This will be my fourth night sleeping on the floor. I can hear acoustic guitar, so I know Tom must be home, and I smile to myself. Just now, in the hallway, I met Prue for the first time: skinny, dark haired; hugging the faded blue towel she’s wearing with her armpits as she extends a hand in introduction. Everyone wears towels around the house here. Before this I was sitting outside with Sarah, who I also met for the first time tonight, and Mychael, who I’ve met once; we talk about Australian politics and American politics and Pacific regional politics and American bases on Australian soil; and how last week, to Nasa’s inexpressible frustration, the cable being used to transmit an ultra-high-res video of Venus’ transit was accidentally cut into by an old guy shoveling somewhere in the Northern Territory. Megs opens up the lid of the the ash tray and puts his cigarette inside, screws the lid back on, and draws another cigarette out, while waxing lyrical on anything relevant; that guy who threw his daughter off the bridge; the impact of Sharia law on UK families; the time he had to walk home at night through Cairo alley-ways with a pocket full of sharp stones for the packs of feral dogs.
There’s a box of loo rolls in the lounge room with “<3 from Isaac” scrawled on in fluro pink crayon. On my first night here I knock on Mina's door to introduce myself and ask for the wifi password. Instead I'm offered wine by Mina -short for Marina or Minara- and her friend in the middle of their evening’s conversation. Tom walks in to ask if Prue had returned his book, we talk for hours about writing (guess what Tom does) and before you know it I've got his pants off. No, really- he needed someone to darn a hole in his trousers before he goes out for drinks later. Gab in room #2 comes into Mina's lounge at another point- she has a fantastic laugh which goes right through the hundred-year-old walls. Earlier I have read through the fine print of the lease agreement and find clauses about “if we throw a disco party we expect you to invite your friends and to go in on the hire costs of disco equipment” and that you can have a cat but only if you buy it from the RSPCA. These seem eccentric, but not unbelievable, and a lot of the agreement is consistent with a (lower case) communist ideal that I don’t mind trying on for a bit, but I work up the courage to ask Mina if the agreement is steadfast about vegetarians being undesirable because they complain about paying a full share into the kitty for food costs. Mina bursts out laughing- “That agreement? Have you read some of the stuff in there?"; No one’s held to that since before I got here.” Going on eighteen months, first in what is now our room and then in the converted stables, Mina is the distinguished and dependable mother bear.
All together we (legally) occupy The Captains House, “an historical cottage built on the outskirts of urban Melbourne” about a century before you were born. I wake up and walk around the corner to Smith street, blink, look back the way I came. Yup- I live here. Finally. But I’m so excited I don’t feel like ‘finally’; I feel like “already”. We walk around in towels, enthuse about authors, share glad wrap.
I sit on the one piece of furniture I have in my room (I can’t say “the one piece of furniture I own” because I don’t own it) and survey my space, my things. It’s such a luxurious freedom to have so little- everything we have fitted into the back of Mum’s sedan. Somehow having less makes me feel lighter, and feeling lighter makes me feel stronger. I’m cold but I’m writing. I don’t have a lot of money in the bank but I’ve got a lot planned for this week; pick up my Chromantic fixie from Blackburn, tick off another of the “Melbourne coffee review” top 100, dinner in the ‘Grave and watch a violinist friend ply his trade. In fact, I might see him on my top 100 rounds- “As a professional musician, naturally I spend a lotta time making coffee.” This may change soon; after randomly buying an actual big tent, a friend of this friend has head-hunted him to be the ring-master, more or less on the basis of his fabulous mustache.
Right now the immediate future looks like this: I wait for approval to take Honours for my undergrad degree, writing a thesis on the medieval English, middle-English and early modern predecessors of (post/)apocalyptic literature. School’s out (from my job) in three weeks, and I get three weeks of sleeping in, painting and relaxing before school’s in again. Daniel enrolls in a physics degree. We spend all our time acting like we’re nineteen and just out of home, or discussing that fact that we’re suddenly a lot older than that and where did the time go? and does it matter anyway how old we are if we’re living the way we want to live.
I’m going to have a vegan feast/house-warming soon. Megs said “Great! There’s chairs in the driveway, you can push those tables together in the living room and there’s a fire pit under the feijoa tree.”
I’ll bake the cookies- you bring the wine.
❤
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