ira friedberg*
Bad Times in Red Brick Flats
A sample from my novel manuscript awarded a Fellowship with the State Library of NSW in 2025.
https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/fellowships/summer-fellows
Well, I was close to giving up on finding the apartment. I had wandered the streets for weeks, following phantoms and red herrings, and I was utterly dispirited. What kind of an idiotic idea was this, anyway? It was worse than a needle in a haystack, it was a strand of hay in a haystack. My days had become endless meanderings, with those first few promising sightings becoming reminders of the impossibility of my task; everything looked the same, the style of apartment was ubiquitous. It was a sprawling family, with cousins upon cousins, each with their own special features but the same general attitude. Worse, I had thought that if this were the case, such a family would gather together, in a single neighbourhood, distinct from others. But there were no easy divisions, it was chaos, each suburb was a medley of every possible design.
I found them near my hostel by the sea as well as in the landlocked suburbs, both inner-city and outer. They were plonked next to Victorian terraces and Federation cottages and twenty-storey new builds, each block a mutation of a basic premise. Some had accented sections of yellow brick. Some had balconies, some had their staircases hidden. Some blocks were levitating, propped up by support pillars that allowed for a carpark on the ground floor. Some were ringed by a brick fence, some stood naked before the street, with glass doors and dilapidated bare stairwells, or wood-effect entrances with carpeted lobbies. Many had a name plastered by the entrance; Wentworth Towers, Kennedy, Winston, Fuji San, Erin Court, Santa Maria, Casa del Mar, Carbrook, the names of kings and queens, the words King and Queen, names of the old aristocracy, names of towns, regions, and ideas from another continent. They were unfathomable, irrelevant names, each longing for a place far away, and the attempt to recreate or transplant them, none with any connection to the land the buildings stood upon.
Occasionally I was taken in, I would glimpse a familiar shape and become convinced I had stumbled on the one. I would linger on the doorstep, look up at the first-floor window, where I might glimpse the head of a bookcase, or a cat on the sill, behind a sheer curtain. I would touch the brick, touch it with open palms, as if I was a physician or a psychic, as if I thought I would feel a heartbeat or an ebb of energy that would satisfy my expertise. I felt nothing—how could I with my head so full of is this it, is this it, is this it?
Only on my walks, though my goal seemed to recede further into the distance with each block, was I at least walking closer to life, away from the deathly call of that sixteen-bed cavern which I was paying for by the night. I dreaded returning to those sixteen steel-framed beds, in that eternally damp room, with its acrid stench like burnt lemon zest, decades of sweat piled atop sweat. Avoiding this fate, I prolonged my search each day, walking longer than was comfortable, sometimes into the late summer night. I called it quits only when I felt I was so exhausted that I felt I could fall asleep immediately on returning, for sleeping was very difficult in that room; there was always a bedside light left on, and the silver moonlight forever streamed through the long, uncurtained window. I’d creep up the rungs and crawl under the thin pilled white sheet.
.