“What for?” he scowled, staring vacantly. “Give her a week and she’ll be back on her feet.”
His prediction proved accurate.
In turns Carol and I took trays of soup and toast, and cups of tea to her. Eventually she decided to have a bath. She locked the door and stayed in the tub a long time. When she emerged she was in a dress instead of pyjamas. None of us commented, not even to ask her if she were feeling better. We simply carried on as if nothing unusual had happened. We collectively obliterated the week. Within a day or two she was back at work.
I admired her resilience. I let a few weeks pass before I asked her about it one evening as we were doing the rounds of pillar boxes.
“What choice have I got?” she said, unable to conceal her bitterness. “People like us don’t have the luxury of moping around for too long, do we, darlin’? I just needed a few days rest, that’s all.”
“Why don’t you just leave him?”
She glanced askance and sighed. “I might one day. But not until you children have grown up and gone.”
“You don’t have to wait for us. We’ll come with you.”
I had a couple more years of school to go. Carol was three years behind me.
“Once you’ve got your lives sorted out, I’ll decide what to do with mine. Promise me one thing, though, love. Never bet. Never waste your money on them bloody nags. It’s ruined poor Denny’s life.”
I was annoyed by her sympathy for him. She always seemed to find excuses, as if she knew or understood something about him to which I would never be privy.
“I’m not completely stupid,” I replied.
The temptation to gamble was there. Jimmy was quite a keen follower of form, if not yet a punter. Each Saturday he would study the guide and make his selections. But I had already developed an aversion to it. Jimmy considered this, along with my Christianity, a character blemish. It was, after all, what working class men did on the weekend. It gave them hope of a better life.
Was that what Denny wanted? If so, he wanted it desperately. He was never gracious about his continual losses, always finding someone to blame for his ill luck: Pat, me, my sisters, Barry Woods, the jockey, Da.
Our grandfather, Da, came in for particular attention towards the end of his life. Well into his eighties, he refused to give up driving around in his old unroadworthy Hillman. The family had begged him to stop but to no avail. So they plotted to hide the car, which ended up in our backyard.
I can’t remember how Denny felt about this development.
Although he was fond of Uncle Mick, whom he always called ‘Master’ (for reasons I never discovered), he would have been hard pressed to think of the last time anyone from Pat’s family had done him any favours. But there the car was, taking up space and killing the lawn beneath it, and being there when the police came around to question him over its theft.
Denny suffered paroxysms for weeks, even though no charges were laid. Aunt Gerty came in for particular attention. He saw her as the prime mischief maker, but he reserved most of his venom for Da.
“That silly old cunt! He’s fucking demented!” he bellowed. “The sooner he bloodywell dies the happier I’ll be. No bugger should be allowed to live beyond seventy, much less bloody eighty-something! They’re just a waste of space. I promise I won’t be hanging around. And anyone with any nous’d do the same. Spare the rest of us, for cryin’ out loud. I’m dead serious.”
He never lived long enough to put his assertion to the test.
Not long after the car episode was settled, Uncle Fred arrived in need of somewhere to stay. We took him in. Even Denny consented. An extra bunk was placed in my small bedroom. If he had been a conventional adult with superior airs and imperial ambitions towards my small territory, I might have complained. But he was a gentle soul who apologised every other day for his intrusion.
He was the only one of my mother’s brothers who still had hair. Perhaps that had something to do with the quantity of alcohol he consumed. Or the type. His preference was sherry. Port would do. Beer was his chaser. If there was nothing else around he didn’t hesitate to imbibe a little methylated spirits, or cough syrup. Indeed, we had to start locking the medicine cabinet after we discovered most of my father’s stockpile of fluid medications was missing.
He was so undernourished his brothers and sisters called him Slim. When he was young he had looked just like a youthful Frank Sinatra. But fate had been less kind to him than the crooner. His face was ravished, his body stooped, his lungs were clogged with tar. He had once been a long-distance truck driver. Travelling somewhere in the outback he had fallen out of his cabin, dead drunk, but had only run over his own arm, which was spared amputation thanks to the famous orthopaedic specialist Dr Kneebone. It now hung rather sadly at his side, full of pins. He could still use it but its muscles were atrophied.
