Neither Claire nor her friends were the least bit interested in sport. Art, about which I knew a little, and music, particularly ‘the blues’, about which I knew less, occupied them to the detriment of most other things outside of sex. Food, for instance, was of such little importance to them that I often found myself staring into an empty fridge, or at things on shelves so old they were giving new meaning to life. Meals were irregular and often a mere irritating adjunct to the important artistic acts that were taking place before my eyes. If she made a meal it was usually frog-in-a-hole with a bacon side dish.
I began to associate insalubrity with creativity.
It so happened that Claire was a gifted artist, who did the most exquisite life drawings and painted many of the grotesque figures that haunted her imagination and dreams: vile, gnomish creatures that unsettled me and made me wonder about the state of her mind. The contrast was astonishing. It was difficult to accept the paintings were from the same hand as the drawings, which delighted in the human form. Her explanation was simple: the body was natural, our animal state, while the mind was cultural or social and reflected how far humans had removed themselves from nature. Our retreat from Eden was mental, not physical.
I had long, enlightening discussions with her about art and how it reflected the evolution of human society. She talked about contemporary culture with a passion most people I knew only showed at sporting events. Her understanding of the world was much deeper, I realised, than any of the glib recycled commentary I heard at university. It seemed based on experience rather than theory. For every idea I put to her she had a considered response that surprised me. Despite my education I was learning more from her than the books I pawed over daily or the smug tutors whose musings I endured each week.
She took me to art galleries to view the latest works of Melbourne artists. I went with her to the National Gallery of Victoria on the wide leafy boulevard of St Kilda Road. In its gloomy courtyard she stood for half an hour before Rodin’s imperious statue of Balzac, who seemed to be emerging in all his towering glory from a clinging primordial bog.
I was overwhelmed and a little apprehensive to find myself in her company—at art galleries, or in her rented room, or in the company of her friends. What they thought of me I had no idea. I was a university student, and that, to say the least, made them distrustful.
One night she disappeared. We were in bed together when she got up and left the room around 10pm. She didn’t come back. I searched around the house and the street, but couldn’t find her. None of her housemates knew where she was. None of them seemed to care. They had their own preoccupations. I slept alone in her bed and went home the next day none the wiser. When I managed to contact her a few days later she said she had been in some trouble with the police. Her voice over the phone sounded deadpan. We arranged to meet in a park but she didn’t show. I went to her place and begged to know what was going on. She was propped up in bed, watching TV, looking wan and fatigued.
I turned off the TV.
She looked at me for a few moments without a word.
“Well?” I said.
“I’m an epileptic.”
There had been a boy in my class at high school who used to have fits and we had to put a ruler in his mouth to stop him swallowing his tongue. That was the extent of my knowledge of epilepsy. I hadn’t yet read Dostoyesvky. I didn’t know Charles Dickens, Beethoven, Van Gogh and dozens of other great writers and artists were epileptics. It almost seemed a prerequisite of genius.
When Claire was seven or eight she had ridden her pushbike into the back of a parked truck, which had resulted in head injuries. Soon after, she had suffered a seizure. Epilepsy was diagnosed and she was put on medication. The medication prevented fits, but it wasn’t all good news. The side effects of the medication left her with little control of her moods.
When her mother fell ill with cancer and died, Claire had plunged into an emotional pit from which she was still struggling to escape. In a constant mood of gloom and self-deprecation she began a relationship with a member of the Melbourne chapter of the Hell’s Angels, and later with a warlock who had the ability to change physical matter before her eyes and claimed to possess the power to eliminate undesirable people with nothing more than his mind. She had broken with him just before she met me. But she was attracted to people like that. When it came to lovers I was the exception rather than the rule. I gave her some hope. She wanted to change. She was fed up with cynicism and gloom. But bouts of depression still affected her.
Depression crept up behind her like the bogeyman and grabbed her by the neck. The other night when it happened she left her house and wandered the streets in the dark, dressed inappropriately for the freezing conditions. The police found her sitting in a gutter, assumed she was on drugs, bustled her into their paddy wagon, took her to the lockup and, as was their wont, slapped her around a bit and strip-searched her. Later they had allowed her to phone her father, who came to the lockup in his army uniform and persuaded them to release her.
As she sat under her blankets, hugging her knees, I asked her what triggered her bouts of depression.
“Work, usually.”
She managed a soft laugh.
“Give it up then,” I said with an earnest gesture, “And why don’t you try living without your medication?”
She took my advice on both counts and straightaway found the rim of the pit within reach.
When Denny came home after a couple of months, earlier than I had expected, he inspected the flat, went onto the balcony and cast his gaze over the dismal estate, declaring it a vast improvement on our Olympic Village tenement, as if it vindicated his reckless behaviour. He had with him a number of tiled concrete flowers pots that he had made in therapy sessions.
