You Never Met My Father (43 page)

I began to associate insalubrity with creativity.

It so happened that Claire was a gifted artist, who did the most exquisite life drawings and painted many of the grotesque figures that haunted her imagination and dreams: vile, gnomish creatures that unsettled me and made me wonder about the state of her mind. The contrast was astonishing. It was difficult to accept the paintings were from the same hand as the drawings, which delighted in the human form. Her explanation was simple: the body was natural, our animal state, while the mind was cultural or social and reflected how far humans had removed themselves from nature. Our retreat from Eden was mental, not physical.

I had long, enlightening discussions with her about art and how it reflected the evolution of human society. She talked about contemporary culture with a passion most people I knew only showed at sporting events. Her understanding of the world was much deeper, I realised, than any of the glib recycled commentary I heard at university. It seemed based on experience rather than theory. For every idea I put to her she had a considered response that surprised me. Despite my education I was learning more from her than the books I pawed over daily or the smug tutors whose musings I endured each week.

She took me to art galleries to view the latest works of Melbourne artists. I went with her to the National Gallery of Victoria on the wide leafy boulevard of St Kilda Road. In its gloomy courtyard she stood for half an hour before Rodin's imperious statue of Balzac, who seemed to be emerging in all his towering glory from a clinging primordial bog.

I was overwhelmed and a little apprehensive to find myself in her company—at art galleries, or in her rented room, or in the company of her friends. What they thought of me I had no idea. I was a university student, and that, to say the least, made them distrustful.

One night she disappeared. We were in bed together when she got up and left the room around 10pm. She didn't come back. I searched around the house and the street, but couldn't find her. None of her housemates knew where she was. None of them seemed to care. They had their own preoccupations. I slept alone in her bed and went home the next day none the wiser. When I managed to contact her a few days later she said she had been in some trouble with the police. Her voice over the phone sounded deadpan. We arranged to meet in a park but she didn't show. I went to her place and begged to know what was going on. She was propped up in bed, watching TV, looking wan and fatigued.

I turned off the TV.

She looked at me for a few moments without a word.

“Well?” I said.

“I'm an epileptic.”

There had been a boy in my class at high school who used to have fits and we had to put a ruler in his mouth to stop him swallowing his tongue. That was the extent of my knowledge of epilepsy. I hadn't yet read Dostoyesvky. I didn't know Charles Dickens, Beethoven, Van Gogh and dozens of other great writers and artists were epileptics. It almost seemed a prerequisite of genius.

When Claire was seven or eight she had ridden her pushbike into the back of a parked truck, which had resulted in head injuries. Soon after, she had suffered a seizure. Epilepsy was diagnosed and she was put on medication. The medication prevented fits, but it wasn't all good news. The side effects of the medication left her with little control of her moods.

When her mother fell ill with cancer and died, Claire had plunged into an emotional pit from which she was still struggling to escape. In a constant mood of gloom and self-deprecation she began a relationship with a member of the Melbourne chapter of the Hell's Angels, and later with a warlock who had the ability to change physical matter before her eyes and claimed to possess the power to eliminate undesirable people with nothing more than his mind. She had broken with him just before she met me. But she was attracted to people like that. When it came to lovers I was the exception rather than the rule. I gave her some hope. She wanted to change. She was fed up with cynicism and gloom. But bouts of depression still affected her.

Depression crept up behind her like the bogeyman and grabbed her by the neck. The other night when it happened she left her house and wandered the streets in the dark, dressed inappropriately for the freezing conditions. The police found her sitting in a gutter, assumed she was on drugs, bustled her into their paddy wagon, took her to the lockup and, as was their wont, slapped her around a bit and strip-searched her. Later they had allowed her to phone her father, who came to the lockup in his army uniform and persuaded them to release her.

As she sat under her blankets, hugging her knees, I asked her what triggered her bouts of depression.

“Work, usually.”

She managed a soft laugh.

“Give it up then,” I said with an earnest gesture, “And why don't you try living without your medication?”

She took my advice on both counts and straightaway found the rim of the pit within reach.

When Denny came home after a couple of months, earlier than I had expected, he inspected the flat, went onto the balcony and cast his gaze over the dismal estate, declaring it a vast improvement on our Olympic Village tenement, as if it vindicated his reckless behaviour. He had with him a number of tiled concrete flowers pots that he had made in therapy sessions.

Pat had helped him load them into the car boot after his discharge from the hospital, and together they had struggled with them up the stairs. When I arrived home from a weekend with Claire, the pots were in the middle of the lounge room.

“What are you going to do with them?” I asked, dismayed by the amount of space they took up.

“Sell 'em,” he said. “There must be a thousand flats around here. Someone'll buy 'em.”

I could see the fervour in his eyes. He stared a lot. He moved around each room, studying its potential as a workshop. He pursed his lips as he did whenever he was in a strategic mood.

His early release was on condition that he attend occupational therapy sessions at the hospital two or three days a week as an outpatient. He only went for two weeks. His absences led to the hospital discharging him, which terminated the Public Trustee's authority over his financial affairs.

