‘They were great days,’ Simon tells me about Sydney, wringing his hands at the sink, his big dog Bolla lapping water from a bucket beside him.
He doesn’t mean the year we lived together, but the days, years later when he lived with Morgan and the woman he most adored, Loretta. By then he had finished the music degree. It must have been a sweet time with not much money, or many cares, and having time to practise and play and listen, to read and think and dream.
Living together there with Simon, Morgan and Loretta got it together, and after they broke up, and the house broke up, Loretta started a relationship with another mutual friend that last a long time.
I met Simon one year at a Sydney music school in the 1990s and the next year we rented a house. I was composing and needed silence; Simon needed sound. We knew each other from getting drunk together, which was better than answering two-line ads in the local paper.
We found a cheap, narrow terrace ten metres from the tracks that led to Macdonaldtown Station in Sydney’s inner west and we got in a magnanimous medical student to share the rent.
The trains changed the pitch of my records. Our fingers tingled from the electricity that leaked out of the bathroom light switch. Inside it was always dull and on cold winter days we opened the house to let in the warmer air from outside.
Trying to separate myself from everyone then, I was inhospitable and quick to arrogance. I cooked meals only for people I invited into the house. I insisted on having my stereo in my room when every other lounge room had one. I rented a piano but was angry when the others played it because they never paid. When next door was excited about a new cutlery set, I entreated her to go and get it: ‘Do, please, show us your spoons, Kate.’
None of us had much money, but Simon – who worked for his – always put a coin into the busker’s purse. He always walked fast. He was always thin. He only said he was ‘always hungry’ a few times. The medical student always gave me exact change for bills the night before they were due and we owe each other nothing.
After that year we finished our degrees and then I moved away and Simon stayed, living first near the beach and then again in the inner west with Morgan and Loretta. Soon after I got back, Simon went to Spain and stayed.
Eventually we lost touch and last I heard he was busking in Alicante, complaining how caricaturists would set up their easels next to him and earn forty Euros an hour while he made ten a day. Then he found me on Facebook a month before I flew out.
These days
These days Simon is married to Sonia and living in Molina, near Murcia city, in southeast Spain. He is heavier and walks slower. They are soon moving to Australia. A quarter of Spain is unemployed. ‘In Murcia city,’ Simon tells me, ‘forty thousand families have exhausted the two-year period they can get unemployment benefits for, and have no income.’
On the day I arrive from Granada, Molina looks worse. There is dog shit everywhere. There are many streets of illegally built houses and three storey apartment blocks.
Money isn’t easy and jobs are scarce, but there are services. Sonia is resigned about Spain and unsure about Australia. She is quick, strong, direct: ‘If I get sick will the government pay for a doctor, or a hospital, like they do here? If we cannot get jobs in Perth, we will come back, because at least here we eat.’
They are taking the dogs – Bolla, and a small black matron, Luna, who like a mad aunt barks with bright-eyes from behind a greying muzzle.
‘Would you pay the price of a first class ticket to take them, or would you leave them here?’ Simon asks.
‘I’d leave them to a good home if I could. Otherwise, I’d take them.’
‘Yeah,’ he smiles, rubbing their necks with their hair in his fingers. They pant and bark and Bolla bunts his face.
After we eat a late lunch of pork and chorizo casserole, the dogs wolf what’s leftover and we walk them outside the town limits.
The first stop is a large dirt island between two traffic lanes. The dogs drop their stinking innards and Simon scrapes it up. It does not smell like they will live to see the plane.
I soon see why. In a moment they smell a cooked chicken carcass someone has left near an industrial skip. Bolla strains the leather strap Simon has wrapped twice round his wrist.
‘Do you think someone has poisoned it?’ he asks, holding her back and looking at the bag.
‘Yep. Even if they haven’t it will be full of bacteria. The bones might splinter their throats.’
‘It wasn’t here this morning.’
