The Village
Our neighbour Joe passed two pairs of tiny Adidas shell toes over the fence.
We lived in a bougainvillea-covered granny flat behind the terrace Joe was renting in Rozelle.
He was a construction manager and looked fancy – nice shoes, big car, pressed shirts, Don Draper hair – but was ocker and kind.
Joe asked us if the little sneakers would come in handy one day for our newborn baby – his twins had outgrown them.
Only weeks earlier Joe had gone on holidays and left us the keys to his truck, knowing we didn’t own a car. He didn’t want us to have to catch a taxi to the hospital if I went into labour with our first baby.
One evening, cradling a newborn, I heard him having dinner outside with his children.
His daughter didn’t want to eat her carrots.
“C’mon darlin’,” Joe said, “They help you see in the dark!”
It’s a line I still use on my daughters.
***
For a while we lived in a tightly packed row of townhouses in Marrickville, painted in 80s forest green and mission brown.
Anna and her daughter Chrissie lived at the opposite end, and they always gushed over our two-year-old daughter in lightning fast Greek as we walked past their front door.
On New Years Eve, Anna – well into her 80s – fell down her stairs and became mostly housebound.
I left chocolate slice and a note on their doorstep, and that is when the floodgates opened.
Every time we saw them, homemade treats were offered, our daughter was given new dolls, or Easter eggs, or textas, or a dress.
They would ask us in for morning or afternoon tea most days, especially after our second baby was born.
All they wanted to do was chat and laugh and be pleasantly distracted by the baby’s cheeks, which looked like they’d been scooped out of a tub of strawberry ice cream.
Next door to us was Nat, a paramedic, and her husband James, who checked in to make sure I was OK in the weeks after I gave birth.
One day I was walking from the kitchen to the lounge room holding the baby, and I slipped on a grape near the dining table.
I fell fast and hard, my daughter’s soft baby skull narrowly missing the edge of the table.
Nat heard my shriek and came over to see if everyone was OK.
(As an aside, she seemed slightly doubtful about the grape story. Since then I have sometimes thought if the baby was injured, it would have been incredibly hard to convince police or a jury that a grape was to blame. I can see the Daily Telegraph headline now: NO GRAPE ESCAPE FOR KILLER MUM)
One night, our smoke alarm went off.
I came down the stairs, calling out to my husband just to make sure everything was under control, and James was already at our screen door.
“Stay calm Steph. Just stay calm. Everything will be OK. Unlock the door,” he called out.
Sheepishly, we admitted our dinner was burning.
***
Then we moved across the river to Earlwood, into another row of townhouses.
My heart sank when I made eye contact with a creepy guy sitting shirtless in the courtyard over the back fence, listening to Marc Maron podcasts on high volume. He had gross conversations about women with his mates, and he and his chain-smoking mum yelled at each other all the time.
The first neighbour in the block to introduce herself told us to keep an eye out for Les, an old man who lived alone in one of the flats.
One afternoon I heard a whistle blowing over and over, and figured kids were doing soccer training somewhere nearby.
But the sound got louder and more urgent. Les!
I plonked the girls in their cots and dashed up the driveway to Les’s flat and found him on the floor, whistle in hand, unable to get up.
I lifted him onto his armchair, and had a quick chat.
It turned out most of the residents in our block had agreed to be on a little roster to check on Les. He’d written everyone’s number in giant scrawl on a notepad beside his phone.
Some people put his bins out, others helped him organise groceries, some got him a taxi, and everyone made a point of chatting to him when he’d waddle out onto his verandah to catch some sun.
The kindness was spread around: We watered a couple’s plants while they were on holidays, they gave us chocolate. They took our key to let a tradie in, we bought them honey from the country. One neighbour saw me trying to move our washing machine all by myself, and jumped out of his car to give me a hand, grinning without exchanging a word. We got Easter and Christmas cards, written in formal, old-fashioned handwriting, slipped under the front door. Everyone was suspicious of a new couple moving in when the Sydney rental market did its thing and we were forced to leave.
Good neighbours are hard to find, they said.
***
The Adidas shell toes have seen better days.
The white shoes are shedding their plastic skin, and the Velcro on the black ones refuses to stick.
It’s not surprising. They’ve been on tiny feet from Rozelle, to Lilyfield, to Marrickville, Earlwood and Orange.
