You Never Met My Father

by Graeme Sparkes

  I could see the sergeant was exasperated by the drama Denny had put him and his constables through, and so I dressed what else I had to say in diplomatic tones. I asked him if there was any chance of us staying on, since our father had kept us in the dark about the eviction.

  He was reasonable enough. He said he had no discretionary powers in these matters. It had already been decided by the courts.

  “What courts?”

  “Evictions don’t just happen, son. There’s a judicial process. It takes six months or so.”

  “But we knew nothing about it. I went to university this morning completely unaware of this.” I waved my hand around.

  He shrugged. “That’s not our fault, son. It’s your father’s.”

  “Well, how about giving us a few days, until we find somewhere else to live?”

  “Can’t be done, sorry.”

  “We can’t live on the footpath!” My voice was rising in desperation.

  “We just enforce the law. There’re government departments that deal with cases like yours.”

  “Which ones?”

  He gave me a phone number to contact, which was probably standard practice when they threw defaulters out on the street.

  “Can I at least make my mother a cup of tea?”

  “If you’re quick, son.”

  I asked Carol to make a cup of tea while I went off to find a phone box that worked. I rang the State Welfare Department and explained our situation to a public servant, who said she would arrange emergency accommodation. I was to ring back in an hour.

  I returned home and went upstairs to my bedroom. There was broken glass and water across the floor. Most of the furniture had been removed. The wardrobe was still there against the wall opposite the broken windows. Shards of glass, like transparent daggers, were imbedded in it. I felt numb. I figured that Denny had barricaded himself into my room with his petrol bombs and the firemen had turned their hoses on him. I wondered where he had gotten the petrol from since he had no money and there was none in the tank. I wondered if he had been injured. The fire trucks were still outside. Our furniture was piled on the nature strip. The crowd had all but dispersed. Just a few curious stragglers and a dogged member of the press remained.

  When I rang State Welfare back, the bureaucrat told me she had made arrangements for us to stay a few nights at the People’s Palace, a Salvation Army hostel in the centre of the city. As for long-term accommodation, she recommended I contact the Housing Commission and try to get them to reconsider.

  “And try to get some charity to store your furniture in the meantime,” she suggested. “Do you belong to a church?”

  I hadn’t attended church since Portland but I figured after the years I put in as an altar boy, gratis, the Anglican Church owed me. I rang the local parish vicar and after a good deal of moral coercion on my part, he begrudgingly agreed to have our belongings collected from the footpath and put in storage for a month.

  I walked to the nearest garage with a plastic container and bought petrol with some money I had concealed in our back yard shed. Carol and I helped Pat gather a few of her personal effects together, packed some spare clothes for ourselves, loaded them into our car and left Boyd Crescent for good. There was not going to be any cleaning up. If we were being forcibly removed, why lend a hand?

  As I drove off, I noticed Suze sitting on the low wire fence next door. She smiled and shrugged. Her boy, Tiger, was already fossicking through our belongings.

  I bought more petrol with the few dollars I still had in my pocket and drove to the People’s Palace.

  The hostel was a seven or eight storey building on King Street. It had seen better days but our room was clean and tidy, if somewhat noisy from the traffic below. We had to share a bathroom with other guests on our floor. I tried to cheer Carol up a little with distractions, taking her up to the roof to observe the city while Pat had a nap, exhausted from the ordeal.

  With the din of the city resounding from the stark walls, water tanks and discarded crates, Carol flung her arms wide and stared at me. “He’s fucking mad!” she shouted. “What do we do now?”

  While Pat was still asleep I contacted the vicar to make sure our belongings had been collected from the footpath. Then I rang the hospital and spoke to one of the resident psychiatrists, who asked me to meet him to discuss Denny’s situation as soon as possible. I left Pat sleeping and drove to the hospital, a Dickensian edifice on a forbidding rise with a view across the northern suburbs to the distant city towers, barely visible through the smog. Most of the windows had bars and there were no signs of life, until I went to the reception desk in a cold gloomy anteroom. I was led from there to the office of the psychiatrist I had spoken to, who gestured towards a seat in front of his desk.

  “I’ll come straight to the point,” he said with an expressionless stare. “Despite recent events that might suggest otherwise, there’s nothing wrong with your father’s mental health at the moment, which means I could discharge him immediately, and he could leave with you this afternoon. I have been briefed on the circumstances you find yourself in. I understand it’s a bit of a crisis and you don’t need any further complications. So I wouldn’t discharge him without taking into consideration your wishes. It’s your call. However, I would caution that if he is discharged he’ll be arrested. The alternative is to have a family member commit him to this hospital.”

  “If I do that, how long does he stay in here?”

  “Three months and then it’s reviewed. Your mother will have to do it. If he left here today no doubt he’d face a lengthy jail sentence, given his record. It’s up to you.”

  Putting aside my surprise that he knew of Denny’s criminal record, I gave his words due consideration. It crossed my mind that he deserved a lengthy jail sentence, but I couldn’t have lived with my conscience. So I decided to bring Pat out to commit him.

