You Never Met My Father

by Graeme Sparkes

  Finally lime-green cement sheeting with minute corrugations was attached as external walls, leaving only the interior to be completed. A brand new house and very modern-looking by Housing Commission standards. It was set forward on a deep tapering block with a partly concreted driveway. There was even a small tool shed in the back yard.

  I could hardly believe our change of luck.

  We didn’t take up the option of buying the place. We couldn’t afford the modest deposit. But, as its first tenants, it would seem like our own. My impatience to take possession grew with each day.

  Before we shifted in Denny had the floors in every room and passage covered in a grey, floral-patterned lino. We moved a lot of our old furniture—our table with a red-and-white patterned laminex top and fading red vinyl seats, the stainless steel framed single beds, my mother’s old timber double bed, our clumpy kapok mattresses, our worn cream vinyl covered armchairs—but he bought new venetian blinds, our first television since the time we were travelling along the eastern seaboard, and our first automatic washing machine, on hire purchase, which of course meant he didn’t have to pay for anything straightaway, a gift-horse to a compulsive gambler.

  Denny was proud of his domestic achievements. Despite his bad back he immediately went about raking the ground, front and back, until it was even and smooth. He cast lawn seed around and watered it in. The effort left him unable to move for three days. From his chair he issued instructions on various tasks that had to be done. There were a couple of small bushes he had got from somewhere which needed to be planted, briquettes to be bought for the heater in the lounge room, a TV antenna he had already attached to the roof to be adjusted a tad, seedlings to be requisitioned from Uncle Mick’s hothouse for our vegetable garden. When he finally got to his feet he seemed satisfied with everything I had done, which surprised me and raised my spirits. I dared to ponder the possibility that this new place might change him. In a rash moment I even imagined he would stop gambling.

  He remained friendly towards us. He sounded optimistic about the future. He sat in his chair with his legs crossed, tapping a beat on the timber armrests as if he were a jazz percussionist. I could tell he thought it was a new start for him. He kept saying, “we can do this…” and “we can do that…” laying down plans, which we all endorsed, hardly able to believe our ears. He kept tapping a syncopated beat.

  “There’s a talent you didn’t know your old man had,” he said.

  “What? Playing the armchair?” I joked, expecting his fury as soon as I’d said it.

  But he half-closed his eyes, moved his neck and shoulders rhythmically. “The drums, my friend. Something I learned in the army. I could’ve been a drummer, you know.”

  He looked nothing like Ringo Starr.

  He was also friendly towards the neighbours who were all just shifting in. He offered to help unload trailers of furniture as they arrived, despite what had happened to his back while labouring on our lawn. He offered to run those without cars down the street to do their shopping. If they had an intractable cold or looked in need of a good sleep, he offered them medicines they couldn’t buy without prescriptions.

  As a TTI pensioner he got whatever medicines he wanted free of charge. He requested pills and ointments for a wide range of ailments in quantities well beyond the needs of one person or one family.

  He took it upon himself to operate a communal dispensary, specialising in Kenacomb, an antifungal, antibiotic ointment, which he believed could be used on any type of injury, sleeping pills and BTZ cream, whose use I have forgotten but seem to remember rubbing on muscular pains and swollen ankles after football matches.

  Denny saw this as a community service, ‘helping your own kind’ . You took what you could from the powers that be, whenever you got the chance. You looked after your own. “The poor bloody worker,” he would say. But such generosity, such friendliness, wasn’t to everyone’s liking. It made some of the neighbours wary.

  Everyone on the estate had arrived at roughly the same time, which meant none could claim dominion. Nobody was shifting into anybody else’s territory, which was especially important for children or teenagers like me. If disputes arose they weren’t settled on the basis of precedence.

