Every eight years, we replace our furniture. We went to Fantastic Furniture at first, and later progressed to Freedom. Then, after Chanel’s last promotion, one of the Corporation’s senior managers invited us to dinner. You could almost see the money rolling around that house. Everything in it was mid-century modern, so now we’ve gone down that route as well. All our furniture is repro from Matt Blatt. It’s the perfect solution: old furniture that’s new. We renovate a bathroom every seven years, and the kitchen every ten. The expense is essential. Household debt and home improvements are key Australian values. Chanel and I never feel more assimilated than when we wake up with headaches from the smell of paint or when an apprentice plumber is ensuring that our new sink will fail to drain.
The first time we redid our kitchen, the builder found a small package behind the wall oven. Waxy cloth folded back, and a Christian image was revealed. Perhaps in the previous owners’ homeland there was a tradition of keeping an icon in the hearth, and hiding one behind the electric oven was an approximation of that rite. Religion was one of the things that Chanel and I chose to leave behind, but Ivy took the picture into her room. It’s still there, in its blackened tin frame. She also has a tapestry Jesus on a cushion cover, a plastic Kuan Yin, and a Buddha framed in tiny electric lights. Ivy has never outgrown the retrograde practices instilled in her by those nuns. Her instincts are more sweeping, that’s all. Every morning she shuffles a pack of playing cards and draws one out – the day is foretold.
People talk readily to Ivy. She looks harmless, I suppose. In the days when she was well enough to get about, she used to volunteer at a food bank. The stories she brought home! There was a girl who lived at a Moorabbin storage facility because a unit there was all she could afford to rent. Another time it was an old man who cooked up enough porridge to last a week and kept it in a drawer. That was how his mother had done it in Aberdeen, and he saw no reason to change.
Ivy gave everyone she got talking to her phone number. The porridge man arranged to see her. They met in the city and went to one of those Hare Krishna eateries in Swanston Street for lunch. Next thing, they were meeting every week. Chanel and I became alarmed. Ivy wore her emerald ring on those outings – what if he snatched it from her finger? Who was paying for his lunch? When we asked Ivy what they talked about, she said, ‘The beauty of algebra.’ We learned that he’d been a mathematical whiz kid who had a breakdown at the age of twenty – his life never got back on track. We wondered if Ivy was giving him money to buy a fridge. Luckily, lockdown arrived, and they switched to calling each other. One day he told her, between bouts of coughing, that his whole body felt hot. He could barely summon the strength to pick up his phone. After that, no one answered when Ivy called. She told us that at the end of their last lunch, he’d got down on his creaky, swollen knees and clasped her shins. It was safer than shaking hands or kissing her cheek. We pointed out, very gently, that the pandemic was a mercy for someone like him – what kind of life was that, a rented room with porridge in a drawer?
