WE BOUGHT THE HOUSE IN Thomas Street by accident. A real estate agent I’d come to know phoned to tell me she had this house that needed work and the price had come down. We went to see the house and ruled it out because it needed so much work and we didn’t have enough money. Six months later, the price came down again and the agent phoned me and said we should make an offer. Although we didn’t know it, she only included us in the invitation so she could push a buyer with more money than us up in price, but the other buyer withdrew at the last minute. The family who owned the house were keen to sell so they sold to us.
We bought the house by accident but, even so, everyone said we bought well. We got a survey map from olden times and found out Thomas Street was once called Enoggera Terrace. This seemed apt. There were no trees in the yard so we planted some.
The drought started.
Before the contract settled, we discovered the house itself had problems too. According to the surveyor, the western edge was sitting in the neighbour’s yard. The solution, shifting the house, would be expensive and complicated. We could have backed out at that stage—our solicitor advised us we should—but we decided instead to proceed, not really knowing why.
The day we settled we went over and drank champagne. I hadn’t been to the house since we’d bought it and even though it was empty of the detritus of a family’s fifty years, it felt strangely cloying, as if one couldn’t take in enough air. We quickly gravitated to the backyard. We returned a few days later with the architect and builder, and the same thing happened. We walked through the house and met in the yard. It’s a strange thing to say, but it was as if the house pushed you out.
‘Look at that view,’ visitors said, and it buoyed me up.
At first we decided to renovate before we moved in, but then our rental sold so I suggested we should live in the house while we planned. This will be great, I told David, like camping. We’ll understand the breezeways, the play of light at different times of day. It will make for a better renovation.
Before we moved in, we arranged for the men who wear special suits to remove the asbestos sheets that lined the kitchen and laundry. After they finished, our builder Dave found live termites in the back half of the house. The termites had eaten out most of the western wall, which we’d have to replace when we removed the aluminium cladding. Termites don’t like hardwood, the termite exterminator told us, so the structure was probably okay. He was strangely enthusiastic. He described the termites’ achievements like they were his children making the honour roll.
During the Christmas break, we went to the house intending to remove the wallpaper from the living and dining rooms and clean the mouldy ceilings. We’d already taken up the carpets after they filled the vacuum cleaner four times and were still nowhere near clean. We were to move in at New Year. Where the men in special suits had removed the asbestos sheets, Dave had put up plasterboard as a temporary fix. Our light switches hung out of the walls on bits of taped-up wire.
We used an abrading tool to score the wallpaper in the dining room, planning to steam it off so we could paint. I let Otis use the abrading tool, like a pizza wheel with spikes, as this was something he could do. Late on the first evening, I asked David why the wallpaper colour looked powdery, like lead paint looks powdery. We tested and found out that the wallpaper was full of lead. Lead was used in wallpaper dyes as well as paint, apparently, although most people don’t know that. We had been letting Otis help all day. There were flakes of leaded paper everywhere.
We stopped immediately, removed Otis from the house and then cleaned the floors and masked as much as we could of the remaining leaded surfaces with paint or tape.
We researched lead poisoning. Children take up heavy metals at twice the rate of adults. A piece of lead paint the size of a ten-cent piece would kill Otis. Smaller amounts would affect his growth and brain development. In the United States, lead has been named the number one environmental hazard for children. We agonised over whether to get Otis tested, decided against it as the pain of a blood test seemed unfair and there was nothing we could do if we had poisoned him but wait.
Life-threatening acute lead poisoning is treated with chelating agents, chemicals that bind with the molecules of lead and take them out of the body. Chelating agents are themselves hazardous to human health. Sometimes they damage the liver or kidneys on their way through the body. But if the alternative is death, chelating agents are better than nothing. For chronic lead poisoning, chelating agents are not used. They’re too dangerous. The only thing you can do is wait and hope. We masked and re-masked whatever leaded surfaces we came across and prepared to move in as planned at New Year.
When we started packing up to move, I realised I didn’t want to bring my father’s ashes with us to our new house.
Dad had died five years before. His ashes had followed me from Stanley Terrace, where he was in the laundry tub cupboard and couldn’t see the fig tree, to Prospect Terrace, where he took up the back of the garage and missed the view of the gum tree in the bushland reserve, to the rented house that had nothing more than a backyard shed for him, though with louvres through which an edge of a mango tree was visible. I wasn’t proud of the way I’d kept him, but I hadn’t known what to do with him.
I had the ashes because the woman Dad had been living with when he died, Pat, offered them to us once Dad was cremated. My brothers had no interest. Mum was still in Perth. So I’d taken them.
Ian and I met Pat and her daughter for the first time at the funeral home where the consultant (that’s what it said on her badge)—who had amazing fairy-floss-pink hair in a beehive—took us through possible coffin accessories. Pat and her daughter, the mother of a toddler, wanted to put a teddy bear on the coffin because, they said, Dugald so loved teddy bears. He regularly gave them to the toddler. Pat and her daughter wanted a teddy bear rather than a cross.
