Our plan was to do all those things that you were supposed to do on Sundays, but which we never got around to doing. The sort of things we used to do on Sundays when we were kids. Both Lucy and I had memories of Sundays being about packing the car and going somewhere new. For me in Canberra, it was often into the bush for a walk, or a picnic near a river. I would always take a book to read on the way there, but never quite get around to opening it because I wanted to see what was around the next corner. Then there was the anticipation of arriving and exploring, poking about down the river or seeing where a bush track led. My favourite places were those where there was no one else in sight, and I would imagine we were discovering the place for the first time. That, in the old days, was a Sunday.
That sense of discovery was what we wanted to recapture, but how could we in a city we had both lived in for so long? The answer was to start thinking like tourists. Whenever I visited somewhere new, whether it was Paris or Parkes, I’d spend a couple of hours wandering about trying to get a feel for the place. But I never did that in Sydney. Everywhere I went was for a purpose. I’d go, do what I had to do, then come home. If I went to a friend’s house in a part of town I’d never been to before, I’d go straight there and come straight back. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that there were all sorts of places within a hour’s drive of home that I had no idea about.
Sitting on the train on the way to work that day, I realised that the pattern of my life had become entirely predictable. I woke up, I hung out, I went to work, I came home and I went to sleep again. Sometimes I’d go to the movies or to one of six parks or three beaches, or to visit one or two of a couple of dozen friends.
My life wasn’t boring. I liked most of it and it was all pretty comfortable, but I clung to my patterns. Pretty much all my life occurred at home or at work, or at a few other places within 10 kilometres of where I lived. If anyone ever wanted to assassinate me it’d be easy. They’d know exactly where I was going to be pretty much any time, any day.
And the day after I got assassinated, when I was having my exit interview and it was put to me that for years and years I had spent week after week after week doing pretty much exactly the same thing and following pretty much exactly the same not-all-that-challenging routine, how would I feel?
Slightly embarrassed, I think.
So this was my chance to break those patterns, to go places I had never been before and explore them, like Marco Polo and Vasco da Gama and Captain Cook had before me. Well, not quite like them, because they went places that no one had ever been before, whereas we were just going to go to places that we hadn’t been before and, okay,maybe exploring different areas of the city in which we’d lived for many years wasn’t quite as exciting as travelling halfway around the world and discovering new continents and civilisations and bringing back gunpowder and beef and black bean sauce and whatever else Marco Polo brought back, but the point was that we would be exploring— seeing new things, breaking patterns and, most importantly, getting away from those loud bastards with their drills and their radios.
And the other important point was that in accepting this idea I had stopped panicking about the builders and the impact they were going to have on my life and now had at least an illusion of control. That was very important.
That night we made a list of places to go. We agreed that we should ease into it. Or at least I insisted. Whereas we planned to normally only go to places neither of us had been to before or knew much about, our first destination was familiar. Bronte Park.
The next morning the demolition continued so we had no trouble motivating ourselves to get going. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for property developers, but there must be an anxious period when the first thing you do after buying a very expensive asset is destroy it. After just one day the nice family home Ivan had bought looked like something out of a war zone. In real estate talk, ‘A Little Bit of Beirut in the East.’
Bronte Park is at Bronte Beach. Unlike most beachside parks, which are merely strips of grass that separate road and sand, it’s a huge green expanse that eventually thins into a tree-lined gorge and runs deep back into the suburb. At the south end of the park—and the beach—are what used to be the Bronte shops and are now the Bronte cafés. Ten years ago there was the normal variety of suburban shops, newsagent, greengrocer, mini-mart, etc. One by one they all became cafés. There are eight in a row, with a fish and chippery at the end thrown in for variety. It’s an indication that Bronte—like all Sydney’s eastern suburbs beaches—is now primarily for visitors.
I couldn’t help feeling for the locals. The only way to buy milk at the Bronte shops now is to order a cold flat white without the coffee, and if you need some bread you have to either order a goat’s cheese, asparagus and prosciutto focaccia without the goat’s cheese, asparagus and prosciutto, or nick half a slice of sourdough from someone who hasn’t quite finished their scrambled eggs with the lot.
What makes Bronte so beautiful is the way the park and beach connect. At Bondi there is a beautiful park and a beautiful beach, which are for some reason separated by an ugly carpark. To get from the grass and the playground to the sand you have to look to your left, look to your right, then look to your left again. Not having to do that ups the relaxation factor considerably. There is plenty of parking at Bronte but it’s tucked out of the way.
While the visitor population is high on weekends, locals do exist and this morning one particular variety was in abundance— the sixty-something newly retired ocker male. There were a couple of dozen of them spread around, none wearing anything other than Speedos, and all with those impossible beer guts that are attached to otherwise fit-looking bodies and seeming as if they have no right to be there. They appear affixed in the same way as a grass catcher is to a lawnmower, and it would be no surprise to see someone whip his off and empty the contents (presumably 15 litres of VB) into the bin.
They lie in groups in the sun and all talk a bit louder than necessary, as people who reckon they own the joint do. Even though we had just emerged from winter, they were already ridiculously brown, with skin the colour and texture of desert boots.
