You Never Met My Father (35 page)

The niece had a room inside the house but would have preferred the bungalow. She was peeved that her aunt was more interested in making money from rent than in her peace of mind.

One day she called on me while my roommate was out.

“If you guys weren't here, I'd have this room,” she lamented. “It'd be almost tolerable here then.”

She flicked through the record collection in a bored sort of way.

“You're so straight,” she said, at a loss to choose one to play, drawing out the ‘o' in
so
to exaggerate her point.

“They're not mine.”

“Do you like this uncool shit too?”

I feigned distaste, glad my meagre collection was still in Portland.

“You're nice,” she added, playfully tugging at my sprouting whiskers. “Cute.”

The magma inside began to solidify. A cold arctic sea surrounded me.

She lay on a bunk, watching me, her hands behind her head, her raven hair spread over my absent roommate's pillow. “I wish I could be out here with you guys, instead of where the old battleaxe can keep an eye on me. Even if you are a bit uncool, you're nice.”

I glowed with self-consciousness and prayed she mistook my wordlessness for a kind of studied indifference.

She moved close enough for me to feel her humid sigh.

“I bet you wished I was out here too,” she said in a tormenting, breathless way. “I could teach you a thing or two about living in Melbourne.”

She jumped up and opened the door. She had to meet her boyfriend.

Our only other meaningful encounter came a week or so later on a night hot enough for a swim at the public pool, across the park behind Fleur's place. My roommate, being a sociable lad, suggested she accompany us.

Seeing Maureen in a bikini was as close to a vision of perfection I had ever encountered. Her skin was white and silky. Her freckles and moles reminded me of leopard spots. She was in a gay mood. She started to splash us. We reciprocated. I ducked beneath the surface to escape her playful assault, and caught sight of her thighs and that slight mound most teenage boys dream about. She seemed to sense my eyes on her because she lowered her hand and ran some fingers teasingly beneath her flimsy bikini bottom.

When I resurfaced, spluttering, she put her arms around our shoulders, drew our heads towards her heaving chest and kicked her legs to splash us all.

“I think we're going to have some great times together,” she laughed.

I went home full of youthful optimism. I had had some setbacks in my first months of university. I had been lonely. But now there was Maureen. And lately I was finding some of the students in my tutorials pleasant and interesting and amiable. I had no money. But it crossed my mind that I could speak to someone at the Repatriation Department. They surely knew my father well enough to see reason. I would ask them to forward my allowance directly to me. They must know of his gambling. After all, they had a long relationship with him, probably longer and more sustained than my own. I resolved to phone their offices and make an appointment. Once I had decided on that course of action a great weight seemed to lift from me. My spirits soared. I lay awake long after Maureen had disappeared indoors and my roommate had gone to sleep. My life would be wonderful, I resolved. My life would be interesting and full of joy.

The next day, out of the blue, Denny arrived, the first time I had seen him since university had started. He was dressed in a light-grey cardigan and tan pants. His hair, which was going grey, was immaculately parted, even after a wearying trip from Portland. One eye was patched to protect a corneal ulcer.

“Surprised to see me?”

More than surprised, I was incensed. But at least, I tried to reason, even he would have enough sense not to arrive empty-handed.

“I need money,” I said without a greeting. “You've haven't sent me anything for weeks. How am I supposed to live? How am I supposed to pay Fleur?”

“Don't worry about Fleur. I'll fix her up. But I've got good news for you, my friend.” His broad grin made me wary. It meant something rash, I was sure. “We've shifted down to Melbourne.”

I gaped at him.

“You'll be coming back to live with us. How about that, eh?”

“What have you done that for?” I said, unable to disguise my dismay.

“What's the matter?” he said with a scowl. “Instead of getting your nose out of joint, you ought to appreciate the sacrifices we're making for you. Getting a place down here wasn't bloody easy.”

“You needn't have bothered on my account. I'm quite happy where I am. All I need is my money.”

“Your sister's pregnant.”

“Carol?”

