Not even Mum’s bout of kidney stones – howling agony in the dead of night, a stay in hospital, minor surgery – could derail Dad. For a day or two he had no choice but to focus on her: collect her from hospital, tend to her, make sure she kept her fluids up. But before long, his bowels came roaring back. ‘Come here and look at this! Soon I will be gone and out of your way, and then you’ll see . . .!’
*
At some point, I’m not sure when, somebody made the mistake of introducing Dad to golf. If ever there was a game designed to deliver maximum irritation and unhappiness to the mentally ill person, golf is it. Golf rewards inner calm and Zen-like equanimity, an ability to put behind you the mistakes of a moment before and focus with every synapse on the singular present – it requires, in other words, everything Dad lacked. And yet, for a time, golf was all he wanted to do.
So every Saturday he and Mum would pack their clubs and head to Royal Sydney Golf Club, a gated estate for Sydney WASPs, with its undulating dales and baby-soft greens, its stately clubhouse and old-school segregation: ladies here, men there. RSGC, or more simply ‘the Club’, was a viral culture of Victorian England transplanted to Sydney’s eastern suburbs, an adult version of Tom Brown’s School Days, replete with billiard tables and bridge rooms and croquet lawns, lawn tennis and squash. When I was a boy, my parents made me a ‘junior member’. I remember the submarine gloom of the men’s locker room, dissected, as in a cathedral, by mote-flecked sunbeams; there were polished brass fittings, wooden slat benches, and the pale flash, here and there, of old men’s lily-white bum cheeks. The showerheads were like giant clams.
The Club had unwritten codes: no Jews, no dark people, and (preferably) no Asians. There was also a dress code, which could be summed up in one word – white – and which was enforced with regimental strictness. Be gauche enough to exhibit so much as a stitch of colour on your squash shorts and you’d be subject to tractor-beams of wordless opprobrium – tut-tutting, glares, raised eyebrows. Or you’d simply be ordered to change.
Dad respected the code. His golf outfit, his Saturday afternoon uniform, consisted of white shorts, a white short-sleeved shirt with collar, white socks pulled up to the knee and golf shoes. The shoes had little pleated leather flaps that flopped over the laces – I still don’t know why – and spikes as sharp as cats’ teeth. I always knew he was going to golf by the woody rattle of the clubs in his bag, and by the crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch of the spikes outside.
Quixotic: that was Dad and golf. Demented is another word. Sometimes Mum and Dad would drag me along, golf being one of those games that parents considered a life skill back then. I would watch Dad, his bulging eyes, his murderous intent. A hearty swing, a topped ball, a muttered curse. A hearty swing, a majestic drive, a smile. Eighteen holes of this, a trial of patience, with Dad like a satyr in a maze, frustrated, elated, relieved; trying corridors, turning in circles. To see him bearing down on that dimpled, blameless little ball was to witness our world in miniature, all the expectations of his furious existence, the power, the petulance, all the obliterating little triumphs—
Whack! ‘BUGGER.’
Whack! ‘BUGGER.’
Whack! ‘CHRIST ALMIGHTY.’
—then the club jammed in the bag, stabbed down; the trudge down the fairway, Dad trailing little black clouds of pique. Then, at the next tee, Mum, as always, serene, consoling: ‘Max, darling, head down. Quiet now.’
Golf, like booze, has a hangover. Whatever mood Dad contracted on the course was the mood he brought home – sometimes a certain buoyancy, elation even, but usually a mix of exasperation and disappointment combined with elements of third-degree sunburn, all of it topped off by three angry gins in the clubhouse afterwards. And so into the house this mood would march, stinking it out like a dead bird in the wall space.
I hate golf. I’d rather stub cigarettes out on my eyeballs.
*
It was a Friday night. Dad was happy, on a high, his mood soaring, jet-propelled, into the empyrean and beyond, the cloudless stratospheres of mania. We were all sitting around a table at Rosie’s Kitchen, our favourite restaurant – favourite because it was just around the corner, and because of its name, the same as Mum’s, a coincidence we found irresistible.
