The Mascot (4 page)

A
fter my father had returned to Australia, I held back from calling him until he'd been home for nearly a week.

As I dialed my parents' number, I wondered if by now he would have confessed to my mother where he'd really been and imagined he might now explain to me his cryptic outbursts. I couldn't have been more wrong.

When he answered the phone, my father greeted me in his usual fashion, almost immediately turning on the speakerphone so that my mother could listen in. Jovial and relaxed, he asked me what I had been up to and how my week had been, careful not to indicate that he had been with me only days earlier. Clearly he'd been maintaining the charade with my mother.

When I put the phone down, I realized that he hadn't imparted a single piece of information, certainly nothing that related to the dramatic climax of his visit.

Two weeks after my father's visit, I had spoken with him two or three times, yet he still acted as if nothing had happened. On one occasion he even affectionately echoed my mother's oft-repeated question: “When are you coming home for a visit, Marky? It's been ages since we've seen you.”

I decided to take matters into my own hands. I called a travel agent and booked a flight for the following evening to Melbourne. My research trip to Tokyo would have to wait.

My father was waiting for me in the arrivals terminal at Melbourne airport. We were both bleary-eyed—me from the journey, which had taken nearly twenty-four hours, and my father from having to rise so early to meet my 5:00 a.m. flight. But he bore no other sign of surprise at my unexpected arrival. I suspected that he knew why I was there.

I hadn't seen my father in just over three weeks, since his brief visit to Oxford. I felt very strange to be in his actual physical presence, self-conscious and even a little ashamed, as if my arrival was a demand for access to his secrets. But I also felt that what had transpired in Oxford and London had been a tentative invitation to be his companion. To the out sider my father may have seemed emotionally intense—paradoxically making him appear gruff rather than sensitive at times—but I had gotten used to it. He did want to express his emotions, but they seemed trapped. He said, “What are you doing here, son?” then stretched out his hand to shake mine while I opened my arms to embrace him, bungling our greeting.

“What are you doing?” my father exclaimed, attempting to smooth over the awkwardness. “Trying to push me over or something?”

With that, he grabbed my luggage and headed for the parking lot, with me following behind, benumbed and disoriented. It took me several moments to notice the familiar scent of the pungent eucalyptus trees, the dawn chorus of birds—kookaburras, rosellas, wild parrots, the slightly ungainly pink and gray galahs that often thumped into trees for no reason—and the vast high Australian sky. I gave an involuntary shiver.

We drove home in silence. Somehow the incident on the subway in London had become the lodestone of our relationship, and until it was mentioned we wouldn't have much to say to each other.

I rolled down the window and stared out at the passing landscape of sprawling suburbs, built when the Australian dream—the triple-fronted brick house nestled on a quarter-acre plot—was in full bloom. The “brick veneers,” as they were called, dominated either side of the freeway. Even as a child I knew I didn't ever want to live in one, though I had envied their atmosphere of proper Englishness. They all seemed so quiet and ordered compared to the chaos of my own arid childhood suburb, Altona, in the west. Altona was in essence a vast, open volcanic plain, full of dry scrub and tiger snakes, on which were dotted little pockets of newly built homes, some still incomplete, with dry, weedy gardens. When I was growing up, the roads were largely unpaved and the sewage was not yet connected, so the inhabitants would have to wait for the “dunny man” who came weekly to change over the smelly metal toilet tanks.

Altona was the site of the city's petroleum industry and had been named after the German Altona, a sister oil town in Germany. The town surrounding the industrial complexes had been built to support the factories.

As we drove, my father drew my attention to some new buildings under construction. “Melbourne's really coming on, isn't it?” he said, obviously searching for a neutral topic. I didn't respond but instead gazed at his profile, which was reflected next to me in the passenger window. I saw him turn his head briefly in my direction before facing the road again.

As he turned into the main artery leading into Altona and then into a smaller road that took us directly to our street, a familiar sight came into view—the oil refinery complex, with its spidery web of pipes rising high into the sky. A single flame burned continuously from the top of a slender pipe at its upper end and cast a thin glow over the houses that otherwise lay in the refinery's shadow.

When I was a child, this flame had always comforted me—like an Olympic torch or the eternal candle on a church altar—sending me off to sleep, safe in the knowledge that it was giving off its protective light. Sometimes, when I awoke during the night, I would raise my blinds and peer out of the window, just to make sure that it was still burning.

At the other end of our street lay the abattoirs, whose smell of freshly slaughtered carcasses added to the acidic taste of petroleum that regularly coated the inside of our mouths. Always upwind of our neighborhood, the stench would blow down and settle over the street by midmorning. Sometimes it was so bad you would have to cover your mouth and nose with a handkerchief.

We turned into the driveway and came to a stop. My mother was already standing on the front porch.

“Go and say hello to Mum,” my father said, unlocking the trunk of the car. “I'll look after your bags.”

“You didn't feel well enough to come to the airport, Mum?” I asked as I kissed her.

“Sorry, luv,” was all my mother replied. She was not averse to complaining about her various aches and pains—her Irish stock was not a sturdy one—but now her stoic response made me think that something more serious may have been affecting her.

The house was full of familiar smells.

“I've got your breakfast on,” she called across to me from the stove. “A full Aussie fry-up. How many snags do you want?”

“Two sausages are fine, Mum,” I answered.

“Oh, you call them sausages now, do you?” she said, teasing me. “That's your posh Oxford way of talking, is it?”

