House Hunting

House Hunting

  Jonathan M Barrett

  Copyright 2010 Jonathan M Barrett

  Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This story may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided it remains in its complete original form.

  Kim is still sleeping when I get back from the dairy, and so I dare to watch her for a while. She must have been asleep when I fell in love with her. I let in a ray of light through the curtains to illuminate the property section I've spread out at the foot of the bed. Still dozy, Kim sits up and asks me what I'm doing.

  "Getting ready to hunt houses."

  "You do know open days are only on Sundays, don't you?" she says.

  I didn't, actually, but carry on scanning the pictures.

  Her performance of turning over to go back to sleep includes a histrionic sigh and a ravelling of the duvet around her like the opening of a sardine can. But, moments later, I hear a muffled, "So, how exactly are you going to approach it?"

  "I'm going through and ringing the ones I like the look of." I hold up my magic marker, but she has a pillow over her eyes.

  She does her 'grrr' noise that signals my incompetence at life, and crawls across the bed to check the first one I've marked. "But that's Newtown. David, we agreed Newtown is too up and coming. Remember? We agreed it might not come up – and then what?"

  "But look at it." I point to the photo of the renovated cottage with its all around veranda, and creeping wisteria. "They say here it's Cute and Cosy. Doesn't that sound just like us?"

  "No. Once you've got a plan, you've got to stick with it." She pulls out another supplement, and opens it out over mine. "Look. There's an index with the suburbs – they've even got the price ranges."

  I think her approach is far too business-like. It's supposed to be something special, spiritual even, buying your first home. But I don't argue, straight off. I retreat to the kitchen to make coffee. Back in the bedroom, I tut at the hamster's nest she's made of the newspaper, and make a show of reordering the parts she's discarded. She doesn't notice. I peek over her shoulder at the houses she's ringed. Some are horrible: they look as if they've been cobbled together from sheets of asbestos and crushed ambition.

  "We need to think about the feel of the places," I say.

  "How exactly are you supposed to put a price on 'feel'?" Kim is a policy analyst for Treasury.

  "That's the whole point – it's not just about the money." Like TS Eliot, I work for a bank.

  "Excuse me," she says. "It's my parents who are helping us out with the deposit – you can hardly expect them to go along with your feel for a place. David, you really don't have a clue sometimes."

  It's true; Kim does have the better grasp of economic value. I once wrote her a haiku.

  "That's very nice," she said, as she flattened the sheet of paper for filing. "Of course, I don't get poetry like you do; but I would have thought you'd need more than three lines to fully express your feelings for me."

  #

  We're not sure of the protocol for entering a show house. Do you remove your shoes like a considerate guest, or do you make your mark on the shagpile as a brazen invader? But we see a row of shoes on the porch of Fantastic Family Living, the first place we scout. We undo our trainers and step over the threshold, tentative as tourists into a scented temple. A starched woman in a vocationally-specific mix of bling and too tight black stops us for our names and addresses. "It's the law," she says.

  I feel Kim's tug at my sleeve: she knows I'm about to ask which law that might be exactly.

  Kim's adaptability is a marvel. Truss her up and throw her in a lake; she'd soon grow gills. Within minutes, she's opening cupboards and pointing out ceiling damp like the other hunters. I look at the titles on the bookshelf. The sellers seem to be more into cake icing than poetry, but I suppose icing cakes might have its own moments of Zen.

  "I don't like this," I whisper to Kim. "It's way too prurient, poking around people's houses when they're not in. I feel like a stalker."

  "Get over it. Half the time, the stuff on show isn't theirs. Sellers even hire paintings by the day to give the place ambience. And god this place could do with some. Anyway, they hide the things they don't want people to look at." She pulls open a drawer of a bedroom dresser. "See?"

  I don't look.

  Small world! It's Kate and Darren. We flatted with them at Uni. They're also house hunting. We 'hey' four ways. I stop to catch up, but Kim and Kate never really got on – something about unmarked coleslaw in the fridge – and they wander off in different directions. As if marking the steps of an intricate dance, a few minutes later, the women simultaneously reappear. They exchange bogus smiles, and pull their men away and on to the next place.

  #

  As I struggle at Smell the Coffee to kick off my trainers without undoing the laces, I knock someone's shoe from the porch into a flowerbed. I start to fetch it, but Kim stops me with a stern shake of her head.

  I nod and smile at a couple I recognise from Fantastic Family Living, but, when they ignore me, I realise we're supposed to be invisible to each other.

