You Never Met My Father (15 page)

Only Jean was bold enough to stand up to him, which must have brought him to his senses, a child letting him know his behaviour was inexcusable. He stared at her incomprehensively, and for a moment I expected her to be murdered. But he shook his head. His body lost its tensile bearing. He left the room. Silence descended on our household. A few more days passed. Then the sedan was gone.

But surprisingly he stayed. He sat in the lounge, reading the newspaper and a pile of
Readers' Digests
, listening to a transistor radio and, on Saturdays, gambling. Where he got the money from to gamble I have no idea. I doubt if it even crossed my mind. Occasionally he disappeared all day and came home in the evening without explaining his absence.

It took a few jittery weeks without another incident before I began to think his attacks mightn't become a regular occurrence.

I was naive enough to hope that, with him around, our fortunes would improve. While my mother had never blamed him for our lowly circumstances, she had led me to believe our lot had much to do with his long stays in hospital, which seemed to suggest things would improve if he were around. I desperately wanted to believe it. Most families had a car. Most had a TV. Most kids I knew had pushbikes. Most went on holidays with their own families rather than the vicar's.

In the months after his return Denny seemed ready to be part of the family. He helped around the house. He got a job on a building site. And before too long he had another car, a second-hand two-toned Austin A40.

From the moment I set eyes on it I loved that little sedan with its brown upholstery and bone steering wheel, a modest vehicle but nothing to be ashamed of, and something he was paying for with honest money.

“Come on, Butch,” he said, “I'll take you for a spin.”

Travelling alone with him I had the privilege of sitting in the front. I felt heady with pride, finally having a father who'd started to act like I imagined he should. And he was chuffed. He displayed dazzling white teeth (dentures I was later to learn) in a sustained grin. He winked at me occasionally. Each time he winked, he gave his head a little jerk sideways and clicked his tongue, a sound that emerged from the orifice he formed at the corner of his mouth. What it meant I wasn't sure, but I thought he wanted me to know everything would be fine between us from now on.

“I'll teach you to drive this one day,” he said, giving me one of his unnerving grins.

He took me to the site where he worked, a half-built house, a frame beneath a tiled roof, with planks across a muddy yard to stacks of timber. There were off -cuts scattered around the structure. It looked like a demolition site to me.

He insisted I follow him around as he showed me the sections he was working on: the bathroom, the kitchen, the laundry. He was building frames for cupboards. The ground everywhere was muddy and he was jumping from one timber off-cut to another and chuckling and urging me to keep up.

“What do you reckon?” he said at the end of the tour, fishing for a compliment. “Not bad, eh?”

I tried my hardest to show I was impressed, but I sounded insincere. I didn't know how to keep the conversation rolling.

“Okay,” he said, upset by my tepid response. “I'll show you something. Get in the car.”

He drove along Must Street, past our relatives' houses, where he muttered some indiscernible words of disgust, to Wellington Road, which ran down to the harbour. He stopped in front of the square blue cement-sheet house he had built when I was an infant, on one of their first attempts to live in Portland, where my mother had cracked her ribs under a falling wall frame. It was half-hidden behind a hedge.

“Still standing,” he boasted. “I built the entire thing on my own.”

“Is that the one Mum helped you with.”

“A lot of bloody good she was.”

I tried diplomacy. “You did a good job.”

“You might have grown up here, Butch, in this place,” he said. “This might've been your home. But you can never tell what's going to happen.”

“Why didn't we stay?”

He didn't answer. “How would you like to become a carpenter?” he said instead—with faint hope or sarcasm, I couldn't tell.

I didn't know how to reply. I hadn't given work much thought; it was something adults did. My shrug was the wrong answer.

“So being like your old man's not good enough, is that it?”

I maintained an uncertain silence.

“Well, if you don't want to be like me, make sure you get a bloody good education. That's what your mother keeps going on about. She's always bloody right, isn't she? That's what you kids think anyway.”

“She's right a lot of the time,” I said rather lamely.

“You know who put that idea in her head, don't yer?”

“You, I suppose.”

“Too bloody right I did. Don't think I don't know how important an education is. I only wish your mother and I had had your chances.”

I said nothing, not knowing what to say.

“You think I'm stupid, don't yer?”

“No, I don't.”

“What's thirty-six times forty-eight?”

“I don't know. I'd need a pen and paper to work it out.”

“It's one thousand, seven hundred and twenty-eight. Ask me another.”

“Nine eights?”

“Seventy-two. Something harder.”

I shrugged. “Twenty-four times sixty-seven.” I said it reluctantly, too intimidated to disobey.

“One thousand, six hundred and eight.”

His answer was immediate. I could see he wanted me to continue.

“Fifty-tree times ninety-eight.”

“Five thousand, one hundred and ninety four.”

“I don't know whether you're right or wrong, do I?” I protested.

“Yeah, well, you aren't as smart as you think. And I never got past Grade Six.”

“You're cleverer than anyone I know,” I said, hoping it would cheer him up.

And it did. He drove home in a positive mood.

“Not a bad little bus, this, eh?” he said, tossing me a glance as he tapped the steering wheel affectionately.

One day I went with him to inquire about a cottage that was half the rent we were paying for the place in Percy Street.

He parked outside a double-storey, bluestone mansion that had a gravel track and tall timber fence separating it from Portland's Salvation Army Citadel.

The landlady was a middle-aged woman dressed in dirty jodhpurs and a brown cardigan worn out at the elbows. She kept her hair under some kind of net as if it was an annoyance or something to hide. She had a muscular neck and an angular jaw that made her look imperious. I had seen her often enough before. Her name was Daisy O'Brien and she operated the paddleboat business on Henty Beach every summer.

