by Tony Birch
We walked up a set of heavy stone steps. Our collective footsteps echoed a staccato beat throughout the building before coming back to meet us. At the top of the stairway we turned into another corridor.
The door to each room had been left open. I looked along the corridor to a series of shafts of light breaking the darkness. I slowed my walk to a halt just as the nuns ahead of me reached the last doorway. One of them knocked on the door.
‘Mr Byrne, you have a visitor. There is somebody here to see you.’
They left me alone in the corridor. I did not move, preferring to look down at the tiled floor while listening to their fading footsteps. I slowly put my head around the door. He was sitting at a small wooden table, holding a pencil in his hand and focusing on what it was he had just written in an exercise book. He was wearing a grey pair of pants, black shoes and a white T-shirt. His muscled forearms were unmistakable.
He turned to me and remarked so casually, as if I had seen him just the day before, ‘Won’t be a minute, I’ll just finish here. My weekly budget.’
I could see that he was doing some mental arithmetic in his head. He then did a final count on his fingers before putting his pencil to the page and recording the answer to his sum. He rested the pencil and book on the tabletop.
He turned again, shifting his body this time and sitting sideways on the chair. He looked so slightly built, sitting in that chair. His hair was longer than I remembered it as a teenager. It gave his face a softer look. I was also surprised at how young he looked — just a few grey hairs on his head and only a wrinkle or two. It would not be until I was at home that night and doing a few sums of my own that I would realise that when he first went into psychiatric care he was no older than I am now.
He looked up from the chair, as if seeking an explanation for my visit. I did not know what to say. I did not even know if he recognised me. He ironed out the creases on the bedspread next to his chair and patted the mattress a couple of times.
‘You want to sit down, Michael? We’re not supposed to sit on the beds. They don’t like it. But we’ll hear them coming. You want to sit?’
His flattened voice carried little expression. I looked at his hand moving back and forth across the bedspread. My legs were weighted to the floor. I looked at him. With his face looking back at me so blankly I could not tell if he was angry, sad, or maybe happy to see me.
‘It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ll stand up.’
He took his hand from the bed and folded it into his other hand and rested them both in his lap. For a moment he looked as if he was about to pray. He looked straight at me, but said nothing more. It was up to me.
‘I saw Scissors a few weeks back. Over at the cemetery. He told me you were here.’
He continued with his blank expression.
‘You remember him … dad? Scissors.’
He unfolded his hands and placed them on the back of his head, before lifting his body out of the chair, forming an arc with his body as he stretched out. He slumped back into the chair before answering me.
‘Yeah, Scissors. I see him around a bit, now and then. Skinny as he ever was.’
I didn’t know how to break the increasing tension. I went for the obvious option.
‘You been following the footy? They’re not going too good, are they?’
His face lit up, if only slightly. ‘Yeah, hopeless. I watch it on the telly here sometimes. Can’t afford to go to the game. They’re hopeless. Some things don’t change, do they?’
A second long silence between us was broken by the sound of footsteps returning and then the appearance of the nun who had let me into the courtyard. She informed dad that the daily mass was just about to start in the chapel downstairs.
After debating with myself as to whether I should depart, I left dad at the doorway to the chapel and waited on a chair in the courtyard for him to finish at mass. He had never been a churchgoer when I was a child. I should have been shocked to discover that he was attending mass, but I was not. This man looked like my father, but I did not recognise him as the father I had known.
He was more willing to talk after the mass and asked me questions about the family; not his family, but some distant relations that he may have known at some point in his past.
‘How’s your sister, Katie?’
‘Oh she’s good. Well, the last I heard of her she was, anyway. She’s been away for two years. Travelled around a bit, and now she’s working in London. Got a bloke there. Talked to her on the phone, just before Christmas. But that’s it. Haven’t heard from her since. She’ll just show up when she gets tired of the moving around.’
He looked puzzled with the idea of Katie being an adult and living away from home.
‘A boyfriend? London? And your mum, how’s she been?’
I did not want to tell him that she had been living with someone for the last six years. I don’t know why. It should not have mattered to him, not now.
‘She moved to the bush, back to the country. A few years ago, now. She comes down on the train now and then to see the kids.’
‘Kids? You got kids?’
‘Yeah, two girls, four and seven. My oldest is Eleanor; she’s the seven-year-old. Tough little kid. Says she wants to be a boxer. Just so she can belt the boys at school. She’s got a real temper.’
‘Like you had.’
‘Yeah, like me, and like …’
My voice trailed off as I searched his face for signs of memory.
‘And the other one, the four-year-old, what’s her name?’
I looked away from him, out through the wire grille of the gate, and into the street.
‘It’s May, dad. Her name is May.’
His expression did not shift.
That night, as I sat at the table going over the morning papers, I reflected on how relaxing it had been talking to him after getting over my initial anxiety. Physically, he looked so familiar, not all that different from how I remembered him, except that he was now a lot trimmer, on account of him walking every day, he told me.
