I tried to be upbeat and peachy keen, using that jolly-hockey-sticks tone often used by people trying to make-believe they are part of a normal family.
‘Go on!’ I said brightly. I leant forward, the baby in my arms, offering tiny Joe to my mother, my face creased in what I hoped was an encouraging smile. I was on the balls of my feet, the baby, held in my outstretched arms, getting a little heavy as I awaited her response.
‘Come on, Mum,’ I said after a moment or two, ‘you must have held me when I was a baby.’
‘I never did,’ she answered immediately. ‘The natives did it.’ She then shook her head furiously, as if I’d accused her of something improper.
I felt a moment of genuine hurt, of the kind I’d mostly protected myself against receiving. It felt like I’d just been slapped in the face.
I also didn’t know how to interpret what she’d said. My mother was either a woman who really never had held her own baby, however unlikely that sounds, or, weirder still, she was a person who wanted to be seen as someone who’d never held her own baby.
Maybe it was simply her way of escaping the invitation to hold baby Joe – a child she assumed would be covered in germs.
It was hard to know which of the three options was the saddest.
My mother, by the way, may have been right about the ‘natives’. My father was a keen photographer so there are plenty of shots of me as a baby and toddler. There are a couple of photos in which my mother is holding me, but in the vast majority I’m being cradled by the Papuan woman who lived with us, Danota.
In these photos Danota gazes at me with a look of intense love. She has beautiful crinkled black hair, worn in a sort of beehive, and a glorious smile. Her husband, Gogo, is often in the photographs too: handsome, always bare-chested, beaming at the camera. The three of us create the shape of a traditional family photograph: two Papuans and what appears to be their adopted white child.
My parents used to tell a story about having a dog in Port Moresby called Mischa that bit me so badly it had to be put down. It had its jaws around my one-year-old head and was about to despatch me when someone intervened. My mother always told me Mischa was a great dog; she assumed the attack had been caused by jealousy over my arrival in the family. But why had the dog waited until I was one year old? Danota, my mother explained, rarely placed me on the ground, instead carrying me everywhere, as was the local custom. The dog had acted when given his first opportunity; he’d just had to wait a year to have me free of Danota’s perpetual embrace.
The best bits of family stories are like this: fragments which fall out when someone is busy unwrapping what they see as the main gift. I don’t care about whether I was bitten by a dog. The important part of the story is the detail that’s meant to be incidental: that I was always carried, that Danota treated me – tenderly, traditionally – as if I was her own. And did so for the first three-and-a-bit years of my life.
There’s another set of photos, taken when I was eleven and accompanied my father on a business trip back to New Guinea. He was still on the board of the South Pacific Post and was required for a meeting. In the photos, we are back at our old house, posed in front of the same water tank as in some of the older shots. Danota and Gogo smile again for the camera. By now they have three children of their own, who sit grinning on the back steps. I sit among them, smiling just as vigorously. While I can’t remember the words that were spoken, I remember the reunion and the fondness with which Danota greeted me.
The perpetual embrace ... Danota, Gogo and me, their ‘baby’.
All these years on, I know nothing about her save for these various photos. I’ve put Danota’s and Gogo’s names into Google, but there’s nothing. I’ve written to various people who know about Papua New Guinea – ‘Is this a common name? Is there some way of finding her?’ – with no result. She is from a different world; I have no surname. I don’t know how to summon up a trace of her, even though it may be she who gave me everything. I feel a rush of gratitude but have no way to express it.
While my mother crawled deeper into her hobbit hole, my father was stumbling along a course that involved many wives, many boats and many houses. There’s a saying about owning boats: they only make you happy twice – first, on the day you acquire them and, second, on the day you get rid of them. In my father’s case that was also true of the wives and the houses.
