You Never Met My Father (41 page)

“It was beetroot juice.”

I gaped at her, unable to decide whether to scream or laugh.

She went on to say he had gone to the car in the night and siphoned what little bit of petrol he could out of the tank and into an empty jam jar. Then he had opened a can of beetroot from the pantry and emptied its juice into a couple of clear plastic bottles. When he filled these with water, the juice was diluted enough to reproduce the pink colour of petrol.

She shrugged her shoulders and stared at the table. “He wouldn't tell me what he was going to do with it.”

In the morning, after I had left for uni, he had locked the front and back doors and gone up into my bedroom. When the police arrived, he threw the jar with the trace of petrol through the window into the front yard. Then he held up the two bottles with diluted beetroot juice and yelled out to the police that he was going to blow the place up if they didn't leave him alone. Obviously his ruse was successful.

My mother raised her head looked up at me. “He fooled them.”

I thought I detected a trace of pride in her voice.

“What happened next?”

“They called in the fire brigade, didn't they? And turned their stupid bloody hoses on him.”

She paused to control her emotions.

“They could've killed him,” she went on after wiping her nose with a tissue she found in her handbag. “He was just lucky he had on that big thick coat of his. That saved him.” She had heard the glass breaking. “Fancy them doing that to him, the mongrels.”

The pressurised water had hurled him across the room and knocked him out. I had seen shards of glass sticking out of the wardrobe, which must have passed close to his throat.

“I thought they
had
killed him,” she added indignantly.

“Jesus,” I murmured. “Where was Carol?”

I looked at my sister. She grimaced and said, “Outside with Mum.”

She still looked traumatised.

Pat hunched over her plate and poked at her food. I could see she no longer had the resilience to think about what we should do next.

I told her of my plan to take her to the hospital so she could commit Denny. “For his own sake,” I added. “Or he'll be chucked in jail for a lot longer than he'll stay there.”

“He's used to hospital,” she said to make it seem more palatable.

“You could go back to Portland,” I suggested. “Ring up Uncle Mick. He'll help us.”

“But what are you going to do? You're at university.”

“I'll find somewhere. Carol can go back to school in Portland.”

I thought she was about to cry. “I can't ask Mick to help us again.” She was barely audible. “He's done enough for me. I just can't ask him again.”

She was a pitiable sight. I was scared she was going to have another breakdown. I didn't know whether I could cope with that.

I touched her hand, trying to reassure her. “I'll go into the Housing Commission tomorrow and get our place back,” I said, feigning confidence. “There's no way they can throw an innocent family out on the street and get away with it, especially with Dad certified insane. I won't leave until we've got a roof over our head.” I made it sound like I was complete master of the situation, that there was nothing to worry about. But I was utterly at a loss. I had no faith in my ability to organise anything. “You'll have to meet with the people from welfare to get some money. The psychiatrist also told me the Housing Commission would call in the Public Trustee to manage all his debts. That means it will control his pension and it might affect yours. And there's my bursary money. I need that.”

I was glad I had a room to myself. My mother and Carol shared another. I lay awake a long time, fully clothed, on top of my unyielding bed, thinking about my father. Beetroot juice! It was clever. Edward De Bono would have been impressed. But did he really imagine he could get away with it? Even if he had fooled the police with his beetroot juice bombs, even if they were convinced of his intentions, did he think they would shrug their shoulders and go away and leave us in peace? If he did, surely he was mad. But I didn't for a moment believe he thought he could achieve any such thing. So, why do it? It took me a long time into the night before it struck me that the siege was about his self-esteem. There was no way he would submit meekly to an eviction. It would bring his manhood into question. Pushing him around had consequences. Like all his dealings with authority it had to be a violent affair. No matter how outrageous he was, at least people feared him. And he misinterpreted that as respect.

In the morning I rang the Welfare Department and made an appointment for Pat. I took her to the hospital and waited outside while she signed the papers. It didn't take her long. She wasn't up to visiting Denny. Before I headed off to the Housing Commission I had a bad attack of the nerves and decided to contact my uni friend, Charles, to see if I could enlist his moral support. He listened in amazement as I told him what had happened, and was only too keen for a role in the drama. When I met him outside the Housing Commission office in the city he was dressed in a suit and tie, ready to play the lawyer.

The area manager agreed to a meeting after a predictable delay.

When he finally took us into his office and invited us to sit opposite him at the desk, he saw through Charles's masquerade immediately and allowed a cynical smile to warp one side of his face.

“What can I do for you?”

I started to give an account of our eviction but he tapped his pen impatiently and interrupted.

“Yes, yes, I'm acquainted with the case, and I'm afraid there's nothing I can do about it. It's been a matter before the courts for some time. I can't just on a whim overturn a court's ruling as you would appreciate.” Saying that, he smirked at Charles, challenging him to contradict him.

“My father's been certified insane,” I replied. “He has not been responsible for his actions in this whole affair. The rest of the family knew nothing about the court proceedings or any of its rulings. The first we learnt about it was when the police arrived on our doorstep to evict us. With all due respect, my mother, sister and I have been victimised in all this. So I'm asking you to take that into account. Show a little humanity. We've got nowhere to live.”

“With all due respect,” he echoed, “that's not my concern. I can't be expected to address all the personal problems afflicting members of the public, now can I? It's patently unrealistic. Of course, you're quite within your rights to make another application for housing, which would be considered in due course. But I'm afraid at the moment there's quite a waiting list.”

I glanced desperately at Charles, whose face was atypically inanimate.

I knew how Denny would have handled this: thump the desk, do his warlock's act, scream and rant, threaten murder. A different tact suddenly occurred to me, one that my old mate Jimmy's father had used when his life depended upon it.

