The pub - hotel - mentioned in the previous post was, of course, Poynton’s Carlton Club, on the corner of Grattan and Cardigan, opposite the Royal Women's Hospital. The Carlton Club was three short blocks from the small terrace house, whitewashed brick in the fashion of the Greeks (the owner was Con, a barman at the Continental Hotel in Lonsdale Street, to whom I paid the rent), in which we lived for five Arcadian years (an Arcadia chequered by the stop-start linear domesticities of child-raising; the eternal nightmare-producing (even now) failure to complete a degree; and the death, one late night, of an older sibling, announced at the door by a couple of dark blue uniforms whose lines and colouration and stance and timing told me all I needed to know.
Nine minutes walk, slightly downhill; across Elgin, Faraday, and Grattan. The hotel’s Cardigan Street side had a separate door with a 1950s backlit and illustrated sign over it: Pink Pussy Cat Bistro, the cartoonish cat a slender pink arc with a black accented, like make-up, smiling face, as close to an Audrey Hepburn impression as a cat could get. I was a wine waiter, Friday and Saturday nights, and drinks for the waiters were on the house, within reason.
Home by midnight, or one o’clock. The front door of the faux-Greek terrace opened directly, up two steps, from the street, European-village-style. Behind it, a hallway with two bedrooms off led to a living room and kitchen conjoined in a sunny L, afternoon-lit by a west window. A rusty orange carpet flowed through the whole thing. Another door opened to a small yard, with an exterior laundry and a WC facing a length of brick-edged garden in which a rubber plant and some monsteras tangled. A clothesline on which squares of white terry-towelling, pre-disposables, were pegged ran the length of the yard. At the house end a spider made a home long enough one summer for the growing toddlers to give it a name.
The house was a few minute’s walk to Melbourne University, whose grounds became a default park, especially during deserted term breaks, for the two children. Dressed in pastel-hued T-shirts, shorts and sandals, their tiny dimpled calves and quadriceps motored furiously as they powered their miniature single-geared tricycles past history, medicine, ancient language and physics, through an arched stone quadrangle that seemed colder in its summer emptiness, and emerged on a treed lawn edged by a long oblong ornamental pond. A modern sculpture of black metal, all angles and slopes like a giant grasshopper, became a slide and they threw aside their tricycles to climb its avant garde angles, except on intense summer days when the fiery black steel might burn their pale tender skin.
On some afternoons I left them napping with their mother, eyelashes like small splayed paintbrushes resting on cheeks still pink-flushed from some morning exertion, and took my book to the shaded pond-edged lawn. On several November days in 1980 I read Raymond Chandler - The Long Goodbye? Farewell My Lovely? Killer in the Rain? - under the burgeoning pale-green canopy of some spring-warmed tree, sap rising, the arboreal equivalent of a human’s new-season optimism.
Comments
Post a Comment