You Never Met My Father (16 page)

Where he had placed the bedroom furniture determined what rooms we were to use. Carol and I were to share the room off the kitchen. Jean was the lucky one. She had the smaller, masonite-lined one at the end of the verandah. Pat had the dingy front room off the passage opposite the living room. We set to work washing and cleaning the place from top to bottom. With an old tomahawk left by the previous tenant, I cut some kindling from bits of timber I found in the yard. I lit the stove to boil some water for the cleaning but also for a cup of tea. Pat couldn't function too well without one. We unpacked our clothes, our linen, our crockery and kitchenware.

“Well, we better get used to it,” she said with a forced smile that was supposed to fortify us.

She took a Bex.

There was no warmth in the house as much as we tried to make it cosy. The flooring throughout was old lino. Around the edges it was torn, exposing rotten floorboards. The house was draughty, with a broken window in the kitchen and gaps beneath the doors. The walls were thin. And a relentless chill, like a blast from the Southern Ocean, emanated from the off-limits lounge room. Pat shed some private tears. It upset her that Denny wanted to shut her out of his life, that his mood swings were so dramatic and forbidding. There was no doubt she still loved him.

While my sisters and I, hurt by his refusal to talk to us, were prepared to hate him, she made excuses for his behaviour. “You know your father's not himself these days,” she whispered, lest he catch her remarks across the silence. “He doesn't really mean to upset you. It's just me. I'm the one upsetting him.”

“That's not fair,” Jean cried.

“Shhh.”

We all pretended he had gone away. In the days after our shift none of us mentioned him, but we crept around the house to avoid any aggravation. Every evening after Pat had prepared a meal for the family on the old wood stove, she slid his plate into its cast iron oven, under an aluminium lid to prevent the food from drying out. It was always gone in the morning.

What upset me most wasn't that he had wanted to be alone, but that he had pushed furniture against the door to prevent us attempting to enter, as if he couldn't stand us being near him, as if we were vile, as if we were the cause of all his woes. He wanted to quarantine himself from us. I tried to think what it was about me, about us, that was so abhorrent.

Then one day he emerged from the lounge.

I saw him sitting at the kitchen table, as if he had just returned from another hospital stay. As Pat moved past, getting breakfast ready for the rest of us, he grabbed her arm and said, “Give us a hug, love.”

And she tried to pull away, shocked by his show of affection. “Oh, Denny, not in front of the children,” she responded, unable to hide her joy from us.

I was stunned.

The relief Pat felt transformed her. She looked younger and less haggard. The Denny she had fallen in love with, years before, was back. He also looked younger and more handsome. He punched me playfully, when I came near, and gave the girls a squeeze. He was as gentle as a monk emerging from a lengthy meditation. A rare sound filled the room—our laughter. Not a word was mentioned of his self-imposed exile.

Since he had no job, he started to help our landlady service and repair her paddle boats, probably because he had no way to pay the rent. The garish boats were stacked in the yard adjacent to the huge shed near our place. One by one, with Daisy on one side and Denny and Fred the other, these were hoisted onto a specially designed bench where each was inspected for damage to plywood, rudder, pedal mechanism and floats. Metal parts were greased, timber repainted, before the boats were stacked in the shed for the off-season.

For a while Denny was in an expansive mood. He enjoyed the work he did for Daisy. He often praised her strength and technical know-how. He was no weakling himself; nor was he unskilled. But he readily admitted he was no match for her. If he found a crack or hole he considered beyond repair, she scoffed at him and took over, directing him to a simpler task. It amused him that such a woman existed, who, if not repairing paddleboats, had her head in the engine well of one of her huge black American cars alongside Fred. Away from them, he voiced his pity for Fred, whose deadpan face he interpreted as a long-suffering expression of subservience.

It crosses my mind now, with the benefit from decades of feminism, that Daisy and Fred treated each other as equals, well before their time. But a man with such an attitude in those days was considered a weakling and effeminate. He was derided for allowing his wife, despite her capabilities, to perform so many tasks that were generally considered men's work, to issue orders and dominate masculine conversations. Yet, if I publicly joined in the sly derision (nobody dared do it to her face), I privately admired her, as I believe my father did.

