You Never Met My Father (34 page)

Towards the end of summer my grandfather gave me an accordion with large red panels and mother of pearl buttons, hoping I might follow in his footsteps by learning to play some old-time music. He was too old himself to offer me lessons, but there was a glint in his eye, an optimism and the wish of the aged that something precious of theirs would outlast them. Thinking he had chosen me, of all his descendants, probably because I was born on his birthday, I promised him I would learn to play. I fiddled around with the cumbersome accordion for a while but couldn't imagine ever mastering it, or ever wanting to. I put it away, in my wardrobe, thinking it was something I could return to in my semester holidays.

Just before I left for university it disappeared.

I'm walking the grounds of La Trobe University, amongst all those imposing buildings, in a state of suspended belief. I'm so far out of my territory I'm beyond anxiety. I might as well have been marooned on another planet. The one certainty is I'll never return to the place I came from. I'm in some kind of stupor. Yet, despite the alien environs, I don't feel there's any danger. It's pleasant enough here and there are many familiar objects. The sun is drifting between puffy white clouds. There are ducks on a reedy moat and languid eucalypts everywhere. The inhabitants don't seem much different from me, except they're moving around in groups and I'm the only one dressed in a striped French shirt. Like others I carry a bag full of books and pens. But I clasp a map of the campus and a piece of paper with my lecture times, and I see no one else doing this. Eventually I locate the Eastern Lecture Theatre complex, which is shaped ominously like a flying saucer. It's about to carry me to the furthermost reaches of the galaxy. I ascend one of its ramps and open the door to Lecture Theatre One. A blast of air, as if from a furnace, greets me. But it's just the sensation of a myriad undergraduates gathering in the one place, filling the auditorium in layers above me, like passengers on board
Spaceship
Esteem
that travels express to
Planet
Privilege
.

Philosophy One. A guaranteed pass. The most popular course at La Trobe. The undergraduate noise is like an engine rumbling. I climb the side stairs, relieved that no one is taking any notice of me, until I find a vacant seat which has a varnished five-ply board that pivots into position for my notebook. Like a seat belt it makes me feel secure but slightly claustrophobic. Slyly I scan the auditorium. The sensation of being part of a herd is overpowering. Precisely on the hour a door opens and a nondescript man walks in, makes his way to the lectern. He's old, bespectacled, slightly stooped, with sagging jowls and bulbous lips. Perhaps he's myopic; he doesn't pay much attention to those before him. Without waiting for the noise to subside he begins to talk into a microphone and some minutes transpire before all the audience realises the lecture has started.

It's the first time I hear the word ‘utilitarianism'. I figure it's important because of the number of times he repeats it. I write it on a blank foolscap sheet, my first comment on a new life. Weeks pass before I grasp its rather simple meaning, months before I learn that the lecturer, whose superfluity grows with every appearance, is one of the world's pre-eminent utilitarian scholars, according to the gossip I overhear. After each lecture he sighs and puffs his cheeks until those lips start trembling. On the hour precisely, he turns and shuffles out, his face a dejected knot. Philosophy One…
Utilitarianism
.…the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Too bad if, like the professor, you're in the minority.

Despite the strangeness of the world I had entered, my own happiness began peeping through. I was away from my father, and the freedom I felt left me light-headed. I was giddy with the notion of being my own master. It was a little scary but at least the heavy weight of my home life was lifting, like a fog before the rising sun.

The day I enrolled I had organised a place to board. It was twenty minutes south of the university by bus in the drab working-class suburb of Fairfield.

For the next few months Fleur was to be my landlady, an enormous matron with a scowl engraved on her jowls as if she found the simple act of respiration distasteful and tedious. For a modest fee she fed me two meagre meals a day, allowed me to use her bathroom and toilet, which tilted, incidentally, whenever I wiped my bum due to the structural damage she had wrought with her tremendous weight. I watched the programs she chose on TV and slept in the bungalow behind her pink weatherboard house, which had two narrow bunks with a couple of threadbare blankets, a painted wardrobe and an old dresser whose varnish was worn away. She wanted a second boarder, so I arranged to share it with another student from Portland who was attending Melbourne University.

