Route 109: Fiona Hardy
Image by Connor O’Brien
Route 109: Box Hill to Port Melbourne by Fiona Hardy
On the tram from Box Hill to Port Melbourne, a young woman grieves for her beloved late uncle. As she considers the inheritance he left her and her brother — a house in the Tasmanian forest for the two siblings to live the full life that he could not — the tramline traces the path of their time together over the years. As her memories unfold, and the past catches up with the present, it becomes clear that her brother has different plans for the gifted house, and that the death of their uncle may not have been an expected tragedy...
The optimum place to listen to it is on the route 109 tram, starting at stop 58, Box Hill Central, and ending at stop 129, Beacon Cove, but it can be listened to on any tram at any time.
Credits
Written and read by Fiona Hardy
Commissioned by David Ryding
Edited by Elizabeth Flux
Recorded at the State Library of Victoria
Produced by Beth Atkinson-Quinton
With music by Steve Hearne
Tramlines is a podcast created by Broadwave in partnership with the Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature Office.
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Box Hill to Port Melbourne – Route 109 by Fiona Hardy
[SFX A tram travels towards the listener. Rumbles along the tracks. People board.]
Intro (various voices): Tramlines, Tramlines, Tramlines (laughs), Tramlines, Tramlines, Tramlines, um T-R-A-M-L-I-N-E-S, Tramlines.
[SFX Tram doors open]
Beth Atkinson-Quinton VO: This is Tramlines: part audio book, part spoken word and part locative literature. These are stories written to be listened to on a tram.
[SFX Tram dings and journeys on. Theme music fades out. Episode theme opens]
Beth Atkinson-Quinton VO: Today’s journey is a new fiction work by Fiona Hardy: Box Hill to Port Melbourne. The optimum place to listen to it is on the route 109 tram, starting at stop 58, Box Hill Central, and ending at stop 129, Beacon Cove, but it can be listened to on any tram at any time.
Fiona Hardy VO:
We are now departing from Box Hill Central.
Lily: The three of us were eating dumplings and Chinese doughnuts in the Box Hill food court when Uncle Sean told us he was sick, and it was just like him to make something so important feel so mundane. He had ordered for us, just like he used to, and we sat there and let him.
Even though my brother and I were now past thirty, we’d always fallen easily into our old habits with Sean, like him taking us out while our mother was busy on the weekends. During school holidays, when we were kids, we’d catch the citybound train with our mother on her way to work, and she’d let us out at Box Hill where Sean would meet us on the platform. He’d buy us bags of prawn crackers and trading cards if we had to follow him to work and wait in his van, or he’d take us for fried rice or salad rolls in the food court if he’d wrangled the day off. This place was a stretch of memory, of generosity and toys and childhood, and hearing about his prognosis didn’t fit in here.
I’d said nothing at first, like I couldn’t hear him, because what he’d said jarred so much with our lunch, with the noise and the food and the chaos of chopsticks and forks against bowls and plates. Before he’d said he had cancer I’d been thinking about the noodles the woman beside me was eating, and wishing I’d ordered those instead. I couldn’t bring myself back from that—jealousy, frustration—to these words he was saying. Chemo? But there are noodles right there. Sick? You can’t be, the broth smells so good.
I couldn’t eat my dumplings after he told us, and he told me off for wasting food, like I was still a child, and I cried into my plate, like I was still a kid.
A week after that lunch, I went back on my own, and ordered the noodles I’d seen that other woman eating, the food I’d thought about all week, that had sneaked into my dreams, which were a mess of getting lost in my own house, or being unable to drive, or of Sean standing on top of a table telling me a story I couldn’t hear, me yelling at him, what are you saying to me, what?
The first mouthful of those noodles tasted so good, slick with oil, deep with flavour, intense with a week’s confused regret and yearning. But in the end, that one mouthful was all I could eat.
The next stop is Inglisby Road.
Lily: Uncle Sean lived in Mont Albert, his unit tucked in just off Whitehorse Road. Further east, where we lived with our mother, life seemed more frayed around the edges, louder, sharper. When we were in Mont Albert, everything felt soft-focus, like an historical movie. Here, the only graffiti I remembered was done in copperplate calligraphy on the wall of an antiques store.
When we stayed at Sean’s, we would walk the streets playing Which House Would You Live In, airily dismissing million-dollar homes because there were no turrets, or the immaculate cottage gardens had no room for monkey bars, or there were only two car spots when we needed at least four, for all of our Porsches and Lamborghinis. Back then I didn’t believe bad people could live behind those doors, or walk these same streets.