  A puffy man in a Holden racing jacket slumps into an armchair to make a public broadcast on his mobile. His partner is obviously hunting elsewhere. "You really have to see the crap they've got here to believe it. You'd need a skip for the books alone."

  It would feel good to show this boor the exit, but I console myself that it was probably his shoe left among the peonies, face up to collect drizzle.

  Kim sucks up to the estate agents, and I don't like it. It reminds me of my youth in nightclubs, how girls, who could have better used their time, dancing with me, for instance, chose to hang around the DJ. I didn't like that either. At Renovator's Dream, the agent hasn't taken his shoes off and chews nicotine gum as Kim tries to engage him in conversation. He's got a cocky look as if he's appraising her for market value. As soon as the hunters have gone, I'm convinced he'll spit out the gob of gum and grind it into the carpet with his short man's Cuban heel.

  "It's all about getting information," Kim tells me when I moan to her in the car about the indignity of sucking up to these people. "Who knows what they'll let slip if you get them talking?" She says house hunting is a challenge, actually quite fun, but, still, she sighs with despair at my navigational ineptitude when we arrive too late at An Absolute Winner, and the rictal agent bars us like a bouncer on a 2 am lockdown.

  #

  The next Saturday when I wake up, Kim has already been to the dairy and edited the property supplements. I hold up the gutted newspaper. "Hello? What's happened to the property pages?"

  "I've already found the promising ones–" She taps a plastic envelope of clippings, "–and recycled the rest."

  "Don't I have a say in it?"

  "Sure, when I've narrowed things down a bit. We didn't have focus last week. That's what went wrong. And it won't happen again this time."

  #

  At Picture Perfect Brooklyn, a little girl climbs up a terrace in the garden. I'm smiling at her tenacity, and nudge Kim to share the image of the moppet in her party dress scrambling up the bank. But, when Kim shouts, "Oh my god; is she safe up there?" I suspect she's willing the child to fall to make her point more vividly. The father slips on mud as he climbs up to save his daughter from almost certain death. "Really, this garden is a tragedy waiting to happen," Kim tells the shamefaced mother. She turns to me and whispers, "Right, they're out of the running."

  This, I decide, is how wars started: we are different groups of hunters after the same prey. The first time we meet, we laugh at the coincidence, maybe sit down around a fire to swap creation myths. Then, the idea of scarce resources is born, and, at the next chance encount
er, we fall upon each other and stab our new enemies with sharpened sticks.

  From the pavement outside Million Dollar Views, we admire the vista of Central Park, across to the city bowl, and fancy we can pick out our offices. "This is very nice. Imagine what it looks like at night." Kim scans the cars of house hunters packed in along the street. "But no off-road parking." She checks again, then takes the keys from my hand. Before I realise what's on her mind, she's scored along the sides of three cars. "Right," she says, "that should focus their minds on no off-road parking."

  She holds up the keys. Curled slivers of red, white and green paint nestle in the grooves of the ignition key like scoops of gelato. I grab the bunch of keys and shove my hands into my jacket pocket to hide their shaking. We stop our climb and stand aside to let a couple pass, bubbling with renovation plans, on their way down the steep, narrow path from Million Dollar Views. Kim says, "Oh, the neighbours must have such a lovely view." The couple carries on in silence to their newly engraved car.

  #

  The following week, I tell Kim I don't want to go house hunting, and she seems quite pleased with my news. She probably thinks this is a natural division of labour: she'll go out hunting, and I'll stay behind to vacuum the flat or winnow grain. But, as soon as she's driven off with her plastic folder, I escape into town to fossick among pre-loved anthologies that rarely feature sagas of famed house hunters.

  The second hand book dealer is next door to the crystal shop. That's where I bump into Zara, a girl I once hooked up with at a party. I've often wondered what happened to Zara. She tells me in great detail over coffee in a wilfully bohemian place at the top of Cuba Street.

  "They take their coffee seriously here," Zara tells me. Indeed, my cappuccino is tepid by the time the barrista has finished crafting a crop circle in the froth. Zara kisses most of the staff and patrons of the café. They all know her there. She likes to play at playing the decommissioned pinball machine.

  Having discovered South America, Zara is now giving acting a shot. She tells me about a role in a short film she may get to play, pro bono. Zara is very sweet; a conversation with her is much like eating candyfloss. We swap mobile numbers.

  #

  Kim is out of breath when she gets back from hunting the next week. I have visions of her having just hauled a bison carcass up the stairwell. "I've found the place for us," she says. "And we're going to get it."

