You Never Met My Father (48 page)

I was wrong.

A few weeks later a personal cheque from Denny for the exact amount arrived in the mail. I was so pleasantly surprised I stared at it for a long time, thinking finally he had changed. I considered keeping it as a memento, which might have been his hope, but I now needed every cent I was making.

I took it to the bank to cash.

It bounced.

I spent a few years picking tobacco, travelling north to Queensland for winter, returning to the Ovens Valley for the next harvest. Claire had a flat in Melbourne. Sometimes she travelled with me. Sometimes she was with Richard Ireland. Both of them worked on the tobacco for a couple of seasons. Usually the farmers I worked for allowed me to stay in the pickers huts rent-free after the harvest, on condition I occasionally worked for them on the hoeing or planting. I had a lot of idle time between harvests. So I started writing. I fancied I might become a writer.

Claire was thrilled. She said, “I knew you'd do something like this one day.”

Writing soon became an obsession.

When I tired of tobacco picking I tried the pear and grape harvests but found the conditions too unpleasant. I returned to Melbourne to live, sharing a house in Northcote with Claire and Richard, driving a taxi on weekends to pay the bills. During the week I wrote. I managed to get a couple of articles published in newspapers, which was just the bait I needed to keep tapping away on the antique typewriter Claire had bought me to encourage my creativity. Eventually I shifted into a bedsit and went on the dole. I sold my motorbike.

Years had passed since I left home, enough time for me to pass a more dispassionate judgment on my parents. The chronic anger I endured was no longer directed at them. Like me, I reasoned, they were products of their circumstances. I began to feel guilty, particularly about the way I had treated my mother, who didn't deserve my neglect after all she had done for me, the years of work to keep us fed and clothed as well as the solitary parenting. And in a way I actually admired her for sticking with him as his health declined. Despite everything, she had kept her noble spirit intact.

I started to give my father the benefit of doubt too. The bouncing cheque had raised my suspicions about the state of their finances, but I wanted to believe they had them under control. Three pensions between them—two of them full war pensions—besides some pocket money from the flea markets. And they had shifted into a council unit next to the lagoon where he had once tried to drown himself. On the rare occasions when I was around, Denny still sat as he had always done, in a sprung chair, thighs crossed, with the portable transistor on the coffee table next to him tuned in to the racing station, the packet of
Albany Trims
next to an ashtray he kept clean by licking a tissue, scouring out the ash after each cigarette, and placing it in an empty milk carton that sat opened beside his turf guide. But he was nowhere near as demonstrative when he lost, which led me to believe his gambling must have involved less money than in years past. And I thought,
if not exactly in a state that the
Buddhists called Enlightenment,
the old boy is finally mellowing
. He never went so far as to take up lawn bowls, like my mother, who established a whole new lot of friends at the club she joined, lovely garrulous country women who were kind and generous and kept her laughing. He was still too unsociable for that, but mellow all the same. I could sit down and have a yarn about world affairs, without him having a tantrum over our politicians, which was more likely to have been my response. He even occasionally made some astute comments that gave me pause, like: “There's too many money-hungry bastards in the world, my friend. Greed'll tear the human race apart, if not in my lifetime, in yours, mark my words.” Once he even praised Pat. “She's a good woman, your mother, the best there is. Anyone who can put up with the likes of me…”

He was in his fifties and, with wild sideburns and un-oiled hair, looked like a consumptive old rock star. But I had never seen him as relaxed and content as he was around this time of his life. He sometimes showed impatience with Pat but rarely allowed his rage to resurface. There was only one incident I remember that festered with him, that kept his rage on simmer for months, and that was when his doctor left the consulting room for a moment and Denny, taking the opportunity to see what the doctor had written in his medical file, discovered a note that claimed he was selling his prescription drugs under the counter at flea markets. He declined to tell me what he said to his doctor or if he had been reported to the police. But he denied the accusation categorically. His eyes lit up with fury as of yore.