My brother’s name was Patrick, but I called him Tricky because I was his sister, and that’s what sisters do, and Uncle Sean called him kiddo, right up until the end. “Kiddo,” Sean would say as we walked along, his fingers trailing along the picket fences, “which house is yours?”
“I’m not a kid,” Tricky would always reply, and then: “The biggest.” He had decided which one that was: we just called it Number 30, and it was behind a hedge so large and dense we had never been able to see past it. He knew, though, right to his bones, that it was hiding the most enormous home of all, that it had a swimming pool, a soccer pitch, sixteen bedrooms, a cinema, and two kitchens, including one that only made brownies.
For my part, I always changed my house, because I had a strange, secret childhood belief that one day somebody would just walk out of their front door, tell me I looked like a good person and simply give their house to me, and I wanted to be glad for any of them.
Sean wanted the smallest one, the compact peeling weatherboard on a big sparse block surrounded by a chickenwire fence. “One day,” he would always say, “I’ll have a huge backyard, and you’ll be able to race each other around it.”
I used to think he was making it up, and that the only house he wanted was the poky unit he lived in. Surely if he wanted that chickenwire house so badly, he could just buy it. I didn’t understand, then, how that couldn’t happen if you were paying rent, while chipping in for your sister’s mortgage, and buying your niece and nephew ice creams and trading cards whenever they whined loudly enough.
Besides, I always considered the hallway of his apartment the perfect length for a race. He would drag his shoe cupboard out of the hall and into the lounge to give us one extra stride before we smacked into the wall, leaving the paint constantly smeared with prints from our dirty hands. Sean would stand in the doorway, rolling his eyes, telling us to stop after the next race, or maybe the one after, or, you know what, best out of five.
The next stop is Wharton Street.
Lily: Not long before Sean took us to lunch that day in Box Hill, he’d asked us to meet him at Maranoa Gardens. It was his favourite place for the times he was feeling as exuberant as the plants; he would walk us through compact native landscapes and tell us elaborate, occasionally implausible tales of his youthful travels around the country.
Sean still commanded our time like he was in charge of it: he would message us for our free dates, then reply with a time and location he’d decided on: at his place to watch late-night baseball, at my place for breakfast pizza on a Sunday, after work for a drink near Tricky’s office in town. There were months on end where we saw Sean more than we saw our own mother.
She’d worked hard her whole life. It seemed impossible for her to get ahead, and events conspired to stop her: a safe investment ruined by the Global Financial Crisis, redundancies, paying Tricky’s university tuition so he could get into the course he’d missed out on. When we left home, I always worried we’d abandoned her to a permanent life in her little suburban court, with the guy next door who always bought oversized pets that jumped the fence and ate all her plants, or the woman on the other side who practised tennis against her back wall, grunting from seven in the morning until after it was dark. Our mother insisted that it was fine, that your children moving away was how it was supposed to be. And so when she couldn’t make the time, her brother could, and did.
At Maranoa Gardens, Tricky headed straight for the tiny rainforest cluster, and after we caught up, Sean sat on a rock under a knot of twigs and told us he’d done it, he’d bought a house, finally, in Tasmania. Picked it out of a real estate brochure he’d been sent in the mail. He was going to go down to inspect it and sort it out, but first, he had to go to the doctor, sort out this pain in his back. Couldn’t sit in a seat on a trip that long until it was fixed, really.
“If I had it by May,” he said, putting his fingers in the bubbling water so very gently, “when do you think you could come down?”
“May the second,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Tricky said. “Maybe for Christmas?”
“Sooner,” Sean said, firmly. “I have plans. A new fireplace, for one that’s not so rusted. The place is beautiful, right on the edge of the bush. Do you think if I made bird-boxes, rare birds would come and visit?”
“Of course,” I told him.
“Even if they have a whole forest of food behind them?” Tricky asked, knocking a tree trunk with his knuckles.
“Everybody likes a free meal,” Sean said, winking at him.
“I’m so pleased for you,” I told him, squeezing his hand, thrilled.
He smiled back at me. “I can’t wait for you to see it. There’s a beach 10 minutes away, the estate agent says. I’m going to start taking cold baths to prepare.”
Tricky pointed at the pond. “Like this one?”
“Why not?” Sean said, and started unbuttoning his shirt, so that my brother and I shrieked and ran away laughing, out of the rainforest and into a meadow.
The next stop is Balwyn Cinema.
Lily: One of my favourite family traditions—surpassing Christmas and its exhausting family politics—was that Sean and I went to see a new Pixar movie whenever one came out. I would buy the tickets, because he thought buying anything online would get you hacked, and his end of the deal was that he’d buy the food. He’d always feel guilty about endangering my online safety and overspend, coming with a covert picnic in his backpack—gherkins, tiny cocktail onions, stuffed olives, all kinds of things you shouldn’t eat in the dark. He would have a pocketful of toothpicks for us, and halfway through the movie he would sneak out and come back with choc-tops for dessert.