  I wonder whether I should tell her about meeting Zara again, this time by design, not chance. But I don't think she'd listen. Zara took me to see the place she's staying. It's an old converted garage in Aro that's still got oil stains on the floor. She's very proud of these oil stains, as some people are of their harbour view. I said, "Contemporary Urban Living." Zara looked puzzled.

  Kim tells me how she reconnoitred Once in a Lifetime Opportunity. Like an escapee from prison, flitting between searchlights, she avoided other hunters to delve in cupboards and drawers to find out about the owners. She discovered plenty, but now she goes online to find out more. She reminds me of a geek detective who can deduce the serial killer's childhood trauma and his next victim, all from spittle left on a coffee cup, except she's profiling Bob and Ruth Whitby, who've lived at 15 Nixon Terrace, Brooklyn for 45 years.

  "So what if you can find out which brand of toothpaste they use?" I say. "It doesn't make any difference. The house will be auctioned."

  "Not necessarily. Not if Bob and Ruth decide to sell to us first." She gives me a look that reminds me of my incredible stupidity, and adds, "I accidentally left my sunglasses there."

  An aerial photograph of a house is on the computer screen. It's detailed enough to see washing on the line. I don't ask Kim to explain it to me, and she zooms out to a bombardier's view.

  "We'll give it an hour to make sure the agent has gone, and then we've got an excuse to go and introduce ourselves to Bob and Ruth. We'll pick up some flowers on the way – Ruth likes tulips."

  I don't ask Kim how she knows about Ruth and her weakness for showy bulbs. She may have water boarded someone for the information, and I don't want to be implicated. When she stands, hands on hips, with a look of complete triumph, I notice dark rings at her armpits, and, thinking it might be cruel, say, "Maybe you should shower first – Ruth would expect that."

  "Yes, you're right. I'll put on my visiting grandma dress, and surely you can find a better shirt than that?"

  #

  We drink tea in the lounge of 15 Nixon Terrace, and admire the view across the park and city to the harbour. Bob and Ruth are no fools, but they fall for Kim like an offer of TWENTY MILLION DOLLERS in a Lagos bank account.

  "We want the place to go to the right family – we've been here 45 years."

  "45 years? Oh, that's lovely. I hope we can be here that long." Kim manages to blush at her sham presumption, and looks down at her teacup.

  "The agent tells us we might get a higher price at auction. But selling your home isn't just about money. After being here so long, we want to know it's going to the right people."

  "I know, I know. I know." Kim says. "It's about the feel of a place. And how do you put a price on that? I just felt this was home as soon as I walked in."

  I don't care about Kim's stratagems and ruses anymore; if you're not going to shout in protest, when she's become this good at her calling, you've more or less got to sit back and shout 'Oh, well done!' in your mind.

  "Are you married?" Ruth asks.

  "Engaged." Kim flashes the ring her parents bought her on graduation: first class honours, double major, accountancy and witchcraft. "We're getting married as soon as we can find the right place."

  Bob and Ruth exchange glances.

  Ruth stands, takes Kim by the arm, and leads her from the room. I hear Kim's voice from down the hallway. "And this will be perfect for the baby's room."

  This is my chance to run screaming from Once in a Lifetime Opportunity, but I stay in the lounge, with Bob, in silence.

  "Are you much of a handy man, David?" he asks me at last.

  "No, not really." Kim would have kicked me under the shonky coffee table for that. "Bob."

  "Pity. There's three-phase electricity and a solid workbench in the cellar. In fact, I made all the bookshelves myself."

  I turn to admire Bob's handiwork. It may be my eyes, but the bookshelves look skew to me.

  "And the kitchen cabinets," he adds.

  "Really?" I think I can detect the influence of Frank Gehry on Bob's DIY. "Well, I suppose I could always give it a bash."

  Bob seems happy enough with that.

  Kim is all smiles, and squeezes my arm as we walk down the path of 15 Nixon Terrace. She turns to wave at Bob and Ruth, suckered and framed in the window behind us.

  I'll let her savour the moment. I'm not saying anything serious is going to develop between Zara and me; you can't live on candyfloss alone, though I suppose you can always try. Kim will miss her Once in a Lifetime Opportunity, but she's become so good at hunting, it should be no problem for her to snare another one.

  ###

  About the author

  Jonathan M Barrett lives and teaches in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written several plays, novels and short stories.

  The Ball

  Accident Report

  Uses of Agapanthus

  Connect with me online