You Never Met My Father (38 page)

Instead I tried to learn a little more about him. I was beginning to realise I should try to get to know him better. I asked him about his family in Tasmania. I knew virtually nothing about them. I knew both his parents were dead. But he had two brothers and two sisters. All except one of the siblings had children. I knew none of them. He told me his elder brother had become a civil engineer and had overseen the construction of Launceston Airport before his premature death on a golf course. His other brother, Geoff, the one who had been kind to me as an infant, had disappeared into the highlands of Tasmania, working on the Hydro. Geoff was a bachelor as far as my father knew. One sister had married a forester. The other, a nurse, had gone to New Zealand to work and had married an author of children's books. Denny had no contact with any of them. I gathered from what he had to say that he was either ostracised or estranged from them all. He hadn't gone to any of the family funerals.

“Your mother writes to my sisters,” he said, “not me.”

When I asked about his father he made a strange noise, as if something astringent had coursed into his throat.

“He was a plasterer…taught me everything there is to know about the trade,” he said. “But he was a bloody mongrel, I tell yer. I used to get a hiding every day for nothing. I swore I'd never do the same thing to my son.”

He glanced at me but I was staring straight ahead.

“Did I ever belt you?” he insisted.

It was my mother and elder sister who had endured his beltings.

“No,” I admitted. “You tossed me across the room once but I deserved it.”

“There you go,” he said, vindicated.

It was a long drive to the New South Wales border. We passed through Rosedale, Pat's hometown, and Sale where she had lived during the war years; over the Mitchell River at Bairnsdale, where decades later I would have a near-fatal car crash, past Lakes Entrance, a fishing port and holiday resort, and on through the remote State forests of East Gippsland. I was dead tired by the time we reached the border, but not Denny, despite driving most of the way, despite his debilitation from the surgery. He appeared more alert than when we set off.

Eden might not have rivalled the mythical beauty of its namesake; nevertheless, it was a picturesque fishing village, perched above a tiny bay, with trawlers, a cannery, gulls and craggy fishermen. I took to it immediately.

Carl lived with his wife and infant daughter in a rambling old timber house with a view over the Tasman Sea. Denny and I were offered the sunroom as our quarters.

After scallops for breakfast the next morning, Carl took us to the Fishermen's Club, a garish place with a bar and a lounge full of poker machines. I had never been in a club like this before. In Victoria the pokies were banned and clubs served a different purpose to those in New South Wales, mostly lawn bowls.

He introduced me to the manager, a ruddy-faced fellow with hair that was greased straight back from the forehead and a thin moustache on an overhanging lip. He invited me to share a beer while we talked. As he explained my duties, should he decide to employ me, and questioned me about my experience in the liquor trade, which was less than my mother's, I sipped gingerly on the beer he had provided.

Like my parents I rarely drank any sort of alcohol. After the first few mouthfuls I felt nauseous. The more I drank, the more I felt like throwing up. I cursed Uncle Carl for feeding me scallops. Seafood had never agreed with me. I tried to appear relaxed, confident, as I struggled to prevent my stomach disgorging its contents.

He took me behind the bar to show me how to pour beer that was on tap, and in the middle of his demonstration I excused myself, rushed into the toilet and vomited.

After I cleaned myself up and returned to the bar, the manager gave me a queer look and asked if I was all right. I feigned nonchalance but he wasn't convinced. He told me he would give me a day's trial. If I handled the work he would employ me the following day.

It turned out to be easy. All I really had to do, I soon figured out, was keep the customers in change for the pokies. Coins only. They

bought drinks as an excuse for getting more coins. Some stayed all day, losing money. The machines were as voracious as fledglings.

As much as I found the job unpleasant and dreary I could have put up with it for the rest of my summer break, for the sake of the money I'd earn. But my physical condition deteriorated as the day wore on.

When Denny came by to see how I was doing, he gaped at me.

“God Al-bloody-mighty!” he muttered. “Come on, let me get you out of here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look at you, boy. You're as yellow as a Chinaman.”

There were several country hospitals in Gippsland but he decided to return to Melbourne.

His eagerness to leave aroused my suspicions. All manner of possibilities crossed my mind before I entertained the thought that he might genuinely be concerned about my health. Besides, I didn't for a moment consider there was anything seriously wrong with me.

“Look at yourself,” he advised, turning the rear view mirror my way.

I did and needed no more persuading. The few times I had walked through Chinatown in Melbourne, I had never seen anyone the jaundiced hue I had become.

“Every bloody time I get a job something conspires against me,” he muttered.

“I'm sorry.” I felt wretched.

The journey home was nightmarish. My condition deteriorated with every mile we travelled. By the time we reached Melbourne I was beyond helping myself.

Denny took me to casualty at PANCH, the general hospital nearest our home, where an intern recommended I go straight to Melbourne's Infectious Diseases Hospital in Fairfield.

“Don't let any bugger tell you I don't care for you, my friend,” he said awkwardly.

The hospital was on the banks of the Yarra River, surrounded by bushland, a few kilometres from the heart of the city. I was placed in an isolation ward for hepatitis sufferers, which was as gloomy as a prison, with grey walls and barred windows. I had no view of the sedentary river.

I lay on my steel-framed bunk and stared at the stains on the ceiling high above, too weak to move. I was sweating so much from a fever that my bedding and pyjamas had to be changed three times overnight in the first week I was there. During the day I stayed on my bed in a torpor, listening to the radio, without the strength or inclination to hold a book. The doctors had told me I could be confined for weeks, and that only members of my immediate family could visit, just for short periods and wearing hospital gowns and masks, for fear I might infect others.