  There were about twenty households. Within a few months we more or less knew everybody. One of our next-door neighbours was a violent drunkard, whose wife Denny drove to Casualty once or twice, her face swollen and bruised almost beyond recognition, a tad ironic, I thought, considering the condition he’d left my mother in on occasions. Our neighbour on the other side was a homely religious nutter. Every so often some evangelicals paid her a visit. They carried printed brochures containing dire warnings with biblical quotes to support them. In return she gave tea and biscuits and as soon as they were gone, she was leaning over our fence, announcing to me or my sisters or my mother the exact date that the world would end—Tuesday 27, Friday 3, Wednesday 15—with a well-intentioned warning to repent and prepare for the Lord. And when the day passed without the slightest hint of Armageddon, not even a tremor, a dress rehearsal, disappointment replaced her eagerness. Her gloom prevailed for weeks. In a sombre mood, she would busy herself in her garden, planting plastic flowers rather than real ones, shifting them from one bed to another until the clean-cut evangelicals knocked once more with an apology for the miscalculation and a revised date, which would immediately cheer her and have her rushing back to our fence with the good news.

  We took no notice of her. Nor did her husband, a fat, taciturn fellow, who scowled a lot and occasionally managed a cynical guffaw. If she wanted Armageddon she needed to look no further than him. He was a slaughterman at Borthwicks, the Grim Reaper to all those terrified cattle in its mustering yards.

  One woman around the corner in the cul-de-sac, a tall grey-haired widow, a migrant with what I eventually learnt was a Yorkshire accent, was known to clip her boys around the ears if they complained about her poor house-keeping. Needless to say the house was in chaos. Her four or five boys were wild. One reportedly was in jail or the army, or both. They were all feared for their volatile tempers. And the youngest, the mother’s favourite, turned out to be the wildest. One day he killed his mate with a shotgun after a dispute over sharing the day’s catch of rabbits.

  And there were other bellowers and beaters besides the drunkard next door, besides the woman around the corner, besides my father. Even having a policeman living on the estate made little difference. But there were quiet households as well, which I found reassuring, people who kept to themselves, who watched the commotion, peeking through their blinds from time to time, no doubt horrified by the behaviour of some of their neighbours. They were the ones I hoped were normal. As for boys my age, there were a few on the estate, some I played football with but none I would call a friend.

  Pat was pleased with her new house. In the kitchen there was an electric stove, far superior to the old wood stove in our former hovel. There were hot water taps throughout. There was an indoor bathroom, which had a shower, a novelty for us, and an indoor toilet (mercifully independent of the bathroom) that flushed! She could hang the washing on a rotary clothesline like the type Denny used to sell, instead of wires that looped across the yard and were raised with heavy props at our previous place. Denny saw that she approved and for a while they got along fine. It was the first time she had ever possessed her own space. Being new, the house was clean too with nobody else’s grime, and she intended keeping it that way.

  Denny helped her. He was no loafer, despite his erratic work history and injured back. The inactivity thrust upon him by his industrial accident, left him frustrated and restless. Providing there were no races on and his mood wasn’t too dark, he would take up a broom or a duster, sweep or mop the floors, dust down the venetians. They argued over who should do the cooking. Pat felt, as mother and wife, the kitchen was her domain. All Denny wanted to do was make himself useful. She begrudgingly let him help around the periphery, peeling potatoes, cutting onions, tur
ning chops and sausages. He accepted that graciously. To my surprise once or twice he came up behind and gave her a hug, which she endured momentarily but then shrugged off with an almost inaudible Oh, Denny, her usual dissenting utterance, embarrassed by her children witnessing their intimacy.

  Then he got another job.

  A massive contraption arrived in the bay one day, an oil rig, a tripodal monster that towered over the port and attracted crowds to the cliff tops and breakwaters while it was fitted out for exploratory drills off Cape Otway. It had been towed from the other side of the world and was one of the first to be seen in Australian waters. When he heard of the lucrative wages being offered to work on it, he applied for and got a job as a slusher. He thought it was the kind of job that wouldn’t be too taxing on his injured back. Two weeks at sea. One week break. That was the roster. He thought the job would be a cinch.