I sat down at the kitchen table. After my father had taken my luggage through to my old bedroom at the back of the house, he joined us. He poured himself some coffee and sat down opposite me, pretending to immerse himself in the morning paper. My mother served me my breakfast and sat down beside me.

Just as she sat, my father rose, gulping down the remains of his coffee.

“Well,” he announced gruffly. “Some of us have work to do. I'll be in the workshop if you need me.”

“Workshop?” my mother snorted, winking at me conspiratorially. “Is that what you call it? It's a junk heap. He hasn't tidied it since the day we moved here in 1963.”

He pretended not to have heard her and turned his back on us. “He's never gonna do it!” she silently mouthed across the table, shaking her head in a gesture of mock disgust. I laughed, suddenly pleased to be home.

A short while later, I took my breakfast dishes over to the sink where my mother was standing. I came up next to her, gazing with her into the backyard. We could see my father tinkering in his workshop, an old ramshackle garage that was literally falling down around him.

She began to wash my breakfast dishes. “It's a bit of a surprise,” she said, “you coming home like this.”

My mother expressed herself in her typical low-key fashion, but I felt her eyes intently examining me for clues.

I tried to shrug her off. “Things are a bit slow moving in Tokyo. My research won't begin for some time yet,” I said, being deliberately vague. “Thought I'd come and see how me old mum and dad are.”

My mother laughed lightly before her expression became serious. “Just as well you did,” she murmured, looking down into the sink.

I shot my mother a questioning look, which she must have sensed.

“It's your father,” she said. “I can't explain it at all. He's been in a strange mood the last few weeks. Ever since he went to see an old friend in Sydney.”

“Any idea why?” I asked. I hated lying to my mother like this.

She shook her head. “He's not said a word. In fact, it almost seems like he doesn't want me here. He doesn't want to do anything, not even go out on Sundays.” Sunday had always been their day together.

“Perhaps he'll talk to me,” I said. “After all, I've come halfway across the world to visit.”

My mother stopped what she was doing and seemed to reflect on my answer for some moments before responding.

“Give him time, luv,” she said in a way that conveyed the modest wisdom I always associated with her. “In good time we'll learn what this is all about.” Then she changed the subject. “You must be wrecked,” she said. “Why don't you have a nap?”

When I awoke it was just before lunchtime. I lay on the bed staring at the ceiling. Everything was just as I had left it years earlier, when I had left home for the first time. I sensed that my mother had never given up hope that I would return permanently, and on every visit home she would always ask me at least once, “Do you ever think you'll come back home to live?”

I usually took this line of questioning as her test of my attachment to family life with them, but I wondered now if instead it betrayed a fear of being left alone with an unknown quantity. My mother was a highly intuitive woman—she knew something was wrong.

A light tap on the door roused me from my thoughts. My father poked his head in. “Lunch, son,” he said and went away again.

I was acutely conscious of the fact that my father had avoided me all day. I wondered how I was going to broach the topic when he seemed so determined to remain silent.

Almost a week had passed since my return to Melbourne, and during that time my father and I had resumed the bizarre pas de deux of our time together in Oxford and London. But this time the dynamics of our choreography had subtly altered. He still set its terms, but now that we were under the same roof he could escape only as far as his workshop, and he couldn't stay there forever.

In the meantime, I spent my time catching up with my brothers, aunts, and old friends. Everybody was surprised by my unexpected visit, but I would just shrug in response to their probing. It was as if a bomb had been dropped into the midst of my family that had yet to explode. Only I knew about it, but couldn't warn them.

Pulling into the driveway late one night toward the end of my first week home, I noticed a faint light coming from the kitchen of the dark house. I let myself in quietly. I could hear my mother snoring gently along with her radio in the front bedroom. I was tiptoeing across the living room toward the kitchen to get a glass of water when I heard my father's nervous cough. I opened the door a fraction to see what he was up to.

My father was seated at the kitchen table. His reading glasses were perched on the end of his nose, and his head was bent down over his case. He was rummaging through it with the lid wide open, but from where I was standing I couldn't get a clear view of its contents.

For several moments I stood at the door, but he must have sensed my presence. He turned abruptly and caught me hovering there. He snapped the case shut and laid his arms across its lid protectively.

For a moment I was offended. It was as if I were an enemy threatening to intrude on his territory.

“How long have you been there?” he asked suspiciously.

“Only a moment,” I replied.

He chose to accept my response, though I sensed that he suspected otherwise. “I didn't hear you come in,” he said.

I walked over to the sink and poured myself a glass of water. “What are you still doing up at this hour?” I asked. “It's nearly one in the morning.”

“Can't sleep,” he said wearily.

I sat down opposite him.

“You're in late tonight,” he said. He set his case casually on the floor next to him, trying to make it as inconspicuous as possible.

“What were you looking for just now?” I asked, nodding in the direction of the case on the floor.

My father stretched his arms above his head, feigning nonchalance as if the case were of little significance to him.

“Nothing,” he answered casually, but his nervous cough betrayed him.

“Nothing?” I said evenly. “Always the same thing. Nothing!”

My father looked at me with sharp, appraising interest, but he didn't say a word. I was too tired to pursue a game of cat and mouse at this hour. I rose and walked over to the sink to deposit my empty glass. My back was still to him when I heard him mumble something. I turned around and saw that he had again brought his case to the table and was opening its lid.

“Sorry, Dad, I missed that,” I said, approaching him as he began to rummage in the case.