You Never Met My Father (33 page)

I took a few moments to sit alone in the bare central plaza, called the Agora, looking across at the vivid glass mural in front of the library. I tried to get excited about the new direction my life was heading. Finally I was getting away from my family. That alone should have made me happy. But I was numbed by the unfamiliarity. I tried in vain to glimpse the future. I hoped for wisdom, independence, courage, happiness. I had little idea then that it wouldn't be that easy to get away from Denny, or that the next few years would be the most tumultuous in my life.

In the weeks before I shifted to Melbourne some odd things happened.

First Denny suggested I stop working. “Have a break before you start your course. You deserve it.”

His concern unsettled me. In recent weeks he had become rather accommodating, a trait I couldn't remember him ever displaying before.

I took his advice.

Then to my amazement he offered to go rabbiting with me. Just the two of us! A father-and-son bonding session is what it would be called these days. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I borrowed a couple of ferrets and some nets from Jimmy, who chuckled at the prospect of Denny and I going it alone. I could see his point but pretended our excursion was nothing out of the ordinary.

We only went a few kilometres out of town, as if both of us wished to get it over and done with. We hardly spoke. And when we did our voices sounded unnatural, in his case higher than usual and evanescent, while mine became a strained, dull monotone.

Adding to our discomfort, the ferrets were inexplicably lethargic. Usually they couldn't wait to leave their box and shoot into the dark recesses of the earth to terrify their quarry. This day they moped around the entrance, as if nothing was going to lure them deeper. I suspected Jimmy was behind some practical joke. More than likely he had just fed them before my request and hadn't bothered to tell me, or he hadn't wanted to risk his best predators with rank amateurs like the Sparkeses. So he had given us the duds. Still, I scanned our surroundings in case he and his father were hiding in the bushes somewhere, delighting in our predicament. When an hour transpired and we were still waiting for our first rabbit, I suggested we go home. And he was as eager as me to leave. He made a feeble joke about having to eat a different sort of rodent again tonight.

A few days later he asked me to accompany him to a men's wear store, which was having a sale on summer shirts. To be able to buy me something, he must have had a win on the horses. Surprised, I thanked him.

But when I saw the shirts my heart sank. They were in a style I thought looked foreign, probably French—horizontal stripes, half-length sleeves, and, instead of a collar, a slit that exposed the shoulders—but nothing like any recent fashion trend, most likely failed stock from the previous summer, as their reduced price suggested. Denny invited me to choose a couple. I did so reluctantly, fussing over the choice, as he bargained with the shop assistant for a discount. The shirts were in a large crate in the centre of the store. There must have been well over a hundred. I fossicked around, wasting time, hoping to wear out his patience and change his mind. But, with no sign of him relenting, I picked out two. Denny came over and insisted I take more. Annoyed, I grabbed a couple from the top of the pile and handed them to him, thinking I could dispose of them once I went to live in Melbourne.

As he drove home he commended my choice.

“Why couldn't I have chosen some other shirts or maybe a couple of T-shirts? I could do with a few more of those.”

“You saw the price I squeezed out of him!” he protested.

I went to my room and tried them on in front of a mirror, trying to convince myself they might one day come into fashion.

Denny poked his head around the door. “How do they fit, my friend?” He was giving me his unnerving grin. “Nice! Beaut!”

A short while later he got into his car and went out again.

When he returned he came to my room and asked for some help. The car was full of cartons. The front passenger seat. The back seat. The boot.

“What's in them?” I asked.

“Have a look.”

They were packed with shirts from the sale.

“What do you think?” he said, immensely pleased with himself.

“You've bought me enough shirts for the next sixty years!” I cried.

“Keep your bloody voice down,” he muttered, looking around to see if the neighbours were spying on him.

After we had deposited the cartons on the living room floor, he began to pull the shirts out and hold them up to my chest. He had purchased the entire stock. “I got twenty percent off the sale price too. Twenty bloody percent!”

“How could you afford so many?”

He gestured off-handedly, as if I need not worry over such trifling matters.

“The guy just wanted to get rid of them,” I mumbled, feeling defeated, as if I were never going to escape his interference.

“Take as many as you want,” he said, ignoring me. “There's plenty. You'll need them for university. I'm going to make a killing on the rest of them. But take what you like.”

“You're going to sell them?”

He mistook my query for greediness and was aggrieved. “You don't think they're all for you, do you?”

“Who do you think's going to buy them?” I replied, my voice rising.

He gave me a wink, his mouth momentarily drawn down on one side.

“Come payday, I'll set up outside the gates at Borthwicks.”

I stared at him, hoping he was joking.

“Oh, how embarrassing, Dad,” I said, when I realised he wasn't.

“For who?” he demanded, his temper simmering.

“Jimmy and Marty are still working there.”

“They won't care.”

“People coming out will laugh at you,” I pleaded.

“Rubbish.”

“These aren't exactly the latest fashion.”

“Workers are never too proud, my friend.” He held another shirt up to my chest. “Keep that in mind as you're mixing with that lot down there…your university mates.”

