by Luke Davies
‘And now I know that all men are like this: unknowable. It’s just that in some cases they stay longer. And what then? They stay. All right. That’s good. They stay. They’re in the house. That’s their body there, moving through the rooms. And the daughter grows up with an unknowable father. What difference does it make? Better the way it was for Tess, I suppose.’
Given the opportunity I would have begged to differ. My admiration for Tess lay in the way she had navigated her way through the sterility of childhood. Blame: we could go back forever. And yet I can’t help but see, in the origins of what Tess did, the dark stain of Constance’s psyche. As if, denied so much for so long, Tess would without even knowing it want everything. And Tom and Dan, as I’ve already said, were the two halves of everything.
I am, perhaps, paying too much attention to all the details of this affair with Dan. I just don’t know. It’s true that much of what I remember is a kind of harmony. I think of long stretches of my childhood, of growing up, and I remember the three of us, my parents and me, an inviolable unit of warmth. Maybe it was beginning to change a while later, maybe when I was ten or twelve and off in my own world. Everything happens after a delayed reaction. From 1973, when the affair began, to about 1978, my dad was home a lot. Evenings were a wonderful time of homework consultation and games and television and, in spring and summer, long hours playing in the backyard. As the affair neared its conclusion around the end of the decade, we began to see less of Dad. We had it all and then we got some more: more cars, a new house, this one with a swimming pool, a luxury apartment on the Gold Coast each Christmas holiday. And I didn’t care about any of it. Or at least I took it for granted. It was other things that made me happy: high-jumping, poetry, photography. And just being with my mother and father.
My father’s delayed reaction was this hunger for money. I grew up in the undercurrents of a stream that was already flowing towards its doom, twenty years before the dam burst in Dad’s head on Mount Kilauea. I was happy enough in that stream. I did well at school. There was sport. The company of friends. I am told I was a girl who laughed a lot. I roll tape and my memory confirms this. The print of my past is immaculately crisp.
And later, I piece everything together, and it’s horrendous. What happened? My mother Tess and my Uncle Dan set in motion a series of events that led to my father just…resigning his commission on the planet.
The affair had ended when I was about eleven. My father spent the late eighties and 1990 and ’91 in prison for Medicare fraud. Around ’92, I began to live with Matthew Smith. One day in late 1996, when I was twenty-seven, only a few months before Matt died, my mother told me all about it. I remember feeling dizzy for days afterwards.
We’d spent the afternoon shopping; it had become, over the years, a pleasant way of spending time together. Later we always chatted and gossipped while we unpacked the groceries. When Dad went to jail Mum had gone back to nursing. She was a senior nurse in the emergency ward of the local hospital and loved her job with an enthusiasm even other nurses found intense. Often I had to ask her to tone down her graphic descriptions of the day’s events. Her empathy for the suffering of others was boundless. Other than work, she seemed to do nothing else but paint and draw. Her sketchbooks were bursting with the most vivid colours, perhaps the very ones that were being bleached slowly from Dad’s world.
We’d finished unpacking. I was drinking iced tea. Mum made herself a gin and tonic. She wasn’t a big drinker. One was enough to put a red flush in her cheeks; halfway through the second one she was a little more tipsy than usual. I have forgotten many things in my life but I will never forget the way the cold droplets sweated off our glasses that afternoon and pooled on the kitchen table as shafts of sunlight moved through the room. I will never forget the blue-tongue lizard I had noticed out the window as it sunned itself in the garden. Nor the incredible weight with which my mother’s soft words entered my ears.
I don’t even remember how it began. Perhaps I had mentioned Uncle Dan’s upcoming birthday; let us assume it was that. Dad was so lost by now. This was only three years before the end for him. Perhaps, because Tom was so lost, the mention of Dan was enough to spark something off in my mother. Maybe she had wanted nothing other than to offload the secret.
‘I suppose you guessed way back then about Uncle Dan and me?’
My heart suspended activities for a few beats. ‘Guessed? Guessed what?’
