by Michael Earp
I follow him down the corridor, through the kitchen, into the bathroom. I get in the shower with him, my T-shirt still on; I wrap my arms around him, my mouth kissing his neck.
“I want to be with you,” I whisper, “I want to be with you into eternity.”
Mum and my siblings told me nothing of what Dad had done. Or at least, nothing at the beginning. I was sent to Maryborough, to stay with Uncle Jim and Aunt Sonja, to stay with my cousins Elena and Jacob. It was Elena who confided in me, she said, “I know a secret and I promised I wouldn’t tell however I think I should tell you.”
We were in the far paddock, it was a harsh hot summer and we were swimming in the muddy brown water of the dam. A hawk was gliding across the endless blue sky. The cows were lazily sitting in the shade, under a small copse of ironbark gums. Elena and I were treading water; she wouldn’t look me in the eyes.
“What secret?”
“It’s about your dad.”
“What secret?” I ask again.
“He did a bad thing, he’s going to jail.”
I was cold. The water was warm, the day was all heat, yet all of me was cold.
“No he’s not.”
“He is.”
“You are a dirty bitch!”
The force of my obscenity was of such velocity that the water became electrified, both of us felt the words hurl through our bodies. Elena’s mouth had formed a perfect “O” of shock. And I dived, I slipped into the dark below and I swam under the water and held my breath as long as I could; I didn’t want to emerge. There was a dull buzzing in my ears and then I heard a distant booming, I heard Elena shouting my name. I broke the surface, I spluttered, coughed. I couldn’t stop coughing. Elena was screaming and she was crying. Without a word, still spitting water, I hoisted myself over the side of the dam and lay on my stomach on the dry, yellow grass. I held my eyes shut tight and I sensed that Elena was beside me, that she was shivering, still crying. She placed a hand on the small of my back. I didn’t move. Slowly, her sobbing lessened; it came to a stop. A crow called. I lay still. She didn’t move her hand off me.
Paul and I drive to his parents’ for lunch. Milan is in the kitchen, he’s throwing floured pieces of calamari into the frying pan, has the radio playing loud, something golden-oldie, and he’s singing along. His voice is low and out of tune. He’s so absorbed in the cooking and the song he doesn’t hear us knock on the back door, looks around startled when Paul calls out, “Tata, we’re here.” In a series of continuous flowing motions, so quick that it seems all one action, he brushes his floured hands across his sweatshirt, he flicks off the radio and he embraces us in one strong hold. He kisses me three times, the hint of caffeine on his breath, and then he does the same to Paul.
“How are my boys?”
Paul wiggles free from under his dad. Paul’s six foot two but Milan is even taller. Milan’s arm is tight around my neck, his hand is patting my chest. It’s comfortable, it makes me feel secure, I feel safe when he does that; yet I’m always the first to break the hold.
“Papa,” Paul says quietly, “Jack and I have decided to get married.”
At first Milan seems confused, he is rubbing the tip of one finger along the grey stubble on his chin. Then he breaks out into a wide and joyous grin. He embraces us again, and there are more kisses. His greetings are a rush of Serbian and I don’t understand a word.
“Hey,” Paul warns, “I think the calamari’s burning.”
Milan releases us, swiftly turns over the frying fish, and points out the window, to the lean-to shed he has built off the garage.
“Go tell your mother.”
Paul’s face is all grimace and doubt.
“Can’t you tell her?”
Milan laughs, he’s shaking his head.
“No, no, no, Pavle, that pleasure is for you.”
Milan built the lean-to however I’ve always known it as Vera’s shed. It’s where they store their jars of pickled beets, salted olives, the shelves crammed with bottles of foul-tasting red wine that Milan brews himself. It is also where Vera runs her web business. She returns to Yugoslavia twice a year, hunts in flea markets, scouts through villages and abandoned rural hovels for communist-era medals, trinkets and paraphernalia that she buys up cheap and then sells for inflated prices to buyers as far away as Mumbai and Paris, as close to home as Leederville and Northcote. It’s been twenty-five years since she and Milan and the ten-year-old Paul first came to Australia as refugees and it’s been over twenty years since Yugoslavia ceased to exist. She refuses to call it anything else.
