It's August, 2025.

How I ended up here.

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It’s September 2018. Wind and rain billow south down Punt Road to Richmond, whistling chaos into the rabbit’s warren of lanes behind The Cricketer’s and The Royal. Through share-house aluminium blinds I watch a man scurrying through the downpour. He covers his hair with one hand, and drags a sheet of plywood from the middle of the lane and onto the pavement with the other, before scrambling back into his car and driving on.

The two bedroom house fits a rotating cast of four, each room subdivided by thin walls. It’s cheaper than Sydney, cheaper than Canberra too, which is how I ended up here. The landlord lets himself in every Sunday, tips the rent out of a tin onto the kitchen counter, and adds it up in front of whoever’s unlucky enough to be home.

The chaos outside has Lacey huddled under the doona next to me, and the heater I’d found on the side of the road before I went into hospital keeps short-circuiting. My housemates think I spent a couple of months in Queensland.

Another car stops, and I prop myself up to watch a second man darting through the rain. The same piece of plywood’s back where it was, having come unstuck from a temporary fence surrounding the small residential construction side across the lane. It seems to want to be face down in the rain.

When the storm settles I put on Lacey’s lead and check the train timetable. They let you take dogs on public transport in Melbourne, and if you’re desperate enough, they even turn a blind eye when you bring them into AA meetings. I drag the plywood from the middle of the road on my way out, and again in the dark on my way back in.

When I turn it over I notice that it has an ad on it that says TSM BUILDING CONSTRUCTION, with a phone number at the bottom. I fetch some cable ties from under the sink and re-attach it to the fence, hovering over the number.

*

The dog barks before the knocking starts. It’s bright outside—I hadn’t noticed. Through the blinds I watch a stocky, swarthy man in steel caps move the broken front gate to one side and stride up root-cracked concrete path. When I open the door his smile beams through me and up the corridor.

Solid gold warmth, big hands, big eyes.

”Sugar Sean Michaels”, he roars, as though he’d towed the sun in with him. “Thanks for sorting the sign, got your message!”

That’s how I got my first job in construction.

*

The last job I’d had ended in me sending long, delirious, intoxicated texts to a florist on Chapel St about penalty rates and wage theft after a fortnight of wasting their time and arguing with rose thorns.

Anxiety kept me up most of the night before my first shift on the site. An unholy amount of instant coffee had my body upright long enough to be useful, before exhaustion saw me quietly off in a corner of the formwork vomiting up brown and yellow.

*

It’s April 2012. I’m wearing a suit, walking around the Parliament House Senate Press Gallery with a lanyard, ordering coffees next to George Brandis and Bob Carr, pissing in urinals next to Bernard Keane, and dreaming my way into vast enterprises. My parents sent me to a good school. I got into a good degree. I met good people.

Pissing it all away doesn’t take long at all.

I don’t know if I was born with termites in my soul—lying dormant like sleeper cells and waiting for a catalyst to activate their gnawing—or if they were something I unwittingly invited in. The trouble with mental illness is that it is cunning. Adaptable. Silver-tongued.

It can perch on your nape like an ibex, make you feel 15 feet tall and convince you that anything Hunter S. Thompson could do, you could do too. And when you fail, it sits on your chest for months, pushing your whole body down into a urine-stained mattress, presenting terrible ideas as rational responses to a world that has already fed you to the termites.

*

It’s November 2018. The days are longer and warmer. The mud’s firmed up. At 27 years old I’ve been told how to use a shovel, how to hold a wheelbarrow, and how to grip a hammer in front of sun-hardened men. Coming to terms with my own uselessness doesn’t take long. Neither does learning how to get out of bed at 5, feeling my hands roughen, and surprising the landlord with rent on time.

I throw the steel caps I found next to a recycling bin out and buy myself a pair in the correct size.

I’m starting to think about ‘what next’. I haven’t given ‘what next’ any serious consideration in years.

*

It’s June 2022. I’m on my knees picking oxalis from a veggie patch I built for a client in Caulfield. My t-shirt is slung over the edge of a wheelbarrow and one of the guys I’ve got working for me is grabbing us coffees from the 7/11 up on the corner of Glenhuntly and Hawthorn.

I don’t need another coffee, but you can’t send a guy for a walk just to punch a dart. I know he wants one, and he knows I don’t want him smoking on a client’s property. My skin is dark, my shoulders are wider and my chest is firm. I never run out of sunscreen.

The boys drink their coffees and eat Callipos in the sun.

Lacey gets up, stretches, shakes a grey plume of dust off her back, laps some water from her bowl, and finds some shade under a lillypilly hedge.

Steam rises from two cubic metres of mulch banked on the ute. Mont hops onto the tray and scrapes layers off the pile and into the ‘barrow, gliding the shovel across the top of the mound and letting gravity and momentum shoulder the work. When the ‘barrow’s full, I hop off the tray, wrap my fists around its handles, lock my elbows in, tense my gut, and lift with my legs. Mont doesn’t know it, but he owes his lower back to Sean.

In the evenings, podcasts and books fill in the gaps from the degrees I never finished. Word docs start to crowd the desktop, replacing the excel spreadsheets I use to write invoices with. Everyone tells me to use invoicing software but I can’t justify the $20/month. I’m subletting the spare room in the place I’m renting in Caulfield, growing my own vegetables, and if I buy coffee it’s always from 7/11. The voice in my head still talks like we’re living on $10 a day.

Being tired is good. Being sore is good. There’s a lot of work on. Most of it I do on my own. And there’s always a couple of young guys in AA looking for cash. Those who don’t need the money still need something to do.

*

It’s October 2023. Manual labour gives you a lot of space to think. For a long time there I was thinking about the cost of living. Rental prices. Landlordism. Covered in dirt on a 3 million dollar property one day, being debated with over $20 worth of fertiliser charges the next.

But none of that matters now. I’m thinking about war and I’m thinking about a guy at university calling for the removal of Jews from the Levant. I see on Instagram he’s won some poetry prize, in between posts that say ‘glory to the martyrs’ in bright red.

I’m thinking about the limp corpses of Jews piled on top of one another while measuring and cutting lengths, lifting bags of soil, digging holes.

I’m thinking about people I have known for decades stirred into action by the killing of Jews; the simultaneous celebration of intifada and the reduction of rape and genital mutilation to ‘propaganda’.

Artists I adored begin posting online about the importance of outing other artists who expressed any sympathy for the Jewish victims of what happened only days prior.

Within weeks, they get the war they wanted. The violence they celebrated. And I can’t get my gloves off fast enough.

*

Six months pass and I’m towing a trailer with everything I own up the Hume. We pull off the highway about 200km from Sydney. I lean against the ute while Lacey eyes off some patchily shorn sheep a couple hundred metres into a paddock. A twisted, burnt out tree gnarls sticks out of the grass like the last tooth in a gum. I’m coming home.

That is how I got my second job in construction.

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