  Soon the oil rig was towed away with him aboard. I watched it until it slipped beyond the horizon.

  He lasted two weeks. He said his back let him down. But I heard a rumour that he had been in a fight, which would have been unacceptable on a tall platform in the middle of the sea.

  Resigning himself to an idle life, he settled back into his routine, setting himself up in the lounge room, his coffee and ashtray and form guide laid out beside him on a little coffee table, his trannie on 3UZ, listening to Bert Bryant’s call of the city races. The TV was directly in front of him. In the evening he could watch the replay of the final furlong of each race on the evening news, groaning with a hand sheltering his eyes if he had backed a loser, hissing with his fists clenched on the rare occasions when he had won.

  Once, while he was out buying dinner after one of his wins, and a mood of levity lingered, my mother spoke about his gambling. “Did I ever tell you what your father said straight after our wedding?”

  I shrugged and pouted. “Tell us.”

  “When we left the church we took a cab to the wedding reception. And while we were going he tapped the driver on the shoulder and asked what had won the race that was on while we were getting married.” She gave a little strangled laugh. “I should’ve known then, shouldn’t I?”

  For a while we were like a normal family. No great affection but no arguments either. Pat would cook tea, which we still ate at the kitchen table rather than in front of the TV. She always prepared an Anglo meal: meat (chops, sausages, rissoles or corned beef) and three vegetables (potatoes, peas or string beans and one other: boiled carrot, pumpkin or cabbage). For sweets we ate canned fruit with cream or ice cream, or a pudding of some sort for dessert, a rhubarb sponge or bread-and-butter custard. We ate early—around five o’clock—the dishes were done, and then we’d file into the lounge room to catch the news. Every night we sat together before the box. Pat liked I Dream of Jeannie and Bonanza. Denny’s favourite shows were F Troop, The Red Skelton Show and The Andy Williams Show. He liked the crooners who appeared with Williams, and occasionally he sang along, although in a voice so soft it was difficult to tell whether he could hold a tune. His favourite singers were Bobby Darin and Nat King Cole.

  The first big dispute in the new place happened when Pat complained that the automatic washing machine Denny had bought on hire purchase produced inferior results to her old twin tub.

  Fury descended on him like a fiend. “Jesus wept! Every time things start to go okay for us, Trish, you find something to bloodywell complain about!”

  My mother was equally adamant that it was a waste of money, which was not strictly accurate, since he was yet to pay for anything.

  And that became a problem too. One day he received a summons over his unpaid installments. He warned us not to open the door to strangers, who might force their way in to repossess the television, washing machine, venetians, floor coverings and a few other things besides, like the encyclopaedia he had ordered from a door-to-door salesmen and never paid for, which stood proudly in its complimentary bookcase in our lounge room.

  He went to court and returned unexpectedly triumphant. The magistrate had ruled against him. But since he had recently gained an invalid’s pension (which was independent of TPI pension he sought), he had only been ordered to pay off the debt at a nominal rate.

  “Twenty bloody cents a week!” he chortled, unable to believe his luck.

  “Do you think they’ll ever let you buy anything on hire purchase again?” Pat said, weary of his antics.

  He winked, as if he were already working on a plan. “They’ll let you, though, Trish.”

  He wanted Pat to give up her job at the post office. If she was unemployed, a pension would come her way as well.

  “Why work for bloody peanuts?”

  But she had no intention of resigning no matter how much the pension was worth and not merely because she was suspicious of his motives and unsure of the actual destination of the fortnightly payment, but it would have meant giving up some of her independence, the bit of her life beyond his control. She had recently been shifted to customer service, working behind the counter, dealing with the public, a promotion that meant a great deal to her, since it came with responsibilities. She also emptied the town’s postal boxes each evening. For the first time in her life she felt respected and trusted by others outside her family. But he mistook her resistance as part of an ongoing endeavour to oppose, out of spite, every scheme he had ever devised to improve our lot.