‘Oh dear. Worse than I thought.’
‘Mum? You’re kidding me, aren’t you?’
‘Oh dear. Maybe we can just rewind this conversation.’
‘Mum, what are you saying?’
She took a deep breath. ‘I thought you might have known,’ she said. ‘I just assumed…’
‘You and Uncle Dan?’
‘We had an affair. A tiny affair.’
‘Wait. Wait. A tiny affair when?
‘When you were tiny. When you were a baby. A couple of years old.’
‘For how long?’
‘Not long. I mean not much. Too long. But hardly ever. A few years, I suppose.’
‘A few years. And Dad knew?’
She sighed again. ‘I guess he does. Did. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want a confrontation about it. Maybe that’s why he and Dan don’t make so much effort to see each other these days. Maybe it’s a delayed reaction thing.’ I poured her a third gin. I wanted to hear more. I don’t know if at this moment half-remembered emotions from my childhood were beginning to make sense: confusions, uncertainties, the registering of tensions.
‘But how did it start, Mum? How exactly did it happen? The first time?’
‘Issie, I don’t know. All I know is that five seconds before it started, I didn’t think it was about to happen. I had never thought of it. It had never entered my mind. And it wasn’t like disloyalty to your father.’
I felt a surge of anger. ‘That’s bullshit, Mum. What is it if it’s not disloyalty?’
She stared at me, stunned. Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh, Issie—’
‘No, it’s just—’
‘You’re right. You’re right. But in the beginning I loved the excitement of it. I don’t know. It was crazy. I don’t know why it kept going.’
‘And Dad never talked about it?’
‘Not really, no. I tried once. He didn’t want to talk. He said, “It’s in the past, it’s over, it’s nothing.” And when it was happening, if he’d ever brought it up, I would have denied it.’
‘How often did you…like, how often did you see Dan?’
‘A few times a year, maybe. For a few years. Completely insane. And I loved it. But I regret it. And I can’t help thinking it’s the cause of everything that Tom’s become today.’ ‘Oh Mum, don’t be silly. Dad’s not well—that must have been bound to happen anyway.’ I didn’t believe a word of it. I just didn’t want her to cry any more.
It was all information. I didn’t want to ask about the feelings of the thing, about abstractions. That was too much to know in one afternoon. That could take years to sort out. From the rest of the conversation I might have got clearer dates, that’s all. Those are the dates I’ve tried to piece together in this story. Oh, and she told me about the three reasons, which I’ve mentioned earlier. The three reasons for continuing with the affair. Something like: life is short; sometimes you can’t turn back; surely the thing will end soon anyway. Kind of like one reason, in a sense. The awful thing is, I think I can understand. I think I can imagine how that might happen, how a direction, a momentum, could begin from a seed and grow into something nobody could have predicted. I think I can see how Tom just sent everything deep inside. It’s like a cancer, the kind a doctor could never find. But he was his own doctor, and in the end he could only remove it himself, up there in the heat of the caldera with the baked lava canyons all around him. A specialised operation. For every gain there is a sacrifice, and the removal of the parasite sometimes entails removal of the host. Well, that is just as well; and
it is clear at any rate that he took himself far away from us.
What if this, what if that? If there were never any Dan? It is also clear that only in the here and now, on the path of events, are we measured against circumstances, and that hypotheses are flimsy in the face of what actually happens. Tom is dead now. Every word I write takes him further into the past. Yet I remain assailed with an unrequited longing for his presence.
Arrest
BUT I HAVE GOT AHEAD OF MYSELF. WHAT I REMEMBER now is that I couldn’t bear to see the fear and sorrow in my father’s eyes, the day the police came for him. What I remember is one of these moments when everything goes cold, when the heart overloads and the whole world changes.
