“I won’t,” she had replied, but I countered with the comment that my aunt had been telling my uncle that for nearly 20 years.
“You see, Fran. Everyone I love lets me down. Everyone I trust betrays me.”
She knew I loved my aunt. What could she say? She tried to assure me that the failure of their marriage didn’t mean my aunt was deserting me, but there was no way to convince me. Ultimately, I didn’t give my aunt the chance to show me that I was mistaken. I cut her off, declaring that she was not worthy of my affection any more than she deserved her husband’s.
Fran watched me nervously, afraid to speak, and clearly distressed that the kids could hear. They sat in the back, white–faced and silent. I wrestled with remorse and rage. Finally, she summoned the courage to break the intolerable silence.
“What will you do, Paul?”
I pulled away from the kerb and started towards the mall. “Guess I’ll take these kids for lunch and shopping. Get this bah humbug business over with,” I said. “Wouldn’t want to spoil their fun.”
“I meant --- ”
“How will I earn a living, now that I’ve been fucked by the system again? The business wasn’t viable before I met Hopo. It won’t be viable after we part company.
“My racing system failed, Fran. I’ve been agonising for weeks over how to tell you I lost the whole bloody five grand. Nothing I do ever works out. Never can. The system has been screwing me since I was a little kid, and it will continue to screw everything I try to do. Some people are born to live shit lives. Obviously I’m one of them.”
~~~~
40: THE POWER OF FAMILY LOVE
OCTOBER, 1988
Despite the beauty and tranquillity of that beachside paradise, I continued to languish and waste after closing the business. I rose late, lingered sullen and morose over breakfast, stared blankly at the television set, snapped at the kids and battled with Fran over anything and nothing. Fran urged me to take up music again, but the trumpet rested in its case at the back of the wardrobe. My reading interest denigrated to mindless paperback westerns I could devour in an hour and never needed to finish reading anyway, because they were written to a formula with both action and ending entirely predictable. Fran complained that my conversation, when I consented to engage in any, consisted of nothing but whining, criticism and complaint. I was entirely unresponsive to her efforts --- or my children’s for that matter --- to engage my interest. Finally, fed up after months of watching me fritter away the days and shun her every attempt to motivate me, Fran snapped.
“You have responsibilities, Paul,” she screamed. “We have children to feed and educate. You need to find a job.”
“I had a job, Fran,” I replied. “One that damn near killed me. Remember? What if I had died?”
I punched the wall and kicked a dent in the kitchen door.
Over almost a year of unemployment, my mental state had steadily declined. However unsatisfactory and unfulfilling line work might have been, it had been a distraction. I had worked our little hobby farm before the move, too. I brought home four poddy calves and raised them and let them mate. I held the children, delighting in their innocent amazement while they watched in awe the miracle of birth. Now and again I’d fished for eel and we skinned and boiled it and dipped slices in batter to fry. We’d raised chickens, and the children delighted in fetching the eggs. When a hen went broody, they waited and watched anxiously for the tiny fluffy chickens to emerge.
The children had loved the farm, and I had loved watching them grow up there. It reminded me of my days at Ohio --- happy days when I had ambitions and dreams to cherish and I believed in myself and the things I could do. I’d been happy here as a child, too, but it was the scene of a beach holiday, and I guess I was intent on treating my life here now as one long vacation.
After my business failed, I tinkered in my shed on occasion, but without purpose. I sat in front of the television set from before dinner to late into the night.
“You are so clever with your hands, Paul. Can’t you find some good use for that talent?” Fran pleaded.
“What do you suggest, Fran? Make Harley–Davidson badges, perhaps? Or should I try for adult training in leatherwork or carpentry? I was too old and too stupid at 25, when the army owed me paid retraining, remember? What hope would I have at 39, huh?”
“Do something with your music, then.”
“God, Fran! What’s wrong with your fucking memory? My music qualifications aren’t worth the fucking paper they’re written on. I sat exams in the army, but I might as well have spent my time on a fucking desert island cracking coconuts! All that wasted effort. For what?”
