You Never Met My Father (46 page)

For a while I feared our relationship would be a casualty of her trauma but she seemed to want my company more. She kept away from her other friends whose tact in fragile situations she couldn't rely upon. We went to the movies, to cheap restaurants, to pubs to listen to bands. We avoided any talk about what had happened. She seemed to treat the pregnancy and birth like an illness, and having recovered she had no inclination to dwell on the experience. At times we talked about renting a flat and living together. Then one day while we were sitting on a swinging garden bench in her father's back yard, enjoying a quiet afternoon in the insipid warmth of a rare winter sun, she suggested we get married.

I was taken aback. Both of us had rather negative views of marriage. And amongst most of our friends it was considered unnecessary or obsolete.

“Look, don't be so astonished. It'd mean nothing to me. It just seems to be the easiest way of us living together. You'd get more money from any studentship you got and my father would leave me alone.”

I gave my lukewarm agreement. If we were going to live together and I was going to train as a teacher, it made sense. The idea grew on me. I desperately wanted to get away from my own father. Since his release from the asylum his behaviour had become increasingly erratic. Or I, at least, was becoming more conscious of how antisocial he was and how little concern he had for the most basic norms. I might have admired him for that but I was concerned I'd be dragged into his madness, which I suspected had already started to happen to my mother.

I should have been more enthusiastic, some independence at last, but at the back of my mind there was a question: if it was our intention to marry, why did we abandon this child of ours?

Before we got married, my grandfather Da died—begrudgingly. His lungs had finally collapsed. He had smoked rollies since he was seven. Eight decades of smoking. What did he expect?

I travelled to Portland with my mother and Claire, and saw him in the hospital just hours before he died. He stared at me with resentful eyes and trembling lips, the cheekbones almost visible beneath his skin. When I took his clammy hand and squeezed it, I felt a faint reciprocal pressure.

The funeral was held on a bleak day at St Stephen's Anglican Church. We followed the hearse to the Portland Cemetery where egregious rows of headstones defied the contours of a windswept slope. Denny had refused to attend. But Pat was there in subdued colours rather than black, weeping quietly, with the Stagg clan at her side. Many of them I barely knew. The display of grief from some of them added to a sensation weighing on me that we were all part of a charade, a clan that pretended loyalty and closeness, a sensation that returned at every family funeral I attended over the next couple of decades.

I don't remember Uncle Fred attending his father's funeral. But he showed up at our flat in Carlton some time later. My mind was in such a self-absorbed state I'm unsure if it was days, weeks or months later; or how long he ended up staying. The only thing I recall clearly is his delight at discovering our proximity to the Woolshed Hotel. My room was too small to share. So he bedded down on a fold-up bed in the lounge, next to Denny, who still slept upright on a sprung chair. I was fond of Uncle Fred but his drunkenness was becoming more severe, if that were possible. His physical condition had deteriorated spectacularly, and he was more maudlin and ingratiating. If he was going to stay, the best thing for me to do was get married as soon as possible and move out. It would create more space in the flat.

We prepared for our wedding discreetly, set a date in spring, a few months before my twenty-first birthday. Claire was already twenty-one, the age of consent, but I had to get my parents' permission to marry. The legal requirement annoyed me. I procrastinated.

In the meantime I worked on excuses to justify our decision to friends who had heard me disparage the institution of marriage often enough. It was also the last year of my degree and I was facing a decision about my future. In truth I didn't want a career. But I could see myself either joining the public service or the teaching profession by default. When I weighed up these options, teaching came out slightly ahead on the grounds it meant another year of study. One of the reasons I had gone to university was to postpone the day I was condemned to the workforce, although I seemed to be constantly in work, at the fly-screen factory during the academic year, or temporarily at Golden Poultry, a holiday job I'd arranged through Jimmy, whose family had shifted from Portland to Frankston.

The other factor in favour of teaching was the opportunity of receiving a studentship, which offered a sum greater than the amount Denny received from the Repat on my behalf. A married recipient of the studentship received almost double. Why I hadn't applied for one earlier as a means of gaining an independent income, I have no idea, except perhaps the dread I felt in those days of making a decision about a career before it was absolutely necessary. A studentship had contractual obligations: each year of payment required a year of service.

I remember the day I showed my mother the engagement ring that I had just bought Claire. (God knows how many chickens went to their death at my hand to pay for it.) We were on a tram in Carlton, in public, but that didn't stop her tears from flowing.

“What's the matter?” I muttered. “I thought you would've been pleased.”

“Oh, Graeme,” she sniffled. “You're too young.”

“It's just Claire, isn't it? You think we're not suited.”

“There's plenty more fish in the sea, darlin'.”

Snapping the ring box closed, I sat in a cold silent rage. So, finally, she had let slip how she really felt about Claire.
Plenty more fish in
the sea!

Knitting, gossiping, shop-loving, sports-mad fish that could talk sales, football and sewing patterns in the one breath, or go ga-ga at the sight of a baby! A garrulous fish. A conventional fish. Any fish was preferable to my unconventional catch!

Again I realised how far apart we'd become. Somewhere in the last year or so our trajectories had separated and were heading inexorably in different directions. And I knew there was nothing either of us could do about it. The thought never crossed my mind that she might not have wanted a daughter-in-law who wouldn't keep her own child.

After we set the date Claire stayed over more often. She was there the day Denny announced we were shifting to a house in Reservoir, a suburb on the northern fringe of the city. He tried to argue the merits of the shift: we would be closer to La Trobe University and Carol's high school. But I figured we were about to be evicted again.

Once more I was given no warning of this, despite the flat being in my mother's name. He must have persuaded her to hand over control of all their finances and once more had landed us in a pickle. But at least this time he had steered away from the folly of another siege. This time it would be the moonlight flit.

