I placed a candle on the altar. I gazed at the ceiling. I registered the moment and pondered the ineffable. When we walked out, Cam came up to me. ‘Mum and Dad say that when we get home, you should get confirmed.’
I didn’t know what ‘confirmed’ meant, but it sounded serious. It implied commitment, not to mention certainty. But the minute she said it, I realised that I wasn’t certain about anything. I had thought I was, but I knew now I wasn’t.
Shortly after we returned to Sydney, Dad’s embolism vanished. Apparently it just dissolved, melted away, like a gob of butter in a hot pan. He was in the clear. Mum was much relieved, and Dad too. I was a little confused, though. There I was, just about to give up on God, but it appeared all my praying had paid off, after all.
*
In my first years at Shore I was small for my age, feather-light, fluff-haired, as soft as dew. I felt cowed, translucent almost, like one of those silvery fish you see stranded in rock pools, darting about with their innards showing.
Shore was a jungle, full of much larger, potentially threatening primates: big boys shouting, guys with lots of hair on them. The teachers were either all buttoned up, squared off, or older sow-faced men, patchy-bearded and blotchy-skinned, with beige woollen suits and hair in their noses: men who considered regular canings an essential component of a private education – a value-for-money thing. It was one of these older men, Neville Emery (a former Wallaby, as I later discovered), who paused in the middle of rollcall one morning and, in front of the class, asked, ‘You’re Max Elliott’s son, are you?’, which made me inordinately happy.
Shore was grey. Our jackets were grey. The carpets were grey. The classrooms and the fittings were grey – the blackboards, the walls, the fancy overhead projectors. Pretty much everything was grey except for the chapel, which was grey-green, thanks to a seventy-year-old coat of ivy. The school employed two sergeant majors, both Vietnam vets, who walked about with sticks in their hands, indiscriminately whacking boys, who they clearly considered to be pampered little poofters. They stood at the front gates every morning, shouting at laggards: ‘You, boy, get in here now! Ruuuuuuuuun!’ One day, years later, we coaxed a war story from one of these men, about a battle he’d been in against the Viet Cong. ‘Don’t believe a word you hear about them,’ he said. ‘They fought like old women.’
The headmaster was ‘Jika’ Travers. His first name was Basil, which we all sniggered about. Jika had a toothbrush moustache, like Hitler’s, and a spine like a length of mahogany. He scowled a lot, stalking around, scouting for signs of slippage, his long black cape billowing liquidly behind him. Jika had been a rugby hero (he played for England), a war veteran (he fought, as a brigade major, in New Guinea) and a Rhodes scholar. He was a pillar of imperial manhood. Yet the years had not been kind. By the time I arrived at Shore, Jika had been headmaster for twenty-three years and had long since slid into an unhappy senescence, a brittle, andropausal little cocoon out of which he squinted, afraid, suspicious, watching the world as he had known it descend into ruin. He would address us every morning at assembly, telling us what a dissolute bunch of thankless no-hopers we were. Our manners were non-existent, our dress appalling. We had not suffered. ‘If you wish to understand sacrifice, look at my numberplate!’ he would boom. I didn’t understand this until someone explained that his registration number was NX17 – his World War II service number. Such was his fury at us that he would sometimes cry at the podium, in front of everyone.
Shore was a perfectly self-contained world, a biosphere of almost total Anglo privilege. I think there were two Chinese boys, a kid who may or may not have been Jewish, and one Greek guy – a short, excessively hairy child called Harry. It was a strange place whose strangeness we took for granted. One of the first things we did was the year seven medical, where we all filed one by one into the office of the school doctor, who pulled down our pants, gripped our testicles and told us to cough.
It was a pervert’s paradise. I suspect most boys’ schools are. There was a teacher who became known for smacking the bare bottoms of boarders with his toothbrush, and the teacher who, as he talked to you, stroked your tie repeatedly with both hands, as if he was masturbating it. This was the same man who would later show up at cadet camp and stand off to the side taking photos of boys in the outdoor showers.
