by Luke Davies
After fourteen months the case was heard and my father was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, with a non-parole period of four years. For a few days the papers editorialised: was he the sacrificial lamb or was it a case of greed getting its comeuppance? Opinion was divided.
I was reaching the end of my first year of photography and print-making at art college, had moved out of home and into my first shared house. Prepared though I was for the outcome, I cried on the day of the court case. But the next night, dancing in a nightclub, the idea came to me— it may have been the strobe light that did it, or possibly the ecstasy—that I could begin the process of trying to forget, and move into a new world. I wanted to make my own way. Clearly my father was not the whole universe. He was merely my father. It struck me that forgetting everything would be a pleasant thing, as this new world descended more gracefully upon me than other people’s sadnesses and the heavy sadness of prison cells. Then a friend introduced me to Stephen, lean and angular with a mop of dark hair, like Shaggy in Scooby Doo. We had a drink, we danced for a while, we went home to his place, and spent the next ten months together. It wasn’t that I was replacing one man with another, though retrospectively it looks like that. It’s just a coincidence that as my world was beginning to expand, my father’s was contracting.
And yet it was as if my life was split in two. It is so tragically easy to see that now. Tom wasn’t retrievable then nor ever again. I think that I coped with what happened by trying to hate him for a few years. I tried to show this hate by visiting him in prison as rarely as possible; on those occasions I did visit, with my mother, my folded arms and sulky silences would invariably collapse, at the visit’s end, when I would fall into his arms and cry into his chest. I longed to be nine years old again, but knew that being nineteen and twenty and twenty-one was its own kind of power, and that horizons unfurled, though not forever.
The other side of my life was…well, it was bounteous, benign. I practised doing what adults did, and wondered if this was love, my time with Stephen. Good practice, at least, in the matter of lust. On musky summer nights in my twentieth year, when legions of fruit-bats were screeching and flapping through the skies over Sydney and the soft breeze blew ripples through the mosquito netting, I would feel deeply the elegant satisfaction of being caressed by that gawky boy, and I would take his face in both my hands and kiss him hard, as if I could draw from those lips the very strength and sweetness he did not know he had.
The Ticking of the Clock
WHEN TOM WAS RELEASED FROM PRISON AFTER FOUR years I was twenty-two years old and many things had changed; indeed, most days I felt nothing but the future, a violent wind slamming into my face. And every event that tumbled towards me seemed a pleasure, if for no other reason than its newness. The past was beginning to seem like a town across a river whose bridge had been destroyed, but there was a dreadful sense of anticlimax and a painful choking of emotions at my father’s return.
In the first months after his imprisonment the thought had been that all of us would hold our breath and Tom would be out before long and then everything would return to what it had been before. But life had long since flowed on.
The first Sunday lunch after his release was a good sign that there wouldn’t be too many more. It certainly didn’t feel like they were about to become a weekly or even a monthly event. Grandmother Constance was there, surprisingly pleasant for a change in her attempts to make vacuous conversation. Dan and his family came. Dan drank too much, as usual. When we were all seated he said to Tom, ‘Jeez, it’s good to see you here, like this, mate. I bet freedom feels good, eh?’
Most of the conversation focused on my studies. I struggled hard to add colour to my art college life, to an environment I really only visited for the purpose of delivering essays, using the darkroom and hanging out with my friends. My real life took place at night, in the crowded inner-city pubs where my favourite bands played. I felt that college was all but over, and that I was an unknown, unformed thing. I could barely express this to myself, let alone to Tom.
There were silences during the lunch. The foreboding of things to come. Tom seemed to be having trouble concentrating. I noticed his new habit of staring hard at salt shakers, wine bottles, walls. A small furrow, like an arrow pointing downwards to the bridge of his nose, had appeared between his eyebrows. I’d never seen it during the prison visits; maybe it was the lighting.
