You Never Met My Father (37 page)

I had joined a university team and was performing well. Pat occasionally came to watch me play, the only diversion she allowed herself. But not Denny. I went to the trots with him a few more times in the hope he would discover what interested me and might decide to be a part of it.

My mother was worried. “You're not starting to bet too, are you?” she asked one evening as we did the dishes together. “That'd be the death of me, darlin'.”

I looked around to make sure my father couldn't hear. “I'm only going to keep an eye on him. He mightn't bet so much with me there. Does he give you enough to makes ends meet?”

“I make sure he doesn't get his hands on my cheque.”

She had her hands submerged in the sink. I put my arm across her shoulders, which drooped under the weight of my sympathy.

“Don't worry, Mum,” I whispered. “Jean won't stay with us forever. I'll bet she's gone within the year once the baby's born. And I'll be finished uni in a couple more years. Before you know it you'll be back in Portland.”

“What about Carol? She'll want to go to uni. There's another three years.”

“She'll be old enough to look after herself. When I finish I'll get a good job and set you up in Portland.”

I gave her shoulder a squeeze and she looked at me gratefully.

“You'll have a better life then, I promise.”

“Some people are just born unlucky,” she said, not believing me.

She placed another dish on the rack for me to dry.

One day when I came home from university Pat announced grimly that Denny was in the Repatriation Hospital, having urgent surgery to remove a stomach tumour. He was in his early forties. I remembered how he had complained for years about the pain in his stomach. His doctor had treated him for an ulcer but he'd insisted he had cancer. He used to tell me there was blood in his stools. Perhaps he had been frightened and had wanted someone to believe him. But I had taken little notice, had even thought on more than one occasion it served him right for the hard times he'd given us.

I didn't visit him in the hospital, which was only in a neighbouring suburb, but Pat went each day, sometimes with Carol. When he came home a week or so later I hardly recognised him. He seemed decades older. His hair was almost white. He had already lost a third of his weight. For the first time in my life I was heavier than him. He moved around hunched like a person who had been badly winded. Half his stomach had been removed.

I felt sorry for him. There was a good chance he wouldn't survive long. If anything the anger etched into his gaunt features looked more intense than ever. I think he knew that any remaining traces of his youthful physique had been erased by this latest assault on his body.

I wanted to show him my sympathy, but stupidly I asked, “Are you all right?”

He grimaced and glared. “What's it bloodywell look like?”

And then, guessing my thoughts fairly accurately, he added, “The sooner I kick the bucket the better off you'll be.”

Pat was moved enough to put her own misfortunes aside for the time being. She nursed him. He went upstairs to bed for a week. She administered his medications and took him meals, soups mainly because that was about all he could eat. She was aware of the significance of his latest setback. It was another cruel, perhaps deadly, twist of fate for the young man she had fallen for so many years ago, whom she hadn't stopped loving despite all that had happened, all the ‘rotten luck' he'd been dealt.

I helped out as much as I could, running errands, keeping him in smokes, but my sympathy for him ebbed and flowed. I thought, if he dies, she can go back to Portland, my bursary would be sent to her, she would forward it all to me, and I…well, I would be where I wanted to be. Then guilt crept up on me, like a sea fog.

To avoid thinking about him I spent more hours in the library hidden behind books. With my degree well under way, I tried to convince myself that there were more important things to worry about than a dying father. The nature of society, for one. More Marx, Weber, Parsons, Merton. The indomitable march of history…

I was so engrossed I hardly took any notice of my sister's pregnancy. So much so that after she went off to the Queen Victoria Hospital in the centre of the city and came home with a swarthy baby that had a smudge of sooty hair, I was more surprised than anyone, including Denny, whose reaction I watched with a degree of cynicism. We had a coloured baby in the family.

Yet to my astonishment Denny adored it at first sight—his first grandchild. The colour of the baby's skin mattered ‘not one iota', as he put it. Seeing my father, still recovering, still emaciated, standing on the front doorstep in flannel shirt and boxer shorts, looking down with a beatific smile at the infant cradled in his arms, I was struck by ambivalent emotions. Had he held me as an infant in his arms like that? I had no recollection of it, no photographic evidence, no tactile experience as I was growing up that might have indicated a loving bond existed between us. I wondered if his recent brush with mortality had something to do with his new-found affection.

I took a photo for posterity.

Having a baby in the house was just the tonic both my parents needed. Young life took my father's mind off the gravity of his condition and hastened his recovery. You'd see him heating bottles of milk, testing the temperature by squirting it onto his wrist; even see him changing nappies when Pat or Jean wasn't doing it. You'd see him with the daily laundry, washing the soiled nappies and hanging them out while whistling a quiet tune. If you woke in the night to a cry from the baby you'd soon hear Denny's muffled voice offering to settle him down for Jean so she could get some proper sleep.

And Pat was just as solicitous. The baby took her out of herself. She carried it around swaddled in a pale blue blanket. She talked to it and blew bubbles until it smiled. She gently pressed her finger against its nose or the dimple in its chin. She kept telling Jean how lovely it was and offering maternal advice. She doted on it as if it were her own.

Perhaps that's why within six months Jean was gone. As headstrong as ever, Jean would have resented all the children-rearing suggestions. She had her own ideas on good parenting and she could only see disputes as the child grew older. So she left to board in a distant suburb for a while and then to return to New Zealand.

A wistful quiet descended on our tenement.