There was also my English teacher, whom I’ll call Mr Peters. I liked Mr Peters, and he liked me. He gave me good marks and was brusquely encouraging. He was one of the most physically unattractive men I had ever met, with Fanta-coloured hair and eyes that sagged at the edges, as if they had melted. When we went on our end-of-year-seven camp to Lake Macquarie, Mr Peters was one of our supervisors. I remember that year because we all went swimming a lot, and there had been a sea lice plague; everyone got bitten, especially around the crotch, where the lice got caught in your costume.
One day, Mr Peters took a bunch of us on a long bushwalk. After about an hour, he stopped and asked if anyone had been bitten by sea lice. I put up my hand, expecting other boys to do likewise, but they didn’t. I was the only one. Mr Peters then told the rest of the boys to go on ahead, out of sight. Once they were gone, he asked me where I was bitten. ‘Around here, sir,’ I said, pointing to my crotch.
‘Well, take down your pants, and I’ll have a look.’
I did as he told me, whereupon he fell to his knees, his face level with and very close to my penis. He then took it in his hand, and began massaging cream onto the tip of it, gently, almost lovingly, as if he were stroking a small, frightened bird. He did this for a while. Then, still kneeling, he looked up at me and smiled.
‘Is that better?’
‘Yes, thank you, sir,’ I said.
Then he got to his feet, patted me on the head, and walked off down the trail.
Later I thought about this episode. Why had I just gone along with it? Why did I put my hand up when Mr Peters asked if anyone had been bitten by lice? The other boys obviously knew better, but I had walked straight into it.
*
I played rugby at Shore. I enjoyed it, but I was small, and not particularly talented. Despite this, I somehow got into the 13Bs, which was ostensibly pretty good. (Playing rugby at Shore was compulsory for the first two years, and the grades went from A to K). And yet, as the season wore on, I was confronted by the unavoidable reality that we were terrible: we lost virtually every game. Dad would come to watch sometimes, standing on the sidelines, his big brown eyes burning holes in my back. The first thing I would do when I came off after a game was run up and apologise to him. Later, at night, I would hear him downstairs, screaming: ‘. . . And what’s more, that stupid bloody boy plays in that bloody team that loses every single match!’
Still, I was fit. Crazily fit. Dad always used to say that it took six weeks of daily running to get properly fit, so that’s what I did. Running, though I hated it, became an obsession: if I didn’t run in the morning, I felt besieged by guilt all day, a feeling of worthlessness, so I would get up first thing and go, pushing on up the street then down a long flight of steps, through the reserve, along the water’s edge to the lighthouse, around the point and back again, going as hard as I could, blood in my ears, wind in my eyes, the world receding, steadily building up speed towards the end, preparing myself for what I knew to be the final assault, a series of about a hundred and fifty steps that I attacked so pitilessly I felt my thighs popping, tendons pinging like piano strings, my walloping heart and hot throat clicking, gagging on air, and then looking up and seeing those last dozen steps and putting my face down and seeing that white light flashing bright behind my closed eyes like phosphorous, an anti-ecstasy, pure pain, then reaching the top finally to feel my legs go hollow and wobble, weightless, swamped in the God moment, almost sexual in its intensity, when everything went black and I didn’t know where I was.
This I did every day for five months, which was how I became the fittest, worst rugby player
in the whole school. If nothing else, Dad respected my commitment. One day, I was stretching in the front yard when I overheard him saying to Rob, ‘He could wear the green and gold, you know.’ He was probably manic, or simply joking; later I realised he was probably not even talking about me, but at the time I was so proud I swooned.
Being the youngest of four children means you are essentially invisible. You can do what you like, which is fantastic. But the flipside of this is powerlessness: even if you manage to make yourself heard, your voice doesn’t count. You are ineffectual. I had this exact same feeling on the football field. I desperately wanted to show Dad my worth, to show everyone my worth, and so I ran about like a mad thing, buzzing here, buzzing there, a bundle of furious whirring. But I made little impact and changed nothing.
Still, towards the end of the season, I was standing on the sidelines after my game when the coach for the A team told me he wanted me to hang around, that he wanted me to have a run in the As. My God, I thought, this was huge. Dad was there; Mum was there. I was not going to let them down.
I waited, and waited. Virtually the whole game went by, with me on the sidelines, hanging by the coach’s side.
