Page 65 - 2017 WTP Special Edition

Drive-By (continued from preceding page)
at the corner of Oat, I’m plagued with curations of the stance and the tone that I ought to have worn, to emasculate the little bollix.
this run of four-story apartment blocks, all uni- formly salmon brick, vaguely Soviet, and woefully dated. It’s like the municipality took the notion of dispersing the social housing, but didn’t commit properly to it. And we hear a lot of trouble from the blocks, music that descends into ructions.
—Come on child.
Rosie slews her weight from my arm and dances the cracks in the pavement. She’s at that age where everything must be an experience. She quite literally sticks her nose into every bush go- ing up the road.
Pot-heads, I’m guessing. You see them traipsing in scrims of two and three to the deli at all hours.
In the deli at the corner of Oat, we buy a caramel koala from the little Indian man. I grab a fistful of scratch-cards, scratch them in the doorway, and dump them in the bin outside.
—What’s hope, grandpa?
Rosie is at that age, all curiosity, a warren of how’s
—Don’t ever take to gambling, I tell Rosie.
Nearing home, and opting not to rise any more strife with Anika, don’t I kneel on the sidewalk
to wipe the evidence of chocolate and trace hairs of caramel from Rosie’s chin. And don’t I kneel beneath the street’s only tree which, within the next twenty-four hours, I will Google, and learn is called a jacaranda —properly titled: Jacaranda- Mimosifolia: A sub-tropical tree native to south- central South America, regarded as an invasive species in parts of Australia, due to problems with the Blue Jacaranda preventing growth of native species
She starts to laugh, these little underwater war- bles that she’s developed lately.
—What’s gambling, she asks?
It’s sometime around seven. The last of the sun is lodging between two of the Homes-West blocks on the far side of Hubert. You can feel the heat of it dropping.
—It’s monetised hope, I tell Rosie.
The ground around us is blue with dropped blos- soms. It’s early December and over the course of the weeks just gone, one morning after the next, I’ve stepped from the door, and this jacaranda which was previously a knuckled shrub you’d hardly notice, kept filling and filling with colour. Until now, it’s this lurid class of blue, like a tree that’d been crayoned by a child.
And Hubert Street feels paused. Eff-all cars, just a few people here and there, doddering near their letterboxes. It has that eeriness, like you’d get
in an empty church, or an empty airport lounge. We’ve lived on Hubert for near-on a year, and I’m yet to reconcile with it. I still can’t figure it for what class of neighbourhood. Our side is a litany of these little twenties-era weatherboard work- er’s cottages. Overvalued shacks that are painted all in pastel notes and gone gentrified. If you
—What’s monetised, asks Rosie. —Never mind child.
can picture paved driveways and SUV’s, pop-up sprinkler heads fizzing after-dark in prim flower beds, rose stalks wove through lattice, that class of thing; retirees in their dressing gowns on their front lawns in the mornings with mugs of frothy coffee, poking about idly, dew on their slippers, and everyone on first name terms, that’s our side of Hubert. But then, opposite, and especially for the block between Dane and Somerset, you’ve got
Rosie, right now, is gathering handfuls of blos- soms, and bringing them right up close to her nose.
and what’s; her little contraptions of why.
—It’s a class of annoyance, child.
—Quit that child, I say —a dog might have
pissed there.
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