You Never Met My Father

by Graeme Sparkes

  He was in his fifties and, with wild sideburns and un-oiled hair, looked like a consumptive old rock star. But I had never seen him as relaxed and content as he was around this time of his life. He sometimes showed impatience with Pat but rarely allowed his rage to resurface. There was only one incident I remember that festered with him, that kept his rage on simmer for months, and that was when his doctor left the consulting room for a moment and Denny, taking the opportunity to see what the doctor had written in his medical file, discovered a note that claimed he was selling his prescription drugs under the counter at flea markets. He declined to tell me what he said to his doctor or if he had been reported to the police. But he denied the accusation categorically. His eyes lit up with fury as of yore.

  There is even a note about this in his Veteran Affairs [formerly the Repatriation] Department files from the 4th of August, 1977:

  Patient arrived without appointment.

  Patient refused to go without seeing a doctor and got very aggressive towards me, bringing up past failings of the Repatriation Department:

  • Lack of contact regarding his Physiotherapy.

  • Lack of co-operation on his medical drugs that his doctor will not prescribe for him.

  All this was shouted at me in the Waiting Room with about thirty other patients waiting for their appointments…

  I checked with Dr Myles in Portland who stated he had not sent the patient down to see us, also that he had been authorised by the Department of Veteran Affairs not to repeat these drugs for Mr Sparkes as he was no longer on them. Dr Myles then said he also knew of Mr Sparkes selling the drugs prescribed by himself in Portland market place.

  When they shifted again, back into a larger public housing unit in West Portland, I was mildly surprised. Had the Ministry forgotten our record?

  On the phone Pat informed me that Denny had recently made contact with his only living brother, Geoff, who had long ago bought me a little red pedal car. Geoff had disappeared when I was still an infant. He had made no contact with his family for decades. Eventually Pat learned of his whereabouts and began corresponding with him. He wrote back in a childish hand. He was sick and wanted to retire from his work in the highlands of Tasmania. Denny began scheming to secure him a pension. Geoff would shift to Portland and live with them. Plans were finalised. Denny was going to meet him at Melbourne Airport. Just as Geoff was about to leave, the illness was diagnosed as cancer. He only had weeks to live.

  When I heard the news, I was sharing a house in North Fitzroy, living in a windowless room so small I had to roll up its foam mattress to open the door or to sit at my desk to write, indulging in what I fancied was a writer’s existence, occasionally visiting Claire and Richard, who had retreated to a bush block in Gippsland.

  I saw the irony of this latest episode in Denny’s life. He was returning to Melbourne to reunite with his dying brother. Why hadn’t he tried to find him years ago? Why had it been my mother who eventually corresponded with him? Why had he left contact to the last minute? Why had every plan he ever made turned to dust? Was it fate? Was it karma? He scraped together enough money for a ticket, flew to Tasmania, and saw his brother just hours before death mocked their reunion. Geoff used to be a huge man, a man whose size had made the bath overflow, but he had wasted away until he resembled a starving waif. It shocked Denny and he never recovered.

  “It was the sight of his brother that brought it on again,” my mother said after Denny’s cancer reappeared some months later. “It happens. It just takes a shock. Denny had to arrange the funeral and everything.”

  Denny inherited his brother’s car, a Fiat. On one of my rare visits to Portland, after his brother’s death and before he knew about his own resurgent cancer, Denny insisted I take his other car. He wanted me to have it, a Kingswood no less, to settle accounts. I was stunned, not so much by his generosity but by his acknowledgement that he owed me. It wasn’t just the bouncing cheque but my belongings he had hocked or stolen over the years: a record player, watches, an accordion my grandfather had given me, sundry piggybanks. I turned away from him to conceal my emotions. And I dared to think we were finally starting to get on okay. Or maybe I had been wrong about him all along. Given half the chance maybe he would have always been considerate. The idea of writing a book about him took root. It would tell all but in a way that showed how circumstances had led him astray. It would tell of his ‘dirty rotten luck’ as he and my mother often called their circumstances. Before I had a chance to mull over the entire matter I received a phone call from Pat—Denny was coming to Melbourne for some medical tests.

