You Never Met My Father

by Graeme Sparkes

  How they got the furniture to Portland I have no idea but I later heard the story of the way Denny took the ceramic tiles he had accumulated and wouldn’t part with. Carol had started university. She had a friend, Bruce, who offered to help out with his panel van. Bruce was an obliging soul. They loaded the tiles into the back of his van until its springs were totally compressed. Carol and her boyfriend, Peter, went with them. Pat took the car, which was packed to the roof with other chattels. With no more room in the front of the panel van, Denny volunteered to squeeze into the narrow gap between the metal roof and the pile of tiles. With a little help from Bruce he managed it. He lay spread-eagled and immobile for the five-hour trip without complaint.

  Before I took up my teaching post in Myrtleford, Claire and I went to Portland for Christmas. Since shifting away from my parents I felt less mean-spirited towards them. With the distance growing between us I had begun to see the humorous side of my father’s antics. He was, after all, thumbing his nose at a society that had done him few favours.

  The flat they were renting was in the aptly named Casino Court. It was tiny compared to the home we’d had in West Portland. And the living room seemed crammed with TVs. There were three stacked on top of each other in a corner. Each played a role in their nightly entertainment. The bottom one didn’t work at all but had solid legs and was used solely as a stand for the other two. The middle one had a picture but no sound. The top one had sound but no picture. Together, the complete caboodle! Next to them was a Christmas tree surrounded by parcels.

  Claire and I had decided to abandon the tradition of giving gifts at Christmas. We were convinced commercialism had hijacked the festive season and it was our duty to rise above such trivialisation. Besides, we were non-believers who wanted to avoid any hypocrisy. And maybe we should have stayed away altogether. A few weeks earlier I had contacted them about our decision and asked them not to waste money on us as well. It might have upset Pat who loved all Christmases and birthdays, but knowing how tight finances always were for her I felt doubly magnanimous. And I didn’t think it would bother Denny who would prefer to put the money to other uses. I had just finished listening to his explanation of the column of TVs when he took me by the arm and led me into their bedroom.

  The bed was covered with parcels. “These are yours,” he said.

  For a moment I mistook what he meant. “I asked you not to waste your money buying me presents.”

  “No, no, they’re not for you. They’re from you,” he corrected. “See this one here. That’s for your mother. And here that one’s for me. Cigarettes. And that’s for Claire. I hope they fit her. Panties. Hard to judge the size.”

  I was stunned. He had bought these gifts, wrapped and labelled them on my behalf so that my empty convictions wouldn’t spoil their Christmas.

  “You know what your mother’s like.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I murmured, unable to look him in the eye. I sat on the edge of the bed, dumbstruck and ashamed. It wasn’t the first time he had done something thoughtful for my mother, but it seemed more poignant, to me.

  Claire was amused, at least, and was prepared to set aside our decision in order to maintain the peace. I put the presents under the Christmas tree, and after a lunch of roast chicken, baked vegetables and peas, followed by a plum pudding that came out of a tin, Denny played Santa Claus and we all pretended what lovely gifts we gave each other.

  A month later they helped us shift to Myrtleford. Claire and I had found a ramshackle farmhouse in Happy Valley, fifteen kilometres from the township. The farmer who owned it lived out of sight behind a hill. He took some persuasion before he rented it to us. When I promised him we would renovate it with the help of my father (a builder by trade, I explained) he eventually agreed, setting us a nominal rent.

  The rooms had slanting floors and cracked walls. The kitchen, which was reached via a collapsing verandah, was beyond use. Much of its floor had caved in and the wood stove was smashed. (A concrete slab would eventually be laid and an electric stove fitted with the help of Claire’s father.)

  Pat and Denny showed up and started work immediately. Pat took to cleaning cupboards. Denny assessed the structural problems of the front rooms, removed floor boards, climbed under and began to raise the joists with his car jack. I passed him chocks of timber to place on top of subsiding stumps.

