You Never Met My Father (27 page)

The Woods' house was not big enough for the entire family. Soon a bungalow was built for Jimmy and his brother, Tom, with a little help from my invalid father. And behind the bungalow, against our shared fence and to my mother's disgust, a chook pen and ferret run went up.

Barry was a keen rabbiter. He bred ferrets and always had ten or twenty of them in various cages. On a day when the north wind blew, an awful stench wafted over our place, giving Pat another reason to loathe him.

The Woods eventually bought an old green Ford Customliner. They needed a vehicle not only to get around town but to carry their rabbiting gear: traps, ferret boxes, nets, spades, mattock, crowbar and knives. Barry had never learnt to drive so Barbara always went with him. Jimmy was even keener on rabbiting than his father. I often accompanied them, as Denny did on some days when there were no race meetings.

It seemed weird for me to be doing something with my father. Even things like our vegetable garden, which he had prepared, we never tended together. The experience would have been too raw for me. He would have found fault with whatever I did. If I saw him milling around the beds, tugging at weeds or planting seedlings, I kept away until his back gave out on him. Likewise he never appeared while I was there. We never made or fixed things together. Nor did he show much interest in my schooling except to remind me now and then of its importance if I wanted to avoid ending up like ‘the poor bastards around us'. Going rabbiting, then, with the Woods didn't feel like I was doing something with him. Rather it was an experience more akin to being on a train together. We were merely travelling in the same direction due to shared space in economy class. Like strangers in a carriage, we avoided each other's eyes, kept out of each other's way as much as possible, exchanged words only when it would have been more embarrassing not to do so. I observed him surreptitiously, which was like watching someone who was yet to learn how to behave normally in public.

I wondered if he was trying to ingratiate himself when he took more than his share of equipment from the boot whenever we arrived at our destination. He was still young—just on forty—and strong, but he was bound to aggravate his spinal injury. Once he got home after rabbiting from dawn to dusk, having done more than his share of digging up burrows and hauling the catch or ferret boxes back to the car, he could barely lower himself into his armchair. As his body cooled his vertebrae locked together and for days he was barely able to move. Was he trying to prove his masculinity to Barry? Sometimes he acted the clown, falling into rabbit holes with arms flailing, head flopping like a rag doll, or chasing rabbits that escaped the nets, as if his life depended upon competing with the Woods' whippet. At other times he held hapless rabbits aloft when he managed to extricate them from nets as a child might brandish a sporting trophy at Little Athletics. Jimmy used to snigger and whisper remarks about what a funny bloke my old man was, but I couldn't see it. All I felt was humiliation. I couldn't reconcile this man with the one who skulked and scowled around at home.

“Dad, stop it, will yer?” I whispered to him once. “Stop muckin' around.”

“What?” he said, as if he was at a loss to understand what I was talking about.

“They take their rabbiting serious.”

“Me, too, my friend. It'll save us from the poor house.”

Years later I thought that perhaps his chronic depression and the long periods he had spent in psychiatric hospitals had deprived him of the ability to socialise in a way that wouldn't raise the eyebrows, either in amusement or alarm, of those around him. He had no idea how to be sociable. None of this occurred to me at the time. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I rarely tried to understand him. I was only concerned that others might think I was tarred with the same brush.

Still, with or without him, rabbiting with the Woods was something I looked forward to. I enjoyed getting up before dawn and being in the paddocks as mist rose from the waking earth.

