You Never Met My Father (44 page)

“We didn't buy them there.” My voice rose again, alarmed at my mother's apparent complicity. “We got them in Portland years ago!”

My mother ignored this point to avoid its implication of impropriety. McEwan's was having a sale, she explained. Its brochure had been put in our letter box. “There were these nice sets of knives and forks.”

“To buy, not to bloodywell swap!”

My reputation as an anarchist was looking rather misplaced.

“And after what you said yesterday,” she persisted.

Denny emerged from the lounge, somewhat stooped from his chronic back pains, with his cardigan falling loosely.

“I went in there this morning and demanded a refund,” he said, reluctant to let the story unfold without his contribution. “The kid that served me, she refused. She reckoned they didn't stock that type of knife and fork.”

“I bet they didn't.”

“So I kicked up a stink.”

Shrewdly he had counted on the allegiance of other shoppers who were there at the sale in great numbers. When he started creating a scene many of them gathered around him. Confused, the young sales assistant hastened to find the manager, who strode over ready to send Denny packing. But when he failed to intimidate or shame him with declarations of dishonesty, he raised his eyes at the sales assistant as if to say
there's one at every sale
. His next move was to try to get Denny away from the crowd, offering to discuss the matter in his office.

That had been the cue for another outburst. “Isn't that bloody typical,” Denny appealed to the crowd. “They get you away from the public and that's the last anyone hears about it.”

There were murmurs of agreement.

“I'm not moving until I get a replacement for these knives and forks,” he shouted. “Is everything you sell in this place bloody rubbish? I spent half me pension on these. It's daylight robbery. Look at 'em!”

There were more rumblings of sympathy from the crowd. The manager, fearing the worst and doing some hard-nosed calculations, instructed the sales assistant to let him choose another set of cutlery and set him packing, before striding back to his office.

With a new set in his hands Denny insisted the store take back the old ones.

I marvelled at his audacity but tried to disguise my feelings lest he interpret them as approval or, worse, encouragement. I bowed my head in concentration as I applied a new stainless steel knife to my sausage.

My mother's tacit endorsement of Denny's antics concerned me. Far from being wary of any further antisocial tendencies he displayed, she was ready to participate. Since his siege and his latest stay in the asylum she seemed to have resigned herself to his world. Perhaps it was the isolation she felt in Melbourne. Better to accept Denny the way he was than suffer his hostility and estrangement as well. After all the drama in their lives she supported him. Was it enduring love? I suspect she had never lost sight of the charming young man she had married who had always had a good heart, a generous spirit, whose true nature had been thwarted and twisted by something terrible that had happened to him at the end of the war when he was hardly more than a boy and afterwards by an uncaring country, the high-spirited, charismatic bloke she'd fallen for when she was barely out of her teens herself, still full of hope and joy. She'd endured the battles he'd had over the years with his illness and the Repatriation Department as he tried to get a decent pension. She would stand by him now more than ever.

It reminded me of a short story I had recently read, about a woman whose husband went mad. He had entered another world that excluded her. But she decided she would never abandon him. If he could no longer share her reality she would follow him into his. Soon she was seeing the same flying statues that her husband saw.

For me the new cutlery was another watershed. Pat might have decided to follow Denny but not me. I was desperate for a way out before I went down the same track. Claire, not the most stable of people herself, seemed my best hope.

I eventually invited her home to meet my parents, after procrastinating for many weeks, worried about her judgment of our humble abode, worried about the impression my father might make, worried too about what she would think of the pile of tiles in the kitchen and the tables being assembled in the living room.

My parents were very polite and welcoming. Denny tried his best to be urbane. He probably guessed I had warned her about him. And for a while she considered him quite charming, wondering what my concern was.

But one day, soon after, when she arrived at the bottom of the flats she could hear him bellowing at Pat. She came upstairs rather gingerly, the outcry resounding down the stairwell, and hesitated before our door, wondering whether it was wise to interrupt. When she finally knocked, the shouting ended abruptly and he opened the door, wearing his friendliest smile.

