His daily circuit was about five kilometres. He ran along the edge of Mosman Bay, out to the lighthouse at Cremorne Point, through the strip of emerald bush we called ‘the reserve’, then returned to the house on the back roads. His running style was unusual, essentially a shuffle, his gaze fixed on the ground before him, pounding out a stuttering rhythm of up-tempo baby steps. People in the area knew him; they remember his running style, that odd tottering. For years he ran with a bunch of mates, including one named Norman, to whom he was particularly close. Dad missed his jog with Norman one day, which was the day Norman dropped dead. Dad was touchingly distraught. If he had been there, he thought, he may have been able to save him.
Dad’s running style was absurd but it had one advantage: it was slow. This meant that I could jog with him, an activity Mum encouraged. When I was about ten, we would go together, mostly on weekends, me running as slowly as I could to stay beside him. He sweated voluminously, a steady flow down the rocky ridge of his nose to the tip, where it would gather in clear drops that clung tenaciously for several moments before being flung off, usually onto me. I must have absorbed litres of Dad’s sweat over the years. We didn’t talk much as we ran, certainly not in a way most people would recognise as a conversation. I never knew what to talk about with him. His world was so different from mine. He probably also would have preferred to be alone – and there I was, tagging along, asking stupid questions, blabbing away, searching for a point of overlap, signs of life. I didn’t want to ask him about his night-time rants; it was best to pretend they didn’t happen. But I did want to reach out, show him at least that I was there, receive some acknowledgment of my presence.
What did we talk about then? Mostly forgettable things. He gave me advice, like how to get rid of a stitch (change your breathing pattern). One day, out of the blue, he told me I was ‘very observant’, a compliment I clung to for years, polishing it in my mind over and over, like a beaver with a pebble.
*
Between the ages of six and twelve, I was obsessed with fishing. There was a little wooden jetty directly below our house where I would go every afternoon after school, even before school sometimes, and on the weekends, carrying my gear in a green plastic box: three cork handlines, a knife, and a series of compartments filled with hooks and sinkers. I used mincemeat for bait, or prawns, or bread. If Mum wasn’t watching I’d carve off a piece of rump steak and use that. All I needed was my first fish, it didn’t matter what it was: I would then cut it up and use that as bait.
I caught lots: tailor, bream, yellowtail, leatherjackets, the occasional flathead. I liked eating the fish, and I especially liked catching the fish for Mum. Fishing also has a certain mystery about it: you throw a line into the deep, only guessing what is down there, and hoping that whatever you pull up is good. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes I caught an octopus, or eels, which I didn’t know what to do with. Once when I retrieved the hook from the mouth of a fish, I saw a little white creature like a legless cockroach crawling up its gullet. This was a ‘doctor’, another boy told me. Whenever I saw a ‘doctor’ in the throat of my fish, I threw it back, repulsed.
One day a pelican flew in low on the water and skidded to a stop just a metre away. There it sat, watching, until I caught a fish, whereupon it plunged its beak into the water, trying to snatch my fish off the hook. I started yelling: if the bird swallowed the fish, the hook would get stuck in its throat. I managed to keep the pelican away the first time, but it kept happening. After a while, I caught a small yellowtail. I told the pelican to be patient. I then took the fish off the hook and threw it at the pelican, which caught it, snapping it out of mid-air and swallowing it whole.
The next day, I’d been fishing for about ten minutes when the pelican showed up again. This time, he paddled over and hopped up on the jetty beside me, as if we were old friends. When I caught a fish, he didn’t go nuts trying to get it off my line; he just waited for me to hand it over. I ended up giving him every second fish I caught. After a while, this bird began doing things – strange things, like gently opening its beak around my head – that I couldn’t help but interpret as a thankyou.
When I told Mum about this bird, she came to have a look. She then told Dad that he ought to have a look, too. ‘In fact,’ she said, ‘why don’t you go fishing with Tim? It would be the perfect way for you two to spend time together.’