As we approach we hear the scratch of a match, there’s the pungent reek of a cigarette. It’s the real reason Vera loves her shed. Milan has banned smoking in the house. He can’t dare ask her to stop smoking completely. She bangs her breasts. “I’m a Yugoslavian,” she roars, followed by a short and sharp cough, “to ask me to stop smoking, those are grounds for divorce.”
She doesn’t get up from her seat, her thin-framed glasses are perched on the tip of her long nose and she’s squinting at the laptop screen. Instead she beckons us over and we are either side of her, we are both kissing her.
“Is lunch ready?” she asks.
“Soon.”
Paul timidly glances at me over the top of her head.
Good luck, I mouth in silent encouragement.
“Mama,” he says, “Jack and I have something to tell you.”
“What?”
Her eyes are fixed on the screen.
“We’ve decided to get married.”
She still doesn’t look at either of us. And then she snaps, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“It may be ridiculous but we’re doing it.”
She swivels on her stool, grabs a mop of her thick silver hair, shakes it at her son. “Marriage is a conservative and sexist tradition. You love Jack.”
She swivels to me.
“You love Paul.”
She turns and faces her son again.
“That’s all that matters, end of story.”
“You got married.”
I gaze down at my shoes. Even to me, Paul’s voice sounded petulant and childish.
Vera quickly crosses herself, head to chest, right shoulder to left shoulder.
“I married to please your Baba. She promised to kill herself if Milan and I did not marry. Why for you marriage? I’m not going to kill myself if you two not marry.”
“We want to,” I announce.
I surprise myself. All the way in the car I had been insistent with Paul that this was his family, his parents, that I wasn’t going to say a word.
Vera takes a final long drag of her cigarette, bashes the fiery end of it in the overflowing ashtray. She says something curt in Serbian.
“Let’s eat,” she announces, getting up and hooking arms with both of us.
Later, on the drive back home, I ask Paul what it was that she said.
He laughs.
“She said, ‘As long as he doesn’t expect a damn dowry’.”
“I want to see Dad.”
“You can’t.”
“I want to see him!”
Mum began to cry. It was a month since I returned from Maryborough and my father’s presence had been stripped from the house. All the photographs of him were gone. The wedding photos on the lounge room wall. The curling and faded photographs of our holidays at the beach that had once been Blu Tacked on the fridge door. The photograph of him holding me in his arms when I was four, where I have my Spider-Man T-shirt on and I’m wriggling in his arms. For all my life, all my memory of it anyway, that photograph encased in a simple black frame had been sitting beside the dresser next to my bed. When I returned that too had vanished.
I felt so ashamed. I clenched my jaw; I was trying not to cry. I wanted to go over to Mum, to wrap myself around her but I was scared that I had hurt her and that she’d push me off. Everyone always said, Jack looks like Robert, Jack looks exactly like his dad. I used to be so proud when my aunti
es or uncles, when Mum and Dad’s friends, said it of me. My dirty-blonde hair, the freckles that disappeared all the way down my neck, the jade-green of my eyes. Did Mum hate me now? Did Mum hate me because I looked exactly like my dad? I was immobile, frozen, and I couldn’t move. It was Sara who rushed over to Mum, it was Sara who put an arm around her. My sister’s eyes were full of fire, her face was stretched tight in a fierce sneer. She did hate me. When she finally spoke her voice was cold.
“Why are you doing this to Mum?”
I started blubbering, I couldn’t help it, I started crying. And with those first sobs it was as if the knot deep at the centre of my belly was loosened. My words spilled out, incoherent.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I wailed, “I hate Dad, I don’t want to ever see him again, I hate him, I really hate him!”
My mother disentangled herself from my sister’s tight hold. Her hand grasped mine. I was safe.
Later, in the corridor, going to my bedroom, as I passed Ben’s room, he opened the door. His face was pale. I smiled wanly at him and he hissed, “Traitor!” He banged his door shut.
Later, Benjamin will tell me of how he came home from school to find Sara and Mum standing either side of the kitchen’s island bench, each with a pair of scissors, cutting up all the photographs of my father. They didn’t look up. Silently, purposefully, they were erasing our father from our life.
