The Best Australian Essays 2014 (3 page)

My father continued driving into his nineties. At one point he bought a hearse. It was roomy and my mother could recline fully across the lustrous scarlet back seat. As Merv chauffeured her hither and thither, their journeys conjured another era of morbid glamour, or perhaps just another point along the timeline. When she had breast cancer he would ferry her, down the big hill, to hospital, parking the hearse, haphazardly, in the ambulance entry. Once the rehearsal was over, and death overtook her (despite their satirical efforts to drive mortality away), Dad travelled solo.

Occasionally he crashed a car. In his late eighties he rolled down an embankment on the way to the local gun club. Not long after his rifle was confiscated by police. They found it nestled in the mahogany wardrobe behind my mother's billowing caftans. I had hidden it there from him. But the cars remained, sprouting prodigiously in the rambling garden. His favourite was the boxy bare-boned Suzuki.

Merv was outraged when he had to sit for his licence again. The bureaucratic imperatives of old age were, he felt, an affront to his many decades on and off the road. He failed the test but appealed the decision. He was by then well known in the lower villages of the Blue Mountains. The hearse, the flamboyantly macho manner, a seemingly random tendency to recite long reams of poetry and outrageous forms of flirtation that usually bordered on something more dangerous had inevitably created infamy. The story of his successful driving licence appeal was written up in the local newspaper and Merv momentarily enjoyed basking in the tepid sunlight of gerontocratic heroism.

After Mum died, Dad lived alone for a decade. I would drive up the motorway from Sydney, inhaling the sprawling suburbs and finally crossing the familiar serpentine curve of the Nepean River. Dad had always left the talking to Mum, and it was hard for us to know what to say to each other. I busied myself unpacking weekly groceries and cleaning the chaotic kitchen. Sometimes Dad talked about the federal agents who followed him down the Great Western Highway. Or how politicians were inverting his words on the evening news. I cried silently into the soapsuds. One Sunday, grinning, he told me about an elderly lady who approached him as he sat on a bench, resting at the local shops. She made the mistake of asking if he was okay. He replied, ‘Good day – for a rape.'

I only once drove my father. Merv isn't the kind of man to take kindly to being a passenger. By then I had another husband, Neil, a son and a navy blue Passat. The electronic sunroof never did keep middle age at bay.

It was the anniversary of my mother's death, and it was my habit to take flowers to her grave. We all mourn the passing of time in different temporalities. My sister is focused on lost birthdays while I memorialise Mum's final exit. Each year in August I recall how pitiful her last morphine-addled months were; the mournful linoleum expanse of the palliative care suite; her urgent and ultimately unanswerable pleas for help and the tender reliability of my father's unswerving loyalty.

One year I decided to take Dad with me to the graveside. When I picked him up from the house he was already surly with anxiety. He didn't like it when I set the agenda. With a lapse of judgement I'd bought a posy of artificial flowers. I worried that I only went to her graveside annually and that the bloom of my grief would too quickly perish. Dad looked at my offering with disdain. He had planted a Wollemi Pine on her grave; its prehistoric claims typical of Merv's monumentalisms. ‘You know she hated plastic flowers,' came the snarky rebuke.

I sighed, decades of experience having taught me to never fight back, to roll the sneers and the incursions inside, tucked away in a tight spot. We travelled through some back roads, cutting across the railway line towards Springwood cemetery. Dad started yelling out, claiming I was too close to the side of the road and that we were going to have an accident. He was too used to being in the driver's seat. Then he uttered a high-pitched scream, followed by wild laughter. ‘Shut the fuck up, Dorothy,' he viciously reprimanded. I was surprised to find myself driving both my mother and my father. Three is a tight squeeze – all those ghostly refrains jostling for a front seat view.