My final exams were looming and I felt a strange buzz of anticipation about university next year, a wide new world away from the incestuous claustrophobia of high school. I was trying to work hard. I was seventeen. Looking back, I see that all the bursting impatience of adolescence had somehow transformed itself into that infinite patience, a kind of grace, that is liable to descend on students in the home stretch of high school. To an outsider, it might have looked as if I was in some Hindi trance of ecstatic calm. This was not the case. The grace was a survival mechanism that helped me focus until the exams were over. I wanted good marks, the best possible. Uncle Dan had said to me, when I was thirteen, ‘Study hard, Issie. Education is knowledge, remember that. And knowledge, as they say, is power. We all need some of that.’
The notion had stuck with me. At thirteen I thought that power meant strength and I knew I had that—I could jump higher than almost anybody—and I never wanted to lose it. At seventeen I was beginning to see also that power was not just something that resided within, a potential energy called strength. It was also the power to choose. At this point I still couldn’t decide between studying literature at university or painting and photography. Either way, the choice seemed a pleasure.
And so, despite the palpable tension I’d felt in the house for some time (not a result, I realise now, of the Dan undercurrents still flowing deep beneath everything else six or more years after the affair had ended, but rather the looming criminal investigation), despite the unexpressed fears between my parents, I sailed through eight months of intense concentration and rigid study that were somehow bearable.
And then, with only two months remaining until the first of the exams, the night arrived when the police knocked at the door.
I was upstairs studying English. This sense of evocation and observation presents many readers with the difficulty of deciding whether the ‘I’ of many of the poems is voicing the personal attitudes of the poet. I was reading well beyond the nights homework, preparing for an essay. The moonlight transforms the scene, making it appear a harmonious whole and, as it dissolves some of the features of the daylight world, so it dissolves the usual ordered process of memory and the poet surrenders to a different, more random principle of association…
I heard the knock at the door; I wasn’t expecting anyone and it didn’t mean anything. But after a few moments I was shaken from the poetry by an unfamiliar keening sound moving up the stairs and past my bedroom door.
I opened the door. My mother moved past me on the landing, hands to her face, her fingers trembling uncontrollably, a soft wailing coming from some place deep in her throat.
‘Mum! What is it? What’s going on?’
She didn’t look at me, as if eye contact would cause her to crumble. I followed her into the bedroom. She was opening cupboards and pulling out drawers.
‘Mum! What’s going on?’
‘They’re arresting your father,’ she snapped, and fell to her knees at the chest of drawers. ‘I’ve got to get him some pyjamas! And a toothbrush. You get the toothbrush. And the toothpaste.’
She was quivering. I couldn’t take it in. ‘Arresting? Mum, what do you mean?’ Then my feet were moving before my brain had done a thing. I raced out the door and down the stairs. ‘Dad! Dad!’
My father was sitting perfectly still in the leather armchair, each arm lying symmetrically on the armrests, like a sphinx. On the couch were perched the two detectives. All three stood up as I reached the bottom of the stairs. I glanced at Tom; he seemed to be looking back at me with something that resembled sorrow. I looked at the two other men. They were blank-faced, awkward.
I stood there, suspended in time.
‘This is my daughter, Isabelle,’ said my father.
The older one, at whom I was glaring, nodded politely.
I turned to Tom. ‘What’s going on, Dad?’
‘It, er, appears that I’m being arrested, darling.’
The older one reluctantly spoke. ‘Your father is under arrest for conspiracy to defraud the Commonwealth Government in matters relating to the processing of Medicare claims.’
My vacant mind was trying desperately to create some detail. I stared at the patterns on the carpet.
‘Isabelle…’ my father said in a strange quavering voice. I looked up into his eyes. ‘It’s all a misunderstanding. It’ll be cleared up in no time. It’s a dreadful misunderstanding.’
‘But where are you going? To jail?’
‘We’re just doing our job, Miss,’ said the detective. ‘Your father will be taken to the North Sydney lock-up tonight. He has the right to a lawyer of his own choosing, or to Legal Aid. Bail can be applied for tomorrow. Whether it’s granted or not isn’t up to us.’
