You Never Met My Father (40 page)

But all my plans vanished the moment I came around the corner into Boyd Crescent.

I saw two fire engines with their red lights twirling. And outside our place there were police cars (blue lights twirling), a crowd of onlookers, a television van. As I drew closer I craned my neck to see what damage fire had done to our house. There were no black smoke stains on the outside walls. The roof was intact. But a couple of upstairs windows were shattered, the ones to my bedroom.

“What's happened?” I asked the people around me, none of whom I recognised.

“Siege,” an old fellow said grimly. “It's over but. Cops carted the bloke off. Now they're chucking the furniture out. They're evicting 'em.”

In shock I rushed forward. The police were indeed removing our furniture. “What's going on?” I demanded of a young constable struggling with Denny's sprung chair. He ignored me. I repeated the question to a man in a suit who was scribbling notes on a pad.

“Eviction order,” he said. “The bloke resisted, was going to blow the place up. He was up there with a couple of petrol bombs.” He pointed to the broken windows. “The cops called in the heavy artillery.” He pointed over his shoulder at the fire engines. “It's some story. Who are you?”

“I live here.”

Suddenly he was very interested in me. He grabbed my arm.

“What's your name? You're not related to this bloke, Dennis Sparkes, are you?”

So the press already knew his name.

An 18th of May, 1971, edition of
Th
e Herald
included an article with the headline,
“I'll kill myself ”: bomb man.

A man, 44, threatened to blow himself up with petrol for more than an hour after police tried to issue him with an eviction warrant at his home in Boyd St. [sic] , Heidelberg, today.

The man stood at the window on the first floor of his Housing Commission home yelling: “Come near me and I'll kill myself.”

He had a petrol bomb in each hand, and two others were on a table behind him.

Police called two fire units.

After 80 minutes four police officers charged the premises.

At the same time firemen poured water into the room, knocking the man to the floor.

Sen. Constable J.R. Matthews took the man to Austin Hospital.

Later he was driven in a police van to Heidelberg police station, where he was put in the cells.

Earlier the man allowed his wife and daughter, 16, to leave the house.

They ran crying into the street, where they were comforted by neighbors [sic] .

The man told police he would not hesitate to set the bombs on fire.

Sen. Constable Matthews said the man was on his hands and knees when the four officers reached the top of the stairs.

“He came easily. There wasn't a struggle,” he said.

Sen. Constable Matthews said: “The man was a long way behind in rent.”

I found the newspaper article and a police notice that gave a similar account in his medical files years later. The amount of arrears was $186, probably in those days about ten weeks rent.

I broke free and headed indoors, bustling past the constables carrying furniture. Pat was slumped in the only chair left in the lounge room, her hands covering her face. She looked like one of those shrunken old ladies in a nursing home.

I knelt in front of her and touched her arm. She withdrew her hands and stared at me as if I had awoken her from a nightmare. She looked around and quickly realised she was mistaken.

“Oh, Graeme, Graeme, your father….” Her voice retreated into an inaudible cry. After a few moments she managed to add, “We've got nowhere to live.”

I hung my head momentarily and murmured a farewell to my adolescence.

“Just take it easy, all right?” I said softly. “I'll organise something.”

My sister was sitting on the floor in a corner. I asked her if she was all right and she nodded. She had rung for me at the university, apparently.

I found the police sergeant in charge and asked what had happened to my father.

They had taken him to the Heidelberg police lockup where they were going to charge him. But he'd had the wit to inform the police doctor of his medical history. After the doctor contacted the Repatriation Department, Denny was transferred to its psychiatric hospital in Bundoora, not far from La Trobe University.

I could see the sergeant was exasperated by the drama Denny had put him and his constables through, and so I dressed what else I had to say in diplomatic tones. I asked him if there was any chance of us staying on, since our father had kept us in the dark about the eviction.

He was reasonable enough. He said he had no discretionary powers in these matters. It had already been decided by the courts.

“What courts?”

“Evictions don't just happen, son. There's a judicial process. It takes six months or so.”

“But we knew nothing about it. I went to university this morning completely unaware of this.” I waved my hand around.

He shrugged. “That's not our fault, son. It's your father's.”

“Well, how about giving us a few days, until we find somewhere else to live?”

“Can't be done, sorry.”

“We can't live on the footpath!” My voice was rising in desperation.

“We just enforce the law. There're government departments that deal with cases like yours.”

“Which ones?”

He gave me a phone number to contact, which was probably standard practice when they threw defaulters out on the street.

“Can I at least make my mother a cup of tea?”

“If you're quick, son.”

I asked Carol to make a cup of tea while I went off to find a phone box that worked. I rang the State Welfare Department and explained our situation to a public servant, who said she would arrange emergency accommodation. I was to ring back in an hour.

I returned home and went upstairs to my bedroom. There was broken glass and water across the floor. Most of the furniture had been removed. The wardrobe was still there against the wall opposite the broken windows. Shards of glass, like transparent daggers, were imbedded in it. I felt numb. I figured that Denny had barricaded himself into my room with his petrol bombs and the firemen had turned their hoses on him. I wondered where he had gotten the petrol from since he had no money and there was none in the tank. I wondered if he had been injured. The fire trucks were still outside. Our furniture was piled on the nature strip. The crowd had all but dispersed. Just a few curious stragglers and a dogged member of the press remained.

When I rang State Welfare back, the bureaucrat told me she had made arrangements for us to stay a few nights at the People's Palace, a Salvation Army hostel in the centre of the city. As for long-term accommodation, she recommended I contact the Housing Commission and try to get them to reconsider.

“And try to get some charity to store your furniture in the meantime,” she suggested. “Do you belong to a church?”

