Lessons in Letting Go (25 page)

I adjusted my expectations.

A week later, I found a place in a block of flats I thought I could live in. The next-door neighbours appeared to be normal and the building didn’t smell like anyone was cooking up drugs in their kitchen. There were windows and new carpet, there were built-ins in the two bedrooms and a little balcony overlooking the busy street below. It even had city views if you climbed up on the kitchen island, stood on tiptoes and employed a telescope. The auction was in two weeks’ time. I quickly arranged a building and pest inspection, gathered all the paperwork together and gave it to a conveyancer to check over. Everything seemed fine. The flat was even advertised at well below what I could afford to pay. I allowed myself to get a little bit excited.

My only problem was the auction. I had never bid on anything before, not even at a charity event. Buying lotto tickets scared me. There was no way I could risk doing this myself; I knew I would panic and forget to put my hand up even once. Then, luckily, I was introduced to a friend of a friend. His name was Julian and he had bought two houses for himself and had bid on behalf of nearly everyone else he knew. He seemed friendly enough and, although he had a disconcerting habit of looking away whenever he was speaking to me, he knew a dizzying amount about the auction process. If there was such a thing as an auction nerd, I had found it.

On the morning the apartment was to be sold, I sat a little further up the road at a café with my friends Gerard and Katharine. My mobile phone and a plate of uneaten poached eggs sat in front of me. Julian told me he would only call if things got tight and he needed me to decide on any further bids. Adam rang from his holiday in Sydney to ask me how the auction was going and I almost yelled at him to get off the phone and stop clogging the line. He laughed and hung up. Then the phone rang again. Julian sounded excited.

‘You hear that?’ In the background I could hear the auctioneer calling out numbers two hundred thousand above the advertised price. That could not possibly be right. I frowned.

‘Where are you, Julian? Please don’t tell me you went to the wrong auction.’

‘Nup. I’m here. It’s gone crazy.’

It felt like I had been done an injustice. Someone—definitely not me—was responsible for needlessly getting my hopes up.

‘That’s ridiculous. Who would pay that much for a flat?’

‘It’s two guys in suits. I think it’s less about the property and more about the size of their dicks. The rest of us are just standing back and watching.’

I listened to the rest of the auction by phone. In the end, the little apartment I thought would be mine went for the price of the mansions I knew I could never afford. I stared glumly at the eggs congealing on the plate in front of me.

‘Looks like there’s a property boom on!’ Julian sounded thrilled.

My suburb was now way out of my reach.

‘Not to worry, you can always try again a little further out.’ Julian hung up before I had a chance to start swearing at him.

I didn’t want to try ‘a little further out’, I wanted to live here where I knew everyone. I knew Steve who ran the fruit and vegetable shop, Alex who owned the cocktail bar, Dolores who owned the deli and Sebastian at the flower shop where I bought bunches of jonquils I didn’t want because he was cute and had an accent. Gerard lived in the next street along from me. Katharine lived a ten-minute walk away. My friend Fahey and her two hilarious children were my regular Monday lunch date. Adam was only two tram stops from my house. I had found a little community within a big city and I didn’t want to leave it. Those years in the hellhole, far from my friends and completely on my own, were still painfully vivid. As nice as owning my own place would be, it wasn’t worth losing everything that mattered to own one thing that might.

However, the reality was undeniable: I couldn’t afford to rent and I couldn’t afford to buy in this suburb. My only other option was to stay where I was, living in the same flat I had shared with my ex-boyfriend and lying in bed at night feeling him seeping out of the walls. I shuddered at the thought.

I reluctantly started looking in a suburb a ten-minute drive further north. I drove out to look around the area and, to my surprise, I didn’t mind it too much. The streets were lined with blossoming trees, all the houses had rosebushes out the front and I didn’t see one abandoned shopping trolley. And everything was quiet. I had lived surrounded by noise for so long that I’d forgotten that most people don’t live in places where they need earplugs just to get a good night’s sleep. I bought a newspaper and started circling likely properties.

