You Never Met My Father (5 page)

All due to my father's sudden return, his eyes wild, his mood cagey, as if in his parent's house, even with his own father dead, he felt unwelcomed.

He took us to the mainland.

To me it was strange how this man, who was hardly ever around, as elusive as the stray cats, had so much influence over my mother, and we—my sisters and I—had little choice but to follow.

At some stage my father had fallen in with a group of travelling salesmen who convinced him their career laid out the path to riches.

And riches lined his dreams.

The product they peddled was the recently invented rotary clothesline.

He started door-to-door sales in Sydney.

How we got there from Launceston I have no recollection. I was only five, too young to remember. Jean assures me we flew, and I have some vivid memories of flying when I was a child but none of destinations. I remember clearly seeing the plane Charles Kingsford Smith flew across the Pacific Ocean, the Southern Cross, which was on display at Brisbane Airport. But that must have been a year later on our rushed return.

While we were in Sydney we apparently lived in a few suburbs, but the only one I recall was Sylvania Heights on the south side of Botany Bay.

Every time we shifted, my father adopted a different surname, which used to upset my mother, who insisted at the very least that Jean and I keep our real name at the various schools we attended, anticipating the complexities and embarrassment if different names appeared on our report cards and other records. Even at a young age I thought it dishonest or at the very least sneaky to take a new name. It suggested to me that my father was trying to hide something. But I was an adult before I figured out that he might have been trying to elude police or debt collectors, that there might have been mischief behind our assumed names.

Perversely, the first surname he chose (Jean told me years later) was that of my mother's former boyfriend. He even adopted his precursor's first name. When I learnt this I wondered whether it had hurt her. Was it meant to be a joke or something more sinister? Was it his way of telling her she had made a mistake marrying him?

At Sylvania Heights Primary School we were to remain Sparkes; elsewhere we were to be Mathews. Any stranger who inquired was to be told Mathews. He scribbled the name onto scraps of paper for us to learn. Under no circumstances were we to use the ‘either-or' option. When Jean wanted to know why we had to lie, he said, “You can't be too careful”.

Pat, whose loyalty to her husband already seemed boundless, gave a stoical sigh and implored us to do what he said with the warning any slip up might cause trouble. I was confused. She had reminded me often enough, “always tell the truth”. But she proposed that this was probably not a lie, just a new name like when we were christened. You were allowed to change your name in a free country. But the expression on her face was unconvincing, even as she hugged me to her.

I shuffled around the house, clutching the scrap of paper. As I tried to commit the name to memory, anxiety kept flapping like moths against my ribcage.

Unlike Launceston, where I had been constantly cold, kept in a woolly jumper, suffered chilblains and red blotches on my salient ears and sculptured knees, Sylvania Heights was warm enough to get about in sandals and a short-sleeve shirt, which gave my skin a chance to gain an oily sheen. The sun was stronger. Sometimes it hurt. My colour changed.

“You're starting to look like a blackfella,” Denny said, whose skin was even darker than mine. Carol was my colour, Jean was more red than dark, and Pat remained white, avoiding the sun when she could, wearing a broad-brimmed hat outside.

While Jean and I were at school, trying desperately to find some friends, my father worked the neighbourhood. He was selling a contraption that was to revolutionise washing day. Within a few years the company he worked for would become a household name. After a stint as a real estate agent some years later and a decade of selling cheap jewellery and tiled tables at flea markets, he told me rotary clotheslines were the easiest things in the world to sell. He just had to peep into back yards and see the unsightly wires looping from one side of a lawn to the other, propped up with cumbersome poles: so much wasted space, so untidy, so much heavy lifting. And the housewife on his brochures looked more like a beauty queen than a weary washerwoman.

He must have saturated the local market rather quickly, or had other urgent reasons for leaving, because without warning he shifted us again, this time to somewhere north of Sydney, by the shore of Lake Macquarie, near the port of Newcastle. Jean and I were put in another school, wondering if it was worth the effort to make friends with anyone.

I was starting to see the benefit of make-believe friends, who could at least come with you when you shifted.

The house we took, close to the lake, made a great impression on me. Only a few yards from the water, it was like a barn with a giant double door and space inside, I was told by my erudite sister, to house a boat. The living quarters were at the rear and in the loft. A salty, fishy smell filled the building whose size and shape fired up my infantile imagination. Outside, where pelicans rocked as water lapped against a pebbled shore, Jean, her blond hair swept back and her face ruddy from the wind and excitement, told me there were pirates, invisible for the moment but known to approach at tremendous speed when the wind was up. I had just become Peter Pan, she Wendy, and the house a mighty cave, a fabulous hideaway, where broom cupboards and dark places underneath the stairs were concealed nooks and secret tunnels that no pirate was clever enough to discover.

But without warning we were uprooted once again by my restless father, who moved us into an ordinary house in another town near the lake, where the rent was cheaper or the neighbours less nosy. Or he was harder to trace.

I was dizzy from the third new name in as many months.

What my mother thought of these constant changes I have no idea, although I doubt she enjoyed them. Later, when I was old enough to appreciate her as an individual, I realised how much a proper home meant to her. She liked a place she felt was her own, where she could grow flowers and vegies, and she could shut the door on the world and go to sleep in the same bed she'd been sleeping in for years, knowing she would still be there in the morrow. Yet, despite our nomadic existence, it would have pleased her that Denny had a job, and one that suited his temperament. He seemed to be happy, or at least not depressed. Occasionally an extraordinary grin would appear, a billboard promoting false teeth, which always startled me. It vanished as quickly as it came, like the sun poking through winter clouds, as if he could find no reason to sustain it. Yet he seemed optimistic, as if he too envisaged the day when he would have enough money to buy a place and settle down. They were both around thirty, still young enough to harbour dreams.