The home in the mountains, with its stately flagstone verandah bristling with the piled high detritus of Merv's spending sprees, is largely a memory now. These days there's a caretaker and a token fortnightly payment. I had to take my father from it. There were rats nesting in the microwave and scorch marks in the front room where he often slept. The burning embers from the open fireplace were a constant source of worry to the long-suffering fellow travellers next door. One day he phoned and said, uncharacteristically, ‘I need help.' When I asked him what he needed help with, he replied, simply, ‘Everything.' Neil and I collected him and we all drove together, one last time, down that big hill. Merv was as excited as if he were shipping out. He didn't comprehend that he was washing up back in Sydney for good.

Dad now lives in a nursing home, appropriately enough in Lilyfield, a suburb not far from me. My husband plays draughts with him each week, and always contrives to lose. When I visit Merv often remarks on Neil's perplexing inability to improve. ‘Does he come here just so I can beat him?' he heckles, beaming with pleasure that he is still on top of his game. Sometimes Dad still asks after his last car, the Suzuki. I cannot bear to tell him that we sold it for scrap metal.

We sit and talk more easily now. Dad sometimes plans his escape, driving back up the motorway. ‘I'd need to go there for a couple of days to make it worthwhile', he muses. ‘The trouble is', he adds slyly, ‘it's not easy to organise getting out of here.' When he returns to Faulconbridge he plans to water the fruit trees and cook some dampers in the ashes of the glowing fire. After that he'll make sure that at least the Suzuki is in good mechanical condition. If the battery is dead, he'll call the NRMA to start it for him again. Then he'll back it out the driveway, without, as usual, bothering to check the rear-view mirror, and drive, well, anywhere.

I'd like to spring my dad; to return him to his autonomy and to give back the gift of freedom's dignity I took away. But it's not possible.

These days I rarely drive. Walking seems easier. It's getting close to being an eccentricity and I'm amazed it's taken me half a century to find one of my own. There's a shallow groove worn in the pavement between my inner-city terrace and the cul de sac of Halcyon House. You can't find it on the satellite images provided by Google Earth. It's a secret path, with hope and need and resentment scattered slipshod across the paving stones. As I'm walking along it I dream about the treats I will give my father, small offerings to atone for his confinement. Some days it's a rice pudding. Or maybe just a good strong cup of black coffee. Once inside Merv can mostly be found in his coffined room, the window dwarfed by a camphor laurel and the giant television blaring. Dad is usually far from there, rambling barefoot through the rural Queensland of his childhood, scrambling up the heavily laden mango trees, inhaling the heady promises of youth as he surveys his kingdom.

I spent decades refusing my father's offers of a lift and internally rebuking him for his frequent kindnesses – the art easel he made for me, permanently wonky because it flew off his roof-racks; the huge bowl of trifle with mouldy strawberries he carefully conveyed to my forty-fifth birthday; the enormous hands splayed open in a gesture of gentle regret for all things past that cannot be undone.

When I was a young woman, Dad wanted us to take a road trip, to show me the dairy farm he grew up on and to introduce me to some of our relatives. In childhood I had met only a few. One was a gemologist; another sold cars. Unlike the familiar world of my mother's side, with the seeming solidity of their upper middle class homes and university degrees, these people were mercurial. They slipped through your fingers as they sprawled untidily across the continent, their get-rich-quick schemes and dilapidated boarding houses leaving only legends behind. Really Merv just wanted us to share an adventure. But I wouldn't join him. I didn't know how to tell him that certainly I was afraid of his driving but, mostly, I was afraid of him.

These days we've settled in for the last ride. Dad dictates the itinerary as we duck in and out of byways, visiting the landscapes and characters of the past. Sometimes the stories are frightening, spotlighting the darkness of rural poverty and the terrors of a physically abused boy. At other times they are tender, full of the gentle rhythms of farm life, the quick canter of the horse who carried him across the creek to school, the lucid call of his mother across the wintry paddocks.

Mostly I'm enjoying the trip. But, wherever we roam, I keep my eyes fixed firmly on the rear-view mirror, just in case that belligerent bastard is still behind the wheel.