That weekend, on my first round of open houses, I found a place that I instantly loved. It was a beautiful two-bedroom Edwardian, with a climbing rose over the front verandah and a little study built on the lawn out the back. It had ducted heating and polished floorboards and a big tree in the yard. The front bedroom had an open fireplace and was filled with sunshine. I wanted to live here more than I had ever wanted to live anywhere. Adam was with me and I turned to him to ask what he thought of the place. He was leaning against the bedroom door with his eyes closed.

‘Adam!’

He jumped awake. ‘What, I’m here! Oh, yes, lovely. Hmmm.’

The day before, Adam had agreed to come house-hunting with me. He had then put on his best clothes and headed out to a friend’s birthday party. When the last bar closed at 10 a.m. that morning, he walked out of it and straight to my place. He looked like a junkie and smelt like he had taken a nap on a toilet floor.

Now he was leaning against the doorframe, half asleep and trying to look apologetic.

‘Sorry, I probably shouldn’t have come with you today. I think I smell like a department-store Santa.’

I rolled my eyes and kept looking. People do house inspections in the same way they walk through art galleries. They stand thoughtfully in each room, murmuring
sotto voce
to their partners, their forefingers on their chins and glossy brochures in their hands. They don’t show emotion and they don’t reveal what they really think of the place. Adam took a different approach. We had already looked through two other houses that morning and he had caused a scene in both. At the first, he had walked into a house that had obviously once belonged to an old man and announced loudly, ‘Oh, luv, you can’t buy this! Someone’s grandad carked it in here!’ We left immediately.

The second place we visited was a brand-new townhouse. Like so many others I had visited, it was mass-designed, ostentatious and at the same time cramped, impractical and devoid of personality. Someone had decided to lay a swirling green carpet in the living area, presumably in an attempt to give the place some kind of character. Looking at it gave me vertigo. Adam clutched at his head, loudly proclaimed, ‘This carpet is vomit,’ and staggered dramatically back out the front door. I quickly followed, avoiding the disapproving gaze of the real estate agent.

When we got to the car I looked at him as sternly as I could.

‘Adam, we are inspecting houses, we are not touring a one-man show called “Attack of the Crazy Drunk Man”. Pull yourself together or I’m leaving you in the car.’

He grinned lazily and looked mostly in my direction. ‘Okay, sweetpea. I’ll behave. Unless the next house is really shit and then I can’t be held responsible.’

Thankfully, when we walked into the little Edwardian he kept his mouth shut and, apart from the odour and the swaying, he passed for almost normal. I walked through the whole house slowly and thoughtfully, trying to hide my excitement. It was gorgeous; there was even a cat flap in the back door. I didn’t own a cat but if I moved here, I would definitely get one. I wanted this house.

On the way out, I asked the real estate agent a couple of questions about the price of other properties in the area and how much the rates were. In return, he asked me if I would be buying on my own. I looked at him, puzzled. I couldn’t see the relevance of the question until Adam answered, ‘Oh I’m not living here with her, I’m just her drunk friend.’ The agent looked relieved.

Once again, I passed on all the details to my conveyancer, organised the building inspection and rang Julian to ask him if he was willing to try his hand at another auction. He told me he was going to be out of town. Now I was stuck. Even if I had been game enough to do the bidding myself, I wasn’t going to be here either. I had a job in Darwin and there was no way I could cancel with only a week’s notice. I sat down at my desk and tried to nut out a solution. Then I searched the internet looking for a buyer’s advocate. I found one called John. We met over coffee and he was so earnest and enthusiastic that I liked him instantly. Still, it felt wrong sending a stranger to handle such a big decision, so I asked my sister Wendy to go along as well.

‘I don’t have to bid, do I? You know I’ll go crazy and either buy the house for too much money or hit whoever wins.’

‘No! Good grief. John will be there, you just have to hand over my signed cheque as a deposit if I get it. Please don’t hit anyone.’

Again, I felt a bit excited. Thanks to being a little further out of town, this house was way below my limit. Even if things went crazy, I would still be in the competition.

The day of the auction came and I sat in a hotel room thousands of kilometres away, staring at my phone, waiting for John to call and tell me whether I’d got the house or not. Like Julian, he was only going to ring if it was getting close to my price and the bidding was still heated.

