His absence should have been a relief, but in fact his despair created as palpable an atmosphere as his anger did. I would try to ignore it, but I often found myself outside his study door. Knowing that I was the only one likely to be allowed in, I would knock tentatively, and then wish I hadn’t as soon as I stepped into the gloom.
‘Since your mother discovered feminism,’ he would say, referring to her work on the commission, ‘she wants to get rid of me. None of you love me. None of you care.’ He would take his hands away from his face for a moment and look at me. ‘Except you,’ he would say. ‘You are the only one who would mind if I died.’
It was a weight I didn’t want to carry. I would stand in front of him, fists clenched, digging the heels of my shoes into the carpet, hoping I was making the border filthy, and hating everything: my father, my mother and even women’s liberationists.
Of course, my mother didn’t simply embrace feminism and decide to change her life. But as her confidence grew, as she became more involved with her work and the people she met through it, she realised she didn’t have to live with the fear he inflicted. I have often wondered why it took her so long. I have often wished it had happened sooner.
Although I was never on the receiving end of his violence, I was often a witness to it. Pressed against the wall or crouched on the stairs, my pleading never managed to stop him, even though he’d told me I was the only one who loved him, the only one who cared.
My mother remembers the day I challenged my father and broke away from the oppressive hold he had over all of us. Strangely, I don’t.
She says it was during the time she was trying to leave, when he had retreated into his study. He would emerge only at dinner, then sit at the table, head in his hands, hardly speaking. We’d ask him if he wanted vegetables and if he did respond, it would only be to ask us what we cared, what any of us cared; in fact, he could die and none of us would care, he would say, without looking up.
My mother says that one day I finally told him he was the one who didn’t care; how could he behave like this if he loved us. I pushed my chair back, scraping it loudly on the kitchen floor, and left the table without being excused.
I don’t remember. I wish I could, but I don’t.
As I listened to his interview, the rat-a-tat firing of questions that constituted his idea of a ‘lively’ program, I cringed. He sounded like a man who didn’t listen, who wouldn’t stretch himself to take in a different viewpoint. I suspected he hadn’t really thought about any of the issues they were discussing, let alone read any of Germaine Greer’s work. He was clearly out of his depth, and the embarrassment I felt escalated as the interview progressed, reaching a peak when the conversation turned to lesbians. As Germaine laughingly stated that nearly every man believed that all a lesbian needed was him, my father, sounding uncomfortable, said that her comment was ‘something of a whack under the belt’.
‘Why?’ she asked him.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied.
‘If you think I have any interest in what’s pattering about under your belt, you are mistaken,’ she retorted, as he urged her to change the subject. I blushed for him. It was clear that she was the consummate performer, far more adept at handling an interview than my father.
Recently my mother told me a little of the background to the program. It was part of a day-long press call. Germaine was ensconced in a hotel suite, dressed in white, a half-bottle of champagne on the table in front of her. My mother was one of the people interviewing her in the morning, my father was on the afternoon roll call.
My mother’s interview was for another radio station. She had a young photographer with her who was taking publicity stills. He was so entranced by his subject that he took his pictures hanging from the lights, the table, the bed, all in an attempt to impress her (‘Like a scene from that Antonioni movie, Blow-Up,’ my mother said), only to discover at the end of the shoot that he had forgotten to put any film in his camera.
Halfway through the session with my mother, Germaine jumped up and started making a fuss. She had menstrual blood on her skirt. ‘Look,’ she said, with delight, pointing it out to everyone in the room, and sure enough, there it was.
It was a performance that was apparently repeated for my father, with the same surprise and the same fuss.
I don’t think my father would have been horrified by menstrual blood as such, other than by the possibility of it causing a stain. In any event, the episode never made it onto tape, luckily. I found listening to his attempts at dealing with Germaine’s comments about lesbians difficult enough, and I turned the volume down a couple of notches.
