There was another boy, John. He didn’t go to my school, but he lived nearby. I met him one afternoon in the street above our house, where I used to smash a tennis ball against the wall for hours, like a machine, until I was exhausted. I was going at it furiously one afternoon when John walked by, school bag slung casually over one shoulder, calm, unrushed, intriguingly at home in the world.
John also went to a private school, but had already rejected everything it stood for. He didn’t play footy or cricket. He didn’t plan on becoming a lawyer or a fund manager; he preferred art. He was practising to be a hippy and was, within the martial strictures of his school, trying to grow his hair. He also listened to Pink Floyd. Every weekend we would smoke dope and go skateboarding around the neighbourhood. Or we would get the bus to Manly, carrying our surfboards and a little backpack with dry undies, a banana and a five-dollar note.
I was drawn to John’s constancy and inner calm, perhaps because, like Dad, I was showing signs of being an improperly wired unit, a defective bulb, blazing one moment, blinking out the next. I frequently had the sensation that the world was in fast forward, just like on our VHS player. I became dizzy, and would have to close my eyes. I mentioned this to John, who said he had no idea what I was talking about. John seemed to have what Kahlil Gibran (who we were all reading) might call ‘inner peace’. His soul was a beautiful flame, which shone at the same steady rate, a comforting, mellow, golden glow, much like the colour of his hair. Standing beside John at a party, I always knew he was the main attraction, that I was the junior party. I got excited, said silly things. John never said anything silly, or at least nothing that sounded silly. I got pimples; John never got pimples. I felt improperly formed; John was a complete being. I got jealous of people, like John, whom I considered better than me. That’s another thing John would never do: get jealous.
Also, I had no sense of smell, by which I mean none: zero. When we went to a party, I relied on John for a quick ‘smell test’. He would run his nose over my armpit, then say: ‘You’re fine.’ He never made a big deal of it. I loved him for that.
I loved him, and I trusted him. But I never told him about Dad. That would have been a step too far. Besides, John was pretty smart, he probably already knew. He could sense things, like a cat.
*
Soon I stopped obsessing over nuclear war, which allowed me focus on other areas of concern, such as my penis. It wasn’t exactly small, but it wasn’t as big as I would’ve liked, and it certainly wasn’t as big as Grant’s. Grant was a school friend. He was tall and exceptionally good-looking, like a doctor on Days of Our Lives. He was so good-looking that he could wear a turtleneck sweater without looking ridiculous. He was so good looking, in fact, that Gina fancied him, which was weird. Grant played in the band at school, but they were thinking of chucking him out, because to have someone as good-looking as Grant detracted from their street cred.
Grant’s penis was five inches long. I knew this because he told me at every opportunity, and particularly during Maths in Society, also known as Maths in Space, which was the maths class for the boys who still counted using their fingers and toes. Grant also said his balls hung right down; he called it his ‘dillbag’. ‘It’s amazing. You should see it,’ he said.
I hadn’t measured my penis lately, but I doubted it would be five inches. It was probably more like four. But then Grant was a year older than me (he’d repeated), so there was a chance, however slim, that my penis would grow another inch in the next year. Or maybe I could stretch it? For a week or so I spent half an hour every night in bed pulling it from the end, like a rubber band, hoping this would elongate it permanently, but I soon got bored and stopped.
Then there was my face, significant elements of which drove me mental, beginning with my pimples. They were killing me. There was almost nothing I wouldn’t have given to wake up one morning and look in the mirror and not have my face resemble the surface of the moon. Mum had taken me to every dermatologist in Sydney. I tried creams, unguents, lotions; I modified my diet (less dairy, less sugar) and trialled various cleansing regimens. I also made sure I got plenty of sun. But the pimples were still there. They got so bad in year ten that I started putting on Mum’s foundation before school, to cover them up. This was a risky strategy, though: having bad skin was not as bad as people knowing you cared so much about having bad skin.
The other thing that annoyed me was my nose. It was broad, fleshy and slightly hooked at the end – or, rather, bent down, kind of abruptly flattened. Gina had this same nose; she said it looked like we had run into the back of a bus. That would be just like me: a puppy dog, always chasing something, trying to catch up. When I was younger I spent hours pushing up the end of my nose – the opposite of my penis technique – hoping that if I did it long enough and often enough, it would stay that way.