I didn't enjoy killing rabbits although I did it from time to time, pulling their necks or less frequently cutting their throats to bleed them, the preferred Woods' method of slaughter. I felt sorry for these small creatures, ending their lives as if it were trivial when I sensed it was no laughing matter for them. But there was something about the self-sufficiency of rabbiting that appealed. Not only did the Woods have free meat to eat, they sold it around the pubs and caravan parks to supplement the invalid pension that Barry received for his ‘dicky' heart. I enjoyed the feeling that they were beyond ordinary society in a way I was yet to fully comprehend. Partly it was their notorious background but it also had to do with the way they helped themselves. They asked nobody's permission to ferret on farmland or set traps along fencelines. They merely opened gates and drove across properties in their imposing Ford Customliner whose huge motor rumbled arrogantly. What they did felt powerful. And it was enterprising. It seemed infinitely more sensible than gambling as a way to make a bit on the side. On top of that there was always talk about corruption: of police, of politicians, of ostensibly decent members of society, especially those in business, who often employed criminals to steal from their warehouses or retail outlets for insurance purposes.

To the Woods everyone was trying to rip everyone else off. We lived in a dog-eat-dog world. There were ‘them and us'. We were ‘the workers' (without work, as it happened). And the workers were always getting screwed. We had to ‘look after our own'. I just had to keep in mind ‘which side of the fence I was on'. And we had to stick together. I began to feel like I belonged to their world. And Denny did too.

The day came when Denny did have a big win. I don't remember how big. Perhaps it was a double or a quadrella. He was at home. I remember being at the kitchen table reading the paper when the hissing started. That was his way of offering encouragement to the horse he'd backed. The closer it got to the lead the more strident his hissing, which was interspersed with shouts of
Go!
then
You…little…bloody…beauty!
as it crossed the finish line, each word enunciated separately, as if he were speaking to someone without much comprehension of English.

He came prancing into the kitchen. “It come from bloody nowhere!”

He hugged Pat from behind as she stood before the sink. “No cookin' tonight,” he said.

Of course my mother was delighted but a little unnerved. I remained hunched over the newspaper, reluctant to participate in gaiety that wouldn't last long.

“You see, your old man can occasionally pick a winner,” he said to me, as if he sensed how I felt about him.

That night we had to watch the sporting section of the TV news and listen once more to his hissing through the replay while we ate Sweet-and-Sour.

The following Monday, after much thought, he bought Pat a gift, an ironing board, as a gesture of atonement.

But she spurned it. “What do I want that thing for?” she complained. “I can't iron on that. Look how wobbly it is. I'm happy just doing it the way I've always done it.”

My mother was someone who ironed everything except socks: sheets, pillow slips, towels, tea towels, hankies, underwear. She pressed everything on an old blanket covered by a sheet spread across the kitchen table. I had the feeling she was addicted to housework, or any sort of activity, which kept her from thinking too much about her circumstances.

“And I'll keep on doing it that way, thanks very much. You might as well take this useless thing back and buy me something I do need, like some new underwear. I could do with that. All I've got is rags. Lucky no one can see them…”

She kept going on, ungrateful and tactless, which earned her a few choice expletives, and when these failed to change her mind he delivered a whack to her head.

“First it's the washing machine and now the bloody ironing board,” he yelled. “Jesus wept!”

She cried out in pain and used some derogatory terms of her own, questioning whether a proper husband would do what he was doing, while I hid behind my newspaper.

I was afraid for her. She appeared to have finally had enough of his abuse. She had reached some kind of tipping point and it had emboldened her.

“Why don't you give it to that mate of yours around the corner? You've given him just about everything else.”

I heard him open the cutlery drawer and the clatter of knives.

Suddenly Jean was in the room, flailing her arms and shouting at him. Her indignation was majestic. It shamed me. She placed herself between them, facing him defiantly, and was decked for her trouble.

For some reason he turned to me. “I suppose you think I'm a bastard too,” he jeered.

I turned the page and shrugged, scared of meeting the same fate as Jean.

My mother refrained from further incendiary comment. She withdrew, aware of how close she had come to the edge of her own sanity.

But this was the first skirmish of another period of domestic hostility, which had long stretches of cold war with the occasional flare-up, the occasional flashpoint, when Pat or one of us kids would be threatened with his fists or a kitchen knife. We were blamed for his run of punting bad luck, which in reality was a return to the norm. We were forced once more to creep around the house to avoid antagonising him. Pat kept providing him with meals, which he took without a word of thanks and ate alone in the lounge room.

