New Australian Stories 2 (20 page)

One morning, my father sent me on an errand to his friend who ran the local bottle-o. (This word formerly meant a person who sold and collected bottles: it came from the cry,
Bottle-oh!
) After I paid him, he took me to the back of the shop and put a bottle of whisky in my bag.

‘Remember, not a word to anyone,' he said. ‘I would lose my job.'

I rode back home on my bike and gave the whisky to my father. He sent me out to buy us some sausage rolls for lunch, and when I came back, the bottle was half empty. He saw me looking at it and said, ‘Don't be such a pessimist. It's half full. Now, what new words have you learned today?'

After drinking, he always enjoyed a good sleep, and I would hide the bottle away in my bedroom. It wasn't long before my father was sending me to the bottle-o every other day. I tried to stay away from the house so he couldn't ask me, but my mother wanted me to be near home in case she needed me. A few weeks later, my mother went to visit her sister. I was studying in my room but, after a while, I heard my father singing my name. I groaned, and ignored him until he began shouting. When I went in, he smiled and patted the seat beside the bed so I would sit down.

‘Do you have any new words for me today?' he asked.

‘Yes,' I said, still standing in the doorway. ‘
Dipsomaniac
.'

‘That sounds like … That sounds like a … good one. What does it mean?'

‘It's from the Greek
dipsa
, meaning thirst; and the Latin
mania
, indicating an extreme desire for something. Its short form is
dipso.
'

‘I don't understand. What does it mean again?'

‘You should know it,' I said. ‘It means a drunk.'

My father nodded, and then as he understood what I had said, he tried to sit up in the bed.

‘You don't know …' he said. ‘You don't know anything. How about you break a few of your ribs, see how you feel?' He took another drink of the whisky. ‘Jesus Christ, you're a poor excuse for a son,' he muttered. ‘You and your books.'

I stared at him. Like a word that you look at for too long on the page, he began to lose any meaning for me.

‘Well, here's a question for you,' he said at last. ‘How many syllables are there in
piss off
?'

In fact, I knew that
piss
came from the Middle English
pissen
, itself linked to the French
pissier
, and descended from vulgar Latin. But I said nothing. In response, he shouted at me, ‘Go on, then. Piss off!'

I went out of the house to look at my books in the shed. An hour later, my mother came running from the kitchen.

‘Come quick!'

My father was unconscious on the bedroom floor. Having drunk the rest of the whisky, and all the beer left under the bed, he had vomited on the bedsheets and on himself. Then he had fallen out of bed. The carpet around him was soaked with urine.

‘Oh, Jimmy,' my mother said, weeping. ‘Not again.'

(It was not until much later that my mother told me my father had had problems with drink before, but had gone teetotal when I was born.)

I helped her strip him and wash him. He groaned but didn't wake up. Between the two of us, we got him back on the bed after my mother changed the sheets, and we took turns watching him through the night to make sure he didn't choke on his own vomit.

When he awoke, he was penitent. Tears in his eyes, he swore to my mother that he wouldn't touch drink again. For the next two weeks I spent a lot of time with my father. Playing Scrabble kept his mind off the pain, he said, and we had endless games together, though when we changed the rules to allow Doric, he won every time. In a while he was able to walk again without much pain, and within another month he was back at work.

On my way back from school soon after, I saw my father sitting at the window of the pub, drinking whisky. I rode home, and searched my bookshelves until I found a particular notebook. I opened the notebook and crossed out
filicate
. Then I went to tell my mother what I had seen.

Slut

I was in my second year at university when my mother left my father. In the past three years his drinking had gotten worse. If my mother begged him, he would stop for a week or so, then start again. He was a good drunk for a long time, in that he was never violent and not usually unpleasant. Very often, if my parents were with other people, it would just be my mother who would notice he was drunk. The only outward indication of the alcohol was a certain jerkiness as he talked. As he told all his old stories (including, inevitably, the one about the cock) his body seemed to react, giving physical representations to parentheses, commas and question marks. By the end of an anecdote, he was often on his feet, clapping his right hand against his leg to mark full stops, and stamping his feet for exclamation marks.

The only place I could study etymology was in Brisbane, so I wasn't able to come home often. During the holidays, I rarely had enough money for travel; even if I did, I still made some excuse not to visit home. At Christmas, however, there seemed to be no avoiding it, and as it turned out, this would be the last time we were together before my mother left.

Christmas morning was quiet, my mother cooking an enormous lunch, my father watching television, while I boxed up some books I wanted to take back to Brisbane. I found the dictionary that my mother had spanked me with all those years ago. When I showed my father the words he had written there, he was delighted.

‘I mind that day well,' he said, and he began to hum ‘Scotland the Brave'.

My mother heard him from the kitchen and laughed.

After lunch, my father said, ‘I'm going for a walk.'

As soon as he left, my mother said simply, ‘He'll come back drunk. I never thought I'd have a drunk for a husband.'

I realised then how little I knew about my mother. I had often thought that the only way to truly understand a word was to know its past, but I knew almost nothing about my mother's.

‘Who did you think you would marry?' I asked her.

For the next two hours, we talked about the boys she had been in love with before my father; about her own mother and father, whom I barely remembered; and about the good times she had had when my father was courting her. It was then that my father came home. He was, as my mother predicted, drunk. Having overheard her talking about my birth, he said, ‘Yes, that was some day, some day. The best day of my life,' and my mother smiled at him.

‘Almost as good was the day we conceived you,' he continued, winking at me.