He resembled a skid row derelict and perhaps that’s what he really was, but one fortunate enough to still have relatives willing to take him in when his wife, Val, kicked him out of their house in the city. She was a hard drinker herself, with seven or eight kids, only a few of them his, some from a previous marriage and others from more recent liaisons. Pat’s side of the family asserted that Val had the crudest mouth of any woman they knew, which coming from some of them was a bit rich. It impressed everyone that Fred was still alive, surviving both the booze and his wife’s regular bouts of abuse. The seasoned wits amongst us put it down to the pickling qualities of alcohol.
Despite his drunkenness he soon found work a few miles out of Portland at a small sawmill. There were vast pine plantations west of the town, but he milled hardwood from the patches of State forest to the north. Neither his inebriation nor his poor arm hindered him.
I half-expected the circular saw to finish what the semi-trailer had started. Each day he drove to work in an old Peugeot given to him by his brother Mick, who had a flash new Mini Minor. Each evening he arrived home drunk. One day, sometime after the Portland Railway Station on the foreshore had closed forever and the North Portland Station near our place had become the passenger terminal, Fred took a right turn instead of a left and drove through an open freight gate onto the platform. Fortunately the next train wasn’t due for a while and there was nobody waiting around. With the front wheels over the edge, Fred staggered away in a panic, imagining an imminent disaster. On the hoof he headed to the nearest pub for spiritual fortification.
As luck would have it the stationmaster recognised the car. He contacted Uncle Mick who in turn contacted Denny and together they managed to pull it from the platform with our sturdy Austin A40. By the time Fred made it home the drama was over. As he paused to catch his breath at our gate he was transfixed by the sight of the Peugeot parked in the driveway.
One misfortune followed another. Soon after this he inadvertently dislodged his dentures while peeing and flushed them down the toilet, only to retrieve them, months later, after Denny suggested submitting a lost property requisition to the local sewerage authority. Delighted, he brought the dentures home and gave them a cursory rinse before replacing them in their rightful location.
Denny and Fred got along well. They often sat in the lounge together listening to the race previews in the morning. Fred was always deferential, which pleased Denny, and he never made him feel bad about losing money. He understood what addictions did to a bloke.
Meanwhile Denny, as an inveterate campaigner for the TPI pension, set about trying to arrange one for Fred. He worked almost as hard at it as he had on his own.
A conscript in the Second World War with mechanical know-how, Fred had been posted to New Guinea where he had maintained and piloted a launch for Colonel Blainey. It had come under enemy fire a few times, enough (Denny argued) to turn Fred into a skid row alcoholic. The fact that he was well on the way years before the war started was an irrelevant detail that seemed hardly worth mentioning to the pension board.
Fred was a keen gardener. Now and then I went with him to collect cow m
anure from paddocks, picking up dry pads and putting them in old hessian potato bags. When we got home we emptied these into forty-four gallon drums and added water. Soon we had liquid fertilizer. To apply it Fred placed one end of a cut length of hose into the drum and sucked on the other until a murky flow began. It worked a treat. He didn’t seem to mind the taste. Besides, it was an excuse to rinse his mouth with a little purifying beverage. We had never produced any vegetables as robust and, dare I say it, as delicious, which bolstered my admiration for him considerably. The other thing he was good at was drawing. He could copy the cartoons from The Post and The Pix in perfect imitation. We stuck his best on the back of the dunny door.
His only undesirable trait, as far as I was concerned, was his constant inebriation. He usually retired early after tea and shut the bedroom door behind him. By the time I went to bed some hours later I would enter a cloying fog of alcoholic fumes, which no doubt accounted for my weird and wonderful dreams. He impressed Pat because he insisted on making his own bed each morning. She thought he was being considerate, he wanted to be useful, but that wasn’t his only motive. When eventually he departed and we decided to give his mattress a good airing, underneath it we discovered dozens of empty sherry bottles.
