The auction.

We sat down at 10 o’clock - hipster breakfast time - in a 1980s cafe (you can tell by the aged clientele) in the shopping strip that runs east-west a few hundred metres from the house; the house that will, in two hours plus auctioneer spiel time, fall out of the family’s ownership for the first time in 74 years, signalled by the anti-climactic slap, like an egg cracking, of a rolled-up contract into the auctioneer’s left hand. Or his right, if he is left-handed.

The shopping strip is a drawcard because it has cafes which have ascended the real estate pecking order of residential desirability to rank narrowly below ‘schools’; in some cases above. Our cafe, cornily named Strudels despite bearing no apparent affinity with Northern European cuisine, culture, staff or décor - indeed, it is run as so many of these places are by an industrious ex-subcontinental family - stands where once an aircraft engine maintenance plant dominated the block, its massive patients - Rolls-Royce Darts from Vickers Viscounts, Pratt and Whitneys from DC-3s and Fokker Friendships - starting their daily wail at six in the sound-carrying mornings of my childhood; deep, urgent, like waking dinosaurs, reaching a high-pitched whine which never, intriguingly, sounded as loud as the screaming motorcycle whose leatherclad rider from four doors up passed every morning, oil-blackened Triumph crescendoing outside my house before slowing for the corner. 

Siblings, there are four present, eat toast and eggs and curls of well-grilled bacon and glistening brown halved mushrooms and green trimmings and pancakes, and drink coffee the colour of my father’s khaki World War Two hat, never worn in action, and hung later, in the comfortable 1950s, on a wall in the garage of that waiting house, a useless souvenir. His ‘participation’ medals were lost decades ago; ANZAC Day marches never saw a glint of them, nor him; to hell with war and its juvenile annual birthday-like anniversaries, he must have thought. 

We had met in the cafe because the house would host its final inspection before being sold. The last temptation. 

I parked around the corner. The street’s original 1940s narrowness was no problem until the multi-car-family adopted trucks. A crowd, like one watching a building on fire, made a ragged circle under warm sunshine - the last day of autumn, and no clichéd falling leaves in sight - three houses from the corner, on the hill down which I once rode, aged four, out of control on a tricycle, onto the road, colliding into the side of a moving car. 

The auctioneer, wearing a three-quarter length double-breasted black overcoat, unbuttoned for an air of casual urbanity, rang the bell, faced east in front of the house in which I awoke 7305 times, and auctioned it to the highest bidder.