On 9 December 1964, the University of London awarded him a Doctorate of Philosophy. Faculty: Medicine. Field of study: Pathology. He was thirty-four years old.
In 1965, with Dad’s secondment over, he and Mum returned to Australia, with Gina and Rob around their ankles – another boat trip, more shitty nappies, though I don’t think Dad played as much quoits this time. They moved into a flat in Waverton, near the Royal North Shore Hospital, where Dad worked as an assistant physician. Mum was by then pregnant with Camilla, and they needed a bigger house. She spent her days searching, inspecting house after house, belly like a basketball, Rob and Gina in tow. Dad came when he could. One day, exhausted, she walked into an old Victorian home with black shingle and a balcony overlooking the bay. From the balcony she saw the boats, the water, she smelled the tide. She thought to herself: ‘I’ve found it.’
*
In a way, you meet your parents thirty, maybe forty years too late. You really only get to know them after they have hardened into what may or may not be their best selves, with their habits of mind and ideas of the world already fixed. What would it have been like to meet Dad and Mum in their thirties, when they were mere larval versions, softer, more pliant, less damaged? By the time I met Dad his patience had run out, his sap sucked dry by decades of anguish and illness, of senseless, sourceless worry. He didn’t look tired so much as fried, in a very real, literal sense, as if he’d jammed his finger in a power point: eyes wide, hair wavy and wiry, growing out sideways. He had a temper like a solar flare, a tongue of pure fury. But he wasn’t always like that: ‘He was a beautiful man,’ Gina once told me.
After Camilla came along, Mum had a miscarriage. It was, in its way, a blessing. Dad was starting to become erratic; he would sink into toxic funks, bouts of irretrievable darkness. His emotional palette had always been vivid. He once told Mum that a beautiful sunset made him want to cry. But this was different. His work was intense. He was setting up his private practice as well as working at the hospital, and there were long days, sleepless nights. Mum, ever the practical one, had her eyes fixed on the future; she thought the stress of another child might not be good for him. And yet Dad insisted, which is how I came to be.
CHAPTER FIVE
Dad was a fantastic father, though he was absent a lot: he was always working. But when he was there, boy, was he there, loosing big rivers of emotion, like a burst dam – anger, elation, envy – bulk quantities of adult emotion coursing through the house, sweeping us along, clearing out corridors, unhinging doors. He was tactile, too – there were lots of hugs, and kissing and tickling. He would give us pony rides on his back, and bear hugs and squeezy-kneesies; these were the currency of his love. He would do ‘aeroplanes’, lying on his back and putting us on his feet, flying us through the air. But it was his Chinese burns I loved the most, when he wrapped his giant hands around my forearm and twisted, hurting me just enough but not too much, knowing just when to stop. I can still feel the heat of it on my skin.
He loved his children; he wanted us around. We were intense, antic souls, like him. But there was that temper lurking around, ever ready to pop out, like a demented jack-in-the-box. Rob or Gina would do something naughty, and he would give them ‘the belt’, a truly fearsome punishment. Gina told me that when I was still a baby, less than a year old, he flew into a rage and started smashing up a wall. Then he turned on Mum, who ran, herding the kids into the far bedroom in the upstairs hall. Pauline was there, too; she had returned from England and was helping out with us kids while Mum worked in Dad’s practice. Now, there she was, with Mum, Gina, Rob and a five-year-old Camilla, leaning against the door as Dad chopped away at it with his big square fists, bellowing like a stuck bull.
It seems fair to ask why Mum didn’t leave Dad there and then. These days, I suppose most women would. They would pack up the kids and walk out the door. But that wasn’t an option for Mum. Dad had been working so terribly hard. He was under a lot of pressure. And he had always been ‘up and down’. His behaviour was understandable, she reasoned, if not excusable. Besides, she couldn’t just walk out. She had no way of earning money – at least, not enough to support four children. And perhaps most importantly, in her reckoning, she was married. To Dad. For better or worse. In sickness and in health. They weren’t just words to her.
