You Never Met My Father (25 page)

“Twenty bloody cents a week!” he chortled, unable to believe his luck.

“Do you think they'll ever let you buy anything on hire purchase again?” Pat said, weary of his antics.

He winked, as if he were already working on a plan. “They'll let you, though, Trish.”

He wanted Pat to give up her job at the post office. If she was unemployed, a pension would come her way as well.

“Why work for bloody peanuts?”

But she had no intention of resigning no matter how much the pension was worth and not merely because she was suspicious of his motives and unsure of the actual destination of the fortnightly payment, but it would have meant giving up some of her independence, the bit of her life beyond his control. She had recently been shifted to customer service, working behind the counter, dealing with the public, a promotion that meant a great deal to her, since it came with responsibilities. She also emptied the town's postal boxes each evening. For the first time in her life she felt respected and trusted by others outside her family. But he mistook her resistance as part of an ongoing endeavour to oppose, out of spite, every scheme he had ever devised to improve our lot.

The washing machine disagreement affected him badly. He saw it as another slight; another insidious way of putting him down, of refusing his efforts to do something positive for the family, and for her in particular. A period of silent hostility ensued even while Pat was at work. He would sit with his legs crossed in his armchair, his back to the wall you might say, an elbow on the timber armrest and a hand against his forehead, not drumming any more, concealing his face like a barrier to anyone else in the room.

I could feel the resentment every time I entered. Usually he'd ignore me, even if I bothered to greet him. Sometimes he looked up long enough to glower. He'd turn the radio up a decibel or two.

At night he slept in the same chair. He claimed his spinal injury caused too much pain to lie in a bed overnight. If I got up early enough I saw him sprawled in the chair, out of his day clothes and in his pyjamas at least, his mouth agape, his false teeth on the coffee table, where his packet of smokes, an empty ashtray, a biro, and a cold cup of coffee from the previous night were arranged in their usual order. The only difference since our shift was an empty milk carton (recently invented to replace glass bottles) opened completely at the top, into which he tipped the contents of his ashtray after every cigarette.

His mood could last days, if not weeks, where the entire family had to tiptoe around and converse in muted tones again, as if someone was dying. I think all of us found it a relief when occasionally he left the house to place some bets at the public phone box a couple of blocks away, or entire afternoons when he took a straw broom and swept our street from one end to the other, making separate piles for rubbish and metal screenings, leaving the rubbish for the council to collect and barrowing the screenings to a path he was constructing around the front of the house, which he intended to concrete if he ever found he had enough spare cash to buy cement. I used to wonder what the neighbours thought, getting their street swept, having the cleanest street in Portland.

It left him doubled over in pain by the end of the day, his spine locked into some kind of hideous shape, from which it took days to recover. There is no doubt in my mind that his suffering was genuine, despite all the scepticism the medical team at the Repatriation Department was showing. Nevertheless, he kept doing manual tasks with grim determination, as if he were punishing himself for his ill luck, or he expected the pain might explode, like a sonic boom. Breaking the pain barrier. Then it might dissipate.

In a moment of sympathy or guilt I offered to help him. I wheeled a load of screenings to the path and tipped it between the edging boards he had erected. The weight of the load was more than I expected. The barrow tipped over and one of its handles punctured our cement-sheet wall.

I almost collapsed with the fear. But when he saw what I had done he said nothing. He went inside. He abandoned the path and never went back to it.

Partly to get out of the house while he was in it, partly to help my mother, I began to accompany her on the postal round in the evening. She drove a red van from pillar box to pillar box, and I jumped out at each with a key and emptied its contents into a large canvas sack. She claimed that my assistance shortened the task by half an hour.

I enjoyed our time together. We didn't talk much—a little gossip, a few questions about my football training, the occasional mention of schoolwork—just enjoying each other's company without histrionics or mood swings spoiling anything. It was like we had a secret pact, a special allegiance that nobody knew about. I felt close to her, as I had when I was young and my father was elsewhere. We had been through a lot together, my mother and I. We had looked after each other.

One day out of the blue I mentioned my father's moods, which were getting me down. “Why's he like that all the time?” I complained, without expecting an answer.

“It's not his fault, darl. He doesn't really want to be like that. He can't help it if he gets cranky now and then. You heard what happened to him in Japan.”

I hadn't heard the full story of what had happened to him in Japan, and ‘cranky now and then' seemed a slight understatement. But she said it as though that was her final word on the subject. It never occurred to me to ask her if she ever talked to my father about his mental problems or his gambling, whether she let him know how serious she thought his problems were, and whether they had discussed ways of dealing with them. I suspect her approach was to roll with the punches, as they say, and hope that one day things would settle down. But she had been rolling with the punches for twenty years. She probably believed that talking about his problems would only make matters worse. She probably had no idea how to deal with him. Nothing in her upbringing had prepared her for her life with Denny. And there was no one around to advise her.

“How long can he go on blaming Japan?” I said bitterly.

As she pulled up at our next pillar box she glanced at me with pained expression. “That's just my thoughts, not his. He doesn't talk about it. He won't talk to me about anything.”

I emptied the box and when I returned to the van I changed the topic to football.

Helping her each evening was good for me in other ways. Besides our collaboration, it gave me the chance to feel like I was doing something useful for my community. For the first time in my life I felt a strong bond to a place. It wasn't much of a place, a tinpot port with spurious claims, I had learnt, to the title of first settlement in the region that would become Victoria, but a place, all the same, where I had been to the one school for several years and now had a house resembling a home, not to mention a few friends I could count on.

Besides, I was about to meet a new friend. And so, too, was Denny.

