TRAUMA TOWN PART 4: As my father’s psycho analytical business boomed, the clay soils ripped apart the Federation-era project home Dad bought next to Burns Bay Road near Lane Cove shopping centre for his practice.
His dream was the Mayo Clinic for neurotic people. The domestic arts and crafts vibe was cheap, Torrens title and calming for the families bringing in their little monsters. Dad thought you had to see the whole family to get the real picture. He gave me a smile when he saw me counting the sessions in my head. He bulked billed family assessments. He had a social conscience and kept the narcissistic whip on the neurotic advertising executives that could pay. He also said they tended not to show up sometimes, whereas no one ever missed a family assessment.
The clay soil was the real problem. The cracks in the architecture were undermining the sessions. It was hard to get them to focus on transcending, etc when masonry was falling out of the window frames. Dad would put a few objects in the room, like a mock treasure chest which I still have. He said it helped to get them talking, explore fantasies. Sure Dad, I think you just want the focus off the cracks. He was a mix of care and cunning.
Dad went straight to a drafty for the new offices. This one was a cash grab, not a dream home. And he was spending up on the engineering, no more falling masonry undermining business. He got some bad advice about finance; an offshore loan sounded sophisticated, Mum loves that sort of stuff Dad would have thought. No one explained properly to him how a loan like that interacted with exchange rates, or he didn’t listen. My Twin and I did demolition to foundation trenching. I had taken over all regulatory responsibilities after his lawyer cousin sent him an invoice for a conversation. Dad, I just think he wants you to call him less.
Dad wanted to keep business running through the build, so we had to break up the house of rebate into two modules. Stage 1: keep the cottage and build the bit at the back with some parking. Stage 2: knock down the bits still standing of the cottage, pack up the complete works of Freud, move the couch to the new room, build the other bit and landscape.
Parking dominated my first DA experience; we were a bit under. Dad led on this one. He proposed a stacked doctor-patient parking system, therapist in the back, patient in the front, moving in and out. He did a diagram to demonstrate the three-point turn required to enter and exit in a forward direction. Parking was included in the session rate. Praise the rebate. He explained how it worked to the council guy and let him know he was a real doctor. I got a parking credit for the cottage, and we were over the line. Soon the Twin and I were reenacting great trench battles of WW1 in the clay pits we dug.
Try not to scrap the SAAB as you park in that car park.
If it was not for the rebate, Dad would have retrained as a landscape architect. He liked plants. He would point out natives on the various bushwalks he took the Twin and I on and was a little overly fond of deciduous plants that grew erratically in coastal Sydney. Finishing the house of rebate, Dad did a bit of a Da Vinci in front of the Twin and I.
He salvaged all the sandstone from the cottage foundations and built a sandstone wall to the entry on Burn Bay Road. Some of the stone was buried. It was like digging up treasure. He said it was great for quietening the place, gave a sense of entry and nesting, and Mum loved stone. The Twin and I thought he was going for a rough-cut Callan Park vibe; it was always good to see Dad happy.
I saw my father perform a miracle on a tradie one Saturday.
He was finishing work on the new offices, getting some carpet laid. The carpet man was massively hung over; every time he kicked his carpet thingy, he had to get up and spew. So far it was just the newly mulched landscaping that my Twin and I had put in that was copping it. My father and I watched him do that twice. I looked at my Twin he was thinking what I was thinking: “do we remulch or just try and work the vomit into the existing”, and we were a bit worried about Dad.
Commercial and medical instincts kicked in; spew on new carpet in the reception area trumps the Hippocratic oath. Dad gently put his hand on another man and said, “let’s slow down here; you’re a bit under the weather. I am a doctor, take two of these, have a break and a few glasses of water to rehydrate.”
The Twin and I expected rage, not therapy. What are they, doctor? Really strong Codeine tablets; they will settle your stomach and make kicking out the carpet less painful. And they did.
The carpet man felt so good after he finished the job, he looked at Dad like he was Jesus and said he was going back to the pub. The application for strata was lodged before Dad got cancer.
Disputes with builders, up to 23 per cent interest rates in the late 80s, loyalty to your accountant and becoming out-of-fashion with the Psychoanalytical Society were a bit hard on Dad. And Mum was getting out a bit more too. A financial crisis brings families together. Mum went to work for Dad in the new offices because there was a bit of a recession on and he was lonely. The Twin was in Canberra by then, and I had moved to the inner city. John Howard cancelled the rebate in 1997. Dad died in 1996 in harness; he would have wanted me to wave off the rebate, and Mum sold the last strata and moved to Paddington.
Next week, we all die by our own hands.