One was talking to a similarly aged German woman whose English wasn’t all that good.
‘WE CALL THEM THONGS,’ he shouted, pointing to his footwear. ‘NOT FLIP-FLOPS. NONOEY. YES. THONGS. GOOD FOR THE SHOWER. YES?’
The woman looked nervous. I wondered if I should go over and explain that his shouting wasn’t meant to be aggressive, just slightly patronising. But she probably wouldn’t understand me either, and I’d end up shouting too. Then she’d be doubly nervous.
‘THANK YOU FOR SUCH KIND OFFER,’ she replied, just as loudly, ‘BUT I HAVE SHOWER AT HOME. I WILL HAVE SHOWER ALONE. NOT WITH YOU. THANK YOU.’
‘NO. I DIDN’T MEAN . . . AHHH!’ and with that frustrated sound he threw his arms up, turned on his heel and strode off with a peculiar legs-tied-together-with-an-invisible-rope-so-can-only-take-very-small-steps gait.
We picked a spot in the grass under a tree on a bank, just high enough that we could see the sea. Bibi explored the vicinity. A guy played guitar under another tree. At first it seemed idyllic, but then I noticed he kept looking around and I worried he might be the world’s worst-located busker. There’s not much passing traffic in a big fat park on a Tuesday morning.
Up the north end of the park near the swings and playgrounds were the mums and bubs. They hunt in packs, the mums, up to fifteen clustered tight in picnic circles, with three-wheeled racing prams strategically placed covered-wagon-style around the outside in case of attack. Around lunchtime a couple of dads arrived from the office, one going so far as to remove his tie for 23 minutes of quality time before the free enterprise system claimed him back.
Bibi and I escorted Lucy to the seawater pool, which looked inviting but felt freezing. After dipping her toe in, then pulling it out very quickly, Lucy would have changed her mind—but luckily, when in the car she had recklessly declared she was going to go for a swim, I had had the foresight to cement her bold declaration into a 50-cent bet. She was trapped.
In the time it took her to descend three steps to be waist deep, a local had stripped off, got in and swum five laps at the sort of pace that would have had him being overtaken by a floating twig. When Lucy was rib deep he was onto lap eight.
‘Look, Beeb, there’s Mummy shivering.’
‘Shut up.’
‘It’s easier if you just jump straight in, you know.’
‘It might also be easier if you jammed one of my sandals into your mouth.’
‘Hey, it’s only 50 cents.’
But she hadn’t heard. As if I had become Laurie Lawrence, my words had motivated action beyond normal human capabilities. She had dived in. I looked at the old local, now halfway down lap nine. He had a big start, but Luce was fired up. She’d catch him in minutes. She’d zoom up and down and . . .
‘Okay. Pay up.’
Lucy was beside me, shaking and covered in towel. She had virtually teleported onto the edge of the pool, so fast had she got out.
When she stopped shaking, we wandered back up the park past the little train that ran round a 100-metre track in the park. It was packed away this day in a little train-shaped house. We sat down and I lay back and thought how brilliantly clever I had been to escape the builders. All right, how brilliantly clever we had been. Okay, Lucy had been. But I’d agreed.
I thought about the importance of peace and quiet for mental health, how necessary it was to . . . WWWWAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!! WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?
An engine.
A really loud engine.
So loud you had to shout your thoughts to hear them inside your head.
What, had they followed us here? Was the demolishing of number eighteen merely a cover to hide their real aim of driving us mad? I looked up. No planes. Then around. No tractors, no cars, no lawnmowers. There! A leafblower. A guy from the council with a leafblower. A really loud leafblower. And he knew it was loud too. That’s why he had earmuffs on.
The train of thoughts flowing through my mind was instantly replaced by the repeating loop of This leafblower is really loud, I hope it stops soon, I wonder if, after he does this path, he’s going to do that other path. This leafblower is really loud, I hope it stops soon, I wonder if, after he does this path, he’s going to do that other path. This leafblower is . . .
The quiet was gone. The peace was gone. I wondered why no one had been able to invent something that did what a leafblower did but was quiet. Then I realised they had. It’s called a broom and it’s not only quieter but cheaper, easier to carry and environmentally friendlier. And brooms don’t break down. But they do take just a little bit of effort to operate and that, obviously, disqualifies them as suitable council equipment.
‘Owwwhhhh,’ I said.
Lucy was strangely unperplexed.
‘Don’t worry, he’s just cleaning the paths.’
‘But it’s so loud.’ I got out my phone. ‘I’m going to ring the council and complain.’
‘Don’t ring the council.’
‘The council are supposed to be making our lives better, not worse. If he had a broom, he could do exactly the same thing, except it’d be quiet and he’d be getting some exercise which would be good for him. I’m ringing them.’
I started dialling.
‘They’ll think you’re a nut.’
I stopped dialling. She was right. I didn’t want to be that crazy guy who hates leafblowers. Leafblowers are probably part of world’s best practice. Perhaps there’s an occupational health and safety regulation prohibiting brooms as being needlessly wearing to backs and shoulders.
I sighed.
‘Do you reckon this is some sort of conspiracy?’ I said.