Dad sat at the head of the table, radiating good cheer and love, discharging bolts of feral elan, like sparks from his fingertips. There was beer for Rob, wine for Mum and Gina, pink lemonades for me and Cam. ‘Order whatever you want. Order this!’ he said, stabbing at the menu. ‘The beef Wellington! The chicken Kiev! I’ll get you three servings,’ he told Gina and Mum. ‘And sweets, too, the date pudding or the chocolate log or the mousse. Don’t worry about the calories – don’t be silly, you’re all beautiful, with great figures, amazing figures, the best figures in Australia! Look at Gina, for Christ’s sake, just look at her figure!’
Talk turned to golf: Rob was good, and Dad thought he could go professional. ‘Rob! You’ve got the best swing I’ve ever seen! You could go all the way!’ Then he started in on his day, recounting a breast examination he’d performed, hamming it up, making the motions, hands out, twisting and turning, like a minstrel.
Dad, in a fit of exuberance, had recently bought himself a Porsche 911. It was canary yellow, with lights that flipped up at the flick of a switch, like frogs’ eyes. This car confused me. It embodied everything he and Mum normally disdained. It was brash, garish; even the colour was wrong. It was, essentially, a big loud boast, and Mum and Dad disliked boasting. Rob had recently driven the Porsche and crashed it; the car had to be towed back to the garage even before Dad himself had driven it. But tonight, not even this crashing-of-the-brand-new-Porsche could hold Dad back. By the way he was going on, you’d have sworn he wanted Rob to crash it again and again. ‘Why not? It’s just a car! You can drive it too, old sport,’ he said to me. ‘When you get older. Anyone can drive it. It belongs to everyone in this family.’ Gina suggested I have a go at crashing the car, which Dad found uproariously funny, throwing his head back and laughing, his gullet gaping open like a mineshaft.
At some point, someone mentioned something called ‘dying’, a craze that was really catching on, apparently, like a party trick. It’s hilarious! You stood in the middle of a crowded room and simply collapsed, groaning on the way down, as if you’d just dropped dead. It totally freaks people out! Dad thought this was the greatest thing he’d ever heard, and suggested we all do it, together, tonight, right then and there. Mum said no, darling, please don’t. But Dad paid the bill, plus a big tip – he was nothing if not generous – and stood up. We all got up too, and began walking out. Halfway to the door, however, Dad started clutching his chest and groaning, before collapsing, right there, straight down, WHUMP, taking a chair out with him.
‘Max!’ Mum said, still standing. ‘Get up!’
But we all followed Dad, dying too, right there on the floor of Rosie’s Kitchen, the other diners all turning to look, the chef popping his head out from the kitchen, the young waitress rushing over.
Hilarious!
Later, at home, someone put on a record, Simon and Garfunkel, before changing it to Nana Mouskouri, a favourite of Dad’s which we all teased him about, and then all the kids sat on the couch and watched, a little audience, as Mum and Dad started waltzing. Dad was smiling; I could see his giant white teeth. His mouth was next to Mum’s ear, touching it, whispering. He moved so gently, gliding now, heavy but light, transformed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The writer Irwin Shaw once described his marriage as one of ‘mutual and unexpressed understanding, private jokes, comfort in adversity, automatic support in times of trouble and hours spent in cordial silence in the long and tranquil evenings’. This is exactly what Dad and Mum had. Not all the time, obviously, but in fleeting, paradisiacal slices: the holidays in Fiji, long days on the beach and fire-lit dinners, all of us together, sun-stung, muscle-sore; the holidays at Palm Beach,
salt-misted walks in perpetual sunsets; the brief windows in which Dad was stable, not manic, but just normal, when we could talk to him, crack a joke even, and not be violently misinterpreted. Those ‘tranquil evenings’ existed for us, also, on our balcony overlooking the bay, nights numberless at the time but now so finite, with the dusking water and beer-coloured sun, when all was redeemed and all absolved; nothing forgotten yet all forgiven.
It never lasted long. I’d come home from fishing and discover Rob’s clothes in a pile in the top garden. Dad had chased him away from the house and thrown all his stuff – shirts, socks, magazines, all his cool surfing posters – out of the upstairs window. It was starting to drizzle and everything was getting wet, and so Camilla was outside, on all fours, collecting it. The withering put-downs, the biting asides as sharp as uppercuts – I walked into them again and again. Once I asked him to watch the football with me and he flashed me a stare, black as a gun muzzle. ‘I never ever want to see another game of rugby as long as I live.’