Pat had helped him load them into the car boot after his discharge from the hospital, and together they had struggled with them up the stairs. When I arrived home from a weekend with Claire, the pots were in the middle of the lounge room.
“What are you going to do with them?” I asked, dismayed by the amount of space they took up.
“Sell ’em,” he said. “There must be a thousand flats around here. Someone’ll buy ’em.”
I could see the fervour in his eyes. He stared a lot. He moved around each room, studying its potential as a workshop. He pursed his lips as he did whenever he was in a strategic mood.
His early release was on condition that he attend occupational therapy sessions at the hospital two or three days a week as an outpatient. He only went for two weeks. His absences led to the hospital discharging him, which terminated the Public Trustee’s authority over his financial affairs.
Even as he regained control of his pension, Denny had his eyes on other sources of income. The pots were a god-send. Within a couple of days he had hawked them all, which prompted him to buy more tiles and concrete pots. For the tiles he went to display rooms and purchased seconds, which he brought home by the bootload. Soon he had a brain wave—tiled coffee tables. He bought pieces of chipboard of various dimensions and boxes of screw-on table legs. Tables were quicker to construct. Laying out the patterns was easier; gluing the tiles and grouting less tedious. And they leant themselves to larger tiles than could be applied to flower pots. Again easier and quicker. And he could adapt his carpentry skills. Our lounge room became his workshop, full of coffee tables under construction; our kitchen a storeroom of raw materials. Its furniture had to be rearranged. The table was shoved against a wall. In one corner tiles descended like a multicoloured glacier, fanning out from the ceiling, occupying a quarter of the kitchen floor.
Pat wasn’t too pleased with the appropriation of her kitchen but she seemed resigned to it.
“At least it keeps him busy,” she sighed.
I’d help to carry the tables to the gloomy foyer of a residential tower early each morning, while Denny, in a cardigan and PP trousers from a charity store, set up a makeshift stall outside the lifts to await customers, right under a ‘No
hawkers’ sign. I couldn’t watch him do business. Th e exaggerated smile as potential buyers approached upset me for some reason. I kept thinking, I’m glad I’m not you. I’m glad I don’t live your life. It must be hell, every moment of it. As I moved away I realised I didn’t hate him. I had often feared him but never hated him. All I had ever felt for him was a humiliating pity.
I left him there until late afternoon, when I returned to help him home with any table he hadn’t managed to sell. Sometimes he arrived home early, rubbing his hands together, having sold his stock, eager to finish more tables. He never asked for assistance with their construction, sceptical of my ability to meet his standards.
Eventually a janitor on the estate discovered what he was doing and he was ordered to dismantle his stall or face the police. Nevertheless, he kept hawking his wares, employing an alternative strategy, riding the lifts, taking the tables a couple at a time door to door, with even greater success than he had in the foyer.
One day he arrived home and asked me to come downstairs with him. When we were standing under the flats, between the concrete pillars, he pointed at our car. “See that yellow one next to it?” he said, lifting his hand onto my shoulder.
It looked fairly new, a later model than our own Holden.
“It’s yours.”
I was astonished. A car for me? How could he have afforded even the deposit for it? Surely not from hawking tiled tables around the housing estate. It crossed my mind that he’d had an improbable triumph at the races, but we would have heard the hissing and exhortations or at the very least had takeaways. I had no idea how easy it was to get credit.
“It’s an automatic,” he added proudly. “Go on, take it for a spin.”
He dangled the keys before me.
“What have you bought that for?” I muttered, thinking of a thousand other needy things he could have spent money on.
“For you, my friend. To get you to uni.” He gaped at me, dismayed at my ingratitude, “You must be sick of the bloody bus. Besides, you’ve got a girlfriend now, I hear.”
I guess it was my reward for sorting matters out after his siege but that didn’t occur to me at the time. I focused on the absurdity of anyone in our financial straits having two cars.
“Unbelievable,” I muttered.
I headed upstairs without further words.
He arrived shortly after and out of breath from the climb. “What’s the matter with you?” he demanded, his temperature rising. “Why didn’t you take it for a spin?”
“I’m hungry,” I said lamely.
I was in the kitchen, buttering a slice of bread to eat, to mollify my anxiety and anger. The knife I was using had a loose wooden handle that over the years had begun to rot away in the daily dishwashing ritual.
“Look at this,” I said, trying to sound reasonable but conscious of the shrill pitch of my voice. I pulled open the cutlery drawer behind my chair. “We need new knives and forks. These are all falling to pieces.”
I wasn’t game to add ‘instead of another bloody car’ but he got my drift.
I disappeared into my room, but the next day as a gesture of conciliation I asked him for the keys to the new car so I could go to university.
He was delighted.