The days were boring. Each hour dragged. I drifted in and out of reveries about my life. What had I done with it so far? Where was it heading? What did I want to do with the rest of my days, assuming I survived the disease? But I couldn't concentrate, not even on trivial matters, much less abstractions like these. The persistent sensation I had was of a life going wherever external forces took it. I was like litter blown here and there by fickle winds.

I shared the ward with few others, a young fat man who smiled but said nothing, and a sullen teenager whose hair was cut short, except for a few strands down his neck, who wouldn't stop talking to me about a rock star I'd never heard of called Alice Cooper and the song ‘I'm Eighteen' from the album
Love It to Death
. There was also an older man in the bed opposite mine, who said his name was Casper, like the friendly ghost, which is why I still remember it, but was probably spelt ‘Kasper'. He tried a few times to talk to me but ran out of words or fell asleep mid-sentence. In an adjacent ward were the Hep B sufferers, an exclusive group of junkies, who had caught their disease through shared needles. They stayed aloof, too cool to fraternise with Hep A-ers.

One morning I noticed Casper's bed was empty and when I inquired, after allowing enough time for him to emerge from the toilet or the bathroom, the nurse revealed in a matter-of-fact way that he had died in the night.

“He never made it,” she said and cheered me up by letting me know all the nurses had half-expected me to die, too, in my first few days on the ward.

But the danger had passed.

She explained how I was lucky to have youth on my side. Casper had been in his thirties.

Her voice sounded churlish.

I was nineteen. Thoughts of mortality were making me more depressed. I abandoned introspection but I did try to figure out how I could have caught hepatitis.

Pat was such a house-proud mother you could have eaten off her floor, as they say, without getting so much as a belly ache. When she visited me, her eyes always moistened guiltily behind the hospital mask, as if she feared slovenliness on her part was responsible for my illness. I wanted to put her mind at ease.

When one of my doctors told me hepatitis took six weeks to incubate, I calculated I had been in Sydney with Charles. After seeing His Holiness fleetingly as his cavalcade swept past, we had gone to pay homage at that antipodean holy site, Bondi Beach. I remember swimming out beyond my depth and when I stopped to tread water, an armada of human turds floated before my eyes. I was surrounded. In those days untreated Sydney sewerage was pumped straight into the sea.

My mother and younger sister came to see me a few times. But my father, despite his declaration of concern, never bothered. Still, I could hardly hold it against him, since I had treated him the same, the last time he was in hospital. After three weeks confinement I was allowed to go home.

I was still weak and sick. The day before I was discharged I played a game of pool in the recreation room. It felt like I was tapping my cue against cannon balls. I'd struggled back to the ward and was barely able to lift myself onto the bunk. The rest of the day I lay motionless, too exhausted to raise my head.

Nevertheless Pat came to collect me and I spent the next three weeks in my own bed.

Jean was no longer living at home. Without the infant around, the house seemed as quiet as a catacomb. Denny didn't venture upstairs to see me. He sat in the living room but he too was quiet. I was listless, apathetic and self-piteous. I was glad that Pat and Carol were kind enough to bring my meals upstairs on a tray and that the toilet was on the same floor as my bedroom.

“Dad wants to know if he can get you anything?” my mother said one day.

I smiled, strangely pleased with his offer, even if he hadn't managed to make it up the stairs to my room. At least he had given me some thought.

I spent hours staring out the window across the desolate park with no other thought than
what is to become of us?
I desperately wanted a happy life, not only for me but for all of us, which still depended on my father. I clung to some of the changes I thought I saw in him since his arrival in Melbourne; his attempts to moderate his gambling, his approval of my trip to Sydney, the concern he was showing my mother more often and his affection for his grandson. There was also his eagerness for us to work together and his concern about my health. But above all he seemed to have his mood swings and his terrifying temper under control. All these struck me as positive shifts in his attitude towards us. They were modest shifts, to be sure, but at least he was heading in the right direction. I had to remind myself that his transformation wouldn't happen overnight. I had to be patient. And I had to encourage him, which required me, too, to change my attitude towards him.

When the new academic year started I was well enough to attend. So I buried myself in my studies again. I saw less and less of my uni acquaintances. By the afternoon I was usually exhausted and needed a sleep. When I got home Pat was always in the kitchen, dressed in clothes that were faded and shabby, but always with a clean, pressed apron over them, peeling potatoes and shelling peas for tea, keeping herself occupied and any introspection at bay, while Denny was in his sprung chair, legs crossed, a form guide on his lap, fingers pressed against his temple holding an Albany Trim.

I would take a nap and return to the kitchen to see if I could help my mother. I felt responsible in part for her misery. If I hadn't gone to university she would have still been in Portland. I tried to talk to her, to chat, but found we had less in common than we used to have. I felt sorry for her, not having the understanding of the world I had gained from study, and it pained me to think it was a breach that would only get wider.

At uni things were hotting up politically. The anti-war movement across the nation had such a head of steam it looked like bringing down the government, ending two decades of conservative rule.

In Melbourne massive demonstrations were planned. A convoy of thirty or forty buses would bring students and academics into the centre of the city to join forces with unionists, schoolchildren, families, any office workers with a conscience, proselytized shoppers and conviction politicians, like Jim Cairns from the Labor Party, who was an unabashed socialist.