You Never Met My Father (24 page)

We never heard anything more about the block of land Denny claimed to have bought in Greensborough. Perhaps he had taken our wishes into account and quietly sold it. Instead he applied for a Housing Commission home under construction on a new estate in West Portland. I didn't know anything about the application. As with his medical history, neither he nor my mother revealed anything about such adult matters as a change of address (which had happened every year or two throughout my life) or the state of the family budget (if ever one existed), bills and rent, or legal issues.Th ese were matters children need not know about.

When the application was approved, my sisters and I were told about it, and we soon went to view our designated home under construction. The street and an adjoining cul-de-sac already had a bitumen surface, concrete drainage and footpaths. It was a thrill to see, first, the foundations and then the timber frame, tiled roof and aluminium windows of our place.

Occasionally we would visit the estate to check its progress. If the builders had clocked off for the day, we would climb around inside, stepping from joist to joist, imagining each room. The area that was to be my room looked tiny but it would do. My sisters would have to share a bigger room.

As we climbed around the structure, Denny admired the builders' handiwork. “What do you think, my friend,” he would say to me.

He was calling me ‘my friend' more often, which I preferred to the excruciating nickname, ‘Butch'.

Finally lime-green cement sheeting with minute corrugations was attached as external walls, leaving only the interior to be completed. A brand new house and very modern-looking by Housing Commission standards. It was set forward on a deep tapering block with a partly concreted driveway. There was even a small tool shed in the back yard.

I could hardly believe our change of luck.

We didn't take up the option of buying the place. We couldn't afford the modest deposit. But, as its first tenants, it would seem like our own. My impatience to take possession grew with each day.

Before we shifted in Denny had the floors in every room and passage covered in a grey, floral-patterned lino. We moved a lot of our old furniture—our table with a red-and-white patterned laminex top and fading red vinyl seats, the stainless steel framed single beds, my mother's old timber double bed, our clumpy kapok mattresses, our worn cream vinyl covered armchairs—but he bought new venetian blinds, our first television since the time we were travelling along the eastern seaboard, and our first automatic washing machine, on hire purchase, which of course meant he didn't have to pay for anything straightaway, a gift-horse to a compulsive gambler.

Denny was proud of his domestic achievements. Despite his bad back he immediately went about raking the ground, front and back, until it was even and smooth. He cast lawn seed around and watered it in. The effort left him unable to move for three days. From his chair he issued instructions on various tasks that had to be done. There were a couple of small bushes he had got from somewhere which needed to be planted, briquettes to be bought for the heater in the lounge room, a TV antenna he had already attached to the roof to be adjusted a tad, seedlings to be requisitioned from Uncle Mick's hothouse for our vegetable garden. When he finally got to his feet he seemed satisfied with everything I had done, which surprised me and raised my spirits. I dared to ponder the possibility that this new place might change him. In a rash moment I even imagined he would stop gambling.

He remained friendly towards us. He sounded optimistic about the future. He sat in his chair with his legs crossed, tapping a beat on the timber armrests as if he were a jazz percussionist. I could tell he thought it was a new start for him. He kept saying, “we can do this…” and “we can do that…” laying down plans, which we all endorsed, hardly able to believe our ears. He kept tapping a syncopated beat.

“There's a talent you didn't know your old man had,” he said.

“What? Playing the armchair?” I joked, expecting his fury as soon as I'd said it.

But he half-closed his eyes, moved his neck and shoulders rhythmically. “The drums, my friend. Something I learned in the army. I could've been a drummer, you know.”

He looked nothing like Ringo Starr.

He was also friendly towards the neighbours who were all just shifting in. He offered to help unload trailers of furniture as they arrived, despite what had happened to his back while labouring on our lawn. He offered to run those without cars down the street to do their shopping. If they had an intractable cold or looked in need of a good sleep, he offered them medicines they couldn't buy without prescriptions.

As a TTI pensioner he got whatever medicines he wanted free of charge. He requested pills and ointments for a wide range of ailments in quantities well beyond the needs of one person or one family.

