You Never Met My Father

by Graeme Sparkes

  Another factor: he never talked much. He didn’t know how to keep a conversation going. His friendship with Barry probably lasted as long as it did because he rarely interrupted the other man’s monologue.

  But one day Barry raised a butcher’s knife to Denny’s throat. Jimmy witnessed it and told me about it. What had provoked the incident I never found out. Maybe Denny had spoken out of turn. Or stopped listening. Or maybe it was something he had said in jest that reminded Barry he was not the great hero, the great champion of the working class, he deluded himself he was. Or perhaps Denny had picked a few winners and he hadn’t.

  Denny reacted calmly enough when the knife touched his skin. He knew when he was at a disadvantage. He knew what Barry was capable of. And his heart wasn’t the best any more, certainly no longer up to street brawls. He told Barry to calm down and, when the weapon was withdrawn, went home, the friendship over.

  But Denny wasn’t the only one to experience Barry’s aggression. Perhaps the ex-informant was cracking under the pressure he felt he was under from the local police, who kept close tabs on him, harassed him whenever possible, pulling over the Customliner regularly for roadworthy inspections, inspecting the boot for stolen property, arriving at the house with search warrants, never letting him forget that he was a squealer who had tried to frame some of their colleagues. He began to threaten his family, over trivial matters. Jimmy, trying hard to ignore him, spent a great deal of time in my company.

  We often went rabbiting on our own, usually riding into the countryside on my pushbike, loaded with a box of ferrets, a Gladstone bag of nets, a long-handled shovel, a lunch box and thermos. We’d take it in turns to dink each other, our dogs running alongside.

  I had another dog, which I had called Sailor, after my first dog. He was a big, good-natured mutt, who spent much of his time during the week at the local primary school, where he allowed small kids to climb onto his back. But on weekends he wouldn’t miss the opportunity to hunt down a few rabbits with us. The Woods’ whippet came too. Together they dashed across the paddocks their noses to the earth following scents, occasionally flushing out a hare or rabbit, rarely making a kill. A hare in full flight was a marvellous sight to behold. It barely touched the ground. It even made the whippet look at tad sluggish. We laughed and hooted as the dogs in pursuit yelped their frustration.

  Usually by late afternoon we had caught ten to twenty rabbits.

  After Jimmy knitted their legs together in pairs and suspended them from the shovel across the handlebars, we headed home. I left Jimmy to gut and skin them in his backyard. He fed the offal to his ferrets and hung the skins in a shed to dry. But later in the evening, after I’d had a bath and changed my stinking clothes, I went with him to sell our catch around the caravan parks and pubs. We split what we earned evenly, and, since he did most of the work, he took all the profits from the skins, selling them to an itinerant furrier.

  Barry resented our independence. He often grumbled when we arrived home with a good catch, complaining that we were overworking his ferrets, or ruining his nets, or blunting his knives. One Saturday morning he wanted to come with us. When Jimmy objected, his father punched him in the face and broke his nose.

  He had started to slap Barbara about too. The attacks on her were becoming severe enough for her to genuinely fear for her safety. She secretly planned to abscond, but getting the Customliner down the driveway without rousing Woods wouldn’t be easy. It was too heavy for her to push by herself. So she got a message through to Denny, who agreed to help her.

  Regardless of the condition of his heart, it was still a big risk for him. He knew what Barry was capable of if they were discovered in the act. Nevertheless he joined her at midnight.

  Denny was always generous. He never refused to help anyone who asked. I’m certain, had he been rich, he would have given most of his money away. Since he had none, what he had to offer was his time and his assistance.

  They managed to get the car onto the street without arousing anybody. But, queerly, the old V8 wouldn’t fire up. She tried a few times but then desisted, losing her nerve, afraid Barry would hear the starter motor cranking over and catch her deserting him. Unable to push the heavy vehicle back up the driveway, they left it on the street. Denny disappeared into the shadows and she crept inside. In the morning, when Barry found the car outside, he didn’t seem too surprised. Barbara was composed enough to suggest anonymous pranksters, of which there were plenty in the neighbourhood, or possibly the cops.

