When Dad got home, he led me around to the pipe. He stood there with his hands on his hips, looking at it. He had the V on his brow. Then he sat me down on the outside step, and sat himself beside me, very close. I remember sitting, waiting – hoping almost – for his retribution. Instead, he said: ‘We will have to think of a suitable punishment for you.’
Then he got up and left, and that was the last I ever heard of it.
CHAPTER SIX
By now, Dad had been diagnosed with clinical depression. I was about twelve. I overheard snippets of conversation about this or that psychiatrist – Dad must have seen a dozen, touring from doctor to doctor, Mum and Dad in their little caravan of woe, keeping most of Sydney’s mental health experts gainfully employed. There were lots of meds, too, pills everywhere; pills in the bathroom, pills by the bedside, sleeping tablets, antidepressants, tranquillisers, hypnotics, all with space-agey names: Noctec, Sinequan, Buspar. The cupboard closest to the fridge was devoted to these pills, their canisters stacked in wobbly white columns. These canisters filled me, at first, with the richest hope: their labels, the tiny black lettering, spoke of the promise of modern medicine, respite, maybe even a cure. But the pills were useless. Some made Dad impotent, which infuriated him; others made him dopey. None made him happy.
The thing about living with someone who is clinically depressed is that the depression takes over everything. And I mean everything. Not only the depressed person’s behaviour but everyone else’s is wrapped around the contours of the illness: what you say, what you do, who you bring home and when, and how happy you are allowed to be (answer: not very). A lot of this is self-censorship: it’s hard to laugh around someone who is suicidal.
Quietly, then, we assumed our roles, we took our positions, skulking around like stagehands, the greatest imperative being to cushion reality, to allow Dad the smoothest possible passage through life. There must be no turbulence, no bumps in the road, nothing that could disturb him. If Cam was having trouble at school, we weren’t to let Dad know. If Rob failed an exam, or the dishwasher broke, or the car needed new tyres, we were to hide that from him, too.
At other times we would all get together and puzzle over possible solutions. Mostly this was an adult thing, and so I wasn’t included, unless I stumbled into the meetings, as I did one Saturday afternoon in autumn. I had come home from fishing and found the house empty. I went to the kitchen sink, put my fish in there – two tailor just under a foot long each – and ran cold water on them. I turned around and dried my hands on the dishcloth and, as I did so, became aware of a noise upstairs: low talking, animated murmuring, the kind people do when they’re riled up but don’t wish to be overheard. Curious, I walked upstairs to see what was going on.
At the top of the stairs I could see into Mum and Dad’s room. Dad was in there, naked, surrounded by Mum, who was sitting on the bed, and Rob and Gina and Cam. They were talking about Dad, about something he was going to do or had done or wanted to do.
‘It’s beaten me,’ he said. ‘I’m telling you, it’s beaten me.’
He was standing with one leg on the bed now, as if stretching his hamstrings. His cock and balls dangled stupendously, but Dad seemed oblivious to his nudity. He may as well have been dressed for work.
‘What? What has beaten you?’ Rob said.
‘I’m beaten,’ Dad said again. ‘You don’t understand.’
‘Dad, nothing has beaten you,’ Gina said. ‘We’re all here, we all love you. Look at us. How can you be beaten?’
‘I can’t go on,’ Dad said again. ‘I’m beaten.’
He was grinding his teeth and staring at some point low down on the wall across the room, near the skirting board.
‘Darling, we love you so much,’ Mum said. ‘All we want is for you to be happy.’
‘I’m going to . . .’ Dad said. ‘I just . . .’ He gave a little hiccup-snort, as if he was about to cry. Instead, his head flopped down. ‘It’s beaten me.’
I moved into the room and sat by the far window, beside Cam, across from Dad; I felt oddly anonymous, invisible.
Suddenly Dad noticed me. ‘And you,’ he said. ‘I’m going to tell you, Tim, the truth about you.’
‘Dad, don’t you dare,’ Gina warned.
‘Max, don’t,’ Mum said.
My mind raced. What was he about to say? Did I want to hear it? I had no control over what came out of Dad’s mouth, but I did have the ability to walk out, to refuse to hear it. And that was exactly what I did, very self-consciously, as everyone watched me go.