  In the middle of it all, I took him to a hardware store in town to buy some nails. He went to the counter and asked for a tradesman’s discount. I muttered to him that I was happy to pay the full amount for a few nails, which cost just a couple of dollars. He ignored me. When the shop assistant asked to see his certification he changed tack, asking for a pensioner’s discount. The assistant glanced sceptically at me and charged the full amount.

  “It’s all right for you,” I muttered as we stepped outside, “but I’ve got to live in this small community.”

  “So you’re ashamed of your old man, are you?”

  They stayed a few days and did a marvellous job getting the old farmhouse habitable. In the daytime Pat cleaned and scrubbed alongside Claire and me, while Denny plastered walls. We set up camp stretchers for them in the room next to our bedroom. And at night for the first hour after we had gone to bed, we listened to the slaps of a rolled-up newspaper, while Denny barked orders at Pat to pursue cockroaches or spiders he spotted emerging from beneath the skirting boards, incapable of pursuing them himself due to the excruciating pain in his back.

  Before he had finished plastering all the rooms, Denny’s back gave out on him completely. I had overlooked his disability. Feeling guilty but relieved to see the last of them, I waved them off as they started the eight-hour journey back to Portland, appreciating what they had done for me, thinking I’ve been wrong about my old man. He helps me when he can. He probably would have been the ideal father if he hadn’t been such a desperate soul. And his desperation wasn’t all of his own making. Society had to take its share of the blame. And maybe I should take my share for not understanding him better and acting more sympathetically.

  As they left I promised to visit as often as I could.

  But over the next few years I saw very little of them. I managed to get there once a year, which was like stepping into the past. The meals my mother cooked were the same as I’d had growing up, always meat and three vegetables, followed by dessert, usually canned fruit and ice cream. Denny sat in his chair, smoking and studying the form guide, taciturn as always, not so much unwilling as unable to chat. They watched soapies and sport on TV. In between visits I received letters from Pat, always starting with “Dear Graeme, just a few lines…”, telling me, amongst the family gossip, how Denny had started making jewellery or that he’d had another scare with his heart or more treatment for his bad eye, or how he’d repeated his old-for-new-goods routine, this time with a vitamiser, taking it to a Warrnambool department store in its original packaging and successfully demanding a replacement; or how he was making more tiled tables.

  The two years I spent teaching at the high school in Myrtleford were full of conflict. Its conservative policies were at odds with the principles I and many of the staff considered vital for a modern educational program. Much of my energy went into endeavours to change the place.

  My preoccupation with the school was one of the reasons my marriage began to falter. Claire had found the isolation of the farmhouse difficult and the life I had imposed on her rather boring. Increasingly she resented the hours I spent in the evenings and on weekends discussing school matters with colleagues, mulling over pedagogical issues, dealing with my anxieties. She read a lot, but that just seemed to make her more restless. She tried to continue with her art, starting a course at a Wangaratta college some forty kilometres away. But the results depressed her. She started to collect dogs and cats. She said she found them more honest than people. She looked after injured wild birds. Mostly she couldn’t stand my colleagues, but one of them, Richard Ireland, owned a large capacity Italian motorbike. Perhaps rem
embering the wild days she spent with the Hells Angels, she accepted his invitation to tour Queensland during the September holidays. Without a bike of my own I stayed behind. When they returned she announced she hated the whole idea of marriage, regretted that we had ever thought it was a sensible idea, and was returning to Melbourne. Ireland resigned and followed. I was broken-hearted but couldn’t really blame either of them. I felt I had nothing to offer Claire in the way of an artistic life.

  “We’ll always be friends won’t we?” she said.

  Depressed and feeling a total failure, I resigned from teaching at the end of the year. I stayed at the farmhouse and for a season picked tobacco, which was cultivated in the valleys throughout the district. Claire approved and, to my surprise, came back for the summer. We worked for an Italian couple, voluble peasants from Calabria who hardly had a word of English but fed their pickers homemade salami and pickled green beans and wine for lunch, allowed them a siesta afterwards, and offered them a drop of grappa before they went home each evening.

