FATHER—
She had been gone for two years, three years, and in her fourth year his daughter wanted to look for a house. She now wanted to leave the beautiful flat, which had been renovated over the years so it had new carpeting, new kitchen, new paint on the walls, a new light-filled bathroom. All this great newness and she wanted to leave! There was no precedent for it: what to do about unwed daughters leaving home before they were married? Who would look out for them? She had seemed so happy at Janet Clarke Hall. The staff were supportive. The students had really taken to her. And the college had safely cloistered her: a visitor had to get through a locked gate, two layers of doors and a flight of steps before they could even approach her flat.
He started thinking. If she moved to Footscray, he and Kien could check up on her every couple of days. Bring her home-cooked food. Make sure she was not sick. He’d found her one day with the flu, curled up on the floor of her flat with a half-eaten tin of lychees.
So he helped her do what she wanted, which was to look at homes for sale every Saturday. They would set off mid-morning, with the real-estate sections of the newspaper on her lap in the car, and they would go house hunting. These trips made him realise that his daughter only looked at the surface of things. She couldn’t care less about house foundations or building materials. She deliberated over rooms that he knew at a glance would never be worth investing in. The space was too small, the house too old, the walls made of flimsy plasterboard that had been painted to disguise its poor quality.
Yet she would rail at the sight of a house in Braybrook that was bright blue or bright green, as if paint could not be repainted, as if such ugliness had to be permanent, as if she had never considered that it could be knocked down to rubble.
You could put a vase of flowers on a tablecloth in a bomb shelter and his daughter would be sucked in. Look at this, she would say, a sign of life – when all the people with their hands over their ears would be the clearest sign of life to him. Gestures like the vase were such time-wasters. It was like playing a violin to a buffalo, as that Burmese expression goes. Come to think of it, who would play a violin to a buffalo when the fields needed ploughing?
Dignity in poverty, she would have called it, seeing all the little gewgaws – a plastic vine with washed-out yellow fabric leaves wrapped around an iron railing, cheap porcelain cats, curtains hanging from the kitchen window. It seemed the older the house, the more it mattered to her. That was the trouble, he thought, the accursed poverty of these people, these new Australians. They found a place, their first place, and decked it out with flecks and flickers of their cash flow, treating the flow like a tub of freshly opened Dulux paint. Oh, we’ll just use a little to fix up the curtains. Get a glass cabinet for the living room. A larger television. Maybe even a home-entertainment system. It won’t empty the pot. But he knew that once the lid of the tub was open, the paint would dry out quicker. And that’s how they became stuck. These people were not long-term thinkers. They were always thinking of immediate comforts, to make it a bit easier here or there. Whereas he and Kien – well, they worked and worked until they could build their new house away from the carpet factories.
So when his daughter was away in Adelaide for work one weekend, he and Kien decided to look at some blocks that they had driven past on their way back from work – new parcels of land near the Maribyrnong River. How best to tell their daughter who was so quick to react to things? They decided they would not tell her until she got back from Adelaide. It would only make her anxious.