Defeating Forni. The Bridie Episode!

I was midway through telling you the story, wasn't I, about how we scotched the schemes of our nasty Icelandic rental agent, Forni-Kate, with a series of tearfully-received miracles that got us out of her life FOREVER, kinda!

This is the next part of that saga:  The Bridie's House Episode.

Bridie was from Sri Lanka and worked at the university with Keith. She was the sweetest, most kind-hearted, decent and honourable lady ... but had recently become The Evil Villain in an on-going saga being played out on national television by one of those "Sixty Minutes" style current affairs shows.

We're talking about Brisbane, Australia, in the early 80s, when there was nothing like wearing a sari to turn you into an easily accepted EVIL VILLAIN by the public, and almost nightly her "crimes" were tearfully recounted to the national audience by "the good guys" and so she was currently trapped in a nightmare, being recognised everywhere she went, suffering untold abuse by random strangers, and her lovely saris were being spat on by all and sundry.  Horrible situation and horribly unfair too.

Her only crime, apart from being a sari-wearing Indian, was to lease her rental property to prison parolees who didn't take care of her house and knew how to manipulate the media when she tried to evict them.  But evict them she eventually did, and that was that!  The house was, she said, so badly damaged she was having it demolished, but, for the six weeks before that happened, this house was ours, rent-free, for the asking.

As recounted in the previous episode, we were desperate for somewhere to live, thus Keith was thrilled by the kindness of her offer ... although his elation somewhat evaporated after she took him to see the house.

It was bad.  Like, seriously bad.  As tearfully-received miracles go, this was one of the less fortunate ones.  The grass was waist-high, everything was dirty, moldy and vermin-ridden and, before departing, these "good guys" had dragged all the furniture, fixtures and everything else into the middle of each room and set it alight.  However, none of the fires had taken and so all the walls were blackened by smoke but the house itself remained ultimately undamaged.

Seems like Bridie too had a good angel.

However, bad as it was, we were in no position to complain so Keith grabbed the college's serious cleaning equipment and returned to high-pressure-hose and scrub down the walls of one bedroom and the enclosed veranda, then rang our kindly removalist to drop by with our belongings. 

In retrospect, stacking our furniture and boxes on that veranda was a mistake because it meant, when we ultimately moved into our next house, we took a lot of parolee vermin with us ... but that's another story, although one so uninteresting - we had the pest controllers take care of it - I won't relate it.

Keith picked me up after work that night and warned me not to expect much but ... well, I actually liked the house.  It was a century-old wooden miner's cottage built right next to a beautiful park; a lovely-looking house in a lovely setting. 

As for the rest?

We had water but no electricity and our only furniture was a mattress on the floor of the single clean bedroom and, yes, cockroaches and rats ran over us at night. "I can't live like this."  I told Keith.

And, can you believe it of me? - Me, the world's most unskilled housewife? - I took to that entire house with scrubbing brushes and brooms, mouse-traps and bug spray.  I knew the house was about to be torn down but I didn't care.  For the six weeks it was ours, like some sort of mad woman, I scrubbed and cleaned and scythed down that grass and removed ingrained dirt and mould and fire damage and binned the burned ...

... I won't yet tell you the punch-line and instead will tell you of my good fortune.

Those parolee fellows belongings that weren't burned?  In the living room, under the top layer of charred and blackened who-knows-what, I first found seriously good quality stereo equipment.  I took it apart and discovered that a wire had separated from some other doodad so I stuck the wire back into where it looked like it should go.  Since we had no electricity I couldn't test it, but nonetheless, I took it to the second-hand dealer a block up the hill and he tested it and there was no problem whatsoever ... and he gave me A$500. for it!  SCORE!!!

After that, I was inspired and went through the only-top-layer burned heaps with gusto and found such amazing stuff.  Those parolees knew how to shop - or steal, although I've never thought of that before this! - but didn't, however, know how to take care of stuff, and so, with just minor manipulation and a quick fix, I had daily trips to that second-hand dealer and made such a killing. 

Oh, and they never bothered to wash anything either and simply threw everything dirty out the kitchen window, so when we scythed back the lawn, we found rice cookers and electric frying pans and high quality pots and pans ... which were scrubbed clean before making their way up the hill and into my bank account.

But in those mounds I also found a tragedy: letters from little sister to big-brother-in-jail.  What a beautiful child that was!  She was about five when she wrote her first letter and twenty five when she wrote her last, and in there was an entire life laid out before me, and I simply wept and wept.  For the first seven years it was all school and sport and friends and kittens and puppies ... but then she turned 12 and the tenor changed and you could see her slipping into bad company, sex, drugs, petty crimes, all alluded to although not exactly stated.  At 14, she had her first child, a son she named after big-brother, and by 15 she was working as a prostitute ... and then there were references to her brother's prison escape and I could understand why!  I too wanted to save her.  But seems he was caught and blah, blah, blah ... and over the next ten years you saw this exquisite child turn into a right piece of slime.

And now those letters, obviously treasured for so long, were consigned to the fire along with everything else in the lives of these parolee fellows, but I was so moved I kept those letters for years, thinking they'd make a great book just as they were, but somewhere along the way they got lost.  Sad, really! They were a real treasure.

It took five weeks of seriously hard but bank-account-enriching work before the house became properly liveable, and then Keith went through the entire place, inside and out, with the high pressure hose and suddenly it looked like what I always saw it as - a lovely-looking house in a lovely setting - and when ... now for the punch line ... Bridie saw it she too wept and wept ... and she cancelled the demolition and, for the first time seeing the potential, decided to renovate it instead.

We dropped by to see the house about ten years back, on one of our infrequent jaunts to Brisbane, and can tell you that Bridie did indeed renovate the house ... and did a truly lousy job of it!  Instead of celebrating what the house was, she brick veneered it and ... if ever there was a house in need of a good burning down, it's this one!

Any prison parolees out there looking for accommodation?