The transformation unnerved her. He attempted to talk to her about his tables, to get her opinion on his designs, to offer her any one of her choosing. Speechless, she headed for my room.

“You're right. He's nuts,” she decided.

She begged me to get the phone connected so she could contact me to find out the lie of the land before she came around. Often she insisted we go somewhere else to talk. And the only place I could think of where we could be alone without costing money was the Melbourne Cemetery across the road. Usually we could get some peace and quiet there.

She pointed out something that I hadn't noticed about my father. He loved his tables. She had watched him on occasion applying the tiles, with as much concentration and aesthetic judgment as an artist, balancing colours and patterns. There was not a skerrick of aggression in his body as he worked on his designs. It reminded her of young children when they were handed bright paints, a brush, and some butcher paper.

“Maybe he's a frustrated artist,” she ventured.

Denny eventually tired of making the tables. But the pile of tiles in the kitchen remained and he had boxes of screw-on table legs stacked on top of each other in the lounge room with nowhere outside the flat secure enough to store them. Then one day he hit upon a novel idea: hawking table legs, minus the tops, around the housing estate.

He bundled them into sets of four, attached to each a small plastic bag containing mounting plates and screws, and went from door to door.

To my amazement people bought them. I couldn't for the life of me think why, unless it was to get rid of him. Once he even managed to exchange a set for a more edible leg at the local butcher's.

Increasingly Denny's behaviour and my mother's acquiescence were alienating me. There was a vast no-man's-land between my home life and the circles I moved in at university and even at Claire's place, where her friends and acquaintances weren't exactly conventional, law-abiding citizens. But at least we occupied some common ground (I liked their music and was beginning to understand more about art), while there was nothing, now that I'd abandoned football, which I felt I could talk to my family about. It was an effort to be in their company. We no longer seemed to share the same language.

I didn't blame them. I was the one drifting away. And I was helpless to prevent it.

I was almost grateful when Denny had another heart attack, which landed him in the Royal Melbourne Hospital for a while towards the end of 1971. I just needed a respite from him.

It wasn't long enough.

There is a note in his files on his time there.

Normally a patient of this age group would be anti-coagulated, but because of his manner of leaving the hospital this has not been possible.

It was only a few months after Denny resumed control of our financial affairs that we began to experience difficulties again.

The first sign of it came one afternoon as I arrived home from university. Denny was waiting downstairs under the flats. As I pulled up in the automatic he jogged over and instructed me to get in the other car, while he took my place in the automatic. I was to follow him. There was a note of concern in his voice and he surveyed the carpark furtively.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“Just follow me.” His manner was rather sheepish. “I'll explain later.”

He headed along St Georges Road, switched to Plenty Road, driving erratically, cautious at intersections, reckless between, speeding past the psychiatric hospital where he had spent two months, and on through the suburbs until he reached Settlement Road (which in those days was the northern limit of the city). He stopped a short distance from some kind of storage depot. There were decommissioned trams and heavy machinery stowed in its yard, and a shed near the gate with a sign indicating it was the office. The land around was degraded: rocks, rubbish, thistles. There were views across the neglected landscape to the hills around King Lake.

When I pulled up behind him he came over and told me to wait. He returned to the automatic and drove it into the depot.

After twenty minutes he emerged from the office, jogged out of the depot and slid into the passenger seat.

“Let's go,” he said, looking pleased with himself.

“Are we leaving the car behind?”

“It's collateral,” he said in an undertone, as if someone else might hear him. If he had received money for the car, he had already secreted it. “We'll get it back in a month or so. Not a word to anyone, you hear?”

I figured it was the last I'd ever see of it. Yet I didn't grasp the entire purpose of his actions until the next day, when a representative of the hire-purchase company that Denny had used knocked on our door. He demanded to know the location of the automatic, which was to be repossessed due to a series of repayment defaults.

