Bri Lee: 'All our people waved to us from outside our old home as we veered off into the sunrise'

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This was published 4 years ago

Bri Lee: 'All our people waved to us from outside our old home as we veered off into the sunrise'

By Bri Lee

As it turns out, you don’t need any particularly special type of licence to drive a 20-cubic-metre truck across state lines. If my parents were at all nervous about this, they did not communicate it. My partner and I certainly communicated our nervousness about this to each other when we paid for the most comprehensive possible insurance package.

This was all happening in February, so I’m sure I was only sweating from the summer heat. We couldn’t really afford to hire the truck and pay for someone else to drive it from Brisbane to Sydney. And besides, you can’t put (nor take) guinea pigs on aeroplanes.

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“Yeah, we’re just hiring a truck!” I’d been saying confidently to anyone who asked. This confidence faltered when the truck in question arrived. My dad laughed at me when he saw my face: mouth falling open, eyes wide. Benevolently, my partner agreed to take the first shift driving. We had a lunchbox of samosas and sandwiches that his mum had made us. Eddie and Louis had a delicious greens-from-the-garden selection from my folks.

“What an adventure!” I seem to remember exclaiming as we took out an orange cone at the very first corner, traffic cops looking on suspiciously. All our people waved to us from outside our old home as we veered off into the sunrise and across the Story Bridge.

My family have this thing we do where we all help each other with house stuff all the time. As the much younger sibling, I was prone to outbursts of impatience and whingeing on these working bees. My parents’ new place, my older brother’s first place … and me (with absolutely no prospects of a having a place of my own any time soon) deeply resenting that I could never call in return favours to help lay concrete or paint walls or rip out bad pavers.

Then I moved out of home. As any young person pinballing from rental to rental each year will tell you, you always go into a place that’s dirty and then freak yourself out with a hundred products trying to make it clean before you leave. There are never enough utes or yellow-green sponge scourers. Not getting your full bond back is not an option, and they will try to screw you.

Moving out of our Brisbane rental was no exception. It was a very tiny and very crappy place in the most wonderful location – right where Fortitude Valley meets New Farm. You could lean out our bedroom window and hear the idiot on acoustic guitar playing Wonderwall at The Brunswick Hotel, and you could go out dancing and walk home, yet we had a backyard big enough for our neighbours’ chooks and our guinea pigs’ hutch. Still, we had tired of the holes in the floor and the split personality hot water system. The landlords had used outdoor paint inside (we think it was to create an extra-safe, extra thick coating over the asbestos) in what can only be described as “aged mustard”.

Once, when the owners scheduled a termite inspection, I watched a man walk around our lounge/dining/office space and tap all three metres of the cornices with a special tool that looked suspiciously like a rubber ball on the end of a stick. He did this twice and paused, then on the third tap a long strip of paint came away and a clumpy cloud of miscellaneous former building materials poured out of the ceiling and onto our broken couch. He left and the hole in the ceiling stayed.

My parents had asked at least five times in the months and weeks leading up to the move date whether or not we needed help. “You know we’re more than happy to,” my mum repeated. Even my brother had texted offering some muscle. I kept saying, “No, thank you”, “No, thank you”, because I have a pathological inability to pass up any opportunity to demonstrate independence.

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The day before the truck was being dropped off, we’d moved all the furniture from inside the unit to the filthy underneath of it so that we could clean properly. It was late that afternoon when I began to realise we were perhaps, to put it mildly, screwed. My partner and I were reaching exhaustion and we hadn’t even loaded the truck. Yet another message came through, “Are you sure you don’t want us to come by?” I caved. Yes, please, dear Lord oh God, yes, please come, and bring every mop and bucket you’ve ever owned, and also we are starving.

Sometimes I do this very unattractive thing where I express great frustration towards my partner when he can do things stronger or faster than I can. When we go jogging, for example, I have been known to have been training for weeks before him and then cry when he beats me, on his first run of the season, to the top of the final hill. Moving house meant lifting the opposite end of whatever large piece of furniture my partner was lifting, so please let your own imagination populate the extent of my exasperating immaturity at that time.

Despite this, my memories are mostly of us joking about things and being thrilled to cull a lot of stuff we were happy not to need in this new chapter of our lives. We had been partners for six years, three of them full of rather unique challenges, and we had held together, I believe, fantastically. That night before the truck arrived, when we finally lay down to sleep, we were bone-and-muscle tired, but I fell asleep thinking about how incredibly easy it was to fling yourself at life when you knew help was always at hand.

The next morning we split tasks in the frustrating but logical way: my mother and I started vacuuming and scrubbing while my partner, brother and father were loading the truck. Three hours later we were ready to roll.

