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

  ‘Three hours and eighteen minutes,’ I said, and he beamed like a Hollywood searchlight.

  We waited hours for them to give him the all clear. At one point a nurse came through the curtains and asked, ‘And how are we today?’

  ‘I’m a bit bored, actually,’ I said, and she shook her head at me.

  ‘I meant Jeff!’

  Watching the footage of him finishing is still one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. Jeff wants to laugh about it now, and although I can make jokes about the drama, I still can’t stand to watch it. I suppose it was the defining moment in our relationship – before the marathon I’d taken Jeff for granted somewhat, as so many of us do our partners, and at even the hint that he might be taken away from me, my whole life came to a standstill. He didn’t need to run himself to death to find purpose in life – maybe there was something we could do together to give both our lives more meaning.

  *

  So what do a marathon man/cushion addict and cookbook-hoarder do to give their lives meaning? First, they buy an investment property in the bayside suburb of Russell Lea and renovate on next to no budget – but it just doesn’t evoke the same feeling as when they were making a home for themselves. They go on holidays to amazing places like Japan and Russia but this only adds fuel to their fire, reminding them that something is missing in their settled-down lives. So with a renewed sense of urgency they return to the possibility of a full-scale lifestyle change. They consider turning their backs on everything they’ve worked hard to create; they ponder the madness of starting from scratch doing something they’ve never done before. Nothing is forever, after all.

  Jeff and I are, in many respects, polar opposites. Jeff worked in finance and I worked in marketing. He is all numbers-driven and precise; I am all airy-fairy with a vivid imagination. He can fall asleep whenever he chooses; I frequently lie in bed for hours counting different kinds of sheep like past lovers, listing Meryl Streep’s Oscar nominations in chronological order or trying to create brand-new recipes (chocolate paté!) only to realise most already exist. He likes superhero films and I seek out quirky independents. He loves Mary J Blige and I am borderline obsessed with Cyndi Lauper and have travelled to seven Australian cities to see her perform twelve or thirteen times. I love to cook; he loves to clean. I stay in touch with all of our friends; he is happy to pick up where things left off months before. I learned how to play corporate games like ‘How many ways would you like me to tell you you’re great?’ and he prefers to say it like it is. I avoid confrontation like a toupee wearer avoids the wind; Jeff will pick you up on something he doesn’t believe is right: ‘That campaign didn’t really drive a million dollars in sales; by my calculations it really only made fifty thousand . . .’

  ‘Yes, but it also made our customers happy and you can’t put a price on that, Debbie Downer.’

  ‘I’m just being realistic.’

  ‘No, you’re being depressing. And you’ll never get a promotion if you present the whole story. It’s about creative editing.’

  Jeff has a keen eye for design. By now we’d renovated three properties and he’d been doing handyman jobs around the house since he was a young kid in Birmingham. I am more of a people person, and my entire career had more or less been in retail – including helping my father run his small business. I am okay at marketing, strategy, customer service and planning. While at university I unloaded semi-trailers full of plastic pots, so in a competition of who is prepared to work hardest, I will definitely win (until Jeff reminds me he used to scrub clean his father’s lorry after a long day hauling scrap metal).

  The more we talked about changing our lives, the more we agreed we had the right mix of skills; the right balance of personalities – plus we share the same determination to succeed. We also have a passion for adventure: Jeff left home at twenty to travel Europe on five pounds a day; the first time I left Australia I went on a four-week camping safari in East Africa with Kirsti. (Mind you, I did have Daddy’s Gold Amex on hand for emergencies but I wasn’t a princess, honest.) If any two people could give a tree-change a go, surely we had the essential ingredients? We’d out-run, out-cushioned and out-cookbooked Annandale.

  Remembering the terrible B&B from our jaunt to the Barossa with Mel and Jesus, we decided if that landlord could make a killing despite her net curtains and slimy spa we’d have no trouble at all, given Jeff’s flair for interior design and my many, many talents. Accommodation, we decided, was going to get us out of the corporate world once and for all.