I thought about this incident for years. What could Dad possibly have been about to say? For a while I thought maybe he was about to tell me I was adopted, but then I realised that was ridiculous. Did he want to tell me I’d ruined his life? How I was a ‘mistake’? How he only ever wanted three kids? But he’d already told me that, lots of times. I started to regret walking out of the room. Why hadn’t I stayed? I also wanted to ask the others what they thought – what did Gina mean, for instance, when she said, ‘Dad, don’t you dare’? She must have known what he was about to say.
Later, when I was much older, I asked Gina about it. I described the scene in detail – Mum and Dad’s room, Dad naked, all of us there, the despondency, then Dad turning to me and saying what he did.
Gina heard me out, nodding, listening patiently; she’s a great listener. Then she said simply: ‘I don’t remember that at all.’
But I didn’t give up. I asked Camilla about it, but she couldn’t remember the scene either, which made me unexpectedly, irrationally, indignant. How could both my sisters have forgotten something like that? Maybe forgetting was an essential part of staying sane. I had the feeling Rob forgot a lot on purpose. It was quite a skill. But I couldn’t forget. Instead, I was left marooned, nagged by all my orphaned recollections.
*
Mum was a world-class optimist: she inherited this quality from her mum, Nan King, who had pale blue hair and an unlikely penchant for dirty jokes. One afternoon, when Dad was bad, Mum palmed me off on Nan King, who took me to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I was indifferent to the art; it all looked pretty much the same to me, except for the religious paintings, which were morbidly, almost hypnotically, creepy – the Virgin Mary with her eyes rolled skywards, as if she were about to faint with anguish, and Jesus looking all lank and hungry: I felt sorry for him.
After we had walked around for a while, we sat in the cafeteria and ate some deliciously bland toasted ham and cheese sandwiches. At one point, Nan leaned over. ‘And don’t you worry about your father,’ she said. ‘Things will get better, I really believe that.’ The word ‘believe’ worried me. I realised that Dad getting better wasn’t a given. It was something you had to ‘believe’ in.
Mum’s optimism was a crucial life force for her: it gave her the energy to keep looking for solutions, to keep visiting different doctors, to keep trying different drugs. It enabled her to spot new horizons, fresh continents with friendly natives. Her empathy worked much the same way. ‘I just can’t imagine what it must be like to feel that bad,’ she would say, with emphasis on ‘that bad’. ‘I’m just glad I don’t feel like that.’
Even so, sometimes her tanks were drained. When this happened, she bypassed the empathy stage and went straight to despondency. One day, when I was about ten, she sat me down in front of Dad.
‘Look at him,’ she said, grasping me by the shoulder, like a court exhibit, and turning me to face him. ‘Look at your son.’ Dad glanced at me sideways. ‘He is asking me why his father is sad and angry all the time. Can you tell him? Go on, you tell him.’
Dad shifted in his seat. He looked at me as if I was to blame for embarrassing him, which, in a way, I was. I had voiced my concern to Mum, who was relaying it to Dad. This placed me squarely in the middle of all that concern, which now made me want to apologise: to Mum, to Dad. To everyone.
I am
sorry for the way you feel, Dad. I am sorry for being here to see it. I am sorry, Mum, for worrying you. I am sorry for bearing witness. I am so so so so so sorry.
*
One afternoon after school I walked into Rob’s room, which was right at the end of the upstairs hall, and was bigger than all the other rooms, apart from Mum and Dad’s. I loved just being in this room. It felt forbidden, grown up. There was lots of cool stuff in there, too. There was a poster of Mundaka, the famous Spanish surf break, above his bed, and beside that, a poster of Terry Fitzgerald – ‘the Sultan of Speed’ – taking a crazy high line on a huge wave at Sunset Beach in Hawaii. On the floor in the corner was a silent cop, luminous yellow and chipped, that Rob had stolen from the road at the end of our street, and a red metal road sign that said Caution: Men at Work. Leaning on his low set of drawers was a tall skinny mirror with Old Parr Scotch Whisky written on it in fancy curly letters and a picture of an old man with a long white beard. The words and the picture got in the way of your reflection, which, I gathered, was kind of the point: it was a trick mirror, a mirror that wasn’t just a mirror. I couldn’t wait till Rob got sick of this mirror and gave it to Cam, after which Cam would get sick of it and give it to me.
