Realising she can afford to buy a house, but only one that contained meth use or murder, Kristin Kelly reflects on the true value of a home.
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‘Yeah, lockdown was hard for some people,’ the real estate agent said. He’d just finished telling me that the owner of the three-bedroom bungalow I was inquiring about had been killed by his boarder. There was a joke in there about this being more than a deceased estate, but I couldn’t focus enough to make it. I was doing the maths. You can’t put a price on a human life, of course, but you could expect to knock off $100k for the loss of one.
“And the traces of meth?” I asked, bringing the toxicology report up on my work computer. “Place has been professionally cleaned since that first report.” I scanned the numbers. They weren’t high enough to suggest the house had been used as a lab, just a den. This was something I was willing to compromise on because my workmate Steph said that it would probably be fine and I wanted to believe her.
“OK, thanks,” I said, “I’ll be in touch about a viewing.” Phone screen-down on the table, I massaged my temples with my fingertips and looked out the window. From my desk I could see out to the harbour, but in the staff kitchen, it was all motorway. Steph slid into the booth beside me, and I turned to face her. “So you know how the owner died in the house?” I said. “Yeah, he was, like, murdered.”
The agent had made a real point of underscoring that this was the result of a dispute between flatmates. “Nothing gang-related,” he’d said cheerily. While I could appreciate this attempt to indicate that the wider neighbourhood was safe, still it struck me as bizarre, like reassuring a vegetarian, “It’s finely chopped, the bacon in the quiche.”
“You wouldn’t be comfortable living in a… a murder house, would you?” Steph asked. It was a good question, and one I didn’t know the answer to. I’d been looking to buy a place for my family and me for a while, but with the post-Covid price boom, it felt as though my goal was rapidly becoming a fantasy. “It has been blessed…” I trailed off, thinking about the floors. The house had been built in the 50s or 60s, and so it was quite likely native. Kauri? I wondered. Or maybe tawa?
It had a great yard, too, at least as far as I could tell from the photos. There was a giant nikau palm in the front and a fruiting lemon tree in the back. If you were able to forget about what happened in between, then the place had loads of potential. “I mean it does feel pretty awful,” I said, drumming my fingers against the table, “but for $700k?”
My parents bought the house that I grew up in for the views. Never mind that it was single-glazed, uninsulated and dark all winter: they had not left a landlocked state and travelled halfway across the world to stare at their neighbour’s fence. Beauty, they agreed, was more valuable than comfort.
Like so many beautiful things, our house was easy to fall in love with but difficult to like. To get to it, you had to climb up a set of steps that looked as though they had been cut directly from the Pyramid of the Moon and then installed by drunk children without opposable thumbs. Concrete and crumbling, each of the one hundred steps presented its own hazard, and each hazard was only magnified by the handrail, so softened by time that you could dent it just by thinking about it. “Don’t touch that!” we’d shout at visitors. “Use the flax instead!”
The flax lined the steps, parting only for our pōhutukawa tree, which grew out of the side of the hill, roots concreted over so that it both helped form, and buckle, the path around it. I saw this not as foundational nor dangerous – not even metaphorical – but instead as an extension of my kingdom: the Southern Wing. I used to climb up the tree and, nestled between its dense green leaves and red blooms, dream up stories about the passerbies to whom I was invisible. Occasionally I would further test the limits of my superpower, throwing handfuls of leaves at them and making what I considered to be bird calls. Notice me, I would think, as I hid.
While I was in the tree, my parents could see me from the house, but I could see only as far as Dad’s rock garden. He had built this partially because he liked Japanese landscaping, but mainly because he didn’t like mowing the lawns. Every time we went to the Ōwhiro Bay quarry, Soph, our beloved shaggy dog, would abscond to roll in a seal’s carcass or eat horse shit, and Dad would instruct me to fill tramping packs with rocks. Then, with Soph leading the way, we would drag them back to the car, which managed always to remain exactly a kilometre away.
It was a challenging exercise, one we did almost every Sunday morning the same way many families go to church. It made me feel intrepid, though; powerful. When I discovered that you could buy rocks from Bunnings I stopped feeling that way. “Yeah but you have to pay for those ones,” my dad explained, wagging his index finger. And they come with delivery options, I thought.
Past the rock garden were two further sets of steps to the house. There were the wooden ones which we could have served with cream and called sponge cake, and the concrete ones which dumped us unceremoniously at the back door. This door was heavy and had it expanded in the sun or, more regularly in Wellington, swollen with rain, it demanded not the pull-push method I usually employed, but the pull-push-kick. The more desperately I needed to get inside – to pee, usually – the more obstructive the door would become, glueing itself shut, or changing the locks. Taunting me.
Sometimes I found the struggle so taxing I would smack it and then slouch down beside it, head in hands. Maybe I’ll just live under the deck with the kamikaze wasps, I’d think, and eat flaxseed oil paw-ground for me by local possums. It was appealing, in its own way. A difficult life, but edgy. Character building.