Despite being forced back into the bosom of the family, I tried to maintain at least a semblance of independence. I wanted my parents to understand I was no longer a child. I spent as much time away from Boyd Crescent as possible.

My friend from university, Charles, had a car. So I went on trips with him or to parties. Someone was getting married in a country town; we went to the wedding and stayed the weekend. We had a few days camping on the coast. We went on a trip to the snow with a youth group from his church.

Towards the end of the year I accompanied him to Sydney to see the Pope, a pilgrimage that meant nothing to me beyond an excuse to get away for awhile, never having been a Catholic and abandoning Christianity after my philosophy tutorials on the existence of God convinced me that He was, by definition, impossible, an all good, all powerful being, who permitted the existence of evil. But to go I had to ask my father for funds. To my surprise he agreed and gave me what I considered a generous amount of money for the trip.

In Sydney we stayed with Cynthia, an ex-school friend of my elder sister, who had kept in touch with Jean and left an open invitation for any of our family to stay if we ever went north. She had married into a large family that had recently been featured in a popular national magazine. The patriarch was a renowned cook. One son was a ballet dancer. There was a violinist. The mother was a pianist. The youngest child was a prodigy who was already composing symphonies. The magazine had labelled them bohemian. How Cynthia had encountered a member of this family I had no idea. Perhaps it was because she was a talented artist and singer, and came from a middle-class family that was immersed in the Arts, someone with a creative streak who fitted effortlessly into the bohemian scene. The entire family was vegetarian. They made their own beer and yoghurt, and listened to classical music on the ABC. They painted and danced and sang. For me, at least, this was an astonishing experience. They lived in an ivy-clad terrace house in Annandale, which was full of clutter and pungent cooking odours, with musical instruments and easels in various rooms, and bookcases in passages and ceramic pots with exotic plants near windows, unlike the tidiness, the sterility, the smell of disinfectant in our place. It was so far removed from the insular world I had grown up in that I had to shake myself now and then to make sure I wasn't dreaming. The way they lived opened my eyes to all kinds of possibilities.

Charles and I went to see the Pope. We waited in the crowd that lined the road from the airport and caught a glimpse of him as he was driven past. But we also went to Bondi beach. And one night we went to a strip club in Kings Cross.

Charles was unfazed by the mixture of spirituality and hedonism. Both were important to him. He liked the Catholic rituals more than the faith. Appearances were what mattered. Barely catching sight of the Pope didn't disappoint him; he was able to return and impress his family and fellow worshippers with the tale of his papal encounter. The time we went camping, he found uncomfortable and a bore. Nevertheless, he took photos that belied his experience, and on return he invented an adventure to go with the pictorial display that kept his family enthralled.

He wanted to impress me too. So he took me once to his home in East Malvern, a posh suburb, south-east of the city, a comfortable Edwardian dwelling in a street lined with elms. I met his parents. It was a Saturday. Both were reading in the living room. But they were dressed in their Sunday best. Both raised their heads momentarily to greet me politely and to study the boy from public housing whom their son had charitably befriended, before returning to their books. The house was clean and, unlike our stay with the bohemians in Sydney, everything was in place. In that respect it had more in common with our place.

Charles pointed out the antiques: the teak dining table and tapestry chairs, the chaise lounge, the genuine Persian rugs, the elegant chandelier, the sideboards and buffets and bookshelves, the leather-bound books, the statuettes and Victorian oil-paintings of pastoral scenes.

His home was as strange to me as the house in Sydney, where at least I had felt relaxed enough to move. Charles' family home had little to do with homeliness. It was formal, like an old-fashioned museum. Disaster would befall the entire house if anything was moved an inch.

He showed me framed photo portraits of his siblings. Two of his brothers were at Melbourne University, studying law. His sister was at La Trobe doing an honours degree in economics. They were a brilliant family, he wanted me to know. Every child had made it to university.

Before I left he took me outside so I could watch him shoot at birds with his air gun.

A few weeks after I returned from Sydney, one of my mother's cousins, Carl, dropped in while he was passing through Melbourne. How he knew where we lived I have no idea. Perhaps he had found out through our relatives. Years before, he had stayed a few days with us in Portland during one of Denny's long absences. I remembered the occasion because he had baked a huge salmon with an apple in its mouth, the first baked fish I had ever eaten and the first man I had seen cooking. I remembered him too because of the way his sides had touched door frames as he passed through. This time, at Boyd Crescent, he only stayed a few hours. But it was long enough for him to reminisce about the years he had shared with my mother in Rosedale. They talked and laughed until she wept. She grieved for her carefree childhood. Carl squeezed her fondly and told Denny how he'd had a crush on her throughout his teenage years, and what a lucky bloke my father was to have married her.

Denny nodded and pursed his lips but said nothing. He didn't know how to respond.

When he learnt that Carl was a chef for the Fishermen's Club in Eden on the south coast of New South Wales, he asked for a job in his kitchen, on the sly, so as not to relinquish the pensions. I was to go as well and Carl would ask the manager to take me on as a barman. I was to be my father's alibi if the pension police got wind of his deception. It was during the summer holidays and I desperately wanted to earn some cash of my own.

As we set off towards Gippsland I experienced a queer sense of satisfaction. We were heading for work together, acting like responsible adults, working collaboratively as father and son. The times I had spent socialising with him at the trots finally seemed to be paying off. I was on his radar at last. I wanted to point this out to him but couldn't bring myself to do it, fearing such a delicate matter might prompt him to change his mind. I didn't want him turning around.