‘Jimmy! Don't!' my mother said, but my father had already started tapping his hand against his thigh as he told the story. ‘And it was the first time we did it. I remember you blushed, didn't you, Mary, and I said, “But you've seen my cock before,” and then you laughed. Of course, we had to get married after that, when your father saw your belly. You said it was your first time, didn't you, Mary? But that wasn't what I'd heard. You see, son, your mother was a bit of a slut in those days, and —'

My mother slapped him. It must have been the first time she had struck him since that afternoon in my grandparents' garden all those years before, and the result was the same. The blood started leaking out of my father's nose, but this time my mother left the room and didn't come back, and it was I who fetched a dishtowel for him. Without a word, my father took the towel, held it to his face, and went out again, probably back to the pub. I found my mother in the shed, sobbing against the fourth volume of the dictionary,
Caf to Dar
, a place where I had always found comfort. In the volume
Ske to Tar
, it was noted that
slut
was first recorded in English in 1402, originally meaning an untidy woman. It was only later that the word developed a sexual connotation. I tried to tell my mother this, but she wouldn't listen. So I put my arms around her, and for a long time neither of us said a word.

Gook

After finishing uni, I got a job in Sydney working as an assistant lexicographer for the
Macquarie
. I had just become engaged to Phuong, whom I had met in my first year at the university. We drove down from Brisbane, stopping off at Coffs Harbour, where my mother now lived in a small unit, close to the ocean. When I introduced Phuong to her, she was delighted and immediately began to talk about grandchildren. Then she asked me when I had last seen Jimmy. For a moment, I didn't understand whom she meant. She had never spoken my father's Christian name to me before. He was always ‘your father'. I told her we were going to stop by his place on our way to Sydney.

‘I write to him every week,' she said. ‘But he never replies.'

It was still Christmas at my father's house in Newcastle, as it had been for three years. My father had never taken down the decorations after my mother left. There was a broken windowpane in one of the front windows, and the lawn was weedy, the grass long.

I begged Phuong to wait in the car first. ‘You don't know him,' I said. ‘I have to see what state he's in.'

I collected the mail and walked up to the house. I wondered if one of the envelopes contained the latest issue of
Tits
, or perhaps one of my mother's letters, and then I wondered which would be more welcome to my father. I knocked on the door and waited for some time before he answered.

My father was wearing a frayed dressing-gown my mother had bought him years before, and he had a cigarette in his mouth. He had become an antonym of himself. The last time I had seen him he had still looked quite young: thin, tall and with a full head of hair. Now he was old, fat, stooped and balding. He saw me looking at his belly and said through the smoke, ‘Do I still have two feet, then? I haven't seen them in a while.'

He offered me his hand, which trembled a little, and I shook it.

‘So where's this girl of yours?' he asked, stepping out onto the front porch.

I waved at Phuong and she started to get out of the car.

‘I thought Phuong was a funny name.' He squinted so he could see better. ‘You never mentioned she was a gook.'

Without a word, I left my father on the porch and hurried down the path. Taking Phuong's hand, I led her back to the car.

‘Son,' my father was calling, as he carefully made his way down the porch steps. ‘Son, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. I don't know why I … She looks a lovely girl. Son!'

‘What is it?' Phuong asked.

‘We're going,' I said, opening the car door.

‘Why?'

An 1893 dictionary of slang defines
gook
as a low prostitute. It was adopted by American marines in the Philippine–American War to refer to all Filipinos (perhaps taken from
gugu
, a mocking of Filipino speech) and expanded throughout the twentieth century to embrace all South-East Asian countries, including Vietnam, where Phuong's parents had come from.

‘I'll tell you on the way.'

‘Son!' I heard my father again as we drove away. He jogged awkwardly after the car, then stopped, and leaned over, holding his knees.

I didn't speak to my father for five years.

Fuck

My mother called me from the hospital to tell me my father had had a stroke. He had telephoned her earlier that day, shouting gibberish into the phone. At first my mother thought that he was simply drunk, but there was a tone to his nonsense that scared her. She immediately caught the train down to see him. On arriving at the house, she found him in the bedroom trying to pull his work overalls on. He had retired the year before. When he saw her, my father said thickly, ‘What's for tea, Mary? I'm fucking starving.' His mouth was horribly twisted, and his right arm hung limp at his side.

I found my mother sitting by his bed at the hospital. My father was asleep among the various lines and tubes that were keeping him alive. He was completely bald now, and his skin had a yellow, coarse look, like the old newspapers you find under carpets. I kissed my mother, then leaned over to look at my father. He opened his eyes, said quite clearly ‘Fuck!' and closed his eyes again.

‘The doctors said the stroke has affected his speech,' my mother explained. ‘They told me the name of it, but I can't remember. Dys-something. Or a-something-ia. It's the bit of the brain where you form words, where you choose them. The doctor said he can't censor himself. He's been swearing the whole time he's been in here. They said, in the scans, there was evidence of older lessons in his brain. Lessons. Is that right?'

‘Lesions?' I suggested.

‘Yes, lesions. That maybe he had a small stroke years ago, and we never noticed, not with the drinking he did. And he said things … He couldn't stop himself from saying those bad things.' She began to cry.

‘What's that fucking racket?' my father said, drowsily. ‘I just want to sleep, for fuck's sake.'

We took my father home three weeks later. He had lost much of his memory of the past ten years, and his speech was confused. He would ask for a fork when he meant a knife, and call my mother a ‘silly tart' when she brought him one. But then he would shake his head, saying, ‘I'm sorry, hen. I can't help it. My fucking brain is fucked.'