  Back in the Repatriation Hospital, where he had been operated on for his first cancer twelve years earlier, he was up to his old tricks.

  Mr. Sparkes is a 57 year old man who was a recent inpatient with a left-sided chest lesion, most probably carcinoma of the lung, who had discharged himself against medical advice but had now re-considered and was admitted with a view to thoracotomy (left) and left lower lobectomy.

  Denny indeed had cancer again. As he told me he was smiling, a smile which meant just my luck. The cancer was in his lungs. On their way home they stayed at Carol’s place, where he steamed open the letter his specialist had asked him to deliver to his GP in Portland. Carol’s husband, Peter, retrieved a medical encyclopaedia from his home library and discovered that the type of cancer the specialist had diagnosed was unrelated to smoking—a rare incurable cancer. He realised he only had months to live.

  When the cancer spread to other organs he was hospitalised in Portland. Tumours showed up in his liver and brain. It spread through his lymphatic system. I had a distressed phone call from my mother. She wasn’t coping well. So I decided to go and stay with her for a while, to give her some emotional support.

  It was a chance to do something for her, a chance to repay her for some of what she had done for me, a chance to appease my conscience, to make up for the limited number of times I had stayed with her since leaving home. My private excuse had always been that we could no longer communicate in any meaningful way, and to try was just stark and painful. No doubt it was my selfishness that had guided me. My mother always loved to see me, would have loved to see me more often, even if I talked very little, even if I just sat and read the paper, even if I spent a lot of my time going for walks along the beach alone. She would have been happy because I had come home to see her.

  It was just as well I was unemployed because Denny took a long time dying. Pat said I could use the room set up for Uncle Geoff, “since he won’t be needing it, will he?” Again she presented her theory about the impact of Geoff’s death and the recurrence of Denny’s cancer. “He wouldn’t admit it, but I saw how much it shocked him, seeing his brother like that after all those years.” It was an observation she returned to time and again over the next few months.

  I encouraged her to maintain her normal routine: her shopping and gardening and her lawn bowls, which had become a big part of her life. Her sister played as well, and she had made other friends at the club. She showed me the prizes she had won—glasses embossed with the club emblem in gold, and souvenir teaspoons—and the trinkets she had bought or received as gifts that delighted her, such as a Brazil nut dressed in a tiny, white bowls outfit, stuck to a board that bore the message, ‘I’m a bowling nut’. Her buffets were full of these types of knick-knacks.

  I was pleased she had a social life outside her immediate family. She told me endless stories about her friends—their tournaments and their trips together to other bowling clubs. And when she completed her repertoire, she retold them. My attempts to deflect them usually failed. Comments such as ‘you’ve told me that already’ were just a minor annoyance to her, like a fly buzzing around. I began to spend a lot of time at Denny’s bedside.

  I watched his slow decline from a state with little outward evidence of illness, which left me doubting there was anything seriously wrong with him, to the pitiful sight of a carcass taunted by the obstinacy of life.


  There were times of long silence between us, which I should have used to talk about his life, our lives together. We might have finally come to some understanding of each other, even a rapprochement. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it and nor could he, if indeed that was what he wanted. I asked stupid questions like, “How are you feeling?” which invariably made him angry.

  As I sat there and the hours dragged by I sometimes wondered if his silence meant he had turned inward. He knew his end was coming. Was he reflecting on his life? Was he looking at the ledger and asking , Am I satisfied overall? I made my choices. Did I conduct my life well, or at least as best I could? Was he finding peace?

  When he asked me to arrange his funeral I grimaced, which again made him angry.

  “What’s the rush?” I joked lamely.

  But he insisted. He wanted to know the details. I thought it was macabre but agreed. He also told me he wanted to die at home.

