24. the townhouses called palm court, with one palm tree amongst concrete
i called it 'the palm tree from hell', someone had planted it out the front of all the new townhouses & had erected the sign, 'palm court', to give the working-class suburbs that tropical feel, to remind us all that where we lived was not good enough, but that the ideal palm tree was something to strive towards, to remind us all to save up & go to queensland once a year, preferably surfer's paradise, the two grass mounds either side of the palm tree were meant to create some kind of creative landscape, but i had seen the twisted building material waste being buried under them, the builders hadn't bothered to move it, they threw the roll-out african grass over the top, they got all artistic on us & it was the disaster of two green mounds surrounded by cement, with one palm tree sticking up between them, i could see that none of my school friends would want to visit me, i watched it from my upstairs bedroom window, during sydney's southerly busters & late into the frosty winter nights, when mum's headlights lit it up as she drove in late from the factory job, checking the mail box on the way in, she was too tired to speak much, she just wanted to go to bed & gnaw on her chocolate, & get stuck into some glossy magazine, i knew that there were all these other places where people lived & all these other lives that they lived through, but i didn't know how to get there, the hours of my adolescence in liverpool, in the claustrophobic townhouse, were the longest i have ever spent in my life, they were the hours most full of death that i have ever spent, thinking, i want to live in every other place, except in the townhouses called palm court, with one palm tree amongst concrete |
