bit of a running battle with some close shaves and a whole lot of giggling and panting at the end.
Mostly Ginnie didn’t want to do that, and I couldn’t do it by myself – just me and all those boys – so there were days when we’d both get into a sulk and she’d go home and nothing’d happen at all. I’d watch TV and draw a bit, or see if I could make some kind of cleavage if I pulled the front of my bra together really tight.
But I’d be outside again soon, helpless against the magnetism of the Dropkicks’ front yard. I’d pass by ‘accidentally’ and have a grunting kind of conversation with Gaz. Suddenly he’d become very long, with round bunches of muscle at his shoulders and elongated ones on his arms when he reached up and there were blue veins up his forearms and his hands were big and a bit pink. This close up his eyes were a speckled browny-green and though he had a few pimples I decided I liked his mouth.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’
‘You’re Tania aren’t ya?’
‘Yeah. That your dog?’
‘Yeah. His name’s Bodgie.’
‘Oh. Nice dog.’
‘Yeah.’
His front door slammed and one of his brothers started down the front steps. Both brothers were much older than me and they swaggered and were sneery-superior to all the other younger kids.
‘Ok. Better go now. See ya.’
‘See ya.’
He was a couple of years older than me, enough to make him interesting. I could hear him and his brother start to talk behind me and there might have been a bit of a snicker, but I still managed to walk as though I wasn’t self-conscious.
Sometimes I actually could persuade Ginnie to sit on their fence for a bit. She didn’t mind Bodgie, anyway, and would make him fetch sticks. She would sigh loudly if I talked to Gaz for too long. So that was how one day I challenged Gaz to a wrestle on the weedy grass on The Dropkicks’ front lawn. Don’t know why I did that; his brothers were just walking through the gate when he said OK.
He smelt of sharp sweat and socks and that musty boy-smell. It was fun at first: the struggle, the straining and the push of all that waiting energy and all the shouting around us and Bodgie woof-woofing with the excitement. Until Gaz got me so I couldn’t move, with his face not smiling and damp next to mine and both of us steaming and him panting into my ear, and me pinned hard and too helpless even to wriggle, him so heavy and pressing I could hardly breathe and it hurt but I couldn’t say so out of pride.
‘Do ya give up?’
‘No!’
‘Do ya give up?’
‘Ow! Ow!’
‘Do ya give up?’
‘Ow! OK, OK, Ok…’
And then Ginnie afterwards angry with me like she was too totally good-to-be-true standing there with a bandaid on her knee and all those Dropkicks including Gaz jeering in a sing-song while I dragged my bruises back up the street, a bit shaky and hobbly leaning on the bike and all that energy sucked out by absolute defeat.
Something had got out of hand, that was for sure, and I went quiet for days with the confusion of humiliation and a shame I couldn’t really explain. Ginnie wasn’t talking to me except to say her mother said I was a slut. I didn’t want to talk to any Dropkicks, ever again.
Days indoors and leaving the room when my mum asked what was up. The whole world gone gray and the worry lying sick and heavy in my stomach.
What was left was old-lady lavender and frilly curtains and Anzac biscuits and fruitcake and Phoebe being perfect and comfy old stories, all inside the slow-hedged cocoon so sure of itself. So that Friday I started down the street to Mrs Molly’s just about the right time, because there she was just coming up to her gate. She glanced up like she always did at that point and it made me smile because she always did that, just to check the street, and I had my hand raised to wave but she looked away and opened her little gate and went in through the hedge as if I was invisible. And I knew that she knew and that was the moment when everything became forever just that little bit tainted, like me, like me.
Like me.
So here I am now, sitting in my little clapped-out car, visiting the street where I used to live. Nothing much has changed, except that our old house has gone from yellow to mostly pale green. Mrs Molly’s hedge has one burnt spot, but it’s only one small spot as if someone made an attempt to break into her little world but couldn’t.
It’s time to go. I put the key in the ignition.
The radio blasts into a shout, two people shouting, but there’s something weird and garbled about it and then I work it out. There’s something going on, a tootling sounding through all that radio ranting, so I turn it off. And there they all are, further up the street. A crowd of maybe thirty men with instruments – drums, different kinds of woodwind, is that some sort of brass? – and they’re dancing with those really deliberate steps Greeks make with one hand in the air, all dancing and drumming and tootling towards me. Where are they going? I wind the window down to look back down the other way, and there’s another crowd coming from the Papadopolous house, and they’ve got more instruments and they’re dancing too, and there are women clapping and laughing.
A wedding party.
Mr and Mrs Sanchez are standing looking out at the street, framed by roses.
And there’s Mrs Molly, in mauve and blue like the first time I saw her though it hangs on her more like a sack now, standing at her gate with her all-purpose smile. Mrs Papadoloupos looks around and calls something out and then runs up to Mrs Molly and pretty soon she’s got her arm through Mrs Molly’s arm and she’s propelling the old lady down the street to the enormous house just as all the men pass me with all the wild and wavy music and the happy sedate dancing.
But it’s all very quiet inside my little car and anyway, I’ve only come to look; I’m not really here and it’s been a long time since I was. Mrs Molly is back there behind me clapping in a restrained, quavery way to the music.
Giving benediction to anyone but me.
I turn the key in the ignition and drive away.
Glossary:
*Cal Bung: Californian bungalow; #dropkick: unflattering term derived from Australian Rules Football.
© JL Crozier
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