Thirty Thousand Bottles of Wine and a Pig Called Helga Read online

  ‘I really could live here,’ I said with a sigh. ‘I think I would like to be Maggie Beer.’

  ‘I’m not sure her husband, Colin, would be too happy about that,’ Jesus said dryly.

  That’s how our daytime hours in the Barossa were spent – living idyllically with no schedule, meetings or other mundane chores holding us back. But after tasting delicious wines, spending too much on lunches and visiting cellar doors of exquisite beauty, every evening the dream crashed back to grim reality: we’d somehow managed to pay a shedload of cash to stay in a dreary backyard on a suburban street. Advertised as a ‘villa’, there was no disguising the fact we were sleeping in a garage converted into two bedrooms, and while maybe all we needed were beds and a roof over our head, this little garage was just awful.

  The felt carpets were filthy, their flower patterns faded and frayed. The thin fibro walls were beige, but we couldn’t tell if they were painted that colour or were just filmed over with years of other people’s grime. The beds were rock-hard; the sheets were see-through, and they felt and smelled like a weeks-old scourer that had sat in the kitchen sink, too disgusting for anyone to contemplate throwing in the bin until Dad cracked the shits and took the fall for everyone. The advertised ‘generous breakfast provisions’ comprised, per person per day: one rasher of bacon, one egg, 125 millilitres of orange fruit drink, two capsules of milk and one small box of Sultana Bran (the one from the variety pack wanted by no kid, ever).

  ‘I reckon we could do a better job than this,’ Jeff said to me the first morning.

  ‘I reckon my nan could do a better job than this – and Jeff, she’s been dead for ten years,’ I agreed.

  ‘I mean, come on people, it’s not hard,’ Jeff continued. ‘Net curtains have no place in the world – anywhere! And don’t get me started on the choice of cushions. It’s not that hard to find a lovely cushion to lift things a little.’ Jeff never really acts all that gay, but get him started on soft furnishings and he turns into Mr Humphries from Are You Being Served . . . ‘I’m free!’

  Before going out to dinner, we decided to make full use of the amenities and walked to the covered carport to partake in a little hot spa action.

  ‘Ooohhh,’ Mel, the first one to climb in, cooed, ‘this is sooo nice.’

  I stepped in next, turning up my nose against the strange chemical smell that singed a few of my nostril hairs on the way in. As my body sank beneath the surface of the water, my skin felt like it was coated in Vaseline.

  ‘Oh boys, wait till you get in,’ I joined my partner in crime. ‘It’s perfect!

  ‘You’re such a bitch,’ I whispered to Mel.

  ‘You didn’t think I was going to suffer this alone, did you?’

  ‘You two are a pair of shunts,’ Jeff said, leaping straight back out again. ‘That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever done.’ I knew he’d done worse but decided to save that challenge for another day.

  Within a minute we’d all evacuated the chemical spill and were towelling ourselves with delightfully threadbare cotton, scrubbing away at our contaminated skin as if we were all Meryl Streep in Silkwood.

  That night at dinner, Jesus said, ‘I looked at our host’s website and she’s fully booked every weekend for the next few months.’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ Jeff said dismissively. ‘I’ve stayed in better hostels than that, and for just twenty pounds a night.’

  ‘And at least there you got a few complimentary extras from some of the other guests.’

  ‘Supply and demand,’ Mel said, ignoring all the smut, as she so often has to. ‘She’s got the location and that’s all most people care about when they book.’

  ‘And remember: we do have Jeff to thank for choosing such luxury.’

  ‘Piss off! I’m sure she didn’t advertise the fact she’s hung net curtains on every bloody window . . .’

  ‘We’re so missing out on something here,’ I said as the mains arrived. ‘If she can make that much money from a dirty rundown shithole, imagine what the four of us could do if we put our heads together. I mean, even with Jesus weighing us down . . . heavily.’

  ‘You wanker!’

  ‘I’d get to open my chocolate shop . . .’ Mel looked like she’d transported herself there already.

