You Never Met My Father (39 page)

As weak as I felt, I was determined to participate. I was against the war. I was against all wars. I was against the Americans trying to rule the world. ‘Imperialism' and sometimes ‘hegemony' were the words student activists shouted. To any clear-headed person it was obvious the USA was meddling in the affairs of other nations. And the Australian government supported it slavishly. Who could forget the shameful spectacle of our Prime Minister grovelling to the American president a few years earlier?
All the way with LBJ
. Jesus!

I was against my own government. More than that, I was against the state. I had become an anarchist, although a law-abiding one. There were many students calling for revolution, the violent overthrow of government, but I had seen enough violence to know such talk was the talk of ideologues with their heads in the clouds, students who had lived soft, comfortable middle-class lives, mostly, and knew nothing about violence and the impact it had on victims and perpetrators alike. Political violence was no different and no more excusable than any other form of violence. People got damaged. People's lives were destroyed. I was all for people, nations, solving their differences in a civilised manner, talking things through, using reason, that incredible tool that had taken so long evolving, to find a solution to all of the world's problems. I was for the free association of people and the destruction of the oppressive apparatus of the state. I was for co-operation, and not just in a silly way—a touchy-feely, hippie way—but in an earnest, socialist way, where people built a world together for the benefit of all, not just a few, a world that had justice at its core. That wouldn't be easy. Convincing the powerful to relinquish their privileges would take some doing. But it would be worth it. Eliminating such people had only led to greater horrors: the regimes of Stalin and Mao. The anti-war movement would get the ball rolling. It gave me heart. My despondency began to lift. And there was another reason why I was against the war. In a year my number might be drawn from the conscription lottery.

More reason to attend the rallies. I took one of the buses, packed with fervent students, all chanting radical slogans and cheering and laughing as we made our way into the city, as if we were on our way to a VFL grand final. More than a hundred thousand people gathered in the city streets. Melbourne had never before seen anything like it. I pushed as far forward to the stage in front of the steps of the Victorian Parliament to see and listen to the charismatic politician Jim Cairns, who was leading the campaign for a moratorium. And afterwards I knew Australia's part in the war would soon be over.

My mother was ambivalent about the war. She wasn't fond of Asians, didn't trust any of them but had her suspicions about our allies.

“We're always following the bloody Yanks.” she would say.

At least here we had something we could talk about.

Denny, of course, had no time for the Yanks either. He believed more Australians were killed by Americans than Japanese in the Second World War. “They'd shoot at anything that moved,” he said. “You wouldn't want them behind you, that's for bloody sure.”

But there were more urgent matters he had to attend to.

One day he asked me to accompany him to the regional office of the Housing Commission. It was the next to the bowling alley at the corner of Bell Street and Oriel Road, a prefabricated building that looked like the field headquarters in a war zone much closer to home. I had no idea what he was doing—paying the rent, I assumed—or why he wanted me to be with him.

Inside he demanded to see the manager. I followed as we were led into a back room, where Denny got straight to the point. He tossed a letter onto the desk and demanded more time to pay his arrears.

The manager was a slightly built young fellow with a gaunt face and sunken eyes too close together. He was ensconced on a padded chair behind a huge desk, which seemed much too stately for the outpost. No doubt his rise through the ranks of the Ministry of Housing had been rapid; you could see it in the smug expression he wore.

“My son.” Denny pointed at me. “He's at university. You can imagine how much that's costing me. He'll have to give up his studies if you don't give us more time.” He picked up the identification prop from the desk and studied the public servant's name. “Maurice…My son will be a dropout, Maurice. You want that hanging over your head?”

An argument ensued, the details or substance of which I no longer remember. But I started to pay attention when he said, “You listen here, you little worm,” and he started to excoriate the hapless fellow.

I had witnessed the transformation in his appearance often enough when he lost his temper, but I doubt if Maurice had ever seen anything like it. Denny's skin seemed to tighten and lose its colour. He would close his eyes for a moment. Then they would suddenly bulge, while their pupils constricted. And his bottom dentures would wobble around in his mouth as if they had a life of their own. He looked possessed. And it was the perfect mien for what he did next, which even took me by surprise.

He leant over the stately desk and pointed his finger a few centimetres from the shocked district manager's nose. His eyes protruded so much I could see their whites in profile. When he spoke he sprayed him with cold fury.

“I've only ever put the hex on two men in my life before and both were dead within six months.”

And then, to my utter astonishment, his final utterance was sibilant. “And now it's your turn, Maurice.”

It was an utterly convincing performance. And judging by the expression on the poor fellow's face he was no less impressed than I was.

I hastened from the office, mortified.

When Denny emerged he was wearing a triumphant grin.

“What did you want me in there for?” I protested.

He was genuinely surprised that I asked. “I just needed a witness,” he answered with a defensive lilt.

“To what? Your Lucifer act?”

“You saw how reasonable I was with him. He wouldn't listen when I tried to explain what our costs are like, would he? It's not cheap, you know, putting you through university. I wanted him to realise I wasn't just wasting our money.”

We drove home in silence, both of us knowing where our money went. It was like the elephant in the car, if that were possible. As he parked he reached across and squeezed my neck reassuringly.

“Don't worry about him. He's only small fry. You've got to give 'em a bit of a scare so they'll sit up and take notice, that's all. You've got to let 'em know you mean business.”

And I assumed from this that there would be some agreement reached about our arrears with the unfortunate man's superiors.

Th

ere were other signs that financial matters were once again going awry, which I should have picked up on. But I was so hopeful that he had turned a corner, that this scene at the regional Housing Commission office was a minor aberration, that we were still on track to normalise our lives.