Even as he regained control of his pension, Denny had his eyes on other sources of income. The pots were a god-send. Within a couple of days he had hawked them all, which prompted him to buy more tiles and concrete pots. For the tiles he went to display rooms and purchased seconds, which he brought home by the bootload. Soon he had a brain wave—tiled coffee tables. He bought pieces of chipboard of various dimensions and boxes of screw-on table legs. Tables were quicker to construct. Laying out the patterns was easier; gluing the tiles and grouting less tedious. And they leant themselves to larger tiles than could be applied to flower pots. Again easier and quicker. And he could adapt his carpentry skills. Our lounge room became his workshop, full of coffee tables under construction; our kitchen a storeroom of raw materials. Its furniture had to be rearranged. The table was shoved against a wall. In one corner tiles descended like a multicoloured glacier, fanning out from the ceiling, occupying a quarter of the kitchen floor.

Pat wasn't too pleased with the appropriation of her kitchen but she seemed resigned to it.

“At least it keeps him busy,” she sighed.

I'd help to carry the tables to the gloomy foyer of a residential tower early each morning, while Denny, in a cardigan and PP trousers from a charity store, set up a makeshift stall outside the lifts to await customers, right under a ‘No hawkers' sign. I couldn't watch him do business. Th e exaggerated smile as potential buyers approached upset me for some reason. I kept thinking,
I'm glad I'm not you
.
I'm glad I don't live your life. It must be
hell, every moment of it
. As I moved away I realised I didn't hate him. I had often feared him but never hated him. All I had ever felt for him was a humiliating pity.

I left him there until late afternoon, when I returned to help him home with any table he hadn't managed to sell. Sometimes he arrived home early, rubbing his hands together, having sold his stock, eager to finish more tables. He never asked for assistance with their construction, sceptical of my ability to meet his standards.

Eventually a janitor on the estate discovered what he was doing and he was ordered to dismantle his stall or face the police. Nevertheless, he kept hawking his wares, employing an alternative strategy, riding the lifts, taking the tables a couple at a time door to door, with even greater success than he had in the foyer.

One day he arrived home and asked me to come downstairs with him. When we were standing under the flats, between the concrete pillars, he pointed at our car. “See that yellow one next to it?” he said, lifting his hand onto my shoulder.

It looked fairly new, a later model than our own Holden.

“It's yours.”

I was astonished. A car for me? How could he have afforded even the deposit for it? Surely not from hawking tiled tables around the housing estate. It crossed my mind that he'd had an improbable triumph at the races, but we would have heard the hissing and exhortations or at the very least had takeaways. I had no idea how easy it was to get credit.

“It's an automatic,” he added proudly. “Go on, take it for a spin.”

He dangled the keys before me.

“What have you bought that for?” I muttered, thinking of a thousand other needy things he could have spent money on.

“For you, my friend. To get you to uni.” He gaped at me, dismayed at my ingratitude, “You must be sick of the bloody bus. Besides, you've got a girlfriend now, I hear.”

I guess it was my reward for sorting matters out after his siege but that didn't occur to me at the time. I focused on the absurdity of anyone in our financial straits having two cars.

“Unbelievable,” I muttered.

I headed upstairs without further words.

He arrived shortly after and out of breath from the climb. “What's the matter with you?” he demanded, his temperature rising. “Why didn't you take it for a spin?”

“I'm hungry,” I said lamely.

I was in the kitchen, buttering a slice of bread to eat, to mollify my anxiety and anger. The knife I was using had a loose wooden handle that over the years had begun to rot away in the daily dishwashing ritual.

“Look at this,” I said, trying to sound reasonable but conscious of the shrill pitch of my voice. I pulled open the cutlery drawer behind my chair. “We need new knives and forks. These are all falling to pieces.”

I wasn't game to add ‘instead of another bloody car' but he got my drift.

I disappeared into my room, but the next day as a gesture of conciliation I asked him for the keys to the new car so I could go to university.

He was delighted.

One of my subjects was urban sociology. I had to attend a tutorial whose focus was on high-rise housing and its impact on the family. Students eager to display their erudition or their solidarity with the ‘proletariat' who were housed no better than animals in a zoo by an oppressive state, raised issues like the paradox of isolation in a high-density community, crime rates, delinquency, alienation, the absence of critical services, such as health and education. The Housing Commission estate in Carlton, one student mentioned by way of example, housed over seven thousand people, the population of an average-sized town, but had no supermarket, no medical centre, no welfare centre, no police station, no primary school and no high school. I bowed my head so no one would notice my flushed complexion. As each issue was discussed and subsumed into one theory or another (but predominately Marxist social theory) I remained silent, despite agreeing with much of their analysis, too ashamed to reveal my familiarity with the subject matter. (My essay on the topic read like an autobiography.)

When I returned from university, tea was on the table. As I sat down to eat I noticed my mother or sister had set the places with brand new cutlery.

Denny was in front of the TV in the lounge where he preferred to eat.

“Where did these come from?” I said loud enough for him to hear, again sounding shrill.

“Your father got them,” Pat informed me when no response was forthcoming from the lounge.

“How could we afford a car
and
these?”

I noticed a sly smirk on my sister's face. Carol evidently knew the story. “They didn't cost a cent,” she said. “Dad exchanged them.”

“Exchanged them?” I gaped at her. “You don't exchange knives and bloody forks.”

She shrugged, content to let the evidence speak for itself.

“Besides, who'd take them?” I persisted. “You know what condition they were in. They were worthless.”

“Well, you're father managed it,” my mother said with a faint smile.

There was a rare note of satisfaction in her voice.

“How?”

“I packed the old ones up in their box.” Incredibly, through all the recent turmoil she had kept their original packaging. “And then he took them in to McEwan's and asked for a replacement.”