  The reason the car failed to start was soon revealed. Barry produced the distributor cap he had removed the evening before, and tapped two fingers to his temple.

  “Thinking,” he said. “Never trust any cunt.”

  She never tried to leave him again.

  MARTY

  Jimmy and I had a friend, Marty, who lived about a block off the estate. He wasn’t too enamoured of rabbiting, but he liked to play sport. I had known him since primary school, but we only really became close friends after my shift to West Portland and into the same junior football team. We played kick-to-kick in the street after school. We practised basketball in the old drill hall every Saturday morning. We played tennis now and then on a bitumen court in our neighbourhood. We hit golf balls around his large backyard. His family was sports-mad. His father was crazy about golf. So was his mother, who also played tennis at the Portland grass courts during the week and didn’t work as far as I can recall.

  Marty was better off than Jimmy or me. His parents were buying their own place. They had two cars. But his father was a boner at Borthwicks, a worker and a shop steward for the meatworkers’union. So we accepted Marty as one of our own.

  On the football field he was a bit of a show pony, which we tolerated because he was in our team. He liked to play full forward so he could kick goals and gain the glory. But he was an accurate kick and won more than a few games for us. And we approved of his celebratory antics after each goal because these unsettled the opposition. Humiliating the opposition was a crucial objective of any contest, as far as Marty was concerned.

  His arrogance often transcended football. He laughed at anyone’s weaknesses or foibles. He considered a strict adherence to any principle a handicap, not a strength. To bend the truth, then, was a sensible strategy on occasions, which often brought him into conflict with Jimmy, whom he considered naïvely honest. Their friendship was rather erratic, but in spite of this I got along well with him, in part because his arrogance was always garnished with humour and seemed to me to be laced with irony, as if self-deprecation loomed over every one of his wisecracks. Jimmy couldn’t see it; he rose to the bait each time. And each time Marty took his pleasure from Jimmy’s fury.

  I never expected their friendship to last, but it did, at least until we finished high school and went our separate ways. There were even times when I was jealous of the depths of their affinity. For instance, while I barracked for Melbourne in the VFL, they both barracked for Collingwood, an allegiance I could never overcome. Being a Collingwood supporter was as good as being a member of a secret society, like the Masons. I could only stand outside and ponder the mystery.

  Most days we were inseparable. We walked to and from school together. We were in the same classes. We spent morning recess, lunch and afternoon recess together. We eyed the same girls, fancied them and talked about them. Marty, in his cynical way, would tell us who he’d like to screw. On the other hand, Jimmy, the sentimentalist, would tell us who he’d like to be the mother of his children. I was less forthcoming. I’d merely contribute with a snigger and a nod, never a proclamation; such was my diffidence when it came to matters of the heart or the fraught erogenous zone. Only when they undertook an inquisition would I reveal my latest infatuation.

  And it could change from week to week, for all of us, which often led to complications. Once, when Jimmy declared his attraction to a particular girl, I realised I fancied her too. I considered her unattainable but Jimmy’s confession made her more so. She
had long flaxen hair, an angelic face and breasts ready to feed his babies. Her name was Katie and she strolled home, part of the way at least, in the same direction as we did. Jimmy would delay our departure from the school grounds until he saw her leave with her girlfriends, and then we would follow fifty metres behind, clowning around to draw attention to ourselves. If he accidentally passed her in the school grounds, he would manage ‘hello’, to which she usually responded with a silent glower.

  But once she answered. Once she said ‘get fucked’.

  The rejection broke his heart but my spirits soared. Afterwards I thought she looked at me in a special way, and I was about to try my luck with her when it suddenly occurred to me how disloyal it would seem to Jimmy. Unwilling to risk our friendship, I desisted. This set a pattern that would govern our lives over the next couple of years. It was Marty who got the first girlfriend, but that wasn’t until our final year of high school. Prior to that we just watched and envied other lads who seemed totally at ease with the opposite sex.