“I can’t believe we thought we could do this without you,” I said to my mum as we wiped our brows. I suspect this is something that, upon a parent hearing, makes them want to simultaneously scream and weep and laugh. My partner’s parents had arrived, too, with gifts and snacks, to see us off.

I looked out the empty bedroom window at everyone else below: my mum and dad, my brother, and my partner’s mum and dad. Also, two of our friends and our two neighbours had lent a hand. Everyone was standing, leaning, sitting around, having their flat whites, making jokes, sharing news. And I knew it then, the surest I have ever been: I am a one-per-center with people. Just like others are with immense financial privilege, I was born into an abundance of love, and then I found it easy to grow it, and now I claim it as my own.

A few times in my life I have stumbled into the cross-hairs of rather unpleasant people. Once or twice completely by accident, and once or twice deliberately. I’ve written about a couple of these and haven’t written about others (yet), and what strikes me about each of these stories is how lucky I’ve always had it; never striking out without a sense of home to come back to.

The gods deposited me into a strong team back in 1991, and we’ve stuck it out together season after season. My grandma passed away in 2017 and left a gap for a while, but I think we’ve found a way to keep her memory alive while closing ranks even tighter than before. My friends in both Brisbane and Sydney prove themselves to be kind and generous and hilarious time and time again. While I don’t consider myself to be particularly “popular” in terms of numbers of friends, I am only ever a single message or phone call away from someone whom I care about and who cares about me.

And what can I say about my partner? He had felt “overwhelmingly negative” about guinea pigs before we got them (and then for about a year after we got them), and they are a funny example of how I get to do almost whatever I want. His moving to Sydney not just with me, but really for me, for my work, is a good example of him truly supporting me to do whatever I need. We are kind to each other. When my nastier angles emerge – my greediness, my pettiness, my jealousy – he is patient and seemingly undeterred. He is much smarter than me. Most importantly, he makes me laugh every single day we are together. Sometimes when I am able to make him laugh – a good long laugh, beginning with surprise and ending with a wiping of the corners of the eyes – I feel so happy I could just burst into a million little stars and die.

Honestly, I’m just gloating now, but I even seem to happen upon very wonderful strangers quite often. In our giant truck we stopped overnight in Armidale. My partner’s colleague’s parents lived there and, never having met us before, opened their home to us four weary travellers with warmth and hospitality and delightful conversation. When we set off the following morning at dawn, we had a little tuckerbox of fresh bread rolls and boiled eggs, complete with some salt and pepper wrapped carefully in little foil squares.

I will never forget this image: countryside rocketing along outside the window, us high up in that cabin, my guinea pigs on the seat to my left, me squeezed in the middle, my handsome man to my right, and me looking down at my lap through my truckstop aviators as I tried to sprinkle salt onto my boiled egg for morning tea.

We were operating heavy machinery that we definitely shouldn’t have been allowed to, moving to a city where my partner didn’t have work and where we’d be paying almost double the rent, to an apartment my partner hadn’t seen in person, leaving the only city either of us had ever properly lived in and all of our family behind. And, as always, I felt completely invincible.

I spent a lot of time in my early 20s embarrassed about the wrong things: body things, money things, “cool” things. Now that I’m a little bit older, I am instead haunted by the times I wasn’t the friend or sister or daughter or granddaughter or girlfriend I could have and should have been. I’ve leaned on people a lot in the past three years in particular. In this way I am aware I have gathered debts, but these people I’m blessed with let me go about my life wearing them lightly.

We had left a small army of people behind, and when we arrived at our new place 36 hours later, there were five friends waiting to help us unload and carry box after box to the third storey of our new apartment building. When the last box was dumped, the pigs settled, and we had the truck masterfully reverse-parked into a tiny inner-west suburban lane, my partner and I high-fived and went for dinner at the pub.

About 10 seconds after we’d each finished a single schooner, we could barely keep our eyes open. Walking up the stairs to get to our new home, even with empty arms, was painful. The electricity was being connected the next day, so our cold showers involved some laughter and bracing camaraderie. We dug out a sheet, half-heartedly covered the mattress on the floor, and crashed together.

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The thing about this big life stuff I’ve learnt so far is that if somebody wants to just sit on the bench while shit is getting real, then they’re not really on your team. The opposite end of the spectrum is the privilege and daring that comes from knowing you’re never alone. Choosing the life you want for yourself can make things hard, the same way standing up for yourself or picking battles can be hard, but gosh, what’s the alternative? That nothing bad ever happens to you and you’re surrounded
by people who half know you or sort-of care? No thanks, I’d rather drive the truck myself.

Bri Lee’s second book, Beauty (Allen & Unwin, $20), was released in November.

To read more of Good Weekend’s 10 short stories by 10 big authors, visit this page.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

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