Southerly

Waltzing the Jaguar

Caroline Baum

‘Baby, would you like to come to the car wash?'

On Sunday mornings my father often invites me to join him on this errand. I always welcome the interruption to my homework, thinking we might stop on the way home to buy some chocolate. We don't do much together except argue and eat. These we do aggressively and competitively, with my mother as unwilling spectator.

The car wash is a novelty in my 1960s London childhood. Another labour-saving device, like the ones my father orders from mail-order catalogues and the fancier ones he brings back from business trips to America.

An early adopter, he installed a fax machine at home before I had seen one anywhere else. Predicted the future would belong to computers. Bought that rabbit-shaped wine opener along with other gadgets and gizmos soon abandoned for new playthings. Ingenious storage solutions, clever cleaning devices. My favourites: a spoon with a kink in its handle so you could rest it on the lip of a jam jar; a miniature silver golf-club-shaped utensil that cooled tea (of which he drank copious amounts, weak with one slice of lemon) – perfect for an impatient man always in a hurry.

Other families might go to church, but we commune at the car wash, cleansed physically if not spiritually and soothed into a more serene state by the gentle rhythmic vibrations of the machines as we progress along tracks through various stages – rinsing, sudsing, polishing. I laugh without fail when the car is pummelled, rocked slightly from side to side by the initial bursts from the water jets. I like to watch the long fringes of fabric licking at the windscreen and feel the hum through the car door as the hard bristles whirr, buffing the duco. It's like a fairground ride without the fear.

I don't remember us talking during the seven or eight minutes it takes to get through the wash, so perhaps my father is savouring the same sensations. I pretend that the noises the machines make are a terrible storm from which we are protected. We emerge back into daylight, buffed by chamois cloths to a shellac shine, as if we have undergone a ritual of purification, all the tensions that encrust the chassis of our family washed away. When the car is clean, it's possible to believe we can start again.

*

Some girls dance with their fathers at their wedding, but I did not have that kind of wedding. Instead, I waltzed with my father in the car. A Jaguar, updated with the release of each new model, but always navy with a walnut and maroon leather interior, proof that my father is a self-made success, the deserving owner of a sleek, purring prestige pedigree cat.

We are in France on our annual summer holiday in the south, a pilgrimage to temples of gastronomy carefully chosen from the Michelin guide. Everything about our family is deliberate. My father is a planner. He reads train timetables for relaxation. He is in the travel business so even our holidays feel like work. From a precocious age, I know the differences between a four-star and a three-star hotel, how to assess whether a room is adequate in size and comforts. I make friends with concierges and am an enthusiastic patron of room service. My collection of hotel miniature soaps, shampoos and unguents is second only to my collection of shells.

I am five, maybe six years old. My father sits me in his lap, puts my hands on the black ridged wheel of the Jaguar, and leads me in swooping zigzags along the cypress-lined roads of Provence in dappled sunlight, following the shimmering, swirling cadences of Strauss and other Viennese compatriots of his own childhood on an eight-track stereo cassette (the latest innovation in sound technology).

He is never playful or light-hearted except in that moment. An uncharacteristically spontaneous and carefree episode in a life that was always disciplined, timed down to the last minute and strict in its formality: I was expected to curtsey to visitors. His wardrobe said it all: racks and racks of meticulously hung silk ties, bought in Paris, organised by colour. It was my job on school days to select one to match his handmade shirts and accessorise my choice with a silk handkerchief from a glass-fronted drawer. I loved to run my hand through the weight of their heavy tongues, feeling their dense opulence.

But I feared my father, even when he was in a good mood. His hugs were too tight and nearly suffocated me. His pale British pork-sausage fingers held my hand to cross the road in a vice-like grip. His footsteps shook the landing of the upper floor of our house, his snores rattled doors. It was like sharing the house with a giant. On Sundays he would play recordings of classical music at deafening volume, conducting at his own tempi, bending my mother's knitting needles with the force of his strokes.