  Instead of trying to chat up girls, we did what we did best, what we loved: playing kick-to-kick on the sports field, trying to out-mark and out-kick the dozens of other schoolboys. The football should have burnt off all my excess energy. Yet when I arrived home after school I was still restless. I often went inside, ran a bath, and sank into its steamy water to masturbate.

  But it would be a mistake to think sex was the only thing on my mind after I reached puberty, or that girls was the only subject I discussed with Jimmy and Marty. There was sport, of course, but we were more sophisticated than that. Jimmy in particular took politics seriously. And not just the day-to-day machinations covered by the daily press and the TV news. He was a big-picture man. He was all for a total rearrangement of society, so that the working man would have the upper hand and all the rich bastards would be cleaning public toilets or washing dishes or collecting garbage or opening doors for the working man in big hotels or doing some mind-numbing job somewhere on the production line.

  “The day will come,” he prophesied.

  In our economics class he would argue with the teacher, who was in thrall of Adam Smith. Jimmy would ridicule the notion that prices fluctuated according to supply and demand.

  “What fluctuations are you talking about? It’s a one-way street. Do you ever do the shopping, Sir? Well, then, just name one thing, one thing, you’ve ever bought that was cheaper than on the previous occasion you bought it?… Can’t think of anything, Sir? I rest my case.”

  He clapped his economics text shut in a dramatic gesture.

  While prices never dropped in a capitalist society, they wouldn’t rise in a socialist state, he declared.

  I was all for the socialist state myself. Why shouldn’t the state own everything and the profits be distributed to all the people? The state, after all, already owned banks, railways, Telecom, the Gas and Fuel, even some factories in Melbourne. It ran schools. All those things seemed to work without the sky falling in. So, why not all the factories and all the businesses? Why should businessmen get all the profits? They did virtually nothing to earn them.

  I held this view despite a sustained attack upon socialism from one of the mentors in my local branch of the Church of England Boys Society, to which I belonged for a while. He considered it the Devil’s work, particularly in its Soviet incarnation. And I held this view despite the hours I was forced to listen to Jimmy’s father extolling the virtues of the Soviet system. Any recommendation he made had to be spurious.

  Strangely, both these harangues occurred while I was sitting in the back of their parked cars; the former in the middle of winter outside the granite church in the proximity of severe carved crosses; the latter on a sweltering evening just before New Year on the edge of what was known locally as the Nun’s Beach, on account of its proximity to a convent and a couple of bathing huts that the nuns used, with my father in the driver’s seat and Jimmy next to me, and all of us, except Denny, drinking beer and smoking Cuban cigars.

  “The Russians give all their workers a house to live in. Everyone’s got a job. Everyone. Even the cripples. Hospitals and medicine’s free. There’s no lying bloody religion. They’ve got the best scientists in the world, working for the common man. They beat the Yanks into space. They’ll be the first on the moon, too, you mark my words. The working man’s got his dignity. He lives in a country he can be proud of. Everyone’s happy in Russia…’

  Jimmy and I turned our attention to the girls on the beach in bikinis.

  Despite what the deputy from the church said about the Soviet Union, I always thought of Jesus as a socialist. The New Testament was full of socialist stories. Blessed are the poor. The rich had less chance of getting to heaven than a camel getting through the eye of a needle. Jesus’ outrage at the venders who had turned the holiest Jewish temple into a marketplace, etc., etc… A lot of the people who went to St Stephen’s, particularly the church elders, were members of the local business community, whose attendance I suspected had more to do with appearances than conviction. I wondered how they could read the stories of Jesus’ ministry and still look so sanctimonious.

  Their children, boys I went to school with, usually the ones who had failed or been expelled from private boarding schools, looked down their noses at me. They smirked at my piety, as if I misunderstood the real purpose of the church. At school they were an exclusive group.