Tess brought a jug of water from the kitchen and stood behind him, stroking his hair. She wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned in close to squeeze him. ‘It’s so wonderful to have you back.’ He smiled and his green eyes flashed. In them was the handsome carefree father swinging me around the backyard. I became giddy with the vertigo of the sudden shift to five-year-oldness. My face flushed.
Between the main course and dessert there was a lull. Dan lit a cigarette and leant back in his chair. Constance rabbited on about the unseen creatures attacking her garden in the dead of night, and how the different snail and insect repellents contained acids that corroded the skin on her hands and possibly also thinned out her hair. This was only a couple of years before she died, God rest her tortured soul. Tess went to the kitchen to whip the cream. Tom placed both hands on the table, as if to steady himself. He began to stand. ‘I’m very sorry. I just have to lie down.’
Acting according to some unspoken etiquette, Dan and I stumbled to our feet.
‘Oh—listen…you do whatever you have to, big Tom.’
‘Are you okay, Dad?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said my father, offhand. ‘I guess I’m just not fully myself yet. Tess, love!’
Mum poked her head around from the kitchen.
‘I’m going to lie down. The meal was beautiful. I’ll give dessert a miss.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine, I’m fine. I just really haven’t adjusted yet. New rhythms, new habits, I guess.’
He turned and started up the stairs, and at that very instant I understood that he was already a ghost, that the molecules that made up his body were beginning to disperse at the edges and blend with the atmosphere.
Over the next few years I came to visit the house less and less. Curtains were drawn more often so that even on the brightest blue of Sydney summer days the inside of the house was like a cold, still mausoleum where the dust had settled forever. It was the house of a considerable part of my childhood and yet it was not at all the way I wanted to remember my childhood.
Often Tom was sitting in an armchair in the dark and staring at the floor. Any attempt by Tess to open the curtains was met with wrath. All this was anger I had never seen before. It was as if the man, my father, had changed so much that only his appearance was the same. I can’t say now if accepting this change was in some way more difficult than coming to terms with his death. This was the first death.
Why do the angry become so verbose? From the kitchen one day I heard Tess start to pull open the curtains, and my father’s harsh, ‘No!’
‘But you need some sun, Tommy.’
‘There is, I believe, my dear, a veritable fucking universe of sunlight outside these four walls. The garden, for instance: from memory, it’s absolutely awash with photons. Luminosity so thick you’d choke on it. If I wish to expose myself to such freewheeling airiness, I’ll go outside. In the meantime, I like this room the way it is. Do you think you can grant me this one indulgence?’
With me he avoided such confrontation. One time I swung the curtain open, catching him unawares, and said, ‘What you need, Papa Bear, is Vitamin E.’
He smiled weakly and said, ‘You’re probably right. You’re probably right.’ He sat blinking and unshaven in the armchair. ‘My beautiful Bella—you probably know a lot more than me now.’ I pictured all his brain cells shutting down and felt the flush of goose bumps on my arms.
Five minutes later he had left the room to go upstairs and take a nap. He never slept in the main bedroom any more. He had moved a camp bed into his stud
y and nestled there among his pillars of books.
I made tea and sat down at the kitchen table with my mother. The kitchen abutted the sunroom and had become the designated area of light on the ground floor.
‘It’s beyond a joke,’ said Tess. ‘I don’t know what to do. It’s a psychological condition, you know? It’s called depression.’ I reached out and stroked her hand.
There was only ever one time I tried to talk with him about what had happened, about the Medicare stuff, about why. It was a conversation that faltered and barely got started before it finished. It was a relief to change the subject. And with my relief came the feeling that I wouldn’t try to go down that path again in a hurry.
I had said, ‘You wanna see a movie, Dad?’
‘Not today, love. I’m not really in the mood.’
‘But Dad, you’ve got all this freedom now, you can do all these things you couldn’t do in prison. Let’s get started!’
‘I know, you’re right. I just don’t seem to have the energy right now.’
‘But you’ve got to start doing things for the energy to come back. You can’t wait for it to arrive.’