Once I made it through the door, the climb was always quickly forgotten, the struggle worth the payout. Although it was the views my parents bought the house for, and the views that most charmed visitors – because they were, by all accounts, impressive, and perhaps the only truly impressive part of the house – what I loved most about the place was that it was ours. There was the long hallway that Soph and I ran up and down, when we weren’t playing hide and seek (tricky, given the living areas were open plan.) There was the spot just by the French doors where the afternoon sun would filter in and soften the wood into caramel, making it the ideal spot to read.
At the back of the house was my parents’ bedroom, which, painted bright yellow, adjusted the time so it was perennially 12pm on a clear summer day. Just beside that was the room Soph and I shared, which I knew was not really a room, but the heart of the kingdom.
Many of my favourite days spent in that house were the days when we had no views at all. When the fog rolled in, settling low and thick, blanketing the suburb so that we could not see the South Island, nor Tapu Te Ranga, nor even the Southern Wing. On these days, I would look out the three metres of window we had in our lounge, wondering if we had become the entire world; or perhaps the entire world had become us. It didn’t bother me, either way, because it was on those foggy days that this fact became most clear: everything I needed was already inside, even the outlook.
My mom’s faith in my abilities is generous; still, after over a decade of driving, she does not trust me on the motorway. As a result, on that Sunday morning it was she behind the wheel as we headed up the coast, and therefore she we could trace the $80 speeding ticket back to. “To see the murder house!” she had cried when it arrived in the mail. “I mean, my God – salt in the wound!”
It was a drizzly day, and I assumed that, in combination with the place’s history, this would mean a relatively quiet open home, but it was packed. Investors, families, rubberneckers. The house had been emptied of furniture, yet stuck to the walls of each room were staged photos. In the kitchen was a picture of a round table with four matching white chairs atop a jute rug, while in the study you could find an MDF desk, shrunk down to two centimetres and hanging beside the light switch. “It’s like they didn’t think we could figure out where to put a couch, or what room a fridge might belong in,” I told Amy later, lamenting that I had not taken photos of the photos.
While the people around me busily checked for things like watertightness and solid foundations, I mentally filled in each room with my own personal effects and affections. In the master bedroom, I would place my mustard-yellow armchair in one corner and a bookshelf in the other. In the living room, I would hang my batik print of an elderly woman carrying sticks over my low-slung couches, which would in turn be framed by the rubber tree from Meredith and the begonia from Ronan.
“Wanna look at the yard now?” I asked, turning from the photo of a bed to face my mom. I had never lived in a place with a garden, and while the rubber tree and begonia made up only a small part of my extensive indoor collection, I wanted sprawling grounds on which to plant vegetables and fruit trees. I wanted to spend afternoons digging and pruning while my dog Bosco played with the pigs and goats I would adopt against council bylaws.
“Sure,” she replied, and so we walked out the back door, around the yard’s perimeter, past the lemon tree, down to the fence made of sheets of rusty corrugated iron and suspended at gravity-defying angles. Then, standing by the derelict pool, squinting through the rain, I looked at the house with its creamy weatherboards and new roof and murmured, “It doesn’t have terrible juju.” “No,” Mom agreed, nodding. “It doesn’t have terrible juju.”’
When I moved out of the house that I grew up in, I had two weeks to pack a suitcase. We knew then that my Aunt Sue’s surgery hadn’t been successful: that the tumour had grown tendrils, and that these had crept throughout the soft tissue of her brain. We did not know, though, exactly how bad the prognosis was; that at 55, she was only just going to make it to 56. My mom and Sue were best friends, and Mom had always found living far from her family difficult. Cancer is not a welcome reason to move, but it is a compelling one. “We have to do it,” Mom told me. “I have to be with her.”
Dad was in the middle of a play and in charge of finalising the sale of our house, so he and Soph were set to join Mom and I in Wisconsin a couple of months later. Instead we returned to them, because while on stage, my dad had a brain aneurysm. As his pause tipped from dramatic into ominous, a friend in the audience stood up and called out, “The show is over.”
It was a genetic condition; the clot would have formed and been lying dormant for a while, years possibly. Still, without healthcare, living in the US was no longer a viable option. “We’d be fucked,” my mom explained, and so the show was over there too, and once again I packed my suitcase, quicker now, having fewer possessions and more practice.
Upon return to New Zealand, the four of us – my parents, Soph and I – bunked with former neighbours. From their lounge I could see up into our old house. That the new owners had painted the entire interior grey was not nearly as significant as it felt when I let my mind wander up those crumbly old stairs and through the back door to peer out from the three metres of windows. I knew this, and so when my mind did wander, I would quickly call it back; back across the road and back into reality, with Soph, forever faithful, lying beside me, my neck craned forward, searching, searching.
A few months after Mom and I got back, my parents bought, for the views, an apartment. Never mind that it was tiny, on leasehold land, with windows held together by reams of tape: they had not left a landlocked state and travelled halfway across the world to stare at their neighbour’s fence.
