Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe Page 2

  There were problems with the sewage: the first real indication of the haste with which, especially in the final stages, the estate had been built and what effect this had on the workers’ attention to detail. The sewage pipes were connected to each house, to be sure, and these pipes linked to the main line which was to carry the effluent away. But further to that no plans were made and, as was later found, the main line simply stopped about twenty metres beyond North-East Court and discharged its contents there. At this point, on the northern fringe of the estate, a small creek passes in an east-west direction before turning south towards the sea—usually drying to a trickle in summer but often flooded in winter—and it’s into this creek that the sewage found its way. (It is an even greater cause for disbelief to remember that, at the time, there was a plan to dam this creek at a point a little west of the estate, excavate a large area east of this dam and so create a lake that was to become the central feature of a five-hectare recreational park.) The creek began to stink, so much so that those who had bought houses on the northern edge (and they were not a few, having heard and believed the story of the park) soon applied to swap them for houses on the other side of the estate. The northern sector became deserted. The petrol station, despite the endless promises, was and remained no more than a large concrete slab that had been hastily poured one afternoon a week or so after the opening. Four square metal plates with four rusting bolts in each were the only evidence left that they ever had any intention of returning to erect the structure. Finally, as if to rub salt into our wounds, we soon found that not a single telephone on the estate worked: every phone was dead.

  With the odour of sewage wafting through our doors and windows whenever the breeze was from the north and with the realisation that the offer of discount petrol had been no more than an empty promise, many people quickly made plans to get out. For Sale signs went up in the front yards of a number of houses but the grass grew thick around them. Rumours of the estate’s problems had already reached back to the city and no-one wanted to buy. A few households took down the signs and decided, with a certain fatalism that marked the period to follow, to stay; others, desperate to get out at any cost, eventually sold their houses back to the government at a fraction of the price they’d paid for them. In this way we lost (I’m speaking of the first twelve months here) eight families in all: those that remained had quickly established themselves in the southern part of the estate, as far away as possible from the creek. The northern part quickly fell into neglect; wild grass, gorse and thistle took over and grew to chest height in the yards and gardens. Weeds forced their way up through and widened the cracks in the footpaths and streets. With the combined weight of sometimes ten or twenty birds’ nests the eaves on the houses began to sag and collapse. And, in the case of those houses on the very northern edge, the combined forces of the first winter’s rains, a swollen creek and a small moving sea of effluent soon served to undermine the foundations. The houses themselves began to sag and crack—in one case a whole front wall falling over onto the lawn, exposing an empty lounge room with the paint already flaking from the walls and the half-rotted body of an old stray dog inside.

  By the end of the second year (Inauguration Day was marked by a small protest in the square) many more people had left, but a relative handful, some fifty in all, had decided to stay. Though no-one believed in the petrol station any more, the freeway was still a hard dream to give up. As the greater part of the estate began to fall apart around us, the remaining population—concentrated around and to the south of the square—were drawn together all the more tightly. We believed, despite the unfinished works and unfulfilled promises, that the freeway would come: it was hard for us to believe how it could not, given that the whole rationale of the estate’s existence was based on the very fact of its coming. It was only a matter of waiting, we told ourselves, and of making the best of it in the meantime.

  But such faith was misguided: by the end of the third year, still without a freeway and with the population now reduced to a mere twenty-seven adults, five children and an uncountable number of dogs and cats, the real situation became clear. The original planners had made a mistake: they’d built an estate over fifty kilometres north of the city but the fact was that in the intervening years it had become clear to everyone that the north was not the place to be. Under the influence of various private property developers who, soon after the declared government backing of a northward expansion, had wisely bought up vast tracts of land on the much more lush and hospitable eastern belt, the suburbs had begun to march unstoppably in that direction. Housing was cheap, one estate was quickly grafted onto the next to form whole new suburbs, families moved there by the thousands, new business and employment opportunities flourished and before long the expansion had moved so far out that the idea of building a freeway north at the expense of the much more obvious needs of those in the east became, for those originally responsible for our estate, unsustainable. The northern freeway was ‘temporarily delayed’ (as if it had not been delayed already) and all the money, equipment and manpower was immediately transferred to the construction of a new eastern freeway, to be completed with all possible haste.

  The north was suddenly and quite brutally forgotten. All those previously responsible for the estate’s planning and construction quickly wiped their hands of it and turned their eyes to the east. The estate fell back in on itself, more isolated than ever. House prices fell dramatically again (they were now hardly worth more than the dry earth they stood on) and, however much they may have wanted to get out, few people could afford to sell at such a loss. We protested, of course, and the government, no doubt driven by guilt, responded to our protests with the payment of a small monthly subsidy to those hardy residents who had decided to stay. Rest assured, they said, the freeway will come—but the wait may be a long one and we should not be made to suffer in the meantime. Finally, and a little ridiculously, as if to expunge any remaining guilt, a telephone box for which no coins were needed suddenly appeared overnight in the square.