‘But he didn’t do it,’ I pleaded.
The older detective shrugged.
‘You’ll have to talk to your father about that, love,’ said the younger one.
I looked again at my dad. My own wide eyes could have devoured his. It was all about eyes, the truth.
‘I’ll be back later tonight or tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You look after your mother. It’s all a storm in a teacup. A colossal cock-up.’
Tess came down the stairs, still trembling, clutching a pair of pyjamas I’d never seen before. They were blue, with a gold fleur-de-lys motif. The young cop tried to hide his smile.
‘That’s ridiculous, Tess,’ said Tom. ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Just give me the toothbrush.’
We both moved forward to hug him then. He kissed Mum once on her wet cheek and me once on each eye. I was too much in shock to be crying.
He pushed us away and composed himself, pulling the white cuffs of his shirt from his coat sleeves. Tess collapsed on the couch and I stood there, face to face with Tom.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper.
But I was looking into his eyes and could see that he was really saying, ‘Help me.’ Everything changed. Everything would be different from this point on. I would be on my own. They say that’s what the final exams represent: the passing into adulthood. Well here it was, a month or two early. A premature birth, I guess. I cannot even begin to imagine what he was thinking at this moment. Trying to keep a hold on the concept of relentless failure. An exhausting undertaking. I loved him, and had never had reason not to. And here I stood, in my self-obsession somehow taking his crime as a personal affront. I just can’t imagine what was in his tortured mind.
And they took him away. It was very civilised. No handcuffs.
We were solid people, sound, as they say: trustworthy. My father had made some mistakes with paperwork. It was hardly like robbing a bank. I must be remembering the comments my mother made that night. We talked until 4 a.m., by which time my father’s hastily located lawyer had secured bail. But I went to bed before he arrived home. It was becoming apparent to me, as I talked to my mother, that my father had in all likelihood committed a crime. The knot I woke up with in my stomach was crippling. I looked around at the walls of my bedroom and was struck by the sickening feeling that they were collapsible. Exposed to cyclonic winds, my bed would be torn from the room, me trapped in it.
The exams passed in a blur. There was a coldness in my approach—it felt like coldness was spreading through my veins—that resulted in lucid ans
wers for English and History, in a clear logic that made Maths and Physics a breeze, French and Biology problem-free. Without seeming to concentrate, I ranked in the top 10 per cent of the state for all subjects and found myself free to choose from a range of university courses.
In the meantime, lawyers and solicitors were hard at work and the trial was continually set forward while preparations were made for a defence. I tried hard to take no notice of all this. My father’s name was in the papers. I shut myself off from my fellow students. I drifted through life in the Airly household as if it were not my own. I drifted through exams, through my father’s endless phone calls, through his stunned silences in the armchair, in a kind of reverie. I began to pay greater attention to loud live music, experimentation with drugs, and boys. In this life away from all that was happening at home, I felt most acutely my physical body; previously the exquisite pleasure of inhabiting a body had come to me on the athletics field, in the high jump. Now, away from home, I began to see that a happiness unconnected to my parents might be possible. It was a notion that until very recently had been far outside of my consciousness.
I’m not saying I knew nothing of my sexuality before any of this. I’d been discovering myself from the age of thirteen. There had been the boyfriends, the ‘Will you go out with me?’s, and all that graceless fumbling. Gradually it got better, but it was clearly nothing more than practice. I lost my virginity, under only moderately disappointing circumstances, at sixteen; and already by seventeen I was getting an inkling of how good things might get. I’d dreamt through all my childhood of what I might do with my life. There was high-jumper (‘Toby and Isabelle’), architect, archaeologist, then photographer. But now I began to await with excitement not what I would do but the someone that I, Isabelle, might possibly be.
The house we lived in became the House of Whispers. It surprised me, the ease with which I made the transition from believing in my father’s innocence to understanding the fact of his guilt. It surprised me to suddenly see court cases as tactical battles rather than arenas of absolution, of the restitution of reputation.