At first I was thrilled, especially since I hated the whole jogging thing. This was a much better way to hang out. But when Dad came down and sat on the jetty with me, it felt wrong. He was impressed with the pelican, at least initially, but he didn’t exactly appear to be having a great time. After a while I sensed he was there just ‘to spend time with me’ when, in fact, all I had wanted to do was get away from everything, including him. He would sit there looking anxious. I would fret, and also get anxious. I think even the pelican became anxious.
In the end, I resented Dad for being there, and I resented Mum for making him come. And then I felt ashamed of this resentment. And so I was left feeling ashamed, and resentful, and guilty.
*
It was night-time, during the week, maybe ten or eleven o’clock. I was ten years old, and was meant to be in bed, but I snuck downstairs just to see Dad. I hadn’t seen him for a few days; he’d been working late. My strategy was that if he was angry, I would pretend that I had come down to get a glass of water – he couldn’t get angry about that.
I walked into the kitchen, taking care to examine Dad’s face. When he was angry, a deep crease, a big V, appeared between his eyes, like an arrowhead or a road sign, pointing down at his nose. But the arrowhead wasn’t there, so it was okay; I was safe. He was occupying his customary position, wedged into the eating nook, shirt off, his chest caramel coloured and slightly saggy. His nipples were dark and leathery, and pulled down at the edges, like sad eyes. He had his tan briefcase open before him, full of X-rays, and a glass of clear liquid by his side. He wasn’t drunk though. He was dictating patient histories, so they could be typed up the next day. His voice was steady, deep. When I appeared, he seemed to be lost in thought for a moment, then he raised the dictaphone to his lips:
‘Patient presents with a history of cough comma and shortness of breath stop also exhibits fatigue comma night sweats comma and weight loss stop new paragraph—’ He paused, looked at me, nodded absently. ‘Sputum is blood-flecked and dark stop X-rays show infiltrate in the upper lobe of the right lung comma with air space consolidation brackets note air bronchogram close brackets stop new paragraph also noted were formations of numerous cavities and reticular pulmonary opacification stop new paragraph there are satellite lesions and fibrosis of the involved lung with traction of the right upper hilum.’
He paused again, holding his finger up, gesturing for me to wait a moment. He was thinking, his teeth doing that weird circular grinding motion, like he was chewing cud. He raised the dictaphone once more. ‘Radiography also shows stage-two sarcoidosis with bilateral hilar and mediastinal nodal enlargement stop new paragraph kind regards.’
He turned off the dictaphone, put it on the table, then looked at me and smiled. I stood on tippy toes and he leaned down; our cheeks met, we kissed. I felt his sandpapery bristles and his hand clapping me on the back.
‘I love you, Daddy,’ I said.
‘I love you too, old boy.’
I went upstairs to bed: whole, content, complete.
*
Sputum. Such a delectably revolting word. Sometimes Dad described it as bright green – electric almost, teeming with white blood cells – and sometimes it was a drab olive, or even rusty red (blood), yellow (bronchial) or brown (a smoker). Patients didn’t randomly cough, they ‘expressed’ sputum. And a cough wasn’t just a cough; it was either ‘dry’ or ‘productive’. I appreciated the precision of Dad’s language. You could gauge a lot from it: who was seriously sick and who wasn’t, who was going to die and how
long they had left. And yet his patients weren’t entirely real to me. They were just words Dad spoke into his dictaphone at the end of the evening.
It was Dad I wanted – when he was happy. But after his patients and the hospital and his jogging had each had their share, there wasn’t much left of him, save for one small, unlikely trace: his handwriting. Tiny, compact, excruciatingly neat, it trailed across scrap paper on the kitchen table and prescription pads and on the backs of envelopes. It spoke to me of authority, of a manful lack of affectation, and yet it was elegant too, fluid and sleek: a perfect creation. Rob’s was similar; I liked his writing as well. If I came across a note scribbled by Dad or Rob I would spirit it away, take it up to my room and study the shapes of the letters, teach my hand to produce the same effect. I’d kept all the birthday cards Rob and Dad ever gave me – they were good to copy too.
