You Never Met My Father (42 page)

“Have you been in here before?” I ventured.

He returned his gaze to me, surprised that I didn't know. “They tried to once but I did a runner. I've been in others like it. This kind of place is my second home,” he declared with a cynical snort.

I refrained from asking him where he thought his first one might be.

“Do you receive good treatment?”

He snorted again and turned his head away. I thought he wasn't going to answer.

“When you're in a place like this,” he said eventually, “you're just a bloody guinea pig.”

I frowned but remained silent, waiting for him to elaborate.

He paused again, rocking slightly, as if his thoughts were too disturbing to express. “Once they tried out that LSD on me, just to see its effects.”

“When was that?” I said, sceptical.

“In the early sixties, well before flower power got onto it.”

I asked if it had any effect on him.

“They ended up giving me too much of the stuff. It took me back a long way. Too bloody far. I went through my own birth like it was the real thing.”

Despite his mirthless laughter, his face was soft, as if the memory distressed him. I knew that stuff could do permanent damage to the mind. I mulled it over. Did that explain his behaviour, his deteriorating mental condition, his suicide attempts? Then he started to tell me how the doctors had once asked for ten volunteers for a medical experiment.

“Fancy asking these poor buggers to volunteer.” He gave a sweeping gesture, a familiar glimmer of anger in his eyes. “Some of them, they're as nutty as bloody fruitcakes. A lot were POWs. They come home looking like skeletons. Like that old fella, Teddy, there.” He pointed at the naked inmate on the pool table. “Never recovered from what the Japs did to him. But at least I was as strong as a bloody bull, physically, so I put my hand up, to spare one of these poor bastards.”

“What was the experiment?”

“Encephalitis. That's what they gave us. Trying to work on a cure, they told us. A good cause. All for the sake of bloody humanity.” He paused for a moment. “Just two of us survived.”

Stunned, I took a quick look at him. His jaw was tense. He was staring, moist-eyed, at the men in the room as if they were his mates, his kin. I thought of the times he had been placed in an asylum, suicidal. And they had asked for volunteers for something they probably knew was going to cause deaths. It would have been like a second chance for him. That afternoon he also revealed he had once received shock treatment on thirty consecutive days.

I shared tea with him without further discussion. I might have interrogated him some more about his time in asylums, which most likely would have revealed more horror stories, but I was feeling too fragile, too depressed by the scene before me.

“I have to go,” I said, getting to my feet.

He signalled to an orderly.

“Thanks for coming,” he said again. “I really appreciate it.”

I looked back at him sitting there passively, without a skerrick of his aggression on display. I could have believed, in that moment, he was not the same man I had been living with, masquerading as my father. He gave me another fleeting smile as I turned to hide my emotions.

I went across to La Trobe University and found a quiet spot to sit by the moat to recover some composure before I headed back to Carlton. The campus, I realised, had become my refuge. There were ducks and water hen waddling around but no students nearby. The afternoon was unusually quiet. I sank into a morose reverie.

While my father's psychiatric history might have helped to explain his appalling behaviour and his violent outbursts, I wasn't prepared to say it exonerated him. But I was ready to concede his time spent in grim institutions like Bundoora, suffering reckless medical experiments over the years, would not have helped him. Just an hour or so in there was more than enough for me. I couldn't imagine what state of mind he would have been in after spending months at a time inside over many years.

I remembered the occasions when he had reappeared in our lives, sometimes inexplicably exuberant, at others washed out and depressed. It made some sense to me now. I had been fearful and contemptuous of him most of my life for all the hardship and humiliation he had brought upon us. But as I headed home I felt some sympathy for what he had endured. A grain of compassion took root in my befuddled soul.

How much time he actually spent at Bundoora I am unable to determine. Access to the Bundoora files was limited through Administrative Release rather than Freedom of Information with no right of appeal. I found evidence of his shock treatment at other hospitals but no mention of medical experiments in any of the files I viewed, although that didn't surprise me. No institutional authority would have been foolish enough to leave a paper trail of the crimes it might have committed.

