While Jean and I were at school, trying desperately to find some friends, my father worked the neighbourhood. He was selling a contraption that was to revolutionise washing day. Within a few years the company he worked for would become a household name. After a stint as a real estate agent some years later and a decade of selling cheap jewellery and tiled tables at flea markets, he told me rotary clotheslines were the easiest things in the world to sell. He just had to peep into back yards and see the unsightly wires looping from one side of a lawn to the other, propped up with cumbersome poles: so much wasted space, so untidy, so much heavy lifting. And the housewife on his brochures looked more like a beauty queen than a weary washerwoman.
He must have saturated the local market rather quickly, or had other urgent reasons for leaving, because without warning he shifted us again, this time to somewhere north of Sydney, by the shore of Lake Macquarie, near the port of Newcastle. Jean and I were put in another school, wondering if it was worth the effort to make friends with anyone.
I was starting to see the benefit of make-believe friends, who could at least come with you when you shifted.
The house we took, close to the lake, made a great impression on me. Only a few yards from the water, it was like a barn with a giant double door and space inside, I was told by my erudite sister, to house a boat. The living quarters were at the rear and in the loft. A salty, fishy smell filled the building whose size and shape fired up my infantile imagination. Outside, where pelicans rocked as water lapped against a pebbled shore, Jean, her blond hair swept back and her face ruddy from the wind and excitement, told me there were pirates, invisible for the moment but known to approach at tremendous speed when the wind was up. I had just become Peter Pan, she Wendy, and the house a mighty cave, a fabulous hideaway, where broom cupboards and dark places underneath the stairs were concealed nooks and secret tunnels that no pirate was clever enough to discover.
But without warning we were uprooted once again by my restless father, who moved us into an ordinary house in another town near the lake, where the rent was cheaper or the neighbours less nosy. Or he was harder to trace.
I was dizzy from the third new name in as many months.
What my mother thought of these constant changes I have no idea, although I doubt she enjoyed them. Later, when I was old enough to appreciate her as an individual, I realised how much a proper home meant to her. She liked a place she felt was her own, where she could grow flowers and vegies, and she could shut the door on the world and go to sleep in the same bed she’d been sleeping in for years, knowing she would still be there in the morrow. Yet, despite our nomadic existence, it would have pleased her that Denny had a job, and one that suited his temperament. He seemed to be happy, or at least not depressed. Occasionally an extraordinary grin would appear, a billboard promoting false teeth, which always startled me. It vanished as quickly as it came, like the sun poking through winter clouds, as if he could find no reason to sustain it. Yet he seemed optimistic, as if he too envisaged the day when he would have enough money to buy a place and settle down. They were both around thirty, still young enough to harbour dreams.
One day I came home from school to find a television in our lounge. It was early days for television in Australia and not every household could afford one. I had only ever seen them before in the display window at a Sydney emporium, where a crowd of curious onlookers had gathered. Denny had bought or hired this one. He was delighted with our excitement and gratitude. He sat on the couch to watch it with his arm around Pat’s shoulder. The program I remember was the Mickey Mouse Club. I remember it in colour, which of course is a false memory, since colour television wouldn’t appear in Australia for another two decades. But I remember red on the Mouseketeer uniforms. The show was thrilling. I laughed and joined in the singing. M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E. Mickey Mouse, ra, ra, ra! I felt the joy of privilege. But I squandered the opportunity when my mother caught me weeing in the bath one evening. She saw a yellow subterranean stream that I mistakenly assumed was undetectable. She banned me from watching TV for a week, which might as well have been a life sentence because it soon disappeared without explanation. I felt it was my fault, a punishment for a bad habit. I would be sixteen and properly toilet trained before we had another set. More recently I’ve realised it had probably been bought on hire purchase with a small deposit, and hocked or resold at a profit, which was to become a scam my father employed when he was desperate for some cash.