“Paul, there must be something you can do. You can drive. Get a taxi licence.”
“Spend my days dodging maniacs and being abused by fat bitches with snotty–nosed whining kids, rude, impatient businessmen always in a hurry, or drunk teenagers emptying their guts on the way home from the club at two in the morning. I’d last five minutes. I’d lose it completely and kill a passenger before I got through my first day.”
“There must be something. I can’t stand seeing you like this. It’s driving me insane, and it’s disruptive and distressing for the kids. Your bad temper scares me. If you don’t pull yourself together and –”
“What? You’ll leave me? Well go on. Piss off, Fran. Just bugger off and leave me in peace.”
“You realise you’re destroying yourself?” “So clear out and let me get on with it.” “You don’t mean that, Paul.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Fran. You think I need you? You think you can hurt me by leaving. You’ve forgotten a lot of things, it seems. People come and people go in my life and once they go I never think of them again. I don’t need anyone. I can be happy in a bull’s–head tent in the middle of nowhere. All I want is to be left alone.”
“Fine. I’ll leave you alone, but you can leave, Paul. This is mine and my children’s home, and I’m not giving it up. If you want to spend your life wallowing in self–pity, go do it somewhere where it won’t ruin mine and our children’s happiness.”
I stood up and threw my chair across the room, then stormed into the bedroom, thrust an open suitcase on the bed and began carelessly throwing clothing from the wardrobe. I pulled drawers from the dresser and tipped their contents into the case, thrusting them upended on the floor as each was emptied. Slamming into the bathroom, I dragged drawers from the vanity and upended them. After selecting items from the medicine chest, I swept an open hand across the shelves and sent their contents smashing into the basin below. In my rage, I found the sounds of shattering bottles perversely comforting.
Misty visions of nuns and scowling soldiers with stripes on their sleeves appeared. I wished they would take form so that I could punch their faces in. I wished Wicks --- the employment officer who denied me retraining --- would appear. I wanted to push him down, squat on his pot belly, clench my fingers around his bulging red neck, stare into wild yes, and slowly… ever so slowly… squeeze the air out of him. I wanted to hear him gurgle and splutter and squeak, and see the colour drain from his whisky–reddened cheeks and watch his goggling eyes begging for mercy. Maybe I would ease my grip, now and again, just enough so he could ask me why and utter a plea, and I could reply with a mocking laugh and increased pressure. I would not explain myself --- never let him know how his abuse of power had hurt me. Even as he breathed his last breath, I would not give him the satisfaction of knowing how he made me suffer.
I kicked the front door shut behind me, thrust my suitcase in the back seat of the car, and booted the car door closed. Folding myself into the driver’s seat, I revved the car motor mercilessly, grated the gears, and careered --- tyres throwing up clouds of thick dust --- down the back road to the highway. At the corner, the speeding vehicle skidded to a stop, and then, with another wheel spin, I took off and swung on to the highway.
Nearly 12 hours later, now outwardly calm, I turned into a government housing estate and parke
d in front of the neat little cottage Mum and Dad now called home. The Housing Authority had moved them from the shack shortly after Rob’s wedding, in response to intense lobbying by Carly.
“Paul! What a wonderful surprise,” Mum said, hugging me. “Fran and the kids not with you?”
“Fran’s working. Couldn’t take the kids out of school,” I said, trying a little too hard to show no emotion.
I hadn’t planned to visit my family. The decade–old Holden wagon I’d taken such pride in restoring often seemed to have a mind of its own. It knew its way home --- not that I’d ever regarded my parents’ house as ‘home’. I still had mixed emotions when I thought of Fred and Elsie. At first I’d found it awkward calling them ‘Mum and Dad’, but when I observed Fran using those titles with ease I followed her lead, and I discovered delight in hearing them call me ‘son’.