‘Now, sir?’
‘No . . .’
‘Now, sir?’
‘No . . .’
Finally, with only minutes remaining, I was sent on. I can’t remember much; perhaps I’ve blocked it out. Mostly I remember being struck by how much bigger these guys were: they were nearly men. Then there was a kick-off, the ball sailing over my head, to be caught by our prop, a huge red-headed guy called Bill Penrose. Bill tucked the ball under his arm and charged forward, which was when I, for reasons I still don’t understand, ran towards him – and, indeed, right into him. The impact was extraordinary: Bill hit me like a freight train does a box car, bouncing me up, high into the air, and out, flying backwards, my legs flapping, arms flailing. I looked sideways and beheld, as if in slow motion, the faces of the people on the sidelines passing by, frozen in disbelief, concern and outright scorn. The humiliation was cosmic, saturating, beyond anything I’d ever experienced. Even before I hit the ground I was shrinking into myself. But I picked myself up quickly, determined to re-enter the fray, just as the final whistle went. The game was over. My football career had hit its peak.
*
Two weeks later. Another game, another loss. Mum, Dad and I were walking to the car when I heard the father of our halfback talking to his son about what an appalling game the hooker had had, what a fool he was, how he should never have been allowed on the field. I was the hooker. I was that fool.
I felt sorry for the man; he had a thick black moustache, like Inspector Clouseau. I also felt sorry for him because I knew what would happen once Dad heard him.
Dad slowed down and tilted his chin, as if smelling something. Then he stopped, turned around, and, in the midst of all the other parents, began telling this man what a cretin he was, how a hooker was only as good as the pack behind him, and how he ought to learn the basics of rugby before he opened his fat stupid mouth about it. There were some swear words too – a few muffled fucks – and a pre-scuffle face-off before Mum and the other man’s wife intervened.
I was mortified, as were Mum, my teammate and everybody else in a fifty-metre radius. And yet I was also happy. On the drive home I sat in the back, my forehead on the window, smiling all the way.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mum and Dad’s was a simple marriage, as plain and enduring as an old country barn. Dad made the money, Mum made the home. Every cent Dad earned he gave to Mum, to do with as she saw fit. Their trust was deep and implicit. ‘Your father is a great provider,’ Mum would say. And he was. Mum had everything she might want to make her life easier, including cleaners – a gay couple, Terry, who had a harelip, and Steve – and Mrs McIver to do the ironing. Mrs McIver was in her sixties; she was Hungarian, and had lived through the Nazi occupation of Budapest. She had lots of stories. One night the Gestapo hauled her husband out of bed, stripped him naked in the street below their window and, seeing he was circumcised, shot him dead on suspicion of being a Jew. And yet Mrs McIver still preferred the Nazis to the Jews, who she said had run the city like a cartel. ‘If you weren’t Jewish, you no get any work,’ she said, waving her finger. ‘You just starve.’ I was always fascinated with this story, by the counterintuitive nature of it, and by what it said about the complexity and power of prejudice. Mum was fascinated by it too: she and Mrs McIver were fond of one another.
So she had these things. But still she had to wage the long grey battle, the inglorious drudgery of lunch-making, school pick-ups, of swimming carnivals and bad report cards. For Dad, this would never have been enough – nothing was enough – but Mum was a gleaner, adept at savouring the ordinary, at spotting, through the dull scrim of domesticity, those fragments of meaning and beauty. She must have felt claustrophobic; she must have thought, as most people think at some stage of their marriage, ‘I cannot spend the rest of my life with this person.’ She must have looked for escape hatches, a way of saving herself, but she never let on. Instead, she put up with everything. Every night she dealt with Dad’s insults and provocations, parrying his blows, absorbing the impact on our behalf. Only rarely did she respond in kind. ‘You never ask about my day,’ she told Dad once, tremulous, in tears. ‘You don’t care what I do. You never ask about me.’
