It’s no fairytale sharing my space with 6-foot-plus males who never stop eating. Goldilocks and the three Australians. At best, the boys are bemused by dad’s girlfriend: "Why do you live in this tiny house? Are you poor?". All their friends live in mansions and talk like ripped Kyle Chapmans. Gold Coast: beautiful one day, racist the next.
These things can make you lose the run of yourself.
"Look at this house," said the Yorkshireman, showing me the listing on his phone.
It was listing all right.
"That place is ferked," I said, "look at the rusty roof, it’s a crime scene."
"Let’s just go over there and take a look."
The garden had grown up round the eaves. The backdoor was open. Moonlight shone through the stained-glass panels on the front door, illuminating the dark humps of buckets dotting the hallway to catch rain. There were numerous outbuildings, crammed to the gunnels with hoarded bikes, a Flymo, refrigerators. A classic Vespa was keeled over in the yard, half claimed by the weeds, its curved metal rear glinting like an iridescent beetle. A slime-covered shed was actually a greenhouse. It had been a beautiful home, once.
We went back through with the agent and acted like it was our first time. A huge 1910 villa with a leaking roof and 50 years of accumulated possessions, it was being sold "as is, where is" and had belonged to a man who’d kept to himself; he’d even bought the house next door so he didn’t have to have neighbours. There was a piano, a pile of Disney comics, an old radiogram, his watercolours were still on the table in the front room. Old dressers. Ripped lace curtains, peeling wallpaper.
But the attic, accessed by climbing up a tall ladder through an old photography dark room was where the mystery really began. Jam-packed with suitcases, stacks of Popular Mechanic, old exercise bikes (three at least) lamps, chairs, a gas heater ... how on earth had he got this stuff up there? And why?
I imagined him hiding things so his siblings couldn’t get them. Those fat cows aren’t getting my exercise bikes! Walking past the sheds and not thinking "junk" but, "my treasures".
The living room had vicious claw marks on the walls, deep, shredded down to the sarking. Possum or an unhappy spirit? You wouldn’t just sage the place, I thought, you’d bless it in all the religions there are.
At some stage he’d stopped living in the house and moved into a wee shed in the backyard. His world a small cot covered by a chequered orange wool blanket, a shelf of paperbacks, old camera film unspooling, a collection of curling boarding passes, a hot water bottle.
After we put the offer in, I was so jacked with adrenaline I walked the Routeburn.
I stopped sleeping properly and had a nightmare that I was entered into a Christian rap competition.
It was like when you’ve bought a lotto ticket. In between the buying and finding out you didn’t win, there is a golden period — Schrodinger’s lotto ticket. You haven’t won, but you also haven’t lost, so you can dream about what you would do with untold millions.
Same with the house. We re-roofed, built an extension off the back, kept the old coal range, felled the trees to let the sun in. We built a cottage for guests accessed by a path through the woods down the back.
"If we get that house, I’m going to get these," said the Yorkshireman, scrolling Marketplace. It was a box filled with clay pipes. "For making a wine bottle holder." The house’s hoarding power would not be denied. I imagined it would be like Amityville, but with more power tools.
In the end, we didn’t get it. Disappointing, but at the back of my mind, I’d been nervous: it felt like we’d missed some important stages and jumped straight to buying a house and living together. Disappointing, but also, a relief. I was exhausted from all the imaginary renovations.
