I woke at 4.30am for a piss. Sam woke up too. We were like the walking dead stepping around each other in the dark, stop, reverse, proceed. It was as though we were on Dalek wheels, except in silence. We both drank water. It has been humid these last couple of days and the bedroom was hot. When I got back into bed, I couldn’t sleep, I tossed and turned. I lay there with the doona over me, I lay there uncovered. It didn’t seem to make any difference to how warm I was feeling if I had the doona on, or not.
I got up at 4.45am.
Buddy didn’t seem to stir when I opened the back door and called into the door of his house. I returned to the coffee table leaving the back door open and he soon came padding into the room.
At 4.55am, “Where is he?” Buddy was at our bedroom door, cowering as he thought I’d come up stairs to retrieve him. (am I really that big and scary?) He scampered into the bedroom, after I opened the bedroom door, and jumped up onto to the bed. I think I heard him sneeze 5 times before I closed the door and walked away.
Sam was up not long after 5am. Buddy came trotting down from upstairs behind him. It is a new command he seems to understand, he understands when Sam says it. Buddy goes to sleep between us on the lounge room floor.
I rolled a few joints and felt “done.” It is debilitating pot, makes me sleepy. I got the big pillow and lay down on the floor in front of the fireplace. Buddy curled next to me, more curling on the edges of the woollen blanket than me.
I work at 8.30am, with Buddy perched on my hip with his two fat front paws, all 22 kilos of him, gazing down at me. Sam had been playing his Nintendo but he’d clearly gone back to bed.
He was back downstairs by 9am.
We fired up the Peugeot and headed off to Box Hill Central for Congee. It was a hot day. I’d worn the wrong clothes, I so wished I’d worn shorts and Crocs than jeans and runners.
We found a 3 hour car park for $1, in the old industrial feeling catacombs of car parks underneath the shopping centre. Then we rushed to the congee hall, the morning was getting late.
As we walked across the mall and into the main Box Hill Central building, I reminded Sam that this had been where, as kids, we drove up the mall, that was still a street then, and gave in our saucepans at the Chinese take away, on take away nights, at the Chinese restaurant that was just where the front door is now. I remember the building well, the old red brick train station and surrounding shops. It was a brick red streetscape that once stood here, now completely obliterated. Imagine the Melbourne we would have had, had we preserved what once stood in this street and we repurposed that into the major shopping centre that now stood in front of me?
Rather than this aging badly debutante of a building, looking every bit of its years now.
The congee was good. They came with a tarot cake and plate of noodles. The congee hall has always been in a state of renovation and while, admittedly, we hadn’t been for congee for a long time, the hall was completely renovated and colourful and busy for the first time that I’d ever seen, it seemed so vibrant.
We went to Harris Scarfs and bought a wrought iron baking dish, a hand held mixer, and two memory contour pillows.
We bought groceries, before we left, of course.
Then we went to Bunnings in Middleborough Road. We bought screws and hooks for the rose at the side of the house. We bought succulents to fill the plant gaps in the atrium. We bought potting mix to repot the succulents into bigger pots so they looked like more like substantial plants than tube stock.
We drove up Middleborough Road, all the way to Burwood. It seemed like a different world. It was an area of Melbourne that I was unfamiliar with, I felt like we were driving into a new world.
We came home down Canterbury Road. Through Box Hill. It all looked so different, to when I was a kid….
…have I told you that story? My mother’s mother bought my parents a block of land as a wedding present. My father and his brother were to build a house on it, and to use it as a collateral for a better house when the house was built. Well, my grandmother, always the property wheeler and dealer decided, when the house was nearly complete, that the house was taking too long to finish, and she sold the nearly finished house out from under my parents, essentially, leaving them destitute. They had spent all their money on building the house. It got messy. It went to court. Ultimately, mum & dad lost because the land was still in my grandmother’s name. Consequently, they never spoke again. When it all looked bleak, my gorgeous great aunt, the sister of my grandfather, who had always had ill feelings toward my grandmother, stepped in and bought my parents the house in Box Hill, for which they paid her back. But I digress…
…And then one corner, or, at least one corner of a corner, the houses looked uniquely familiar and we were driving up Station Street Box Hill South. It was the same, but different, to when we lived there, it all looked so leafy and green. The streets looked green and healthy, much more plump and green than I remember them being as a kid, when I rode my bike all over with my sister and my friends. Funny the things you remember.
We zipped past all the stupid weekend drivers who were just drifting along, who all lemmingly got in the middle lane leaving the left lane clear. It was easy passing them all, up the left lane, like taking candy from a baby.
We came home and changed immediately.
We smoked pot and drank tea and ate toast and vegemite.
David called, I didn’t answer, I was far too chilled by then for him.
I repotted the succulents. I put the washing on. We listened to Duffy. Our French doors out to the garden were open letting the glorious day in.
I rolled another joint. Sam told me off.
We drank more tea.
We ate noodles for dinner.
The pot was strong, the joints were plentiful and I ended up maggotted. We ended up on a couch each. We watched our library of recordings. I started to fall asleep during Chatty Man. Sam began watching me like a hawk. The moment my eyes were shut for more than five seconds, the day was declared to be at an end. The teli made a kerthunk noise.
“Off to bed!”
“Er what? No, I wasn’t asleep.”
“Yes, you were.”
It was 10pm.
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