‘I wouldn’t let them eat it. Not if you want them in Australia.’
‘It’ll be all right.’
As he squats to untie the bag and Bolla is in there in big gulping crunches that break through the soft carcass.
‘Oh, you’ve gotta let Luna have a go,’ he says, and a hesitant moment later her little jaws are going at it.
When you change countries
When you change countries you carry the weight you do not shed. Simon is selling the car. His ideal buyer is a twenty-something single woman with a job (half of Spain’s youth is unemployed) who wants a go-about-town car that gets seven hundred kilometres to a tank on the highway. Maybe her Dad will pay when he sees the air bags.
We go to the Sunday car yard and arrive at eleven. We pay five Euros to enter a flat, dusty lot. Simon turns the wheels in the gravel and a man walks up and offers three thousand Euros before he parks. We do not know if he is buying or selling. It is four hundred less than Simon wants and there is no deal.
There are cars everywhere, but no prices. There are only men from Morocco and greater Arabia. Clean-shaven, unshaven, moustached men: the ones selling greet each other with handshake-hugs and double-kisses and their familiarity makes me wonder if anyone has ever sold a car; the ones buying poke about the duco, sometimes with their wives.
We sit and wait and stand and wait and each of us walks the yard to look for prices and to see if anyone is dealing.
‘They say you should leave the oil on the engine,’ he says as he opens the bonnet after an hour. ‘That way people know you haven’t washed a leaking engine.’
‘It’s dry here,’ I say.
‘It hasn’t rained all summer. When it does there are crops on the flat here and up into the hills.’
‘How much?’ some say.
‘It’s a good car,’ he tells them. ‘Seven hundred kilometres a tank. Four years old. Nice blue. Air conditioning. Only seventy thousand kilometres. What are you looking for?’
But they do not want to talk and soon walk away.
By lunch the young men with big engines skid out of the lot and we soon leave and drive to the market to shop for a rabbit stew. Friends are coming for dinner and bringing fresh tortilla. Later that night we drink red wine by an open fire and stream Australian Crawl and Cold Chisel and the Church through YouTube. Then the rain settles in.
A narrow chaos of one-way streets
The dogs have stopped barking in the morning. I knock on the door. Sonia rolls over his name and Simon lifts his heavy-eyes into the apartment. He claws at the tea I hold for him.
‘Would you like some rolls?’ he asks, knowing the hunger I will soon have for Madrid.
The best bread is at an unlikely French patisserie on a street that channels traffic into town. Simon walks the dogs and I pack. I wonder if there is street meat for them today.
‘I couldn’t get baguettes,’ he says coming through the door. ‘The street is a river. I couldn’t cross.’
But he has found bread and as we leave for the bus I sit with two rolls filled with leftover tortilla in the unsold car.
The water forces peak hour cars into to three-point-wrong-turns down a narrow chaos of one-way streets.
‘It happens every year,’ he says. ‘The drains are blocked with rubbish so when it rains the street fills up. There is a free for all of traffic everywhere.’
‘Are you looking forward to Perth?’
‘Australia’s not like it was fifteen years ago is it? You can’t just sit on the dole. You have a case worker and they have to find you something.’
‘My brother has work as a carer for disabled kids,’ he says. ‘It’s good work. You help these kids into the world. I’d like to do some training. Then we can save for Sonia to come back to Spain once a year.’
‘Do you have guitars there?’
‘I have one. I haven’t played for two years. It should still be good. Maybe I will.’
The rain has cleared and the Sun is beneath the spent clouds, shining a glow of morning yellow though the humid sky.
‘What are some songs about rain?’ he asks.
We sing answers driving with the light in our eyes … It’s raining again … Who’ll stop the rain? … Have you ever see the rain? … Raindrops keep falling on my head … Why does it always rain on me … Singing in the rain … I can see clearly now the rain has gone …
‘No, he says, ‘that’ll be tomorrow.’
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