He had lost control, something I knew he could not bear to do. This was a man who regularly measured the distance between the candlesticks on the sideboard, adjusting them if they were even slightly out; who made us watch him while he remade the beds (no housekeeper was ever capable of doing the job to his satisfaction) so that we could learn how to get each hospital corner perfect; who always had a Wettex in his hand and who would darken with rage at a mark on a wall, crease in a sheet or crumb on the floor.
The interview progressed and my father abandoned the sticky subject of lesbians and feminists to ask Germaine about her childhood. From the boredom in her voice, I guessed she found this line of questioning dull. As I listened, I found myself remembering the little I knew about my father’s own childhood, the few stories he had told us, so few I could count the bare, stark summaries on the fingers of one hand.
He was the only child of a solicitor called Norman and a would-be opera singer, Maisie. Once he told me that Maisie used to whip herself rather than him whenever he misbehaved, a story that is doubted by other members of the family. He also told me that every Sunday he went to his very strict and very religious paternal grandmother’s for the day, where he had to stay in a darkened room with only bread and water and a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress. And finally, he was sent to Bedales School in England for a short period, which he hated. I didn’t know anything else.
I was always particularly fascinated by the story of the paternal grandmother, the sheer gothic horror of it.
‘But didn’t you starve?’ I would ask him, wanting to know more.
‘I was very, very hungry,’ he would tell me.
Although the tale of Maisie whipping herself was even more horrific, I stayed away from it, sensing that it might be too much even for my melodramatic tastes. He never volunteered anything further.
I never met either of his parents, both of whom died before he married my mother. I also never knew, until shortly before my father’s own death, that Norman had killed himself. My father didn’t tell me this, instead he gave me the first and only chapter of the autobiography he had been working on.
Norman, he wrote, had been a solicitor who had gone broke in the Depression and had not been able to bear the shame of telling anyone. The night my father finished his final law exams, they sat down together and went through the answers he had given. Convinced my father had passed and would be able to support Maisie, Norman turned on the gas oven and killed himself. Shortly afterwards, my father found out he had failed.
I relayed the story to my mother and asked her why no one had ever told me this before. I was thirteen at the time, and it seemed a very significant tragedy that helped to make sense of so much that was difficult in my father.
My mother was surprised. It was true, she said, that Norman had killed himself, and his business had failed during the Depression. However, my father had failed to tell me that Norman had dipped into clients’ trust funds and was about to be caught. Furthermore, my father had never gone past his first year of law.
After this conversation I began to doubt every other story my father had told me.
As I turned the car into my friend’s street, the interview began to veer away from the relatively straightforward topic of Germaine’s childhood, slipping back into sexual politics. I wished the tape would end. It was difficult to listen to, and not for the reasons
I had anticipated.
Germaine was telling a story about a man losing his virginity. My father interrupted her. He sounded patronising.
‘So many of these little anecdotes of yours,’ he said, ‘which are delightful and illustrative or tragic and poignant or whatever they may be, they all appear to relate to men. I wonder if you have a similar fund about women.’
I was holding my breath as I waited for her response.
‘I am really baffled by that statement,’ she said, and the surprise in her voice was genuine, her entire performance momentarily floundering as she searched for a way to respond.
The few minutes of the interview that remained descended into a shambles. My father’s responses seemed to come increasingly from the hip, and made less and less sense. I pulled up at my friend’s house, feeling excruciatingly embarrassed for him.
It was the first time in my adult life that I had listened to one of my father’s interviews, and I found myself hating this rapid dissolution of the last shred of respect I had held for him. I was surprised at how much I still wanted to believe he was a good interviewer.
The program was followed by a panel discussion among contemporary feminists. They discussed my father’s attitudes; one woman mentioned that he had been married to one of Australia’s better known feminists.
I did not want to listen to them, and I found myself wanting to defend him. It was the times, I wanted to say. That was how it was.