When his work for Daisy came to an end he was in such a positive mood, he looked for paid work and found it on the wharves.

The port, designed to serve the farming hinterland of western Victoria and the local abattoir, was still being developed. Because it was relatively small, stevedoring was casualised. Somehow my father was notified whenever ships docked. Perhaps he listened to the shipping news on the local radio. Whenever the wharfies were called, he attended recruitment meetings in a makeshift office, down on the foreshore, alongside scores of others, where work crews were selected by lottery.

In those days, before the container and bulk carrier revolution, loading ships was labour intensive. Wharfies worked long shifts, sometimes fourteen or fifteen hours a day, under gruelling and often dangerous conditions, hauling carcasses of sheep and beef or sacks of grain. If they loaded grain they had to endure its suffocating dust, which swirled around the docks like a spiteful animus. He would come home looking ghostly grey.

Denny didn't shy from this kind of toil. He revelled in it. Perhaps it made him feel worthwhile. Perhaps it made him feel good about himself. Perhaps he enjoyed the kudos he gained amongst his comrades. He quickly gained a reputation around the wharves, not only for his endurance and his militant attitude at union meetings, but mostly for antics that relieved the monotony of the toil.

Once he walked across a plank over an open hull, where a fall could have meant his death. Another occasion he stripped down to his underpants, dived between the wharf and ship and resurfaced on the starboard side. Anything risky. Anything for a wager. A little extra
spondulicks
for the punting. Anything to amuse his fellow wharfies. But he never wasted a cent drinking with them, which no doubt marked him as an oddball, an outsider. Almost all the money he earned on the wharves went on the
nags
.

As for his militancy (which, he claimed, earned him the title of ‘Denny the Red'), there were periods of industrial unrest on the wharves in Melbourne, which spread to other Victorian ports that might have motivated him. It would have been hard for someone of his temperament to back away from a stoush of any sort. And he was a socialist, one of the rough-and-ready kinds who never bothered with theory. My mother had the task of washing his filthy overalls and flannel shirts, which she boiled in the copper. She never complained. She was just glad he was working. She felt it gave him some dignity, although she wouldn't have expressed it like that. “He's like a bear with a sore head when he's not working” was more her line. But whether or not his dignity was the issue, it meant he was less likely to pressure her into handing over her wages for his gambling. So there were less disputes and bitterness poisoning the domestic atmosphere.

One day he brought a pup home from a ship that had docked in port. He said the merchant seamen had asked him to find it a good home. But I suspect he had won it with one of his stunts.

The pup had the proud stance of a working dog. It had a fawn coat with white markings on the forehead and chest. Nobody warmed to my suggestion that we name it after the Phantom's dog,
‘
Devil'. Denny said he already had exclusive rights to that name. Besides, it was the wrong colour. So we called it ‘Sailor' on account of its former lifestyle, even though on inspection it proved to be a bitch. Denny said I could keep her as long as I promised to feed and train her. I happily took on the task and in no time at all she and I were the best of mates. I taught her to sit, stay, come and roll over. I took her for walks, down to the beach and along the breakwaters. In return she gave me licks. I would have liked to take her inside, especially in bad weather, but my mother banned her from the house. Denny made her a kennel.

At home he laboured outside with the garden, dressed in his khaki overalls, pulling weeds, preparing vegetable patches, trimming bushes that had been neglected for years. I was nervous about helping him but I tried, keeping my distance, but seeking his advice and approval for what I was doing and chatting about school, pretending he was a normal father.

He wasn't. He didn't seem to know how to do the father-son two-step, or waltz, or whatever it was we were attempting. When the handle on our old rake broke, he tried to show me how to fix it. My effort was slow and tentative. It drove him too distraction.

“Here, give it to me,” he muttered, snatching the pieces.