  Dying at home seemed a reasonable request. But my mother, for once, put her foot down.

  I was surprised and annoyed.

  “I couldn’t cope,” she said.

  Perhaps she was afraid of sharing a bed with a dying man.

  “He can have the bed I’m using. I’ll sleep on the couch. A nurse would come by each day.”

  But she was adamant. I thought it callous but didn’t put much effort into changing her mind, not after the way he had treated her throughout their life together.

  I knew it distressed him because he asked me more than once. I tried to convince him that hospitalisation was the best thing for him, but it merely reinforced his low opinion of me.

  One day he could no longer make it to the toilet and was forced to use a bottle. I remembered how he had discharged himself the day after his first heart attack because the nursing staff had insisted he use one. He was beyond a repeat performance now. He had to ask me to hold the bottle while he peed. He sat on the edge of his bed.

  In such close proximity he had trouble starting. He muttered something about turning on the tap over the hand basin near his bed. At a stretch I was able to reach it. There was no dignified way to do this.

  His humiliation was palpable and contagious. Finally I was having an intimate moment with him, a moment I had always longed for, and it had to be helping him pee. I averted my eyes while he struggled to commence the most mundane of functions. I had felt sorry for him before this, but not so profoundly, not for both of us, not without a trace of anger.

  I would have liked to have read to him Dylan Thomas’s poem Do Not Go Gentle Into the Good Night, but he would have rebuked me for talking nonsense. Once upon a time he told me, and I can’t remember when exactly (or even whether I have invented it), that life was shit, life was a joke, life was a gamble, and he had drawn the short straw.

  I returned to the unit and informed Pat I was going to Melbourne for a break.

  In the depths of winter the city was bleak. My tiny room was as gloomy as a prison cell. If I had previously romanticised it as a writer’s sanctum, it merely reminded me of some dead-end I seemed to have stumbled into. I stayed a week, went to my usual haunts, trying to retrieve some of my optimism. I saw the same people who were always there. The same people I used to find interesting or amusing, seemed jaded, neurotic and sad.

  The night before I returned to Portland the other residents held a party. It was someone’s birthday but it was a joyless occasion. Relationships were falling apart. People were on edge. The music was too loud, too harsh. Hysteria was looming. Spiteful sex was happening in most rooms and the garden. I retreated to my den alone, snibbed the door and unfolded my mattress, which had developed a mouldy smell in my absence. I tried to sleep. My week in Melbourne had been anything but a respite. Depressed and weary, with images of Denny intruding, I tossed and turned and pulled the pillow over my ears, waiting for slumber. But I couldn’t escape the cacophony. Fractious voices and sudden changes in the sound-system volume kept me awake all night. In the morning I was exhausted and petulant. I swept aside the mess on the kitchen table and ate breakfast in the pall of post-party silence. Sleeping bodies littered the living room. As soon as I had packed my bag I left, vowing to find somewhere else to live once Denny’s funeral was out of the way.

  But Denny was yet to die. When I got back to Portland I dropped in on my mother before I went to the hospital.

  “He’s not good, darlin’,” she said, her voice strained with dread. “You better call on him straight away. You might not get another chance.”

  I spoke to the charge nurse when I arrived.

  “He’s stopped responding to morphine. Any higher dose would kill him.”

  “If there’s no hope, why not give it to him?”

  “As much as I’d like to,” she said, “I’d be up on a murder charge.”

  She took me aside. “Between you and me, we’ve pulled the plug on him. No more life support. Nothing intravenous. He can’t eat. We’ll do all we can to make him comfortable and hope he doesn’t linger too long. It’s the kindest thing. He’ll only last a few days at most.”

  His deterioration in the week I had been away undid me. I was exhausted from the sleepless night and a five-hour drive. I had no reserves of energy to cope with the withered creature coiled in agony before me. I whimpered and groaned and then the tears flowed, ugly sobs that caught in my throat as I tried to stifle them.

