Sleepless in Ivanhoe
I can’t sleep. I’m staying at an Airbnb in Ivanhoe. It wasn’t a good choice.
On arrival, Ian meets me at the door and takes me through his rambling, ramshackle house. We walk past three doors on the left, two on the right, and a staircase going up. The hallway leads into a sort of lounge room, which gives out onto an unkempt garden with long grass and a dirty pool that has not been used in a long time. There is a second staircase, going down, which takes us to the lower level. The house lies on a steep slope rising up from the banks of the Yarra, although some kilometre or more back from the river. The pungent smell of pot, which I had caught the moment I entered the front door, grows stronger until I can doubt it no longer. Somebody here is smoking or growing weed. Ian says nothing.
Downstairs, there is a door to the right, a door to the left and a pair of glass doors lined with heavy curtains and containing a bright fluorescent light presumably powered by the extension cable that runs from the doors along the floor into the room next door. Ian takes me down yet another corridor, shows me the bathroom on the left and then through the door at the end of the hallway. This is my room. It’s basic but comfortable and tolerably clean. There is a bed, an old wardrobe, three chairs, a clothes horse and a plastic fold-out table, the kind you might see at a school fete. The walls are filled with framed advertisements for Penfolds wine from what looks like the 1940s, framed old photographs of 19th Century Paris, a Monet print and three small curtain-less windows that seem to serve no discernible purpose for there is a very large floor-to-ceiling window that runs almost the length of the south wall of the room that looks out onto the garden. And there are two more doors. One opens up to a store room full of junk. The other, which has a key in the lock, leads under the house, which is also full of rubbish.
Ian leaves me to unpack. On leaving the bathroom, the door opposite opens and a young man in his twenties appears. He looks dishevelled and has several earrings and piercings. I later learn he is the couple’s son. He mutters something to me but I don’t hear him because the waft of marijuana coming out of his room has momentarily caught me off guard. He must have realised it for when I went out later for a walk along the river to clear my head, I came back and the smell was gone.
Earlier, I had spoken with Ian’s wife, Mary, in the kitchen upstairs. She is a lovely woman and seems out of place here. She has a PhD in history. She wrote a book based on her research about the experience of a nurse during Word War I. The nurse had come from the same small country town that Mary was from. She wanted to hear about my research but was especially interested to learn that I had quit my IT career to do something I loved.
‘Did you have to retrain?’ she asked.
I told her how I had gone back to university to do a Master’s and had then worked in my new field for several years before embarking on a PhD.
‘It’s so good to do something you love,’ she said. She had clearly loved doing her PhD.
‘I never really loved IT and after a while I realised I wanted to do something different,’ I said.
‘Like Ian,’ she said. ‘He wanted to be a geologist.’
But unlike Ian, I had actually done it with all the pain, anxiety and joy that entailed. Ian, it seemed, had never taken the leap. It’s a useful reminder that what I’m doing with my life, no matter how mundane it may sometimes seem, is both unusual and revolutionary. Most people cannot or will not do it. Most people live their lives like Ian. Lives restricted by routine, habit and comfort.
I make a cup of tea. The TV is on. Mary is now telling me about her ailing mother who had suffered cognitive decline during COVID for lack of social contact. Ian is heating up last night’s pasta and tuna in the microwave while explaining to me the breakfast provisions: Weetabix, muesli, toast, honey, marmalade, tea and Aldi instant coffee. It is like something out of a nineties motel.
*
I have tried for an hour and half to fall asleep but I kept getting disturbed by noise or lights going on and off. Every footstep and creak is amplified such that it sounds like someone is coming into my room. The train rattles by every now and then. But I’m not complaining. It’s clean, comfortable, well located and cheap. The hosts are friendly. Harmless.
But it’s an odd place. The air of disappointment and unfulfilled lives hangs heavy. I will always remember how Mary’s eyes lit up when she spoke about her PhD, how she became animated and alive. The way she took off her sweater with almost reckless abandon. For a few moments, there was a flash of life in that lifeless kitchen. A spark arced across the room between us. And I will also remember the tone of crushing defeat as she uttered those lines, ‘Ian wanted to be a geologist. Or a footballer.’ Why had she told me that?
Another door bangs. I suspect the son is using the bathroom. It’s odd that neither parent acknowledged his presence as though he was something to be embarrassed about, like some kind of Mrs Rochester, hidden away, imprisoned in his own home. Now, I’m letting my imagination run away with me. Perhaps it’s the tiredness. Or the weed. I’m resigned to not sleeping. But every cloud has a silver lining. I cannot sleep but at least I can write.
