‘Right.’ Not a lot of humour there. I took the business card he handed me.
‘I warn you, it’s a mess. You had surfies twenty, thirty years ago throwing up these shacks all along the best beach frontages,’ said the man I now understood hailed from First National Real Estate and who obviously thought he had a potential buyer while, at the same time wishing to make it clear he was not at one with Byron’s hippy surfie culture, particularly its impact on local real estate values. At any moment, I expected to be given a spiel about the attractive all mod cons, security lock-up cream brick townhouses he had on his books back at the office.
We broke through the last of the shoreline scrub into the clearing and straight away I knew I was home, knew I was looking at my future. No more than a dilapidated one-room beach shack, but yet a piece of magic nestled behind the dunes on the doorstep of that wild Pacific Ocean out there!
The Voices were clamouring. Buy it! Buy it! It’s ours! It’s ours!
The little shack and its environment were beyond romantic, beyond any of the normal parameters one sets when contemplating a real estate purchase.
It was a keeper.
The agent was right, however. It was a mess. The owner had left behind the detritus of a surfer’s life in the rectangular little fibro hut with timber veranda. And, suspiciously, left it behind in a hurry. Apart from the two enormous surfboards I noticed sticking out from under the wide veranda, when I walked inside the shack the first thing I noticed was the old double mattress laying on the wooden floor down the far end. It had a faded pink cotton blanket crumpled across it.
‘Feels like he’s just gone down to the beach and will be back for breakfast,’ I said.
The agent shook his head. ‘He’s not coming back, I assure you.’
I walked across to the tiny kitchen, no more than a cornered-off section of the rectangle. Doors on the two timber cupboards had come off their hinges a long time ago and hung at an unhealthy angle to the uprights. Their dusty shelves displayed a motley collection of plastic plates and dishes as well as empty jam jars and stoneware coffee mugs, the type I hadn’t seen since the early Seventies. Sitting on the chipped green Formica kitchen bench were several more cups and plates haphazardly stacked, and on closer inspection it was clear they had been abandoned before the remains of the owner’s last meal had been scraped and rinsed from them. Two battered aluminium saucepans and a dirty fry pan similarly stained languished in the putrid sink.
I shuddered, imagining the cockroach colonies that must be celebrating the abandonment of this hovel.
The place had the look, feel and smell of a squat, of casual visitors coming and going and not bothering to clean up. A pile of dusty mosquito nets Methuselah might have slept under were piled in a corner of the room and all around the walls hung faded surfing posters. Globs of old Blue-tack adhered in some spots, evidence of other posters long discarded.
Outside again, and I noted the few sheets of corrugated iron thrown up at the northern end of the veranda and a net curtain strung across. Someone’s ad hoc attempt to accommodate overflow guests, no doubt.
The place was hokey, but it worked, and I was in love with it. Except for the aluminium sliding doors and window frames, which were an affront to any right-thinking person’s sensibilities. But none of this mattered. It would be a challenge.
I felt an empathy with the neglected little shack nestled in behind the dunes. It was begging me to love it.
‘There’s more to see,’ said the young agent, stepping down from the veranda and walking me around to the front of the wide, deep property.
We needed to beat through further undergrowth, lush green rainforest rather than the dryer, greyer dune vegetation this time.
We emerged onto a long front yard, overgrown with rapacious blue flowering vines that climbed up through the trees and ran along the fences then climbed back down to strangle a pile of old timber stacked against the fence. Creeper vine overwhelmed anything standing in its path. A huge four-car garage, grey splintery timber walls, a green iron roof and brown double roller doors stood at the side of the property, up front, at street level. Paspalum weeds grew around the base of the garage, and the two narrow windows facing onto the yard were boarded up. Unlike the cozy-but-grubby shack, there was nothing quaint about the garage. Possibly a fairly recent addition, utilitarian at best. It lacked charm but it would be useful for storage.
It would only be later that I learned what had gone on in that huge garage with its boarded-up windows, rows and rows of shelves lining the interior walls and its extraordinary amount of overhead lighting.
‘The keys for this are back at the office. I could go get them if you’re interested?’
I shook my head. ‘Uh-uh. I’ve found what matters. It’s what’s back there, the shack and the beachfront.’
I left the young man and walked up the yard to the street. Parking earlier to go down to the beach, I’d tucked the Golf in a sandy cul-de-sac, somewhere along this stretch. Now I realized the car was on the other side of the high ti-tree fence and bushes.
‘Serendipity,’ I whispered.
‘Sorry. What did you say?’ The agent had come up behind me.
‘Nothing. Just getting a little carried away,’ I said with a smile.
DAY ONE - MY NEW LIFE
The fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.
Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 1, Sc 1
Fate, Serendipity, Kismet, Destiny.
Whatever. Here I was. From the moment of packing up and pulling out from the Mermaid Beach house this morning I had been heading for this place. Why else such coincidence; being twice directed to Suffolk Park and then being on the spot the very moment the agent was emerging from behind the dunes.
Eight hundred square meters of land with prime beachfront. Three hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars. Ten per cent deposit. Immediate settlement.
Too easy.
I had some modest savings, mostly from my days running my PR business and, post-divorce I’d had a generous Family Court settlement paid monthly that would amply cover the repayments. Not that my crazy mind was paying much heed to financial practicalities. I had fallen in love. End of story. No nickel-and-diming Mr. Real Estate. I would sign on the dotted line for my enchanted dwelling, aware that had I not been directed towards Suffolk Park by the angels of Fate I might have been in the Golf by now and driving aimlessly down the Pacific Highway to an uncertain future.
Instead, I had found heaven in a homely old café, stepped onto the beach and serendipitously bumped into a real estate agent taking pictures of an orphaned property, one for which he had no heart, one he needed to flog to the first interested party. It was meant to happen. We were a couple, that little shack and me.
Too impulsive, perhaps, I hear you ask?
Join my conveyancing lawyer. It seemed my fertile imagination had thrown a rainbow around everything. At least that was hinted at by the city slicker from the law firm who had handled my divorce. To give him his due, he was aware of my mental condition, thanks to the two AVOs taken out against me by my estranged spouse during the turbulent early stages of my illness.
I responded that I didn’t believe so. Where better to ring in the changes than in magical, mystical, legendary Byron Bay. Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme; time for Love, Peace and Harmony. My new life would take shape in a coastal village of surfers and hippies, where the ambiance of the Nimbin Aquarius Festival of two decades ago still hung over the landscape, hung over its hinterland, hung over the lush green rainforests, over the white crystal sands, the