Paddy drove us through a town north of Wollongong in late afternoon sun. After a line of goldrush era shops, a ‘70s library, a McDonald’s, and a cricket match, we passed a stand of Illawarra Flame Trees. I started humming the Cold Chisel song’s chorus, but even that wouldn’t shift my earworm.
We’re all going on a summer holiday…
That lyric had been chewing at me for hours, along with Cliff Richard’s sugary voice singing about no more work for a couple of weeks, lots of laughing and fun in the sea. I wasn’t exactly sure how I knew the song, but thought it had turned up as an ironic tune on the soundtrack for a BBC drama, set in London housing commission flats.
… for a week or two-ee-oo-ee-oooo
Life for me and Paddy could have been a gritty Australian drama, but we’d scraped into university – despite some teachers and family telling us, like the Screaming Jets’ song, that we’d never get anywhere. Not that we were any place in particular; I had a public service job and Paddy sometimes used his photography major in his comms role with a not-for-profit.
We cleared the little town and its Flame Trees, settled again onto the highway proper, off to Coolangatta, where the sun was, yes, Cliff, forecast to shine brightly. For a few days we were finally escaping the concrete and car yards of our never-quite-up-and-coming-enough western suburb of Melbourne. In Coolangatta, Paddy and I would hold hands and leap over waves, our tanned bodies taut and gorgeous as we laughed and frolicked.
Yeah, right.
I turned to the backseat and checked on our three romance killers: six-year-old Jay and the twin four-year-olds, Mia and Luna. Married late and probably too old for kids, we’d decided to have them anyway. And they were everything I had always wanted –
and that Paddy had sometimes always wanted – but who were mostly more than either of us could handle. Right now though, the three of them were asleep at the same time. I nudged Paddy gently on the arm.
“I’m driving.”
I pointed to the rear-view mirror.
“I don’t believe it,” he said.
“I can’t remember the last time.”
The car said thirty-six degrees outside and the air-con in our Holden Nothing station wagon was struggling. I gulped water from my steel bottle and Paddy sipped his Coke Zero. The car continued its highway whistle as we drove past a skanky dried out swamp on our right and an unknown National Park on our left. Nothing out there worth talking about.
At home, when the kids finally stopped protesting and went to sleep, there were a couple of quiet hours when we might have talked. But Paddy would usually go to our weatherboard shed and the darkroom he’d fashioned out there, where he’d develop another portrait photo he hoped would win him a prize and result in his long-hoped-for discovery. I’d try to squeeze out a couple of lines of poetry, but would soon give up and scroll Facebook, before collapsing in bed. No energy for watching a series and barely enough to stay awake a few minutes to plan out tomorrow night’s dinner, or sort through the kids’ commitments that we had to manage between our jobs. I was constantly worried I’d forgotten something, like a birthday party invitation, an excursion permission, a learning disability – anything that might make me a bad mother and the kids fodder for counsellors. When I’d finally hosed down my anxieties, I’d slide off to sleep, then wake for a moment when Paddy came in and peeled back the doona. Other times I’d sleep on because Paddy would bunk in his darkroom on a stretcher bed. Apparently, he didn’t want to wake me.
It's so funny, how we don’t –
Christ, that was a Cliff Richard song too!
– talk anymore…
When we did talk, it was about money and career woes and what the kids needed. And, in between all that, we’d give each other hints that our dreams were shattering. But somehow we came up with the holiday plan, the most important part of which was to drive to Coolangatta because we couldn’t afford to fly.
I flicked my phone app to find some music. For once, it wouldn’t need to be kiddie music! I blasted Hoodoo Gurus’ ‘What’s My Scene?’ but Paddy motioned to the back seat and tapped the volume down. I turned it back up and sang along with the chorus.
“What are you doing?” he asked the single-lane highway and the truck ahead.
“Singing. You used to like it when I sang.”
“It’s been a while.”
The truck in front turned left off the highway and into a forest.
“Hasn’t everything?” I said and he grunted. Too loud.