For the release after he got sick, we went to a morning session, and like usual I used more of the napkins for my tears than for spills. Once I’d cleaned myself up, I drove him up the road to the Town & Country nursery to buy him a plant for his bedside table, but he was too tired already to wander the aisles, so we just sat and shared a pot of tea in the sun.
He had his eyes closed and his face tilted up when he told me, “Lily, I was always so desperate to have a holiday house when we were kids, me and your mother. I mean, we had a tent we’d sometimes pitch at our aunt’s farm, but she’d put us to work there. We had fun—I’m not trying to be too ‘poor me’ here—but that idea of just endless days without a plan seemed impossible, and I was convinced a holiday house was the only way to have that. Then when you kids came along I wanted to get one that you could use, but it wasn’t like your mum could afford it, not with your dad how he is, and I’m sorry I couldn’t either.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I said, surprised. “We didn’t expect anything like that from you.”
“I know,” he said, “but you wanted a holiday house, didn’t you?”
“Of course we didn’t want a holiday house,” I said. “Me and Tricky wanted four. A city one, a country one, a beach one and a houseboat so we could take it overseas wherever we wanted. So if you’re not offering that, we don’t want to hear about it.”
He laughed. “Well, I’ve got the country one now, eh? And I was going to live in it, but really, I don’t think that’s on the cards now.”
“Don’t say that,” I said, putting my hand on his.
“Don’t pretend that I’m fine,” he said, taking his hand away. “I mean, come on. Who gets tired from seeing a movie? Not somebody who’s well enough to live in the woods.”
“You’re sick right now, it’s true,” I said, “but now isn’t forever.”
He waved me away. “What I’m saying is that I’m leaving it to the two of you, all right, if this ends me? It makes me happy to think of the two of you in that house, even if you’re too old to play together in it. But I like the idea of you and your brother down there now, or soon, with your partners, walking around through the trees, hiking up mountains. And with your kids someday, too.” He looked at me with damp eyes and I said, shocked, “Oh, Sean.”
“I’m leaking,” he said, getting out a tissue. “Must be the meds.”
“I hate to tell you, but your eyes have always been a bit leaky, Sean,” I said, and then all I could do was reach over, and hold his small shoulders in my arms.
The next stop is St George’s Hospital.
Lily: The chemo worked away, destroying all that was bad in him, and only some of the good.
We took it in turns to drive him to his oncology rehab at St George’s. It hurt him, and he got mean: he spilled coffee in my car one week and told me it was because I hit the speed bumps too fast, then the next week he told me off for having a car that smelled like sour milk. He told Tricky once that he looked perpetually irritated and that he didn’t smile enough and then a few weeks later he asked him to knock off his fake cheerful expression since everything was terrible. Then once, when my mother took a day off work to drive him when we couldn’t, he told her that her dress made her look washed out. It was such a small grouch, so small, but none of us could believe he’d said it, out loud, to her.
It wasn’t that he’d been sweet and turned sour only now. He was a plumber, self-employed, sometimes let go by clients for being a bit too honest about their inadequacies at basic home maintenance. He was also the kind of person who would send food back at restaurants for minor infractions the rest of us would ignore, and if your wine glasses were streaky at home he would hold them up to the light and then give you a very hard look. But when it came to his sister, pre-cancer, he had been fierce, out to annihilate anybody who made her feel bad.
When I was 8 and Tricky was 10, my father had told us all to get out of the house one night and locked the doors behind us. We’d caught the train and trudged to Sean’s door in our pyjamas and the gumboots we’d left on our front porch—both our father’s last straw and our saving grace for not having to make the journey barefoot—and Sean made us an entire lasagne while he and my mother fought in the kitchen over what to do about my dad. After I went to bed, I heard Sean leave the house, my mother pleading for him to be careful. I don’t know what it was that he did, but after that my father was gone, apart from birthdays and one week over Christmas. We got the house, and he took all the money.
It wasn’t the end of our hospital visits. When Sean got an infection after things had started to look better, I went to visit him. My mother was already upstairs, but I met Tricky in the foyer, where he looked so pale and angry I almost didn’t want him to go up with me.
“Are you all right?”
“Why do people keep asking?” he said. “I’m fine!”
“Are you getting enough iron?”
“Just because we’re in a hospital doesn’t make you a nurse.”
We’d never had the same kind of relationship Sean and our mother had. If Sean hadn’t made plans for us, we saw each other every few months or so, and talked about our very separate interests until the wine ran out. “Well,” I said, “you look terrible. If you’re sick, you shouldn’t go up there. You could make him worse.”