  The original dream was shattered, all but the deluded had fled, and in the end six three-bedroom solid brick homes on South Street and one, incongruously, on the edge of North Court, were occupied by one person each.

  So this was the estate, the Outer Suburban Village Development Complex, as the sign on the access road called it, a now dead and forgotten place, testament for any visitor who may chance upon it—and they, believe me, were few—to some now very anonymous architect’s grand but misguided vision. We gathered in the square of an evening to drink and talk (it was summer when the last rat jumped ship and left us seven to sink or swim) and at that hour, as the heat of the day began to subside—and the heat out there in the height of summer was almost unbearable—the estate did for a time begin to resemble as closely as it ever might the village the original planners had in mind. Ignore the empty and tumbledown houses, the gardens of wild grass and gorse, pass over the stench from the creek and the streets and footpaths riven with cracks, and you might almost see the faint stirrings of a new community being born.

  Around us on the square the shops remained empty and ghost-infested, white masking tape crosses still stuck to their windows. Weeds crept up through the cracks at our feet, starlings flew home to roost under the supermarket awning. Far, far away you could hear the tortured bellowing of a cow. On the grass plantation in the centre of the square, where the bronze plaque still stood as a somewhat incongruous reminder of an old dream long faded, a motley assortment of dogs and cats gathered to sniff, gambol and doze. The evenings fell slowly, casting long shadows across the square, and, clear as we were of the city lights, night revealed above us a magical cupola of stars.

  three

  All that, all talk of that, all that hard imagining of things so far away and long gone, leaves me empty and cold. It’s as if I had invented it all, in order to speak of other things. But it happened, I was there, and the more I look back on it the more I come to believe that the lo
ng stretch of time up to those evenings I’ve described, the history of the estate per se, was in fact mere prehistory and that that moment, somewhere there, under the stars, was the real beginning. But that’s the trouble. It was always the beginning, has always been and probably always will be. Even now, don’t I sometimes lie in my bed at night and dream of a new estate rising from the ruins? Don’t I say to myself, Bram, take heart, keep faith, this may merely be the prelude of greater things to come? But then who am I to speak at all, to pretend to give a description of something that is still, to this day, beyond even my comprehension? I’m a nobody really, and should shut my mouth.

  I came to the estate, alone and untroubled by my aloneness, with no greater ambition than to set up a small local paper—The Voice—which, I had calculated, by selling to nine hundred and ninety residents at fifty cents a copy, would have not only recouped its costs but also given me a modest annual income. That was enough, I wanted no more. And in the early days a good few copies of The Voice did indeed run off the press that I had installed in my spare room and were sold through the newsagent’s in the square and my position as writer, editor and publisher did indeed afford me a certain standing in the community at the time, given that most of its pages were filled with accusatory articles and bombastic editorials about the one thing that was concerning us most: namely that we had been conned, and were now destined, it seemed, to end our days living in little more than a well-designed slum. And if my aforementioned calculations ended up falling a good deal short of the mark (a hundred and twenty-six official residents is a long way from nine hundred and ninety, and seven a long way further than that) and I was eventually forced to survive on my small amount of savings and the government’s monthly subsidy, still, my standing in the community was not lessened as a result and in some ways even strengthened (I could be indignant from personal experience now) and my opinions were still valued, indeed, often worshipped. But still, what does that qualify me for in the end? Perhaps this: to merely say that no description of the estate, no matter how scrupulous, could ever hope to be the true history itself. I am more qualified than most to set the record straight—and I’m sure my old friends and neighbours would agree—but the burden of truth is a heavy one that I’m often unable to bear.

  Out in the east the houses sprouted like mushrooms and marched on through the orchards and bush. Streets were filled with playing children, backyards filled with barbecues and beer, shopping centres on Friday evenings were a swirling joyous mass of humanity. It might have been another world, so far away was it from our small forgotten outpost in the north. There they grew shrubs and trees, green as emeralds in the sunlight, and walked or rode through parks and playing fields with sweet grass-smelling thoughts in their heads. (I don’t begrudge them their freeway and never have, they were obviously more deserving of it than us, but what sometimes irks me is that they took it for granted, as an almost inalienable right, not daring to consider that it was in fact ours to begin with and had without warning been cruelly snatched from us.) We by contrast lived like dry stones scattered under an unforgiving sky; we had no mighty river of a freeway to irrigate us, to give us cars and life. We had to make the best of what we had, hunker down, and find some way of sustaining this precarious, perhaps ridiculous, existence.

