The drugs turned Dad into a zombie. They slowed him down at work; consultations became unbearably slow; Mum had to frantically reschedule patients, juggle appointments. They also made him impotent. ‘I can’t make love to your mother any more,’ he told me one afternoon, despondent. ‘Does that matter?’ I replied. I meant that if not being able to have sex with Mum was the price he had to pay for being sane, it might be worth it. ‘Yes, it matters,’ he said.
And so he would go off the meds, which was when he became hyper; his lips would froth, his eyes would bulge and go wide and white, like a wild animal’s. Rob and Gina had recently moved out: Rob to a semi nearby, Gina to a flat on the other side of the city. I couldn’t blame them – not that it stopped me from blaming them. But it left Camilla, Mum and I to cope alone, the three of us scurrying about like firemen below a burning building, a sheet spread wide to catch Dad as he fell.
And then, in between mania and catatonia, came the blackness. There were more threats of suicide, more attempts at suicide. I want to die; I can’t go on. I’m going to do it; you can’t stop me. We were at Palm Beach, on holiday, in 1985; Dad had stayed home – to finish up some work, he said. Then there was a phone call from a neighbour: Dad had taken an overdose and drunk a bottle of gin. (Mum had got rid of the rifle years before.) She raced back and had him checked into hospital.
Each of these attempts seemed more serious than the last; each left us horrified and scoured out, as if by a bout of dysentery. Worst of all, it left us angry. You’ve no idea how exhausting it is to feel both intensely sorry for and ragingly furious with someone at the same time. It tears your head in two. More than anything in the world, I wanted to make Dad happy. At the same time, I half hoped he would die. Then I wouldn’t have to tiptoe around the house, I wouldn’t have to hide him from my friends, I wouldn’t have to worry about him flipping out and hurting Mum. I wouldn’t have to stop myself from laughing too loudly or feeling too sad, I wouldn’t have to second-guess whether he was in a good mood or a bad mood or when him asking ‘How are you?’ meant ‘How are you?’ and not ‘Get out of my house, you dopey bloody boy!’
But most of all I wouldn’t have to live with the constant fear that he was going to kill himself, because he would already be dead. The possibility felt irresistible. If Dad killed himself, everything would be resolved. Sure, it would be ugly, and painful, but it would be over. People would feel sorry for him and sorry for Mum and, more importantly, they would feel sorry for me, which would be nice, and then we could all move on, unencumbered, to our new and happier lives.
Dad knew this too. ‘You don’t love me,’ he would say. ‘You are all sick of me. You want me to be gone.’
So there was guilt, too. You can’t admit to yourself that you want your Dad dead without generating some heavy-duty, industrial-grade guilt. And so I would try to squelch down that secret hope, try to forget I’d ever thought it. But it didn’t work. The thought was still there, and the guilt was still there: guilt everywhere, splashed all over the walls and the drawers, and on the carpet; guilt in the shower, where I’d go to cry (so Mum couldn’t hear); guilt in my sleep.
There was also a lot of worry. ‘Worry’ is such a plain word – such a plain, unremarkable emotion – but this worry was something else altogether, a type of psychic infestation, everywhere and all at once, relentlessly intrusive, like lantana; it’s the kind of worry that makes you thin, that makes your food taste strange. The kind of worry that explains how Mum and I found ourselves in the car, one autumn afternoon, surreptitiously following Dad as he went for his jog. He had been threatening suicide so relentlessly that we were convinced he was about to throw himself under a bus, and we wanted to be there when he did it. Not so we could stop it necessarily, although that would have been good, but just so we could see it. So we’d at least know what happened. So we could tell the others.
And so. There we were. Our happy little family. Mum worrying about Dad, us worrying about Dad and Mum, Mum worrying about everyone, Dad worrying about himself. Rob and Gina were gone, and Cam was seventeen, which meant she could drive away, escape. But I was only thirteen. I had no money, no car. I was stuck in the house, marooned with Mum and Dad and all that dread. Sometimes, when I opened the front door, I swear I had to push all the harder just to get in, what with all that grief piled up like a snow drift on the inside of the house.