Around this time Pat managed to pay a professional photographer to do portraits of her three children, the earliest colour photos of us. We look happy enough, particularly Carol with her infectious grin, although my anxiety was never completely hidden by smiles. I’m dressed in a neat school uniform: brown-and-fawn checked, short-sleeved shirt, brown shorts, fawn socks, tan sandals. My hair is oiled, combed back and flawlessly parted on one side, the handiwork of my fussy mother. My head is on its usual angle to compensate for a lazy eyelid. One of my hands is raised to display a simple balsawood model aeroplane.
Flight.
I’m tempted to interpret the toy as a metaphor for my early years. But that would be reading too much into it. I accepted my mother’s explanation for our constant movement: we weren’t running away from anything but helping our father to do his job. But I wished he would stop because the shifting was making me chronically anxious. I wanted to love him as I loved her, but he was too elusive, too busy to slow down and pay me some attention.
Then Brisbane became our base for almost a year and my anxieties subsided, despite another name change.
When we arrived in this sultry city we spent a few days in a hotel where I used a lift for the first time in my life. I looked down in awe from our fourth-floor room upon the bustle of diminutive pedestrians and traffic. Denny was with me, which was exciting in itself, his hand upon my shoulder, our most intimate moment yet, pointing to scenes in the street, a policeman addressing some sailors, and someone trying to cross the road in a wheelchair, and the café where he had bought me a pie for lunch, now the size of a doll’s house. I knew I owed the adventure to him. I laughed to show how delighted I was that he had given me a new lofty perspective on the world. It never would have happened without him. I thought how wonderful it would be to live up so high and pleaded with him to let us stay, to which he said, “We’ll see.” He was grinning at me and even gave me a squeeze, pressing me to his side, my head against his hip, feeling his warmth. I thought in that moment he liked me as much as I liked him. And I thought if he lets us stay he loves me. But within a couple of days he shifted us into a weatherboard house in the hilly suburb of Kelvin Grove, and he became a stranger to me once again.
The house, whose back section was on timber stilts, had big sunny rooms with hazy views of distant hills, and enough space beneath its floor to hide and play, to evoke highwaymen, the landlocked cohorts of the pirates, whom Jean had recently discovered in books and generously shared with me. There were plenty of places in our lush backyard for the outlaws to maintain hideouts or hold ambushes: behind the garage, where a succulent banana tree grew, or even inside it, where they placed enormous, grotesque spiders, which Jean called tarantulas, for the sole purpose of terrifying us—undermining our bravery, our resistance—especially our little sister, who had been conscripted to swell our ranks but in effect, thanks to her constant blabbing, we would have been better off without.
My mother spent most of her time inside the house. We saw her when she came into the back yard to hang up the washing. I heard her singing sometimes as she cleaned the house or cooked a meal. Most of the time she seemed happy to me. When we went inside in the late afternoon, she would listen to our adventures, fuss over our clothes, and remind us to wash our hands and face. She licked her fingers and wiped away the smudges we had missed around our mouths. She warned us never to forget about tidiness. People judged a family on the appearance of its kids. She’d give us a brief cuddle to let us know she loved us.
Jean and I went
to a double storey school where most of the students were friendly, the lunches were free, a blue tongue lizard lived inside a dead tree stump, and a derelict man used boiled lollies to try to lure young pupils into the bushes at the back of the school yard. It must have been summer because after school each day we walked home in a tropical deluge. We removed our sandals and kicked up the warm gushing water that gurgled in the gutters.
Warmth, verdure, the cloying scent of tropical fruit, the bananas and pawpaws that grew in back yards: these are the residual sensations of Brisbane.
I eventually felt comfortable in Kelvin Grove. It seemed to be the first time I managed to establish some friends at school, in part because I occasionally failed to respond at roll call whenever I became absent-minded about my surname, which built my reputation amongst some students as a fearless antagonist of teachers, amongst others as a harmless dummy, either way someone worth befriending. I made other friends outside of school, most notably the girl next door, who liked to play in the little tent we had in the back yard, where she was keen to compare and touch wee-wees, away from our parents’ prying eyes.