My heroes – surfers, mainly – were troglodytes to him, morons. I was a moron. I had, by then, started high school, at Shore, but he told me matter-of-factly that this was a complete waste of money because I was destined to become a plumber or a bricklayer, and plumbers and bricklayers didn’t need private educations. I should have been angry at him, I should have at least resented him for this, but it was quite the opposite. I accepted it. I internalised his commentary. He was my father. He knew everything. If he said I was stupid, then I was stupid.
*
He started to become more violent. One night, when I was still in my first year of high school, he hit Mum across the shoulder and eye; she came up in bruises. I didn’t see it happen – I was in bed, listening, the sheets pulled up – but I saw the bruises the next day, dark purple and scarlet. These bruises could not be ignored. A line had been crossed. The next night, Cam and I hid down the hallway, listening, as Rob, Gina and Mum talked to Dad in the kitchen. I heard the words ‘never again’, ‘unacceptable’, ‘forgive’ and ‘please’. I heard Dad’s voice: ‘I know, I know.’ He sounded solemn. He was an expert at solemn.
For the next week, Dad was around a lot more. He’d float by Mum’s side, he’d touch her a lot, kiss her ear, compliment her dress, fetch her reading glasses and Dispirin for her back. His sudden good-naturedness made me suspicious. I knew, instinctively, that it was dangerous, that the pendulum would, sooner or later, swing back the other way, like a wrecking ball. It was unavoidable, a law of nature.
Sure enough, I was in bed a week later when I heard the familiar shouting. Banging. Then an urgent little yelp from Mum and footsteps, lots of them, hard and fast, in the dining room. The next morning, Mum had a bandage on her hand. They had been arguing and Dad had grabbed a knife, one of Mum’s new super-sharp Wiltshires, and chased her around the dining room table. Mum ran as long as she could, then, cornered, put her hand up and grabbed the blade. The blood had sobered Dad. Another long week of remorse ensued, followed by threats of suicide; more chainsaw bowel movements. He couldn’t go on. It was hopeless.
A hole appeared in the wall of Mum and Dad’s bedroom, just above the light switch – Dad had put a chair through it. For a long time, Mum didn’t get it fixed, just left it there, to remind Dad what he was capable of. This hole intrigued me. I squinted into it, inside the wall, but all I could see was blackness.
*
I was getting the distinct impression Dad didn’t like me. I annoyed him. One Saturday afternoon, not long after he went at Mum with the knife, Dad came back from his jog and stood, as he always did, in the kitchen, regaining his breath and stretching his hamstrings, which he did by propping each leg up on the stool and bending down, staring at his toes and wincing. I was already in the kitchen making chocolate milk when he entered, so he couldn’t blame me for being there, in his vicinity. But I sensed that he wanted me to leave the room. I felt like one of the cats, always under his feet. At any moment he’ll tread on me, I thought. So I picked up the chocolate milk and took it into the TV room.
Dad was good at catching me out. He’d ask very gently, ‘Is there anything wrong? Anything going on at school, perhaps?’ And when I said, ‘No, no, I’m fine,’ (remember: no turbulence!) he’d rip my head off. ‘Well, if nothing is wrong then why the hell are you walking around with that look on your face?’
His skin would darken, his teeth would gnash. He’d return from his runs in sheets of sweat, unrelieved; he’d be medicated, staggering jaggedly around the house, the floors moaning under his weight. On the kitchen table were his medical journals, thick glossy booklets with colour photos of diseased penises and scrofulous lungs; anonymous organs oozing goo. We’d ask Dad to move them; he’d tell us not to read them. The days would go by. Dad would slowly improve. It was a cycle, the weather of sorrow, the blizzard abating, its furies spun to a stop. The sun would emerge, in tatters.
In our beautiful home by the bay, our gentle elegant bombsite, our lives would begin again.