I hadn't attended church since Portland but I figured after the years I put in as an altar boy, gratis, the Anglican Church owed me. I rang the local parish vicar and after a good deal of moral coercion on my part, he begrudgingly agreed to have our belongings collected from the footpath and put in storage for a month.

I walked to the nearest garage with a plastic container and bought petrol with some money I had concealed in our back yard shed. Carol and I helped Pat gather a few of her personal effects together, packed some spare clothes for ourselves, loaded them into our car and left Boyd Crescent for good. There was not going to be any cleaning up. If we were being forcibly removed, why lend a hand?

As I drove off, I noticed Suze sitting on the low wire fence next door. She smiled and shrugged. Her boy, Tiger, was already fossicking through our belongings.

I bought more petrol with the few dollars I still had in my pocket and drove to the People's Palace.

The hostel was a seven or eight storey building on King Street. It had seen better days but our room was clean and tidy, if somewhat noisy from the traffic below. We had to share a bathroom with other guests on our floor. I tried to cheer Carol up a little with distractions, taking her up to the roof to observe the city while Pat had a nap, exhausted from the ordeal.

With the din of the city resounding from the stark walls, water tanks and discarded crates, Carol flung her arms wide and stared at me. “He's fucking mad!” she shouted. “What do we do now?”

While Pat was still asleep I contacted the vicar to make sure our belongings had been collected from the footpath. Then I rang the hospital and spoke to one of the resident psychiatrists, who asked me to meet him to discuss Denny's situation as soon as possible. I left Pat sleeping and drove to the hospital, a Dickensian edifice on a forbidding rise with a view across the northern suburbs to the distant city towers, barely visible through the smog. Most of the windows had bars and there were no signs of life, until I went to the reception desk in a cold gloomy anteroom. I was led from there to the office of the psychiatrist I had spoken to, who gestured towards a seat in front of his desk.

“I'll come straight to the point,” he said with an expressionless stare. “Despite recent events that might suggest otherwise, there's nothing wrong with your father's mental health at the moment, which means I could discharge him immediately, and he could leave with you this afternoon. I have been briefed on the circumstances you find yourself in. I understand it's a bit of a crisis and you don't need any further complications. So I wouldn't discharge him without taking into consideration your wishes. It's your call. However, I would caution that if he is discharged he'll be arrested. The alternative is to have a family member commit him to this hospital.”

“If I do that, how long does he stay in here?”

“Three months and then it's reviewed. Your mother will have to do it. If he left here today no doubt he'd face a lengthy jail sentence, given his record. It's up to you.”

Putting aside my surprise that he knew of Denny's criminal record, I gave his words due consideration. It crossed my mind that he deserved a lengthy jail sentence, but I couldn't have lived with my conscience. So I decided to bring Pat out to commit him.

From the medical notes after his admission, Denny had shown no sign of aggression. He seemed very dopey, apparently from taking too much medication before the siege, although the doctor suspected there was some acting in his behaviour. He asked to be tested with a pin or needle, saying he couldn't feel anything, except a bit in his thigh. The test was never carried out. For the first few days he was subdued and rational. He talked about what he had done, revealing that he had wanted to prevent eviction by ‘making a martyr' of himself. He told a medical officer that his debts accrued because he had bought an old car, which had needed a lot of expensive repairs.

There is a record of my visit. These comments were made:

Son interviewed.

He does not seem resentful towards his father.

Said that father gambles—hence the debts. Mother has never been allowed to manage the income. Father has never told anyone what he does with the money—son did not know there were arrears of rent. Family would like time to get new accommodation before the patient is allowed out.

They would be quite happy for him to be here 2 or 3 months.

In view of his history I do not think this would be unreasonable.

I did not seem resentful towards my father. That stopped me inmy tracks. Perhaps I've grown more bitter with the years. Perhaps I had more wisdom in my adolescence. Perhaps I was a better person then. Or perhaps I had already learnt the art of disguising my emotions. To live through the dramas of life with my father and not feel resentful would have required a more noble spirit than I had then, or now. The siege had left me deeply angry. How could he have done this to us—to my mother who had endured so much abuse, to my sister whose skin told the story of her emotional state, and to me, who now had the burden of sorting out the mess he had left us in, who had to stay level-headed against all his inclinations?

Back at the hotel, as we ate a charitable meal of sausages and mash in a half-empty dining room, I gave my mother a summary of the circumstances that Denny found himself in.

“Did you see him?” she asked with some trepidation.

“No. I'm still too angry for that.”

Carol remained silent. She had expressed her feelings earlier on the roof and was reluctant to do so again.

I studied my mother. I thought she had recovered enough to face a few questions I dearly wanted answers to.

“I thought he was changing,” I began. “I thought he had his gambling under control. How come he got this far without one of us knowing about it?”

She understood I meant her.

“I didn't know anything about any eviction, darlin',” she said quietly, her head cast down. “It was as big a surprise to me as it was to you, believe me!”

She had known nothing of Denny being subpoenaed to appear in court over the rent arrears, which didn't surprise me. Since her arrival in Melbourne she had become withdrawn and incommunicative. But he must have been given notice, known the exact date we were to be evicted and kept it to himself. Perhaps he hadn't even bothered to attend court. I remembered going to the regional manager of the Housing Commission with him and regretted I hadn't insisted on some sort of agreement about the rent. Now we were bearing the consequences.

“Someone mentioned a petrol bomb,” I said.

Pat could barely look at me. “Oh, that,” she sighed. “Of course he didn't have a bomb. He just wanted them to think he did. He didn't even have enough petrol, you know that, and no money to get any.”

“Why did they think he had it then?”