He let out a sob and said, “You think this is something you have to tell me? You think I’d endanger his life?”
I put up my hands. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m just—we’re all stressed. Maybe you just need something to eat.”
He looked stonily at me and I sighed, parroting what he’d say in hospitals: “Yeah, yeah, ‘Lil, you couldn’t pay me to eat here, you know how many diseases are on these surfaces?’ Forget it,” I said, tired. “Let’s just go upstairs and see him.”
And my uncle had been bright, in that moment. The plant I’d picked out for him flourished on the bedside table, a peace lily that radiated good health an hour after you watered it.
“It’s okay, my cancer results are still looking good,” he said, smiling. His cheeks were sunken, his hair long gone, and he was hooked up to so many things it was overwhelming. I tried not to cry. My mother looked on, in silence, her face torn by grief. “It’s just this stupid infection. They’ll keep jabbing me, pump me full of who knows what”—he lifted an arm, weighed down with IV ports, and let it thud back to his side—"and I’ll just keep saying yes ma’am, yes sir, and then I’ll be right as rain, they say.”
“That’s great news,” Tricky said, in a strangled voice, taking a step back.
“You right there, kiddo?”
“I’m—I just have to stay back from you. Lily thinks I’m sick, but I’m not. Just tired.”
Sean rolled his eyes. “Stop trying to steal my glory with that face of yours,” he said. “You’ll be fine once you get some proper rest. The best thing for you will be if you go get some air down at the Tasmanian house. And soon I’ll be able to come with you.”
Tricky sat down. “What’s it like, Sean, this house of yours? Is it fancy?”
“It has so much potential,” Sean said. “Endless space. You could do up the kitchen. Maybe get a new shower.”
“An extension?”
“I don’t think so,” Sean said, wrinkling his nose. “It’s enough like it is. There’s a wood stove, an old apple orchard gone out of control, a long driveway that probably feels like a grand entrance. If you really wanted, it could be made fancy. Put up one of those flowery plaques out the front. Plant a doily tree.”
Tricky snorted, and I went over and kicked him.
“You’ll love it,” Sean said, then laughed, then coughed, and it was too much, seeing him like this. Just too much.
The next stop is High Street and Cotham Road.
Lily: I couldn’t drive through Kew any more without thinking of the funeral procession, and of driving my mother along Cotham Road with her quietly weeping in the car beside me.
“Sean loved it around here,” she said, her hand on the window. “When we were young, our father would meet up with his friends at the hotel and give us a shilling or two to spend up at the milk bar, then we’d just sit outside and wait for him to be done. It would take hours, and I would be so bored, but Sean didn’t care at all—he just loved leaning his back against the wall and watching the chaos of the High Street intersection. There were no traffic lights back then, just trams and cars barrelling through this ridiculous intersection and people dodging it all.” She ran her two index fingers over the window, like cars in a chase, and went on.
“Even now, if I was going over to visit him and told him I was going to stop by Leo’s Supermarket to get some of the nice cheese to bring, he’d make me pick him up on the way so he could get his favourite cordial. There I’d be, standing in the fruit section, trying to choose an apple, and that flamenco music would start up and he’d grab a hold of my arm and try to dance with me in the aisles, even when I told him he was a silly old man.” She put her hands in her lap and gave a very small laugh. “Come to think of it, he probably did it because I told him he was a silly old man.”
I was full of so much anger the day of Sean’s funeral that I hadn’t even wanted to get up out of bed. I was close to calling in sick, telling everybody I couldn’t do it, that the drive was impossible. But I couldn’t make my mother drive herself, and Tricky had his own excruciating taxi service to complete, picking our father up from the airport, as if any of us had wanted him there anyway. He’d said that he’d come down to support us, that he was taking a day off work for it, you know.
I’d driven along the road, gripping the steering wheel, unhelpfully angry at Sean for lying—for saying he was better—and then dying anyway. I was angry at our father for saying he was coming to support us, as if he’d ever bothered to support us at any other time in our lives, and wondered privately whether he was coming to Sean’s funeral just to make sure he was dead. I was mad at our mother for making me go to the funeral when I didn’t want to. But mostly, I was mad at Tricky, who’d been at the hospital the day Sean had died, and for being the person who’d called to tell me what happened: “It’s over,” he’d said, his voice so cracked I thought my phone was broken. “It’s done, he’s gone.” Now I didn’t want to pick up when he rang, like my own brother’s voice had been ruined for me by speaking that truth.