He took it upon himself to operate a communal dispensary, specialising in Kenacomb, an antifungal, antibiotic ointment, which he believed could be used on any type of injury, sleeping pills and BTZ cream, whose use I have forgotten but seem to remember rubbing on muscular pains and swollen ankles after football matches.

Denny saw this as a community service, ‘helping your own kind'
.
You took what you could from the powers that be, whenever you got the chance. You looked after your own. “The poor bloody worker,” he would say. But such generosity, such friendliness, wasn't to everyone's liking. It made some of the neighbours wary.

Everyone on the estate had arrived at roughly the same time, which meant none could claim dominion. Nobody was shifting into anybody else's territory, which was especially important for children or teenagers like me. If disputes arose they weren't settled on the basis of precedence.

There were about twenty households. Within a few months we more or less knew everybody. One of our next-door neighbours was a violent drunkard, whose wife Denny drove to Casualty once or twice, her face swollen and bruised almost beyond recognition, a tad ironic, I thought, considering the condition he'd left my mother in on occasions. Our neighbour on the other side was a homely religious nutter. Every so often some evangelicals paid her a visit. They carried printed brochures containing dire warnings with biblical quotes to support them. In return she gave tea and biscuits and as soon as they were gone, she was leaning over our fence, announcing to me or my sisters or my mother the exact date that the world would end—Tuesday 27, Friday 3, Wednesday 15—with a well-intentioned warning to repent and prepare for the Lord. And when the day passed without the slightest hint of Armageddon, not even a tremor, a dress rehearsal, disappointment replaced her eagerness. Her gloom prevailed for weeks. In a sombre mood, she would busy herself in her garden, planting plastic flowers rather than real ones, shifting them from one bed to another until the clean-cut evangelicals knocked once more with an apology for the miscalculation and a revised date, which would immediately cheer her and have her rushing back to our fence with the good news.

We took no notice of her. Nor did her husband, a fat, taciturn fellow, who scowled a lot and occasionally managed a cynical guffaw. If she wanted Armageddon she needed to look no further than him. He was a slaughterman at Borthwicks, the Grim Reaper to all those terrified cattle in its mustering yards.

One woman around the corner in the cul-de-sac, a tall grey-haired widow, a migrant with what I eventually learnt was a Yorkshire accent, was known to clip her boys around the ears if they complained about her poor house-keeping. Needless to say the house was in chaos. Her four or five boys were wild. One reportedly was in jail or the army, or both. They were all feared for their volatile tempers. And the youngest, the mother's favourite, turned out to be the wildest. One day he killed his mate with a shotgun after a dispute over sharing the day's catch of rabbits.

And there were other bellowers and beaters besides the drunkard next door, besides the woman around the corner, besides my father. Even having a policeman living on the estate made little difference. But there were quiet households as well, which I found reassuring, people who kept to themselves, who watched the commotion, peeking through their blinds from time to time, no doubt horrified by the behaviour of some of their neighbours. They were the ones I hoped were normal. As for boys my age, there were a few on the estate, some I played football with but none I would call a friend.

Pat was pleased with her new house. In the kitchen there was an electric stove, far superior to the old wood stove in our former hovel. There were hot water taps throughout. There was an indoor bathroom, which had a shower, a novelty for us, and an indoor toilet (mercifully independent of the bathroom) that flushed! She could hang the washing on a rotary clothesline like the type Denny used to sell, instead of wires that looped across the yard and were raised with heavy props at our previous place. Denny saw that she approved and for a while they got along fine. It was the first time she had ever possessed her own space. Being new, the house was clean too with nobody else's grime, and she intended keeping it that way.

