You Never Met My Father

by Graeme Sparkes

  At school I buried myself in study to ensure I gave myself the best chance of getting to university. I had an aptitude for geography and I enjoyed or, rather, was intrigued by biology. But I couldn’t see a career emerging from either of these subjects. To pursue science at a tertiary level I needed maths, which I had dropped. Instead, I focused on the humanities: history and literature.

  I learned about the Renaissance, about its splendours, at least. Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, the Medicis, Dante Alighieri. In literature we started with Chaucer and Shakespeare. I learned by heart the verses we studied. Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote/The droghte of Marche has perced to the roote… Soon I could quote soliloquies from The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Hamlet. Later I fell under the spell of modern poets such as TS Eliot and Dylan Thomas. I secretly tried to write verse of my own. The notion of tormented poet complemented the sense of martyrdom I was assiduously cultivating. Unfortunately my poems were rather wooden. And the gravity I tried to instil failed to sound authentic. I turned my attention to theatre. Besides Shakespeare, there was Arthur Miller, whose Death of a Salesman neatly summed up the faults of modern society for me. There was Samuel Beckett who with Waiting for Godot encapsulated my existential plight. I started to think there was something remarkable about the stage. For a while after playing Henry Higgins in a school performance of Pygmalion, I even toyed with the idea of a career as an actor, before novels captured my imagination: Dickens, Forster, Scott Fitzgerald, Steinbeck. Each book I read was more enlightening than the last. It seemed to me that just about everything I studied in my literature class was significant. Each book offered me an insight into the world and myself that I would never have had otherwise. Each book, I soon realised, set me aside from my parents, who only read penny westerns, Mills & Boon and the occasional Readers Digest.

  One day, on impulse, I bought three tubes of oil paint—the primary colours—two brushes, a palette and a masonite board which I sawed into smaller pieces. I loaded it all into a bag and cycled to a tiny remote beach on the cape south of the town, near Point Danger, where I propped on a large piece of driftwood and commenced to paint a seascape, yearning for a maiden of unbearable beauty, barefooted and loose-robed, to happen by. When she failed to appear, on that occasion and the next, and with an unsalvageable mess upon the masonite, my enthusiasm for a life as a solitary artist ebbed into the indifferent sea.

  Neither Jimmy nor Marty knew about my brief flirtation with the visual arts. They would have been as derisive of it as Jimmy was of my religious devotion, which still mattered to me despite my adolescent preoccupation with everything carnal. I was still attending church each week, still an altar boy, even if the Reverend Walters had been posted to a different church in the diocese and had left town with his family. The arts, religion, spirituality, lofty thoughts were the last things on the minds of my two closest friends.

  For one brief moment, when I was captain of our Under-18 football team, my father showed some interest in my sporting future. When we made the semi-finals, he gave Jimmy, Marty and I some pills before the match.

  “Take these, boys,” he said in an unnecessary whisper, since we were in our lounge room and there was nobody else around who could hear him.

  He was stooped because his back was playing up. He had on an old cardigan that hung loose into the space between his chest and the floor. His hair was getting long and he was growing salt-and-pepper sideburns, reminding me of the villains in Oliver Twist.

  “They’ll have you moving like bloody greyhounds.”

  He winked at Jimmy and Marty, who hooted their delight and then turned serious.

  “Right,” Marty said, while Jimmy nodded, as if our lives depended on it.

  Denny was right. We popped the pills before the game, played with great stamina, and won. But the following week, without a further supply of pills forthcoming, our performance in the grand final was sluggish and inconsistent. We faded in the last quarter and succumbed to an opposition we had defeated throughout the season.

  That year I gained the ‘Best and Fairest’. Pat was inordinately proud of me. She had been my lifelong fan. And because I loved her dearly for what she had endured over the years for us, for me, I dedicated it to her. I wanted her to think I was growing into a fine young adult, even if I had doubts about that myself. Once when she instructed me to do something I lifted her up in an affectionate hug, until her feet were off the ground, just to let her know I wasn’t her little man any longer.

  With just over a month till my exams I turned my complete attention to study. I discovered I had a fine memory. Fortunately the Matriculation Certificate in the late sixties focused on regurgitating facts rather than demonstrating analytical skills. I memorised most of our biology text, The Web of Life. Geography was fairly straightforward. History, English Expression and English Literature were intellectually more demanding. When the exams commenced in early November, I was surprised how relaxed I was. Jimmy was anxiously chewing his cheeks and puckering his lips, his eyes glazed, envisaging failure. Marty—mirthful, uncaring—mocked Jimmy for being uptight. He gave the impression he didn’t give a hoot.

  Following the ordeal, spread across two weeks, we found work at Borthwicks while we waited for our results, which would appear in the newspapers in January.

  Jimmy and Marty shared a job hanging up hides, while I worked inside, cutting beef carcasses into quarters with a splitting saw, working with a man who went to the toilet every half hour to take spirit from the flask he kept in a pocket. I was not far from the packers, where my mother had once worked. I saw what they did and the conditions they worked under. Once more I felt grateful to her for the hardships she had endured to keep us fed and clothed.