  For the rest of the meal I kept daydreaming about a different kind of life. I imagined how freeing it would be to call up work and tell them I was never coming back. We could just stay right there in the Barossa and forge a new path. The funny thing was, I hadn’t even been conscious of my dissatisfaction with our Sydney life until the Barossa showed me that Sydney wasn’t the only place on the planet I could be happy.

  ‘Hey Knob, can I try some of your pink bits?’ Jeff motioned to Jesus’s rare quail.

  ‘Only if you let me pack some of your fudge for dessert.’

  ‘Oh my god you two, stop!’ Mel cried.

  ‘Inappropriate!’ I called. ‘Mel, can I try one of your bearded clams?’

  ‘Enough!’ And she was right: they were mussels, not clams.

  *

  Later back at the ‘villa’, I said to Jeff: ‘We should talk more seriously about doing something like this.’

  ‘Yeah, we should,’ he said, but I wasn’t sure just how much his heart was in it. And anyway, for the time being we had much bigger fish to fry.

  Desperately Seeking: Cushions and Cookbooks

  We returned from the Barossa to our house in Annandale, knowing that we were about to launch into a full-scale renovation. No wall or window in the house was to remain untouched.

  When we’d moved to Annandale in 2007, we were among the first of our friends to make the change from the smart but expensive Eastern Suburbs to the cheaper and more spacious Inner West. We’d thought we’d always live in apartments but by the time we sold the one overlooking Rushcutters Bay, I was tired of living in such close proximity with others and fed up with our old angry neighbours telling us our music was too loud (believe me, I just don’t do loud music) or that our dinner parties (dinner parties!) were too raucous.

  When we decided to put the Rushcutters Bay apartment on the market early in 2007, it became the scene of our one and only barney to date. I mean, Jeff and I never argue, not even about small things, but like most couples we chose a monumental, universal topic as the catalyst for our near-divorce: chicken balls.

  Jeff is incredibly well endowed: his more than adequate proboscis affords him hypersensitive olfactory abilities. Before deciding the Inner West was the place for us, we had gone looking for bigger, more private apartments around Elizabeth Bay, but often he would walk out shaking his head in disgust: ‘Could you smell the . . .?’ and every time the apparent stench was completely lost on me. Foot odour on a sock at the bottom of the laundry basket? Really? Guinea pig urine from the pet of a kid who’d lived in the apartment in the 1970s? No? A glass that three weeks earlier had been filled with a Barossa Shiraz and hadn’t been allowed to dry in the heat of the dishwasher properly? Nope, didn’t get that either. But days-old cooking fat was the one that got Jeff’s goat the most.

  When it came time to sell our apartment, Jeff wanted everything to be ‘Jeff-perfect’. Nick, a local real estate agent, was my man for the job. In time he would go on to star in that Nestlé commercial wearing nothing more than an apron and condensed milk smeared all over his body. Perhaps I was an early appreciator of his star quality, sensing it would appeal to the largely gay and single female audience we were marketing our apartment to.

  With our apartment on the market, Jeff would have liked to place me inside a plastic bubble – and he really did put plastic sheeting over the new cream carpet beneath Mel’s chair one dinner party. Sure enough, as was her habit, within minutes she’d knocked over her glass of wine.

  ‘I’d like to invite my friend Keith over for drinks, show him the results of all of our hard work,’ he said one day, and I quickly agreed it would be a lovely thing to do. Keith is someone whose opinion Jeff values more t
han most because he’s quite fastidious in his own home and enjoys the finer things in life.

  ‘I’ll make some nice hors d’oeuvres,’ I offered. ‘Make it a special occasion.’

  In my opinion, what followed was not exactly the grandest surprise in the history of the world. Clue One: I immediately began perusing a finger food cookbook. Clue Two: I read my proposed menu to Jeff, including the dish ‘chicken balls’. Clue Three: we went shopping and I sent Jeff off to find two litres of vegetable oil. Two litres! Clue Four: come the day of the get-together, I was in the kitchen rolling said chicken balls and on the stovetop was a large frying pan filled with said oil. Jeff went up the road to get some forgotten beers and when he came back I was frying my last batch of chicken balls. There was Clue Five.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Jeff asked with agitation. Clearly the clues weren’t landing with Mr Perceptive.