  From the medical notes after his admission, Denny had shown no sign of aggression. He seemed very dopey, apparently from taking too much medication before the siege, although the doctor suspected there was some acting in his behaviour. He asked to be tested with a pin or needle, saying he couldn’t feel anything, except a bit in his thigh. The test was never carried out. For the first few days he was subdued and rational. He talked about what he had done, revealing that he had wanted to prevent eviction by ‘making a martyr’ of himself. He told a medical officer that his debts accrued because he had bought an old car, which had needed a lot of expensive repairs.

  There is a record of my visit. These comments were made:

  Son interviewed.

  He does not seem resentful towards his father.

  Said that father gambles—hence the debts. Mother has never been allowed to manage the income. Father has never told anyone what he does with the money—son did not know there were arrears of rent. Family would like time to get new accommodation before the patient is allowed out.

  They would be quite happy for him to be here 2 or 3 months.

  In view of his history I do not think this would be unreasonable.

  I did not seem resentful towards my father. That stopped me inmy tracks. Perhaps I’ve grown more bitter with the years. Perhaps I had more wisdom in my adolescence. Perhaps I was a better person then. Or perhaps I had already learnt the art of disguising my emotions. To live through the dramas of life with my father and not feel resentful would have required a more noble spirit than I had then, or now. The siege had left me deeply angry. How could he have done this to us—to my mother who had endured so much abuse, to my sister whose skin told the story of her emotional state, and to me, who now had the burden of sorting out the mess he had left us in, who had to stay level-headed against all his inclinations?

  Back at the hotel, as we ate a charitable meal of sausages and mash in a half-empty dining room, I gave my mother a summary of the circumstances that Denny found himself in.

  “Did you see him?” she asked with some trepidation.

  “No. I’m s
till too angry for that.”

  Carol remained silent. She had expressed her feelings earlier on the roof and was reluctant to do so again.

  I studied my mother. I thought she had recovered enough to face a few questions I dearly wanted answers to.

  “I thought he was changing,” I began. “I thought he had his gambling under control. How come he got this far without one of us knowing about it?”

  She understood I meant her.

  “I didn’t know anything about any eviction, darlin’,” she said quietly, her head cast down. “It was as big a surprise to me as it was to you, believe me!”

  She had known nothing of Denny being subpoenaed to appear in court over the rent arrears, which didn’t surprise me. Since her arrival in Melbourne she had become withdrawn and incommunicative. But he must have been given notice, known the exact date we were to be evicted and kept it to himself. Perhaps he hadn’t even bothered to attend court. I remembered going to the regional manager of the Housing Commission with him and regretted I hadn’t insisted on some sort of agreement about the rent. Now we were bearing the consequences.

  “Someone mentioned a petrol bomb,” I said.

  Pat could barely look at me. “Oh, that,” she sighed. “Of course he didn’t have a bomb. He just wanted them to think he did. He didn’t even have enough petrol, you know that, and no money to get any.”

  “Why did they think he had it then?”

  “It was beetroot juice.”

  I gaped at her, unable to decide whether to scream or laugh.

  She went on to say he had gone to the car in the night and siphoned what little bit of petrol he could out of the tank and into an empty jam jar. Then he had opened a can of beetroot from the pantry and emptied its juice into a couple of clear plastic bottles. When he filled these with water, the juice was diluted enough to reproduce the pink colour of petrol.

  She shrugged her shoulders and stared at the table. “He wouldn’t tell me what he was going to do with it.”

  In the morning, after I had left for uni, he had locked the front and back doors and gone up into my bedroom. When the police arrived, he threw the jar with the trace of petrol through the window into the front yard. Then he held up the two bottles with diluted beetroot juice and yelled out to the police that he was going to blow the place up if they didn’t leave him alone. Obviously his ruse was successful.

  My mother raised her head looked up at me. “He fooled them.”

  I thought I detected a trace of pride in her voice.

  “What happened next?”

  “They called in the fire brigade, didn’t they? And turned their stupid bloody hoses on him.”

  She paused to control her emotions.

  “They could’ve killed him,” she went on after wiping her nose with a tissue she found in her handbag. “He was just lucky he had on that big thick coat of his. That saved him.” She had heard the glass breaking. “Fancy them doing that to him, the mongrels.”

  The pressurised water had hurled him across the room and knocked him out. I had seen shards of glass sticking out of the wardrobe, which must have passed close to his throat.

  “I thought they had killed him,” she added indignantly.

  “Jesus,” I murmured. “Where was Carol?”

  I looked at my sister. She grimaced and said, “Outside with Mum.”

  She still looked traumatised.

  Pat hunched over her plate and poked at her food. I could see she no longer had the resilience to think about what we should do next.

  I told her of my plan to take her to the hospital so she could commit Denny. “For his own sake,” I added. “Or he’ll be chucked in jail for a lot longer than he’ll stay there.”

  “He’s used to hospital,” she said to make it seem more palatable.

  “You could go back to Portland,” I suggested. “Ring up Uncle Mick. He’ll help us.”

  “But what are you going to do? You’re at university.”

  “I’ll find somewhere. Carol can go back to school in Portland.”