I could have done without the fetid air each night but Jimmy and I had a special reason for liking Fred. He was our driving instructor.
“Come on, boys,” he would say to us at every opportunity. “Time for another lesson.”
He would head for the country roads via his local, The Royal, where he always bought two bottles of beer and a bottle of sherry or port. As soon as we were out of town, he pulled over. Jimmy and I jumped in the front and took turns to drive while he sat in the back with his liquid dispensation. Sometimes we would take the ferrets and do an hour or so of rabbiting but mostly we kept driving around, along the coastal roads and through the State forests, our buoyant instructor on the back seat, occasionally offering us words of encouragement. “You’re doing a good job, boys.” By the time we returned to the outskirts of town, Fred would be nursing three beloved but empty bottles. He swapped places with whoever was at the wheel and drove home as best he could. Once he got the giggles as he swept around a corner and let go of the steering wheel to hold his sides as he tried to catch his breath. Had I not grabbed it and managed to hold our line until he recovered, the car would have ended in someone’s front yard.
Fred left us in a hurry. I thought it was because he had discovered a cache of duty-free alcohol, belonging to Rory, Uncle Mick’s son, who worked on a tax-free island in the Pacific and brought home bottles whenever he took leave. He kept them in a trunk in Uncle Mick’s garage for future consumption. When Fred found it he must have thought he’d won the lottery. Aunt Gerty discovered him asleep amidst empty bottles and unleashed a cyclone of well-placed kicks and abuse that eventually woke him. He begged for mercy and received it on condition he paid for every last drop, much of it top shelf, which would have seen him working at the mill for the next decade, a proposition beyond his imagination. Wisely, I thought, he absconded.
Jimmy and I regretted his departure. Despite his casual attitude to driving instruction, we had actually learned to drive quite well.
And he gave us moral instruction as well. Almost every day we spent with him, he advised us against boozing, smoking (‘If you have to, never do the drawback,”) fighting, hating, gambling and loving the wrong woman.
“Or you’ll end up like me, boys,” he lamented, wisdom I, for one, was ready to heed.
About the time of Fred’s departure Denny had a heart attack. I came home from school to learn he was in intensive care. My younger sister was already with my mother and close to tears. Pat said he was lucky to be alive. Her distress was barely constrained but she tried for our sake. Carol wanted to visit him. But due to the gravity of his condition it wasn’t yet possible. I overcame bouts of guilt to dream of a future without him. If he was too ill for his family to visit, he might still die. I went to school the next day animated by this queer feeling of independence. But when I went home Pat met me at the door and urged me to be quiet.
“Denny’s home.”
“He can’t be!” I said with wildly conflicting feelings. “I thought he was about to kick the bucket.”
“Don’t say that,” she whispered, genuinely affronted. “He shouldn’t be home.” She told me he had discharged himself. “They wouldn’t let him go to the toilet. He won’t use one of them bottle things you wee into in hospital. Says he can’t use them. The nurses and the doctor wouldn’t let him out of bed. They reckoned he was too ill. The doctor told him he could go home if he didn’t do what the nurses told him. Stupid bloody doctor!”
To the doctor’s horror Denny had called his bluff.
Once at home he had taken to bed for the first time in a year. The bedroom door was closed. Again we were creeping around the house on account of some misfortune. Not long ago, my mother with her nerves; now, my father with his dicky heart. On top of that, for months he had been complaining of a pain in his guts. He was shitting blood. His doctor had diagnosed an ulcer and prescribed Alka Seltza. But he was convinced he had cancer.
I went into the bedroom on the third day and inquired sheepishly about his health. He looked drawn and his skin was grey.
“At least here I can piss where I like,” he muttered.