Once we had sat down together in the courtyard the conversation flowed easily, possibly because each of us avoided the difficult questions. We both carried wounds that we could apologise for, although him more than me. I was relieved that he never did apologise for anything, not that day, or afterwards, as I had no desire to return the favour.
Before I left I promised to come by again the following week. He went back up to his room and I walked across the courtyard. One of the sisters called me back. She hustled me into a small office at the end of the courtyard.
She insisted that I fill out an extensive ‘next of kin’ form.
‘This is all very important, Mr Byrne. We will now be able to contact you. This is good.’
‘Contact me? Why would you need to contact me? I just arranged with him to come and visit again next week. You won’t need to contact me. I’ll come here.’
She sensed my anxiety and held up her hands and gestured around the small room. ‘This is not a hospital, Mr Byrne. You can see that, yes? You do not “visit” here. These men, they come and go as they please. Your father, he comes and goes. And sometimes he only goes. He does not come back. He then stops with the prescriptions, and eventually finds himself back in hospital. This is your father’s cycle, Mr Byrne. So, when the hospital contacts us, we can contact you, now that you are living back here in Melbourne.’
She looked at me sceptically. ‘You are back to stay, Mr Byrne?’
I hesitated for a moment before replying. ‘Yes, yes. I am back to stay … I suppose.’
As I was about to leave the room she tapped me on the arm. ‘You know, Mr Byrne, you look so much like your father.’
I saw him several times over the following months, always in the courtyard at the Sisters, although I was no
t officially a ‘visitor’. Our conversations remained both casual and distant. He did not mention my mother or Katie again, and we never got beyond the small talk of news headlines, sport and the weather.
The visits with my father were not unlike those spent at the side of a hospital bed when an acquaintance or distant family member is sick. You are there out of a sense of duty, and feel a sense of relief as you walk back out through the doors into the street, knowing that the task is over.
It came as a surprise when he asked me if I would drive him to the cemetery.
‘The cemetery? Who’s buried there that you know? I didn’t know that you had family there.’
‘Not Carlton. Coburg. I want to go to Coburg cemetery. Can you drive me there? When you’re not busy?’
‘Coburg? Who’s buried there?’
‘Family,’ he responded, with the only hint of emotion he had expressed during my visits.
The gateway into the Coburg Cemetery is nowhere near as ornate as that at Melbourne General. While some of the graves are as old as those where my grandmother is buried, the administration building we entered that day was a 1950s cream-brick box.
It took us some time to fully explain our search to the clerk behind the blond-veneer counter. My father did not know the dates of either his mother’s birth or death, and after insisting that her name was Rose Byrne, Maree Rose Byrne, the clerk searched in vain to find a registered match.
‘She is not here, sir. Nobody by that name is buried in this cemetery.’
The clerk and I both sensed my father’s frustration and growing anger. I looked along the counter to where he was standing. He began to slowly pound the counter with his fist, giving me just a glimpse of the old Mick Byrne, the fighting Mick Byrne of my childhood.
He looked at me as if to plead his case. ‘No, she’s here, buried here. I … I … used to come, on the tram, and bring her flowers, when I was still … still young … a kid.’
I looked across the counter at the clerk. It was obvious that he could do nothing more for us. I wanted my father out of that office before his frustration escalated. When I told him we would have to leave he did not protest, and seemed resigned to the failure of our visit.
It was not until I opened the glass door leading out of the office and motioned for him to leave that he remembered.
‘Try McDonagh.’ He pointed a finger at the register that the clerk had already closed and was about to file away. ‘In there. Can you look under McDonagh? Maree Rose McDonagh.’
Even armed with a map, with the section of the cemetery where dad’s mother had been buried highlighted by the clerk, we walked in circles several times before we found the grave located under a large gum tree, on the side of a hill in the far corner of the cemetery.
The grave looked as if it had not been visited for some time. Two glass jars were half buried in the ground at the head of the grave. They contained nothing more than murky water and a few gum leaves.
I stood back from the grave site and my father walked around it a number of times. He leaned against the tree for a few minutes without saying anything. He then walked away in the direction of the car.
I tried speaking to him as he walked in front of me.
‘Next time we come we’ll bring flowers.’
During the trip back in the car I asked him how he felt about finding his mother’s grave again. His responses, although indirect, answered that question and several more that I had never fully articulated to myself, let alone asked.
‘When I was a kid, when I was real small, our place, the place we had in Fitzroy, was crowded. I had my aunties there, and their kids, my cousins. It was good with them there, but, Jesus, it was overcrowded. So I slept with my mum, in her bed, from when I was born, there in the house, until the day she died, when I was twelve. Couldn’t believe she was dead, even when the doctor covered her body over. So I jumped in the bed with her, and wouldn’t let go. Hung on to her body. I did not want to let go. They had to drag me away.’