“Please, Paddy, don’t hassle me about sex. Again.”
“I didn’t bring it up,” he said. “I thought you had. At last.”
Dave Faulkner sang on, confused about where life was taking him, and Paddy slapped on an indicator and passed a Volvo just before another town’s sixty-zone. The place was not much more than a pub and a creek. In one front yard, two rusted cars slept beneath an Australian flag. I chanced a peek into the backseat. The minions slept.
“Do you remember the night we met?” I asked as “My Girl” came on. Not a lot of love in that song so I flipped to the next track, “Like Wow, Wipeout”.
“First or second time?”
“I thought we’d agreed never to talk about the first.”
“You agreed.”
I had a mind to flip bands to Talking Heads and hit Paddy with “Road to Nowhere”. But, maybe because we were on holidays, I chose another option: not to fight. Turn my lions into doves or something.
“Okay, the second time…”
The road rose on its way out of the town and Paddy glared ahead. I kept quiet and waited as he put his sunnies on and settled. A bit.
“Yes. I remember when we met. Of course I remember. Why are you asking?”
Dave Faulkner sang about being gone the moment he laid eyes on someone, but I didn’t sing along. Too serendipitous. The lyric filled the car and I hoped it might soften Paddy.
“I don’t know. Just asking.”
I studied the image on my phone screen of a hyper-coloured Hoodoo Gurus album cover.
“The Hoodoos are one of the most underrated bands in Oz rock, don’t you think?”
We’d met, the first time, at a gig in a massive beer barn. A Black Sorrows reunion concert or something. In his Blur t-shirt and with longer hair then, Paddy had made his move on me later in the night, asking for my number between encores. I’d given it, but he’d seen me leave with a guy who looked like Tex Perkins, who I hadn’t slept with, but Paddy had always assumed I had.
“I think it’s been said so many times that the Hoodoo Gurus are underrated that they can’t help but be rated pretty highly,” Paddy offered as a Tesla passed us.
We’d spent our early days seeing bands, going to music festivals, and bouncing new and old artists off each other, first on CDs, then with endless links. All of this before kids arrived in a batch of colic and sleeping dramas, speech therapy, visits to the Royal Children’s, and all those trips to playgrounds.
“Who do you think’s the best-ever Oz rock band?”
Paddy thought for a moment.
“Cold Chisel. I mean, I don’t love them, but I think even a casual listener would say they had a unique sound compared to everyone else. They were just, I don’t know, quintessential.”
I waited, but nothing. Not even the hint of a smile for saying quintessential. I’d been hoping we could avoid counselling – the cost was a big enough problem – but if Paddy wasn’t even going to laugh at quintessential…He revved the engine and passed a mini-bus full of primary school-aged kids, separated from their parents and off to a summer camp. Two boys waved at me and I waved back.
“It’s Go-Betweens for me,” I said. “You want a unique sound, there it is. All jagged rhythms and timings. And they were deeper than quintessential. They had literary lyrics, and you can almost feel all that humidity of Brisbane in their sound.”
Paddy nodded. His angular jaw relaxed for a moment and he took his gum from his mouth and tucked it into a piece of discarded wrapper. He sipped from his Coke Zero, wiped his lips and, just for a second, I remembered what it was like to kiss him.
“Australian Crawl are underrated,” he said.
“Are you serious? I reckon they got enough rating over the years! They were the biggest band in Australia for a bit.”
“They’re forgotten now.”
A murmur came from the backseat, but Luna just shifted her head and stayed asleep.
“Hardly. ‘Reckless’ is an Aussie rock anthem.”
“But nothing else of theirs is remembered. Put them on?
”I’d planned to replace the Hoodoos with The Go-Betweens, but Paddy at least talking, gave me motivation to endure The Crawl. I could never understand what James Reyne was singing, except for parts of ‘Beautiful People’ – the garden’s full of furniture, the house is full of plants. It was the first song that came on and Paddy talked up its critique of ‘80s glitz. Then ‘Things Don’t Seem’ blasted out and, shit, that track rocked.
