housewarbling

I cannot describe what a privilege it is to have a home of my own after two years of house-guesting, couch-surfing, and six-week sublets. A friend who is also deeply introverted said, You must feel like a tortoise with no shell. I do! I did. But we’ve found a tiny high house with a tree-shadowed back deck, crowded between the new high-rises that despoil old Brisbane and at the same time bring her to life. Hemmed in by light industry, free from lawn mowers as nobody has the space, roaring with traffic all night and all day, wonderful. Within four days of first seeing the place we’d moved in.

Winter in Brisbane is beautiful. It’s not cold, but it’s cold. In a month’s time my beloved goes back to Berlin and my throat shrivels at the thought. But for now, a branch to rest on. Our first place together. An afternoon in the sun. A soft prong of furry grey ears that rises from the doona as I go in to collect my jacket off the hook.

At first it was like camping: a spacious, luxurious, first-world camping, serene in serendipity. We had cold showers and tea-light candles, newspaper for toilet roll. The flickering space so golden at night embraced us from the start. We moved our stuff in. I could feel, or felt I could feel, the kindliness of whoever lived here before, three exotic names in the letterbox, and the shallow tree resting out back with its branches never inactive, the artist who lives next door and who when we were chasing our cat spread his hands saying, “My yard is your yard,” the piercing weird tropical birds at night which that first night were louder than traffic, let me feel at last I was at home at last. Oh, at last, at last.

In the mornings I take a pair of double-handled mugs and scuttle down to the hole-in-the-wall cafe which spills with office workers. I take away two coffees and carry them uphill home. The neighbour who spends his days smoking behind a frangipani tree waves and I call back. From inside the house I can hear the morning mewling of my cat, who is back after two years lodging on the soft laps of my parents, who thus enabled me to travel and delay coming home. That’s if this is home: funny Brisbane, which doubles in size every time you turn your back, where we moved from Jakarta when I was twelve and which I left so many times, forever leaving, last heading south in 2003.

After four days’ flicker the power came on and I carried the stinking kerosene lamp outdoors. We had hunted down the kerosene in the local midnight convenience, in its ribbed bottle that in ribbing says poison; on the lowest shelf, but with child-proof cap. It stood next to a bottle of clear methylated spirits. The corner shop when I lived in West End used to sell meths cold, from the fridge. I remembered that, and the painter friends in a rickety place in Paddington who agonised over the old man who liked to take refuge under their high house on a steep slope to drink his meths and milk. This was years ago. He was rotting himself. They were relieved he didn’t smoke. These houses are like matchboxes on stilts and it’s a revelation to a Berliner how it can be colder inside the house than it is outside in the mid-morning winter sun. The whole place would go up in a giant torch, the house itself is tinder.

I set fire to my house once, late one night. I set a pan of oil on to heat and then sat down to write. Maybe that’s a story for another occasion. The firemen came clanging down our narrow street and couldn’t get through, they had to leave the vehicle and leap out, they rushed in and stomped through, after I’d put the fire out, in their giant boots and yellow rubber overalls. The guy in charge swept a glance up and down my walls, which were floor-to-ceiling books, and said, “This House…. is a Fire Trap. You have got to get rid of some paper.” I was glad, then, to be rid of the flammable kero, its brilliant, electric, improbable blue. Carrying it to the checkout I realised something, and said to the plump fellow staffing the till, “Hey! They probably added this colour because it looks toxic – to show that it’s poison. There’s nothing like it in nature. But, now… we actually have energy drinks that are exactly this colour!”

“Yeah,” he said, incurious, bagging my groceries though I’d said, “No bag,” standing unmoved as I fetched them back out again and piled them under my arms. Sometimes it seems the whole world is an artificial blue whose dire warning passes unheeded. Sirens are not lovely temptresses on wet rocks, combing and combing themselves, calling us off-course to pleasure, but flashing kerosene-coloured lights that revolve with a wet sound that’s unbearable and which we tune out and ignore. I wonder how deep have we poisoned our minds. Are we lit inside like the material world, carpeted in concrete and no longer allowed to grow dark (its dearest crop). The hoop of day revolves around and round earth’s hub and the thousand flights track the near cloud like lit flies, the native, believable blue and green of the world’s watery and earthly chores lying at ease, overridden, injected a billion times with a million kinds of toxic compounds of our own fevered invention: carrying home plastic instead of water, dining off plastic instead of wood; is this why a home of one’s own, until the water rises, is the kind of refuge that it is… nowadays.