My parents ooh and ah over the pictures even though the brochure does very little to convey the real beauty of the property, or the potential of the house. All Jeff will have to do is wave his magic gay design wand and hey presto, it will be transformed into a page from Belle magazine, replete with a shop’s worth of designer cushions. But all in good time.
‘I really can’t believe it,’ Mum says, wiping away the last of her tears. ‘Congratulations!’
‘We should get a photo while we’re here,’ Jeff says.
‘I’ll take it! You stay in it, Jude,’ Dad offers.
I take out my phone, open the camera app and hand it over to Dad. All he has to do is press the big white button.
‘Just this one, Dad. Do you see it?’ I point at it for him. ‘Nothing else. Got it?’ Then I race to position myself between Mum and Jeff and plaster a frozen smile in place. We wait.
Dad holds the camera a little too close to his face, as though he needs to see us through a viewfinder.
‘Wait a minute,’ he says. ‘Why am I seeing myself?’
‘You must have pressed —’
‘Eh?’
It’s easier for me to race back to Dad and press the flip button than try to explain to him at maximum volume what he’s done wrong. I run back to my position.
He’s resting against the hood of our car for support but his hands are so unsteady it’s virtually impossible that the photo will be anything other than blurry.
‘Wait a minute! Oh, Skeet, what have I done wrong now? The button has turned red.’
‘You’ve turned on the video camera,’ Jeff says.
‘What’d he —?’ Dad begins.
Jeff leaps forward and takes the phone from Dad’s hands.
‘Maybe you should take it, darl?’ Dad says in defeat.
‘You can do it, Pete,’ Jeff says. ‘Here.’ He hands Dad the phone then stands behind him to illustrate the process: the pressing of only one button, the big white one in front of his face.
‘Okay,’ Dad says, completely unconvinced. With Jeff back in place and the smile on my face now causing muscle damage, Dad presses a button.
‘I think I’ve done it right.’
I take the phone from him and inspect his handiwork. There is a close-up photo of my father’s left eye. I think it captures the moment perfectly.
‘We’d better get back in the car,’ I say. ‘We’re standing on someone else’s property.’
‘So, we’re not driving all the way to Gloucester?’ Mum asks, like Dorothy waking up after the tornado.
‘Jude! There is no property at Gloucester. There is no cottage with a rose garden.’
‘I was just . . . I was just so convinced.’
‘Got you!’ I say.
‘You hop in the front.’ Dad offers the prime seat to Mum probably so he can have an undetected-by-Jude post-devon sandwich nap in the back.
I watch (but mostly hear) both of my parents haul themselves back into the car and start the buckling-in challenge.
‘Now we’re actually taking you to lunch at the pub in Branxton,’ I add for good measure.
‘Good day, Jude?’ Dad asks lovingly from over the back.
‘The best.’
‘Skeet, at lunch I’ll get you to take a look at my phone,’ he says. ‘It’s not working again.’
I don’t know how he’s done it, but somehow between when Jeff fixed it last – fifteen minutes ago – and now, I’ll bet he’s managed to turn airplane mode on again, and wonder why he didn’t ask Jeff to fix it.
It is a fate familiar to children under fifty everywhere: you will be your parents’ on-call tech help-desk in perpetuity. The job description reads: you will manage the vagaries of HDMI cables, the recording of Foxtel shows, connection of computers to reliably unreliable printers, the paying of bills online and the relentless fixing of airplane mode. You must possess a can-do attitude, have a high tolerance for repeated questions and incredible patience. Salary is not commensurate with anything, because there is none.
All these responsibilities fall squarely on the shoulders of the first child to walk through their parents’ door. In my family’s case, looking at the rich statistical history, this usually means me.
Am I repeating myself? Volumes mysteriously increase and decrease, languages bizarrely change, emails disappear, voice messages are never listened to, text messages are never received. Communications at Jude and Pete’s enter a void – a black hole of unknown and inexplicable happenings. According to them, there is no logical explanation and certainly, most definitely, neither of them is to blame.
My thoughts wander to the night I was watching a Meryl Streep movie and my phone rang. Because it was Dad calling, I braced myself for the worst.
‘Hello?’ I say.
When all I hear is Dad’s laboured, heavy breathing, my immediate thought is that Mum must be dead.
‘Skeet . . . We . . . Sorry, mate.’