One of my subjects was urban sociology. I had to attend a tutorial whose focus was on high-rise housing and its impact on the family. Students eager to display their erudition or their solidarity with the ‘proletariat’ who were housed no better than animals in a zoo by an oppressive state, raised issues like the paradox of isolation in a high-density community, crime rates, delinquency, alienation, the absence of critical services, such as health and education. The Housing Commission estate in Carlton, one student mentioned by way of example, housed over seven thousand people, the population of an average-sized town, but had no supermarket, no medical centre, no welfare centre, no police station, no primary school and no high school. I bowed my head so no one would notice my flushed complexion. As each issue was discussed and subsumed into one theory or another (but predominately Marxist social theory) I remained silent, despite agreeing with much of their analysis, too ashamed to reveal my familiarity with the subject matter. (My essay on the topic read like an autobiography.)
When I returned from university, tea was on the table. As I sat down to eat I noticed my mother or sister had set the places with brand new cutlery.
Denny was in front of the TV in the lounge where he preferred to eat.
“Where did these come from?” I said loud enough for him to hear, again sounding shrill.
“Your father got them,” Pat informed me when no response was forthcoming from the lounge.
“How could we afford a car and these?”
I noticed a sly smirk on my sister’s face. Carol evidently knew the story. “They didn’t cost a cent,” she said. “Dad exchanged them.”
“Exchanged them?” I gaped at her. “You don’t exchange knives and bloody forks.”
She shrugged, content to let the evidence speak for itself.
“Besides, who’d take them?” I persisted. “You know what condition they were in. They were worthless.”
“Well, you’re father managed it,” my mother said with a faint smile.
There was a rare note of satisfaction in her voice.
“How?”
“I packed the old ones up in their box.” Incredibly, through all the recent turmoil she had kept their original packaging. “And then he took them in to McEwan’s and asked for a replacement.”
“We didn’t buy them there.” My voice rose again, alarmed at my mother’s apparent complicity. “We got them in Portland years ago!”
My mother ignored this point to avoid its implication of impropriety. McEwan’s was having a sale, she explained. Its brochure had been put in our letter box. “There were these nice sets of knives and forks.”
“To buy, not to bloodywell swap!”
My reputation as an anarchist was looking rather misplaced.
“And after what you said yesterday,” she persisted.
Denny emerged from the lounge, somewhat stooped from his chronic back pains, with his cardigan falling loosely.
“I went in there this morning and demanded a refund,” he said, reluctant to let the story unfold without his contribution. “The kid that served me, she refused. She reckoned they didn’t stock that type of knife and fork.”
“I bet they didn’t.”
“So I kicked up a stink.”
Shrewdly he had counted on the allegiance of other shoppers who were there at the sale in great numbers. When he started creating a scene many of them gathered around him. Confused, the young sales assistant hastened to find the manager, who strode over ready to send Denny packing. But when he failed to intimidate or shame him with declarations of dishonesty, he raised his eyes at the sales assistant as if to say there’s one at every sale. His next move was to try to get Denny away from the crowd, offering to discuss the matter in his office.
That had been the cue for another outburst. “Isn’t that bloody typical,” Denny appealed to the crowd. “They get you away from the public and that’s the last anyone hears about it.”
There were murmurs of agreement.
“I’m not moving until I get a replacement for these knives and forks,” he shouted. “Is everything you sell in this place bloody rubbish? I spent half me pension on these. It’s daylight robbery. Look at ’em!”
There were more rumblings of sympathy from the crowd. The manager, fearing the worst and doing some hard-nosed calculations, instructed the sales assistant to let him choose another set of cutlery and set him packing, before striding back to his office.
With a new set in his hands Denny insisted the store take back the old ones.
I marvelled at his audacity but tried to disguise my feelings lest he interpret them as approval or, worse, encouragement. I bowed my head in concentration as I applied a new stainless steel knife to my sausage.
My mother�
�s tacit endorsement of Denny’s antics concerned me. Far from being wary of any further antisocial tendencies he displayed, she was ready to participate. Since his siege and his latest stay in the asylum she seemed to have resigned herself to his world. Perhaps it was the isolation she felt in Melbourne. Better to accept Denny the way he was than suffer his hostility and estrangement as well. After all the drama in their lives she supported him. Was it enduring love? I suspect she had never lost sight of the charming young man she had married who had always had a good heart, a generous spirit, whose true nature had been thwarted and twisted by something terrible that had happened to him at the end of the war when he was hardly more than a boy and afterwards by an uncaring country, the high-spirited, charismatic bloke she’d fallen for when she was barely out of her teens herself, still full of hope and joy. She’d endured the battles he’d had over the years with his illness and the Repatriation Department as he tried to get a decent pension. She would stand by him now more than ever.
It reminded me of a short story I had recently read, about a woman whose husband went mad. He had entered another world that excluded her. But she decided she would never abandon him. If he could no longer share her reality she would follow him into his. Soon she was seeing the same flying statues that her husband saw.
You Never Met My Father Page 32