It was just after five and Rob was at his desk, studying. There were books all around him: The Web of Life, a biology text, and a book on advanced chemistry, and crib notes on King Lear. Rob was in his last year of high school, which seemed to me almost incomprehensibly distant, a bit like Rob himself. He had little black bristles above his top lip and on his chin, and his hair was wiry and wild. His hair was a bit of a thing, really. It was, strictly speaking, too long for Shore, the expensive private school he went to, and which I would presumably be going to as well. But Rob had got around the school hair restriction by sleeping with a stocking on his head so as to squish it all together, to make it more manageable. He had a girlfriend he had been going out with forever called Larn, who had very long straight blonde hair and colossal boobs. Rob was good at rugby; he was also the head of the Shore Cadet Corps. And he surfed. It went without saying that he was an excellent surfer. Every couple of years I inherited his old boards, which were passed down to me with a sense of great ceremony, like tribal heirlooms. Rob swore a lot, too. Mum would tell me to wake him up each morning, but he always shouted at me to ‘fuck off’. When he came back from surfing and I asked him how it was, he would say: ‘Ratshit.’ Or: ‘Shithouse.’ He was pretty much everything I wanted to be.
It was difficult talking to him though. He was not much into talking, unless he was telling me something, like how to wax a surfboard, or how to tackle someone, or how ‘chicks dig guys with button noses’, which wasn’t much help because I didn’t know any chicks and had no idea what a ‘button nose’ was. I got the feeling that he wanted to be my dad. But I didn’t want another dad. I wanted a brother.
That afternoon, in his room, I wanted to talk to Rob about things – not just about Dad or girls, but about things in general. Everything. Anything. I wanted advice, not that I had any specific questions. Actually, I just wanted to be with him, so I stood there, behind his desk, while he worked.
‘What do you want?’ he said, without looking around.
‘Nothing.’
‘What are you doing then?’
I shrugged. ‘I dunno.’ I couldn’t tell him anything now. I hadn’t done anything, apart from stand there breathing, and already he was angry with me. Instead, I spotted a bullet on the corner of his desk, just the gold metal casing, standing on its end. I moved forward and picked it up.
‘Don’t touch that!’ Rob said.
I put it back very quickly.
‘You got any idea what that is?’
‘A bullet.’
Rob pushed back his chair, stood up and grabbed the cartridge, which he held between his thumb and forefinger. ‘You got any idea what this can do to you?’ He was giving me a lesson now, a slightly angry lesson, all because I’d touched the bullet, even though I knew the bullet was empty, that it was just the casing. ‘If this bullet hit you in the stomach it would go straight through you.’ He paused, and turned to face the wall behind him. ‘It would go straight through you and rip out your guts and splatter them all over that wall.’
I looked at the wall, imagining my guts all over it.
‘This is incredibly dangerous, okay. Okay? It’s not a toy, okay?’
I nodded solemnly. He then walked back to his desk, put the bullet back down, and resumed his seat. This was my cue to leave. It was almost dinnertime anyway.
*
When I was in year five a kid named Justin, who was in the year above, began to bully me. Justin was short but tough, and had lots of crusty brown snot in his nose and two boys who always followed him around, standing one on either side of him but just slightly behind, like suckerfish. Justin gave me ‘dead legs’, or corked my shoulder when I wasn’t looking by punching it with his middle knuckle stuck out. He also called me ‘Smelliott’. ‘You must smell so bad, because your name is Smelliott,’ he would say. The suckerfish always laughed as if it was the first time they had heard it. He also called me a ‘spastic’ and said that the grey knitted vest I wore to school was ‘obviously knitted for you by your spastic mum’, which was half correct. One day I said to him, ‘You think you’re so cool,’ and he said, ‘I don’t think I’m cool; I know I’m cool.’ This was the most devastating comeback I had ever heard, and left me speechless.