Whenever I visited my folks I made small talk and helped out with household chores. Occasionally, I’d play my trumpet for Mum and Dad, and it thrilled them. There was love in my mother’s eyes when she looked at me, and pride written in the creases of Dad’s half–smile. When they spoke to me, it was as if to a son from whom they had never been parted, but there was an awkwardness in my responses. I worked hard and successfully to hide it, as I had always worked to hide every emotion. Paul Wilson was a polished pretender.
My brothers had become mates. I drank with them and joined their fishing and shooting expeditions. I went with them, sometimes, to the shearing sheds to watch them work the sheep to make mountains of soft, oily fleece, but there was always a distance between us. Fran and I did not belong to that parched, dusty place. There was no air of possession when I surveyed the wire–fenced paddocks littered with black bubbles of sheep dung and dry, cracked cow pats hosting beetle colonies. It was with the apparent discomfort typical of a city slicker that I swiped at the bothering flies and pulled my shirt collar high and my hat low over my pale face to block the savage western sun. And I caught the mildly contemptuous glances of my deep–tanned, bare–chested brothers. So like them that I was often mistaken for one or the other of them, I was nonetheless a misfit among the cockies and the shearers. I didn’t speak their language. I didn’t understand their culture. I was a foreigner in this land of my birth and I could never think of it as ‘home’.
We rarely spoke of my childhood, although Dad told me he had once walked over 70 miles each way to try and see me, only to be told I wasn’t there. I remembered that day --- the lock-down --- the nuns’ report of a vagabond peeping tom. I had glimpsed a shadowy figure through the window as they marched us upstairs. Had I known it was my father I might have called out, and he might have heard me, but they sent him away.
When Dad asked me about my life, I told him I got on just fine. Fred winked and said, “Resilient you are, like me. I always knew you were a chip off the old block. I knew you would be OK.”
I would never do or say anything to compound my parents’ suffering or to reduce their joy in having me back. From arrival to departure I played my part to perfection, but whenever I left there I was an actor leaving the stage. And yet, I was uncomfortable in my own world too --- like the immigrant struggling to assimilate, yet craving to return to the motherland. It seemed there was nowhere I could feel at ease, but now, with my marriage ended, there seemed no place else to go but back to the first family I had lost.
“So what brings you out here at this time of year?” Dad asked.
I shrugged. “Just felt like seeing my bros, and doing some fishing.” My tone was deliberately nonchalant. “Your brothers are working.”
“I’ll find ways to amuse myself. Maybe I’ll go out to the sheds with them, and I’ll see them on the weekends and in the evenings.”
Dad shrugged, went to fridge and fetched two stubbies. He handed one to me and sat down in front of the television set. I sat down opposite him.
“Who’s winning?” There was a rugby league game in progress. Mum busied herself preparing the evening meal while Dad and I sat watching, very occasionally cheering a player or disputing a referee decision, but not in any conversational exchange. Very few words passed between us.
I went to visit a brother after the evening meal. I came back late, heavily inebriated, to announce that I was going to the sheds next day to watch the shearing. Mum nodded and said, “I thought you might. I packed a lunch for you just in case. It’s in the fridge, and there’s an esky in the laundry and some ice bricks in the freezer.”
I said goodnight and promised to try not to wake her leaving in the morning. “You forgot to take your lunch, son,” she said, when I came in the following afternoon. She placed a pot of tea on the table and went to the cupboard for cups.
“I took it, Mum. It was really good, thanks.”
Puzzled, she pulled a lunch box from the fridge and held it up.
“Must ’ave grabbed the wrong one. I had a chicken leg and two sandwiches and a piece of fruitcake.”
“That was your morning tea,” she replied. “This one was lunch.”
I laughed. “Geez, Mum. I went for a day, not a week.”
“I’m used to feeding workmen,” she replied. “Your brothers work hard so they need plenty of fuel to keep them running.”
I shrugged, but said nothing.