“Jean.”

Jean had shifted back to Melbourne after her marriage broke up. She was working as a bookkeeper and boarding with an elderly woman in Camberwell. I had visited her once and had afternoon tea, but I realised we had little in common beyond family ties and had decided there wasn't much point making it a regular rendezvous. “She goes and leaves that bloke in New Zealand,” my father went on, careful not to raise the estranged husband's ethnicity again with me. “And now she finds out she's up the duff. Didn't I tell you something like this would happen? Huh?”

He was glaring at me, challenging me to disagree.

“What's that got to do with me, my circumstances?”

“Soon she'll have to give up her job,” he said. “She won't be able to pay board any longer. She'll have to come home and live with us.”

“She could've returned to Portland.”

“Portland's no place for an unmarried mother.”

“She's not unmarried.”

He kept grinning at me, waiting for me to reciprocate in appreciation of what he had done for me.

“She won't want to live with us,” I went on rather desperately.

I looked around at the place that had offered me my first real taste of freedom. Fleur didn't seem so bad after all. I groaned.

Denny slipped old Norm a cigarette, winked conspiratorially, and went inside to negotiate a financial settlement with Fleur, probably with an offer to pay my debt to her at the pensioner rate—twenty cents a week.

Somehow Denny had convinced the Housing Commission to rent him a two-storey red-brick tenement at the Olympic Village in West Heidelberg. The estate had provided accommodation for athletes during the Melbourne Games in 1956 and had been in decline ever since.

How he managed to pay removalists to bring our furniture from Portland, I had no idea. But there it was, already set up, disconcertingly familiar, in the middle tenement in a block of five on Boyd Crescent, one of several identical blocks that formed a semicircle around a wasteland that the locals called a park. From my upstairs bedroom window I looked across the squalid expanse towards the other dwellings, some with broken windows and doors, with flywire screens hanging off and gates unhinged. Plastic bags and paper, drifting across the park, caught on thistles or abandoned supermarket trolleys. Most of the cars around the periphery were destined for the scrap heap. Denny was pleased. My mother and Carol looked distraught but I was still too angry to bother with them. Why hadn't they resisted the shift? Pat had to abandon the job she cherished at the post office. Carol had to leave her school friends behind.

Denny tried to put a positive spin on it. “Well, at least the family's back together again.”

He looked surprised and hurt by the bitterness in our laughter.

The help in securing the transfer had come from a social worker at the Repatriation Department.

Mr Sparkes has apparently fallen out with [Mr Wood] and the latter is now ‘taking it out' on Mrs Sparkes, eg. taunts her, insults her and tries to upset and frighten her at every opportunity. [An explanation of who Mr Wood is appears in the social worker's report] [Mr Sparkes] feels that the situation is now at crisis point and that he will have to leave Portland or not be held responsible for his actions.

For this reason Mr Sparkes would like to live in Melbourne, but cannot afford the accommodation required by the family.

[Jean] , the eldest daughter is now also pregnant and will shortly have to leave work and return home to the care of her mother.

Mrs Sparkes.

A quiet timid woman who seems to be holding the family together at present. However she is obviously under great strain. It seems unlikely that she will be able to cope for much longer with her husband's behaviour and with other problems…It is therefore recommended that the family…be helped to find accommodation in Melbourne as soon as possible.

This latest change in our circumstances upset my mother more than most she had endured. It was probably an accumulative effect, but at least in Portland she'd had an independent income, and there had been family and friends, like Connie Yallock, to depend on when Denny's moods or behaviour became intolerable. Now on the Olympic Village housing estate she had no one except her children who as fellow sufferers could offer little consolation. She had never felt more isolated.