There is even a note about this in his Veteran Affairs [formerly the Repatriation] Department files from the 4th of August, 1977:

Patient arrived without appointment.

Patient refused to go without seeing a doctor and got very aggressive towards me, bringing up past failings of the Repatriation Department:

• Lack of contact regarding his Physiotherapy.

• Lack of co-operation on his medical drugs that his doctor will not prescribe for him.

All this was shouted at me in the Waiting Room with about thirty other patients waiting for their appointments…

I checked with Dr Myles in Portland who stated he had not sent the patient down to see us, also that he had been authorised by the Department of Veteran Affairs not to repeat these drugs for Mr Sparkes as he was no longer on them. Dr Myles then said he also knew of Mr Sparkes selling the drugs prescribed by himself in Portland market place.

When they shifted again, back into a larger public housing unit in West Portland, I was mildly surprised. Had the Ministry forgotten our record?

On the phone Pat informed me that Denny had recently made contact with his only living brother, Geoff, who had long ago bought me a little red pedal car. Geoff had disappeared when I was still an infant. He had made no contact with his family for decades. Eventually Pat learned of his whereabouts and began corresponding with him. He wrote back in a childish hand. He was sick and wanted to retire from his work in the highlands of Tasmania. Denny began scheming to secure him a pension. Geoff would shift to Portland and live with them. Plans were finalised. Denny was going to meet him at Melbourne Airport. Just as Geoff was about to leave, the illness was diagnosed as cancer. He only had weeks to live.

When I heard the news, I was sharing a house in North Fitzroy, living in a windowless room so small I had to roll up its foam mattress to open the door or to sit at my desk to write, indulging in what I fancied was a writer's existence, occasionally visiting Claire and Richard, who had retreated to a bush block in Gippsland.

I saw the irony of this latest episode in Denny's life. He was returning to Melbourne to reunite with his dying brother. Why hadn't he tried to find him years ago? Why had it been my mother who eventually corresponded with him? Why had he left contact to the last minute? Why had every plan he ever made turned to dust? Was it fate? Was it karma? He scraped together enough money for a ticket, flew to Tasmania, and saw his brother just hours before death mocked their reunion. Geoff used to be a huge man, a man whose size had made the bath overflow, but he had wasted away until he resembled a starving waif. It shocked Denny and he never recovered.

“It was the sight of his brother that brought it on again,” my mother said after Denny's cancer reappeared some months later. “It happens. It just takes a shock. Denny had to arrange the funeral and everything.”

Denny inherited his brother's car, a Fiat. On one of my rare visits to Portland, after his brother's death and before he knew about his own resurgent cancer, Denny insisted I take his other car. He wanted me to have it, a Kingswood no less, to settle accounts. I was stunned, not so much by his generosity but by his acknowledgement that he owed me. It wasn't just the bouncing cheque but my belongings he had hocked or stolen over the years: a record player, watches, an accordion my grandfather had given me, sundry piggybanks. I turned away from him to conceal my emotions. And I dared to think we were finally starting to get on okay. Or maybe I had been wrong about him all along. Given half the chance maybe he would have always been considerate. The idea of writing a book about him took root. It would tell all but in a way that showed how circumstances had led him astray. It would tell of his ‘dirty rotten luck' as he and my mother often called their circumstances. Before I had a chance to mull over the entire matter I received a phone call from Pat—Denny was coming to Melbourne for some medical tests.

Back in the Repatriation Hospital, where he had been operated on for his first cancer twelve years earlier, he was up to his old tricks.

Mr. Sparkes is a 57 year old man who was a recent inpatient with a left-sided chest lesion, most probably carcinoma of the lung, who had discharged himself against medical advice but had now re-considered and was admitted with a view to thoracotomy (left) and left lower lobectomy.