At night, after dinner, I went up to my room to study. I was trying to do better. But I was so stressed about everything. My penis. My pimples. My nose. My dad. I began to chew plastic, any plastic I could find. The lids of milk bottles were good. Bic biro caps, too, though they were harder, more brittle. You wanted the really soft, malleable stuff, like the strips that go around the necks of cream containers. So there I sat, every night, reading and writing and thinking, and furiously chewing all the time, extruding the milk bottle lids into long thin translucent strips which I then nibbled into smaller bits with my front teeth. I then spat out those smaller bits onto my desk, making a little pe-thooo sound. At the end of the night, my desk was covered in these bits, a snowfall of technicolour plastic flakes; blue, green, pink, red. I would sweep them off my desk and into a see-through Pyrex pencil box, where they collected, like layers of sedimentary rock or a Buddhist sand sculpture.
I also chewed my fingers. Not necessarily the nails, because I didn’t have any nails left, but the skin on the fingertips and around the knuckles. I nibbled around the nail, under the nail and down to the quick, and then I stripped the quick back, pulling it with my teeth, quickly, greedily. My fingers were always bleeding; they were ratty with skin flaps. When I surfed, the first ten minutes was agony. But I learned that it was just a matter of waiting. You wait long enough, and eventually everything goes numb.
*
Despite Dad, the door to our home was always open. This was the strangest thing, that our house of occasional horrors was known among friends – Rob, Gina and Cam’s, primarily, but eventually mine too – for the biggest and craziest parties, huge rambling affairs with hundreds of people everywhere, people in the pool, people in the bushes, people in the bedrooms having sex, people vomiting on Mum’s azaleas. There were people getting together, people breaking up, people falling down, people passing out. People breathing clouds of steel-blue dope smoke, people spilling beer on the couches; people taking Mum’s favourite framed pieces of tapestry off the wall (she loved needlework) and saying: ‘What the fuck is this shit?’ Idiot people scratching my favourite records, other idiot people burning their tongues on overheated party pies, or cramming into the kitchen at the end of the night, ashing into the sink and onto the floor and refusing to go home; people waking up in the garden the next morning and coming in for breakfast.
Mum and Dad loved these parties. They liked to see people, particularly young people, enjoying themselves; they were drawn to displays of excess. If the police came, Dad dealt with them, inviting them in, offering them a drink. In the midst of the chaos, he would suddenly appear, popping up beside me like an advertisement for irresponsible parenting. ‘Do you have enough grog?’ he’d yell. ‘Are you absolutely sure? Do you want me to drive up to the bottle shop and get some more?’
It was important to provide for your guests, to be a good host, to throw all your furniture on the bonfire of life and count the cost tomorrow. In Dad’s cosmos, running out of grog at your own party was symptomatic of some deep and irredeemable character flaw.
*
When Rob lived at
home, he grew dope in the bottom garden, with Mum and Dad’s consent. (They believed it was inevitable we would experiment with drugs, and so it was better we did it at home.) When Rob moved out, I took over his crop, and eventually planted my own. The plants grew like mad into small trees, thick-trunked, with broad ‘hands’ of leaves that glowed greenly in the sun, an electric, vibratory, high-frequency emerald. When it rained, they put on a foot or two in a week. I began taking a connoisseur’s interest in their propagation. I learned that only the females produced ‘heads’, the potent flowering part of the plant, and so I carefully eradicated the males. I regularly tipped them, pinching off the uppermost buds, to keep them squat and bushy. I watered and weeded and fertilised them; they were my babies. Every day after school, I raced down to check on them, examining them for new growth, plumping up their bushy leaves, clipping and pruning them like prized poodles.
A large part of the enjoyment was simply seeing new life; the same reward that all gardeners get. The other part of the enjoyment was, of course, getting stoned. I began to smoke a lot of dope: off and on during the week, every weekend, and every day during school holidays. I came to relish getting stoned – the sweet scorching smoke, the sting on the back of my throat, the brief dizziness, then the thrumming warmth that crept, tide-like, up the back of my skull. Marijuana was my magic carpet: it calmed me down and lifted me up, it brought me out of myself and made me talk, while at the same time smoothing off the improper edges of my jagged and irregular personality. Or at least that’s what I thought it did.