Later, Benjamin will tell me of how one afternoon straight after school a group of boys from his class followed him through Baxter Reserve. How they pushed him to the ground, turned him over, took turns punching him in the face, in the stomach, in the neck, all the time calling out dirty pedo dirty pedo dirty pedo in that delirious and ancient vengeance of the righteous mob who believe that sin is visited on the next generation and the generation after that.
And later, much later, in my early twenties, as I scrolled through a psychology tutorial on my laptop and tried to pay attention to the sprightly American voice detailing Piaget’s theories on childhood development, something in the woman’s cheery narration will remind me of Ms D’Onforio, the kindly silver-haired woman who I had to visit for six sessions, in her poky little consulting room, who asked me question after question about my father and my mother. And I realised, at my desk, at twenty-two, that the reason she asked those questions was to gauge if my father ever touched me inappropriately, if my father ever hurt me. And it was as if a darkness had entered my bedroom and first I shivered and I couldn’t hear the voice coming through the cheap laptop speakers any more, all I could hear was a tempest in my head and the vomit rushed up my oesophagus and spilled all over my notes and lap. I didn’t cry with that sudden and awful realisation. It was as if in spewing I’d emptied myself of all emotion. I went to the laundry, filled a bucket with hot water and pine disinfectant. I grabbed two sheets of Chux, I furiously cleaned the desk, the covers of my books. I stripped naked in the laundry, placed my jeans and T-shirt and jocks into the machine, started a cycle, went to the bathroom and showered. All the time there was a buzzing in my head, I couldn’t hear the world. I didn’t hear the pipes rumble when I turned on the taps, I didn’t hear the water splashing on me. I couldn’t feel a thing.
“It was harder for Sara and Ben.”
It’s true, objectively I know it’s true, however resentment swells within me.
Paul is driving. I look out the window to the gloomy suburban vistas of the Nepean Highway. Sensing my fury, he places a hand on my knee.
“I’m not saying it wasn’t hard for you, babe, I know it was. But you were a kid, and they protected you. Sara and Ben were teenagers; Sara was the same age as the girl he abused. You have to try to understand that.”
I push his hand off me.
“He didn’t abuse her.” I try not to make my voice a snarl. “It was consensual.”
“She was fifteen.”
My fury erupts.
“And how old were you when you first had sex?”
Paul sighs.
“Not the same thing.”
“How old?”
“You know how old.”
“Fourteen, weren’t you?”
He doesn’t answer. He is looking straight ahead, at the endless stretch of cars falling into the dismal and flat horizon of Melbourne.
“And how old was the guy?”
I know. I know that he doesn’t know how old the guy was. I know that it was at the toilets at a Westfield shopping centre. But I am insistent.
“How old?” I continue my nagging. “Twenty-five? Thirty? Forty? How old was he?”
“I don’t know how old the prick was! It’s not the same thing!”
And as always when Paul loses his temper, he shouts, his voice booms and cracks and it is as good as a smack across my head. I fall silent.
We are heading home from visiting Sara. When we told her the news that we were getting married she had squealed in delight. Warren had said nothing. His face was beaming and he was the first to come and hug me, to hug me and Paul. He was still in his hi-vis top, his soiled tradie shorts, he smelled of work, his skin gleaming, a film of perspiration. When he released me from his ferocious embrace he was smiling.
“My first same-sex wedding,” he announced in glee, “where is it going to be?”
“Yes, where, when, what do you need from us?”
I turned to Sara.
“We’re not sure where it’s going to be yet. We’re thinking somewhere in Mordialloc, maybe summer so we can get married on the beach.”
“That’s a great idea, Jack.”
Warren shook his head.
“It’s Melbourne,” he said slowly, as always his tone measured and calm, “you can never trust the weather. You should choose somewhere indoors.”
“That’s what I reckon,” Paul said quickly, “I think we should have it at one of the surf lifesaving clubs.”
Warren nodded, put his thumb up.
Sara had come over; she took hold of my hand. There were tears gathering in her eyes.
“Have you told Mum?”
This time I shook my head.
“I’m gonna ring her tonight.”
“Let me do it.”
Warren answered for me.