Denny was so busy we hardly ever saw him. Just as I got up he went to work in summer pants and a pressed white shirt, always clean shaven and with Brylcreem in his hair, selling clotheslines. At least I thought he was. Sometimes he mucked up my hair in a fleeting, friendly farewell. My mother had a strict rule about early bedtime, so he usually came home after I went to sleep. He worked five days a week. Sometimes on a Saturday he was home, sitting in the living room, with a paper spread over his knees (a form guide, no doubt), but he got impatient with me when I wanted to be with him, shooing me away with a flick of his hand.
Pat warned me to keep away. She held my shoulders and looked at me in her usual sympathetic way. “Your poor father works very hard, darling,” she said with the briefest of smiles. “Let him rest.”
There were times when he was cross with her too and would raise his voice. Mostly she said nothing but sometimes I heard her arguing with him.
“You’ll get caught, Denny,” I heard her say one day.
On another occasion she said, “I’m not a magician. I can’t pull meals out of thin air, can I?”
When Jean, who was listening behind the door with me, explained in a whisper what a magician was, I wondered what my mother meant.
“And money doesn’t grow on bloody trees either!” he retorted.
He had already told me that the jacaranda in our front yard was a money tree. He had stood at my side, his hand on my shoulder, and looked up at the tree for a few minutes, scanning for money. “Can you see that?” he said, pointing at something. “There’s a tenner! I’ll have to get up there and get that some time.”
I couldn’t see it. He squatted next to me and kept pointing, urging me to follow his directions.
“Up higher. To the left. A little further. Yeah, that’s it! See it? Are you blind?”
And then he biffed me, affectionately, and laughed.
“Get it now!” I cried.
“Can’t. Too busy.” He nodded at me seriously and went away.
I cherished the times I shared with him but he was always too busy for more than a few moments. I kept an eye on the money tree, wondering when my father would return to pick the ten-pound note he could see, waiting for coins to appear like acorns.
Once or twice I came upon him doing something beneath the house, fiddling with a piece of apparatus whose purpose I didn’t understand. I was eager to learn, especially from him, and when I inquired he answered, “It’s a wigwam for a goose’s bridle.” The second time I asked for its name and he called it a “thingummygig”.
When I told my mother what he had said, hoping for clarification, she just laughed and said, “Your father hasn’t got time for the names of things, darlin’. His mind’s too busy to stop and look for silly old words. He just races past them.”
Our lives revolved around, depended on, our steadfast mother, who fed us, washed and ironed our clothes, who taught us how to tie shoelaces and cut our nails. She made sure we were as clean and tidy as she was, made sure we had brushed our teeth after meals and went to bed early. She instilled in us the importance of sensible routines and respectability, while our father flitted in and out of our daily lives, a chimera whose jokes and commands were usually incomprehensible.
Once or twice we went on family outings, memorable because we were spending a few consecutive hours together.
Denny took us on a picnic to a park on a hill, where I saw some strange people. The men were dressed in shiny jackets and tight trousers that my mother called jeans, which we all thought was funny because it was like my sister’s name. The women wore colourful slacks that brazenly showed the shape of their legs, and tight tops that showed the pointy shape of their bosoms. The cuffs of the men’s jeans were rolled up enough to display their red socks and pointy shoes. All of them had their hair slicked into pompadours, held aloft with grease or spray. Denny told me they were called ‘Bodgies’ and ‘Widgies’.
We moved well away from them and must have had a pleasant time because I remember little else about the day, except that my mother was happy—she was smiling a lot—and he threw a ball to me once or twice. Or am I being fanciful, wanting to believe my mother could be content and my father did play with me sometimes?
He did, after all, take Jean and I to a public pool. I remember this clearly! The pool had cool, unnaturally blue, strange-smelling water. My mother didn’t come because she couldn’t swim. In his bathers he looked like a gorilla: powerful and covered in thick hair. Even his legs were a bit bowed. Gorillas were scary monsters. And when they rushed forward, beating their chests, they were terrifying. He tried to teach Jean how to swim but she sank to the bottom, where, engaging the independent attitude for which she was later renown, she walked across the bottom to an underwater ladder and ascended. Denny was grinning so much that creases appeared on his cheeks and his ears fluttered. He reassured her he would have rescued her if she had been in peril, but he wanted her to learn the most important lesson of all: “look out for yourself; you can’t trust anybody”. He held us both at the shoulders, first Jean and then me, and repeated the words and urged us to remember his advice.