  I thought she was about to cry. “I can’t ask Mick to help us again.” She was barely audible. “He’s done enough for me. I just can’t ask him again.”

  She was a pitiable sight. I was scared she was going to have another breakdown. I didn’t know whether I could cope with that.

  I touched her hand, trying to reassure her. “I’ll go into the Housing Commission tomorrow and get our place back,” I said, feigning confidence. “There’s no way they can throw an innocent family out on the street and get away with it, especially with Dad certified insane. I won’t leave until we’ve got a roof over our head.” I made it sound like I was complete master of the situation, that there was nothing to worry about. But I was utterly at a loss. I had no faith in my ability to organise anything. “You’ll have to meet with the people from welfare to get some money. The psychiatrist also told me the Housing Commission would call in the Public Trustee to manage all his debts. That means it will control his pension and it might affect yours. And there’s my bursary money. I need that.”

  I was glad I had a room to myself. My mother and Carol shared another. I lay awake a long time, fully clothed, on top of my unyielding bed, thinking about my father. Beetroot juice! It was clever. Edward De Bono would have been impressed. But did he really imagine he could get away with it? Even if he had fooled the police with his beetroot juice bombs, even if they were convinced of his intentions, did he think they would shrug their shoulders and go away and leave us in peace? If he did, surely he was mad. But I didn’t for a moment believe he thought he could achieve any such thing. So, why do it? It took me a long time into the night before it struck me that the siege was about his self-esteem. There was no way he would submit meekly to an eviction. It would bring his manhood into question. Pushing him around had consequences. Like all his dealings with authority it had to be a violent affair. No matter how outrageous he was, at least people feared him. And he misinterpreted that as respect.

  In the morning I rang the Welfare Department and made an appointment for Pat. I took her to the hospital and waited outside while she signed the papers. It didn’t take her long. She wasn’t up to visiting Denny. Before I headed off to the Housing Commission I had a bad attack of the nerves and decided to contact my uni friend, Charles, to see if I could enlist his moral support. He listened in amazement as I told him what had happened, and was only too keen for a role in the drama. When I met him outside the Housing Commission office in the city he was dressed in a suit and tie, ready to play the lawyer.

  The area manager agreed to a meeting after a predictable delay.

  When he finally took us into his office and invited us to sit opposite him at the desk, he saw through Charles’s masquerade immediately and allowed a cynical smile to warp one side of his face.

  “What can I do for you?”

  I started to give an account of our eviction but he tapped his pen impatiently and interrupted.

  “Yes, yes, I’m acquainted with the case, and I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s been a matter before the courts for some time. I can’t just on a whim overturn a court’s ruling as you would appreciate.” Saying that, he smirked at Charles, challenging him to contradict him.

  “My father’s been certified insane,” I replied. “He has not been responsible for his actions in this whole affair. The rest of the family knew nothing about the court proceedings or any of its rulings. The first we learnt about it was when the police arrived on our doorstep to evict us. With all due respect, my mother, sister and I have been victimised in all this. So I’m asking you to take that into account. Show a little humanity. We’ve got nowhere to live.”

  “With all due respect,” he echoed, “that’s not my concern. I can’t be expected to address all the personal problems afflicting members of the public, now can I? It’s patently unrealistic. Of course, you’re quite within your rights to make another application for housing, which would be considered in d
ue course. But I’m afraid at the moment there’s quite a waiting list.”

  I glanced desperately at Charles, whose face was atypically inanimate.

  I knew how Denny would have handled this: thump the desk, do his warlock’s act, scream and rant, threaten murder. A different tact suddenly occurred to me, one that my old mate Jimmy’s father had used when his life depended upon it.

  “Well, it’s unfortunate, but you leave me little choice,” I said, trying to conceal my desperation. “There’s a reporter downstairs from The Truth, who’s here at my request. He’s keen to get a scoop on this.”

  “And you know The Truth likes a good scandal,” Charles added opportunely. “So read the next edition, sir.”

  I glanced at Charles who had fixed his gaze on the manager with one eyebrow raised, as if to impress upon him the brilliance of our manoeuvre.

  “Thanks for your time,” I murmured. “Goodbye.”

  As I rose the manager thrust his palms forward in a conciliatory gesture. “Now, wait a minute. Wait.”

  He mumbled something inaudible as he pushed back his chair.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I resumed my seat, sagged into it, as he disappeared into the inner sanctum, taken aback that such a tactic worked. It seemed too simple. I looked again at Charles and now both his eyebrows were in play, rising and falling like Groucho Marx’s.

  The manager was out of the room for ten minutes. When he returned he was carrying a file, which he dropped heavily onto the desk, as if it were a great burden.

  There was contempt in his eyes as he studied me for a moment.

  “The dwelling you had is no longer available. It has already been let to another family. So you will have to accept something else, I’m afraid. There’s a flat in Carlton. And a condition on your acceptance: under no circumstances is your father’s name to appear on the documentation. Your mother will have to sign the contract. She’ll need to fill in these forms.” He slipped the paperwork across the desk. “No need to see me again. Get your mother to sign these. Then return them to level one. They’ll deal with them there.”