His resistance was incredible. I sat on the edge of the armchair and hugged him hard, but he patted my back as if paralysed by awkwardness. In the middle of attempting to hug him, a memory entered me.
I was four years old. It was the year before school began, and we were picknicking in a park. There was a tiny pond.
‘Mum,’ I said, ‘can we throw some money in and make a wish?’
‘It’s not a wishing well, dear, it’s just a pond.’
It was perhaps three metres in diameter, less than a metre deep. I moved away from the picnic blanket and over to the pond.
‘You be careful, Bella,’ my dad called.
A concrete barrier defined the circumference of the pond. I stepped up and spread my arms to gain balance. Tentatively at first I began to sway my way around the circle. I picked up speed, leaning inwards as I ran, feeling the thrill of the water rushing beneath me on one side and the blurry earth on the other, feeling power and pride at my own sense of balance.
Then my sandal slipped out from under me and the thing I thought I could defy was happening.
Parts of the memory, as I sat for long seconds in that stiff embrace, were vague—I couldn’t remember the water coming towards me—but what was vivid and immediate was the immersion. I was flailing in the panic of drowning and loss.
I had been unable to sit myself up out of the water. The surface of the pond had been a thin still film but now I had disturbed it. I’d been on one side and now I was on the other. From the underside it occurred to me that my mother and father would know what to do and where were they, could they please come? I could make out the clouds in the bright sky, and over to my left the tree I’d been climbing twenty minutes earlier, but everything was shifted and stretched and distorted, a terrifying parody of the world of clean edges I had known to that moment.
Still I couldn’t raise myself, though my arms were flapping so wildly I might have flown out of that water, a hundred metres straight up into the air, trailing streams of pond behind me like long arcs of transparent seaweed evaporating on contact with daylight.
At last there loomed a shadow above me, my father all fluid, the shape of his head to the left of his shoulders, his arms seeming to pulsate at odd angles from the dark central mass that was his torso. Although it was an alien shape, I recognised him from the shock of red hair. What was a moving towards unconsciousness felt like sleep, the beginning of a dream. Everything was all right.
The shadow of my flame-haired father expanded until the colour that resembled the sky was blocked. Then a force that came from nowhere clamped onto my tiny arms. It was the only thing that felt strong in that underwater world of weakness where I could not move. I was pulled upwards and the film of water broke up and peeled off my face. The world took shape in all the ways I knew. I coughed, and drank in the sky, huge gulps of it.
My beautiful father was hugging me, his chest a great expanse of kindness. My mother was stroking my hair. ‘There, there. Bella, little Bella, it was nothing.’
I was blubbering but together they made me laugh. I was back!
‘Look at you,’ my father said, rubbing my cheek and pushing my face into his warm neck. ‘You’re a bedraggled little duckling!’
I looked down at the forlorn strands of my hair and my dress. It was a kind of liberation, to be in such a state and yet not be in trouble. I continued to cry but I began to giggle as well. In my wetness was a memory of life closing off, and I thought how I could lie clasped in the abundantly strong arms of my father forever and ever. My beautiful father, the red-haired man. If I stayed there I could breathe. His arms were like sofas as big as clouds. It seemed I thought these things not through my head but through my exhausted limbs.
And now? The man had walked away into another dimension. I stood up.
‘Dad…why did you do it? The Medicare?’
‘The what?’
‘The Medicare.’
‘Why do you want to know about that?’
‘I don’t know. I just do.’
He sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘It just happened, you know. Stupidity. Greed. Idiocy. It just kept happening. You get lazy, you don’t think.’
‘But in the beginning? What happened then?’
It was not a loaded question. This was a few years before Tess told me about the affair. It was about getting closer: knowing more about him, finding him again.
‘Gee, let me see. It’s an awfully long time ago, Isabelle. Feels like someone else’s memories.’
‘But tell me anyway.’
‘Darling, it’s too far away.’