  It occurred to me that the duration of this job at Borthwicks depended on how well I did in my Matriculation. I had a nightmare vision in which I was working there year in, year out, for the rest of my life, getting married to a homely local girl and starting a family. I wouldn’t neglect my kids, like my father had, no matter how dreary it became. It was a vision devoid of pleasure or joy, and replete with drudgery and unwanted responsibility. At eighteen that prospect depressed me. I wanted to live an interesting life, a life free of dread and anxiety, a carefree life, a life that was exotic and exciting. I wanted nothing to do with families.

  But worse was the thought I would never be able to get beyond the clutches of my father. One thing I was certain of: he would never change. If I were stuck in Portland with him, how could I resist the constant demands his gambling made? I doubted I would have the will to resist his incursions.

  I still believed in God. I had never asked Him for anything before, not even to see what He could do about my father’s gambling and violence. But now I asked him for a favour.

  I woke up early on the morning my results were due to be published, with the light-headed, panicky feeling I imagined an accused felt at the end of a trial with the jury about to deliver its verdict. In a daze and without breakfast I rode my pushbike to an early-opening newsagency, and along with some other silent, wan-faced classmates, bought a newspaper. Thankfully Jimmy and Marty weren’t around. This was a moment to endure alone. I avoided searching the lists of names outside the newsagency as others were doing, some whooping, some ominously mute, but climbed back onto my bike and headed up to the cliffs, where I sat on a park bench for a long time, the newspaper on my lap, looking over the port and the broad bay beyond, waiting for the sun to rise from the sea. My hands were trembling. On my knees lay the key to my future. Please, God, just this once…

  It was a beautiful January sunrise. In an instant I could feel its warmth. I found the Ss, then the Sps. Sparkes, Graeme. Good Lord! An A, B, C, and D, and the essential ungraded pass in English!

  The sun was above the horizon. Through my blurred vision the sky was a glorious abstract painting.

  My results were good, far better than anyone had expected, myself included. I was offered a place at La Trobe University, a major in s
ociology, for which I had applied after perusing a long list of subject areas before my exams, not fully understanding what sociology meant and without much conviction, but thinking the scientific study of society sounded important enough to be interesting.

  I won a Commonwealth Scholarship, but Denny insisted I forego it in favour of the scheme offered to the children of war pensioners by the Repatriation Department. When I expressed reservations, reluctant to abandon the sort of intellectual prestige that accompanied the scholarship for a social-security handout, Denny was furious.

  Where were the brains I was supposed to have?

  The fortnightly allowance the Repatriation Scheme paid was more than a Commonwealth Scholarship offered. It seemed too good to reject but still I dithered. Denny’s enthusiasm aroused my suspicions. On the day he took me to Melbourne to enrol at La Trobe University, he detoured via a Repatriation Department office in South Melbourne, this time apparently to a pre-arranged appointment, where I was interviewed by an educational officer, who eventually persuaded me to abandon the scholarship. Besides the superior allowance, the Department bursary supplied all my stationery needs and footed the bill for all the books on any of the Required Reading lists in the subjects I undertook, which was worth hundreds of dollars.

  Once I agreed, Denny’s attitude changed immediately. He put an arm around my shoulder, even squeezed it enthusiastically.

  “Things are looking up, my friend!”

  His mateyness unnerved me.

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  He drove to La Trobe University in the northern suburbs, a fellow interloper, which was how I felt, as if we were about to infiltrate a foreign country. He was extolling the opportunities awaiting me.

  “Aren’t you bloodywell glad I’ve been pushing you all these years?” he said, indifferent to the road rules as he raced to the north. “Now you might make something of yourself.”

  He dropped me near the boom-gate entrance to the campus.

  “That’s my boy,” he said, touching me once more, patting my leg encouragingly before I had a chance to get out of the car. “Your mother and I, we’re proud of you, son.”

  “Thanks,” I said, genuinely touched.

  After he left me there to enrol and went off on some unspecified business, I walked around in a daze amongst the pale brick, oblong buildings. In the brochures I had seen the university had a semi-rural setting, which had been its main attraction. There were gum trees everywhere but that was the extent of its idyll. As soon as I set eyes on the place, I realised I was moving out of my league. Children from families like mine never went to places like this. I felt like a phony as I filled in the admission forms, had a mug shot taken for my student card, enrolled in History-Sociology 1, a couple of statistics subjects necessary for a sociology degree, and Philosophy 1. I didn’t have much of a clue about what I was doing. I chose Philosophy because another fresher informed me, as I dithered, that passing it was a formality.

  “Everyone does it,” he said with a conspiratorial wink.

  I took a few moments to sit alone in the bare central plaza, called the Agora, looking across at the vivid glass mural in front of the library. I tried to get excited about the new direction my life was heading. Finally I was getting away from my family. That alone should have made me happy. But I was numbed by the unfamiliarity. I tried in vain to glimpse the future. I hoped for wisdom, independence, courage, happiness. I had little idea then that it wouldn’t be that easy to get away from Denny, or that the next few years would be the most tumultuous in my life.

  In the weeks before I shifted to Melbourne some odd things happened.

