New Australian Stories 2 (19 page)

One day my father was sent to a property in Bar Beach. The owner was a wealthy lawyer who kept a large greenhouse, vegetable garden and chicken coop, which he liked to potter around in on weekends. There had been a storm, and my father was to replace several glass panes in the greenhouse. At first, the owner tried to chat to my father about his prize chickens, but eventually went back inside when he couldn't understand my father's replies. My father took this opportunity to have a cigarette break. As he leaned on the fence, smoking, the gate gave way behind him, and a rooster ran out of the coop. Closing the gate, he chased after the rooster, which ran down the driveway towards the beach. My father dove at it, and the rooster leaped in the air and over a high wall into the garden of the house next door. My father jumped up, too, and pulled himself over the fence, falling onto his feet a few inches from my mother, a twenty-two-year-old girl, sunbathing in her underwear while her parents were away for the day.

Out of breath, my father said, panting, ‘Excuse me, miss. Have you seen my cock?'

This word, derived from the Old English
cocc
, is commonly used in Scotland to describe a male domestic fowl, but my mother did not know this. She screamed, and slapped my father in the face so hard that she burst his nose. At that moment the rooster came squawking from the open door of the house, and my father was able to catch it. He held the struggling bird with one hand and his streaming nose with the other. My mother, realising that he wasn't a pervert, went to fetch a handkerchief. While she was gone, my father noticed that one of the lounge-room windows was cracked. When my mother returned with the hanky, he pointed out the broken window. Fearing her parents would notice the damage, my mother became upset, until my father explained his trade and offered to repair it free of charge. That afternoon, he asked my mother out. They were married two years later.

Fart

When I was a small boy, my father taught me his national anthem, ‘Scotland the Brave'. My mother loved to hear me sing it, especially the chorus:

Land of my high endeavour

Land of the shining river

Land of my heart forever

Scotland the brave!

Whenever her relatives came to visit — which wasn't often, for they didn't like my father — she would have me stand on a chair and sing, while my father would accompany me on the mouth organ. Shortly before my grandparents came to call one day, my father told me he had forgotten to teach me the chorus properly, and so together we rehearsed the new words:

Fart, fart, my bum is calling,

Must be the beans I ate this morning,

Quick, quick, the lavvy door,

Too late, it's on the floor.

After my grandparents arrived, my mother, as usual, requested me to sing ‘Scotland the Brave'. I never reached the second verse. At the end of the chorus, my mother snatched me from the chair as my father spat his harmonica across the kitchen, bent double with laughter. She took me to my room and spanked me with the
Macquarie Dictionary
, to teach me not to say bad words. She seemed both angry and embarrassed. (My mother's face never showed one emotion, but always a mixture of two, like a portmanteau word.) Later, my father crept into the room with a smuggled lollipop. He flicked through the dictionary and said, ‘This isn't a proper dictionary. It doesn't have any of the best words.'

And he took a pen and wrote
Fart,
in between
Farrow
and
Farmer
, with the definition
to make a bad smell from the
bottom
.

I told my father much later that
fart
was one of the oldest English words, with many cognates in other languages. He found flatulence hilarious. One of his favourite tricks was to have pie and beans for lunch at work, then return home and close all the windows and doors in the living room. For twenty minutes he would sit and break wind, only then calling my mother in from the kitchen. I would hear her shout ‘Oh, Jimmy!' and my father's roar of laughter as she ran from the room, retching. He boasted that he had complete control of his bowels, and would challenge me to say ‘when!', at which point he would instantly break wind. Sometimes I would wait for hours, then cry ‘when!' and he would let out a loud fart. My mother would shake her head in disgust and run around the house, opening all the windows.

I wasn't allowed to say
fart
, so my father taught me the Doric for it:
braim
. Doric was the dialect of Aberdeenshire, where my father grew up. Even as a child I was fascinated by the different sounds and meanings the words had, and I began to realise, dimly, that language was shaped by place. By the age of six I could talk to my father in dialect in front of my mother, and she would have no idea what we were saying.

My father rarely swore at home. Sometimes if he was talking about his bosses at work, he would say, ‘They're a shower of bastards, the lot of them,' and my mother would shoosh him. Even then, it was difficult to catch him swearing because his accent seemed to make even the mildest words profanities.

My mother and I glued together a little cardboard box and cut a slit at the top. This was the swear box, and my father had to put in twenty cents every time he swore. My mother made the mistake of promising me the money from the box when it was full, so I would try to provoke my father. The easiest way to do this was to break wind myself. Often I was unable to and just gave myself a sore stomach, but when I did my father would cry out in amusement, ‘Was that you, you dirty wee bastard?'

And twenty cents would go in the box.

Poof

When I started school, I had a pronounced lisp that my mother believed was due to all the strange sounds I made when practising Doric with my father. She was very worried about this lisp, but my father insisted I would grow out of it, as I did, in fact, a year or two later. But in my first week at school, a boy three years older than me caught me on the way home and, calling me a poof, punched me in the face. I ran home with a split lip. My father came home to find me sobbing in the bathroom as my mother dabbed cotton wool on my lip.

‘What happened, son?' he said, putting down his newspaper.

‘Have you been drinking?' my mother asked him, but my father ignored her.

I told him what the boy had done, which seemed to me the most serious part, and only as an afterthought what he had called me. My father's face, normally red from the sun, turned pale.

‘Fucking bastard,' my father said quietly. ‘Little fucking bastard. Calling my son a poof? No one calls my son a poof!'

‘Jimmy!' my mother cried.

My father went out through the kitchen to the shed, and returned a minute later holding a hammer.

‘What's his name?' he asked me.

‘Stelio Grivas.'

‘A fucking wog, is it? Well, we'll see what his father has to say about it. Come on.'