James was a good-natured soul who didn't mind me listening to his collection of records and once or twice asked me to accompany him on social outings. We shared irreverent sentiments towards Fleur, who complained loudly and constantly about the way we were eating her out of house and home, or how strands of our hair were blocking the bathroom drainpipes. We shared a lonely devotion to masturbation, which he performed on his squeaky bunk once he thought I had gone to sleep and I enjoyed more discretely behind the locked bathroom door. We also formed a secretive alliance with her diminutive husband, Norm, who would shuffle around behind the bungalow each morning for a chat about the weather and a surreptitious smoke, out of sight of his doctor's avid enforcer.

I had known my roommate for years. We had gone to the same school and church. But a lasting friendship was unlikely. Coming from a well-off, reputable family, we had our differences. While money and the easy lifestyle that accompanied it was no obstacle to him, I was constantly trying to contact Denny somehow to beg for my living allowance.

I tried to ignore the financial straits I was soon in. I wanted to enjoy my independence. Wherever I went on campus I saw students revelling in the hedonism that defined university life in the early seventies. Few of them seemed to pay much heed to their studies. It sufficed to absorb knowledge through osmosis, their presence on campus the only requirement to gain a degree with honours, which meant they might as well spend their days having fun. Even the serious ones with a passion for student politics, who denounced the Vietnam War at rallies in the Agora most lunch times and organised protest marches through the industrial district immediately south of the university in a gesture of solidarity with the working class, with whom they assumed shared values and allegiance—even they seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely.

I was very impressionable in my first months at university. I remember a couple of students who strolled around the campus in fur coats (well before winter), their lovely thick beards and long hair reminding me of Paul McCartney on the cover of
Let it Be
. I yearned to be like them, to walk, laugh and fraternise as they did. Since leaving Portland I had been growing my hair longer, relieved that my father wasn't around to order it cut. I cultivated thick sideburns. But what I saved on haircuts wasn't enough for a fur coat.

On campus strange activities occurred daily. Odd behaviour seemed to indicate strength of character, a truly liberated soul. So no matter how silly it seemed at face value, it was worthy of admiration. Worthy of inspiration but not imitation for that would be ridiculous.

There was a student who stood silently above an internal stairwell in the library each day, dressed in a red-collared black cape, wearing ghoulish makeup, rather like a vampire. His arms were crossed and, except for his eyes, which followed your ascent or descent, he was motionless.

Perhaps he was part of a club called Strawberry, an anarchist group whose solemn duty it was to satirise academic life.

One day some Strawberries invaded a Mexican History lecture I was attending. Dressed as peasant followers of the revolutionary Emilio Zapata, they brandished toy guns beneath huge sombreros.

The lecturer stormed out, humiliated.

¡Viva l'insurrección!

Some days the university seemed like a circus.

Other activities were more orthodox but no less histrionic. As I mentioned, often there were students delivering ardent orations in the Agora outside the library, usually on the evils of the Vietnam War, which led to confrontations with student supporters of the government or to occupations of the administrative wing and the Vice-Chancellor's office, where furniture was smashed and banners dangled from windows.

The orators were Marxists, immensely popular and charismatic. I listened to them, envying their confidence and commitment. I agreed with much of what they had to say but doubted whether I would risk expulsion or worse, jail, which seemed to be their goal.

I already considered myself a socialist without going to the extreme of calling myself a revolutionary. When Maoist students, the most radical revolutionaries on campus, handed me an English translation of
Th
e
Little Red Book
and recommended I discipline my mind, a quick perusal led me to doubt their sanity.

As I watched the barricades go up and the waving of red flags by Lenin and Trotsky look-alikes (none of the Maoists on our campus had the physiognomy to mimic their idol), it occurred to me that student activism was a pantomime or the political equivalent of
sowing wild oats
.

The other
wild oats
thing was going on everywhere too. The colleges of residence, Glenn and Menzies, seemed to pulsate with sex at any time of the day or night, with the possible exception from daybreak to mid-morning when exhaustion set in. It was as if I were the only one of several thousand students not involved, which left me feeling wildly desperate.

