My Aunt had died a few months back and had been kind enough to leave me sixty thousand dollars. It was a decent clip of money, and it had been wholly unexpected. Combined with the money I'd been tucking away over the past few years, it bought my bank account balance to a hundred and forty thousand dollars.
It wasn't a fabulous sum by any stretch, especially when you consider that I had no assets to speak of. Well, not unless you count a collection of shitty furniture and a ten year old station wagon 'assets', but by the age of thirty-two, it's generally expected that a bloke has a bit more up his sleeve financially than a thirsty Subaru and a chipboard Queen size bed.
I had a middling white collar job that paid ok money but nothing great, and offered not much in the way of career advancement. That was fine by me, because I wasn't an overly ambitious person. My whole aim in life was to figure out how to retire early and spend my days fishing and writing. I would have liked to add 'with a woman', but my success with them had been pretty limited.
Physically, I wasn't of much interest. I had a mixed Mediterranean heritage and the olive skin and body hair to prove it. A lot of people commented on my eyes, which were an almost colourless shade of green, but that was my only distinguishing physical feature. What name had my parents bestowed upon this mixture of Italian, Greek and Turkish ancestry? Darren. Darren Sahin. If you thinks this means I spend a lot of my life spelling my surname, you think right.
With all of this on my mind, I decided to take stock of my life and start putting some plans in place for the future. A hundred and forty grand wouldn't go near to buying a decent house in Logan, which was where I was living. It was a deposit, not a purchase price, and quite honestly the idea of a mortgage was terrifying.
You might think I'm stupid. Plenty of people take out mortgages. I can't tell you why I dreaded the thought of one, except to say 'I did'. Therefore, I really only had the choice of either continuing to save or buying a weekender in a rural area, somewhere I could move to when I was finally done with my working life. A regional area would still likely be too expensive, but rural was definitely doable. I knew my parameters. I didn't want outback. I didn't want to buy a place amongst bogans or hippies. And I wanted to be able to drive there in less than three hours on a Friday afternoon.
I won't bore you with the details of my search. Suffice to say that within five weeks I found a suitable property. It wasn't much; just a few hectares of scrub with a rundown besser block house perched in the middle of it, but the price was excellent and the Friday afternoon peak-hour commute just under two hours from where I was working. I could have lived there had I wanted to - though I didn't, not yet. For now, I wanted and needed to stay in Logan.
I'm not a particularly handy person so I didn't want to chance any major repairs myself. I presumed the local tradesmen would screw me over, but they were actually quite good about charging me only slightly more than they should have, and the work they did was second to none. Within another month the roof on the house had been repaired, the septic system recommissioned, and the wiring replaced.
All of the tradies made the same comment about the house 'it looks like a fucking council dunny, but it's not going anywhere, that thing would withstand a cyclone'. And they were right, because it looked uncannily similar to public toilet facilities, particularly because it had never been painted. I figured a coat of paint and some minor landscaping and it would look significantly better, but I wasn't in any rush. I wasn't out to impress anyone. I had my home, I didn't have a mortgage, and I was happy.
Not being social by nature, I wasn't in any rush to integrate myself with the community and make friends. I was visiting for peace and quiet, not a cracking social life, but nonetheless, I did meet some pretty decent blokes thanks to the work I had done on my house. There's not much to do in rural areas. Hunting, fishing, football, fucking and drinking seemed to be the extent of it.
The builder who fixed my roof was a mad keen home brewer. Beer, wine, spirits, he had them all bubbling and fermenting in one of his sheds. He and some mates would meet up at a local farmer's house for a drink every Friday night and sample each other's finest efforts in moonshine. He - Sam - was actually pretty interested in where it was I was working, because there was a home brew store that sold a particular product he was interested in and if I was going to be in the area that week... You can see where this is heading, can't you?
So there I was one Friday night, out in the middle of fucking nowhere with a beer in my hand.
'How was your week?' Carver asked. 'Quiet?'
It was my third Friday night with the Brewer's Club. That wasn't their name, they weren't an official group or anything, but it was how I referred to them. We were six men aged between eighteen and sixty-four, some single, most married, one widowed, standing in a shed drinking terrible, terrible beer, but it was Jim's beer and Jim was the widowed one and there was a certain leniency offered to a man whose wife had passed two months ago.
Carver, like me, worked in some mindless white collar job. He was a bit older than me, somewhere near forty, and had a wife and two kids. He said his wife hated him and I had no reason not to believe that.
'Yeah nah, it ended up pretty busy hey,' I replied. 'Yours?'
'Same shit, different bucket,' he said. He took a sip of beer. 'Fuck this is bad.'
'Shithouse,' I agreed.
We were hanging out for the whiskey made by the only member of the club with any sort of skill. It tasted better than any whiskey I'd actually paid money for, and was made by a farmer who counted ten percent of his income from primary production, and ninety percent from his various alcoholic, herbicide and pesticide concoctions. He was an odd duck, but Carver and I had agreed that geniuses were rarely normal. They operated on different planes of existence from us mere mortals.
'Speaking of shithouses, how is yours coming along?' he inquired.
The shithouse was how they referred to my house. I'd have been offended, except that I'm not an easily offended person.
'Yeah, all good,' I replied. 'I was going to start rendering it tomorrow.'
'Rendering it?'
'Yeah.'
'Need a hand?'
'Only if you're bored,' I replied.
He nodded faintly. 'Might come around late arvo. Take the kids with me, if that's alright.'
'Sure. I'll pay them if you want them to actually do some work.'
'Reckon they might be up for that.'
Carver's kids were ten and twelve years old respectively, one girl, one boy.
'Does five bucks an hour each sound alright?' I asked.
'Sounds pretty fucking generous to me. I'll make sure they work for it.'
I went home an hour or so later with a bottle of whiskey I'd bought from the mad farmer sitting in the passenger seat footwell of my Subaru. I thought I'd go home, have a few drinks, then get myself off to sleep.
It would be another night in my besser block getaway. I was expecting nothing to happen, and no one to drop by. I wasn't expecting anything other than a full night's sleep.
Boy, was I about to be surprised.
~~~~~~~~
I'm not ordinarily much of a drinker but I still do enjoy the odd few beers or whiskeys, particularly on a winter's night. It was with a reasonable level of enjoyment that I made a coffee, poured in a generous amount of booze, and took it outside to drink.
I sat in my camp chair, stared at the stars, and thought about the current state of my life. Most people were appalled that I'd bought a house so far from home, but perhaps it was difficult for them to see it from my point of view. My mates were all married and either had kids or were trying to have some. I didn't feel as if I were ever going to have a wife or family, so I needed to find my own happiness.
This
was my happiness. This was precisely what I wanted.
