We got to Melbourne and started looking for houses. In no time at all, I was being ushered into the front seat of an imported coupé by a real estate agent who looked about twenty-two and had a mobile phone stuck to each ear, as well as a conversation going with me at the same time. At one point, a third phone rang from inside the glove box. It was the colleague he’d put on hold from the first phone. Stereotypes are dreadful things and especially when they are true. This was the property agent from Central Casting. I was never sure when he was talking to me or to someone else. It didn’t much matter. His conversations all involved telling people exactly what they wanted, interspersed with intonations about a higher power known as ‘the market’.
Soon I was not so much worried about getting into the car as getting out of it. The agent drove so fast that I began to wonder if he’d discovered a new selling strategy: make your clients so grateful to set foot on dry land that they will buy any property as long as it isn’t moving. On the other hand, he did keep saying that property was moving fast; perhaps the distinction between cars and houses was a nicety from a bygone age.
His tone changed when he asked what was bringing me to live in the city. It turned out that he was related to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the champion of the destitute, a woman who’d departed this life leaving only two saris, a plastic bucket, and one of the most recognisable faces in the world. For Mother Teresa, the day started at 4 am. She had been some kind of cousin of the agent’s father, who, like her, had been born in Albania. The proudest day of that man’s life, and of his son’s, was the day on which Mother Teresa, during one of her trips to Australia, came to visit their family home.
‘My father is still talking about it,’ said the young man.
We took a detour so we could drive past the very house which Mother Teresa had honoured with her presence.
‘You would never believe it,’ the driver said with awe. ‘But guess what.’
I couldn’t guess.
‘That place is now worth $600,000.’
With that, he opened the refrigerated glove compartment, reached under the spare phone and pulled out a small picture of Mother Teresa. It travelled with him everywhere.
‘She looks after me,’ he said. ‘She inspires everything I do.’
A picture of Mother Teresa in the glove box of a European coupé is surely one of life’s curiosities. But real estate is a curious business; it involves a bit more than finding a place to sleep. There were times as we hunted for a place in Melbourne when I reminded myself that I used to be good at Monopoly; I wondered why those skills didn’t transfer to the real world. The answer is that there is little real about real estate. There is, however, a certain reality about three tired children on the backseat of a car. Benny, now aged almost four, asked constantly if the house we were now seeing was going to be our new home and which was going to be his bedroom and where would we put the bunk bed we had promised him.
We looked through dozens of places. At one of them, the current tenant sat in the lotus position on a faded lounge, staring deep into a glass of water. Around her, a crowd of house hunters poked and prodded at every corner of her material world, one couple running a tape measure across the length and breadth of every room in the house, including the toilet. The tenant was immobile: she never looked up and never stirred a limb. In the background, the agent could be heard telling new arrivals that the tenant would be happy to stay where she was.
In one house, beside a railway line, another agent told us that the noise of the trains really wasn’t too bad. Then a train went past and all we could see was the poor man still mouthing the words as though someone had turned off his microphone.
We went to auctions. One of these was for a modest weatherboard which had been advertised at $400K plus. Plus is the most deceitful word in real estate, a game known for its plastic vocabulary. When we arrived, the auctioneer had set out in the dining room a hamper of food, including wine, as well as a picnic set which carried the logo of his firm. These were enticements to bid, as if you’d mortgage yourself for thirty years just for pate and plonk. The word mortgage originates in French. It literally means ‘death grip’.
The hamper and other goodies must have worked. The first bid was $450K. The second bid was $530K. At this point, the crowd moaned audibly and the auctioneer performed a well-rehearsed pantomime about how astonished he was that the advertised price turned out to be a work of fiction. He then declared that the place was now on the market, another of real estate’s cute turns of phrase. If it wasn’t on the market to begin with, what the hell were seventy people doing in the front yard on a Saturday morning when they could have been shopping?
The third bid was $570K. Then two blokes, on opposite sides of the front yard, ground it out like bulls in a paddock. One of them was standing with his son, who cheered his father’s early bids and at one point yelled ‘sold’, much to the delight of the crowd. In time, the boy sensed something and fell silent into the folds of his mother’s dress: his father had been wounded in front of him. The man’s partner kept whispering ‘let it go, let it go.’ But the man took his opponent in hesitant steps up to $613K before he finally conceded. The winner must have wanted that picnic basket real bad.
At yet another auction, a house went for almost fifty per cent more than the advertised expected price. The buyer then announced plans to knock it down and develop townhouses. This is another curiosity of buying in the city. Once upon a time, a decent-sized block might have a house with four people in it. These days, the same block can have four townhouses, each with one person. We saw dual occupancies which were monuments to greed: the original house standing without its land like a prisoner with a shaved head.
We crisscrossed Melbourne, at one point nearly buying a place on a major truck route just so we could get our weekends back again. Several times, we found ourselves on the freeway that goes past the high rise developments at Docklands, places which look like cold storage for babyboomers and emptynesters. They fascinated our Benny. On one trip he announced that those tall buildings were where they kept people who had nowhere to sleep.
For us, real estate was an area of befuddlement. We live in a culture which expects two incompatible ideas, one called home and the other called investment, to cohabit under the same roof. These two creatures make an odd couple: one has a price and the other a value. One pretends to be rational and the other isn’t.
During this time, which felt like years but was really only months, we went back to Gunning to see the friends we had left in such a rush and to check on the house we were selling. When we went into what had been Benny’s room, he burst into tears and started sobbing uncontrollably. A room without a bed is simply not a bedroom. We were all close to tears, mourning what we had left behind, seeing the gaps on the walls where all Benny’s favourite pictures used to hang. Then suddenly Clare started to dance. She put her hands over her head and twirled like a ballerina. Jacob joined her and began a jig, clapping in time to a rhythm in his little head. Clare kept going, sometimes balancing on one leg, soaking up the sadness in the room with her smile. Benny became quiet and watched for a while. Then finally he too took off his shoes and joined in. We all joined in. We were dancing without music. Jacob and Clare held hands and moved in a circle, winding to the left and then the right, turning the room into another kind of space altogether from the one that filled us with grief. They began to free our spirits. They danced us to safety. It was the first time I could remember Benny looking at them with love in his eyes, the first time he had really needed them. It had been worth leaving just for that.
Not long afterwards, back in Melbourne, we were on the verge of abandoning our quest yet again for a week when we tried one last place. It was by no means the best-presented house we saw and maybe not the wisest investment. But it was the only house we saw that lifted our spirits. It may have been opposite a bus depot and down the street from a huge factory but it was painted all the colours of the rainbow and made us laugh. We sensed that under that cold word vendor there were real people who had warmed this space before us. The children didn’t say they liked the house but they did start planning where they would put their bunk beds and where their cuddle toys would sleep. That was as much a sign as anybody needed.
This time, we planted our olives in pots.