Looking Like a Success
The Kingfisher had become a fixture of my weekends by the second half of 2012, but the week was still Sciforma: the dungeon office in Bondi Junction that Maurya had found us, chasing new clients, keeping the ones we had in Sydney happy, Fuji Xerox and Salmat among them.
One morning in the office something genuinely alarming happened. I couldn’t log into PSNext. Overnight, Apple had pulled support for Java on its platform without warning, and PSNext, Sciforma’s flagship enterprise project management system, ran on Java. It had to be installed on every customer’s machine for the software to work at all. We scrambled, got online, tried to work out what had happened. Within twenty-four hours Apple had restored it, with a warning that Java’s days on their platform were numbered because of security concerns. It caused a bit of local panic in our basement office, but I can only imagine what it was doing to head office in Los Gatos, where the entire business sat on that one dependency. I filed it away as a small, strange moment, but I would come to find out later what a monumental event it actually was, one with very negative consequences.
Outside of that, life had a rhythm. Weekdays at Sciforma, weekends with Crazy Colin on the boats: strange characters, strange fish, sunburn, and the usual crowd getting pissed afterwards at the Kauri in Glebe. It was good fun.
What had started to genuinely irritate me, though, was what I was paying Gabby. The apartment in Wollstonecraft really was luxury: top floor, open-plan lounge and kitchen, her ensuite, a proper bathroom with a bath, my room, and a balcony so large you could have grown actual crops in containers on it, which neither of us ever did. $2,000 a month. A serious amount of money. I realised I was paying a full half of the rent despite having only one of the three bedrooms. The third she kept available for her daughter Steph, who was away at uni.
The final straw came when she told me I’d have to move out for December, because her parents were coming from South Africa. She’d arranged for me to stay with her South African friends Pam and Roger, lovely people, in a suburban house north of Sydney, a long train ride from everything, including the boats on weekends. She never once offered to knock anything off the rent. Just the alternative accommodation, take it or leave it.
Christmas happened in the middle of that displacement. My cousin Bill, my mother’s brother Bernard’s son, who I’d known my whole life and who is a story unto himself, put on a genuinely lovely Christmas dinner, and I went.
New Year’s 2012–13 was pretty interesting. I was still at Pam and Roger’s, and I had asked Colin to keep an eye out for any deckhand work on the party boats for New Year’s Eve. I thought I could get a ringside view of the fireworks and get paid. He found me not one but two gigs: the first from 7pm until 1am on a superyacht, and the second from 2am until 10am on New Year’s Day on the massive thousand-person Sydney 2000.
The first gig was easy: me, the captain and two stewardesses, serving a Russian oligarch, his wife and two teenagers, a boy and a girl. I’ve never had the misfortune of meeting such a sullen bunch. They literally sat on their phones throughout the evening. We watched the main fireworks from right under the bridge and they barely looked up, and certainly didn’t smile. When we dropped them off, I politely enquired of the woman, “Did you have a good evening, madam?” The response, grunted at me without a smile or a tip, was “Is ok.” Awful people.
Then the next part of my night started. Never mind the alcohol, I have never seen so much stuff disappearing up people’s noses in my life. It was basically a massive rave on water. By 8am many were collapsing with exhaustion, and the water taxis were making a killing getting those who couldn’t take it any longer away before the official end, which was, I believe, 10am. What an experience the whole thing was, and I think I pocketed about $500.
In early January I moved back into my room at Gabby’s, still annoyed about being shuffled out for a month, and she told me I’d now need to start paying half the cost of a cleaner coming in. By then I’d already quietly looked around and found I could get a place of my own for about half what I was paying her. So I said, “Okay, Gabby, thanks, but I think I’m moving out.” The look on her face told me that was the one outcome she hadn’t planned for.
I found a room in an apartment in McMahon’s Point, leased from a Chinese lady, a very nice room, for $950 a month, literally half what I’d been paying. McMahon’s Point turned out to be a lovely suburb, right by the Harbour Bridge, an easy train ride into Bondi Junction, and a fraction of the cost.
In January 2013 I flew back, South Africa first, then Denmark. I arrived loaded down with gifts that had cost me a small fortune, for Niels and Carey and their boys, now in their twenties, Christopher, Danny and James, because I wanted to look like a success coming home from my job in Australia. The pattern of wanting to impress my elder brother was still as strong as ever. Looking back now, thirteen years on, I can see how much energy I spent on that appearance. Living in Australia had also made the distance brutally real in a way it hadn’t been before. It had already been a long time since I’d lived under the same roof as my children, but the time difference and the sheer geography made it so much harder, and I was desperate to see them.
Mikey had been in Copenhagen since 2010, so that was easy and wonderful. Angie and Olie were living with Terry and Blair in Nigeria, but they had Danish friends, and they came through Copenhagen for a couple of days, so I got to see them too. We borrowed Niels’s car and drove up to Kronborg Castle, the setting for Hamlet, right on the Øresund, close enough to see Sweden across the water. It was a genuinely good day.
Underneath it, though, I was in real turmoil, carrying a lot of guilt about living so far from my kids and only getting these small windows with them. One thing from that day has stayed with me clearly. Niels’s youngest son James, who Angie had always looked up to, closest to her in age of the cousins, someone she’d been so excited to see, spent the big family lunch at Niels and Carey’s place more or less ignoring her, treating her dismissively. I watched her get hurt by it. There is exactly one thing in this world that will set me off instantly, and that’s my kids being hurt. I was furious with him.
That’s a bit of a detour, but it belongs here, because once everyone had left, the anxiety came back hard: jet lag, too much emotion and too much alcohol packed into too few days, and underneath it all the familiar sense that I was in a genuinely bad way, physically and mentally. I went to see the same Danish doctor who’d given me the sleeping pills before I first left for Australia. He ran a full set of blood tests. Everything came back normal. Which told me, as clearly as any test result could, that this was entirely emotional.
I flew back to Australia and did the only thing I knew how to do: threw myself back into work during the week and fishing on the weekends.
And that’s how 2013 began, right before I met someone who would end up being a very large part of my life, for a good while, and not always for the good.