  When we announced our imminent tree change to our friends, there was a mixed reaction.

  ‘Just don’t sell your Sydney property because you’ll need to come back to it when things fail,’ some friends advised.

  ‘Accommodation? But you two don’t know the first thing about accommodation,’ others objected.

  ‘You’re giving up a huge salary to work that hard and never know where the next pay cheque is coming from?’

  ‘Why on earth would you want to leave Sydney?’

  ‘I don’t think you two should work together, it could ruin your relationship.’

  ‘You won’t find like-minded people in the country, you know.’

  But then Mel and Jesus said, ‘We’re so jealous! Do it!’

  *

  But the real challenge was finding the ideal location where we’d wow holidaymakers with our breathtaking style, heart-warming wit and incredible good looks. Wherever we chose, tourists had to be spending money there. In New South Wales alone the possibilities were endless: Coffs Harbour, Kangaroo Valley, Berry, the Blue Mountains, the south or central coasts. Or we could go further afield: Far North Queensland or even Maggie Beer-land: the Barossa itself . . . nowhere was out of the question. Feverishly we started looking at properties online. Jeff had done his sums so we knew we needed to find something big enough to build three villas on or, better yet, something that already had outbuildings we could easily convert. Jeff relished the idea of doing more renovating whereas I’d be quite happy with running water and a flushing toilet, thanks all the same.

  We flew interstate to explore a few different places but none felt right. We kept being drawn back to the Barossa but ultimately it just felt too far away from everyone we knew. Every once in a while we’d also look at properties in the Hunter Valley, a few hours north of Sydney, but I’d always ruled out the Hunter because I found the approach through the main Hunter town, Cessnock, slow and tedious. But perhaps that was about to change . . .

  After a so-so year, eBay had downgraded the annual company celebrations from Thailand to a two-day ‘retreat’ in the Hunter Valley. We were given a choice of activities and, being the stressed and delicate little flower I was, I chose a spa treatment at the appealing-sounding Golden Door Spa.

  On the day of the treatment, I was first in our group to finish so I made my way through the golden door (yes, there really is one, though I was disappointed that it was only painted gold, not made of gold) and sat on a bench facing the Brokenback Range. It was a warm day and the sky was crystal clear. A soft warm breeze occasionally brought the trees before me to life. The bench was on top of a hill that led straight to the foot of the range, a path paved with a mix of bushland and row after row of grapevines just losing their leaves before the cold of winter arrived. The mountain in front of me was mostly bush but some awe-inspiring rock faces reminded me of just how old this valley was – that it was once beneath the ocean. But the thing that struck me most was how quiet it was. I forgot what my life had become, that I was so unhappy in the corporate world and, for those twenty minutes or so without a man-made sound or a passer-by, I was wholly and beautifully just in the moment. Maybe I was simply relaxed from my hour-long massage and the spa and sauna beforehand, or perhaps I was inspired by the rare moment of stillness. Maybe it was a subconscious reminder of Jake and Heath in Brokeback Mountain or perhaps it really was Destiny tapping me on the shoulder. But as I sat there drinking in that glorious view, I knew I’d
found where I wanted to be.

  ‘But I thought you hated the Hunter,’ Jeff said when I got back all refreshed and renewed and bursting to share my epiphany.

  ‘I realise now I don’t know it very well. And I heard they’re opening a new expressway, which means we wouldn’t have to drive through Cessnock! Plus it’ll make the drive to Sydney twenty or thirty minutes faster,’ I added optimistically. It really did tick all our boxes: the Hunter is to Sydney what the Barossa is to Adelaide. After Sydney, it’s the second most-visited tourism destination in New South Wales and its famous wines, delicious food, beautiful scenery, world-class musicians in concert, wedding venues, never-ending calendar of events, countless activities and beautiful year-round weather draw visitors back again and again.

  ‘Come on, let’s look up properties and make an appointment to see some really soon.’