  In our Matriculation year, some of them already owned cars, birthday presents, which enhanced their status amongst the school’s female population. Whether they were ugly or not didn’t seem to matter. They socialised together, were choosy about their company; they even vetted the females allowed into their circle, who had to be bland, blond and willing. The one thing they were keen to let the likes of Jimmy and I know was that they had all dispensed with their virginity.

  Some of them played football but their preferred recreation was surfing. Th ey were wealthy enough to afford surfboards, wet suits and, for those old enough, the vehicles necessary to reach remote ocean beaches.

  Marty aspired to be one of them but Jimmy and I were different. We resented their air of superiority. To unsettle them a little, Jimmy would stroll right through the middle of their group, his hands in his pockets, his head cocked impertinently, nudging aside anyone in his way without an apology. Once when they were in a line, leaning against their lockers in the corridor, chatting to a group of appreciative girls, Jimmy strode past, his hand fixed at head-height. He slapped their faces lightly so that their heads turned sideways one after the other, like a row of mechanical sideshow clowns into whose mouths you dropped ping-pong balls. None of them uttered a word. It was left up to their female companions to protest.

  I admired his audacity, his defiance, his pride. I was delighted to be his best friend. We were becoming inseparable.

  I got him a job at the cinema. We worked the same nights. After interval, we might watch the main movie or walk around town. The air was always dank and salty but it didn’t bother us. We observed the Portland nightlife, the youths in flashy cars, the women who made money from the merchant seamen, the town loners walking their dogs. And if it was late enough when we headed home, we would pass by the bakery and help ourselves to some hot bread that had been placed on racks to cool outside. It didn’t seem like pilfering, more like plucking fruit from a branch overhanging a fence, which I supposed was the public’s right. In a socialist world it would be legal to help yourself. What pleasure we took—gorging on hot bread! It always gave us indigestion, but no matter! The cloying sensation made it worthwhile.

  There were other cloying moments too, which occupied my mind more than socialism. We often lingered outside the cinema before interval, talking to people we knew, who were on their way inside or had emerged from the cinema for a smoke. A friend would come out with a damp stain on his trousers, wondering how he could clean himself up before he returned to his girlfriend. There was a new girl at our school who occasionally went to the pictures with her you
nger sister, a diminutive beauty whose blond hair fell around her shoulders, its fringe overshadowing her dark eyes. Her name was Judy Thompson. If Jimmy and I were outside she would stop and chat. I was soon besotted and lived with an irrational hope that she might notice my feelings and reciprocate. But her own gaze was turned towards the rakes in town who already had cars and incomes. She was affable and incapable of deliberate cruelty, but would inquire if particular youths were inside and, if so, with whom, unaware that her words were flaying me. I could tolerate the pain just to be near her, to feast on her sensuality. I focused on her lips, and imagined the day I would kiss them and she would respond with astonishment and regret that she had failed to notice I had been around all along. When I looked at her lips like that, something strange happened to the tendons behind my knees.

  She started to turn up to the movies with the fisherman that Jimmy had decked at football training. Always they sat in the last row, which offered them the privacy they needed for exploratory amorous activities. I knew where they sat because at interval I was in the cinema with my tray and they bought ice creams from me.

  At school I began to follow her around, accompanied by Jimmy and Marty, who were amused by my infatuation. Occasionally she allowed us to chat with her. It was enough to keep my hopes alive that somehow, miraculously, she would fall for me. Like my father, I ignored the odds, prayed for the rank outsider to get up and beat the field.

  And then one day it almost happened.

  There was a dance in a public hall that I attended with Jimmy and Marty, halfway through our final year at school. I was loitering with them in the vestibule, watching the girls as they arrived, when suddenly Judy appeared right next to me, in front of me, and I was bending forward, kissing her, without asking or thinking, and she responded, my first ever real sensual kiss, a cool, yielding sensation that invited me in deeper, into her heart I hoped, a kiss which I can still feel now half a lifetime later, even though it lasted less than ten seconds.