A travelling salesman came around and installed a small cigarette slot-machine on the kitchen wall. It contained ten or so packets of cigarettes, which Denny could access one at a time after putting coins in a slot. The idea was that each week the salesman would return to collect the money and refill the dispensary. What the benefits of this were over buying cigarettes from a shop I never quite understood. But there it was, getting filled with coins as the days passed. It proved successful for a week or two, until the temptation to retrieve the coins proved too great for my father. He jemmied it open with a screwdriver and spent the money elsewhere. I came home one day to find the dispenser gone, presumably removed by an irate salesman.

On another occasion I suspected my room had been searched. Some money I kept in my underwear drawer was gone. It was a piddling amount but I was furious and should have confronted him about it. I should have demanded to know what was going on. I should have put two and two together and realised that he wasn't dealing with the rent arrears. But I still couldn't ask him, lest it trigger an aggressive reaction, which I wanted to believe was a thing of the past.

Whether my mother was aware of the trouble that was looming I have no idea. She had retreated inwardly, unable to adapt to life in Melbourne. She must have been depressed but I didn't probe, afraid of what I might find, afraid my fragile optimism might be misplaced. I came into the kitchen one day and found her seated at the table, a cup of tea in her hand and a blank expression on her face. She didn't register my presence. In that moment I experienced the weird sensation that she was a complete stranger to me. It passed but left me feeling uneasy. Despite all her care, her nurturing, her protectiveness and her moral guidance, I realised I hardly knew her. I was of an age when adolescents began to view their parents as people, as individuals who perhaps had more to them than rearing offspring suggested.

I occasionally caught glimpses of who she was. It was obvious she loved sport. She could listen to test cricket all day on the radio or to VFL matches all afternoon. She watched the replays on Saturday nights. She would sit up late for the tennis at Wimbledon, if Australians were playing. Sport was her respite. It took her mind off the unfortunate reality that held her captive. And I suspect it gave her a sense of belonging, with cricket at a national level and football at a local level. But I saw other sides to her too. She could be rather prudish. She disapproved of women who dressed scantily, who displayed too much cleavage or thigh and wiggled their backsides when they strutted about in stilettos. She avoided Suze, our neighbours' troubled daughter, who modelled her image on Hollywood starlets, while Suze's mother, who strolled our street in a tattered pink nightgown and slippers, her legs bare and her hair in rollers, left Pat tutting, or puckering her lips as if she had just tasted vinegar. “I can't stand a slovenly woman,” I once heard her mutter, rubbing her forearms in a motion that suggested she had a chill. Men, too, who got about in singlets, tracksuit pants and thongs, and were unshaven when they were down the street, had her tongue clicking intolerantly. She considered people who under-dressed in winter had ‘no sense, no feelings'. If some of her own clothes were a bit worn, she always took care to conceal the worst of it. She always kept a good coat that covered a threadbare skirt. She could be stubborn too. She had a set way of cooking and doing the housework. She had a set day for shopping and was reluctant to change it even if something more pressing occurred. She held firm to certain views about the world—for example, homosexuality was ‘disgusting and immoral' or politicians were ‘crooks', or most men were ‘mongrels'—and she wouldn't be persuaded otherwise.

She was outraged when motorists flaunted road rules, something I inherited from her (except for my lapsed years when I rode a motorbike). If inadvertently she transgressed, running a red light or speeding a bit, she pretended it hadn't happened. Musically, as rock and roll pervaded the airwaves, she found a station that played country and western. While I was discovering the music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, James Taylor, Carol King, and Leonard Cohen, she was tuned in to Glenn Campbell and Tammy Wynette. It surprised me to hear her singing along to ‘Stand By Your Man' while she did the dishes and Denny completed his equine homework in the lounge room.

Months passed and I was slowly recuperating. I went to uni each day but usually came home early for a rest. The football season began. I had no stamina but that didn't stop me participating in matches. I would play three quarters and then come off, unable to finish. But while I was on the ground I could still perform uncanny feats. I wasn't a spent force entirely. My doctors had warned me it would be at least a year before I would get my strength back completely. And here I was, within a few months, back doing one of the few things that really mattered to me. It comforted me too to learn that Albert Camus, the remarkable French thinker whose philosophy of the absurd was beginning to appeal to me and make sense of the way my life was evolving, had loved to play football, although a different and, in my view, inferior code.

My father still disapproved of me playing football on account of my slight physique and now my health, which was still at the delicate stage. But he was showing some interest in my studies, again a sign that he was changing. One day I talked to him about an essay I was doing on Karl Marx's journalism about British rule in India, which had appeared in the
New York Daily Tribune
throughout the 1850s. I could see he wasn't really interested, so, thinking he might need some background in Marxist theory, I began to give him a summary of dialectical materialism.

“All very interesting, my friend,” he interjected before I'd finished. “But what sort of job's that going to get yer?”

One day, as I was pawing over some case studies on delinquency in a sociology journal, an announcement came over the library's PA system requesting my attendance at the borrowing counter. I half-expected I had a book overdue. It was nothing of the sort. I received a message to return home urgently. When I asked the librarian why, she couldn't enlighten me.

I didn't have the car because it had been out of petrol and Denny had no money to refill the tank. So I caught the next bus, which generally took twenty minutes, enough time for the butterflies of anxiety to start flapping. I had no idea which member of my family the message was from. As the bus passed through the industrial zone I considered various scenarios and settled upon the one I thought most likely: Denny had suffered another heart attack. As the thought crossed my mind that he was finished I felt a surge of relief, followed soon after by another of guilt. I steeled myself for my mother's grief. Despite all the hardship and brutality she had endured, I knew she would mourn his passing. I would make it easier for her by inventing excuses for the way he was. I was ready to start eulogising.