“Never was out of work a day in me life apart from when I was sick,” Dad said. “Boys neither. Tough sometimes, findin’ work out here, but we do. E’en if the pay and conditions is lousy an’ we ’ave t’ travel a’ways.”
I suspected my father’s statement might be loaded, but I gave no reply. I hadn’t told my family I wasn’t working, and I couldn’t imagine any way they would know.
I visited my sister the following day. Sandra was the young Elsie --- auburn highlights in a mop of tightly curled golden–brown hair, finely carved features, radiant complexion, and those same talkative eyes. All that distinguished her from our mother was the absence of stick limbs and wrinkles and that slight sagging of the shoulders that had for so long borne the weight of guilt and almost unbearable sorrow.
“God, Paul! What are you doing here?” “Visiting family.”
Did everyone have to demand explanation?
“Fran and the kids with you?” “No. Just me.”
Puzzle lines appeared briefly on Sandra’s forehead, but she composed herself quickly. “Want a cuppa?”
“Wouldn’t say no.”
“So what are you doing for a quid these days? Not just being a beach bum, I hope! Lucky bastard! Living in paradise!”
“I’m working on an invention,” I replied, ignoring her ‘too close for comfort’ comment and hoping she didn’t have extrasensory perception or access to a gossip hotline. I knew Fran would never expose my secrets to my family.
Always innovative, and quick to find inventive ways to manage challenging tasks, I had twice tried my hand at inventing for commercial return. Not long after I left the army, I came up with an idea that, in hindsight, might have made me quite wealthy had I understood, back then, about intellectual property protection and commercialisation. Struggling with a dramatically changed routine --- no longer working until the early hours of the morning --- I’d installed a television set in the bedroom and formed the habit of going to sleep with the television on. It drove Fran crazy, but I couldn’t go to sleep without the distraction. In a quiet room, my mind raced and the demons plagued me.
Back then, the television channels shut down in the very early hours of the morning with a rather loud pop. Inevitably, it woke Fran. She complained endlessly about the interruption to her sleep. To solve the problem, I made a timer that plugged into a power point and turned off the power at a pre– set time. It was clumsy in appearance, but it worked a treat and I used it to impressive effect for a couple of years to switch off the television after I fell asleep. When it wore out, I took it to the local electrical store, showed them the concept, and asked if such a device was available for purchase. It wasn’t then, but within months the highly successful
Krambrook timer appeared on the market.
During my time on the electrical lines I invented a service termination clamp for securing electrical lines to poles and houses. The device in use at the time was awkward to apply, especially in cold weather. I came up with a novel alternative. This time I followed all the right pre-commercialisation processes to test it and assess its appeal to those who would use it.
The market for such a device was tightly defined. A single distributor sold all devices of that type to electricity authorities nationwide. I approached the company and demonstrated my invention. They were impressed. For a brief moment, I dared to hope that they might license it and made excited calculations of how many they sold annually and what the royalties might be. Ultimately, they announced that they had just invested hundreds of thousands in new machinery to make the existing model. Regardless of the superiority of design of a possible alternative, they would need to continue marketing the existing product exclusively for nearly a decade to justify their investment. They suggested I might talk to them again in eight years’ time. Eight years later, I had moved on.
My answer to Sandra wasn’t exactly a lie. I’d been nurturing an idea… even tinkering a little, but my efforts hardly qualified as ‘doing something for a quid’. I felt my cheeks flush a little as guilt stabbed at my heart and chiding voices shouted in my brain.
“Do you really make money from inventions?” she asked.
I shrugged. “It’s hard, and it’s risky.”
Guilt gnawed at me now. Its incessant chewing made my heart gallop and my chest hurt and my head throb. Silence hung heavily, broken only by an occasional hushed slurping or gulping sound as we swallowed tea and the odd soft thud as a mug was placed on the table between sips. Tension magnified the sounds. I searched for words that might be appropriate to speak to break the awkwardness.
“Mum and Dad would have been thrilled to see you,” said Sandra.
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