*
When Dad was down, diamond became rocks. Rob was ‘full of himself’; Gina was ‘vain’; Camilla was ‘dim’; I was ‘lazy’. Actually, we were all lazy. We didn’t know what real work was. We were also ungrateful. And who was to blame for that? Mum. She spoiled us. Dad had other targets, too: rugby league players, the Labor Party and fat people. To be fat was to be lazy and self-indulgent, and to be self-indulgent was to be self-satisfied. And if there was one way in which you should never regard yourself, it was with satisfaction. You could always improve, that was Dad’s thinking. At one stage it became fashionable to blame obesity on ‘overactive glands’. ‘Ha!’ Dad would laugh. ‘The only “gland” that’s overactive in fat people is their mouths.’
And yet he loved his patients, these imperfect, broken people, some of whom were even fat. His devotion to them was absolute, and they loved him in return. He would give them as much time as they needed and more. So long and generously did he consult that his rooms became hopelessly backed up, a queue snaking around the walls of his waiting room. Much exasperation, much rolling of eyes and loud sighing. ‘Do you have any idea when the doctor will see me?’ they would ask.
Mum, who worked for years in his rooms as the secretary, spent her time forever juggling patients, dissembling, prodding Dad to ‘get a wriggle on’.
But, God, was he a good doctor. His sentimentality and emotionalism, which was the flip side of his hysteria, afforded him an uncommon depth of compassion. Mum spoke of the almost mystical way in which he could inform a patient of the very worst, sit with them while they absorbed it – waiting as they wept or went blank – and then say something that allowed them to rise from their seat and walk out the door in something other than a state of utter and complete desolation. ‘I don’t know how he does it,’ she would say, as if pondering a piece of conjury.
The stories of his patients came home with him; some of them became family lore. There was the Aboriginal woman who told Dad that she’d had the bone pointed at her and was going to die. When Dad examined her he found nothing wrong, but she died nonetheless. There were the Jehovah’s Witnesses, parents of a young boy who required an urgent blood transfusion, which, being Jehovah’s Witnesses, they refused. Dad told them: Your son needs a transfusion, right now. Still they refused. When they went home for the night, Dad had the boy rushed into theatre, where he was given the transfusion. The next day, the parents returned: ‘You see, doctor?’ they said. ‘Such is the power of the Lord.’
There was the Italian cake maker, Ross Rocka, who owned a pasticceria in San Souci. Dad saved his daughter’s life around the time that Camilla was born, and every year on Camilla’s birthday, Ross would arrive on our doorstep with a custom-baked cake, a rich and fantastically complicated arrangement I came to understand as typically ‘wog’, all gooey sponge and cream-soaked layers. Then, after twenty-one years, he stopped. Ross and his cakes simply ceased to materialise. The debt was repaid. We never saw him again.
Dad had his regulars, too: people he saw for decades, whom he kept alive and on the road, like vintage automobiles. The old veteran, who had survived the worst of two world wars – he’d landed in the first wave at Gallipoli during the first and been imprisoned at Changi during the second – only to die, eventually, of emphysema. And the immortal, imperious Olga Toltz, Jewish matriarch, Double Bay doyenne, who always, no matter how ill she was, resisted like an opera queen the indignity of being admitted to hospital. ‘No, Dr Ellee-ott, I no go to hospital!’ she would say. ‘I no do it! I die at home!’
‘Good, Olga, go and die at home then, but stop wasting my time,’ Dad told her. (She was admitted.)
I suppose there are doctors who can divorce themselves from their work, who go home every night as happy as larks, but Dad wasn’t one of them. Dad didn’t obsess over his patients’ deaths – he wasn’t in awe of death itself. And he didn’t weep over their pain and tribulations. But plenty of people he treated inevitably ended up dying, and when they died, they took a tiny bit of my father with them. It was a slow, cumulative process – like waves chewing away at the base of a cliff – and it gradually eroded his goodwill and love of life, a commodity that with some people, Dad included, appears to be perilously finite. Lust for life, joie de vivre, hope, whatever you want to call it – it’s the fossil fuel of the soul. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
What was he left with? Anger, disappointment; a certain joyless wonder at how the world had turned out – not necessarily for him, but in general. I remember the boxer Mike Tyson famously remarking that when he punched an opponent he aimed for the bridge of their nose, so he could ram it up into their brain. Dad read this in the paper one morning. ‘What kind of man says that?’ he said, looking personally affronted.