  We were an odd group, those seven residents who had each for their own reasons decided to stay, and I sometimes wonder how we all got on as well as we did for so long. Loners basically, of one sort or another, who had each wanted only to be an anonymous one among a population of a thousand but who were now the only residents left and the estate’s entire reason for being. It was Vito who eventually broke the ice. A wiry old Italian with a moustachioed smile whose leftish ideas had apparently got him into some trouble during the war (this at least was how he explained the missing finger), he had for some time been growing vegetables in his backyard. I waved to him occasionally, as he sat on his front porch of an evening. But, despite the undoubted skill of this loveable man, the soil in his backyard proved to be hard and unyielding. He produced a crop, and a decent crop too, enough in a good year to feed himself and occasionally leave a cabbage, a pumpkin or a bunch of carrots anonymously on our doorsteps, but they nowhere near approached the quality of the remembered vegetables of his youth. Then I saw him one day, out on a paddock south of the creek, just beyond North-East Court, with his shirt off and a shovel in his hand. He worked for weeks, alone, damming up the creek and diverting the effluent from the main sewage line off into a series of irrigation channels and throwing up beds of earth. He planted his seedlings out in rows and spent each day out on the paddock that spring lovingly tending to them. The following summer the crop came on: beans the size of zucchinis and zucchinis the size of melons. Late that summer Vito drove his first load of produce into town and returned to the estate that afternoon with an onion sack full of cash. This is for everyone, he said, as he stood on my doorstep: we can use it to make repairs and so on and keep everything looking good. I invited him inside and counted the money onto the table.

  That evening I wrote and printed a small leaflet that I posted the following morning in the square. It said, in effect, that on Vito’s initiative a petty cash account had now been formed which I had been entrusted with administering; anyone who for whatever reason needed money to tide them over from one week to the next need only apply in person for a small handout to be given, and if anyone, following Vito’s example, wished in their own way to contribute to this fund, then this too would obviously be welcomed. I further suggested that we now pool our monthly subsidies into a joint account in the bank in town, keep them there, and use the annual interest for any additional unforeseen costs.

  My leaflet had the desired effect and Vito’s spirit of enterprise soon became infectious. Nanna (we only ever knew her as Nanna), who had originally come to the estate to set up a flower shop on the square and keep herself busy in her retirement but who had never had more than a handful of customers darken her doorstep, now walked down the access road to the highway every weekend with a bucket of flowers and a foldaway chair and came back every evening with a jam jar full of coins. Craig the squatter, a young man in his early twenties who had taken up residence in one of the empty houses in South Street some time in the second year and who had lived there unchallenged ever since, began scavenging in the deserted houses for whatever he could sell to the secondhand dealer in town—door handles, tap fittings, stoves, carpets—and every Friday at five delivered the profits from these transactions to me in a white plastic bag. Each week Dave added two dozen bottles of his home-brewed beer to Vito’s produce and in a fit of benevolence Slug the real estate agent suddenly offered to buy us a trailer, a pump and a generator with no strings attached. Michael (mad Michael!) began shouldering his gun every morning at dawn and heading out on the paddocks to shoot rabbits, returning at lunchtime with perhaps a dozen strung on a coathanger at his waist: we took one each if we wanted, the rest went into town with the vegetables and were sold to the butcher there.

  An economy had been born—though, true, a strange one—with me as honorary if somewhat reluctant treasurer. Later that year, and by mutual agreement, all the cars on the estate except Vito’s station wagon were communally sold (what need had we of cars, we who had no freeway?) and this money was in turn added to the fund that I now kept in a shoebox in the bottom of my cupboard. We, more than anyone, were aware of our own ridiculousness—no-one who lived through that time could have failed to have a sense of humour—but nor could we ignore that small sense of belonging, of having made the best of a bad situation.

  The seasons began to assume a pattern, unimaginable in the early days when our preoccupations were more with freeways, petrol subsidies and sewage lines than the mysteries of sky and earth. After Vito’s paddock was flooded in winter and the first days of spring broke clear and blue, the beds were prepared and the planting begun. True, the majority of us would barely have glanced at the foul-smelling four hectares of market garden
through the long months of winter and might well have forgotten it was there, but come summer and the harvest it was the centre of our lives. Every morning Vito roused us from our beds with a blast on the horn, every evening the old station wagon came back from town with its sackful of cash and bootful of supplies, all washed down with bottle after bottle from Dave’s new batch of beer.

  The brewery had begun as a hobby, a small enterprise in the back corner of his garage; he’d perfected the art long before coming to the estate—he was a man well into his sixties—and had gained quite a reputation, as he always insisted on telling us, in the street where he used to live. He always made more than he could drink himself and would hand out bottles to his neighbours at Christmas wrapped in cellophane and tied with a bow. He’d lost his wife many years before and where under these circumstances many would have turned to their roses or orchids, Dave turned ever more passionately to the perfection of his brew. It was a wheat beer, brewed in the bottle, high in sugar content and rich with the sweet taste of fermentation. Occasionally in the silence of the night the sound of an exploding bottle could be heard echoing beneath the garage roof and rattling the roller door. Though the beer was Dave’s it was Slug’s idea to set up the bar (what an enterprising mind that man had!) and it was he who provided the premises.