She took us into her kitchen, which was more cluttered and pungent than ours. Denny sat talking to her while we drank syrupy tea, trying to impress her with his knowledge of carpentry, letting her know that, even though he had work, his skills might prove useful in the off-season when she carried out maintenance on her paddleboats, gratis of course, trying to wheedle a few concessions out of her with regard to the rent.

She eyed him shrewdly. Her husband, Fred, a tall dour, grey-haired fellow, hovered around, declining to sit down, saying little.

After we finished our drinks she led us down the lane to a derelict cottage.

My heart sank. It looked like something out of the Deep South of the USA, or hovels I saw decades later along the Caribbean coast of Central America; rotting, unpainted weatherboards, cracked cement sheeting, rusted roof, a yard overgrown with weeds and thistles inside a crude cyclone fence. The chimney was built cheaply of sandstone blocks rather than bricks. The place was connected to electricity but had no gas and no proper hot water system. The bath and laundry sinks were in an outhouse whose weatherboards were in worse repair than the cottage. The water for washing clothes and skin would have to be heated in a wood-fired copper and transferred to our twin-tub machine or bath by bucket. There was another smaller outhouse behind it with a shit-can under a well-worn seat, mercifully well away from the house. Both outhouses were surrounded by geraniums. The kitchen had a wood stove. Hot water for the dishes could be heated in a kettle or copper urn. Cracked brown lino covered all the floors. Along the back of the cottage was a verandah whose timber floor had rotted at the edges after long exposure to the weather. It offered an intimate view of a tall fence topped with ivy that separated the cottage from two asphalt tennis courts at the back of the Methodist Church. At one end of the verandah was another small bedroom whose interior walls and ceiling were bare masonite. Its outer wall was against the fence. I looked around for something that might make living here worthwhile.

Opposite the cottage was a huge three-sided corrugated iron shed, more than twenty-feet high, where Daisy stored paddleboats, one on top of another. Its steel beams and rafters looked inviting. And there were other things worth climbing; behind the shed a pine tree twice its height, whose bark was like dinosaur scales and to my delight behind the back fence, at both ends of the tennis court were sprawling cypress hedges grander than the one I played on in Bentick Street.

Denny made some flattering remarks about the cottage before offering to rent it. Daisy O'Brien grunted, unmoved by his comments, but accepted after a few moments consideration designed to make him sweat a bit, knowing she wouldn't get too many other offers. I thought grimly,
well, he's a builder, he can fix it up
.

As we drove away, Denny, who seemed inordinately cheerful, perhaps because he was finally assuming control of family matters, warned me about crossing our new landlady. “Don't forget, she's the one with the balls, not old Fred.”

I was shocked by his observation, taking him literally, too embarrassed to ask how he knew.

He seemed keen for the rest of the family to view the cottage. But Pat, who was heartily sick of shifting from one place to another, resisted.

“It's going to save us a lot of dosh,” he said with an incredulous smile, his hackles rising. “Why do you always go against everything I do for you, Trish?”

“Dosh for what?” she wanted to ask him, knowing full well the household budget would receive none of it. She held her tongue to avoid antagonising him further. But when she relented and went to view the cottage she couldn't hide her disappointment.

She didn't want to get out of the car to view it.

“Take a closer look, for Chrissakes!” he muttered.

She walked slowly along the path to the back verandah, observing the rotting weatherboards, the overgrown garden, the dilapidated outhouse that was the laundry and bathroom. Inside she looked through the gloomy rooms in grim silence. She noticed the thick grease on the walls of the kitchen, the blackened wood stove, the patterns worn from the lino or concealed by grime, the missing architraves.

“At least we don't have to share it with any other bugger,” Denny countered, referring to our half-house, as if her silence was an argument. “Don't worry about any of that stuff. I'll fix it.”

Her chest heaved. “Oh, Denny, it should be pulled down.”

It was enough to stoke his simmering anger into a brush fire. He headed out of the house and returned, muttering “Jesus! Jesus!” He ushered us out forcibly and slammed the door. I prayed for Jean to keep her mouth shut. She had a propensity to speak her mind and a knack of choosing just the right combination of abrasive words to ignite a conflagration.

Mercifully she was silent this time, but he persisted. “When I get on me feet we'll get somewhere better. Anyone would think I wasn't part of this family. You think I don't want the best for us?”

When no one answered, he drove us home, silently glowering, and after we were out of the car he drove off, leaving us to share a guilty, hopeless presentiment. We didn't see him again for the rest of the day.

The next morning I sensed his presence. He hadn't gone to work. He was in the lounge in one of his dark moods. He wanted nothing to do with us. The house was quiet.

By the end of the week he had arranged our move to the new address, refusing help from us, dismissing our attempts with a disgusted wave of the hand, as if we were annoying flies, shifting all the heavy and awkward furniture by himself in a car and trailer borrowed from somewhere. At the last minute he enlisted the help of our bikie neighbour, bribing him with beer. None of us dared to assist once he had scorned our initial offer.

When it was all done and we stood outside the hovel, dazed by the upheaval, he said, “Sort the rest of it out your bloody selves.”

He disappeared indoors and shut himself in the lounge. I heard him jamming an armchair against the door to prevent our entry.

None of us dared attempt it. We looked at each other and shrugged, unwilling to discuss it amongst ourselves, feeling guilty for something none of us understood.