You Never Met My Father (29 page)

About the time of Fred's departure Denny had a heart attack. I came home from school to learn he was in intensive care. My younger sister was already with my mother and close to tears. Pat said he was lucky to be alive. Her distress was barely constrained but she tried for our sake. Carol wanted to visit him. But due to the gravity of his condition it wasn't yet possible. I overcame bouts of guilt to dream of a future without him. If he was too ill for his family to visit, he might still die. I went to school the next day animated by this queer feeling of independence. But when I went home Pat met me at the door and urged me to be quiet.

“Denny's home.”

“He can't be!” I said with wildly conflicting feelings. “I thought he was about to kick the bucket.”

“Don't say that,” she whispered, genuinely affronted. “He shouldn't be home.” She told me he had discharged himself. “They wouldn't let him go to the toilet. He won't use one of them bottle things you wee into in hospital. Says he can't use them. The nurses and the doctor wouldn't let him out of bed. They reckoned he was too ill. The doctor told him he could go home if he didn't do what the nurses told him. Stupid bloody doctor!”

To the doctor's horror Denny had called his bluff.

Once at home he had taken to bed for the first time in a year. The bedroom door was closed. Again we were creeping around the house on account of some misfortune. Not long ago, my mother with her nerves; now, my father with his dicky heart. On top of that, for months he had been complaining of a pain in his guts. He was shitting blood. His doctor had diagnosed an ulcer and prescribed Alka Seltza. But he was convinced he had cancer.

I went into the bedroom on the third day and inquired sheepishly about his health. He looked drawn and his skin was grey.

“At least here I can piss where I like,” he muttered.

In a week or so he was back to his old routine, sleeping on his armchair in the lounge room, reading the form guide, or, on days where no races were scheduled, a penny western from the stack he kept behind the paper rack—aside from a few school library books the only novels to be found in the house. And a gloomy intensity returned, like it used to be before the advent of the Woods.

Barry came around to see him a few days after he got out of bed.

My mother gritted her teeth and let him in, the first time he had come into our place. When he put on an extravagant show of civility, she assumed correctly that he was ridiculing her. He noticed she wasn't fooled, which prompted him to be more polite. But with Denny he dropped the facade, and joked about mortality and the need for temporary celibacy, which he would have known was fairly redundant advice. Pat made him a cup of tea, how he (but not she) liked it, white, strong and syrupy, to remove an area of criticism he would have used against her later to amuse his family. The atmosphere in the room was palpable, as if a storm were about to break. Mockingly, he raised his little finger as he drank. But Pat kept her wits and avoided showing any sign of outrage or disgust until he left. Then she vented her indignation by mimicking his finger action, decrying the implication that she was a two-bob snob.

Denny told her not to be thin-skinned.

Soon he was well enough to resume his visits to the Woods, which, paradoxically, were a relief and an aggravation to Pat. Denny was getting better, but it rankled that he preferred the company of someone like Barry to his own family. Around at the Woods', Barry would be bragging as usual about all the dare-devil things he got up to as a young man: the scores of women he'd had, the fishy smell of their genitals, or the crimes he'd got away with, the criminals and corrupt cops he knew, the police corruption inquiry he'd instigated. No doubt he exaggerated. No doubt he wanted us to believe he was in the big league, and we, the Sparkeses, were mere babes in the woods. Underneath all his glib bravado it struck me that he was really trying to ‘big note himself ', as Pat would say, which was really a way of putting us down. He wanted us to know that he, more than anyone else, knew how the real world operated. And it wasn't a pretty sight.

“It might be his world,” Pat said, when she heard of his exploits second-hand. “But it isn't mine. And it doesn't have to be yours.”

As much as I thought my life had gained a new dimension since the arrival of the Woods, I had grown to dislike Barry as much as she did. He was arrogant and cruel, even to those who befriended him. Once he showed me an article from
Th
e Sun
that was about a man who had bet his pants at the races, a country track in the Western District. The man, who had lost all his money, left early and was trying to raise some funds for a bus fare to another town where he lived. He went into a pub to listen to the last race and, with the publican, wagered some work pants he had bought before the races. He lost. No name was given, but the gambler was Denny, according to Barry, who took great pleasure in letting me know.

