Confessions of a Bondi Blonde

Sorry.

Unlike Australian ex-PM John Howard, I have no problem saying this five letter word. In fact, it’s usually quite a handy phrase as I often mutter it after doing something I illicitly enjoyed. Sorry for eating the last of the chocolate that I know you like. Sorry for taking that parking space, I didn’t see you waiting for it too. Sorry for parking my trolley in the queue at the supermarket, claiming my spot while continuing to shop, collecting ice cream and salt. So, sorry for not writing sooner.

My excuse is that the Bondi Blonde has been contemplating moving house. So among the packed boxes and lost hours poring over photos on me in shoulder pads, smiling out of a pre-kid corporate scene from decades past, I have not really known what to write. I am scared of the future and am tired of analysing the past, so stay paralysed in the present, waiting for a lucky roll of the dice as my house going to auction sometime soon. I am caught in a sticky web of real estate agents’ imprecise promises, and am trying to control too many unknowns while keeping my house as immaculate, impersonal and as aspirationally welcoming as a five-star hotel.

The double brick facade and mortar of this place have been the safe harbour for my children and me since they came into the world and, five days later, home.

Two years ago my ex-husband swiftly exited in a whiff of another woman’s perfume, crunched uncomfortably with his suitcases in the front of her two seated sports car while I was doing pre-school and school drop offs. I returned to an empty walk in wardrobe, coat hangers swinging in the space where suits and ties had dominated in shades of navy blue and dark grey. After a while, I filled the space with a new, feminine wardrobe of pale silks and lots of different sexy black dresses (black looks good on a Blonde, so I overinvested in that investment dressing option). My bedroom and its closets were gayer (in the old-fashioned meaning of the word) than they had been in years. The smell of cedar balls and aftershave were replaced with sprays of lavender and the perfume that I acquired, bottle by bottle, filling my shelves with glittering, happy glass and silver baubles; declarations of my sensual survival.

I have always been ambivalent about the family home. It is posher than me. It makes an impression that I don’t agree with and says something about the owner that doesn’t fit well with my self-image. It was always my husband’s home, which I dutifully filled with overstuffed reproduction furniture and relentlessly average art, well behaved oils of humourless places. Unsure of how to fill the space and bringing a Freedom sofa and a dog from our previous lives as working stiffs, we hired an expensive interior decorator that I felt deplored my natural taste and was in tacit agreement with my husband on how to fill a serious house, seriously. I was a well behaved wife who had given up my middle ranking PR job to pop and raise the brats while my husband’s banking job went into the stratosphere of prestige and payment; I felt that agreeing to live with furniture that was more adult than I had ever felt was the polite thing to do.

We had bought the fancy house after his first big bonus cheque arrived with lots and lots of zeros. The amount, factual and cleanly typed, wasn’t a dream. But it was more lottery win than income. It was more than my dad or my husband’s dad had earned in a decade of work, including weekend overtime. The bank cheque declared that we had arrived into the good life, so we dutifully bought a house that kicked over the traces of our working class pasts.

My husband was anointed king of the garden while I managed the house’s domestic routine. We built a garden that was formal, green and free of birds due to the lack of flowering plants that were planted. It was elegant and was kept free of weeds by my husband’s diligence with the Round-Up and his hand picking of weeds on Sunday afternoons, removing clover while talking on conference calls to New York, Mumbai and London on his mobile phone.

After he left the family home, moving into his girlfriend’s courtyard flat, I ignored the garden for ages. Weeds grew. Children kicked balls that were quickly lost in the long grass. Flowers that were really flowering weeds happily took root. One afternoon, searching for a football, my son found a four leaf clover among the many that, finally, prospered.  Last summer, a kookaburra visited us almost daily. My garden had become a haven for lizards, especially skinks. Spiders laced the overgrown lillipillis together with skeins of web, glistening silver with sunlight and dew every morning.

By March, dividing the spoils of war that my marriage had become had been finalised. The house had to be sold so we could move forward as two, independent family units.

I called a gardener I found on-line. He surveyed the small urban jungle that my once pristine green square had become, scratched his head, applied his sunscreen and set to work. I hurriedly cut the flowers from the camellias before they were reshaped into acceptably straight hedges. As the afternoon wore on, the smell of cut grass filled the house, wet, earthy and metallic, as the mower ploughed through the unkempt lawn.

At 3:00 p.m. I went to pick up my children from school. When we arrived home, the gardener was finishing his day. His labour had returned the lawn to a pristine square, not the ragged tangle of weeds it had relaxed into. There were many brown patches where the grasses had grown too long, but the gardener told me that the green would return as long as I continued a regular maintenance programme. He said goodbye, though he would return tomorrow to continue the hedging.

In the corner of the lawn lay a pile of balls. An old rugby ball, three soccer balls, eight tennis balls, grey rather than the lime green they had been when they were first lost in the grass, and fifteen other balls. They had been swallowed up in the past few years, absorbed by the hedges and overgrown playing field. My eldest son picked up a plastic cricket bat that lay beside the balls. We all played cricket into the late afternoon, loosing most of the balls back into the hedges, ignoring homework and enjoying our lawn again until it was time for dinner.

So, sorry again from the currently located-at-Bondi Blonde for not writing sooner. Communication has recommenced, though I am not sure where it will be from, maybe I’ll be the Bellevue Hill Blonde or the Beecroft Blonde, though I don’t think either of those addresses will suit me quite so well.