While my father remained in the asylum our lives seemed less desperate. My mother still received her pension. The Public Trustee didn't give us much extra money but enough to live off. I went to uni by bus each day, an hour long trip that took me through Fairfield and West Heidelberg, quite close to our former abode. I never stopped off. (It took me another thirty years before I went back to take a look at Boyd Crescent. The house was still the same but some attempt had been made to beautify the park.) Carol kept going to the same high school, although we had one of those unspoken sibling compacts to avoid travelling on the same bus. Pat kept the house cleaned, the clothes washed and the shopping done. The nearest supermarket was a small grocery in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, to which she drove once or twice a week. It was run by a ‘wog', as she called its cheerful Italian owner, but she found shopping there more tolerable than at Northlands.

Carlton in those days was still working class, with a bohemian element on account of its proximity to Melbourne University, but not the working class that my mother was used to. It was populated by migrants, who couldn't speak English in a way she could comprehend, who preferred to ‘ jabber away in a foreign tongue', which irritated her. She kept to herself, distrustful of neighbours, feeling isolated, bitter about her life. I could see it in her face, which was starting to harden and lose its gaunt beauty, formed by years of fortitude. Her mouth was drawn down in a permanent expression of discontent.

Almost daily she lamented leaving Portland where she'd had friends, a job, her own income, a decent house, an extended family. The distance from her family was one of the hardest things for her to bear. Her brother and sister in Portland had been the bedrock of her sanity. Without them to turn to whenever Denny went off the tracks or spun out of control she would never have been able to cope with her life—of that I was sure. It distressed her to be so far away. She was turning sour.

But she was also proud and could be quite obstinate. Again I suggested she take the opportunity, while Denny was out of the way, to shift back to Portland.

“Just go down there and see if you can get your old job back.”

I thought that would appeal to her.

“What about Denny?”

“He'll survive,” I said, barely able to contain my frustration. “When he gets out he can go back there too.”

“He hates the place.”

“And you hate it here? It's about time you put yourself first. It's always been him or us. Think of yourself for a change.”

But she wouldn't hear of it. Despite everything she had endured, she remained loyal to him, a loyalty that was costing her any hope of happiness.

Yet she was less stressed with Denny out of the way. There weren't any tantrums or abuse to deal with. No knives were wielded in unpredictable bursts of anger. Our lives settled into a routine that was uneventful. If happiness eluded her, some level of equanimity settled over her at least. She had what she called ‘a bit of peace and quiet', which was probably the best she could hope for.

Once or twice a week she went off to Bundoora to visit Denny for an hour.

I was still convalescing. Seven months after I contracted hepatitis its effects had only abated slightly. I was seldom able to stay awake beyond nine o'clock. I had no reserves of energy, no stamina. I forced myself to go to a few student parties despite the likelihood of falling asleep at them and medical orders to avoid the consumption of alcohol. My anxiety in the presence of females failed to dampen my desire for a girlfriend if for no other reason than I wanted to be able to consider myself normal. And there were other compelling reasons.

Sex. Love. I believed love would be my salvation, would lift me out of the mire into which my life was sinking. The longing for that explosion of smitten love was rather debilitating. Sex on the other hand seemed less exalted but far more urgent. I rarely went into a newsagency in those days without sidling over to a certain stand to flick through the most promising girlie magazines, in the company of half a dozen other furtive men. With regard to other forms of literature I had already got my hands on a copy of
Lady Chatterly's
Lover
and the more thrilling
Tropic of Cancer
.