On departure days before just about every holiday he would erupt in a sudden temper tantrum, turning purple with apoplectic rage, slamming doors, swearing at the top of his lungs, causing my mother to barricade herself in her room until the moment it was time to head for the airport, usually in tears.

When I was disobedient or exposed in some petty lie, he beat me with a leather travelling slipper. It was as humiliating as it was painful, more so because he'd insist that after the punishment was over, I give him a kiss on the cheek.

By my teens we were openly at war and I wished he would die, leaving my mother and me alone. We were both marathon champions at feuding. He would simply refuse to speak to me for weeks at a time when I had displeased him, ignoring my presence at the dinner table, which, when there are only three of you, makes for a very tense atmosphere. I could match him sulk for sulk, leaving my mother exasperated between us, unable to broker peace, lacking the confidence to intervene and troubled by her own memories of a brutalised childhood. Conflict was our default setting and it became so familiar as to be almost comfortable.

There were rare moments of harmony. Most of them in the Jag, as my father called it – surprisingly, as he was not usually one for nicknames and rarely succumbed to verbal laziness. As a child refugee, he took great pride in mastering English till he spoke it better than most natives with a posh accent. Together with the car it made him seem like a Tory when he was in fact a passionate Labour voter.

He drove me to school every morning for twelve years, the car foggy with the haze of his chain smoking (Benson & Hedges Special Filter, my job to push the lighter in for him. Then, oh horror, I deliberately inhaled that delicious first hit of burning tobacco, which blended perfectly with the slightly faecal sweet smell of the car's leather upholstery).

In the Jag he treated me more like an adult, discussing world affairs, explaining the history of territorial disputes in the Middle East or old enmities between European nations, his grasp of history dazzling in his ability to quote from speeches, to string together dates into chains of events across centuries, to draw maps of changing and disputed borders in the air, while displaying his natural aggression as a driver, a split-second-reflex overtaker, tailgater and lane changer, intimidating other drivers with showy manoeuvres.

His driving made me feel ashamed. On the passenger side I often met the irritated or more openly angry gaze of drivers he had cut in on. Sometimes I could see their lips move as they swore at him. At times I would adopt a sorrowful pleading expression as if I were his captive begging to be rescued, but no one volunteered.

My mother was his most anxious passenger, sucking in her breath loudly and wincing when he almost grazed other vehicles. On these occasions, when he was showing off or conducting a silent row with us, I met his aggression with feigned indifference, refusing to give him the satisfaction of a reaction while my mother gripped the seatbelt with white knuckles.

But sometimes we shared the road peacefully. When I was seventeen and at summer school at a US college, we drove together from Pennsylvania to New York, finding a sustained serenity in the rhythms of Route 209 until we were stopped by a police motorcyclist and my father was fined on the spot for speeding.

‘Don't tell your mother,' he said, establishing a complicity between us that endured through years of such episodes. I never betrayed him and was soon losing points on my own licence, having inherited his lead foot.

He taught me how to park in the tightest spots, reversing into position with one elegant manoeuvre (‘Never buy a car without power steering,' he advised, giving the car credit for his skill), leaving a hair's breadth between the Jag and other cars, as the French do.

When he needed to park in the centre of London he would pull in to the forecourt of a hotel where he knew the doorman, hand over a fiver and say in a genial and offhand way, ‘Look after that for me, will you?' before we walked through Knightsbridge, Soho or Piccadilly on some retail errand. My mother found this embarrassingly ostentatious but I liked the efficient and lordly way he could dispose of the car without having to endure the endless circling for a meter that would run out before we had achieved our goal.

*

‘Papa, what's that funny car with the bashed-in roof?' I point to a red Mercedes 280 SL. I am ten years old and the concave curve of the roof, together with the car's sleek elegance, catch my eye.

‘When I grow up I am going to buy one of those,' I announce with the kind of aspirational confidence my father encourages.

‘Over my dead body,' my father retorts.

‘Why?'

‘Because it's German.'