A whole suburb was wiped off the map the day of his funeral. Once, it had been a place that Sean loved to go, and now it was a place I could never return. There were too many reminders: the dentist that had been so complimentary about his good oral health; his favourite pizza place—with his favourite order: a vegetarian, with pepperoni. Every building that sang out with memories he’d pass on to me. And my own memory, ruined: all those times he took us to the library with him when he needed to borrow a new stack of biographies—because everybody else’s lives are so interesting, he’d tell me—and then haul them straight to the park just nearby to sit in the grass and read. Now I could never go to that park again, because I would want to cut the flowers off the stalks, and climb the trees only to tear off their leaves, just for thinking it was okay to bloom when nothing could grow in my heart again.
The next stop is Findon Crescent and Barkers Road.
Lily: We couldn’t pass a river without my brother reminding me of all the times Sean would take us canoeing, and all the times we’d fall in. He always brought the ziplock bags we forgot for our car keys and phones, and told us to stop splashing around, even after we were old enough to be in our own canoes and make our own bad decisions. Now, when I was going past a river, it was me that reminded whoever I was with about all those times with Sean, about the feeling of the lifejacket pushed up around my neck in the water, laughing with my brother while Sean rolled his eyes in his own, perpetually stable canoe.
A month after Sean’s death, it had felt too long since I’d seen Tricky, and I wanted to check in on his grief. In an attempt to turn it into something positive, I told him to meet me in Ikea, where I waited for him at the entry and greeted him by explaining that we could start planning what furniture we could buy for Sean’s Tasmanian home. “Do you have a style in mind?” I asked. “Lots of wood, since it’s near the bush?”
“Is that why we’re here?” He picked up a vase that had fallen over and gave a short, sharp laugh. “I don’t have the money to furnish a house. You know that.”
“I mean, I don’t either, and it’s not like we have to do it all at once,” I said. “It’s just nice to dream. All we need at first is, you know, a bed or two, a table and chairs, or just a sofa, and I can buy that—"
He sighed. “Do we need any of that?”
“I mean, I guess we could take blow-up mattresses, pretend like we’re camping—"
“Lily,” he said, “I’m not furnishing any log cabin in the woods.”
“I’ll do it all, then,” I said, backing away, my hands up in surrender.
“Don’t. Just leave it. We’ll sell it.”
I opened my mouth, closed it again. “Sell it?”
“You know,” he said, and he had a different face on now, his older brother face, the one that made him look like our father’s son. “For money.”
“But he wanted to leave it for us as a place to visit, remember? To take our families.”
“What families? I can’t afford to think about starting a family; I can’t even afford an engagement ring for Kira.”
“You want to marry Kira?” I was shocked. I’d met Kira precisely once: we’d gone to Victoria Street for my favourite pho, steaming hot with smoky broth, silky noodles and a citrus tang. I’d waited for the two of them to compliment me on my choice but Kira sat there quietly, taking slow sips of the broth from her spoon, and all Tricky did was list all of Kira’s interests while she nodded beside him if he was right and did not move if he was wrong.
“Of course I don’t want to marry her yet,” he said to me now. We were in the kids section, and I picked up a stuffed toy shark, wondering if I should buy it for a friend, or some future child of my own that I didn’t really want most of the time, but tried to stay at least moderately enthusiastic about the idea of, in case I met somebody worth changing my mind for. Tricky took it out of my hands and put it back. “I’ve only been going out with her for a few months. But I can’t afford a ring if I wanted to.”
“Tricks, we don’t live in that kind of world any more. Not everybody needs a diamond to feel loved.”
He laughed. “I think maybe you live in your own kind of world, bud. Because everybody I know needs exactly that.”
“I don’t want to sell it,” I said.
I had the pictures and the house plan in my pocket, sent to me by the real estate agent in Tasmania. Sean’s house had two bedrooms, a lounge with the kitchen running along the side, a bathroom, and a laundry on the back deck. We could fit two small couches, maybe an armchair too, in the lounge. Bunks in the small bedroom, a double bed in the main, which was also small, really. If the couch was a sofa bed two families could fit in that house, Tricky’s and mine. A six-seater table couldn’t fit inside, but it could outside; the backyard was so large it couldn’t fit in the picture, and I didn’t know where the house ended and the bush began.
I’d already picked the bed I wanted if Tricky decided he didn’t mind, with big drawers underneath to store sleeping bags and spare blankets, but I had not picked him not wanting to buy furniture at all, not wanting to live there, not wanting a piece of this future that Sean had left us, this house he had decided was a missing piece of our past. I’d imagined me and my brother in there: board games, walks in the bush, seeing animals snuffle around on the forest floor. In my deepest thoughts, I’d imagined a thylacine scratching at our front door.
“Remember,” I said, wiping my eyes, “how we always wanted a holiday house, like our friends had?”
