DERRICK THE MAN

'What's in Perth?' Dave Sadler stood in my garage in Sydney leaning against my Kawasaki, scratching his crotch and looking confused.

'Mate, we're moving to WA in two weeks. I've taken a desk job.'

'Oh,' he said. He knew about my promise to my wife, a promise I'd made years ago, that if we ever had kids, I'd stop working offshore on drilling rigs and stay in one place, stay at home and be a father. He knew Clare was six months pregnant, he knew I was worried about finding a stay-at-home job in a city like Sydney, and he knew I would probably move interstate, but he'd wanted to avoid the conversation as much as I did.

'Shit, mate.' He finished his beer. 'I'm going to miss ya.'

Dave had just given me a hand with a new set of exhaust pipes. We'd changed out the baffles, altering the note on a Harley-Davidson XR from a modest rumble to something like King Kong gargling battery acid. Dave grinned as he killed the engine.

I knew I was about to begin a new stage in my life, but I didn't want this one to end. I'd miss our regular motorcycle-maintenance and beer-drinking sessions and blats into the hills. Dave was a motorcycle journalist. We'd met years earlier. For a long time I'd thought motorcyclists in Sydney were a really friendly bunch; every time I was off the rig and belting around the eastern suburbs on my bike I'd get a wave during rush hour on the big lane split into Bondi. Turned out it was Dave every time, just on a different bike each month. When we finally stopped one day in the same place he explained he'd been waving to me for ages. 'Mate, I always had on the same helmet.' I hadn't noticed.

Though I didn't want it to, my time in Sydney was ending. Staying in our tiny flat and rotating out to a different rig every month just didn't fit into our plan now that Clare was pregnant.

We needed a house, with a garden. I needed a normal job, home every night, no more adventures; I knew I could no longer just roll up after a job and jump on my bike and disappear for a few days. It was time to get serious about our future. I had to grow up.

* * *

Shortly after that conversation with Dave, Clare and I packed our life into cardboard boxes, I freighted my bikes to a mate's place and had the obligatory fight with the real estate agent over repainting our flat, and a broken stove (it never worked properly anyway, all I ever did was light cigarettes off it). We had already found a great house to rent in Perth through the internet — compared to our tiny flat it was like Graceland. I had a desk job lined up with a drilling tool rental company in Perth. The move went like clockwork.

In Perth, Clare was blissfully happy. She'd wanted to be a wife and a mother since she was old enough to drape a pillow case over her head and pretend she was a bride. Now she was married and pregnant, and had me permanently at home. And when Clare is happy, she bakes. I came home every day from my new job to wonderful dinners and — I kid you not — cherry pie, unquestionably the sluttiest of the pie family. I couldn't believe my luck. After years of offshore galley dining at 'Chucks' in the Third World and then crawling off to a bunk in a four-man room smaller than my broom cupboard and smellier than the toilets in a cheap cigar factory, I was instead wiping whipped cream off my face and curling up each night in a bed like a sprung tennis court, with my gorgeous, pregnant wife; I was looking like one rabid, but very happy — and fat — dog.

Between all the cooking and the eating, Clare was nesting, so we went shopping, collecting all kinds of shiny new baby stuff. Let me tell you about baby stuff: there are strollers, big, fully integrated, multi-function, dual-directional, go-faster-James-Bond ones with better brakes and suspension than my car. Cots that are stronger, more comfortable and bigger than the bunks offshore. In fact, there are whole superstores that supply every baby thing imaginable. We made endless consecutive trips, collecting carloads of stuff that all needed assembling. We got a pram, a cot, and a baby monitor to wiretap our child's room. We even made the obligatory trip to the brand-new, brilliantly designed mega-Ikea store, joining up with hundreds of other shoppers at the bottom of the escalator like migrating salmon. Everyone had their Ikea face on, that 1000-yard stare into the wonders of modern Swedish pre-fabricated, flat-pack laminated furniture. Clare grabbed the brilliantly designed Ikea shopping trolley, the only item they produce that I actually like, and we entered the one-way river of Ikea zombies. Two hours later, the river emerged into a great feeding hangar — with your eyes shut it sounded like you were stepping into a lagoon full of flamingoes at dinner time. We waited in the brilliantly designed holding zone until a JCB deposited five metric tonnes of flat-packed brown cardboard boxes and an Allen key. All this for one very small baby.

With all the new things for the baby and the house we had to make room. Most of our existing furniture was pretty old, predominantly from the 1950s, but it was well made, so it seemed a shame to toss it. Having moved to Perth from Sydney I was used to just dumping unwanted items on the street. Bondi, where we lived, was for all intents and purposes a black hole where entire skiploads full of old junk evaporated overnight. Furniture moves so fast out there that all the homeless cats in Bondi have nothing left to piss on. (Seriously, you could dump a body on the sidewalk in Bondi and some backpacker would fuck off with it and turn it into a coffee table before you could say, 'Whatever happened to Grandpa?' I once left the most diabolical second-hand mattress on the street, just left it propped up against a lamppost. It looked like someone had shot a snuff movie on it. The next day — gone.)

But in Perth, in the refined environs of Nedlands, the items I left out — which I'll have you know were by no means crap — just sat there for weeks. Which left our house marked as the one moved into by trailer trash. Joggers would scowl at me while I watered the front garden; drivers would slow down and point. I found it quite annoying, although eventually I amused myself by standing in our messy front yard in just a pair of tracky pants and a stained wife beater, scratching my back with a toilet brush and belching my name. In the end, though, I had to pay someone to haul the stuff off just to stop us from being run out of the neighbourhood.

There's a strange kind of dynamic lethargy and indifference in Perth. People are almost snobby...