The irony that they used to criticise the very same apartment complex when we drove past it was not lost on any of us, and certainly not on me. “You bought an apartment there?” I cried, as confused as I was horrified. “Soweto Heights of Newtown”, that was what my dad had called the building whenever we passed it. “It looks like it should be condemned,” my mom would add, wondering aloud if the rust was a structural issue or just cosmetic.
Almost all of our remaining possessions had been packed up in a shipping container and were en route to the life they were not fated to live in America, and so when we moved into the apartment, we ate meals on the floor and slept on borrowed air mattresses. My dad’s friend, a set designer, gave us a red stool and battered step-ladder and these two objects began to serve as seats, tables, anchors; props for the drama we found ourselves acting out. There was so much to do, and there was nothing we could do, and so, as we had in Island Bay, we looked out the windows.
We looked out the windows even when we didn’t want to, because the previous owner had included in the sale price chattels of trash and a dead plant, but stripped the apartment of everything that wasn’t in some way fixed to the rest of the building. “The toilet roll holder,” I called to my parents from the bathroom the morning we moved in, “He even took the toilet roll holder.” Looking at the two holes left in its absence, I wondered what sort of person he must be, to think that it needed to make the move to Scotland with him. “Is this a scarcity thing?” I wanted to ask. “Or are you just really living up to the stereotype?”
I was preoccupied by this: the nature of the person who lived here before us. I had spent almost my entire life in our home in Island Bay and so it had never really occurred to me that it could belong – that it had belonged and would belong – to anyone else. It was clear, though, that the apartment had a history, and that history, much like that toilet roll holder, did not belong to us.
To make it ours, my parents firstly pulled up the thick peach carpet which covered layers of lino, piled atop one another like years. The black and white checkers gave way to brown houndstooth, which revealed orange vines, which finally exposed the cool concrete underneath. “And I just want white,” my mom said of the walls, “I want everything to be calm.”
With no furniture, it was easy to paint, and so while I re-enrolled in school, the two of them sapped the place of colour, the sunshine of their old bedroom, if not forgotten, then rejected. In my own room, in an act of uncharacteristic defiance, I demanded brightness: electric blue and lime green, with magnetic paint on my wardrobe doors. When that paint failed to hold up my magnets, I bluetacked them on, stringing up pictures of family and friends.
Often, lying in bed at night, the photo-booth reel of my mom and Sue as teenagers just on the edge of my vision, I would think about the life I thought we would be living in Wisconsin. I would think about the school I had left abruptly and the friends I had not said goodbye to and the plan we had to buy a house, a little two-storey Cape Cod on a quiet street. “It’s perfect,” my mom had told my dad, days before we returned to New Zealand and it sold to another family. It was perfect, too, with its sloped ceilings and its fireplace and its farmhouse kitchen. But it only had views of the yard.
I know I would come across more sympathetic if I said that it was these events, and the ensuing and pervasive sense of dislocation, that made me desperate to buy a house when, with a steady job, I found I could afford one. That may be true, at least on a subconscious level. Mainly, I think, flimsy and entitled as I am, I saw my workmates buying them and thought it would be a good idea.
Most of them had help from their parents, but this way, I figured, I could help mine. Mom had become the primary earner since Dad’s injury and a social worker salary does not stretch far, especially when you’re flying often, as we were, back to the US to visit your shrinking family. That their apartment had been slapped with an earthquake strengthening bill greater than its worth; that Dad’s knees struggled on the stairs; that Bosco, without an outdoor space, needed three walks a day: these were all additional reasons, I thought, to attempt to replant the roots that had aimlessly trailed me for over a decade.
The child of romantics does not, herself, get to be one, but must she live in a murder house? I deliberated for days, not convinced that the discount was worth the cost; fearing that in buying the property, I might sell a part of myself – or perhaps expose that I, too, would move my toilet roll holder overseas with me.
Just before I intended to submit my offer, I searched once more for information on the killing, and it was past pages and pages of marketing material – a “Kiwiana Classic” boasting “Family-friendly X-factor” – that finally I found it. “He was hit on the head three times with a hammer,” I messaged Amy. “While he was sleeping.”
I agreed, in a sense, with her argument that this way he would ultimately have suffered less. What was the point of a home, though, if it did not offer safety? And if you could not be safe in your home, then could you be safe anywhere? I let my pre-approval lapse. Even if I could afford what I wanted, I could not buy what I was looking for.
I live in a rental now, directly above my parents, who are still in the apartment they bought those many years ago. They have installed a new toilet roll holder, and they have repurposed my bedroom, but they have not repainted it, and so when I sleep, I do so suspended above the tail-end of my childhood.
“So we have a set up like in Friends,” I tell people, and although it is not always a comedy, it is, by and large, a refuge. Here we can flow up and down the stairs, swapping bread for books and books for memories. Here I remain geographically connected to Soph, from whose death I am still raw almost 15 years on.
It is not my dream situation, this. But for now, I know I am lucky to be close to the family I love so dearly, and luckier still to be far enough away that I can keep loving them. And while the extra elevation I have on my parents’ apartment is small, mere metres, it really does expand the outlook.