  A few weeks later as we sat looking at the beautiful view from the Audrey Wilkinson cellar door, we agreed: if we could find a property in the Hunter that had some views (okay, probably not those multi-million-dollar Audrey Wilkinson ones, but some views), privacy and an opportunity for accommodation, then the Hunter Valley was where the next chapter of our lives would be written.

  I Want to Go to Here

  At least for the medium-term, we decided to keep the Annandale and Russell Lea properties as investments, but armed with our modest pre-approval from the bank, it soon became obvious I was as delusional as a naïve heroine in a Hitchcock film. I wanted my own slice of Maggie Beer’s life, only in the Hunter Valley, but I’d clearly missed the boat – our money wasn’t going to stretch anywhere near that far. Maybe we could have three chooks on half an acre but that wasn’t quite the dazzling vision I had for our future. In fact, buying a shack in one of the small towns of the Hunter was more realistic than something larger in wine country.

  Not the type to give up easily, for the best part of the next eighteen months we harassed the lovely local real estate agent, Shelly. She must have hated receiving my calls: The delusional gays are back again. We knew the internet listings were uninspiring, but we still made countless visits to the Hunter Valley, dutifully showing up to meet Shelly at the agreed times. We’d watched enough episodes of Location, Location, Location to know what unrealistic house hunters looked like – surely that wasn’t what we’d become? Phil, if you could just move this house onto a thousand acres and charge us no more . . . We could afford reasonably sized homes on larger-than-suburban parcels of land, but everything we saw lacked that elusive je ne sais quoi. You know – that thing house-hunters say they ‘just feel’ when they see the right property.

  This wasn’t just a home we were searching for, after all; it was a whole new way of life and with a long list of desirable features. I was mid-transformation into Maggie Beer but still hadn’t gone through with the irreversible operation. We had become those impossible-to-please customers. If she felt frustrated though, the ever-bubbly Shelly never let on. After too many failed viewings to count, we made the decision to sell the Russell Lea apartment, freeing up the extra cash to buy something more in line with our dreams. That apartment was meant to be our nest egg but maybe people who don’t believe in forever shouldn’t try to act like sensible folk who make plans for the future. Our grand plans to ‘gayify’ it into a stunning top-floor apartment with water views, converting it from two to three bedrooms, were flushed down the toilet, but selling it would afford us the change we wanted for the here and now, future be damned.

  ‘We’re going to lose money on it,’ I said to Jeff. ‘That makes me feel like hurling chunks.’

  ‘We don’t really have a choice though, Monkey. If we want to move to the Hunter and find a property that’s going to give us a reasonable income, it’s pretty clear 750k isn’t enough.’

  We’d looked at so many properties, even blocks of land. But our vision was to create something as far removed from net curtains as possible. We wanted to have our guests feel as if they were staying in a property they would very happily call home, and simply painting over 1970s decor was never going to cut it.

  So after we lost around forty thousand on that little Russell Lea folly, the bank happily increased our pre-approval to a million dollars. (Of course had we waited five years that apartment would have increased in value by around fifty per cent but we didn’t have a crystal ball and, really, it’s not something we like to think about these days!) At that point we intended to keep the Annandale house, rent it out and move to the Hunter full-time.

  Even with an increased budget, the search dragged on for another few months. There were more viewings of properties – all ugly, run-down or on main roads – and a constant scouring of real estate sites, but there were only so many brick veneer huts a gay with delusions of grandeur can endure. It was now early 2012 and we were beginning to wonder if the dream would remain just that. It was time to concentrate on more cushions and cookbooks instead – that wasn’t such a bad life after all, was it? Maybe I’d even try to run a marathon?