It was rarer still to see her angry. The first time was when I was about nine years old. Dad had come home early from work, in a rage. He and Mum were supposed to see Auntie Joanie that night for dinner, but Dad cancelled it, ruled it out on the spot, as if by decree, whereupon Mum snapped, snapped like a fanbelt on full rotation – bang! – discharging a series of shrieks and a strange growling I hadn’t heard before, telling us we could all get fucked and go to buggery, that she was sick to death of everything.
‘Get away from me!’ she yelled, fending us off. ‘I’ve had it with the lot of you.’
I remember the exotic species of confusion that inhabited the house at that moment. Dad’s the one who’s supposed to lose his temper . . . not Mum. She barricaded herself in the playroom with a bottle of brandy and concentrated on getting drunk, which was, along with losing her temper, something she never did. We all walked about the house gingerly, pausing in the hallways to exchange glances, puzzled and rueful, as if Mum were an antique piece of ordnance we somehow had to defuse.
After a while, I went to Dad, who was in the kitchen, still in his work suit. He was mixing a drink and ignoring Mum. ‘What do we do?’ I asked.
‘About your mother?’ he said. His fury, usually so ascendant, had been gazumped. ‘I don’t know . . . Go in and see how she is.’
And so in I went. She was sitting hunched over the table, staring down at nothing, her head in her hands. Her eyes were red. I was scared she would shoo me away again. I think she wanted to, but she couldn’t. She was too kind; that was her Achilles heel. And so she looked at me, and took me in her arms. ‘I’m not really sick of you,’ she said. ‘I’m just tired.’
There were other moments, too. By the time I was about nine or ten, Mum’s scoliosis had become quite bad. ‘That big hump on my back,’ she called it. It made her seem smaller than she was, and more vulnerable, and she was self-conscious about it. One night, in another rare moment of rage, she yelled at Dad, half crying, a phrase I will never forget. ‘I’m just your wrinkled bent-up old worm, aren’t I? A wrinkled bent-up old worm that you stick your old fella into whenever you feel like it.’ A part of me died when I heard this – Mum bent up, submissive, dad predatory. I didn’t mind when Dad yelled at me, or even when he yelled at her, but Mum calling herself a worm, that was too much.
*
Dad was inappropriate. Hugely, vastly, dangerously inappropriate. These days, he’d probably get arrested for some of the stuff he did. When Gina was in high school, she would have her teenage girlfriends stay the night. Dad woul
d regularly wait till they were walking down the hall then casually emerge, naked, from the bathroom. He did it again and again. ‘Ruined them for life,’ he would say. Gina reckoned that after a while her girlfriends came to expect it. Later I would discover that such hypersexuality – ripping your clothes off, craving sex – is common among bipolar depressives. But at the time we saw it as one of Dad’s idiosyncrasies; not part of his illness but part of him.
That’s the thing about being bipolar: it’s all or nothing; totally binary. Ninety percent of Dad’s life was spent in one of two states: a) Life is awful and I want to die, or b) Life is fantastic and I am invincible. Things were a whole lot more fun when he felt invincible, but this also had its challenges. One evening, when Gina was still in high school, Dad was driving her and a girlfriend to a party. When he reached the top of the hill at the end of our street, he saw five men standing there, blocking the road. Dad flashed his lights then waved at them to get out of the way, but they didn’t move. Instead of simply reversing the car and taking another route, Dad got out of the car and walked up to them, dispensing a little civics lecture as he did so.
They beat the shit out of him. They punched him to the ground and kicked him into the gutter, where they continued to kick him in the kidneys and the back of his head. Soon he was unconscious and bleeding heavily; the girls were hysterical. Gina begged them to stop: ‘You’re going to kill him!’ she screamed. Eventually someone came out of a nearby house and told the men to get lost, that the police were on their way. Dad was taken to hospital. When he was released, for some reason his shirt came with him, all shredded and red. He’d also been carrying his snuff box when it happened; it was later found by the roadside, squashed flat. Mum had it repaired, but it was never quite the same.
By the time I was in year nine, Dad’s behaviour was growing ever more erratic. He was being prescribed colossal doses of tranquillisers and antidepressants. One day, when Mum was getting his scripts filled, the chemist read the dosages and shook his head. ‘It’s too much,’ he told her. Mum shrugged. ‘What do you expect me to do?’
Farewell to the Father Page 8