“Well,” he said, following the arrows without looking up, “I want an actual house, like my friends have now.”
And for the first time, I walked out of Ikea with less than I went in with.
The next stop is Hoddle Street, Victoria Parade.
Lily: For a while, when it got hard, Sean had wanted to go to church. He’d gone as a child, a good little boy in his Sunday best, and my mother told me that he used to punch her in the arm every time she said the lord’s name in vain, which she didn’t think was really God’s authorised punishment. As an adult, both of them had drifted away from religion, to the point where neither Tricky nor I bothered with it at all. In those days of sickness, though, Tricky took Sean to a different church after chemo each time he drove him, to sit in the quiet, see which one felt the best when he felt the worst. I don’t know why he chose Tricky for that task and not me—I was much better with being polite to strangers—but Tricky diligently went to each place Sean researched. In the end, none of them had felt right to him, though, he told me, some seemed nice enough that maybe he could like them when he was better. But while he was sick, even the light from the stained glass hurt in some of them, or all the white walls so tall and clean and bright, or the voices of the people inside, echoing off the walls. Tricky had told me that Sean got mad at the gentle greetings he was offered, and it was so hard to imagine that of our Sean. When we’d walked the streets with him as children he would greet everybody he walked by with a hello and how are you so genuine and heartfelt that I used to think he knew everybody in the entire world.
There were so many specialist visits, so many places he needed to go. So many scans, people to give him medication: this forever, this for now, this until you feel sick, this until you are better. Some days an end seemed inevitable and some days we could feel like fighters, armed with the best weaponry around. Sometimes the only weapons seemed like our own hands on his.
If my mother dropped him off at the oncology ward, she would take him to McDonald’s beforehand and they would share a single milkshake and chips. Both Tricky and I had suggested that pre-chemo McDonald’s was a terrible idea, but neither of them listened: it tied into a childhood memory of theirs, walking hand-in-hand with their mother to a general store, and getting a milkshake and chips as a treat if they remembered the things on her shopping list correctly. If I was ever there with them at McDonald’s and offered to buy them one each instead of one to share, they refused and said that wasn’t the point.
Two days after Sean died, I’d taken my mother to McDonald’s after a harrowing visit to the funeral director. He’d been too brash and loud for us, trying to make jokes, talking about the mechanics of the thing as if it didn’t apply to a real live person. “I’m just going to unload some coffins,” he’d said breezily as we’d left, as if we weren’t there with our grief, paralysed with the thought of a different human that had to fill every single one of those.
At the McDonald’s counter, I’d asked my mother if she wanted a milkshake and chips then, just one of each, to share.
“A filet-o-fish and nothing else,” she said.
“What if I get them?” I asked. “And you just have a little bit, if you want.”
“If you get them,” she said, broken, “I won’t be able to sit with you.”
No more furniture, no more libraries, no more milkshakes with chips. The world just kept shrinking without him.
The next stop is Parliament Station, Macarthur Street.
Lily: I thought about what Tricky said. I did. He wasn’t wrong; he did need a home to live in. And Sean wasn’t going to be around to see us sell his precious house. Maybe some other family who needed a home could live there, enjoy it, live out my uncle’s vanished future inside.
Was I being selfish? He wasn’t asking something unreasonable of me. If Sean had seen into his future, had known for sure he would die, would he want his nephew living in hardship, unable to afford the journey to Tasmania anyway? Why was I denying my brother the opportunity to buy his own home? I’d made the decision early in my 20s to save up for a place instead of travel, got that first home buyer’s grant when it was around, and it meant I now lived in a two-bedroom flat with a courtyard garden big enough for a small dog, a scratchy terrier named Porcupine that so far existed entirely in my imagination. My brother had decided to travel, and he knew a lot about the world and was good in a crisis, but he lived in a cramped city apartment with a mini-fridge and a flatmate, Bjorn, who had a list of bad attributes. One was that he ate all of Tricky’s favourite pasta shapes from the cupboard, and another was that he never took the rubbish out, “Even though,” Tricky would tell me, “the chute is just across from our door.” Bjorn also bar-hopped all night long, and always timed his homecoming with Tricky’s deepest sleep rhythm—according to his Fitbit—with hands full of late-night dim sum or soft tacos or olives he’d scooped up with his fingers as a bar kicked him out into the street.
I didn’t want that future for my brother. The money from the sale could help Tricky buy his own place, start him out somewhere. I wasn’t being entirely innocent as I considered the money: it would help me out, too, of course, but I was trying not to think about that. My savings were drained after all the time I’d taken off to care for Sean, and I needed a new stovetop in my unit, new paint in my kitchen. More than all that, though, I needed Sean and his big dream, now that he wasn’t here in person anymore to sit at my bench and teach me how to cook eggs in the microwave instead.