*
Summertime, just me and Mum, having dinner. Dad wasn’t home from work yet. I was still in school uniform. An extravagant sunset, all apricot and blood orange, blazed away outside, while the cockatoos screeched rudely. We were sitting at the fake-wood table on wheels that we had pulled into the centre of the playroom, eating a lovely, tender rump steak, with Mum’s special sauce – tomato sauce, brown sugar and Worcestershire – when we heard the key in the front door. The door wheezed open and hit the back wall with a BANG! Dad’s heavy steps coming down the hallway. Then he was there, at the door, in his ash-grey suit, briefcase in his hand. He paused, then yanked off his tie like he intended to do something with it.
‘Darling,’ said Mum.
Dad said nothing, just stared at our plates.
‘Steak,’ he said. ‘Rump steak.’ His voice was trembling. ‘I hope you enjoy it.’
I looked down at the steak, which suddenly looked much less appetising.
‘What are you waiting for?’ he yelled, making me jump. ‘Go on, eat it up!’
‘Darling—’ Mum began.
‘I go to work every fucking day so you can eat your fucking steak dinner, so I just hope you make the most of it.’
‘Max,’ said Mum. ‘Max.’
But Dad had already turned and was walking away. We listened, our breaths held tight; we listened to his huge shoes on the carpeted stairs, the shuffle-thump, shuffle-thump, and we dared not say one single word.
*
Mum once said she was amazed how much can go over a kid’s head. ‘They are remarkably resilient,’ she said. The same goes for teenagers. It’s hard to say what goes in and what doesn’t, what slides off and what sinks in. But one thing’s for sure: no matter the dysfunction of their surroundings, teenagers will always find ways to have fun, because fun is what teenagers do.
Most of my fun had migrated now from fishing to more sophisticated pursuits, such as music (I collected records) and poetry – really bad poetry, the sugary, high-calorie stuff that every kid with a love of words inevitably gets a taste for. I wrote this poetry everywhere: on my desk, on my schoolbooks, on random bits of paper. The poetry was about old drunks, dreams (‘That shy ghost who only taps me from behind / Came upon me just last night . . .’) and Dad. Dad got a kick out of it – not the poems themselves, but just the fact I was writing them. One night, out of the blue, he came in and hugged me, clapping me hard between the shoulder blades with his enormous hands: ‘You are in love with the right things,’ he said. ‘Music and words.’ Clap clap clap. Boom boom boom.
I was also a bit in love with Rob’s Playboy collection, which I stealthily appropriated, one magazine at a time, hoping he wouldn’t notice. This happened around the time that I discovered girls, though I would never have put the Playboy girls and those Real Girls in the same category: the magazines satisfied a purely physiological imperative; they were good for one thing only, much like a toothpick or a backscratcher. You got them out, scratched your back, so to speak, then put them away and didn’t think of them until your back got itchy again, which for a teenage boy could be anywhere between four minutes and twenty-four hours later. Real girls were completely different. Real girls were the Magical Other, mystical, not sexual, or at least not immediately so. They were more of an idea, and if an idea is good enough, it’ll stay on your mind all day.
The first girl to stay on my mind like that was Jess. Jess lived next door. She moved there when I was about fifteen, just showing up one day, like a convenient plot development. Jess had straight brown hair
and was exceptionally pretty, with a ski-jump nose and impertinent, questioning eyes. She seemed very light on her feet; she didn’t walk so much as trip or bounce along, like a ball of fluff in a breeze.
Outside of Dad, Jess was the most melodramatic person I had ever met. ‘I’m going to die before I’m thirty,’ she told me one day, very solemnly, while we were sitting by the pool.
‘Really? What makes you say that?’ I asked.
‘A fortune teller told me.’
I presume she thought such statements would make her mysterious. Instead, they made her ridiculous. The last thing I needed was another person telling me they were going to die. And yet she was still alluring. I remember the first time we kissed, which was the first time I had kissed any girl. We were sitting beside each other on the uncomfortable wooden fence beneath our big rotting banana tree, which never produced any bananas, when I suddenly leaned over and put my mouth on hers. It was an act of courage beyond anything I had ever attempted, but the instant I did it I felt rewarded. A kind of charge went through me, something electric. Her tongue, her lips, a bit of teeth, too. A door swung open, and a whole world lay before me, green fields, hidden valleys, untapped and unexplored.