As in high school I became infatuated with unbecoming ease. Many female students wore no bras beneath their T-shirts, and their jeans were as taut as sausage skins. If the sun toyed with their golden hair I wanted to take it in my fingers and bury my face in it.

Of course nothing of the sort occurred. It wasn't something you could just do without taking certain preliminary steps, of which I seemed incapable. On the rare occasions when a female student greeted me unexpectedly or asked me to listen to some music with her in a student lounge (Step One) I turned to stone. My mind solidified like lava oozing into an arctic sea. It was absurd. I kept thinking
what is wrong with me?

I tried to develop a social life off campus. I heard of a folk club in the city that was free. I went and sat alone pretending to be an aficionado, suffering waves of nauseating self-consciousness but determined to come again until I was a familiar enough presence for some of the regulars to make my acquaintance. But after a few times, sitting alone the whole evening, I lost my nerve.

Meanwhile Fleur was demanding the rent money.

The mistake I was to regret for the next few years became apparent within weeks of shifting to Melbourne. Had I kept the Commonwealth Scholarship, a living allowance would have been lodged on a regular basis into my own bank account. The Repatriation Department, however, considered me Denny's dependant, and the money from my bursary went straight to him. He was supposed to forward it all to me. Instead he channelled most of it into his TAB account. My situation soon became desperate. Fleur was demanding payment. And I was forced into the humiliating position of inventing excuses. At times I barely had enough for my bus fares.

At uni I made the acquaintance of Charles and Ian. They had seen me sitting on a bench outside the Eastern Lecture Theatre complex and must have noticed I cut a pathetic figure. They assumed I knew nobody on campus. But I was too ashamed to tell them that for the moment companionship wasn't my most pressing need. My first impression of them was hardly favourable but I was grateful for the distraction. They told me almost straightaway they had just abandoned the idea of becoming Christian Brothers, alluding to the reason with a wink and nod towards the female students milling around.

Despite his background, or maybe because of it, Charles was a rakish character, whose gaunt face and dark beard resembled D.H. Lawrence's, a comparison he alluded to often enough by drawing attention to a photo of the author on the back cover of his copy of
Sons and Lovers
. He had remarkably skinny legs and moved with a jaunty gait that created an impression he was rather keen to reach his destination, whatever it was: lectures, female dormitory, lunch.

Ian, on the other hand, was a nuggetty redhead with teeth that looked like a hastily erected barrier around some wild animal's lair. Like Charles, he was majoring in English literature, dissecting such novels as
Pride and Prejudice
,
Jane Eyre
and
Sons and Lovers
. He had no interest in study
per se
. It was a means to an end, a way into some comfortable career, probably teaching, although anything labelled professional would suffice, while his heart was in sport—football. Nothing would have pleased him more than a career in the VFL. That much we had in common. He had the temperament, too, being pugnacious and dogged, but like me he didn't quite have a professional footballer's physique.

Charles on the other hand aspired to a literary life, which was perhaps why he sought a comparison to Lawrence. He already wrote lyrics and accompanying melodies for the guitar, which he saw as a kind of apprenticeship. He was in no hurry. He was enjoying his youth. But one day he would turn his talent to serious writing. He fancied himself as a poet. His favourite poet was Keats.

They were both from middle-class families and turned out to be politically conservative. But they were personable enough and I was in dire need of a bit of company, if only to take my mind off financial matters.

Not long after I met these two, a young woman took up lodgings with Fleur. I seem to recall her name was Maureen. She was Fleur's niece. As was my wont I became absurdly infatuated. She was wilful and eloquent in her own peculiar way. She was ravishing despite a surfeit of freckles. She soon let me know I was in the presence of a female with a little too much sophistication for a country lad like me. She lived for clubbing. She had a lover. She hinted she took drugs whenever the mood was right. Her father, a divorced airline pilot, was worried enough to send her to his formidable sister to see if she could straighten her out. But even Fleur found her challenging.