Denny indeed had cancer again. As he told me he was smiling, a smile which meant
just my luck
. The cancer was in his lungs. On their way home they stayed at Carol's place, where he steamed open the letter his specialist had asked him to deliver to his GP in Portland. Carol's husband, Peter, retrieved a medical encyclopaedia from his home library and discovered that the type of cancer the specialist had diagnosed was unrelated to smoking—a rare incurable cancer. He realised he only had months to live.

When the cancer spread to other organs he was hospitalised in Portland. Tumours showed up in his liver and brain. It spread through his lymphatic system. I had a distressed phone call from my mother. She wasn't coping well. So I decided to go and stay with her for a while, to give her some emotional support.

It was a chance to do something for her, a chance to repay her for some of what she had done for me, a chance to appease my conscience, to make up for the limited number of times I had stayed with her since leaving home. My private excuse had always been that we could no longer communicate in any meaningful way, and to try was just stark and painful. No doubt it was my selfishness that had guided me. My mother always loved to see me, would have loved to see me more often, even if I talked very little, even if I just sat and read the paper, even if I spent a lot of my time going for walks along the beach alone. She would have been happy because I had come home to see her.

It was just as well I was unemployed because Denny took a long time dying. Pat said I could use the room set up for Uncle Geoff, “since he won't be needing it, will he?” Again she presented her theory about the impact of Geoff's death and the recurrence of Denny's cancer. “He wouldn't admit it, but I saw how much it shocked him, seeing his brother like that after all those years.” It was an observation she returned to time and again over the next few months.

I encouraged her to maintain her normal routine: her shopping and gardening and her lawn bowls, which had become a big part of her life. Her sister played as well, and she had made other friends at the club. She showed me the prizes she had won—glasses embossed with the club emblem in gold, and souvenir teaspoons—and the trinkets she had bought or received as gifts that delighted her, such as a Brazil nut dressed in a tiny, white bowls outfit, stuck to a board that bore the message, ‘I'm a bowling nut'. Her buffets were full of these types of knick-knacks.

I was pleased she had a social life outside her immediate family. She told me endless stories about her friends—their tournaments and their trips together to other bowling clubs. And when she completed her repertoire, she retold them. My attempts to deflect them usually failed. Comments such as ‘you've told me that already' were just a minor annoyance to her, like a fly buzzing around. I began to spend a lot of time at Denny's bedside.

I watched his slow decline from a state with little outward evidence of illness, which left me doubting there was anything seriously wrong with him, to the pitiful sight of a carcass taunted by the obstinacy of life.

There were times of long silence between us, which I should have used to talk about his life, our lives together. We might have finally come to some understanding of each other, even a rapprochement. But I couldn't bring myself to do it and nor could he, if indeed that was what he wanted. I asked stupid questions like, “How are you feeling?” which invariably made him angry.

As I sat there and the hours dragged by I sometimes wondered if his silence meant he had turned inward. He knew his end was coming. Was he reflecting on his life? Was he looking at the ledger and asking
, Am I satisfied overall? I made my choices. Did I conduct
my life well, or at least as best I could
? Was he finding peace?

When he asked me to arrange his funeral I grimaced, which again made him angry.

“What's the rush?” I joked lamely.

But he insisted. He wanted to know the details. I thought it was macabre but agreed. He also told me he wanted to die at home.

Dying at home seemed a reasonable request. But my mother, for once, put her foot down.

I was surprised and annoyed.

“I couldn't cope,” she said.

Perhaps she was afraid of sharing a bed with a dying man.

“He can have the bed I'm using. I'll sleep on the couch. A nurse would come by each day.”

But she was adamant. I thought it callous but didn't put much effort into changing her mind, not after the way he had treated her throughout their life together.

I knew it distressed him because he asked me more than once. I tried to convince him that hospitalisation was the best thing for him, but it merely reinforced his low opinion of me.

One day he could no longer make it to the toilet and was forced to use a bottle. I remembered how he had discharged himself the day after his first heart attack because the nursing staff had insisted he use one. He was beyond a repeat performance now. He had to ask me to hold the bottle while he peed. He sat on the edge of his bed.