Pretending I was not, as a middle-aged woman, narcissistically wounded by my father’s affection for this unknown toddler—the affection he had never shown me, his actual daughter—I began to wonder if we were in the right meeting. I know denial is a natural phase of grief, but the Dugald Ian and I knew did not love teddy bears. He eschewed sentimentality of any kind. He told us Santa Claus was made up and thought ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ was a love song. His most frequent morning greeting was, ‘You kids, shut up!’ delivered in a considerable state of irritation because we’d made enough noise to disturb his sleep.
In the last decade of his life, Dad hadn’t responded when I called and left messages. He’d lost touch with Mum as well, after he’d asked her to marry him again and she’d refused him (pride, you have to have some pride, she told me). I later learned he’d written near the end to tell her he was dying—metastatic brain cancer by the time they found it—and she’d spoken to him several times, but then he’d stopped calling. He’d also told her she wasn’t to tell us he was dying, so she didn’t.
I had a notion that if I could put my father to rest with his own mother, who had loved him dearly, I might find some peace about his death. By telephone, I confirmed that my grandmother’s ashes were in a box in a wall at the crematorium gardens at Albany Creek north of Brisbane.
The next day, I put my father in the car beside me and drove out to the crematorium. I took Otis with me, explaining on the way the best I could the difference between cremation and burial, hoping that when we got there he wouldn’t ask where the furnace was, hoping he would fall into a much-needed sleep on the way home. When we arrived, I left my father’s ashes in the car and went inside with Otis. I didn’t have an appointment.
I had told Susan, the consultant I’d spoken to on the phone, that I was seeking to lay my father to rest with his mother. We found two adjacent niches overlooking the garden.
‘This will do,’ I said. ‘This will be perfect.’
‘It will cost you to move your grandmother,’ Susan said. ‘And you’ll need authority.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said.
‘And time,’ she said. ‘It will take time.’
There’s no nice way to dump your father’s ashes. While Susan answered a call, I took Otis and went out to the hot car and picked up Dad, whose sealed plastic urn was still in the Body Shop paper bag I’d carried it through three houses in. I took Dad and left him on Susan’s desk and made an exit while she was still on the phone. Urgent, I mouthed. We’re moving.
She stared at me as I backed out of her office.
Having done nothing for years, I found myself needing to deal with my father’s remains now. I was becoming used to this new self that needed to do things now. It was as if my body was running the show for the first time in years, and I had as much choice as a newborn baby and no loud squeal with which to protest.
A few days later, I received a receipt for my father’s ashes from Susan, together with a quote and many forms that needed many signatures.
We moved in after New Year as planned. I tried to create a home at Thomas Street but I didn’t have enough energy to contend with a house that disagreed so vehemently. Come a cold snap in April, we discovered rats. I found evidence of them, a half-chewed apple, and then I started to hear them gnawing the wood inside the cupboards in the night. They are habitual gnawers, apparently, to keep their teeth a length that suits them.
Our rats lived in the roof cavity and came down in the night through the places where there were still no walls and ceilings, the front veranda, the lean-to laundry and toilet out the back. I was seeing a counsellor at the time, and he told me that rats will attack small children. He had a rat phobia, I learned, but for a few weeks, until we dealt with the rats, I slept in Otis’s bed with him.
We set traps, baited with bread and peanut butter sprinkled with chocolate, all organic. I’d hear the traps snap in the night but the rats didn’t die; they thumped around the kitchen with the traps on their backs. David had to go out and use a shovel to send them on to the next life. Finally, I bought poison, something I thought I would never do, and threw it into the ceiling cavity. The rats stopped coming.
I called the men in special suits to come back. Otis had found so many pieces of asbestos in the backyard that I could build a wall with it, I told them. I said the terminal diseases caused by asbestos—mesothelioma and lung cancer—take thirty years to manifest themselves and that while for David and me it was less important, for Otis it was a huge burden. He is three, I said. He will die a young man if you don’t find all the asbestos. They stared at me and didn’t say anything.
It was June and the house was a refrigerator. There were holes in the walls, in the floor, and no insulation in the roof. I was swimming at South Bank in unheated water. It was so cold I would shiver uncontrollably after I got out. In those months of midwinter, my swimming was something akin to ice bath treatment in a nineteenth-century Scottish mental hospital. When I was this cold, I forgot what I was upset about.
Otis was happy, oblivious to the dangers and relieved he was able to draw on the walls to his heart’s content since they were coming down in the renovation, but I feared for David. He became more inward-looking. I think he worried about money, about how we’d afford the house if my life disintegrated any further. I was still meeting my work commitments but only barely. Someone told us that many renovations end in divorce. The architect did drawing after drawing but none of them worked.
Some mornings I arrived home from the ride into South Bank to swim and as I climbed the stairs to the front door felt heavier with each step until I reached the threshold. I wanted neither to go nor stay, just to remain there forever in the morning sun. It was the strangest feeling. I started to believe it had to do with the physical house as well as the house of my addled mind.