The phone rang.

It was Wendy. ‘Corinne, can you go another ten thousand?’

I looked at the ceiling.

‘Corinne?’

I was dithering. That would put me outside my limit.

‘Corinne!’

‘Oh god, okay, just ten.’

‘Too late, it’s just gone up another fifty. Some chick just won it. She’s jumping up and down. Do you want me to hit her?’

‘No!’

I hung up and threw out the brochure of the pretty little house that I’d had sitting on my lap for the last hour. I couldn’t afford to live where I wanted, I couldn’t afford to live further out and I couldn’t afford to rent something decent. At this rate, I was going to have to move into a wheelie bin next door to a brothel.

When I got back to Melbourne, Adam met me at the airport.

‘You’ll find something, honey. People spend years trying to find a house.’

‘Thanks, that helps a lot.’

He laughed. ‘Look, maybe you should lower your expectations. Find something in a bad part of town, or something run down. It’s a better option than having to move further and further out. If you keep trying to find this imaginary perfect house you’ll be so far out of the city that you’ll be switching time zones every time you come back to visit.’

Perhaps he was right. I’d lived in a hovel once before, maybe I could do it again. At least this time I would be closer to my friends and I could always renovate and get a guard dog. I started looking in my suburb again, but this time I focused on the places where there was a drug problem, high crime, or a footballer living next door.

The next Saturday, before I started inspecting the run of local dumps I had found in my price bracket, I took myself out for breakfast. I was about to drag myself through four rundown houses: one that was situated next to an industrial estate, one that was partly demolished, one that was ominously described as ‘needing work’ and another that was beside a power plant that visibly shimmered with electromagnetism. Presumably the owners of that house had moved somewhere bigger to accommodate their ever-growing tumours. The hellhole was starting to look like a real estate gem. I needed some cheering up. I ordered eggs, bacon, hash browns, mushrooms, spinach, orange juice and hot chocolate, figuring if I’d missed anything on the menu I could always order seconds. I flicked through the paper as I waited for it all to arrive. John had told me there was a little house in my price bracket up for auction that day and I should swing by to see what it went for. I had looked it up that morning on the internet. It was recently renovated and in a street where houses often went for more than a million dollars. I scoffed at their ridiculously low asking price. I knew too much about auctions now to be fooled by that kind of rubbish. Still, it was going to be sold before my first inspection. There was no harm in dropping by and watching the drama unfold.

I arrived at the house early and wandered through it to kill some time. As soon as I stepped inside I wished I hadn’t. The house was perfect, a tiny two-–bedroomer, just big enough for one person who wanted an office. There were skylights and purpose-built shelves tucked under the stairs. There was even a small courtyard out the back. I went out the front again and waited around, thinking I might not watch the auction after all. It would be too depressing to watch it sell for a thousand-million more dollars than I could afford.

As I stood there daydreaming I realised that the auctioneer had already started to go through the formal proceedings. I was standing right beside him and I wasn’t dressed for the occasion. My unwashed hair was pulled back in a bun, I was wearing my worst tracksuit pants and sneakers, and there were at least fifty people staring in my direction. I’d dressed appropriately enough for inspecting slums; I hadn’t dressed at all suitably for a flashy auction on a flashy street. I panicked and immediately sat down where I was, which happened to be the edge of the gutter, at the auctioneer’s feet. At the time, it felt inconspicuous.

The bidding started at the advertised price and no one raised their hand. I put my arms around my knees and leant back a little, getting comfortable. This always happened at auctions. Things started off slowly and then all of a sudden there would be three or four people bidding aggressively, eyeing each other off, talking on their mobile phones and whispering frantically behind their hands. I looked around the crowd, trying to pick who those likely bidders would be. Time went by. And by. The auctioneer was about to pass in the property when a middle-aged man finally put up his hand. Another ten thousand dollars had been added to the price. Yet again there were no other bids. The auctioneer started to count down the first call, the second call and then, just as he was about to call out the third and final, I stuck up my hand and yelled ‘Ten!’