I met Claire at one of the parties I went to. She was a friend of a female student I knew. The moment I set eyes on her I was smitten. I had been smitten often enough throughout my teenage years, but this time I resolved to ask for a date, at least, no matter how inarticulate my self-consciousness left me. I usually fell for petite girls, but she was quite buxom, although I didn't notice it at the time because I was mesmerised by her raven hair (raven again!), which cascaded down her back as far as her waist. She and Kate, the student she accompanied, were both sitting on a rug. Kate was rather gregarious, jocular and homely, which made conversation with her easy. I steeled myself, anticipating an ordeal, went over and sat next to her, cross-legged. For a while we joked about parties and university, as if we were above it all. Claire seemed content to sit and listen. Eventually I summoned the courage to lean past Kate and ask Claire for a dance. She gave Kate an apologetic look before accepting. As we shuffled about she tried her best to discourage me. No, she wasn't a student, she was a factory worker, she hated parties, hated university types and had only come to please Kate who was trying to meet a nice boy, and why didn't I go and ask her to dance with me? I glanced at Kate. She was laughing with some other students, which eased my guilt somewhat. I turned my attention to Claire, glad the lighting was dim.

“I'd like to go out with you,” I managed to say, putting my mouth close to her ear, so I didn't have to shout above the music.

Amused by her failure to deter me, Claire accepted, but in a manner that suggested I would have been wiser to have taken her hint to move on. I hastily made arrangements before I explained I had to go.

“Why so early?” she asked, her head awry, curious.

“It's past my bedtime.”

“It's a little after ten,” she said, doubting me. “Home to the wife, is it?”

“No,” I said, surprised she would think it. “I just need my beauty sleep.”

I chuckled at my feeble joke, reluctant to tell her the real reason: my slow recovery from hepatitis. But she only managed an awkward smile.

We started going to cheap restaurants and movies in the city. One our third or fourth date, we returned to her father's house in the eastern suburbs, where she was temporarily staying. Her father and stepmother were out. She took me into her bedroom and we had sex, a brief, fumbling encounter, which had her guessing correctly about my virginity.

She reached over and squeezed my arm. “Cheer up,” she grinned. “It's embarrassing for everyone the first time.”

Soon she shifted into a house with some of her friends and I started spending my weekends with her.

If my mother disapproved she didn't comment. Ever since Denny's siege she had been treating me differently, as if I were no longer her ‘little man' but an adult. Having to deal with the aftermath of that debacle had been my rite of passage. She was relieved to have someone sharing responsibility in the family. It was evident in such banal matters as using the car. I no longer asked to borrow it; rather, I merely mentioned I'd be taking it. I even had some say in the programs we watched on TV. If I decided to sleep overnight with my girlfriend, that was no longer her business.

In a quiet way I relished this change, which I felt I had earned. It was obvious that together we could handle our affairs much more effectively without Denny around, even with the pittance the Public Trustee allowed us. I started to feel in control of my life. I was still nineteen but had grown up suddenly, maybe a little prematurely, but with few regrets, glad to be abandoning the hapless shambles of my adolescence.

A new football season began but my interest in playing was over. At the end of the previous season, I had disgraced myself in a final, playing against the all-Jewish team, AJAX, when one of its players defended his goal by kneeing someone from my side in the groin, and I yelled out, ‘Jewish bastard', intending to offend, without much thought for the consternation and hurt it would cause around the ground. I had never hated Jewish people or any other race of people, which, in a way, made my behaviour less excusable. I might have once been an ignorant boy from a Housing Commission estate, but not anymore. I might still live on an estate, but I had a university education. I knew of the historical suffering of the Jews. I understood the odium of racism. I should have known better. I should have gone into their rooms after the game and apologised, but I didn't. And I still live with the shame of it. I was suspended for four games, but I vowed never to play again. I never spoke about it to Claire, or anybody else for that matter. My mother, of course, was disappointed and baffled. She had supported me faithfully over the years and had long harboured a hope that I might one day play football at an elite level.

Neither Claire nor her friends were the least bit interested in sport. Art, about which I knew a little, and music, particularly ‘the blues', about which I knew less, occupied them to the detriment of most other things outside of sex. Food, for instance, was of such little importance to them that I often found myself staring into an empty fridge, or at things on shelves so old they were giving new meaning to life. Meals were irregular and often a mere irritating adjunct to the important artistic acts that were taking place before my eyes. If she made a meal it was usually frog-in-a-hole with a bacon side dish.