In my room I would sometimes wonder if he enjoyed the violence or whether he was ashamed of it. Did he feel good after pummelling my mother or sister? Did it leave him feeling elated? Or did he feel bad about it? Did it fill him with self-loathing and remorse? Perhaps it was both.

With my fear of him and my conviction that a normal life would always elude us, I was turning away from my family, taking as little notice of its petty dramas as possible. What I did with my mates, like Jimmy, was becoming the only thing that really mattered to me. When I look back on that time now I can see how insecure I had become. My fear of Denny was one of a litany of apprehensions I faced each day, which perhaps most teenage boys experience to some degree: insecurities with regard to the opposite sex, insecurities about my looks, insecurities about my intelligence, my wit, about whether people liked me or not. My anxiety level was high and I tried to deal with it through displays of nonchalance or bravado, or arrogance at times, and indifference towards those I loved: my mother, my sisters, even my father. I can't claim I was a teenager whom I look back fondly upon. I wasn't heroic. I wasn't like my elder sister who stood up for decency and paid a price for it.

I have only sketchy memories of my sisters, probably because I was stressed and becoming quite self-absorbed, although I do have photos of us together where we look happy enough. In one I have an arm around Jean's shoulder. I'm slightly taller than her. My hair is short and so is hers. She is in a short skirt with a thick, glossy, black plastic belt around her waist. Both of us are smiling. At whom? At what? Posterity? The future? What sort of message were we hoping to transmit across the years? The truth? I remember once, mucking around, I gave her a Chinese burn and accidentally broke her arm.

In another photo I'm close to a school-uniformed Carol, giving a two-fingered salute behind her head. But, really, my little sister was off my radar. She was just starting high school and was almost always surrounded by a group of giggling friends who lived in the neighbourhood, including Jimmy's sister, Wendy, all of them still scrawny kids.

Jean was doing her Matriculation. She wasn't studying hard; she had no need. Everyone knew she would pass with honours. The infuriating thing was that, had she put in some effort, she could have been dux of the school. That didn't interest her. Nor did the prospect of going to university. Ignoring everyone's exhortations she refused to apply for any tertiary courses, not even for Teachers College, despite her interest in primary school teaching. Denny was infuriated. He took her defiance as a personal slight and reacted predictably. They were increasingly at loggerheads. Her independent spirit riled him. What I remember is a pattern of antagonism throughout her Matriculation year, which might have influenced her final act of rebellion.

After she received her results, which were good enough to get her into any tertiary course she wanted, she announced plans to travel. When she declared her intention to go to Western Australia, Denny became apoplectic.

He must have interpreted it as a desire to be as far from home as possible without actually going offshore. Her motive was pure spite, he bellowed. They argued bitterly. The quarrels were drawn-out and ominous. His threats only hardened her resolve. When finally she set out on foot for the railway station, lugging a suitcase, he went after her, raging and frothing, and forced her home.

My mother tried to intervene and for her trouble was shouted down. I stayed in my room. A week later Jean packed her suitcase again and headed back to the station. This time she escaped. But she left with neither parent's blessing.

Carol and I felt a mixture of vicarious triumph and apprehension. With dread like a leaden weight in our bellies we contemplated the chances of becoming the new object of his chronic fury. Being older, I thought I would be next in line. Carol countered that, as a girl, it would probably be her. Together we made a pact to keep out of his way but fell short of extending it to any avowal of solidarity.

Jean went to Perth and we didn't see her again for a couple of years.

Sometime after she left, Denny succeeded in his long campaign to have his TTI pension upgraded to TPI, which seemed to mollify him somewhat. I never knew about it. He never talked to me about his pensions. Nor did my mother. Jean became persona non grata in our family and wasn't talked about. He settled into a period of inscrutable passivity, like a geriatric tucked under a blanket in an armchair in a dim corner of a nursing home, reading a mountain of penny westerns.