We left the move until the last moment. Denny went out in the evening and returned around ten o'clock with a van. He said the move was easier at night since there was less traffic around to worry about. After he backed it up to the stairs beneath the flats we started carrying our possessions down. He decided to lower some of our more cumbersome items on a rope from the balcony, past the living rooms below. Around eleven o'clock, while Carol and Claire were taking kitchen chairs across the plank that Denny had laid from the stairs to the deck of the van, a solitary policeman emerged from the darkness to investigate our activity.

Claire exchanged a guilty look with Carol, who mustered as much dignity as she could to explain our flight.

He shrugged, po-faced. “Saves us doing it in the morning,” he said.

The weatherboard house in Reservoir had four bedrooms, which was just as well, since Uncle Fred was back living with us. With Claire occasionally staying over I was less prepared to share a room with him again. It had carpets with a smell that required a few bottles of household deodorant to disguise. There was a garage, the first we had ever had, and a big back yard where Fred soon started a vegie garden. Denny tried again to convince me he had made the move for my benefit, being closer to La Trobe University, but I dismissed his lie with a silent shrug, refusing to give him the approval he sought.

Our wedding couldn't come soon enough. Claire and I approached a clergyman who agreed to perform the nuptials at her father's house.

My uni mates insisted on giving me a bucks' party. I was shanghaied to Ian's family home in Bentleigh. The family was out. Ten students were there, all male, only Ian and Charles I considered friends. I was spared the indignity of a stripper but not the attempt to give me an enema with a garden hose. I successfully fought them off and made such a racket screaming, Ian (his feral teeth gnashing) called it off, concerned about the attentions of his respectable neighbours.

I hired a purple velour suit. Claire bought a bone calico dress that came to her ankles, which she wore with leather sandals. My old mate Jimmy, who had passed his Matriculation and was studying to be a primary school teacher in Geelong, agreed to be best man. The bridesmaid was one of Claire's friends on day leave from a private psychiatric clinic where she was receiving shock treatment for depression. Pat and Denny attended. I remember it was a fine day, weatherwise.

The ceremony was in the lounge room. We muttered our vows rather shamefacedly. The vicar was merciful. He used the abridged version of the service, accepted payment discreetly from Claire's father and disappeared.

The wedding breakfast was held in the sunroom on hired trestle tables. When I rose to give the groom's speech, Jimmy put his hand to his mouth to shield his words and interrupted. He told me my fly was undone, a tired old joke from our school days that never failed. To check it I dropped back to the seat bench, which duly collapsed, plunging the entire bridal party to the floor.

I can't recall anything else about the occasion, except Claire's brother-in-law had assumed the role of wedding photographer. None of his photos came out. The only snap I have of the day was taken by Claire with my mother's instamatic camera. It is of me and Pat and Denny on the front lawn: Pat in a floral dress, which used to be her Sunday best when I was still an altar boy, Denny in a St Vinnie's suit and yours truly between them in purple velour. All of us look inept and shabby.

Instead of a honeymoon Claire and I shifted straightaway into a flat overlooking a leafy street in East Melbourne. The building was Edwardian. It had charm, which suited my burgeoning sense of aesthetics. It had character, which I hoped bolstered my own. But above all it was cathartic. After the places I had always lived in it helped establish the psychological space I desperately needed. It allowed me to believe I was unlike my family. I needed to feel different to negate the hopelessness I had endured most of my life.

When I turned twenty-one we had a small party in our flat. Pat dutifully supplied a birthday cake, a sponge with lemon icing, which she knew was my favourite. But cruelly I didn't invite her.

As I had hoped, my contact with Pat and Denny diminished after my marriage. I saw them now and then but claimed I was too busy to visit regularly. They got behind in their rent again and were forced to move into a two-bedroom flat in Alphington, just off busy Heidelberg Road. I helped them to shift. Carol still lived with them. But Uncle Fred was no longer around. He had started on a bender in the city one Anzac Day and when he finally returned a week later, just as Pat and Denny were about to report him missing, he announced he was moving out. He had run into an old army mate who was going to put him up for a while, which was just as well, for there was no room for him in their new place.

Denny's fraught relationship with the Repatriation Department continued. Although I was unaware of it, he spent more time hospitalised.

Mr Sparkes has been feeling unwell, anxious and depressed for 6 months prior to admission. Also he felt excessively tired, and complains of a consistent dull tightness in the chest, present for 3–4 years, that has exacerbations up to several times daily. These exacerbations seem most clearly related to emotional stress…He refuses to discuss his domestic situation at the time, but admits that he was extremely angry with his wife that night, and that he has felt this severe degree of anger on previous occasions.

I was studying for my Diploma of Education on a studentship and still making fly-wire screens to earn a little extra cash. I completed my teacher training in a year and received a posting to the Myrtleford High School in north-eastern Victoria. By then Carol had shifted in with her boyfriend, and Pat and Denny, perhaps running out of options in Melbourne, had moved back to Portland.

How they got the furniture to Portland I have no idea but I later heard the story of the way Denny took the ceramic tiles he had accumulated and wouldn't part with. Carol had started university. She had a friend, Bruce, who offered to help out with his panel van. Bruce was an obliging soul. They loaded the tiles into the back of his van until its springs were totally compressed. Carol and her boyfriend, Peter, went with them. Pat took the car, which was packed to the roof with other chattels. With no more room in the front of the panel van, Denny volunteered to squeeze into the narrow gap between the metal roof and the pile of tiles. With a little help from Bruce he managed it. He lay spread-eagled and immobile for the five-hour trip without complaint.