I thought again about my precious rugs back in Sydney. It would hurt to surrender them but I had never been able to appreciate those rugs without pangs of guilt. Oriental carpets are a moral issue, the trade turning on the exploitation of children. The West has had its long love affair with them, a never-ending supply coming out of the Middle East. We tend to ignore the history in favour of the elegance they provide in our homes and offices; ignore the hardships that lie behind the exquisitely woven patterns that must take a terrible toll on the weaver’s eyesight, the damage the vegetable dyes must cause, dyes that create the a-brash which the serious collector values; that tiny flaw the weavers still weave into their rugs to remind them––and us––that only God is perfect.
I vowed I’d use the profits of their labours to make my new home a place of mindfulness and good karma.
~~~
Life is never dull for the maniacally high. Two and a half hours after first sighting the little shack, having contacted my bank and the conveyancing lawyer and having soaked up more Ringo’s Cafe offerings, I walked out of the First National Real Estate office as the proud new owner of an Alcorn Street, Suffolk Park beach hut.
Who’d have thought?
‘Move in anytime,’ the young agent said as he handed me the keys. I had the feeling he was glad to have the disreputable property off his books.
‘You mean even before––’
‘We’re different ‘round here.’ He smiled and clasped my hand with both of his, a genuinely warm handshake. ‘May as well, it’s empty.’
And waiting for me, I reasoned.
Stepping out into Byron Bay’s brilliant morning sunshine, I stared up at the sky, at the universe to which I had just surrendered myself. I looked back over my shoulder. The agent stood in the doorway, waving me off.
‘Enjoy!’ he called to me.
‘I intend to!’
~~~
It was Day One of my new life and I had an ungainly little shack to rescue, meaning that by mid-afternoon I was up to my eye balls in chaos. No waiting for help. Not in my frame of mind that day. Now meant now!
I had been going hard at it for hours, stopping only to dash around to the local shops in Clifford Street to grab a bag of fruit and a mineral water for lunch and then back in to the cleanup, and if occasionally I pinched myself to prove it was all real, this new home of mine, this adventure I had launched myself on this morning, I did so while taking a break from my frantic activities in order to watch the mosquito nets go into the flames, the ancient piles of gauze disintegrating, shriveling to a soft grey film of ash Pompeii-like across what had gone before.
And what had gone before were the faded Billabong and Quicksilver posters I’d yanked off the walls, a heap of fossilized groceries, random bits of lumber, several threadbare beach towels and a crate of surfing magazines, which I regret now having committed to the flames. They would be a treasure trove today. In my frenzy, I considered ripping out the busted kitchen, booting up the flames and hurling it all on the pyre, but then decided against it.
Common sense made a belated appearance.
I would need a handyman, someone with the tools to help me demolish and rebuild the tiny kitchen and bathroom, to pull down the sheets of rusty corrugated iron from the veranda and, above all replace the ugly aluminium windows and door frames with timber ones.
CHILL
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul
W.E. Henley
Late afternoon, I decided to go into the village. The occasion called for a bottle of celebratory wine.
Solitary drinking?
Not something I normally did but normal needed to make way for novel.
And I needed to pick up a copy of the Byron Echo to check out the Classifieds for a handyman, someone good with timber. I obsessed about replacing the aluminium horrors. The electricity couldn’t be reconnected until the official transfer of ownership so there would be no power for a few days and that meant I would also be needing candles, sweet aromatic ones, the kind I had noticed in the Magic Happens shop. And I would need mosquito coils.
I stayed in my work clothes but ran a comb through my hair. This wasn’t the Eastern Suburbs or Sydney’s north shore. Here, the scene was come-as-you-are. Here, you would be valued for how you lived, not how you looked. The Golf waited up the front of the yard in the shade of the big garage. I was ready to head into the village.
I drove up Alcorn and turned right. Already, I felt like a local as I passed the half dozen small stores on Clifford Street. On seeing the BP Service Station just past the pub corner, I remembered that, in my more rational moments I’d promised the Golf a grease and oil change.
‘Hi,’ I said to the grey-haired man in overalls as he emerged from the workshop wiping his hands on a grimy oil rag.
‘Yeah. What can I do ya for, mate?’
‘I need a service.’
The middle-aged man tucked the greasy rag in his back pocket and raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Y’reckon?’ he said with a grin. ‘Your desk or mine?’
‘Ouch!’ I had not seen that coming.
His laugh was a genuine expulsion of joy as he wiped his hands down the backside of his pants then put one out for a shake. ‘No offence, hey?’
‘None taken.’ I shook his hand, aware I had just collected my share of sump oil for the day. ‘That’s it over there,’ I said, pointing. Can I book it in?’
I would later learn that I’d been recognized as a TV face. In addition to my now burgeoning Beauty and the Beast career, since the early Seventies I had appeared intermittently as a panelist on the Midday Show, and in the Eighties, I was a media-hot PR operator and an opinionated ministerial spouse.
And of course, as my friend the mechanic had just made apparent, I was recognizable from my decade-old Sixty Minutes interview. I had created a media storm with that little gem, the segment becoming such a ratings sensation it surpassed even the TV wonder, Alf, on the Sunday night in March ‘87 when both shows went to air.
In passing, I just want to say about that notorious desk story that I had intended it to support my feminist views about a woman’s place in the scheme of things, but thanks to Channel Nine’s judicious editing of three hours of film into a ten-minute package, my militant message was skewered to imply I was celebrating John's rise to the Ministry. Far from it. I was claiming my conjugal rights at a time they were being seriously denied me by Canberra's political system.
The story that aired had unintentionally titillated the nation’s imagination. Such is life and life goes on...but crazily, it seems from the comments I still regularly receive, I’m to carry the notoriety into my crone years.
I don’t mind.
I think my story of love on the desk shed a little glow of mirth around our national politics. One newspaper wrote that I should have been made Woman of the Year. The sports journalist Roy Masters had a different take on it. Roy reckoned ‘Jan Murray’s mouth was John Brown’s Achilles heel’!
While the cheeky mechanic went back inside his workshop to check his sheet, I wandered over to where the vehicles for hire were parked on the edge of a gully and dense rainforest patch. A big trailer for the mountain of rubbish was what I’d be needing once I started ripping out kitchens and bathrooms and aluminium frames.
I bent over the side of one of the trailers to look inside and gauge its dimensions.
‘Oh, my God!’
I