Spinning Around by Catherine Jinks Page B

detached laundry. I was pregnant with Jonah, at the time, and we had to find something fast because we couldn’t stay in our rented flat in Darlinghurst, with its cramped proportions and mouldy bathroom—I was going mad, in that place. So we bought our new house as soon as we’d saved up enough money for a sizeable deposit, not realising what we’d got ourselves into.
    Old houses are full of secrets. Not good old secrets, like caches of love letters under the floorboards, or marble mantelpieces concealed behind a sheet of plasterboard—I’m talking about bad old secrets. Our house only had two bedrooms, but we thought that we’d add another when Jonah was eighteen months old and I went back to work. We wanted another bedroom, a larger kitchen, and a laundry with a roof that didn’t leak. Little did we know that, on pulling up some of our old linoleum, we would find not only layers of delightful antique newspapers, but termite damage and sewage leaks as well. Pipes had to be dug up, boards had to be replaced, and by the time all that was done our builder was running late; our job was beginning to impinge on another one. So then our builder started to juggle them both, and you can guess what happened. Nothing. Nothing at all, for long stretches of time.
    I was such an innocent when I bought our house. I had no idea what it means to own your own real estate. Sure, I knew about mortgages, but I didn’t understand about pest inspections, gutter cleaning, electric hot water systems, council rates, plumbing problems, sewage leaks or termite damage. I never imagined that it would all be so expensive . God, it’s expensive—especially if neither you nor your husband can change a tap washer, or replace a hinge. And it was all made doubly expensive by the fact that I went a bit mad, when Jonah was a baby. What I mean is, I became obsessed with interior design magazines.
    You know the type of thing I’m talking about. Those thick, glossy doorstops full of ads for upholstery fabrics and tapware and six-burner cook tops. There’s usually a ‘special’ feature on beautiful bathrooms (or kitchens), an article on a designer’s ‘inner-city’ cottage—utterly transformed into a four-storey mansion with guest room and Tuscan courtyard—and another one on a converted coach-house in the southern highlands of New South Wales. Well, I don’t need to tell you. You’ve probably seen about a million of them—or two million, if you’re anything like me. I was fixated on our house when Jonah was a baby. I thought about almost nothing else, because it was our first house, because I was stuck in it all day every day, looking at the wood-grain laminex in the kitchen, and because thinking about limestone benchtops or concealed rangehoods took my mind off the awfulness of Jonah. God, he was awful. I know I shouldn’t be saying it (most people are really shocked, when a mother comes out and says that her child’s being a pain) but some babies are sent to try you. Lisa reckons that when she was pregnant with Liam, and as sick as a dog, the only things that saved her sanity were grisly thriller videos like Seven and The Silence of the Lambs , from which she could derive the satisfying knowledge that, while things were bad for her, they could be infinitely worse.
    During my time of trial, I relied on homemaker magazines. My brief moments of respite—when I was sitting on the toilet, say, or waiting at the Early Childhood Clinic, pushing Jonah back and forth in his pram—were always spent poring over paint catalogues or photographs of window treatments. Raptly, I would marvel at the names of the colours. (Whoever thought of ‘minced onion’ as a name? Or ‘reef cocktail’? Or ‘medici sunset’?) Enviously, I would study shots of somebody’s renovated 1830s farmhouse, wondering how there could be so many people in the world