You Never Met My Father (23 page)

Kathy, a businessman's daughter, was enthralled. A secret admirer was every schoolgirl's dream. Her spirits headed for the stratosphere and remained there for weeks. No one had any inkling who had planted the gift, and a confession from me was out of the question. I gave not the slightest hint to anyone. The degree of attention the brooch generated unnerved me. What if she was horrified when she discovered that I was her mystery admirer? Her feelings about it were in the public domain, which meant the entire class, and beyond, would find out it was me. If that happened I was doomed. I could already hear their mocking laughter. I concluded I had done a very stupid thing and couldn't wait for the weeks to pass for the incident to die down.

Kathy eventually found out it was me towards the end of the year through a careless comment I made to my sister, who told her friends, who told others. But all the steam had gone out of the issue and she was surprisingly gracious about it, saying what I had done was cute.

One day during the holidays before I started high school we met by chance as I was taking a shortcut through the grounds of the Methodist Church, where she was a member of the congregation. Waylaying me, guiding me into a nook, she repeated how pleased she had been and how sweet I was. The cherry colour my face turned was only partly due to her forwardness. I was afraid she would realise where I lived. She startled me with a kiss on the mouth and promised she'd consider ‘taking things further' without elaborating, without even the slightest curiosity about my presence in the church precincts.

But in high school she discovered there were bigger fish to fry. My hopes were finally dashed when I heard her speaking to a friend on the other side of our fence where she was playing tennis at the end of second form.

“Remember my secret admirer in Grade Six?”

She mentioned my name, barely above a whisper, unaware I was watching her through a crack.

“Yeah, he sent you that cheap brooch.”

“Sweet. That's where he lives—in that dump there.”

Despite the barrier between us I went crimson. She knew where I lived!

Her friend could see the top of our house: the rusted roof, unhinged guttering, unpainted weatherboards. “Oh, gawd, poor guy. No wonder it was cheap.”

After that, despite a lingering infatuation, I avoided her at every opportunity.

Second Form had been a mixed year for me. I stopped using hair oil and grew a fringe in a tentative imitation of the Beatles, who had burst like a tsunami across our cultural backwater. As the fringe grew towards my eyebrows I dared to hope, like almost every boy in the school, some Beatle magnetism might rub off on me. Those who kept their pompadours looked sadly out of touch. I longed for a girlfriend. I wanted her to
want
to be my girlfriend. I went to see
A
Hard Day's Night
, and, like every other teenager who saw it, my life changed forever.

While I watched, surrounded by screaming girls, I entered through an invisible membrane the realm of adolescence, abandoning my parents, who became no more than background noise. The message these four zany lads were sending, loud and clear, was just have some fun, do crazy things, even goofy things, that your parents would disapprove of, and the girls would come stampeding after you.

I looked askance at the female faces around me. They were wild, fierce, unconstrained, as if something primordial held deep inside had burst asunder and unleashed its accumulated energy.

Puberty arrived soon after, not in a wet dream as with most boys, but in my hideout in the cypress hedge where I kept some photos of naked women, which I had impulsively torn from a Swedish magazine I had discovered in Uncle Mick's paper rack. I had no idea if he knew they were missing. Nobody ever interrogated me. I was never arrested. The stolen pictures showed everything except pubic hair, which had been airbrushed out. The pictures made my heart beat furiously. As I studied them for the umpteenth time, holding each on the best angle to catch the sunlight and clutching myself, I experienced an astonishing convulsion, followed by a less desired damp, sticky sensation, just as Paul Walters had predicted.

Within weeks I started to get acne, especially under my jaw and around my neck. I squeezed these and covered them with a steaming face washer, hoping to purify the area. They kept reappearing throughout the year, gouging tiny craters in my skin. I was getting more hair on my groin and armpits, as well as my top lip. I could conceal the groin. The armpits didn't matter. But the lip concerned me.

In the mirror I saw a gawky bumpkin. Droopy eye, downy lip, ears that alarmed me whenever I noticed my shadow on the ground, and now a faulty cap on the tooth I'd snapped off with a hammer, whose metal backing had tarnished its white enamel, a verdigris incisor—charity's cheap work—that I hid behind a hand whenever I laughed. The Beatle hairstyle couldn't hide any of my shortcomings.

Around this time Denny reappeared for a short time, arriving early in the morning. He had hitchhiked as far as Port Fairy, and walked the last forty miles overnight. He looked exhausted. Yet his eyes were still fiery and intimidating.

“You look like a hillbilly,” he said.

My hand went to my face.

He fetched me a shaving brush and razor.

“Just the lip,” he advised. “The chin'll sprout hair soon enough without your help. Don't cut yourself. And do something with that bloody hair of yours. Put some Brylcreem on it, for Chrissakes.”

Rebelling against the hair oil order, I did what he suggested with the razor, soaping my lip with the dampened brush and drawing the blade down. I felt a pleasant scraping sensation as the lip meekly resisted. A few strokes and it was over. I gazed at the result. My face was transformed. I could hardly believe such a little thing could make so much difference. Hope flickered faintly against my befuddled heart.

But if any girl noticed she didn't bother informing me.

For my part I was besotted by every second schoolgirl I passed. She only needed to smile politely or say a friendly word and I was hers. I could read a certain meaning in the most casual of remarks. Had any of them voiced what I wanted to hear, I probably would have run a mile.

The pretty girls who completely ignored me attracted me the most. There was one from a grade below mine, who was a sultry creature with long dark hair, and whose mother ran the school canteen. She helped her mother out at lunchtime and I shuffled around in the queue to make sure, when I reached the counter, she was the one who served me.