‘So?'

I know the answer already but like to bait my father, enjoying the ensuing argument like sport.

It always boils down to the war. That is why I am not allowed to buy German pencils for school and my mother does not have any German equipment in the kitchen. And yet, my father is a mass of contradictions: he worships Karajan conducting Wagner, even taking us on a holiday pilgrimage to the holiest of holies, Bayreuth, to experience that most Germanic and Hitler-approved cultural festival.

I taunt my father throughout my adolescence with these inconsistencies, but he shrugs them off. He makes the rules, he earns the money, that's that.

‘But when I am older I can do what I like,' I needle.

‘You can,' acknowledges my father, nodding with equable reason before delivering his ultimatum, ‘but if you do that I will disinherit you.'

He delivers the half-joke, half-threat punchline with a satisfied smile, which implies he has amassed enough wealth for this to be a significant counter-move.

*

Fourteen years later I tell my parents I am moving to Australia with my future husband.

My father's despair is limitless. He mourns as if his only child has been struck by a terminal illness. He begs, he cries, he pleads.

He has escaped the Holocaust. He has survived a fraudulent theft that left his business on the verge of ruin and rebuilt it. But this decision breaks him.

‘Baby, if you stay, I will buy you a Mercedes 280 SL.'

The pathos of the bribe's appeal makes me blush on his behalf even as I write this.

*

Easter, four years ago.

My father comes home after a successful operation for bowel cancer. We attribute his disorientation to the after-effects of the general anaesthetic, as the hospital staff do. In the taxi home, his eyes are dull, like those of a cooked fish. When Felix, the concierge, welcomes him home, he says thank you without looking at who is addressing him, as if on automatic pilot, simply parroting a phrase he has been taught.

He does not seem to register that I have come from Australia to look after him, does not ask how long I am staying. It's as if I have always been there or am not there at all.

He goes straight to bed. Later, he has a little supper, and says he needs to go to the barber and will drive there the next day.

My mother and I raise our eyebrows in alarm.

‘Remember, the doctor said no driving and no going up stairs for six weeks,' my mother reminds him. ‘Caroline can take you.'

‘She can't drive my car,' he replies firmly. He has never let me drive the Jaguar. Now it seems the same rule applies to his new car.

The Prius is just eight weeks old. After a lifetime of loyalty to the same iconic brand, my father swapped the status of gas-guzzling luxury with enviable grunt for sedate green-cred, largely at my urging. I was surprised at this sudden recognition that perhaps a fast, expensive car no longer suited his retired, more modest circumstances. He talked about the Jag with sentimental regret, as if reminiscing about a cherished departed friend.

‘Of course she can. You put her name on the insurance papers, didn't you?'

‘I don't remember.'

We leave it there.

At two in the morning I am woken by a shuffling sound; it is as if a large furry animal is snuffling through undergrowth. Still disoriented by jet lag, I think it's a wombat outside a tent, before recognising the sound of my father's tread in his leather slippers, then a jiggling of keys, the zipping of a bag, the fumbling for the front door chain and bolt, the turning of a handle, the soft clunk of the door closing.

Where on earth could my father be going at this hour? I rummage for clothes, call the security guard downstairs and tell him to stop my father at the gate if at all possible. He says my father has already left the building.

When I get outside it is snowing, the loose, feathery kind of flakes that fall messily, as if someone in the sky has burst a doona. My father is standing by the car, fumbling for his keys in the darkness.

‘Where are you going?'

‘To the bank.'

‘But it's two o'clock in the morning, the bank is closed.'

‘I have to get to the bank urgently.'

‘But it's dark, and it's snowing, and the bank is closed. Why don't we go inside, have a cup of tea and I'll drive you there when it's light? You remember you are not allowed to drive?' I say, reaching coaxingly for his arm. He brushes me away, raising what I can now see is his cane, as if defending himself from an attacker. There is a wild look in his eye, like that of a horse when it shows too much white and is about to kick.