“Get stuffed, Sara.”
He winked at me.
“This is Jack and Paul’s wedding, not yours.”
Sara grinned and let go of my hand.
“Fair enough, I’m being selfish. But text me as soon as you do. Then I’m going to ring her straight after.”
It was then that I took a long gulp of the beer. It was then that I told her.
“I’m going to invite Dad.”
I heard Warren gasp. He and Paul had both tensed up. Sara had crossed her arms, her face had become forbidding.
“No you’re not.”
Her eyes had narrowed, there was more than sternness there. She stared straight at me, into my jade-green eyes, my father’s eyes. Did she hate me? I tried to speak but what emerged was a whine, more a sense of pleading than words themselves.
“Sara, try to understand.”
She cut me off.
“I don’t forgive him. I won’t ever forgive him.”
Warren wouldn’t look at me. Paul was mouthing a word. Was it “careful”? Was he asking me to be careful? As always, faced with the ferocity of my sister’s rage, I fell silent.
“How can you forgive what he did to Mum?”
I couldn’t say a word.
“What he did to all of us,” she continued. “You selfish prick, how can you forgive what he did to Ben?”
I heard the scraping of a chair. Paul was on his feet.
“Sara, Jack,” he said quietly, “we’re not going to resolve this now. Let’s talk about it again when we’ve all had the time to think about it.”
He turned to me.
“After you’ve talked to your mum.”
I knew my gaze was mutinous. As was my sister’s. Warren nodded, in sympathetic gratitude at Paul’s words.
&nb
sp; “Okay,” I said icily. “Give me the car keys, we’re going.”
Sara still had her arms crossed.
“There is nothing to resolve and nothing to think about,” she said, her tone as steely and firm as my own, “that bastard is not coming to your wedding.”
I was already marching down their hall. I didn’t say it, but I was thinking it: Screw it then, there’ll be no wedding.
Now, Paul and I don’t talk until the car is slowly gliding to a halt in our driveway. He brings up the handbrake, he switches off the ignition.
“Sorry,” I say, “I know it’s not the same thing. You didn’t know those guys you first had sex with, they were strangers, they didn’t betray your trust.”
He doesn’t move. He’s staring straight ahead, at the garish blue and red and yellow graffiti that we let Yani, the kid from next door, tag across our garage door.
He takes a deep breath, then turns to me with a weak smile.
“Thank you.”
I also take a long breath. My words are a rush.
“But Dad served time; he’s paid a price for what he did. He’s still paying a price. Sara won’t even let him meet his grandkids. It isn’t fair.”
The man I love, he understands. He’s nodding.
“No, Jack,” he says, “it isn’t fair.”
I glance across at him, think of him as the boy who lost a country and a family and a history to war. I take his hand, I squeeze it. We sit there, staring at the bright and vivid swirls of the graffiti. He takes our linked hands, raises them, kisses my fingers.
We lock the car and go inside.
There’s one photograph of my father that has survived. In primary school we were asked to do an assignment on our family tree. I spent hours over that project, diligently painting the tree with my fluoro textas, sticking in the photographs of Mum’s parents, my Opa and Oma, my dad’s grandparents, Nanna and Granddad. My aunts and uncles and cousins on both sides. And then the photos of Ben and Sara and me. And just above us, a photograph of Mum and a photograph of Dad. Mum was beautiful, barely out of her teens, her blonde hair long and swept over her left shoulder. She was wearing a white T-shirt a couple of sizes too big for her with the words “FRANKIE SAYS” emblazoned across it in black. She was smiling with a wild abandoned glee at the camera. And then there was Dad. He too was so very young. He was at some outdoor rock gig, there were scattered bottles and rubbish all over the muddy grounds, there was a huge crowd filling the amphitheatre and in the distance was the marquee, some band playing. It was impossible to make out anything clearly, everything in the background was fuzzy and blurry. Dad had jeans on, he was shirtless, and he was lying atop the white vinyl roof of the old Corolla, Mum and Dad’s first car. His scrunched T-shirt was a pillow and he had his eyes closed, one knee raised, maybe listening to the music. He had long, shaggy sideburns and he was lean and he was so very handsome.