Silver

Chapter 8 - then

My sister dropped me outside the house, saying she needed to get to work. I let myself in. The house was empty, mother was at work and father was at a conference overseas. I drank a glass of apple and lychee juice looking out our huge expansive window at Port Phillip Bay. My father designed the house two years before I was born. It's the only design he's ever built. He's an academic in Architecture and Design at Melbourne University. My mother constantly liked to tell people how painstaking the building of the house was, how my father changed his mind about every finishing ten times over. She repeatedly recalls the day the site manager walked all his tradesmen off the job and my father had to beg them to come back.

The design was inspired by the white houses on the Greek islands; all the walls are rounded, there is a double-tiered curved balcony at the front of the house and the peak of the roof is a white dome. My father had stones flown in from Naxos Island for the flooring in the ensuite and beautiful glossy red tiles from Santorini for the kitchen benchtop. There were twelve sets of windows and six sets of bi-fold doors custom-made for the house.

It sits at the top of Olivers Hill in Frankston and we have 180-degree views over the bay. When you are swimming in Frankston beach, if you look back at the Hill you can see our house clearly, the stark whiteness stands out from all the other houses like a lighthouse.

Every detail in the house was agonised over by my father, like the fireplace in the centre of the sunken 'round room', where sometimes my parents had dinner parties with their friends and they all sat on the white leather circular couch, like they were around a campfire. My bedroom was my haven. I had my own couch in my room and a double bed. My bi-fold doors led out to the bottom-level balcony and I had panoramic views of the bay. Often I didn't pull my curtains shut at night, so I could see the water first thing when I awoke in the morning.

We were living in the carcass of my father's dream. He quality controlled everything that came into the house. There was not a coffee canister or a roll of toilet paper that did not have an aesthetic quality to it. Sometimes I thought that he surrounded himself with beauty to make up for his loveless relationship and the scorn of my mother.

My father did all the shopping and made our lunches and meals. My mother called him a 'lazy academic' but the truth was his hours weren't as long as hers because he chose to have balance in his life. He wasn't lazy at all. He cooked complex meals for us every night. He'd make Turkish pizzas for us, rolling the dough and letting it sit and rise, and then he'd cook the mince with the spices. He'd make slow-cooked meditteranean lamb, that he'd marinated that morning, served with lemon and rosemary potatoes and for drinks he might serve pickled chyrsanthunum cordial. He planned his menus for each night, with the same meticulous detail, and the same love, that he planned the house.