  After the harvest, Claire and I returned to Melbourne and shared a house with a friend in a rundown area of Kew.

  I bought myself a motorbike, a small capacity Honda at first and then a BMW, which also pleased Claire. Our marriage had loosened up considerably. We were like lovers. But she kept up her relationship with Richard Ireland, and through him I met, Helen, who became my other lover, until she too yielded to her restless spirit and headed north to Cairns. I shifted into a small house on five acres of land on the fringe of the city and, in desperate need of an income, returned to teaching.

  Residing close to Melbourne made it easier to visit my parents. They seemed to be getting along much better than they ever had when I was younger and living at home. The departure of my sister, Carol, who had married her boyfriend and shifted to Geelong, must have brought them closer together.

  They were still in the same flat. Jean had returned from New Zealand to travel around Australia with a Kiwi friend, leaving her son, Dylan, in their care. Denny showed more interest in looking after him than he had ever shown his own children.

  Like his mother Dylan was rather stubborn, and it was amusing to watch the clash of wills when Denny disciplined him. But Dylan could be affectionate. He loved to sit on Denny’s knee and give his Pop a hug.

  I watched them with mixed feelings. I had never experienced the simple joy of intimacy with my father. Maybe I should have been more affectionate, more assertive.

  Denny gave Dylan the job of packaging his jewellery. He made earrings from silver coil, which he cut and threaded through tiny coloured plastic beads before twisting it into loops and hooks with plyers. Dylan placed each pair into sealable plastic pockets. Each Sunday Denny sold them cheaply at flea markets around the district, along with tiled tables.

  Pat accompanied him. She sat on a stool behind a fold-up table guarding the money tin, while Denny spruiked and promoted his merchandise. When Denny was in the Bundoora Psychiatric Hospital after his second siege his doctor had urged him and my mother to seek some activity of a socially satisfying nature preferably that they can undertake together. The likelihood of that ever happening would have struck me as zero, but finally it had happened. I went to one of the markets on the Portland foreshore and stood some distance away, observing them through the crowd. Pat and Denny together. Laughing sometimes. Smiling at each other. It was another poignant moment for me, bittersweet and incongruous after a lifetime of discord.

  In the coming years they would travel farther afield, attending flea markets as far away as Geelong and Melbourne. One winter Denny came up with the idea of making his earrings using the colours of VFL teams and flogging them to merchandisers around the grounds. On his first deal he was swindled out of the earrings. He approached the administrators of the club but they refused to intervene on his behalf. For years until his death he railed against the club.

  In 1977 Uncle Mick died. Just after he retired from the post office, from a job he swore he had hated all his life, he had been diagnosed with emphysema and within a year he could hardly move outside the house.

  I followed his slow decline with morbid curiosity. I had worked at the post office with him and had heard him curse his job aloud every second day so nobody had any doubts about how he despised it. He could barely wait for his retirement. I saw him on a couple of occasions, confined to his armchair without the strength to lift his arms and later to his bed, his whiskery face beneath an oxygen mask, sunken into a hideous caricature. I vowed one thing: I wouldn’t wait for retirement before I started to enjoy my life.

  Soon after he died I decided to resign from the Education Department.

  In the New Year I returned to Myrtleford, not to teach, but to pick tobacco again. I worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day, rising before dawn to empty the tall kilns, picking the soft green leaves from dawn till dusk, loading kilns in the evening. It was exhausting work but deeply satisfying. No onerous responsibility, like teaching. Sunshine and fresh air. The magnificent Mount Buffalo as a backdrop; laconic sharefarmers as boss and comrades.

  After the harvest I crossed the state to visit my parents again.

  While I was in Portland I had an accident on my motorbike. A car suddenly turned in front of me. I swerved but clipped the back of his car. It slightly injured my leg and damaged the steering on the bike. The driver was charged with failing to give way.

  I managed to ride back to my parents’ flat. When Denny saw my leg he insisted I should go to the hospital, “in case there’re complications later”. He took me and sat quietly with me for two hours in Casualty until I was seen to. There were no histrionics and I felt grateful for his consideration.

