14 Vine Street

I’ve been bought and sold three times since my frame was first hammered into this Footscray dirt. Today will be the fourth, if the auctioneer does his job right. Each time, a new young family stakes their claim on my floorboards, desperate for a patch of earth to call their own.

A crowd of hopefuls spills across my front yard. The auctioneer stands on my lawn, his suit a fraction too small, straining at the buttons as he gestures toward my roofline. He’s wearing statement socks – bright, geometric patterns intended to hold the crowd’s eye, or perhaps to distract it from the rising damp behind my sideboard and termites colonising my garage.

“We’re standing here in front of this marvellous piece of history – 14 Vine Street,” he says, his voice a boom that vibrates through my floorboards, rattling the loose window frame in the spare bedroom. “A beautiful four bedder, two baths, as well as a spacious granny flat and a driveway as long as a cricket pitch. We have plenty of bidders today, so make your voice heard. Who’ll start me at seven-hundred thousand?”

A silence falls over the huddle of puffer jackets and latte cups. A low rumble emerges, different from the whispers I remember the first time.

That was sometime in the fifties, before my asbestos was scraped away and long before the lemon tree was uprooted by the storm in eighty-six. I still feel the ghost of those citrus roots where the Phams eventually planted their persimmon tree. Before them, the Nikolaidis family spent every cent they’d brought with them to claim my keys. Yianni used to tell visitors they’d left a Greece that was nothing but rubble. They’d sold their inheritance – the dirt their parents owned – hoping to build something here that wouldn’t be blown apart.

Yianni’s hands were the first to touch my walls with the weight of ownership. That first evening, he stood in the driveway with Elini while the children laughed and kicked a flat soccer ball back and forth. “Listen,” he said to her. “You hear that?”