  To say I was mildly surprised would be a tad of an understatement. ‘I’m making the . . . um . . . chicken balls?’ I said, sure this was some kind of joke.

  ‘I could smell that oil in the hallway downstairs,’ he said. ‘After everything I told you about oil, I can’t believe you’re frying when we have an open house in four days’ time . . .’ and on and on and on he went, but I’d stopped listening.

  With greasy tongs in hand, I yelled at him mid-sentence, ‘Fuck! Off!’

  I stormed into the bedroom and slammed the door. Jeff blared Mary J Blige (what would the neighbours think?) and set about eradicating the apartment of the world’s worst smell, and the thought of him faffing about covering up my crime made me angrier and angrier. (As if Mary’s voice were not grating enough! I mean, she was no Cyndi Lauper.)

  Jeff’s version of events is somewhat different . . .

  In time, the chicken ball fiasco passed into our folklore and it never fails to make us laugh. To make but a wee final point, the auction of our property smashed the building’s sales record despite the alleged faintly lingering scent of chicken balls.

  *

  Though we’d made decent money on the apartment it seemed that the only ones we could now afford in the east were shoeboxes with no views. I kept widening our internet searches, prompting Jeff to consider leaving the only area of Sydney he’d ever lived in.

  Almost from the moment his stalking plan had come to fruition, way back at the start of ‘us’, Jeff and I worked out that we share a similar view on life: neither of us believes in the concept of ‘forever’. This applies to practically everything – relationships, homes, jobs, dreams, scowls from moronic neighbours . . . we believe in enjoying things in the moment rather than fixating on what everything might look and feel like at some imagined point in the future. So while Annandale was never going to be our ‘forever’ home, we both knew we would be living there for a few years at least. And after that, who knew?

  We settled on a rundown terrace on a one-way alley, which we planned to renovate and turn into our dream home. To celebrate, Jesus – who creates stunning jewellery in his spare time (he designed and made Mel’s beyond-fabulous engagement ring) – gave us each a shiny new key ring as a housewarming present. They were stainless steel and shaped like a J on one side and a T on the other.

  The beauty of the key ring contrasted nicely with the state of the house. The walls cried when it rained (we had buckets in the bedroom to catch drops), the floors were uneven and see-through in places (there were about eight different levels inside the house), windows were broken and the outdoor sewage pump had a habit of overflowing. None of this daunted us – but then we never looked too far into the future, as if what we might find there would scare the fuck out of us.

  For the remainder of 2007 and through to the end of 2008, the house was a revolving door of visitors. Dinner parties, barbecues, cooking for friends, celebrations, drinks, huge bashes, me and Andy’s girlfriend Ali on the banister doing impressions of Cher on a cannon singing ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’ at the top of our lungs (I’d always wanted to live in a house with stairs and now finally I had some), very fashionable Nintendo Wii parties, weekly dinners with Andy and Ali, who were now living nearby . . . the list went on. It was as if the house’s state of near-dereliction put people at ease and while once we’d feared that becoming Inner Westies would keep people away, that didn’t seem to be the case.

  For our first Annandale Christmas we had an ‘open gate’ policy – we spread the word that anyone and everyone was welcome to walk through our gate on the street and join us whenever their family get-togethers made them cross-eyed with boredom and/or anger. By the end of the evening we had an eclectic and energetic mix of friends and we partied until the early hours.

  Then our friends started falling pregnant, or moving further out to more affordable suburbs with bigger gardens for the children. That was cool; inevitable really, even for those friends who said they were never having kids. It wasn’t until our second open gate Christmas, in 2008, that Jeff and I realised we were not quite the drawcards we thought we were. Not a single person walked through the gate, and we sat in the courtyard with wine in our glasses and huge platters of food, excited by the sound of every approaching car but quickly disappointed when no footsteps followed.

  ‘Merry Fucking Christmas!’ I said.

  Luckily we still enjoyed each other’s company because it sure as hell looked like that was all we were going to get.

