Chapter Three

The warehouse on Mayfield Street did not welcome us so much as tolerate our presence.

When I hauled the roller door upward for the first time, rust screamed across the street and dust spilled down onto my jacket and hair. Inside, the darkness was almost complete. The windows had been painted black years earlier and only thin seams of daylight leaked through the edges.

The place smelled of plaster dust, mould and old oil.

The lease was already signed.

Pandemic restrictions helped in one strange respect: the world had stopped moving. Cafés were closed, streets were empty, people folded into their homes. But construction and maintenance work continued, which meant I could disappear into the warehouse for hours without attracting much attention. The children assumed I was grocery shopping or walking. I let them.

The first task was light.

A glazier arrived in a battered van and walked slowly around the space, tapping the windows with his knuckles.

“They really didn’t want anyone looking in,” he muttered.

Over the next few days he scraped back paint and replaced cracked panes until daylight finally returned to the room. The transformation was immediate. Sunlight flooded the concrete floor and suddenly the warehouse revealed itself properly: high ceilings, scarred walls, space enough to imagine something larger than survival.

Then came plumbing.

The original sink dripped rusty water into a stained bucket. The plumber crouched beside the pipes, swore quietly, and informed me that whoever installed the system had been “optimistic rather than qualified.”

I insisted on a clay trap.

“A what?”

“A clay trap.”

He looked at me for a moment, then nodded with the resignation of a man who had seen stranger things during lockdown. By the time he left, water ran clear into a proper basin and the room felt fractionally less temporary.

Electricity came next.

The wiring overhead looked dangerous enough to develop opinions. An electrician climbed through the beams muttering curses and dropping screws that pinged across the concrete floor. Hours later, the fluorescent lights flickered on with a harsh mechanical buzz.

It was ugly light.

It was magnificent.

I had water. I had power. I had daylight.

The warehouse was still skeletal, but it had crossed the line from ruin to possibility.

William arrived most evenings with the dog and some new piece of hard rubbish balanced precariously in his arms.

During lockdown the streets had become a strange open-air exchange system. People renovated their homes and abandoned the evidence on nature strips. William treated this as a public service.

One night he dragged in a half-collapsed coffee table.

“Bench,” he announced.

Another evening it was two old doors tied to a bicycle.

“Benchtops.”

Then came shelves, chairs, filing cabinets, planks of timber and crates of mismatched tiles. Every object arrived with a story attached to it: rescued from an alleyway, salvaged from outside a collapsing share house, discovered beside bins in Northcote at midnight.

The dog inspected each item solemnly before approval.

Meanwhile William narrated the future.

“This will be the people’s studio,” he said, hammering together a wobbling workbench. “Clay for everyone. Art without barriers.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “As long as everyone pays rent.”

He waved this away as a spiritual failure on my part.

The invoices arrived in my inbox, not his.

Still, he was useful. More than useful. The benches held. The shelves worked. The warehouse slowly filled with objects that had survived previous lives and were willing to survive another.

Outside, Melbourne remained suspended in lockdown silence. Inside Mayfield Street, things were beginning.

Days settled into a rhythm. Tradesmen came and went. Dust layered itself over everything. I swept constantly and achieved nothing. Sometimes I stayed late after William left, locking the roller door behind him and standing alone in the quiet.

The new lights hummed overhead. The sink gleamed faintly in the corner. Fresh timber smelled sharp against the older scent of concrete and mould.

The studio was still rough. But it was no longer abandoned.

I still hadn’t told the children much. Their lives were already compressed into screens, remote classes and arguments over bandwidth. Let them believe my errands were dull. Let them think nothing significant was happening.

But something was happening.

Not a dream exactly. Dreams are cleaner than this. This was invoices, dust, hard rubbish and exhaustion. It was risk assembled piece by piece.

One evening I ran my hand along a newly built bench, rough beneath my fingertips, and realised I had stopped imagining the studio as temporary.

The Ikea room had been somewhere to hide.

Mayfield Street was becoming somewhere people might actually arrive.

The thought frightened me more than I expected.

Because once other people entered the picture, failure became public. The warehouse would no longer belong only to me and my terrible mug and my quiet experiments after dark. It would have to function. It would have to survive contact with reality.

William, naturally, remained optimistic.

“We’ll fill it,” he said one night, standing in the middle of the room with plaster dust on his coat. “You’ll see.”

I looked around at the half-finished benches, the exposed wiring, the uneven concrete floor.

Then I looked again.

For the first time, I could almost see it too.