At other times, Dad’s temper was merely comical. Shortly after giving birth to Camilla, Mum got very bad mastitis in her left breast while she was still in hospital. It’s hard to adequately convey, she later explained, just how singularly unpleasant it is to have mastitis as badly as she had it, her bosom swelling up like a hot rotting melon, all that freshly produced baby milk building up and building up, and the added pain of trying and failing to breastfeed Camilla. So there she was, in bed in the maternity ward in the December heat with a cannula jammed into her breast to drain the pus, when Dad stormed in, hands on hips, insisting that she come home ‘this minute’, that she had been in hospital for long enough, that it really was time she stopped carrying on. Did she have any idea how hard it was to cook and feed two children and do everything else? How in God’s name was he expected to cope?
It’s amazing what Dad got away with. Or, rather, what we let him get away with. One night he told Mum how he had been propositioned by a lady he’d met jogging. ‘She’d be quite happy to have me.’ It never struck Mum or any of us to tell him to shut up. Another time, just before I was born, Dad and Mum took a holiday to Fiji, just the two of them. They needed a break, away from everything. Pauline was recruited to mind Rob, Gina and Camilla. But no sooner had Dad and Mum landed in Fiji than he started missing his children. Why spend all that time working, away from the kids, then come away on a holiday without them? It was madness! Dad wanted Rob and Gina on the very next flight to Fiji, which was a logistical nightmare, since they didn’t have tickets or, for that matter, passports. Pauline dug out their birth certificates, then raced up to school, pulled Rob and Gina out of their classes and took them off to the passport office in the city. She then put the flights on her credit card, organised a babysitter for Cam and drove the two older children to the airport. All in one day.
Years later, someone would describe this kind of behaviour as ‘enabling’, which came as a shock to me. Until then, I had regarded our efforts as positive. We were trying to help. We were trying to make him happy. But now I saw that we were part of the problem; that despite our efforts, or perhaps because of them, we had been unwittingly complicit.
*
The house was our castle, and Dad was our king. He was an unpredictable king, tyrannous and moody, lethal one day, loving the next. A bit like Henry VIII, whom I had been reading about in a picture book that Nan Ell had given me for my seventh birthday. I didn’t know a lot about Henry VIII, but I knew he was fat and that he chopped your head off if you didn’t do what he wanted.
From about the age of eight, I was given chores. One of them was to shine Dad’s shoes, which I would do, sitting on the floor in the laundry. The shoes were enormous paddle-like things that Dad had specially made because of his funny left leg. One day I put too much polish on them: I brushed and brushed, I brushed until my hand was about to fall off, but no matter what I did I could not get the leather to shine. After an hour or so, Dad came in to collect his shoes. He took one look and went off his head, quivering with rage, screaming at me that I was useless, that I was incapable of completing even the most basic task. You stupid boy, I have given you one flaming job and you can’t even do that! Why are you here? What are you good for? I hid in the back office. He yelled for me to come out until eventually Mum intervened.
He became jealous of the attention Mum showed me, and his jealousy fuelled nightly rages about what a colossal disappointment I had been, what a fool I was, how any money spent educating me was money down the drain, how I should leave school as early as possible and pursue a trade because I was barely able to read and would amount to nothing.
Do
pey. That’s a word he used a lot. ‘You dopey bloody boy,’ he would say, and I would think of the dwarf in ‘Snow White’, small and clumsy. Our house was that cottage in the woods, our family were the Seven Dwarfs. And I was Dopey.
*
‘You were an accident,’ he would say. That was another of his favourites. ‘You know that, don’t you? We never wanted you.’
If he wasn’t saying this to my face, he would shout it late at night, knowing I was listening, knowing I would find it more believable if I overheard it. He was smart like that.
Later, Mum would tell me not to take any notice: ‘Your father says things he doesn’t mean when he gets upset.’ Gina and Cam said the same. ‘He doesn’t mean it,’ Gina would say, looking me over for signs of damage. ‘He’s just saying it to hurt you. Dad was actually the one who wanted you.’