  The washing machine disagreement affected him badly. He saw it as another slight; another insidious way of putting him down, of refusing his efforts to do something positive for the family, and for her in particular. A period of silent hostility ensued even while Pat was at work. He would sit with his legs crossed in his armchair, his back to the wall you might say, an elbow on the timber armrest and a hand against his forehead, not drumming any more, concealing his face like a barrier to anyone else in the room.

  I could feel the resentment every time I entered. Usually he’d ignore me, even if I bothered to greet him. Sometimes he looked up long enough to glower. He’d turn the radio up a decibel or two.

  At night he slept in the same chair. He claimed his spinal injury caused too much pain to lie in a bed overnight. If I got up early enough I saw him sprawled in the chair, out of his day clothes and in his pyjamas at least, his mouth agape, his false teeth on the coffee table, where his packet of smokes, an empty ashtray, a biro, and a cold cup of coffee from the previous night were arranged in their usual order. The only difference since our shift was an empty milk carton (recently invented to replace glass bottles) opened completely at the top, into which he tipped the contents of his ashtray after every cigarette.

  His mood could last days, if not weeks, where the entire family had to tiptoe around and converse in muted tones again, as if someone was dying. I think all of us found it a relief when occasionally he left the house to place some bets at the public phone box a couple of blocks away, or entire afternoons when he took a straw broom and swept our street from one end to the other, making separate piles for rubbish and metal screenings, leaving the rubbish for the council to collect and barrowing the screenings to a path he was constructing around the front of the house, which he intended to concrete if he ever found he had enough spare cash to buy cement. I used to wonder what the neighbours thought, getting their street swept, having the cleanest street in Portland.

  It left him doubled over in pain by the end of the day, his spine locked into some kind of hideous shape, from which it took days to recover. There is no doubt in my mind that his suffering was genuine, despite all the scepticism the medical team at the Repatriation Department was showing. Nevertheless, he kept doing manual tasks with grim determination, as if he were punishing himself for his ill luck, or he expected the pain might explode, like a sonic boom. Breaking the pain barrier. Then it might dissipate.

  In a moment of sympathy or guilt I offered to help him. I wheeled a load of screenings to the path and tipped it between the edging boards he had erected. The weight of the load was more than I ex
pected. The barrow tipped over and one of its handles punctured our cement-sheet wall.

  I almost collapsed with the fear. But when he saw what I had done he said nothing. He went inside. He abandoned the path and never went back to it.

  Partly to get out of the house while he was in it, partly to help my mother, I began to accompany her on the postal round in the evening. She drove a red van from pillar box to pillar box, and I jumped out at each with a key and emptied its contents into a large canvas sack. She claimed that my assistance shortened the task by half an hour.

  I enjoyed our time together. We didn’t talk much—a little gossip, a few questions about my football training, the occasional mention of schoolwork—just enjoying each other’s company without histrionics or mood swings spoiling anything. It was like we had a secret pact, a special allegiance that nobody knew about. I felt close to her, as I had when I was young and my father was elsewhere. We had been through a lot together, my mother and I. We had looked after each other.

  One day out of the blue I mentioned my father’s moods, which were getting me down. “Why’s he like that all the time?” I complained, without expecting an answer.

  “It’s not his fault, darl. He doesn’t really want to be like that. He can’t help it if he gets cranky now and then. You heard what happened to him in Japan.”

  I hadn’t heard the full story of what had happened to him in Japan, and ‘cranky now and then’ seemed a slight understatement. But she said it as though that was her final word on the subject. It never occurred to me to ask her if she ever talked to my father about his mental problems or his gambling, whether she let him know how serious she thought his problems were, and whether they had discussed ways of dealing with them. I suspect her approach was to roll with the punches, as they say, and hope that one day things would settle down. But she had been rolling with the punches for twenty years. She probably believed that talking about his problems would only make matters worse. She probably had no idea how to deal with him. Nothing in her upbringing had prepared her for her life with Denny. And there was no one around to advise her.