  For Christmas 2009, Jeff’s sister Lovain and niece Hayley visited us from the UK and kindly never complained when they were forced to sleep in a room with holes in the ceiling and inch-thick holes in the window frame that let in an endless torrent of mosquitoes and spiders.

  Finally we launched into the full-blown renovation in April 2010, which saw us living in one room upstairs with an open air toilet that could be seen from the street. This resulted in a year out from entertaining, and by the time the house was finished, we could count our childless friends on one hand.

  ‘The same thing happened to me,’ our friend Cheryl said one night. We’d developed a routine of having dinner weekly at her place in Petersham – our one social outing now that everyone else was playing happy families. ‘All my friends went off and had babies and then when the kids grew up they all came back again. You just have to wait fifteen years or so.’

  ‘So we’re in friend prison for a crime we didn’t commit?’ I asked gloomily.

  ‘To some degree, yes. Unless you’re happy spending your Saturdays at birthday parties full of screaming children?’

  ‘See, that’s when it’s likely I’d commit a crime,’ Jeff muttered.

  ‘I had one birthday party as a kid – my twelfth – and look how incredibly well adjusted I turned out to be. I don’t have an addictive personality,’ – I gulped some more wine – ‘or anything. These kids of today are going to want Happy Meals and ice-cream cakes every birthday for the rest of their lives.’

  ‘Spoilt rotten the lot of them,’ Cheryl agreed. ‘Now get up and make me a cup of tea in my new glass stovetop kettle, please. Caffeine-free black tea with that organic Manuka honey in the cupboard. Could you only put one and one-third of a teaspoon of honey in it? Thank you.’

  After I’d delivered her tea, Cheryl put her feet up on the couch and picked up George and John Brown to place them on her lap. Those two white dogs are everything to her and picking them up usually means only one thing. I glanced at my phone and saw that it was 9.32pm.

  ‘Oh well,’ I said with a stretch, ‘we should probably be going – it’s way past your bedtime.’ Home yet again before the witching hour of 9.40pm. As much as we absolutely loved our evenings with Cheryl, they were a far cry from being splashed by vomiting patrons at the now-demolished Baron’s Bar in Kings Cross . . . but then maybe that was a good thing.

  *

  Our situation was actually quite different from the grave one Cheryl had prophesised because we do have kids, though they’re not with us full time. Luckily for Jeff and me, I had donated my sperm to a loving couple in Brisbane who wanted t
heir two children to be genetically related and know who their father is. And luckily for them, my donation turned out to be bounteous – in fact, it was one of the most impressive the staff at the clinic had ever seen. Needless to say, I still have a swagger in my step over that. But whenever any of our friends moan about the challenges of parenting I say smugly, ‘Well, you should have outsourced it to a pair of lesbians in a different state, shouldn’t you?’

  The morning after I’d met Jeff I said to him, ‘If you plan on sticking around you need to know you’ll soon be a daddy.’ I figured day two was as good as any to break the news. Jane was three months pregnant with what would eventually turn into our daughter, Lucy, and I was already slotted in for a visit with her partner, Vicky, at the end of the year for what would become our son, Charlie. Hello, I’d like to make a sizable deposit, please. Weirdly, prospective fatherhood didn’t seem to faze Jeff and after settling in Annandale we also adopted a ‘child’ of our own.

  Mid-renovation we’d inherited a black cat named Leroy from the daughter of our neighbour. We’d taken to her other daughter’s cat that we’d named Florence after she’d moved into our empty house while we were on holiday in Italy.

  Flo used to sleep between my legs (insert predictable pussy joke here) and came running to us whenever we sang a particular harmony, but a car crushed her spine a few months after we’d formally adopted her. Knowing how much we loved her, when our neighbour’s other daughter needed to offload her cat, it was Jeff and I who received a pleading note in our letterbox: No pressure at all but if you do not take Leroy we will be forced to leave him with the Cat Protection Society. There was an altogether too adorable photo of him attached, a pitch-black feline with a lovely red collar. In a bizarre coincidence, I’d included a black dog named Leroy in my first novel, Pictures of Us, and it just felt right that we should have him, mid-renovation and all.