‘Jimmy, don't,' my mother said, holding on to me.

My father grasped my wrist so tightly that it hurt, and hauled me away from her.

‘Come on!' he said, pulling me outside.

He began walking down the street, and I had to run to keep up with him.

‘Where does he live?'

‘I don't know,' I said, holding my nose, which had started to bleed again. ‘Waratah, I think.'

‘Right, then.'

He hid the handle of the hammer up his sleeve, its head in one clenched hand, and my hand in the other. We walked in silence, except that every ten minutes or so he would mutter to himself, ‘Poof,' and then spit on the ground. (He would not have cared that this word dated back to the nineteenth century and had begun as French slang for a prostitute.) When we finally came to Waratah I was exhausted, and my father lifted me on his back and asked what street the boy lived on. I told him again that I didn't know.

‘All right,' he said. ‘We'll look for him. Tell me when you see him.'

My father walked with me on his back for four hours, peering into every garden and, if he could get close enough, every window of every house in every street in Waratah. After a long time it grew dark, and I fell asleep as he walked. When I awoke, we were at home again. I was lying on the couch, and my father was holding my mother, who was crying.

‘Stop greeting,' he said. ‘Stop greeting, now. I couldn't find him.'

‘And what if you had?' she said, looking relieved and angry. ‘What would we have done with you in jail, for assault, or worse?'

‘All right.' He kissed her cheek. ‘Will you not make us something to eat? We're starving.'

The next day was a Saturday. My father got dressed for work as usual, as he said there was a chance for some overtime. While my mother was hanging out the washing, my father rummaged in a kitchen cabinet where we kept all sorts of odds and ends. After he left, I went and looked in the cabinet. Among all the old bills, receipts and blunt scissors, the phone book was open, with the page for Greene to Gruenwald ripped out.

No one at school ever called me a poof again.

Tits

Shortly before my twelfth birthday, a salesman came to our door selling volumes of the
Oxford English Dictionary
. For a very reasonable rate, one of these thick volumes would be delivered to your home every month for a year. My mother, though she never bought anything from travelling salesmen, always invited them in, perhaps to make my father jealous. In fact, he arrived home from the pub that day when the salesman was having a cup of tea. I was lying on the floor, with the
C
volume open before me, so immersed in the dictionary that I didn't notice my father until he nudged me with his foot.

‘Whatever it is, we can't afford it,' he said. ‘Give the book back to the man, son.'

My mother apologised to the salesman, and my father saw him to the door. When he came back into the room, he whispered something to my mother, and she smiled. A week later, for my birthday, I got
A to Bea
.

I would spend hours with the dictionary, learning all of the abbreviations,
v.t. n. pl. colloq. def. MLG conj.
, and following words back in time to the places they were born. I discovered that many English words had come from other countries, like my father. I began to keep a notebook in which I would write down the new words I invented —
umzob
,
caramot
,
grebulous
— and their imaginary meanings. By the time that
Ga to Hee
was delivered, there were too many volumes for the bookshelf in my room, and my mother moved them into the garden shed, where they would be out of the way.

One afternoon, I went to look up
carrion
, a new word I had come across while reading
The Count of Monte Cristo
.
Caf to Dar
was kept on a low shelf beneath my father's workbench. I kneeled on the floor and pulled out the volume. As I did so, a large loose square of chequered linoleum came away. Underneath the lino was a magazine, and the front cover showed a topless woman cradling two gigantic breasts in her hands. The magazine was simply called
Tits
and was dated the month before. I began to look through it. After a few pages I was bored of the breasts, all of them huge and thick-nippled. But I read on to examine all the different words for breasts. There were Bristols, titties, jugs, boobs, boobies, funbags, mammaries, pillows, baps. (The word
tits
itself has an uncertain origin, but is similar to
titten
in German and
tieten
in Dutch.) I had never before seen so many synonyms for one word. I had just opened my notebook to write some of them down when my father came in. He looked at the magazine, then glanced away for a second, embarrassed, before he realised that it was only a pen that I held in my hand. I stood up, and he came towards me and kicked the linoleum back over the magazine.

Then my mother was at the door to the shed, holding a dishtowel. She was wearing a flowery yellow dress, and I noticed, for perhaps the first time, that she was flat-chested.

‘Dinner's ready,' she said. ‘What are you boys up to?'

My father said nothing.

‘I was just showing Dad some new words I learned,' I said.

‘You can show him at the table.'

After dinner, I wrote in my notebook:
filicate n. a species of
lie which a son tells for his father
.

Piss

During my last few weeks at secondary school, my father had an accident. He was putting a new window in a house and was standing on some scaffolding ten metres up. It began to rain heavily. (‘Absolutely pissing down,' my father said when he told the story, ignoring my mother's frown.) As he hurried to finish the job, he slipped and fell onto the muddy ground below, breaking all of the ribs on his right side. He had to stay off work for two months. His employer was very good about it and continued to pay his wages. My father would lie in bed all day, smoking cigarettes and watching the television, which we had moved in from the lounge room. My mother took my room because her tossing and turning kept him awake at night, while I slept on the sofa.

My father never complained of the pain, though for the first couple of weeks getting up to go to the toilet was an agony for him. I had to support him as he urinated, hissing with the hurt. Often his workmates would visit with slabs of beer. My mother didn't like drinking. We didn't even have a corkscrew in the house. But she saw how the visits cheered my father, so she said nothing. She didn't know that his friends would leave a dozen cans of beer under the bed, which my father would drink, one after the other, when my mother was out. He said they were better for his ribs than the painkillers, but I think he often swallowed down the pills with the beer. He relied on me to air the room, buy him breath mints, and dispose of the cans — and not to say anything to my mother. By now, I was very good at telling filicates.