“I don’t remember the guitar being this good.”
“Simon Binks’ guitar work is seriously under-rated,” Paddy smiled. The sun ducked behind a clump of forest, and he raised his sunglasses to his forehead in the dappled light. I wanted to flick off Aussie Crawl for Crowded House and their track, ‘Now We’re Getting Somewhere’.
Jay stirred in the backseat, even opened his eyes, but, merciful God, his head lolled, and he slept again.
“Australian Crawl are to Australia what The Eagles are to America,” Paddy said.
“The Eagles? They don’t sound anything like them.”
“Not the sound, the sensibility. The Eagles were on about emptiness, despair from excess, the California thing? Aussie Crawl did all that for the nouveau rich of Mornington and Melbourne.”
“Hardly a global export, like The Eagles.”
‘Things Don’t Seem’ wound down and ‘Errol’ started up – he want to get higher . . . and then some other lyric I couldn’t make out. And it wasn’t even Reyne singing.
“Your point?” Paddy asked.
“The Eagles, who as you know, I hate, were an international success.”
“I don’t know what your point is.”
I didn’t either. I just wanted to keep talking.
“Alright. Aussie Crawl are our Eagles . . . Discuss,” I told him.
“Okay. Put on ‘Hoochie Gucci Fiorucci Mama’.”
Paddy didn’t sound so tired for once. I scrolled and a solo piano kicked in with Reyne’s echoing and sorrowful vocal. It was a sad tale of a rich eighties’ Mornington Peninsula housewife – full of cash, empty of meaning, and struck by catatonic loneliness.
“This is as good as anything The Eagles ever did.”
I pieced my way through a lyric I’d never bothered deciphering.
“But they blame it all on the woman. Like she’s the only one responsible for the crap situation. The husband’s off making money for her to play with – and he’s playing around, I think that’s obvious – while she’s looking for love and meaning…”
I was suddenly so tired I could have collapsed in the back with the kids.
‘Hoochie Gucci’ finished up and we stared ahead. ‘Downhearted’ played, then ‘Oh No Not You Again’, its story of doomed young lovers. I moved to turn it off but Paddy took my hand gently, laid it on my knee, and put his hand back on the wheel.
Let me tell you ‘bout the two young lovers who lived down…
I looked at Paddy’s lined face, the crows’ feet, and wondered what he saw in my face these days, if anything.
“This one’s about as Eagles as it gets,” he said.
I disagreed entirely. The song was about a poor couple. But I’d lost my mojo for debating Oz rock.
“Yeah?”
She sets the table for four…
We set it for five. Often a time of tears and food refusal from the kids, while Paddy sat there brooding. Reyne sang of the man out on the town looking to pick up a new woman.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh no not you again…
The nights in the darkroom. The Australian Crawl and Eagles chat, with relationship drama and affairs in so many of their songs. So, an admission was coming, but I barely had the energy to care. I braced myself for whatever, whoever it was, as Paddy took a turn for the freeway. The sun blinded us, and we pulled down the car’s sun visors.
“Paddy…”
“Only with my darkroom,” he smiled at the highway.
I wanted to tell him my affair had been with sleep. That gorgeous tranquillity when, for some of the night, I was embraced in hours of nothing to do. There was no husband to harass me for sex, or attention, or love, or whatever he probably needed that I wasn’t getting either. But then my dark fears would bubble away in the shape of dreams until, unrested, I awoke nowhere near ready for a new day, but with no choice but to wade through it.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh no not you again . . .
The chorus, inane, was infectious. I opened my lungs.
“Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh no not you…”
“Again, gen, gen, gen,” Paddy sang, then we did the next line loud and in unison.
“What’s going on?” Jay asked while Luna wriggled and whinged beside him and Mia slept on. Paddy smiled, flicked up the volume, and I realised Jay had never heard us sing together. I resisted the urge to explain why adults did things.
“Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh no not you again,” Paddy and I sang together, even shooting for a harmony.