Coming face to face I blushed furiously. Every time. I was sure she noticed but said nothing, merely waited with an indifferent gaze for my lunch request.

I had to console myself with a photo I had of her, a group photo of the school swimming team of which we were both part. I once lay on my bed with the photo and tried to place a kiss on her head without my lips touching anyone else. For a long while kissing photographs was the closest I came to the real thing.

But at least now I could do it in the privacy of my own bedroom. Denny realised it was inappropriate for me to still be sharing with Carol. He ordered Jean and me to swap rooms.

Eventually, Denny took me and Connie Yallock's son, Gary, to a Father-and-Son evening at the Methodist Hall, a Christian introduction to sex, recommended by our school in a sealed letter to parents. I remember it well because of the number of tense fathers and tittering boys, the most self-conscious gathering I'd ever been a part of.

At the end of the evening Denny gave us a sheepish grin. “So, now you know everything,” he said, as if that would be his final word on the subject.

“We already knew that much.”

“Well, if you want to know more, just ask your mother.”

The matter was never raised again.

Portland was still evolving into an industrial mire. The port was getting bigger. Silos were under construction on a site that was once sea. The displaced water was forced to find a new level across the bay, destroying the Dutton Way beach where we had sometimes gone to swim and play, threatening houses, holiday cottages and the highway. To protect them, boulders were heaped in a great barrier, nearly two metres higher than the road, ruining its recreational attraction and the pleasant view. Yet on a rough day the waves still broke over the rocks, making a trip along the road hazardous.

In keeping with a modern port, a modern municipal district was deemed essential: shire offices, council chambers, police station, civic centre and a public library. Some of the earliest administrative offices in Victoria, all solid bluestone buildings, were demolished to make way for functional cream-brick counterparts. Around this time the railway station below the post office was also pulled down and the tracks removed, altering the character of the foreshore forever. The post office was earmarked for relocation nearer the main shopping precinct. On a national level, pounds, shillings and pence were being replaced with dollars and cents.

Apart from the currency change, 1966 was an uneventful year. I hung around with a goofy British immigrant, Derrick Yardley, who, coming from the land of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones was considered something of an authority on popular culture. He wore his hair in a mop like George Harrison. He knew before anyone else what was
in
: hairstyles, clothes, music, jargon. It was like he had a hot line to the Merseyside. When he decided to form his own pop group and asked me to join, my head swirled at the honour. It didn't matter I had no musical ability; none of us did. And the only instrument between us was Derrick's second-hand electric guitar, which he got for Christmas. Next Christmas he hoped to get an amplifier. He decided I would be the bass guitarist because my hairstyle looked like Paul McCartney's, and like McCartney I was left-handed. And until I bought a bass guitar I could improvise with a broom. Needless to say the band fizzled out after a few rehearsals, which really amounted to just sitting around debating what the name of our group would be. We settled on ‘The Redbacks', in keeping with the creepy-crawly motif our heroes had established (although sadly devoid of any musical pun), or discussing the latest Top 10, the latest fashion, the latest crazy outrage of the latest musical sensation. It was imperative to keep up with the latest. When our parents disapproved of all this—the music, the hairstyles, the clothes, the pop-star antics—we had no choice but to consider adults irrelevant. We were still financially dependent upon them but their significance in every other respect was hardly worth thinking about.

I didn't mind the currency change. One pound equated to two dollars. Overnight my savings from the job at the cinema appeared to have doubled, until Denny returned again and I seemed to lose twice as much.

He arrived late in April, dressed in a St Vinnie's suit this time but looking more handsome than ever, healthier and perhaps a little chubbier, as if he'd had a protracted stay at a resort rather than the loony bin. He told us he felt like a new man, and declared he had changed his ways. But within days he raided the kitty.

I offered my mother money to help with the groceries. In effect my savings for a bass guitar began haemorrhaging into the coffers of the TAB via our domestic budget.

While he was away Denny had been working overtime on getting a TPI pension from the Repatriation Department. He had been to see a back specialist in Ballarat who supported his case for a pension. But apparently the Department took little heed of the recommendation. In January a medical officer interviewing Denny at Heidelberg wrote:
despite my best efforts to discuss his case he worked himself up into a rage and finally succeeded in grabbing me by the shoulder and pushing me out of the chair. (He desisted when he heard the tearing of my suit and it is my belief that his rage was quite a degree under his control).

By September his pension was again reviewed:
[Sparkes] is well known to me. Today he is quite aggressive, expressing his usual material against doctors and the Department. He eventually stormed out of the interview.

This man is a very aggressive psychopath who has an extremely low stress tolerance. He maintains that he is unemployable & strongly states that he wants a decision one way or the other about his pension—he considers that the indecision of the TTI is doing him harm (this is one statement with which I agree—it is therapeutically harmful due to his low frustration level.)

He threatens to suicide if some decision is not reached regarding both his pension & his back condition. This threat is not without meaning—he is quite capable of violence to himself & others.

His psychiatric state is so well developed now that he will not improve…

Although it is felt that [he] will never work again I cannot say that this is completely due to his accepted psychiatric disability.

Despite the final sentence, the assessment of psychiatric disability was given as 100 per cent.

Yet Denny's campaign for a TPI pension, while well under way, was far from over. Further medical examinations took place. In October a doctor reported a near normal range of spinal movement. In February the following year a report cast doubt on the amount of back pain he was actually feeling, stating there was no real organic lesion detectable in his lower lumbar spine. It added weight to the view that he was a malingerer.