  First Denny suggested I stop working. “Have a break before you start your course. You deserve it.”

  His concern unsettled me. In recent weeks he had become rather accommodating, a trait I couldn’t remember him ever displaying before.

  I took his advice.

  Then to my amazement he offered to go rabbiting with me. Just the two of us! A father-and-son bonding session is what it would be called these days. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I borrowed a couple of ferrets and some nets from Jimmy, who chuckled at the prospect of Denny and I going it alone. I could see his point but pretended our excursion was nothing out of the ordinary.

  We only went a few kilometres out of town, as if both of us wished to get it over and done with. We hardly spoke. And when we did our voices sounded unnatural, in his case higher than usual and evanescent, while mine became a strained, dull monotone.

  Adding to our discomfort, the ferrets were inexplicably lethargic. Usually they couldn’t wait to leave their box and shoot into the dark recesses of the earth to terrify their quarry. This day they moped around the entrance, as if nothing was going to lure them deeper. I suspected Jimmy was behind some practical joke. More than likely he had just fed them before my request and hadn’t bothered to tell me, or he hadn’t wanted to risk his best predators with rank amateurs like the Sparkeses. So he had given us the duds. Still, I scanned our surroundings in case he and his father were hiding in the bushes somewhere, delighting in our predicament. When an hour transpired and we were still waiting for our first rabbit, I suggested we go home. And he was as eager as me to leave. He made a feeble joke about having to eat a different sort of rodent again tonight.

  A few days later he asked me to accompany him to a men’s wear store, which was having a sale on summer shirts. To be able to buy me something, he must have had a win on the horses. Surprised, I thanked him.

  But when I saw the shirts my heart sank. They were in a style I thought looked foreign, probably French—horizontal stripes, half-length sleeves, and, instead of a collar, a slit that exposed the shoulders—but nothing like any recent fashion trend, most likely failed stock from the previous summer, as their reduced price suggested. Denny invited me to choose a couple. I did so reluctantly, fussing over the choice, as he bargained with the shop assistant for a discount. The shirts were in a large crate in the centre of the store. There must have been well over a hundred. I fossicked around, wasting time, hoping to wear out his patience and change his mind. But, with no sign of him relenting, I picked out two. Denny came over and insisted I take more. Annoyed, I grabbed a couple from the top of the pile and handed them to him, thinking I could dispose of them once I went to live in Melbourne.

  As he drove home he commended my choice.

  “Why couldn’t I have chosen some other shirts or maybe a couple of T-shirts? I could do with a few more of those.”

  “You saw the price I squeezed out of him!” he protested.

  I went to my room and tried them on in front of a mirror, trying to convince myself they might one day come into fashion.

  Denny poked his head around the door. “How do they fit, my friend?” He was giving me his unnerving grin. “Nice! Beaut!”

  A short while later he got into his car and went out again.

  When he returned he came to my room and asked for some help. The car was full of cartons. The front passenger seat. The back seat. The boot.

  “What’s in them?” I asked.

  “Have a look.”

  They were packed with shirts from the sale.

  “What do you think?” he said, immensely pleased with himself.

  “You’ve bought me enough shirts for the next sixty years!” I cried.

  “Keep your bloody voice down,” he muttered, looking around to see if the neighbours were spying on him.

  After we had deposited the cartons on the living room floor, he began to pull the shirts out and hold them up to my chest. He had purchased the entire stock. “I got twenty percent off the sale price too. Twenty bloody percent!”

  “How could you afford so many?”

  He gestured off-handedly, as if I need not worry over such trifling matters.

  “The guy just wanted to get rid of them,” I mumbled, feeling defeated, as if I were never going to escape his interference.

  “Take as many as you want,” he said
, ignoring me. “There’s plenty. You’ll need them for university. I’m going to make a killing on the rest of them. But take what you like.”

  “You’re going to sell them?”

  He mistook my query for greediness and was aggrieved. “You don’t think they’re all for you, do you?”

  “Who do you think’s going to buy them?” I replied, my voice rising.

  He gave me a wink, his mouth momentarily drawn down on one side.

  “Come payday, I’ll set up outside the gates at Borthwicks.”

  I stared at him, hoping he was joking.

  “Oh, how embarrassing, Dad,” I said, when I realised he wasn’t.

  “For who?” he demanded, his temper simmering.

  “Jimmy and Marty are still working there.”

  “They won’t care.”

  “People coming out will laugh at you,” I pleaded.

  “Rubbish.”

  “These aren’t exactly the latest fashion.”

  “Workers are never too proud, my friend.” He held another shirt up to my chest. “Keep that in mind as you’re mixing with that lot down there…your university mates.”

  I moaned involuntarily at his plan, relieved I no longer worked at Borthwicks, relieved I no longer strolled out the gate alongside Jimmy and Marty. I couldn’t have endured their mirth when they spotted Denny with his wares.

  But I was wrong.

  The day he set up outside the gates, arranging the cartons like a guard of honour, pegging up some samples along the wire fence, Jimmy and Marty saw him. They hung around and humoured him with a bit of spruiking that seemed to set the ball rolling. The shirts sold well and for their assistance he offered them a few each from the remainder.