“Well, it's unfortunate, but you leave me little choice,” I said, trying to conceal my desperation. “There's a reporter downstairs from
Th
e
Truth
, who's here at my request. He's keen to get a scoop on this.”

“And you know
Th
e Truth
likes a good scandal,” Charles added opportunely. “So read the next edition, sir.”

I glanced at Charles who had fixed his gaze on the manager with one eyebrow raised, as if to impress upon him the brilliance of our manoeuvre.

“Thanks for your time,” I murmured. “Goodbye.”

As I rose the manager thrust his palms forward in a conciliatory gesture. “Now, wait a minute. Wait.”

He mumbled something inaudible as he pushed back his chair.

“I'll see what I can do.”

I resumed my seat, sagged into it, as he disappeared into the inner sanctum, taken aback that such a tactic worked. It seemed too simple. I looked again at Charles and now both his eyebrows were in play, rising and falling like Groucho Marx's.

The manager was out of the room for ten minutes. When he returned he was carrying a file, which he dropped heavily onto the desk, as if it were a great burden.

There was contempt in his eyes as he studied me for a moment.

“The dwelling you had is no longer available. It has already been let to another family. So you will have to accept something else, I'm afraid. There's a flat in Carlton. And a condition on your acceptance: under no circumstances is your father's name to appear on the documentation. Your mother will have to sign the contract. She'll need to fill in these forms.” He slipped the paperwork across the desk. “No need to see me again. Get your mother to sign these. Then return them to level one. They'll deal with them there.”

I got up and thanked him. He sniffed and dismissed us with a gesture usually reserved for bothersome flies.

The flat was on the third floor of a walk-up block on the Carlton high-rise estate. From my new bedroom I had a view of the grey residential towers, which housed a hodgepodge of luckless working-class Australians and migrants, the rear section of the Motor Registration Board and Transport Accident Commission offices, which have since been converted to apartment towers, and, beyond these, a glimpse of the vast Melbourne Cemetery, which housed thousands as well but from a broader cross-section of society and some in better lodgings than the living. On the corner of our street was the Woolshed Hotel, which only bona fide alcoholics patronised, a rundown stone building that perhaps dated back to the days, more than a century ago, when livestock grazed nearby.

The block of flats was one of half a dozen that stood on massive concrete stilts surrounded by car parks. When Pat climbed the three flights of stairs to our unit for the first time, with the wind whistling up her skirt and the sound of our heels resounding around the grimy stairwell, her heart sank. She must have thought, as we were rising up, her own luck was spiralling further down. As she stepped inside and realised the entire flat was concrete, she gave a quiet moan. The walls and ceiling were a bland cream colour. The bedrooms were tiny. All the floor coverings were tiles of hard grey linoleum.

The lounge room had a small balcony with enough space for a clotheshorse if she wanted to dry a few towels and some undies, but the laundry and lines were on the rooftop to be shared with seven other families. She hated communal facilities. For someone with her standards of cleanliness, these were difficult to use. Invariably when she wanted a washing machine another resident would have beaten her to it or left it soiled with lint and grime. Washing day always began with disinfectant and sometimes ended in bitterness, with the discovery of clothes missing from the lines.

One day, shortly after we shifted in, there was a knock at our door, and when Pat answered it a charity worker stood before her, lugging a half-full sack of material.

“Have yer got any old rags, missus?” he asked.

“Yeah, but I'm wearing them,” she replied.

Th e charity worker, no paragon of sartorial splendour himself, gave a wistful smile. “Fair enough,” he said and turned away.

After we retrieved our furniture from storage and set the flat up as comfortable as possible, I went to visit Denny in the psychiatric hospital. I hadn't seen him since the day before the siege.

In the asylum's gloomy dormitories were rows of twenty or thirty bunks with cast-iron frames and grey blankets. An intern in a white coat led me through. It was mid-afternoon but some of the beds were occupied by inmates as motionless as the dead. The air smelled of disinfectant.

Denny was in an adjoining recreation room with a dozen or so others, sitting on a bench against a wall beneath a barred window. Another intern unlocked the door to let me in and locked it again as he pointed to him.

A scrawny old man was standing naked on a pool table while others played pool around him. His hooked body was ghostly white, his dick a button mushroom emerging from grey moss. In a far corner someone wailed like a famished infant. Patients sitting in pyjamas near Denny rocked to and fro in silence, mouths open, some with drool hanging from their lower lips, staring at a point a metre or so in front of them.

The moment I set eyes on my father I noticed the change. It was his sheepish, obsequious smile. He looked pleased to see me. He even thanked me for coming. It was one of those moments when my world went topsy-turvy. My anger towards him fell away like a tattered old skin. He looked like a child who had done wrong. I sat down beside him to avoid his gaze, lest he detect the volatile state I was in.

I began to explain what had happened to us since his siege, rambling on as he listened with his head down. “And we had to commit you for three months,” I revealed at the end. “I don't think we had a choice. You would've been arrested and jailed for much longer otherwise.”

“Good, good,” he murmured. “That was my plan all along.”

He looked awry at me and grinned as if he wanted me to believe him, to recognise how shrewd he'd been. When he realised I thought his claim was preposterous he lapsed into silence.

“The Public Trustee's taken control of our finances,” I said, “until all your debts are cleared up. Our new place is in mum's name. So she'll be in charge of it.”

He merely shrugged.

Realising the absurdity of talking finances with him, I decided to change the topic. “So what's it like in here?”

He looked at me for a moment as if I were stupid, and then turned his attention to the other inmates.

“Look at them, the poor trapped bastards,” he muttered, as if he were a mere observer. His voice was full of emotion. “Some of them have been here since the war. Nearly thirty bloody years. If they weren't mad then, they are now.”

There was silence for a moment and then his tongue clacked as it did whenever he was genuinely disgusted.