“He's a card, your old man,” he said between snorts of laughter, but what he meant was
he's a dickhead
.

He was intentionally hurtful. He enjoyed seeing me blush and grimace. My father was a hopeless gambler but I didn't need him to point it out. I didn't want him to laugh about it.

I grew wary of him. He seemed volatile and treacherous to me, as well as a weak character, constantly demanding our admiration. And aggression usually followed if it wasn't forthcoming. When he shot dead one of his sons, years later, after a drunken argument, neither my mother nor I was surprised.

Curiously, Denny never bragged about anything. Except for that one time with me, when he showed me the house he had built and gave me a mental arithmetic lesson, he never boasted about any of his achievements, his unusual strength or his boxing prowess. And I never heard him talk about women either, not about any conquests, nor in a salacious way, not even to comment on their looks as they walked along the street, as Barry made a point of doing with a leer or lewd snigger. There was Daisy O'Brien, our former landlady, but his comments about her were expressions of admiration. Indeed, when I look back on those years, I can't recall a time when I noticed my father eyeing a female like most men are in the habit of doing. Perhaps he considered bragging and perving unseemly, but I doubt it. He probably realised nothing positive would come of it. Besides, for someone as determined as he was at self-destruction, trumpeting achievements would have been the last thing on his mind. As for his sexual attraction to females, throughout his life I never once saw the slightest evidence of it. Perhaps, unlike most men, in his heart he believed in monogamy.

Another factor: he never talked much. He didn't know how to keep a conversation going. His friendship with Barry probably lasted as long as it did because he rarely interrupted the other man's monologue.

But one day Barry raised a butcher's knife to Denny's throat. Jimmy witnessed it and told me about it. What had provoked the incident I never found out. Maybe Denny had spoken out of turn. Or stopped listening. Or maybe it was something he had said in jest that reminded Barry he was not the great hero, the great champion of the working class, he deluded himself he was. Or perhaps Denny had picked a few winners and he hadn't.

Denny reacted calmly enough when the knife touched his skin. He knew when he was at a disadvantage. He knew what Barry was capable of. And his heart wasn't the best any more, certainly no longer up to street brawls. He told Barry to calm down and, when the weapon was withdrawn, went home, the friendship over.

But Denny wasn't the only one to experience Barry's aggression. Perhaps the ex-informant was cracking under the pressure he felt he was under from the local police, who kept close tabs on him, harassed him whenever possible, pulling over the Customliner regularly for roadworthy inspections, inspecting the boot for stolen property, arriving at the house with search warrants, never letting him forget that he was a squealer who had tried to frame some of their colleagues. He began to threaten his family, over trivial matters. Jimmy, trying hard to ignore him, spent a great deal of time in my company.

We often went rabbiting on our own, usually riding into the countryside on my pushbike, loaded with a box of ferrets, a Gladstone bag of nets, a long-handled shovel, a lunch box and thermos. We'd take it in turns to dink each other, our dogs running alongside.

I had another dog, which I had called Sailor, after my first dog. He was a big, good-natured mutt, who spent much of his time during the week at the local primary school, where he allowed small kids to climb onto his back. But on weekends he wouldn't miss the opportunity to hunt down a few rabbits with us. The Woods' whippet came too. Together they dashed across the paddocks their noses to the earth following scents, occasionally flushing out a hare or rabbit, rarely making a kill. A hare in full flight was a marvellous sight to behold. It barely touched the ground. It even made the whippet look at tad sluggish. We laughed and hooted as the dogs in pursuit yelped their frustration.

Usually by late afternoon we had caught ten to twenty rabbits.