*
Jess had guinea pigs that lived in a cage in the gap between our houses. I would play with these animals, which were unbearably soft and vulnerable. I could feel their internal organs and bones, likes twigs, poking through their slippery folds of velvety fur. It made me uncomfortable, as if I might at any moment suddenly squeeze them too tight, crushing them. But in the end, one of our cats ate them. Jess had left the cage door ajar.
Jess hung around our place quite a bit. She would simply ‘pop over’, just like a real girlfriend. She called Dad ‘Dr Elliott’. (Her dad was a doctor too, but he didn’t live with them: her parents had split up.) She regarded Dad knowingly. I never told her about him; I just assumed that Dad’s madness was apparent to most females, who, as far as I could tell, operated via some super-sensitive emotional radar.
One night, Dad and Mum offered to take Jess and me on a ‘date’, to dinner and a movie – Octopussy. Dad behaved impeccably at dinner: entertaining but not overbearing, gentle with me, respectful of Mum and courteous with Jess; he was everything I wanted him to be. During the movie, there was a scene in which the Soviet villain, General Orlov, plants a rough kiss on an unwilling Octopussy, grabbing her behind the head as she struggles to break free. When their mouths pulled apart they remained linked for one shocking moment by a long strand of saliva, gossamer-thin, glinting in the backlight. It was a memorable scene, very real, very messy. Very ‘adult’.
A week or so later, Jess came over to our house. It was a Saturday: Mum and Dad were playing golf; there was nobody home. We went upstairs to Rob’s room, which was actually Cam’s room now that Rob had moved out. Cam had a double bed in there with fancy brass fittings. Jess and I lay on the bed and began kissing. I thought of the scene in the movie, and briefly considered injecting more saliva into my kissing, but I was afraid of slobbering on Jess’s face. Instead, I took off my top then I took off her top. She then suggested we take off our pants, leaving only our underwear – a huge development. For some time we wrestled in our undies, ramming pieces of our anatomy together in a fashion that was, for me at least, both exhilarating and extremely painful. We were curious, and very horny, but not brave enough to go all the way. After a while, we threw in the towel: neither of us had had much satisfaction, but it was a step in the right direction.
Jess had disappeared. I went downstairs and found her vigorously pacing in the shallow end of the pool. I called down: ‘What are you doing?’
‘Sperm are attracted to moisture,’ she said. ‘This way they will come out into the water and not go up, into me.’
For the first time in my life, I felt an inkling of what it might be like to be a man. A man, with sperm. Sperm that can make babies.
‘Wow – okay,’ I said. Then I went into the kitchen and made myself a piece of cinnamon toast, just the way Mum made it, with lots of melted golden salty butter.
*
As it turned out, Jess had her own issues. Her father was a surgeon who had been struck off for reasons that remained unclear. Mum and Dad occasionally spoke disparagingly about him. He was tall, and well fed, with swept-back blond hair and a large-breasted girlfriend named Svetlana, whom Jess described as a viperous blood-sucking airhead. He would show up to collect Jess, tooling down our street in his Rolls-Royce convertible, the top down, Svetlana propped beside him wearing a gold lamé jacket with shoulder pads. Jess would look at me and roll her eyes.
This was the difference between Jess and me. Jess knew her dad was flawed, while I somehow, inexplicably, still regarded my father as all but perfect. Jess had lost her innocence early, but I had a long way to go.
Her worldliness intimidated me. One day we were by the pool when I noticed that the crotch of Jess’s one-piece was blood-red. She was having her period, right there. So I said, ‘Hey, Jess, I think you’re bleeding.’ She sat up and looked between her legs. She was mortified, but also matter-of-fact. There was no carry-on. She went home and got changed then came straight back.
