My family and other animus by James Jeffrey

Author:James Jeffrey [Jeffrey, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522872774
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

Mum was always going to sell her house the way she was always going to give up smoking. ‘I sell my house and piss off,’ she’d say when, yet again, some element of life had let her down.

It wasn’t entirely predictable what might set her off. A squabble with one of her offspring; a fresh power bill; a displeasing run of weather; a possum raid on her tomato plants; a sudden welling of that deep-rooted feeling that the truest solution to all life’s woes is to cast off the trappings of modern settled life and turn nomad once more. Or at least cross the horizon to another neighbourhood that’s home to an Aldi.

‘I call the real-estate agent and—piff-poof—I go from here.’ And, if the latest round had been triggered by heated words with my big sister when she was in residence in Mum’s granny flat, she’d add a clause: ‘And I tell no one where I am.’ Plus a sub-clause: ‘Fuck everyone.’

So we’d wait as the inevitable played out. Like any ceremonial ritual steeped in time, it was elaborate and oddly mesmerising even though its beginning and end had already been written in stone.

And yet the estate agents would come, clinging to that most quietly desperate of beliefs: that hope dies last. Photos would be taken, creative sales pitches written, and a vision hewn from thin air of people falling over themselves to offer cosmic amounts of money for this weatherboard box that shivered through the winter and baked so mercilessly in the summer that whenever I visited I half-expected to feel my buns rising.

Then, the first of the complications. In a nutshell: people.

After the first open house, Mum’s excitement would already be tinged by something with far deeper roots into her soul: an unwavering, undimmable suspicion of strangers. After the second open house, it had swollen well beyond mere tinge. By the third open house, it had knocked all pretenders aside and taken the throne, from where it proceeded to rule as a tyrant.

‘I don’t like them tramping in and out of my house, looking at my things,’ she moaned. It’s a stance she applied to herself in principled fashion down the track with less than happy results, but more on that later.

‘They’re looking at your house, Mum,’ I’d say. ‘Because they’re thinking about buying it.’

‘Some of them just want to look at what I’ve got.’ These discussions tended to be finalised from her end with the lighting of a cigarette, something she did in these circumstances with an irritated and well-practised flourish. ‘They are jealous of what I have.’ Then a puff of smoke.

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