The empty house.

A hot Friday morning, oddly quiet. On ANZAC Day, everything is closed and nothing happens except a football game at three in the afternoon. Everything before that is forbidden. Odd also, given the previous Friday, Good Friday, had been chaos on the roads, a day to race around and prepare for Easter, go camping, buy chocolate rabbits to hide for the kids, whatever. ANZAC Day, no. State-sponsored faux romanticism is the new religion; the papers, what’s left of them, are full of decrepit hundred-year-olds wearing rotting ribbons and old medals, having lived five times as long as the boys of eighteen and nineteen who threw their bullet-ridden bodies, full of hope and the seed of alpha-children, into French mud, all in the cause of the King. 

Nothing to do. So I went on a walk, across a valley and three suburbs. 

And back again. I set off under an intense mid-morning sun, passing houses with half-drawn blinds like sleepy eyes. Through the Vale, past the football ground and diagonally through the grounds of the1960s Catholic church, noticing that the little memorial plaques on metal stems beneath the trees in the car end-spaces have mostly been bent over by clumsy parking. Then down the Gaffney Street hill, steepest in Melbourne, trying not to run, and imagining the horror of pushing a pram and losing grip; and finally into the severe valley carved out by the million-years-old Moonee Ponds creek. The railway line runs north here, along the contour, past a fussy cluster of shops - beauty, phone repairs, massage, burgers - that crowds the railway station with its urgent essentialities. I crossed the tracks and climbed the other side, not as steep, into affluent, Lexus-laden Strathmore, a kind of imitation Brighton. Across Bulla Road,  uncharacteristically devoid this morning of cars queuing for DFO, I continued in the shadow of the freeway wall along the pathway that makes a triangle with Bulla Road and Keilor Road. Then south into the ancestral street. 

The lonely house, visibly corrugated (if, close to the front, you looked along its northern timbered flank) due to gently sinking stumps, sat off-white in its late-autumn private sunshine. The dusky colour peeled in elaborate curls here and there, revealing olive green, a reminder of someone long gone - my father - whose tone decisions reflected the decorator fashions of the time. Beneath the lithosphere of paint colours, two or three below the green, rests the original battleship grey set off by yellow window surrounds, a fossilised expression of 1950s home-and-family post-war optimism. This shade of idealism - was it warranted? did it endure? - was followed by canary yellow in the flower power era, and - several children later - by that earthy olive green, its 1970s post-hippy hue blending mud-brick sensibility with tree-house euphoria. Now, peeking through the top layer, it was resurfacing like ancient bones through melting snow.

Corrugated and lonely now. Ironically, I had yearned for loneliness here once; to be free of the madding crowd of waifs gathered like field flowers by my Mrs Jellyby mother, who picked them up among her church friends and her community aid groups and in hospital waiting rooms and cafes and on trams; and who brought them home like long-lost cousins; transients, drifters, wanderers, I had supposed; but in reality, they were mostly mirror-vision upper middle class types drinking tea from my mug before returning to leaf-land. 

*

On the rare days when the house is empty - usually a Sunday afternoon - I sit in one of the mute living room chairs, turn on the black and white television set and watch a young, jerky, Itzhak Perlman with I Solisti Veneti under Claudio Scimone; or read Forster or play Grieg records, my only other company the cat, also black and white, but now re-coloured gold, having strolled languorously into the room and sat in the mote-flecked sunshine that crawls slowly across the carpet. Hours slip by, too fast; and a motor car’s rising hum as it turns in off the street signals the return of portions of family and new, fleeting, friends.

*

I looked around the house to see that everything was in some kind of order - the real estate people will be here this week, pointing cameras at empty rooms like forensic photographers shooting murdered bodies; carted a few things into the rubbish, put the bin out, took a long drink of ancestral water, locked the house, and left. 

The return journey always seems quicker, even when walking.