Every few years, Ted made some new acquisition – wife, house, boat – believing it would solve his problems. It never worked. My father never overcame the departure of my mother. And he couldn’t free himself from the heavy drinking which was both cause and effect of my mother’s vanishing act. Wife Two, Ivy, eventually left, her vast patience exhausted. Ted then had a year or two with a slightly younger woman, June, with whom he eventually fell out. June, like Ivy, would ring me often, as if I was the keeper of the official ledger of my father’s crimes. As my father was passed from woman to woman, it seemed they were handed the warranty booklet: ‘If product fails, ring the son.’
Soon after the break-up with June, my father married Wife Three, Alice, and to celebrate he moved to Bowral, a town an hour or so from Sydney, and bought a boat for $100,000. Both the marriage and the boat started sinking almost immediately. It turned out to have rust in its innards – the boat, not the marriage – still, within a short while, he was rid of both. He then embarked on a P&O cruise – keen, I’m guessing, to find another partner, and to experience a vessel that could achieve actual flotation. On the cruise he met Robyn, a kind woman whose father was a famous stage hypnotist. She moved into Ted’s house in Bowral, but seemed to lack her father’s hypnotic ability to bend others to her will. My father kept drinking and – freshly optimistic about life – bought another boat.
It proved as unseaworthy as the last, developing mechanical problems that made it difficult to manoeuvre away from the marina. This suited Ted fine. He would drive up to Sydney to spend ‘a weekend on the boat’, which was code for two days of drinking while tied up at the dock. He had created his own floating gin palace.
It had been clear for a long time that Ted was a mirror opposite of Mr Phillipps. My mother, in her contempt for my father, had found herself a sort of anti-Ted, a human antonym. Mr Phillipps was fit, precise, disciplined, arrogant and condescending towards others. My father was loose, overweight, gregarious, generous and open-minded. Lest my comparison seem unfair to Mr Phillipps, my father was also self-pitying, depressive, undisciplined and incredibly thirsty.
Ted, more to the point, was a complainer, right in line with the northern English stereotype best expressed by Monty Python: ‘We had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at midnight and lick the road clean with our tongues.’
I’m pretty sure my father had never heard the Python sketch about the complaining Yorkshiremen. This added to my glee when, using the same northern accent, Ted described his experiences in New Guinea, speaking intently and drunkenly to me and my friend Philip.
Ted: When I was in New Guinea, I worked twenty-four hours a day for four years.
Me: Gee, you must have been tired, Dad.
Ted: I was. I was buggered.
It was hard to disagree. After working twenty-four hours a day for four years you would be a little tired.
Soon enough, the phone calls began from Ted’s new partner, Robyn. Robyn was pleasingly tough and proud. She would ring often, complaining about my father’s latest outrage. He was never violent; it was always drunkenness combined with self-pity and a belief that everyone was ‘crucifying me’. As with his other wives, I was required to fill the role of witness to my father’s disintegration. As usual, I felt this was unfair to both me and my father, although I understood the frustration and rage of the wives. My father was so charming when sober and so boring and unpleasant when drunk that there was a belief in each of the women that ‘No one else understands what I’m going through.’
After a few months things came to a head. Exasperated by my father’s drinki
ng, Robyn removed herself from Ted’s life, at least temporarily. Christmas was approaching, so we invited my father to come and stay with us for a few days. We’d sold our house in Marrickville and were renting a house in Haberfield, an inner-western Sydney suburb notable for its Federation-era homes. The whole place had been built in the early 1900s – a housing estate designed to appeal to people fleeing the cramped and dirty innercity. Its sales pitch in 1906 was ‘No Pubs. No Slums. No Lanes.’ A century on, it still had most of the original houses and, by council decree, a policy of not permitting hotels. This is a rarity in Australia: unlike America, we rarely have ‘dry counties’. A person can walk out their front door, and – without any local knowledge – rely on finding a pub with a brisk hike in any direction.
Cruelly, perhaps, we stripped the house of all alcohol before my father’s arrival and so, on the second day of his visit, quite early in the morning, he announced he was going for a walk, which I knew was code for ‘I need a drink and I can’t find one in this bloody house’. I failed to intervene and explain the local ordinance, leaving Ted to head up towards the shops, his tastebuds tingling, a beer hanging enticingly before his mind’s eye, the whisky chaser queued up behind it.