What about men? he’d kept asking on the program. Surely women’s liberation wouldn’t bring the sexes any closer? Surely it would only cause resentment and anger in men? Surely some women liked the way things were?
I wasn’t even sure if this was really what he thought, despite the fact that he’d always told us that feminism caused the breakdown of his marriage to my mother. I had no idea what his attitudes were. I was a child when he died. If I’d had a chance as an adult to say what I couldn’t say when I was young, and if he had listened and explained, we might have moved into the world of his likes and dislikes, his beliefs and his fears. But I never got the opportunity. All I could say in his defence was that he was an ABC interviewer who wanted to have a bit of a joust on his program with the infamous Ms Greer because it would make for entertaining listening, and that was his job, a job we were always told he was very good at. He may have been – this one interview may have been an aberration – although I don’t remember him as a man who had a great passion or love for his work.
It was during the last part of his life, after he’d retired and before he became ill, that my father seemed to be happiest. He could do what he liked, listen to music, walk and take photographs, and that was what he did, usually by himself, sometimes with me when I stayed with him on the weekends.
But even though life at home became more peaceful once he’d left, I felt hardened towards him, to such an extent that when he told me he had cancer, I sat opposite him and thought ‘What now?’
I only saw him a couple of times after he learnt of his illness, and I did not see him at all at the end of his life. I find it curious now that we never visited him before his death. My mother was not a person to shield her children, and when I ask her why she never took us along when she went to Sydney to see him (we were living in South Australia by then), she says it was just all too much. ‘He was sick, your brother was mad, and I suppose I didn’t think.’ I also don’t remember ever asking if we could go.
When we heard he had died, I didn’t cry. It was Christmas and we were staying in a tiny town by the beach south of Adelaide. Each morning we would walk up to the phone box in the heat and wait while my mother rang Sydney for the news. I remember sometimes kicking at the sand and pine needles, wishing he would hurry up and die so that we could enjoy our holiday. I remember a small part of me believing that he was hanging on for the drama of it.
We flew back for the funeral. Once again, I stayed dry-eyed, unable to mourn for a man I had shut out of my heart and refused to let back in. In fact, I felt more bemused than sad as I listened to the priest get his name wrong and describe him as a ‘gentle man’, ‘a peaceful man’, in a eulogy that had clearly been written for someone the priest had never met.
The only time I come close to crying for him is when I look at a photo of him as a young boy. My mother gave it to me when I was about seventeen and I keep it tucked away in a bottom drawer, not out of anger, but because there is something painful in the shyness of that gaze, the stiffness of the formal pose, the plumpness of his legs; something that’s hard to confront.
I waited for the rain to ease before I got out of the car. As I sat in the silence I could picture him clearly. I could see his face, his silver-white hair, his immaculately pressed open-neck shirts and slacks, the small leather handbag he’d always carried, to my embarrassment.
The rain stopped momentarily. ‘If there is enough blue sky to make a pair of sailor’s pants,’ my father used to say, ‘it’s on its way to clearing.’
NO GOING BACK
STANDING IN THE MIDDLE OF A FLAT DRY FIELD UNDER the harsh light of the sun, my mother rolled the tyre as far as she could. It wobbled for a moment, precarious, and then collapsed, lost from sight in the long grasses that swayed, flaxen, in the sharp clarity of the heat. Shielding her eyes from the glare, she walked back towards us. Her forearm was smeared with grease, and as she wiped at a fly that clung persistently to her hair, an oily black smudge also appeared on her cheek.
By the side of the road, Joshua and I flicked gravel at each other.
‘Don’t,’ I said when a small piece hit me higher than either of us had dared to go, although if the truth be known, I had been the one who had begun raising the stakes, my last piece whizzing past his shoulder.
‘Don’t what?’ He glowered, aware that I had complained loud enough for our mother to hear.
‘Hit me.’
‘You did it first.’ He kicked at the edge of the bitumen.