I moaned involuntarily at his plan, relieved I no longer worked at Borthwicks, relieved I no longer strolled out the gate alongside Jimmy and Marty. I couldn't have endured their mirth when they spotted Denny with his wares.

But I was wrong.

The day he set up outside the gates, arranging the cartons like a guard of honour, pegging up some samples along the wire fence, Jimmy and Marty saw him. They hung around and humoured him with a bit of spruiking that seemed to set the ball rolling. The shirts sold well and for their assistance he offered them a few each from the remainder.

Jimmy declined but, surprisingly, Marty took his. He was deeply impressed by the initiative my father had shown, so much so that, when our paths crossed some twenty-five years later and we started reminiscing, it was one of the first anecdotes he related.

“He used to keep you on your toes, Sparkesy.”

“I could've done without that.”

“Nah, it's all the crazy buggers, like your old man, that make living worthwhile.”

For me the most unsettling moment in the entire episode occurred that same evening, as Denny displayed what was left of his merchandise on the living room floor with an indecent grin and his pockets stuffed with dollars.

“I'll sell the rest next pay day,” he said.

“What're the cops coming in here for?” I asked.

Through the front window I had seen a police car pull up. He rushed to shut the venetians. Urging me to assist he began scooping up the shirts.

“Some little prick's bloodywell dobbed me in!” His voice rose in disbelief.

I didn't have a chance to ask him what he had done wrong. We rushed into my room and stuffed the shirts beneath the bed. He instructed me to lie down on it and read a book or listen to music. He didn't explain what he expected me to do if the police entered.

I lay there catching my breath, with Tom Jones singing the condemned man's lament,
Green, Green Grass of Home
.

When the door opened I expected to be arrested, but it was only Denny. He put his head around the door and grinned sheepishly.

“She's right. They've gone,” he said, giving the all clear. “They just come about something else. Nothing to worry about, my friend.”

I asked him why he thought someone might have dobbed him in.

He shrugged, as if it were of no importance, now the police had left. “I haven't got a hawker's license.”

The only hiccup in our rapprochement came a few days later, when we heard from Jean that her marriage had ended.

“What did I tell you,” Denny cried. “Marrying one of them black buggers was never going to bloody work. Why didn't she marry one of her own kind?”

“Someone like you, you mean?”

We were eating lunch at the kitchen table. The handle of his knife cracked against the table, startling the rest of us. “And what's wrong with that?”

I sniggered warily. “Well, you're just a bum.”

I was stunned by my own audacity. Or stupidity.

He stared at me, unable to believe what he had heard. Then he leapt from his place and rounded the table, hauled me off my chair and flung me across the room. I hit the wall and crumpled to the floor.

“You might think you're better than the rest of us.” He stood over me, breathing heavily, his eyes protruding wildly. “But you've still got a bloody lot to learn. So don't get too up yourself.”

And in that, at least, he was right.

I spent hours mulling over my life, realising it was about to change completely. What had it amounted to so far? Nothing much. Some sporting talent that wouldn't extend much further than junior football, a middling scholarly aptitude, a faith that was diminishing by the day despite the divine intervention in my Matric results, no girlfriend, my virginity sadly intact, only two close mates, and a family I wanted to get away from. My school days were over. My dependence on my family was drawing to a close (or so I thought). The world I was about to enter would treat me as an adult. Was I ready for that? What impact would university have on me? What would happen to my friendships?

Marty had managed to scrape through his Matriculation and would go to Teachers' College in Geelong. But Jimmy had failed. Jimmy was going to repeat.

I remember his face when he learnt his results. A stony expression. Injured pride? Resentment? He went off on his own to consider his future looking devastated and abandoned.

We still hung around together in the weeks before I left. We went hay carting together. The hard physical work did me some good. And so did the camaraderie. But nothing more was said about our plan to travel Australia.

“What's another year?” he said. “I'll join you after that.”

Yet I could see from his demeanour that he was already drawing a line beneath our friendship. And I was too. We had spent a lot of time fantasising about escaping our families together. But I had gotten my chance before Jimmy, and I wasn't going to waste it.

One day I had an argument with him about the existence of God, in one of his ferret compounds, a topic we had avoided judiciously throughout our friendship.

I was still going to church each Sunday. I served as an altar boy for the new minister, a gaunt medieval-looking man, who kept pressing me to study theology and follow in his footsteps. As pious as I was, it felt like a trap, and he only succeeded in making me feel mean-spirited and guilty.

Jimmy ridiculed the notion of the virgin birth, the resurrection and every other fantastic episode that happened in between. He said he couldn't respect anyone who believed such nonsense. I have scant recollection of the details of our argument but I remember it became more physical, a wrestling match, although neither of us was harmed before we came to our senses. Yet something impassable had come between us.

I started to cycle alone along country lanes on pleasant summer afternoons, hoping God would reveal Himself to me. I had laid the most important friendship I'd ever had on the line for Him. I opened my heart, waiting. The sun was balmy. Gum leaves shimmered. The breeze was on my skin. I had never been more receptive, more ready for Him to fill my heart. But He was as elusive as ever.