In a week or so he was back to his old routine, sleeping on his armchair in the lounge room, reading the form guide, or, on days where no races were scheduled, a penny western from the stack he kept behind the paper rack—aside from a few school library books the only novels to be found in the house. And a gloomy intensity returned, like it used to be before the advent of the Woods.
Barry came around to see him a few days after he got out of bed.
My mother gritted her teeth and let him in, the first time he had come into our place. When he put on an extravagant show of civility, she assumed correctly that he was ridiculing her. He noticed she wasn’t fooled, which prompted him to be more polite. But with Denny he dropped the facade, and joked about mortality and the need for temporary celibacy, which he would have known was fairly redundant advice. Pat made him a cup of tea, how he (but not she) liked it, white, strong and syrupy, to remove an area of criticism he would have used against her later to amuse his family. The atmosphere in the room was palpable, as if a storm were about to break. Mockingly, he raised his little finger as he drank. But Pat kept her wits and avoided showing any sign of outrage or disgust until he left. Then she vented her indignation by mimicking his finger action, decrying the implication that she was a two-bob snob.
Denny told her not to be thin-skinned.
Soon he was well enough to resume his visits to the Woods, which, paradoxically, were a relief and an aggravation to Pat. Denny was getting better, but it rankled that he preferred the company of someone like Barry to his own family. Around at the Woods’, Barry would be bragging as usual about all the dare-devil things he got up to as a young man: the scores of women he’d had, the fishy smell of their genitals, or the crimes he’d got away with, the criminals and corrupt cops he knew, the police corruption inquiry he’d instigated. No doubt he exaggerated. No doubt he wanted us to believe he was in the big league, and we, the Sparkeses, were mere babes in the woods. Underneath all his glib bravado it struck me that he was really trying to ‘big note himself ’, as Pat would say, which was really a way of putting us down. He wanted us to know that he, more than anyone else, knew how the real world operated. And it wasn’t a pretty sight.
“It might be his world,” Pat said, when she heard of his exploits second-hand. “But it isn’t mine. And it doesn’t have to be yours.”
As much as I thought my life had gained a new dimension since the arrival of the Woods, I had grown to dislike Barry as much as she did. He was arrogant and cruel, even to those who befriended him. Once he showed me an article from The Sun that was about a man who had bet his pants at the races, a country track in the We
stern District. The man, who had lost all his money, left early and was trying to raise some funds for a bus fare to another town where he lived. He went into a pub to listen to the last race and, with the publican, wagered some work pants he had bought before the races. He lost. No name was given, but the gambler was Denny, according to Barry, who took great pleasure in letting me know.
“He’s a card, your old man,” he said between snorts of laughter, but what he meant was he’s a dickhead.
He was intentionally hurtful. He enjoyed seeing me blush and grimace. My father was a hopeless gambler but I didn’t need him to point it out. I didn’t want him to laugh about it.
I grew wary of him. He seemed volatile and treacherous to me, as well as a weak character, constantly demanding our admiration. And aggression usually followed if it wasn’t forthcoming. When he shot dead one of his sons, years later, after a drunken argument, neither my mother nor I was surprised.
Curiously, Denny never bragged about anything. Except for that one time with me, when he showed me the house he had built and gave me a mental arithmetic lesson, he never boasted about any of his achievements, his unusual strength or his boxing prowess. And I never heard him talk about women either, not about any conquests, nor in a salacious way, not even to comment on their looks as they walked along the street, as Barry made a point of doing with a leer or lewd snigger. There was Daisy O’Brien, our former landlady, but his comments about her were expressions of admiration. Indeed, when I look back on those years, I can’t recall a time when I noticed my father eyeing a female like most men are in the habit of doing. Perhaps he considered bragging and perving unseemly, but I doubt it. He probably realised nothing positive would come of it. Besides, for someone as determined as he was at self-destruction, trumpeting achievements would have been the last thing on his mind. As for his sexual attraction to females, throughout his life I never once saw the slightest evidence of it. Perhaps, unlike most men, in his heart he believed in monogamy.
You Never Met My Father Page 21