Bending low, my mother climbed back through the barbed-wire fence. The flies were thick on her singlet, their cluster undisturbed as a jagged edge tore at the cotton.
‘Shit.’ She strained her neck as she tried to inspect the damage, and I could smell the sweat, sharp and sweet, on her skin.
At her feet, the tools were still spread out in the dust, the jack and the wheel brace now too hot to touch. Wrapping her sarong around the metal, she packed them up into the cloth bag, tying the frayed knot with fingers that were filthy. Bags and boxes were scattered to where the first of the grass straggled at the edge of the gravel, the zips glinting in the sunlight, the vinyl shimmering against the pale sky.
‘We need to pack up,’ she told us.
Hoisting two backpacks onto my arms, I staggered back to the boot. ‘I didn’t know you could do that,’ I told her, and I looked at the spare tyre, now on the car.
‘Nor did I,’ she confessed.
‘So, how did you know? Were there instructions?’
I had thought we were going to have to wait for help, but when it soon became clear that it could be a long time before anyone passed us, let alone stopped, my mother had got to work. She had changed a tyre. As I sat next to her in the front, I looked at her with admiration.
‘We’ll just have to hope it stays on,’ and she turned the key in the ignition.
I stuck my head out the window, and the hot dry wind pulled at my hair and sucked the flies out from the inside of the car to scatter across the scrub, while I watched that wheel anxiously.
Now that my parents were divorced, we were selling the sandstone house that we had lived in for almost ten years, and moving to Adelaide. Everything was on a truck bound for South Australia, with only our clothes crammed into the back of the station wagon. Jonathan was not with us. At seventeen, he had dropped out of school and didn’t want to leave Sydney. He was going to stay with friends for a while, he said. He’d get a job, he promised, although I couldn’t imagine who would employ him. His hair was always dirty, and his eyes were distant and glazed
as he peered out from beneath his fringe. My mother would have worried about leaving him, but she also would have realised she could not force him to join us.
My father, who had met someone new soon after the divorce, was also staying in Sydney. I had promised him I would write, and come back to visit him for the holidays. I would miss him, I said, but I was glad my parents had finally and completely separated. I was also secretly glad to be leaving my older brother, whose behaviour was becoming increasingly strange. I saw us as the trimmed down (and hopefully improved) version of the family, on our way to a new life in a new city. With Joshua and the dog in the back, and my mother and me in the front, we opened the car windows wide, and turned the tape player up loud as we drove away from the house we had lived in for most of my life, and out towards the highway leading west.
On our first day on the road, we had travelled for eight hours before we finally stopped at a caravan park on the outskirts of a small town. We’d had hamburgers, the beetroot staining the butcher’s paper pink as we unwrapped them on the small formica table that could fold back into a bed. There was a television mounted on the wall opposite and my mother let us switch it on while we ate, but the reception was bad, the stations all flickering except for the ABC. Outside our dog barked at the strangeness of the night. The metal roof of the van kept in no warmth, and our sleeping bags slipped on the vinyl bunks. I woke in the darkness to a crash, as Joshua toppled down from the bed above me and landed, half in the sink, half on the stove.
‘Where am I?’ he asked, as my mother helped him crawl back onto the mattress.
‘In the frying pan,’ I whispered, giggling, but he was already asleep again.
‘I need to go to the toilet,’ I hissed, moments later. I didn’t want to go alone. My mother got out of bed again, her silhouette visible in the light that came through the small window at the end of the van. Outside, in the sharpness of the cold air, the sky was smeared with stars, a wild swirl that stretched across the night. There was life up there, I thought, going on without us; a whole busy universe oblivious to us here in this caravan park, and then the sky was gone, obliterated by the tin roof over the besser block bathroom where we had showered earlier, the water smelling like chlorine as it hit the disinfected concrete. Looking up at the fluorescent light above the toilet cubicle, I tried to pee, and then gave up.
Births Deaths Marriages Page 6