Was this his oblique way of telling us we would soon be on our own?
A few weeks later I came home from school to find Pat distraught, packing everything, doing her best to avoid tears. She suddenly looked much older to me. Her face had lines I’d never seen before, like erosion along gullies after a downpour. She was calling me her ‘little man’ again as I tried my best to help her shut a bulging suitcase. I pleaded to be told what was going on and where my dad was. And in a voice that sounded unnatural, as if it were about to rupture, she explained that he had to go away because of work, which was only a small white lie, and she was taking the rest of us back to Portland, and “don’t worry about your father”, we’d see him again one day .
It felt as if the earth was spinning out of control beneath my feet, and if I didn’t run furiously I’d be bowled over and swept away.
All I wanted was to stand still with my father next to me.
WORKING FOR ANGUS CAMPBELL
Was Pat trying to protect us by keeping Denny’s whereabouts a secret? If so, she made a grave error of judgment. Her silence filled me with dread and doubt.
I couldn’t accept that he had left us simply for more work. After all, we had been following him along the eastern seaboard, shifting from city to city, house to house, school to school, as he sold rotary clotheslines. Why shouldn’t that continue? I suspected something more serious had happened to him. Something bad, in fact—something shameful—that Pat wouldn’t reveal to us. I suspected the various surnames we used had something to do with it. You would only change your name if you were ashamed of it or you didn’t want someone to find you.
He became a negative presence in my life, a shadow without embodiment. I couldn’t even bring myself to talk about him with Jean,
much less Pat or anyone else. Except Carol, perhaps. She would have listened to me. But I thought she was too young to understand. So the shadow became my own secret, which set me aside from my mother and sisters, set me adrift, you might say. And that secret radiated shame. It was my first real experience of separation, isolation…individuality. My notion of self, who I am, I’ve come to understand had a morbid origin.
Years passed before I found out what had happened to Denny, although I was to learn much sooner of his whereabouts from an entirely unexpected source.
Bald, bespectacled Uncle Mick was my mother’s eldest brother. He looked cantankerous but a more benevolent, easy-going uncle I couldn’t have asked for. He lived with his wife, Aunt Gerty, and daughter, Brenda, in a fibro-cement-sheet house on the southern slopes of the hill that rose out of Fawthrop Lagoon. They were the Staggs and they took us in without complaint or any questions that I was aware of about Denny.
Conveniently our other relatives in Portland lived next door. The Stewarts: Aunty Barb, who was Pat’s sister, her husband, Harry, and their only child, Don. Why my relatives were neighbours I had no idea and never thought to ask. I was simply grateful for my unexpected inclusion in this gregarious clan after the uncertainty of life with Denny. The Staggs and Stewarts had been in Portland for more than a decade, more than my lifetime. A more sedentary tribe I couldn’t have hoped for. A gate had been installed in the side fence to reduce the number of steps between their back doors. And lest the journey be too taxing a private phone line linked their back porches so they could contact each other just by cranking an antique handset on the wall. All the adults had steady jobs. Uncle Mick worked for the post office as the teleprinter operator. Aunty Barb and Aunt Gerty worked as barmaids at the Mac’s Hotel. Uncle Harry kept the books at a local automotive workshop. After work, within the constraints of six o’clock closing, the menfolk drank furiously as if to negate the monotony of their days. Occasionally, at night and on weekends, they went ocean fishing off rocky outcrops on the capes. They followed the local football team, went to matches and stood as close to the boundary as possible to vent their feelings towards oppositions, umpires, work, the world, or anything else that sprang to mind. But what they were fondest of (it was easy to tell) was sitting at home in beery confabulation, by the wood stove when the wind was cold or outside when the sun poked through, preferably in the company of others. In summer, if a fly happened to land on the froth in a glass of ale, one of them would inquire as to whether it was doing backstroke or dogpaddle. Then the luckless creature would be removed with an artful puff and a grateful comment on how little it had managed to drink.
You Never Met My Father Page 4