I’m sure he gazed from one busy corner to the next, seeing the TAB, the fruit shop, the supermarket, all the while thinking to himself, ‘Surely there’s a pub on the next block, there’s always a pub on the next block, and if not there, maybe if I head down more towards the water . . .’ My poor father, who probably hadn’t walked more than two hundred metres at a go in the previous decade, came back two hours later, sun-struck, exhausted and still dry.
It’s a sad story, I realise; one that makes two people look bad: the drunken father and his mean-hearted son.
Robyn constantly ended her relationship with my father, but always relented, allowing him back into her life. Sometimes she even accepted an invitation to stay on the boat. One Saturday night the boat was tethered at the marina while my father got busy tethering himself to a bottle of gin. By about 9pm he was well gone, standing unsteadily on the small deck, admiring the night sky. Alas, he stumbled and fell. Robyn, sitting inside the cabin, looked up to see my father disappearing from view. She raced up to the deck, peering into the space between the boat and the wharf, her eyes trying to adjust to the gloom. Out of the darkness came my father’s Lancastrian cadences, quite cheery. ‘I think I’ve had a tumble.’
Staring into the gloom, Robyn could just make out my father. He’d fallen onto the tangle of ropes that connected the boat to the wharf. He was suspended face-down, and yet unperturbed by his predicament.
‘I just need to somehow turn around,’ he said, wriggling in his cat’s cradle of rope.
He had the confidence of the truly pissed, yet every time he tried to shift one way or another, the delicate hammock would begin to part, preparing to dump him in the water. Robyn – according to her own account – leaned in, trying to help, one hand hanging onto his ankle, her other hanging onto the boat as she tried to pull him closer. She soon realised the likely outcome was they’d both end up in the water. So she went to get help, bringing back a squad of passing yachties.
She stood aside, humiliated, as they hauled my pissed, ebullient father to safety.
Soon after the incident on the boat, Robyn began to take photographs of my father so that she could prove to me how appalling he was. There’d be a knock on our door and she’d be standing there with twenty-four freshly developed snaps, all showing my father asleep on the nature strip or passed out on the bathroom floor, head cricked up against the toilet.
‘There, you see,’ she’d say, fanning them out on the kitchen table, twenty-four shots of a drunken man asleep. ‘What am I meant to do?’ she’d ask, using the same words as Ivy, Wife Number Two, all those years before.
As usual, I had no answer, although I often wondered what the shop assistants in the rapid-print outlet thought about Robyn: these constant visits from a highly stressed lady whose hobby seemed to involve taking near-identical pictures of the same comatose middle-aged man in front of the same toilet. Call it an art project and she could have won an award.
On one occasion, Robyn went one better and took a tape-recording of one of my father’s rants, which she combined with the usual roll of photographs. She turned up on our doorstep with both. It was like a son et lumière display under the title ‘A Father’s Disgrace’. Robyn insisted on pressing PLAY as Debra and I stood in the doorway. The tinny speakers of her tape-player broadcast my father’s familiar complaints to the world. ‘Everyone hates me.’ ‘That bastard Phillipps.’ ‘Everyone is out to crucify me.’
‘I don’t need to hear this,’ I said, waving my hand to signal that she should turn it off.
‘Who else can I play it to?’ she asked.
In my head, I answered her: I don’t know, but not me. I’ve already heard this speech. I’ve heard it more times than you. I’ve been hearing it since I was fifteen. You are not proving anything I don’t already know.
All I said out loud was the last bit: ‘Robbie, you are not proving anything I don’t already know.’
She paused and thought about this, the tape still playing. My father, through the fuzz of the speakers, was still ranting.
‘Just listen to another minute,’ Robyn said. ‘I want you to hear this next bit.’