*
I was twelve, in my first year at Shore, where, as if to prove Dad correct, I was in the C class for virtually everything. It might have been my imagination, but the teachers appeared to be talking to me very slowly and loudly, as if I were some kind of mental defective, or deaf, or both. Plus, I’d already been caned, within the first two weeks of year seven, for chalk fighting, although I got the impression Dad admired me for that.
One day, Mum sat me down for a talk. I was expecting it to be about school, but I was wrong. It was about Dad. He was sick. Really sick. He had something called a pulmonary embolism, which as far as I could tell was a big blob of blood that had got all clogged together and was floating around his lungs. If it got stuck in a vein, he’d die. After Dad’s suicide attempt and his threats of suicide, after all his catastrophising and apocalyptic bowel movements, it now appeared that he could in fact die, for real, and soon. Obviously this was terrible news, but at the same time I had trouble digesting it. Yeah, I thought, Dad might die, but he’d been talking about that for ages.
‘Dad deserves to die, in a way,’ I told Cam one day when we were walking to school.
‘What? Why?’
‘Because he talks about it all the time.’
‘That is so stupid. Don’t be such an idiot.’
In the face of this life-threatening diagnosis, Dad and Mum immediately began planning a holiday, a trip through Europe with Camilla and me. This accorded with two of my parents’ most cherished principles: first, what they did for one child, they did for all (they had taken Rob and Gina on a holiday to Europe some years before, after they’d finished high school, and so now they had to do the same for Camilla and me); and second, the Importance of Culture, by which they meant crumbling buildings, kings and queens, cathedrals. We had to be exposed to it sometime, and it appeared that it was now or never.
It’s amazing how much money you can spend on an overseas holiday and still have a lousy time. The trip comes back to me now in a series of sepia frames, like shots from an old Pan Am catalogue: the Tower of London, the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa (lots of towers!); cockneys in Portobello Road; tossing a coin in the Trevi Fountain.
Dad’s mood had begun to cycle at a dizzying rate, good one day, abysmal the next. He was fine in London, bad – very bad – at Stonehenge; his face reminded me of the smoke that comes from those enormous tyre fires – pitch black and extremely hazardous. It was freezing, too, stabbing winds, stinging rain, and there he was, walking about, grimacing, in nothing more than a blue cotton shirt, as if to punish himself, or us. By the time we got to Florence, however, he was ecstatic. We toured the Uffizi, Dad, rapturous, holding court before the canvases, levitating almost, a sticky film of white froth collecting in the corners of his mouth. Outside, in the market stalls, he bought armfuls of leather bags and clothes, one for every family member and their partner and their partner’s partner and anybody else he’d ev
er met. Then, in Interlaken, he had agoraphobia and wouldn’t leave his room. Paris was a misery. Mum had to stay with him; she sent Cam and me to the Louvre by ourselves, a fifteen-year-old and a twelve-year-old, bumbling about, clueless.
‘This is a very important painting,’ Cam told me, staring at the Mona Lisa.
‘Why?’
‘Just look at her eyes.’ Cam said they followed you wherever you went, which seemed like a nifty trick, a bit like the picture of racehorses on my pencil case at home, that moved when you looked at it side on.
We saw a lot of hospitals. Dad’s embolism meant he had to take heavy doses of Warfarin, a blood thinner, the levels of which had to be checked every four days or so. Usually we sat in the hire car outside while Dad and Mum went in. I remember being particularly impressed with the gates to the American Hospital of Paris, which were made of wrought iron and black marble.
We also visited a lot of churches. I entered them apologetically almost, with a carefully rehearsed reverence, as if I were auditioning for something, heaven maybe. Dad and Mum behaved as if they were walking into an expensive restaurant: polite, respectful, but with no particular awe. I was looking for God; they were looking for stained-glass windows and a place to sit down. The minute she had sat down, Mum would spot an old cripple praying, and say: ‘It must be a great support to them.’ Mum and Dad thought the idea of God was ridiculous, but they weren’t about to force that on me. I had to make up my own mind, which I did. I formulated for myself a personal theology, a particularly pious one, infused with dashes of puritanism and snobbery. We were at St Peter’s in Rome when a group of street people walked in. ‘Why did they let them in?’ I asked Mum. ‘Because that’s what a church is for,’ she said. ‘Everyone should be allowed in.’
Farewell to the Father Page 7