  He moved his head and summoned as much strength as he could. He opened his eyes long enough for me to see a glimmer of contempt.

  I heard him speak. It was almost inaudible. But I heard him clearly enough. “Stop yer blubberin’.”

  These were the last words he spoke to me.

  He took another fifteen days to die, which unnerved the medical staff and knocked the stuffing out of my mother. I raged at my own impotence and despaired that euthanasia was illegal. If I’d had the gumption I would have gone back to Melbourne and found a dealer. Heroin works when morphine fails. And, if not, an overdose would end it.

  Instead I sat by his bed every day observing his final act of defiance. I tried to make sense of his life, his compulsive gambling, his terrible luck, his years in and out of asylums, his time in jail, his suicide attempts. And it occurred to me that for someone who had been so self-destructive, here was the final irony. When death offered the only release from suffering, he was clinging stubbornly, defiantly, to life.

  I wanted to be with him when he died. I thought nobody deserved to die alone. One night I stayed long after my mother had gone home. In the silence of the opaque ward I brooded on the opportunities I’d missed to talk to him frankly about my feeling towards him, to tell him that all I had ever wanted from him was his love—a father’s love. And I would have returned it in spades. But maybe the fault was mine. Maybe the love was there and I had failed to detect it.

  His breathing came in slow gasps, like water draining into a plug hole. The hiatus between each sound grew longer.

  I was worn out, struggling to keep my eyes open. My will was weak. I was drifting in and out of sleep. In the early hours I rose like an automaton and went home.

  The phone woke me. My mother answered it.

  “He’s gone,” she said, coming into the bedroom.

  It was just after three.

  Through an unnatural silence I dressed and took her to view his body.

  Standing before him, she seemed shrunken, depleted and as fragile as old tissue paper. I heard her sob or sigh.

  “Fifty-eight’s too young to die,” she murmured.

  The skin on Denny’s face was taut, his mouth drawn and narrow, his eyes closed as they used to be just before an outburst of rage.

  THE WIDOW

  The bowling ladies were making sandwiches for the wake in the kitchen. I was sitting in the lounge with the gathered relatives: my sisters and their families, Denny’s cousin who lived in Cranbourne on the outskirts of Melbourne, and the Stewarts.

  Claire was there. Fond of my mother, she had come to offer us some emotional
support. And she was still fond of me. Besides, there was a bond between us nobody could break: a child, a son, we didn’t know, who was growing up somewhere unknown to us.

  Pat, who was dressed impeccably but not in black, entered, looking distracted.

  “It’s getting on,” she announced, tapping her watch, a gift from the boyfriend whom Denny had superseded long ago, which she had always worn for want of an appropriate replacement. Too late now. “We better get to the wedding.”

  The faux pas made me titter. I couldn’t help myself. And once I started no one else could restrain themselves either. Our muffled chuckling upset her. She puckered her lips and blinked back tears.

  “You know what I mean. We don’t want to keep him waiting.”

  The funeral service was held in St Stephen’s, the church where I used to be an altar boy. I can’t remember a great deal about it: whether someone spoke a eulogy, apart from the minister, how many mourners attended, or who, besides myself, were pallbearers.

  Portland Cemetery was on a windswept slope with stunted vegetation offering little shelter and with no ocean vista to ease the bleakness. Grey was the hue: rows of tombstones, the indifferent sky, a mound of clay beside the open grave. With rain threatening, the vicar expedited the ritual.

  After the coffin was lowered and handfuls of sodden dirt tossed on top, everyone headed back to their cars. My mother was in the arms of her sister.

  I took one last look at the coffin. I had seen Denny dead at the hospital, within an hour of his death, and again at the funeral parlour where I went with Uncle Harry to pay our last respects. I tried to imagine him lying on his back forever in a St Vinnie’s suit, without a trannie or a form guide, and thought even in death he’d fidget. Not far away Uncle Mick was buried and nearby was the grave of my grandfather who had accused Denny of stealing his car.