I told Mum about the bullying, and Mum told Dad. Dad said that the next time this boy said anything to me I should punch him as hard as I could in the face. ‘Give him a bloody nose and he won’t ever bully you again.’ Dad said this as if it was the simplest thing in the world, which it was for Dad, because Dad was six feet tall and Justin was a boy. But I was also just a boy. I couldn’t punch Justin, because I was terrified of him. Also, I had never punched anything. What if I didn’t punch Justin properly and all it did was make him more angry? I tried to explain all this to Dad, but he didn’t seem to take it in. Instead, he told me to read a book called Tom Brown’s School Days, which Mum got down for me from the big bookcase in the TV room. It was a very old book and the pages were all brown. To Max, read an inscription on the first page. From your Auntie and Uncle, Xmas, 1940.
‘The Browns have become illustrious by the pen of Thackeray and the pencil of Doyle,’ read the first sentence, ‘within the memory of the young gentlemen who are now matriculating at the Universities.’
I didn’t get it.
Dad and Mum must have told Rob about Justin, because the next day Rob told me he wanted to show me how to fight. We were standing outside his room, in the hallway. I said, ‘Okay.’
The next thing I knew, I was on my back. He’d pushed me over, onto the carpet, which was thin and worn out and hurt my elbows.
‘Ow,’ I said.
‘Get up,’ Rob said. ‘You can’t fight if you’re on the ground.’
I got up, but the minute I was on my feet Rob pushed me over again. ‘Come on, don’t just lie there. Get up!’
I got back up but he pushed me to the ground again. ‘It’s like I said, you can’t fight if you’re on the ground.’
‘But you keep pushing me onto the ground,’ I said.
‘Yeah, that’s what happens in a fight, you blockhead.’
I got up, more slowly this time, and as I did, I charged into Rob, grabbing him around the waist. We wrestled for a bit, and Rob laughed, not mockingly but encouragingly, as if he’d been pleasantly surprised, maybe even impressed. Then he threw me onto the ground again.
‘That’s better!’ he said. ‘Much better.’
That night, lying in bed, I replayed the scene in my head, the sound Rob made while we were wrestling, that encouraging-impressed-laughing sound, over and over, until I fell asleep.
*
I will say this much: life was never boring with Dad. He ev
en weirded out our four cats (most of them were wild, like Grey Puss, my favourite, who followed me home from fishing one day and never left). If Dad wasn’t walking around naked or working eighteen-hour days, he was indulging in midnight feasts, bizarre sleep-eating episodes during which he’d consume whole tubs of margarine or a carton of ice cream and peanut butter. Culinary dissonance was his forte – a packet of Corn Flakes with tomato sauce, toast and mayonnaise, that sort of thing. I’d come down in the morning to find the kitchen trashed: margarine smears on the counter, bowls of mushy Special K, milk streaks down the cupboards. Sugar grains detonated under my feet. Crackle-crackle-crunch-crunch. The fridge would be ravaged.
Then there was his snuff. Despite being a chest doctor, Dad was for some years hopelessly addicted to snuff, which he kept in dainty silver boxes, smaller than a matchbox, with delicately hinged lids. A pinch or two up each nostril. The thing about snuff is that on the way back out of your nose it looks a lot like blood. Mum tried to wash the stains from his handkerchiefs, but it was futile. And so up on the clothesline they went, blotched red, like rags from a field hospital.
But with Dad, everything came together south of the border, so to speak, in his bowels, his endlessly restive, serially malfunctioning bowels. Rarely in the history of colorectal medicine have a set of bowels exerted such complete dominion over one household. Piles, polyps, haemorrhoids, fissures: there was always something the matter with Dad’s back end, some unspeakable condition with whose symptoms – pain, swelling, bleeding – we all in time became intimately familiar. ‘LOOK AT THIS BLOOD!’ Dad would yell, standing over the toilet late at night. ‘COME AND LOOK AT THIS BLOOOOOOOD! I AM BLEEDING TO DEATH!’ Dad, I later found out, had some light bleeding, but nothing out of the ordinary; certainly not bowel cancer or liver disease. And yet every bowel movement was a Greek tragedy, a three-part opera. Lying in bed at night, my eyes like saucers, I pictured the scene, like something from a backyard abortionist, all body parts and red slush.
Farewell to the Father Page 6