He leant forward, slapping his hands together with patently fake enthusiasm. ‘It’s too far away and it’s too bloody morbid, little girl. Now grab the paper, the movie page. We’re going to see a film.’
That was the one film we ever saw together in all those years, between the time he got out of prison and 1999 when he died. Dances With Wolves. Well, at least it was three hours long. Almost like seeing two movies, really. I cried at the end and Dad held my hand while the credits rolled. Really I was crying for him.
And on raged the storms inside his brain as the years unfurled.
Almost two years to the day after his release from prison, he was re-registered as a doctor. Through the long bureaucratic battle it was Tess who did all the paperwork, all the petitioning, all the legal manoeuvring, presenting pages for Tom to sign. On the day the letter arrived confirming his re-registration, he hugged her tight and sobbed once. He rented a consulting room and quietly opened up shop as a general practitioner, far away in Parramatta. He must have begun keeping the diary around this time. We found it in his papers after he died, along with the mad notebook of the suicide week, to which I am coming.
What amazes me is that for a few years he tried to describe what was going on in his head, when for the rest of us it was a lock-out situation. He drove across town to work each day and sat for hours, flicking through magazines, awaiting patients who never came. People have their own doctors; people stick to their habits. It was some years since his name was prominent in the newspapers. I guess people have long memories.
But a trickle of patients began to arrive, almost all immigrants, from Vietnam, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia. The Davi family from Bombay became his most regular customers. I suppose they must have mistaken my father’s catatonic listlessness for serenity. His diary tells me he was grateful for their visits, for the company, the friendship and the sharing they represented, and on days or weeks when they didn’t come he would drive home through the peak-hour traffic with a gnawing hole in his stomach.
And now he began to overservice and undercharge, the opposite of crime. Was he making attempts to redress for the other life a lifetime earlier? He didn’t actually invent illnesses for the Davi children, but given the smallest excuse he was careful to monit
or their progress, sometimes two or three times a week. He refused to charge for all but the most essential visits. He came to love the robust warmth of the family: gentle Mr Davi, trained as an engineer in India and now working as a stock supervisor in a Microsoft warehouse; his wife, so exotic to Tom in her ruby saris and bangles; the four children, two boys and two girls from two to nine, their Australian accents, the boys’ obsession with rugby league.
Tom treated each visit, every patient, with meticulous care. All the while he was freezing himself silent in the dark depths of home, he was with concentrated tenderness attending to his motley new band of patients so recently arrived in the sunny glare of the bigoted old country. He loved them all the more for their knowing nothing of his past. His diary became a bizarre mixture of doctors notes, introspection and the contemplation of his patients.
THUR 15th
10.15 Mrs Tang—compl. shortness of breath on exertion. Trial run Ventolin puffer (samples). Return 5 days.
10.30 Henry Kazik—travelling Laos, Cambodia—prescr. doxycycline.
11.05 Euphonia da Costa. Daughter (Ines, 3)—pers. cough. Sugg, syrup and return if worse.
These idle hours. Boredom might be a kind of crime. Think of the starving children?!! Reminder to bring good book. Boredom leads to thoughts of double-glazing—consciousness of traffic. Consciousness as traffic. Lead poisoning a lose-lose sit’n.
11.25 Raoul Wu—11 sutures removed left elbow. Redressed Melonin & bandage.
11.40 Uri and Ida C.—prescr. nicotine patches x 2! Both ready for another try…
Raoul Wu—strange name. Borrowed? Anglicised? Accident happened kitchen of restaurant where he works. Why back of elbow? I picture illegal gambling dens, tempers raised.
12.00 Lunch. Perhaps I could be more like Don Quixote, believe this is all glorious stuff, the highest calling, utmost importance. Cheese and tomato sandwich: banquet of the gods. Raoul Wu: mounted on golden steed. Henry Kazik: Marco Polo. Mrs Tang: my fair damsel, my Queen.