*
By the time I was eleven, he had started drinking heavily. Sometimes brandy (Château Tanunda) but mostly gin, and then always Beefeater, the label of which – those Tower of London guards with their pikes and pleated jackets – still gives me the shivers. He would drink, and he would become morose and self-loathing: a loathing that would, like a rogue electrical charge, inevitably seek out the nearest warm body. There would be long rants about the necessity of hard work, about how ungrateful we were, about how, despite all evidence to the contrary, his life had been a piteous failure. Entire nights would be consumed by long needling examinations of some tiny slight that I or someone else had delivered him earlier in the day or the week or the year; something one of us had done or should have done that had annoyed him or insulted him or made him sad or just plain fucking livid.
‘Livid’ – that was one of his favourite terms, along with ‘Christ almighty’. Or sometimes even the medley: ‘Christ almighty, I am livid.’
Anything could make Dad livid: my table manners, watching too much TV, my shoe polishing, my school results (which in primary school were uniformly appalling). Nan Ell made him livid, talking her sanctimonious crap about hard work (‘She’s never worked a day in her life,’ Dad would grumble in the car on the way home) or mentioning all the money she had raised for the guide dogs.
His sister, Faye, most definitely made him livid. He seemed to consider that her sole reason for being. When Dad and Faye were still on speaking terms, we would go to dinner at her house, a spotless white castle-like edifice in Pymble. I remember the drive, because I would always get car sick, my head out the window, garlanding the side of the car with ribbons of hot vomit, Dad becoming increasingly agitated, his agitation amplifying my nausea until I could barely breathe. ‘We’ll be there soon, darling,’ Mum would say. ‘Just hang on, pet.’
We would eventually arrive, me pallid, drooling, the back of my teeth coated in bile, at Faye’s place, where her only son, Phillip (or ‘Pep’, as he was known), kept a pair of black Dobermans at his heel, in the manner of an SS officer. I hated those dogs. I was only eight or nine and small for my age, and they appeared to regard me as some kind of food source and/or sexual opportunity. The minute I walked through the door, they would bound over, fangs out, claws skittering on the cold white tiles.
Fa
ye was a handsome woman, with an air of insouciance that required her constant care and attention. She was also a black belt in false modesty. Her house was always ‘filthy dirty’ when in fact it was gleaming. The garden was a ‘bombsite’ when there was barely a leaf out of place. ‘Look at me!’ she would say, resplendent in a six-hundred dollar outfit, her hair freshly done. ‘I look like an old chewed shoe!’ She terrified me. I suspected she had X-ray vision, like God or the devil. She could see all the things I did, all my secret thoughts: she saw them without illusion, with the clarity only real phonies possess. (Even years later, as an adult, I’d freeze whenever I saw her, as if she had some ancient power over me.)
Dad liked to eat at regular times – something about digestion, fitness, weight gain et cetera. Faye knew this, and did everything in her power to delay dinner as long as possible, till us kids were ragged with hunger and the adults drunk and testy. Then Dad would say something – ‘For Christ’s sake, Faye, the food!’ – and she would turn to Nan Ell and shake her head and murmur: ‘Such a pity, Mum, he’s not well, you know.’
*
Dad relished a good argument: he had a sniper’s eye for picking them. And yet whenever I wanted to make him angry, whenever I wanted to get his attention, he remained bafflingly unresponsive. One day, I got a can of gold spray paint from the cupboard under the stairs and painted the drainpipe running down the side of the house. There was gold paint everywhere: all over the black shingles, all over the pipe, all over me. I enjoyed doing it; I got lost in the work. But I knew, also, that I was being naughty. When Mum saw it she went berserk, and told me to wait for Dad to come home. I was duly terrified. Dad was sure to go nuts, give me the belt; I was almost ill with worry.
Farewell to the Father Page 5