Denny kept him at the threshold. “You'll never see it again,” he warned, his eyes bulging. “Not unless you renegotiate. It's as simple as that.”

“There's the payment of arrears to be dealt with first.”

“Out of the fucking question. I already told you that, but you won't listen. It's a completely new deal or zilch.”

It was a triumph for Denny. He had managed to turn a debt into a financial windfall from a finance company. To rub salt into the wound, he arrived home a few weeks later with a huge van, a down-payment for it made with some of the money borrowed on the automatic, under the gaze of the company's representative, who became a regular fixture beneath the flats lest the automatic miraculously reappear. I used to pass him on my way upstairs and we'd exchange a fatalistic look that acknowledged he'd been out-manoeuvred.

Once I said, “You're wasting your time.”

Once he said, “Come on, where is it? Please.”

For a couple of weeks he was there every other day. Then his visits became less frequent until they stopped altogether. But it crossed my mind that he had found a more concealed observation post.

With the arrival of the van Denny went into business, despite the fragile condition of his heart. And I was dragooned into it. Without my assistance it would never have gotten off the ground. He was the brains behind the enterprise while I was the brawn. I went with him to an aerated-waters factory on Geelong Road in Footscray called Boon Spa, where he negotiated a deal to buy wholesale several dozen crates of soft drink in sundry flavours. I loaded the van while he put the final touches to the deal. And when we got back to the housing estate, he headed off to solicit orders. Afterwards I became the delivery boy, riding the lifts of the high-rise or climbing the stairwells of the walk-up flats, lugging a crate at a time, containing a dozen bottles, banging on the doors of identical flats, exchanging crates for cash.

Then to my amazement the yellow automatic turned up again.

Denny arrived in it, euphoric. Apparently the finance company had yielded to his conditions. He tapped his temple gleefully to indicate his ingenuity. There were ways of getting what you want. The only requirements were a bit of gumption and some unconventional strategies.

Suddenly we were a three-vehicle family, which created its own problems since each flat had rights to only one parking space. And parking in the street had time limits. With two cars Denny had managed to arrange access to the parking space of a family that had no car, but a third was more problematic. It looked seriously acquisitive, which aroused suspicion and resentment amongst those who kept the neighbourhood under close scrutiny.

But as it transpired the issue never festered for long.

Within a short while Denny defaulted again, only this time the company was ready for his chicanery, responding with what these days would be called a pre-emptive strike. The company representative who arrived to repossess the automatic was the same one who had shown up beneath our flats for weeks, over and above the call of duty, on a futile vigil. I watched him through our kitchen window. His perseverance led me to believe he was probably the agent who had done the original deal with Denny, and his reputation, if not his job, with the company had been in jeopardy all those months. Perhaps he looked up and caught sight of me as he drove out of the parking bay, for he wound down the window and gave me the bird.

For a few weeks the soft-drink business flourished, even extending to a neighbouring high-rise estate on Nicholson Street, until it came to an abrupt end one night with the disappearance of the van. Denny's refusal to report it to the police brought on a bad case of
déjà vu
. Under sufferance he confessed the van had been repossessed after a cheque he had written to pay an instalment had bounced.

Secretly I was relieved. My feelings towards him were becoming so stark I could barely bring myself to accompany him on the daily merry-go-round he had created, despite recognising how much we needed the extra money. As far as I was concerned the less I had to do with him the better. I stayed with Claire as often as I could, although, wary as I was of her volatile moods, I wasn't prepared to move in with her entirely. My financial dependence on Denny limited my options anyway. I avoided thinking of my mother and what she was going through. My heart was hardening into an ugly ball of resentment. Sometimes when I walked past the TAB near the corner of Lygon and Elgin Streets, I saw Denny inside. He noticed me on one occasion and grinned guiltily, like a naughty boy caught out by his father in a lolly shop. I shook my head in disgust to reinforce his shame.