After Jimmy knitted their legs together in pairs and suspended them from the shovel across the handlebars, we headed home. I left Jimmy to gut and skin them in his backyard. He fed the offal to his ferrets and hung the skins in a shed to dry. But later in the evening, after I'd had a bath and changed my stinking clothes, I went with him to sell our catch around the caravan parks and pubs. We split what we earned evenly, and, since he did most of the work, he took all the profits from the skins, selling them to an itinerant furrier.

Barry resented our independence. He often grumbled when we arrived home with a good catch, complaining that we were overworking his ferrets, or ruining his nets, or blunting his knives. One Saturday morning he wanted to come with us. When Jimmy objected, his father punched him in the face and broke his nose.

He had started to slap Barbara about too. The attacks on her were becoming severe enough for her to genuinely fear for her safety. She secretly planned to abscond, but getting the Customliner down the driveway without rousing Woods wouldn't be easy. It was too heavy for her to push by herself. So she got a message through to Denny, who agreed to help her.

Regardless of the condition of his heart, it was still a big risk for him. He knew what Barry was capable of if they were discovered in the act. Nevertheless he joined her at midnight.

Denny was always generous. He never refused to help anyone who asked. I'm certain, had he been rich, he would have given most of his money away. Since he had none, what he had to offer was his time and his assistance.

They managed to get the car onto the street without arousing anybody. But, queerly, the old V8 wouldn't fire up. She tried a few times but then desisted, losing her nerve, afraid Barry would hear the starter motor cranking over and catch her deserting him. Unable to push the heavy vehicle back up the driveway, they left it on the street. Denny disappeared into the shadows and she crept inside. In the morning, when Barry found the car outside, he didn't seem too surprised. Barbara was composed enough to suggest anonymous pranksters, of which there were plenty in the neighbourhood, or possibly the cops.

The reason the car failed to start was soon revealed. Barry produced the distributor cap he had removed the evening before, and tapped two fingers to his temple.

“Thinking,” he said. “Never trust any cunt.”

She never tried to leave him again.

Jimmy and I had a friend, Marty, who lived about a block off the estate. He wasn't too enamoured of rabbiting, but he liked to play sport. I had known him since primary school, but we only really became close friends after my shift to West Portland and into the same junior football team. We played kick-to-kick in the street after school. We practised basketball in the old drill hall every Saturday morning. We played tennis now and then on a bitumen court in our neighbourhood. We hit golf balls around his large backyard. His family was sports-mad. His father was crazy about golf. So was his mother, who also played tennis at the Portland grass courts during the week and didn't work as far as I can recall.

Marty was better off than Jimmy or me. His parents were buying their own place. They had two cars. But his father was a boner at Borthwicks, a worker and a shop steward for the meatworkers'union. So we accepted Marty as one of our own.

On the football field he was a bit of a show pony, which we tolerated because he was in our team. He liked to play full forward so he could kick goals and gain the glory. But he was an accurate kick and won more than a few games for us. And we approved of his celebratory antics after each goal because these unsettled the opposition. Humiliating the opposition was a crucial objective of any contest, as far as Marty was concerned.

His arrogance often transcended football. He laughed at anyone's weaknesses or foibles. He considered a strict adherence to any principle a handicap, not a strength. To bend the truth, then, was a sensible strategy on occasions, which often brought him into conflict with Jimmy, whom he considered naïvely honest. Their friendship was rather erratic, but in spite of this I got along well with him, in part because his arrogance was always garnished with humour and seemed to me to be laced with irony, as if self-deprecation loomed over every one of his wisecracks. Jimmy couldn't see it; he rose to the bait each time. And each time Marty took his pleasure from Jimmy's fury.

I never expected their friendship to last, but it did, at least until we finished high school and went our separate ways. There were even times when I was jealous of the depths of their affinity. For instance, while I barracked for Melbourne in the VFL, they both barracked for Collingwood, an allegiance I could never overcome. Being a Collingwood supporter was as good as being a member of a secret society, like the Masons. I could only stand outside and ponder the mystery.