In the days after we went to Ikea, I walked the city streets to think about it. Sometimes I needed the noise of it all to clear my head: the people everywhere, the trams ringing on all the streets, the buskers, the joy, the stress, the rush, the amble. I needed the textures of life in Melbourne: the shine of the stores, the luxury of the arcades, Southern Cross station with all its movement, with so many people all working through so many problems.
After a week, I called my brother with a new proposal.
“Okay, Tricky, all right. We can sell the place.’
He let out a breath like he’d been holding it for weeks.
“But not right now,” I said. “Give it one full year. That way, we’ll have a full 12 months with a holiday house, with all of those plans Sean had. We’ll make a checklist, make sure we hike and go to that freezing beach he told us about. I’ll pay for one of your flights there, even.” Because really, who needed a fully functioning stove, anyway?
There was his breath, again, loud in my ear. “No.”
“No?”
“Now.”
“Tricky,” I told him, “If it was up to me, we wouldn’t be doing it at all. But there are two of us on that will, and two of us involved. This is us both getting a little of what we want.”
I hoped he’d capitulate, but was prepared for the fight; what I didn’t expect was him ending the call, while I sat there, blinking at the phone in the palm of my hand, wondering what I had done wrong.
The next stop is Elizabeth Street and Collins Street.
Lily: The day we all went to the city to visit the lawyers, two weeks after Sean died, was on an icy cold day that held off on the rain but was miserable all the same. Sean had written a new will just after he bought the house that left it to both me and my brother, with no caveats. When my mother left the office to go to the bathroom, Tricky asked the lawyer, “Is there anything in there about us not being able to sell it?”
“No,” she said, her face giving nothing away. “Our offices have a conveyancer that will be in touch to process the paperwork that will get the property in your names.”
He nodded. When my mother came back inside, she was told that Sean had left her all of his money, down to nine hundred dollars since he’d bought himself a house and spent thousands upon thousands on medicine.
“At the time of the will, it was a bit more,” the lawyer said, apologetically.
“He did great,” my mother said, touching the back of my brother’s head tenderly, even though he was too tall, even though he moved away from her hand.
That afternoon, Tricky went back to work and my mother and I went to finish clearing out Sean’s rental house. We put on records and made stacks of all his things: for charity, to sell, to give to his friends. The larger furniture was being picked up by people who’d seen our Gumtree posts, one piece at a time. My mother told me what she wanted me to take, and I agreed to it all: the dumpling steamer, a stuffed wolf she’d bought him as a childhood toy, his gardening books on flowers; boxes full of things that meant something. As I finished packing my car, she placed an oversized cut-glass vase of his in the passenger footwell, and said, “Take it down there with you when you go. See if it survives the trip. Laugh if it doesn’t. Otherwise, fill it with native flowers and think of him.”
I couldn’t tell her Tricky’s question about selling the house. Maybe he had just been thinking out loud. Maybe, I had thought, once my brother had gone for a visit, he’d change his mind; maybe I could convince him to just move there instead. It wasn’t something I could do—I’d miss Melbourne too much, the tight cluster of suburban houses, the dirty beautiful river, the soaring city, the way you could do anything you wanted, the pulse.
“I’m still so mad,” my mother said, tapping the roof of my car with her nails. “It seemed like he’d stick around a little longer. And poor Patrick, coming to visit him right after it happened. It must have been so hard. Maybe if he didn’t stop downstairs for a sandwich beforehand, he might’ve been able to help.”
“A sandwich?” I asked. “Downstairs? But he doesn’t eat hospital food.”
She shrugged. “He ate lunch there instead of going straight up. Must’ve been starved.”
“I guess,” I said.
But I didn’t guess anything. I’d seen him—he’d retch even walking past a hospital food court; he’d done it at St George’s when we were there that last time, together, and I didn’t know if his theatrics were real or to prove a point in the most childish way possible. I’d seen him petulantly eat vending machine chips while we ate sandwiches enough times to know for sure that he wouldn’t have stopped to eat there.
Not that it really mattered; Sean had died of natural causes. He had suffered a cardiac arrest as he slept—nobody even heard him make a noise. It was horrible, and too soon. But with all that had been done to him, not a surprise.
Until I remembered exactly what my brother had said when he called.
“It’s over. It’s done. He’s gone.”
What was over? What was done?
The next stop is Batman Park, Spencer Street.
Lily: It was weeks after Tricky had hung up on me for me to try calling him again, and a week after that for my brother to pick up the phone. When he finally did, I told him we should meet up at the casino, mostly because it was always open and therefore impossible for him not to be able to make the time to come. I’d suggested we follow one of Sean’s more ridiculous city habits, one we hadn’t been able to partake in until we were adults: watching a few greyhound races and dropping two dollars on the dog with the name that made Sean laugh the most.