  The only listing I’d ever truly liked was way out of our budget but those delusions of grandeur just wouldn’t leave me alone. It was a grape and olive farm set on one hundred acres (over forty hectares), with two massive dams, expansive views and wide-open fields. It was altogether very Maggie because of those olives and dams, and it even had a few fruit trees at the front of the house. I imagined people coming to have picnics eating our food, drinking our wine and watching our ducks play in the dam. There was a simple but functional house. I first came across the property mid-2011, not long after my Golden Door moment, when I did one of those dangerous ‘no upper limit’ searches ‘just to see what else is out there’. It’s a bizarre form of torture sillier house hunters like me can’t help inflicting on ourselves. That first time I saw it, the property was listed at $1.9 million. Then over the following six months or so, the price came down to $1.7, then to $1.3, and by the end of 2011 it had come down to $1.1 million. I wondered why nobody wanted it; why the vendors were slashing the price on an almost monthly basis. Surely other people dreamed of being Maggie Beer, just like me? One day when Jeff had dragged me off to shop for yet more cushions, I decided on a whim to call Shelly while I waited on a wooden bench outside the soft furnishings store.

  ‘Squire Close,’ I said to her, ‘do you think they’d consider an offer below a million?’

  Shelly knew our budget had increased but she also knew there was no chance of us going over our million-dollar cap.

  ‘They’re really eager to sell,’ she began, ‘but they’ve come down over $800,000 in around eighteen months so they just wouldn’t be prepared to go any lower, I’m sorry.’

  ‘I knew it was a long shot, don’t worry,’ I told her. Back inside the shop, I relayed the conversation to Jeff.

  ‘That’s a bummer. Do you prefer this one or this one?’ he asked, holding up two basically identical cushions. I shrugged and pointed to the one in his left hand – at the checkout I noticed that he’d chosen the one in his right.

  Just over six months later, in July 2012, and with not a single property exciting us, we were on yet another of our trips to the Hunter and treating ourselves to a delicious lunch after several property inspections. Hopelessness was beginning to creep in. We were questioning whether we shouldn’t cancel the rest of the afternoon’s viewings but as we ate, I got out my phone and again looked up that hundred-acre property just to have a little daydream.

  ‘Oh my god!’ I said excitedly to Jeff.

  ‘What?’ he asked flatly, thinking this was some sort of prank.

  ‘That property . . . the one with the dams and the olives . . . it now says “offers over one million”.’

  ‘It’s still too expensive, I don’t know why you do this to yourself . . .’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ I said with a shrug, finding it impossible to hide my excitement. ‘Can we?’

  ‘Oh come on, stop it! You’re just going to be disappointed.’

  ‘Please . . .’

&n
bsp; And less than one hour later we were driving toward the property that had been so flirtatious with me for well over eighteen months, teasing with its evocative photographs, willing me in with its falling price tag. The stalked had become the stalker – only this time the prize on offer was even greater than the treasure Jeff had won.

  *

  The approach to Squire Close was down a road called Sweetwater. Give me some of that sweet water, baby, I got a good taste for this one. The neighbouring properties were uniformly bordered by lovely rural wooden fencing (rather appealing to a pair of gays) and one of them was a formidable Tuscan-style mansion (ditto); others were beautiful properties in their own right. There were countless rows of grapevines, olive groves and fantastic views of the Brokenback Range. That day, it felt like we’d arrived at a secret doorway into the Hunter Valley, a secret and golden door.

  The roads were quiet and deserted and, in an omen too hard to ignore, just as with every other property we’d ever bought together, Squire Close was a cul-de-sac. My heart was racing, my palms began to sweat. My mind was spinning with such excitement and my inner Maggie Beer was about to appear. When you know something is right, you just know.

  The gate to the property was locked but I stopped the car, lowered the windows and we sat listening to the sounds of nature around us. In front of us was an olive grove (just like Maggie’s!) but that was all you could see from the road. It was just row after row of beautiful silver-green foliage and, up along the driveway, lovely deciduous trees that had lost nearly all of their auburn leaves. My mental list was being ticked: tourism (vineyards), serenity, privacy, space and beauty . . .

  ‘This is it,’ I said aloud though more to myself than to Jeff. I didn’t look at him for fear he would not be as in love with it as I was. I had no hesitation about that property whatsoever. I’d known it all the times I’d looked at it longingly on the internet; I knew it that day I called Shelly to ask whether they’d accept an offer under a million dollars; I had known it at lunch; I knew it driving along the approach roads – and I couldn’t even see a cactus in the window.