She found Melbourne too large and impersonal. She hated driving; the traffic was nerve-wracking. She hated the sprawling Northland Shopping Centre, where the only supermarket in the area was located. To her it was the antithesis of shopping in Portland. Shop assistants were rude and other customers more so. Crowds milled around. The air conditioning was stifling. When she wasn't at Northland she felt confined to the house. Back in the Olympic Village she saw sufficient signs of violence and vandalism to worry about going anywhere on foot. Even the back yard was a disappointment, with barely room for a Hill's Hoist and a garden shed. In a lighter moment Denny reckoned he could piss from the laundry door over the back fence and was willing to bet on it. Long-odds and a tad optimistic, as usual, but we took his point. Pat planted a few flowers along the wall and dug a small plot for some silverbeet and rhubarb but nothing like the garden we had cultivated in Portland.

Despite the antisocial appearance of the street most of the locals were friendly enough. They said hello and then kept to themselves, which suited us. But the next-door neighbours to our right were different. I met them when a burning armchair was tossed from their tenement into the front yard on the day I arrived. They were the Lawsons, and the youngest, a boy of three or four they called Tiger, had applied a cigarette lighter to it.

“He's a little terror, I tell yer,” Mrs Lawson announced proudly. “He's just got himself expelled from kindergarten.”

The entire family gathered round as the father, without a word to anyone except himself, extinguished the fire with a garden hose before he returned indoors, leaving them to enjoy the smouldering aftermath alone. No other neighbours took any notice.

The blackened chair would stay there for months.

Later that evening their little daughter, Fiona, who was a few years older than Tiger, arrived on our doorstep, dressed like an urchin, with a snotty nose and knotted hair.

“Mum says lend us some flour.”

It was nine o'clock. Pat, who prepared our evening meal around five, looked surprised.

Jean pressed her for a reason.

“Rissoles,” Fiona explained, annoyed by such a stupid question.

Surprisingly Pat obliged.

Soon after, we could smell more smoke. When Denny went to investigate, expecting to find another chair alight, he discovered the neighbour's kitchen fogged with the oily fumes of deep-frying rissoles.

Fiona's requests became a regular event. “Mum says lend us a tin of fruit. She forgot to get some.” “Mum says lend us some soap powder or we'll have to wear our filthy fings again.” “Mum says lend us some sausages. She's gotta cook tea for Pa before he gets home.” The girl fixed Pat with an accusatory stare. “Or else he'll belt her up.”

Pa worked for Customs where he checked overseas mail for contraband. It must have been a tiring job because when he got home each afternoon he went straight upstairs to bed and demanded his supper.

We could hear him through the walls. “Woman! Where is it? Get a fucking move on!”

Pa was gaunt and stank of alcohol. Mrs Lawson was grey-haired and toothless. They looked too old to have young children. It turned out Tiger was a grandchild. But Fiona was theirs. When I mentioned to Mrs Lawson that I had never seen the young girl go off to school, she merely shrugged, as if the reason was self-evident.

“She hasn't got all her marbles, has she,” she said, nodding her head to acknowledge the seriousness of it. “Fell down them stairs when she were young.”

She patted her daughter's head affectionately.

Tiger's mother, Suze, showed up a month or so after we shifted in.

I was about to drive down to the West Heidelberg Mall to buy some fish and chips for tea when she accosted me and introduced herself. As I got into the car she jumped in the passenger seat, telling me she wanted to get some smokes. She mentioned straight off she had just left her husband after he had threatened to ‘punch her lights out' for being unfaithful to him.

“What I do is me own business,” she added, as if I were her regular confidant.

Her eyes widened suggestively as she waited for me to concur.

She looked like a crude imitation of Marilyn Monroe or Jane Mansfield. Platinum pompadour. Aqua eyeshadow. Scarlet lipstick. Ample bust accentuated by a clinging jumper. Bruising around one eye was a blemish and so too her doughy skin, which was erupting here and there.

“Well, Gary, I couldn't see a bloke like you treatin' a woman bad.”

“Graeme,” I corrected with a blush.

“Well, at last I've found a real gentleman I can talk to about these things. I appreciate it.'

She adjusted the blue pastel tights that chafed her crotch as she settled into the front passenger seat.

“And living right next door. There's not many of yers around, believe you me.”