We heard the next bit. And the bit after that. And then the bit after that bit. It seemed decent to bear witness to her pain.
Chapter Nine
Up in Armidale, my mother was coming to the end of what had become an impressive career. The theatre troupe she’d founded – the New England Theatre Company – had lasted twenty years, presenting a handful of plays each year to people in country towns like Tamworth, Armidale and Glen Innes. She was general manager of the company, choosing plays and directors, scrounging grants from governments, often selling the tickets herself in the box office of a town hall or school of arts, wearing her white cotton gloves to fend off the germs. She charmed local mayors, conned bargains from everyone and, despite her tiny body, helped carry the sets.
Mr Phillipps was by now a lecturer at the university. He’d completed a thesis in which he measured the stress levels of primary school principals. It was a long way from his passion for English literature, but was sufficient to earn him a PhD and a job in a discipline called Educational Administration. He chose to affix the term ‘Doctor’ to his name in all possible contexts.
The couple planned a retirement in Noosa, the fanciest address in Queensland, a place nicknamed ‘Toorak-on-Sea’ after the upmarket Melbourne suburb. They’d bought a block of land with views of the river and were having plans drawn up. Maybe, after all her years of hard work and self-denial – in both meanings of the word – my mother had achieved the bliss she’d dreamed of at fourteen: a house with a posh address, a husband with a PhD, a career mixing with the artistic elite. She’d come a long way from working-class Lancashire.
It was then – with the house planned but not built – that Mr Phillipps was diagnosed with a brain tumour.
My mother rang in tears. Her husband had suddenly begun slurring. He’d had some tests done in Armidale and the results were not good. They were coming straight to Sydney for more tests. She didn’t stay with us, but I remember her at the hospital, overcome with grief. Her plans undone: the love of her life, finally secured after such travail, being ripped from her; the fortress breached.
From the start the doctors were grim. No wonder it felt unfair: Mr Phillipps had always been super-fit. He drank moderately, ate cautiously and exercised each day. My mother took him back to Armidale and put him to bed. I must have gone up to see them, as I remember him lying unconscious on a mattress, still dapper, the beard trimmed. Two weeks later he died. He was sixty-six and they’d had twenty years together.
I travelled back to Armidale for the service. My last sight of Mr Phillipps was in the funeral home: it was an open casket for reasons I didn’t understand, but probably, a
s with all these things, connected with my mother’s social class, either real or imagined. Was it a Lancastrian working-class thing? Or a supposedly posh thing? I made a mental note to ask someone, sometime, but I never have.
He was, of course, dressed in the blue Oxford jacket, with the crest of his college, Jesus. I stood alone in the funeral home chapel, looking down on him, thinking of all that had happened since that night he’d come to dinner and I’d punched my father. He had made my mother happy, I had to give him that.
The funeral was large, held in the cathedral, his fellow academics wearing their robes. The daughter from the first of his three marriages came out from England. The day after the funeral, she and I – on instructions from my mother – went through his office and cleared out anything that wasn’t worth keeping. Amid the detritus, there were signs of his academic promise, of the career that had never been fully realised. He really did have a first in literature from Oxford: here in my hand was the certificate. He’d been to Sandhurst, hence the military bearing. There were radio plays, written and produced when he’d first arrived in Australia, and countless study notes published in The Australian, designed to help senior school students who were tackling Shakespeare or Arthur Miller or Lawrence. As we went through them – saving a single copy, throwing out the duplicates – it was hard not to notice that they were well written and vigorous in their ideas. Maybe there was a reason for him to feel a little discombobulated about where he’d ended up: a minor department in a regional university on the wrong side of the world.
I had to admit he’d taught me things, such as how to use the word ‘discombobulate’ – something I’m still not averse to doing, as you can see from that last paragraph. Even ‘peripatetic’ and ‘post-prandial’ – those other favourites of his – have been known to fall from my lips. And Samuel Pepys? Well, he’s good to read, don’t you think? Even if he had served as a gangplank to my mother.
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