Conversation was limited, even for us. He didn’t apologise, and I didn’t ask him to. We threaded our way through the poker machines, their lights and sounds like a machine-gun to my skull, and I regretted coming, regretted talking to him, regretted talking to my mother, wished that everything in my head right now was gone. It turned out none of the dogs had names that were quite funny enough this time, or maybe it was that we just couldn’t see it. Tricky dropped two dollars on the casino carpet and was so angry that he couldn’t find it that he put a two hundred dollar bet on his credit card instead.
“I thought you were too skint to buy furniture for the Tasmanian place?” I told him.
“Don’t,” he said, and then we sat there, in silence, and watched his dog lose. I saw a familiar flicker in his face then, the same expression my father pulled when he opened the presents we gave him at Christmas, no matter what they were.
Afterwards, we ate a bowl of nuts at the bar and I asked how he was doing.
“Fine,” he said, ordering a second bowl, and two shots of whiskey, neither for me. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
The next stop is Southbank Tram Depot, Normanby Road.
Lily: Two weeks later, three days after the paperwork for Sean’s house was transferred to our names, I waited for my brother at Southern Cross Station, like we’d planned. It was a bright Sunday afternoon, and an hour after he was due there to catch the 11:23 Belgrave out to our mother’s house with me, I called to tell her there’d been a mix-up, but I would see her soon, and then I walked out of the station and through the city, across the bridge, to Tricky’s apartment building.
Nobody answered the intercom, but I had a spare key, and I let myself in to wait for him. I wanted to ask what sandwich he got that broke the drought of hospital food for him. I practised how to ask it like it was a joke.
In his room, he’d upended the navy blue suitcase set he owned—I had a matching set, thanks to our mother one Christmas—and the smallest was gone. There were pieces of paper by his bed, scrunched up but not thrown away, and one had a number written down. I went out into the kitchen and looked the name up on my phone: a Tasmanian real estate agent, the same one who sold Sean the house. I remembered his face in the catalogue picture, his clean white teeth.
Tricky’s housemate, Bjorn, walked out of his bedroom, yawning. “Lily,” he said, standing, tired and slightly confused, in front of me. “Is Patrick back already?”
“Uh, no,” I said.
“Did you buzz? I’m sorry, I’m so tired, I didn’t hear.”
“It’s fine,” I said, and it was fine. He knew I had a spare key; his sister had one too, and would sometimes let herself in and sleep on the couch after her night shifts even if Tricky was trying to watch Netflix in front of it.
“Was he always like this?” he asked, getting milk out of the fridge.
“Like what?”
“Sleeping.”
I stared at him, and he pointed at the pile of pillows in front of the laundry.
“Can’t even have pillows in the room any more, he says. Only wants to sleep on the mattress. I’m like, okay? Whatever you need. He only puts them back in his room when a girl’s over. I’m not sure why he even has them at all. Was he like this when you were kids?”
“I guess,” I said, but I didn’t mean it.
Because no, he’d never had a problem with pillows in his room before now. Never.
I called the real estate agent from the elevator. He was pleased to hear from me, really, and was I going to be there to talk to him about the sale, too? He’d been so pleased when Patrick told him I’d approved it, and I shouldn’t worry, since the buyer didn’t mind shortening the settlement date for me, like Patrick had said I needed.
Into my silence he added, “Are you coming over on the ferry this evening, too?”
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
The next stop is Beacon Cove. This is the last stop.
Lily: Now here I am, in Port Melbourne, eating fish and chips by the pier, watching the gentle waves lick the sand and the gulls steal food from people’s fingers along the foreshore. The Spirit of Tasmania is waiting in the dock, the ship a fierce red and white, primed like an arrow pointed south. Check-in starts at 5 o’clock, and after I board, all I have to do is leave my bag in the cabin, go find a bar and buy myself a drink before I look for my brother. It’ll be nice, the two of us leaning against the railings as the sun sets and the mainland falls behind us. I can ask him where he’s staying in Tasmania, where he thinks would be nice to visit, and about the sandwiches at the hospital. Just me, my brother, an endless expanse of water, and the truth.
Beth Atkinson-Quinton VO: Tramlines is an initiative of the Melbourne UNESCO City Of Literature Office with the podcast created by Broadwave. Route 109: Box Hill to Port Melbourne was written and read by Fiona Hardy, commissioned by David Ryding, edited by Elizabeth Flux, recorded at the State Library of Victoria, produced by Beth Atkinson-Quinton, with music by Steve Hearne.