There was a house that backed onto our place, which was still unoccupied, the last vacancy on the estate. One afternoon, a few days before Christmas, I was in the back yard weeding our vegetable garden when I heard the sounds of removalists unloading. I peered over and saw a sandy-headed tribe. The kids, with broad foreheads and vivid green eyes, all resembled the man. I counted six. Only the woman had dark hair. The eldest boy came over to say hello. He was about my age. When we shook hands he gave mine a mighty squeeze, smiled boldly to let me know he wasn't someone to be trifled with, and declared he was Jimmy Woods. A few hours later there was a knock on our front door.

Always cautious about opening the door to a stranger lest it be a debt collector, Denny parted the venetian blinds in my bedroom where he could get a glimpse of the front porch, until I, behind him, recognised Jimmy and his father. When I explained who they were he went to the door.

Jimmy's father introduced himself as Barry. His handshake was intended to place you somewhere in the pecking order below him. He wanted to know where the nearest phone booth was.

Denny knew it well. Since the shift to West Portland, some distance from the TAB, he had started up a phone betting account. He offered to drive them there, and I went along for the ride.

There was a store near the phone booth, and while Barry was ringing someone, Denny went to buy cigarettes. I was in the front passenger seat feeling tense with Jimmy behind me. I didn't know what he was like or what he might say. As soon as the adults were out of the car he took the opportunity to speak.

He leant forward and tapped my shoulder, as if he needed to grab my attention. “Hey, what are the birds like here in Portland?”

“Most are all right.”

I must have sounded aloof.

“Yeah?” he persisted, wanting more information, probably details I was unable to provide.

“Magpies and cockies are all right. I'm not that fond of seagulls or plovers.”

“You're kiddin' me,” he snorted. “How do you get on with the other sort of bird? Sheilas?”

So I lied about my popularity with the opposite sex, exaggerating the true state of my romantic liaisons. But to avoid a cross-examination I quickly headed for neutral territory and asked him where he was from.

He told me he grew up in the western suburbs of Melbourne but had shifted to Perth and more recently to Brisbane, criss-crossing the continent. I waited for him to explain. Maybe his father was a travelling salesman like my father had been. But before he had a chance Denny returned with some ice creams.

The gratuitous gesture made a favourable impression on Jimmy. And the smokes that Denny shared with Barry were equally well received, even if the brand he offered was short on quality.

On the way back Denny asked if they needed anything while they settled in: groceries, linen or blankets, household cleaners, tools?

Barry looked Denny over, grinned and availed himself of everything on offer.

My mother was peeved, to put it mildly. She resented Denny's sudden bouts of generosity.

“Charity begins at home,” she said to me. “It's hard enough without him giving everything away. I work bloody hard to buy that stuff. And you saw that fellow, love. You only need to take one look at him to know you'll never get one thing back off of him.”

When one of the youngest Woods' boys knocked at the door the next day, thrust a bowl towards her and demanded salt, she refused, telling him to come back after he had learnt some manners.

Word of the incident got back to Denny.

He was furious with her, taking the antagonism she had shown towards the new neighbours personally. Why did she always try to undermine and embarrass him? Why had she disapproved of every friend he'd ever had?

Pat ignored his spurious claim to friendships and responded with a retort that was on the lips of everyone on the estate. “How come they jumped the queue to get a house? They don't even come from Portland. And what Graeme tells me, they don't even come from the state. If you're worried about the needy, giving away our blankets and groceries, then what about all the needy locals who haven't got a roof over their heads?”

Denny was cagey, giving a dismissive gesture, as if he were already privy to information that explained the Woods' preferential treatment.

He began to spend a lot of time with the Woods, helping them settle in and taking them shopping. He even chatted, something I'd never seen him do, at their kitchen table.

As for my friendship with Jimmy, after my initial wariness, we got along well. I didn't trust his father but Jimmy was different. He was straightforward and honest. And even he was capable of a few acid remarks about his ‘old man', as he always called his father.

“Don't let him get to you. He's a bullshit artist.”

“Yeah, mine too,” I admitted.

It didn't take long before Barry was bragging to me about something, about his brilliant memory (a photographic memory he claimed) or what poor cuts of meat he had bought, and how he could do better than all the Portland butchers, being a qualified butcher himself, or how liberal-minded he was about sexuality, making jokes about Jimmy's virginal state, and guessing at mine, and telling us of the myriad girls he had already had ‘sexual intercourse' with by the time he was our age, as if to say,
you'll never be the man I am, boys,
you'll never catch up to me
. He kept asking me about my eyesight.

Jimmy enrolled in my class at Portland High at the start of the school year. We were both fifteen but he could have passed for someone older. He wasn't tall, but able to shave meaningfully every day, and muscular enough for football. I thought he'd be an asset to the team I was going to play for in the local junior competition, once the new season began. In the meantime I hoped some of the respect given to a virile, untested new classmate would rub off on me.

His impatience to meet some of my female friends was finally placated when on the first day of the school year, much to my astonishment and relief, two of the most popular girls in our class, Kathy and Dawn, approached and requested to sit beside us at the back of the room. They handed us a biro each and asked for our autographs. Kathy was the girl I had given a brooch to in primary school for St Valentine's Day. She had long since lost interest in me and gained a reputation as a girl who ‘did it'. Sidling onto the desk pew next to me she pulled up the hem of her uniform and pointed to the part of her thigh she wanted me to sign, not very far from her panties, which caught my eye inadvertently. My heart beat like a kettledrum. I don't know how many notebooks I had filled over the years, practising my signature, trying to perfect it for just such a moment, but any calligraphic ability I'd gained deserted me the moment I touched her soft flesh.