  The charges against the driver were heard the following year. I was working on the tobacco harvest again when I received a summons. I went back to Portland, attended court to explain what had happened. I was awarded travelling costs and the wages I had forfeited attending court.

  The duty sergeant told me it would take a day or two to complete the paperwork before I received my costs. When I explained I had to return to Myrtleford immediately, Denny volunteered to collect the sum owing. Perhaps the sergeant knew Denny. He raised a dubious eyebrow and made a point of asking if I was sure it was what I wanted, which annoyed me enough to agree to the arrangement. The sergeant shrugged. I left the court without expecting to see the money. Denny was certain to collect but it would never reach me.

  I was wrong.

  A few weeks later a personal cheque from Denny for the exact amount arrived in the mail. I was so pleasantly surprised I stared at it for a long time, thinking finally he had changed. I considered keeping it as a memento, which might have been his hope, but I now needed every cent I was making.

  I took it to the bank to cash.

  It bounced.

  I spent a few years picking tobacco, travelling north to Queensland for winter, returning to the Ovens Valley for the next harvest. Claire had a flat in Melbourne. Sometimes she travelled with me. Sometimes she was with Richard Ireland. Both of them worked on the tobacco for a couple of seasons. Usually the farmers I worked for allowed me to stay in the pickers huts rent-free after the harvest, on condition I occasionally worked for them on the hoeing or planting. I had a lot of idle time between harvests. So I started writing. I fancied I might become a writer.

  Claire was thrilled. She said, “I knew you’d do something like this one day.”

  Writing soon became an obsession.

  When I tired of tobacco picking I tried the pear and grape harvests but found the conditions too unpleasant. I returned to Melbourne to live, sharing a house in Northcote with Claire and Richard, driving a taxi on weekends to pay the bills. During the week I wrote. I managed to get a couple of articles published in newspapers, which was just the bait I needed to keep tapping away on the antique typewriter Claire had bought me to encourage my creativity. Eventually I shifted into a bedsit and went on the dole. I sold my motorbike.

  Years had passed since
I left home, enough time for me to pass a more dispassionate judgment on my parents. The chronic anger I endured was no longer directed at them. Like me, I reasoned, they were products of their circumstances. I began to feel guilty, particularly about the way I had treated my mother, who didn’t deserve my neglect after all she had done for me, the years of work to keep us fed and clothed as well as the solitary parenting. And in a way I actually admired her for sticking with him as his health declined. Despite everything, she had kept her noble spirit intact.

  I started to give my father the benefit of doubt too. The bouncing cheque had raised my suspicions about the state of their finances, but I wanted to believe they had them under control. Three pensions between them—two of them full war pensions—besides some pocket money from the flea markets. And they had shifted into a council unit next to the lagoon where he had once tried to drown himself. On the rare occasions when I was around, Denny still sat as he had always done, in a sprung chair, thighs crossed, with the portable transistor on the coffee table next to him tuned in to the racing station, the packet of Albany Trims next to an ashtray he kept clean by licking a tissue, scouring out the ash after each cigarette, and placing it in an empty milk carton that sat opened beside his turf guide. But he was nowhere near as demonstrative when he lost, which led me to believe his gambling must have involved less money than in years past. And I thought, if not exactly in a state that the Buddhists called Enlightenment, the old boy is finally mellowing. He never went so far as to take up lawn bowls, like my mother, who established a whole new lot of friends at the club she joined, lovely garrulous country women who were kind and generous and kept her laughing. He was still too unsociable for that, but mellow all the same. I could sit down and have a yarn about world affairs, without him having a tantrum over our politicians, which was more likely to have been my response. He even occasionally made some astute comments that gave me pause, like: “There’s too many money-hungry bastards in the world, my friend. Greed’ll tear the human race apart, if not in my lifetime, in yours, mark my words.” Once he even praised Pat. “She’s a good woman, your mother, the best there is. Anyone who can put up with the likes of me…”