One day I came home from school to find a television in our lounge. It was early days for television in Australia and not every household could afford one. I had only ever seen them before in the display window at a Sydney emporium, where a crowd of curious onlookers had gathered. Denny had bought or hired this one. He was delighted with our excitement and gratitude. He sat on the couch to watch it with his arm around Pat's shoulder. The program I remember was the
Mickey Mouse Club
. I remember it in colour, which of course is a false memory, since colour television wouldn't appear in Australia for another two decades. But I remember red on the Mouseketeer uniforms. The show was thrilling. I laughed and joined in the singing.
M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E. Mickey Mouse,
ra, ra, ra!
I felt the joy of privilege. But I squandered the opportunity when my mother caught me weeing in the bath one evening. She saw a yellow subterranean stream that I mistakenly assumed was undetectable. She banned me from watching TV for a week, which might as well have been a life sentence because it soon disappeared without explanation. I felt it was my fault, a punishment for a bad habit. I would be sixteen and properly toilet trained before we had another set. More recently I've realised it had probably been bought on hire purchase with a small deposit, and hocked or resold at a profit, which was to become a scam my father employed when he was desperate for some cash.

Around this time Pat managed to pay a professional photographer to do portraits of her three children, the earliest colour photos of us. We look happy enough, particularly Carol with her infectious grin, although my anxiety was never completely hidden by smiles. I'm dressed in a neat school uniform: brown-and-fawn checked, short-sleeved shirt, brown shorts, fawn socks, tan sandals. My hair is oiled, combed back and flawlessly parted on one side, the handiwork of my fussy mother. My head is on its usual angle to compensate for a lazy eyelid. One of my hands is raised to display a simple balsawood model aeroplane.

Flight.

I'm tempted to interpret the toy as a metaphor for my early years. But that would be reading too much into it. I accepted my mother's explanation for our constant movement: we weren't running away from anything but helping our father to do his job. But I wished he would stop because the shifting was making me chronically anxious. I wanted to love him as I loved her, but he was too elusive, too busy to slow down and pay me some attention.

Then Brisbane became our base for almost a year and my anxieties subsided, despite another name change.

When we arrived in this sultry city we spent a few days in a hotel where I used a lift for the first time in my life. I looked down in awe from our fourth-floor room upon the bustle of diminutive pedestrians and traffic. Denny was with me, which was exciting in itself, his hand upon my shoulder, our most intimate moment yet, pointing to scenes in the street, a policeman addressing some sailors, and someone trying to cross the road in a wheelchair, and the café where he had bought me a pie for lunch, now the size of a doll's house. I knew I owed the adventure to him. I laughed to show how delighted I was that he had given me a new lofty perspective on the world. It never would have happened without him. I thought how wonderful it would be to live up so high and pleaded with him to let us stay, to which he said, “We'll see.” He was grinning at me and even gave me a squeeze, pressing me to his side, my head against his hip, feeling his warmth. I thought in that moment he liked me as much as I liked him. And I thought if he lets us stay he loves me. But within a couple of days he shifted us into a weatherboard house in the hilly suburb of Kelvin Grove, and he became a stranger to me once again.

The house, whose back section was on timber stilts, had big sunny rooms with hazy views of distant hills, and enough space beneath its floor to hide and play, to evoke highwaymen, the landlocked cohorts of the pirates, whom Jean had recently discovered in books and generously shared with me. There were plenty of places in our lush backyard for the outlaws to maintain hideouts or hold ambushes: behind the garage, where a succulent banana tree grew, or even inside it, where they placed enormous, grotesque spiders, which Jean called tarantulas, for the sole purpose of terrifying us—undermining our bravery, our resistance—especially our little sister, who had been conscripted to swell our ranks but in effect, thanks to her constant blabbing, we would have been better off without.

My mother spent most of her time inside the house. We saw her when she came into the back yard to hang up the washing. I heard her singing sometimes as she cleaned the house or cooked a meal. Most of the time she seemed happy to me. When we went inside in the late afternoon, she would listen to our adventures, fuss over our clothes, and remind us to wash our hands and face. She licked her fingers and wiped away the smudges we had missed around our mouths. She warned us never to forget about tidiness. People judged a family on the appearance of its kids. She'd give us a brief cuddle to let us know she loved us.

Jean and I went to a double storey school where most of the students were friendly, the lunches were free, a blue tongue lizard lived inside a dead tree stump, and a derelict man used boiled lollies to try to lure young pupils into the bushes at the back of the school yard. It must have been summer because after school each day we walked home in a tropical deluge. We removed our sandals and kicked up the warm gushing water that gurgled in the gutters.

Warmth, verdure, the cloying scent of tropical fruit, the bananas and pawpaws that grew in back yards: these are the residual sensations of Brisbane.

I eventually felt comfortable in Kelvin Grove. It seemed to be the first time I managed to establish some friends at school, in part because I occasionally failed to respond at roll call whenever I became absent-minded about my surname, which built my reputation amongst some students as a fearless antagonist of teachers, amongst others as a harmless dummy, either way someone worth befriending. I made other friends outside of school, most notably the girl next door, who liked to play in the little tent we had in the back yard, where she was keen to compare and touch wee-wees, away from our parents' prying eyes.