I slammed the car brakes and skidded to a halt, just inches away from the bumper bar of the car in front of me. I could smell the burning rubber. I pulled into the kerb, trying as best as I could to disguise my shaking. He leant across and touched my arm. He must have felt the vibration of my body.
‘You all right?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine. Just give me a second. I thought I was going to run into that car. Just give me a sec.’
When I arrived at the Little Sisters of the Poor the following Sunday they told me that he had not been seen for several days.
‘We were about to contact you, Mr Byrne.’
I tried the local police station, but they had not seen him. Neither had the two public hospitals in the general area, although they could not be sure, they explained, considering the number of homeless and disoriented people they come across each week.
One of the nuns had given me a list of homeless shelters. She said that I should ring each of them and leave my details. Other than that her only advice was to wait.
‘He’ll turn up. They always do.’
I got the call from them a week later. His fall had been a mighty one. The next time I saw him he was in the psychiatric ward of St Vincent’s hospital, awaiting a transfer. If he knew who I was he was giving nothing away, and responded to my questions with little more than silence.
We placed the flowers on the back seat of the car. Two bunches of irises. After we had parked the car behind the cemetery Eleanor took one bunch while May grabbed the other. I told her to leave them in the car. She looked at me through squinted eyes and a screwed up face.
‘Are we taking them home?’
I did my usual tidying at the grave while the girls paid their visits to Elvis and Gabriel.
It was not until we had entered the gates and parked the car at Coburg cemetery that they began to question me. Eleanor demanded to know who was buried here.
‘Who have we come to see?’
‘Is there an Elvis cave here too, daddy?’ May asked.
They were not enjoying the Coburg cemetery, on the morning of that first visit. It was cold and windy, there was little protection from the rain, and although they were well rugged up, in boots and raincoats, they looked miserable. I showed them their great-grandmother’s grave; she was a woman whose name and story they knew nothing about.
They helped me to fill one of the glass jars with fresh water and to arrange the flowers, before they wandered away, bored and angry with me. I hesitated over the grave for a moment, before crouching down on my hands and knees and plunging my fingers into the damp soil.
I could hear the girls’ voices in the distance, shouting with sudden excitement. May came running down the hill towards me. She slapped me repeatedly on the shoulder while tugging at my jumper. Her cheeks were flushed with the cold.
‘Daddy! I saw a Gabriel. The Gabriel statue, he is here. He is here, too.’
She took me by the hand and marched me up the hill, to where Eleanor was waiting for us, alongside the statue.
‘See.’ May pointed upward.
I looked up. And there he was, the angel Gabriel, not dissimilar to his likeness at Melbourne General, but not a replica either. The Gabriel at the Carlton cemetery looks upward to the heavens, while resting on his sword; this one looks downward to the earth and rests a book on his thigh while writing in it with a quill pen.
‘What’s the feather for, daddy?’ May asked.
Eleanor answered. ‘It’s not a feather, stupid. It’s a pen, an olden-days pen.’
May screwed her face up at her sister and looked to me for confirmation. ‘What’s Gabriel writing? What is he putting in that book, daddy?’
I again looked up to Gabriel and then down at my two daughters. They each had their arms folded, wearing their serious faces, waiting for my respons
e. I looked at Gabriel, who was deep in thought.
‘He has not written a word. Not yet. He is not ready yet. Gabriel is thinking about what it is he wants to write.’
They looked up at the statue and waited for him to begin.
The Haircut
I threw the newspaper and coat onto the back seat, closed the door and rested my forehead on the steering wheel before turning the ignition. With more than a little pleading, the engine finally kicked over. The front brakes were gone, the tyres were down to bare tread, and the left headlight was cock-eyed. It lit up all the front gardens on one side of the street as the car grunted out of the estate and onto the freeway.
As I cleared the low-rising hump of the Westgate Bridge the lights of the western suburbs filled the windscreen. The furnaces of the refinery towers licked the night sky in the distance, hovering beyond the turn-off to my father’s satellite suburb. Fuelled by the anxiety of what I might find when I got there I gripped the steering wheel and began nervously twitching the knobs of the radio, in search of a distracting song or mindless talkback.
The entrance to the housing estate was marked by a low-rise brick gateway and a rusting sign welcoming residents and visitors alike to ‘Willowbank Park’ — although there was not a willow tree or river bank anywhere to be seen.
I pulled into the only available car space alongside a dumpster. The bin was overflowing with bursting garbage bags, pieces of broken furniture, and a rusting child’s swing set. A pair of car doors and a tandem car trailer standing on its end were leaning against the side of the bin.
No lights were on in the flat. I knocked at the door and listened for a reply — his voice or footsteps. There was nothing. I knocked again. Still nothing. I tried the door handle. It turned. I opened it only to be greeted by a gust of stale cigarette smoke escaping the unit. The stench of his sixty-a-day habit made me feel nauseous. I took a final breath of fresh air before stepping into the flat.