Denny helped her. He was no loafer, despite his erratic work history and injured back. The inactivity thrust upon him by his industrial accident, left him frustrated and restless. Providing there were no races on and his mood wasn't too dark, he would take up a broom or a duster, sweep or mop the floors, dust down the venetians. They argued over who should do the cooking. Pat felt, as mother and wife, the kitchen was her domain. All Denny wanted to do was make himself useful. She begrudgingly let him help around the periphery, peeling potatoes, cutting onions, turning chops and sausages. He accepted that graciously. To my surprise once or twice he came up behind and gave her a hug, which she endured momentarily but then shrugged off with an almost inaudible
Oh, Denny
, her usual dissenting utterance, embarrassed by her children witnessing their intimacy.

Then he got another job.

A massive contraption arrived in the bay one day, an oil rig, a tripodal monster that towered over the port and attracted crowds to the cliff tops and breakwaters while it was fitted out for exploratory drills off Cape Otway. It had been towed from the other side of the world and was one of the first to be seen in Australian waters. When he heard of the lucrative wages being offered to work on it, he applied for and got a job as a slusher. He thought it was the kind of job that wouldn't be too taxing on his injured back. Two weeks at sea. One week break. That was the roster. He thought the job would be a cinch.

Soon the oil rig was towed away with him aboard. I watched it until it slipped beyond the horizon.

He lasted two weeks. He said his back let him down. But I heard a rumour that he had been in a fight, which would have been unacceptable on a tall platform in the middle of the sea.

Resigning himself to an idle life, he settled back into his routine, setting himself up in the lounge room, his coffee and ashtray and form guide laid out beside him on a little coffee table, his trannie on 3UZ, listening to Bert Bryant's call of the city races. The TV was directly in front of him. In the evening he could watch the replay of the final furlong of each race on the evening news, groaning with a hand sheltering his eyes if he had backed a loser, hissing with his fists clenched on the rare occasions when he had won.

Once, while he was out buying dinner after one of his wins, and a mood of levity lingered, my mother spoke about his gambling. “Did I ever tell you what your father said straight after our wedding?”

I shrugged and pouted. “Tell us.”

“When we left the church we took a cab to the wedding reception. And while we were going he tapped the driver on the shoulder and asked what had won the race that was on while we were getting married.” She gave a little strangled laugh. “I should've known then, shouldn't I?”

For a while we were like a normal family. No great affection but no arguments either. Pat would cook tea, which we still ate at the kitchen table rather than in front of the TV. She always prepared an Anglo meal: meat (chops, sausages, rissoles or corned beef) and three vegetables (potatoes, peas or string beans and one other: boiled carrot, pumpkin or cabbage). For sweets we ate canned fruit with cream or ice cream, or a pudding of some sort for dessert, a rhubarb sponge or bread-and-butter custard. We ate early—around five o'clock—the dishes were done, and then we'd file into the lounge room to catch the news. Every night we sat together before the box. Pat liked
I Dream of Jeannie
and
Bonanza
. Denny's favourite shows were
F Troop
,
Th
e Red Skelton Show
and
Th
e Andy Williams Show
. He liked the crooners who appeared with Williams, and occasionally he sang along, although in a voice so soft it was difficult to tell whether he could hold a tune. His favourite singers were Bobby Darin and Nat King Cole.

The first big dispute in the new place happened when Pat complained that the automatic washing machine Denny had bought on hire purchase produced inferior results to her old twin tub.

Fury descended on him like a fiend. “Jesus wept! Every time things start to go okay for us, Trish, you find something to bloodywell complain about!”

My mother was equally adamant that it was a waste of money, which was not strictly accurate, since he was yet to pay for anything.

And that became a problem too. One day he received a summons over his unpaid installments. He warned us not to open the door to strangers, who might force their way in to repossess the television, washing machine, venetians, floor coverings and a few other things besides, like the encyclopaedia he had ordered from a door-to-door salesmen and never paid for, which stood proudly in its complimentary bookcase in our lounge room.

He went to court and returned unexpectedly triumphant. The magistrate had ruled against him. But since he had recently gained an invalid's pension (which was independent of TPI pension he sought), he had only been ordered to pay off the debt at a nominal rate.