When I tried to talk to him about football, hoping for some fatherly encouragement, he criticised me for ever playing. Couldn't I see I didn't have the right build for it? “Look at those matchstick legs of yours. How will they hold up? You've got no meat, no muscle. You'll just get yourself hurt. You'll end up a bloody cripple.”

I summoned the courage to suggest we go fishing together, but I should have known he wouldn't. He didn't have the patience to sit on a pier for hours on end waiting for something that might or might not occur. He merely clucked in disgust, his head jerking slightly, and didn't bother with a reply.

Still I put my own feelings aside to avoid jeopardising the ordinariness that seemed to be settling upon us.

To impress him, I tried to improve my hammering skills. I borrowed his hammer and a few nails and went away from the house where he wouldn't notice. I picked the old pine tree behind Daisy's shed. On my first stroke, I missed the nail and hit the living wood. The hammer bounced back and smashed into my teeth. Enamel slivers dropped out of my mouth.

“For cryin' out loud, who's going to pay for the bloody dentist?” he bellowed when he saw what I'd done.

One day, a few weeks after he had taken me to a dentist that he had talked into doing some charity work, I came home to find him chopping wood, which was stacked under a crude arc of corrugated iron against the wall at one end of the verandah. The day before, he had yelled at me while instructing me on his method of cutting kindling with a tomahawk; I hadn't taken advantage of the wood grain, apparently. To show I harboured no resentment, even though I'd run away to spare him witnessing my emotions, I crept up behind him and for a bit of fun unwisely shouted “Boo!” like I'd done to my mother at
Th
e Pines
, again with unanticipated consequences.

He turned blindly and launched the tomahawk at me.

Fortunately he hesitated enough, when he realised it was me, for the axe to sail past my head, or our destinies might have turned out differently, mine considerably shortened. It crashed into the bathroom outhouse and smashed one of its rotting weatherboards. He was furious again, berating me for several minutes, his eyes bulging like a madman, his hair wafting. Did I realise what I had almost turned him into? Did I know where he would have ended up? No mention of what nearly happened to me.

Perhaps having tasted prison life he had no stomach for another stint. I sat on the edge of the verandah weak with shock, unable to stifle a few sobs. Longing for his sympathy I gained his scorn. Was I a man or a bloody fairy? Bizarrely he warned me to expect the worst from men as I grew up.

“Don't ever go to jail. They'll make bloody mince meat out of you.”

It was an opportunity too good to miss to ask him how he knew. But I did miss it. I was too afraid of provoking his rage further.

When he calmed down a little he claimed credit for my survival. But as I moved off I thought I heard a mumbled apology.

The next day he took me into the yard to give me a boxing lesson.

“You'll be a man before you know it, and you'll need to know how to defend yourself,” he said with an earnest nod. “Put up your dukes.”

I raised my fists tentatively in front of me.

He grimaced. “Like this.” He grabbed my fists and forced them into position before my face, pushing my elbows closer to my body to protect my ribs.

“Okay, throw a punch. No, no! Not like that, for Chrissakes! You'll be laid out cold before you can say ‘Les Darcy'.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

He pranced around in front of me, hunched over, his head down, behind his fists, his eyes fierce.

“Throw a left. Straight. From the shoulder. Hard. See if you can hit me. Come on. See if you can land one to the body.”

As I thrust, he twisted sideways a little so that my blow slid harmlessly off his biceps.

“You see, you see. Keep the elbows tight to the body and there's no way through. That's your defence. Eyes on your opponent's. Then you swing like this.”

His fist passed before my eyes at such a speed it was like a blur, with a fierce discharge of air from his lungs that startled me.

I reacted belatedly.

He laughed quietly, as if to himself.

“I could've knocked your bloody head off. Keep your guard up. Don't turn away like a snivelling girl. Come on try again.”

I sparred with him for a while, trying hard to learn what he was showing me. He seemed pleased. And I was overwhelmed with gratitude. He was trying to teach me something; to help me towards manhood.

“Okay, that's enough for today,” he said. “We'll do some more tomorrow.”