*
So, were Jess and I actually ‘going out’? Were we ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’? We had kissed, and rolled around on Cam’s bed. We had even been on a date, albeit with Mum and Dad. So did that mean we were ‘together’? It was hard to tell. The uncertainty of this concerned me, a concern that inevitably morphed into a worry, a minor one, but a worry all the same, and one which I dutifully filed away in the cupboard of worries I carted around in my head, somewhere between Dad Dying and Me Failing School and Becoming A Plumber.
Soon, however, another, bigger worry came along: Nuclear Armageddon. This seemed pretty much a certainty. People said that America and Russia had enough atomic bombs between them to blow the world to pieces. I lay in bed picturing a ragged chunk of Australia, the part that included Sydney, floating into outer space, our house tumbling through the darkness. This coming war was in the news all the time: Sting had even written a song about it, in which he talked about how the Russians loved their children too. But what would Sting know? Everyone said the Russians were maniacs who wouldn’t mind one bit if their kids died, so long as Communism won.
The most frustrating thing about this inevitable world-ending war was the fact I had just got a new surfboard, with orange on the deck and bright yellow rails. I remember standing on the balcony one Wednesday afternoon after school, staring at the sky and praying to whatever greater power might be out there to hold off with the war until the weekend, when I would get the chance to try it out.
*
Despite the pervert teachers and senile headmaster, I didn’t mind Shore. From other boys, I got the impression that hating school was compulsory. But school didn’t merit that level of emotion: it simply wasn’t that bad. It also got me out of the house for eight hours a day. At football training, two nights a week, I would beg the coach to stay longer, plead with the other boys to hang around, run through more plays. They thought I was a loser. ‘I want to go home, Elliott, you dickhead,’ they would say. But home was the last place I wanted to go.
Friends-wise, my first two to three years were a kind of false start, a period when I somehow got mixed up with the wrong people. By ‘wrong people’ I don’t mean the ‘bad’ kids – quite the opposite: these guys were good students and excellent at sport; they even attended Christian fellowship groups. But they weren’t interested in listening to music or talking to girls. In fact, when I mentioned that I had been hanging out with Jess, one of them said I ‘must be gay or something’, a proposition so illogical that it pre-empted rebuttal.
I also wanted to be cool. I wanted to live a little. I wanted to go to parties and drink beer and smoke cigarettes and indulge in some conventional, age-appropriate delinquency; I couldn’t see any of that happening with these guys.
And so I did something I could scarcely have thought myself capable of: I dumped them. One day, at recess, I just walked away from the group and didn’t talk to them again. I think some of them were hurt; I’d see in them a certain wounded look when our eyes met across the playground. When our paths crossed in the hallways or at the lockers, they wouldn’t acknowledge me; they wouldn’t say my name. I didn’t blame them. I deserved it.
By the end of year nine, I’d got to know a new group, which was headed by a tall skinny boy named Andrew Valder. Because of his last name, everyone called him Vader, as in Darth Vader, from Star Wars. It was a good nickname: commanding, slightly intimidating, a little sinister. He had big googly eyes and a narrow, almost fishy face. He had gone to the prep school with some of the other boys in the group, with whom he formed a band called the Powerheads; Andrew was the lead singer. They did Rolling Stones covers, and an original song called ‘Off Me!’, about people who stand so close when they talk to you that you eventually have to tell them, ‘Off me!’ I preferred the Stones covers.
Status at school was determined by how well you played football, or how smart you were, or if girls liked you, or if you played in a band. (That last category outranked all the others.) Andrew ticked all of these boxes, except maybe for football. But even then, he had turned this deficit into a credit simply by not caring about it. Andrew was terrible at rugby. He played in the lower teams, but he didn’t take it seriously: he mucked around, which was cool. I was terrible at rugby but I did care, which was uncool.
There were other boys: Ross, Tim, Bernard, Garth. Some of them had been friends for years and had formed an invisible ring, a circle of friendship. I only ever sat on the periphery. Andrew was nice to me; they were all nice to me. But I could never know them like they knew each other. I was an outsider, always standing on tiptoes, straining to look in.
Farewell to the Father Page 9