They needn’t have worried. The ‘accident’ bit never bothered me. So what if I was an accident? I was here now. Lots of good things happened by accident, anyway, like finding ten bucks in the street. Besides, I knew that Mum loved me, and Gina and Cam also; even Rob and Dad loved me, in their Rob and Dad way.
But the line about being dumb, that was true. I accepted that. Dad was simply speaking the truth when he called me dopey, because it was self-evident; because Dad was the king of the home, and Dad knew everything.
This is also why I never asked him why he was angry. You don’t ask the king stupid questions. You simply accept that the king is upset and make adjustments. It wasn’t long before I had developed a sixth sense about Dad’s presence in the house. There was the clatter of his car keys as he tossed them on the hallway table, the shuffle-thud of his shoes on the carpet. I became adept at slinking around the house, dodging him. There would be the storm in his voice. Mum would have planned some dinner, a function, something nice, but Dad would cancel it on the spot. ‘I’m not going!’ ‘They can go to buggery!’ There were few activities he loved so much as throwing Mum’s plans into chaos.
Or he could be happy. He might walk in grinning; it would be Friday night, and he would take us all to dinner at the local Chinese restaurant, Han Court, where the owner scuttled out, arms wide. ‘Dr Max! How are you tonight?’ Dad would want to eat quickly, no dilly-dallying; if we were seeing a movie later, he would tell the waitress the screening time and tap his watch. There would be honey king prawns and pink lemonades, sly tug-o-wars over the Lazy Susan. Then we would all crack open our fortune cookies and read the messages: You are very talented in many ways. You will be called to fulfil a position of high honour and responsibility. And: Joys are often the shadows cast by sorrows.
Dad always turned his over and read the message written on the back in red: This insert has a protective coating. It worked every time.
*
From the outside, at least, we were an ordinary family. We had money, but not too much. We had a nice house, a swimming pool. When I was about ten, Dad bought a VHS video player. Setting it up was fantastically complex: there were wires, cords, instructions. Then, a week later our house was broken into and the VHS was stolen, which led Dad to develop a theory that the store was giving burglars the addresses of all the people who had just bought VHS machines, that they were ‘in cahoots’. It was so wonderfully paranoid, so perfectly Dad, but it also made sense. I was inclined to believe it.
We went on holidays to the beach, we were healthy – we had no tragic illnesses or mishaps – and we lived in a safe suburb. We were lucky, then; ordinary, boring even. Except that we were not ordinary and boring, because we had Dad. Or, rather, our usually boring and ordinary lives were occasionally interrupted by periods of hysteria and terror. Years later I would hear that this is a pretty good description of war.
*
Dad and Mum had lots of dinner parties. They called it ‘entertaining’, which made me think they would be performing some kind of merry dance or an amateur play. But it was just food – curried prawns, usually, with lemon and sugar crepes for dessert. If it was really fancy, Mum would cook soufflé or crème brûlée. She laid the table in the dining room with tasteful linen placemats and cork drink coasters and the candelabra primed with tall, white, virginal-looking candles, and then she set out her very best, shiniest cutlery – not the stuff with the imitation-bone handles that we used every day but the heavy silver knives and forks and special dessert spoons that she kept in a set of polished mahogany drawers in the dining room. She got us to roll up the napkins and slip them into the circular holders. I would greet the guests at the front door. I was to be polite and, if possible, cute, but without being annoying. I handed around the nuts, but I couldn’t have any, because Dad said if I breathed some in I’d choke and die. After dinner and dessert I cleared the plates and distributed chocolate mints, thin dark squares with super-sweet white goo in them. I snuck a lot of these. I would notice Dad, laughing volcanically, pounding back the gins and the brandies and then moving on to the red wine, banging his flagstone of a hand on the tabletop, making the silverware jump. Only after all the guests had gone did things get real with Dad, who might scream or pick a fight with Mum, or simply go to bed, zonked out with booze.
I liked the dinner parties, because it forced Dad to make an effort, to be normal. No matter how foul-tempered he was that afternoon, when the guests walked in he became Mr Hospitality. He was suddenly happy. Something about this struck me as vaguely suspicious or even duplicitous. But I was not of a mind to question it. Adults had the right to be two-faced. Besides, I didn’t care. It was good that he behaved. If I’d had my way, I would have had people over to dinner every night of the week, and for lunch and breakfast, too. The more the merrier. They could bear witness. When other people were in the house, I was safe.
*
Every night I prayed. First I closed the door to my room, though, because I knew no-one else in the house believed in God and they’d think I was silly. I prayed on my knees, hands clasped over my bed, eyes shut tight. (You had to clasp your hands together very tight and concentrate, so that God knew you were serious.) I asked God to help all the poor people and the sick animals, all the homeless old men who lived under bridges, and the starving children in Kampuchea who I saw on the front page of the newspaper, their stomachs bulging like balloons. There had been some kind of trouble there, because of some guy called Pol Pot. I prayed for Pol Pot to go away. I prayed also for Pauline to come and visit us more often from Melbourne, where she was living now, because when she came she took me on ferry rides and bought me lollies and I could get out of the house and away from Dad. I also prayed for Dad. I asked God to make him happy, although this seemed like a big ask, bigger even than feeding all the kids in Kampuchea. But I asked anyway. I also prayed for Mum, because she had to do everything around the house, and her back was hurting a lot lately.
As I prayed my lips moved soundlessly. I stayed there on my knees for as long as it took to feel as if I’d prayed enough, which was hard to determine. Sometimes I could be down there for ages, and the carpet prickled my knees. But that was part of the penance. If I had done bad things, like go into Rob’s room looking for his Playboy magazines, or said bad words or thought bad thoughts or got into trouble at school, then I had to pray longer.
God could see into my mind. He knew everything.
When I was finished, I said, ‘Forever and ever, Amen.’ Then I got up and hopped into bed.
*
On the weekends, in summer, we went to the beach. Always to Harbord, its sheer cliffs dotted with fishermen’s shacks in which I fantasised living. Rob taught me to surf in the northern corner, on his old green single-fin ‘egg’ board. I remember struggling to my feet, watching the sand rush by below me. I was desperate to impress him, but he was hard to impress: he just stood there on the shore, with his arms crossed or his hands on his hips. ‘Just do as many turns as you can,’ he would say. Dad taught me to swim in the shallows. His huge face and wavy hair, his hands stretched out toward
s me. ‘Keep going,’ he would say. ‘Swim towards me.’ I swam and I swam, as hard as I could, but his hands always pulled away, staying just out of reach. Later, he took me bodysurfing. He showed me how to get out through big surf: you dived under the wave, deep down, and grabbed hold of the sand on the bottom, and then pulled yourself forward, like a crab, until the wave had passed over you. We did it together till I got it right, the two of us, under the water, side by side, crawling forward.
When I think about Harbord, I think about Dad. Just him, sitting there, absorbing vast quantities of solar radiation. He always brought his transistor radio in its black leather case. He would sit there in his beach seat, belly up in the blazing sun, for hour after hour, his skin turning first violet – the colour of steak, medium rare – then a dirty kind of molasses brown. I can see him now, his tummy creases leaking liquids, a fine vapour rising off him. His eyes are slits; his teeth are clenched. He has the trannie to his ear; the cricket is on. The heat stings me like a pack of scorpions, but Dad is impervious, staring down that sun, challenging it, as if he were more than its equal.
‘Oh, Max,’ Mum would say. ‘You’re burning, darling.’ And so he would rise stiffly and lumber to the surf, boiling with foam, and submerge himself with a hiss and a puff.
On the way home, I’d laugh at his beautiful thick, wiry hair, at what the salt and wind had done to it, frizzing it up like a bird’s nest or a clown’s wig.
‘You look crazy!’ I’d say.
He would growl, taking his hands off the wheel to make us scream.
*
Dad jogged every day. It wasn’t a habit – reading the paper in the morning is a habit. This was a compulsion. If he couldn’t jog, for reasons of illness or injury, then you didn’t want to be around him. Once he hurt his back and couldn’t run for a week or so. ‘He’s like a caged bear,’ I remember Mum murmuring to a friend on the phone, which was about the closest she got to complaining.
Farewell to the Father Page 4