John also liked smoking dope. On the weekends, when Mum and Dad were out, we would sit in the playroom and smoke bongs – I had made one out of a length of bamboo, the mouthpiece sandpapered to a satiny finish – then watch surf videos, or play ping-pong on a table we set up out the front of the house. We would cook pancakes and eat them with sugar and lemon, and go skateboarding.
Smoking was a distraction. When I smoked, I rarely thought about Dad. I didn’t feel guilty, or worried; I felt happy. It’s impossible to feel unhappy when you are playing ping-pong stoned. But dope was what psychologists might call a ‘negative coping mechanism’. I wish someone had taught me meditation. I doubt I would have done it, but at least I would have had an option. Instead, I sucked bongs. And pipes; I liked pipes, because I could carry them around anywhere. I remember sitting in my room one night, at my desk, and smoking a pipe. The next thing I remember is waking up on my back, staring at the ceiling, wondering where I was. I was still in my chair, but I had passed out and fallen backwards. I don’t know how long I’d been on the ground. That was another gazillion brain cells gone, right there.
I regret smoking all that dope, just as I regret all the other stupid drugs I did. If I could take it all back, I would, in a flash. When people say they don’t have any regrets, I think: really? I have plenty of regrets. I certainly regret all those neurons turned to ash; my brain, my mind, the seat of my sanity, that delicate tissue of axons and synapses, the slick wet muck of selfhood, all of it muddled up and messed with, violently, repeatedly, night after night.
There’d be a price to pay, but that was years down the track.
CHAPTER NINE
In winter of 1986, when I was about sixteen, lots of the boys in my year went to Inverell, in northern New South Wales, for a party that the boarders called a B&S – short for bachelor and spinster ball. I didn’t want to go, since there would be lots of new people there, and meeting new people was my least favourite activity. It was so exhausting. Whenever I met someone new – in fact, often even before I’d met someone new – I immediately assumed they were better than me, either because of their brains or their hairstyle or their cool clothes or some other indefinable yet powerful attribute I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Most new people therefore filled me with a sense of mild shame, resentment or fear, or a mixture of all three, until I got to know them better and found at least a couple of reasons why they weren’t as good as I had initially imagined. Of course, there was the occasional person whom I immediately ranked below me, but these specimens were so demonstrably sad and lost that the only appropriate response was pity.
But there was another reason I didn’t want to go to Inverell: Dad. He had been particularly bad, and I didn’t want to leave Mum. And yet she insisted I go. She virtually pushed me out the door. Country people were ‘great fun’, she said. ‘It’ll be good for you. You’ll see.’
We caught an old Greyhound on a Saturday morning from Central Station. The seat cushions were soft and deep, infused, like giant sponges, with the flatulence of ten thousand bottoms. I sat down and looked out the window, noting the large and structurally robust booger that my seat’s previous occupant had conscientiously smeared from one corner to the other.
The trip took eight hours. I was staying with a school mate, a boarder named Bernie, whose dad was a farmer. Late that afternoon, once I’d got set up in Bernie’s house, I called home, worried that Dad might have done something stupid. He answered the phone, so he was still alive, but only just: he sounded catastrophically despondent, and very tired – exhausted, perhaps, from locating all those tall buildings to throw himself off. The usual guilt rushed in on me, surging in waves down the line, only magnified now by the fact that I was not there, and by the sense I had that Dad was making a genuine (though woefully inadequate) effort to disguise his unhappiness. Mum then got on the phone and told me not to worry, to forget about Dad, that he would be fine, that I should just relax and enjoy myself. This was too much: I hung up the phone and burst into tears, which worked out okay, because Bernie had a younger sister who rushed out and gave me a big hug.
The party was large, and loud. The country boys illustrated how much thicker their skulls were by crushing beer cans into their foreheads. It was freezing, so there were fires in barrels, and way off, in the darkness and the long grass, couples rolling around pashing furiously for hours, like snakes locked onto one another via their mouthparts. At one point a friend of mine threw a full glass of beer into my face, which stung my eyes. I was sitting on a hay bale, away from the party, trying to recover, tasting beer draining down my tear ducts, when a girl walked up, a small girl with big brown eyes.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
I explained what had happened.
‘What an idiot!’ she said.
I said I didn’t really want to talk to anyone, that big parties weren’t my thing.
‘I know what you mean,’ she said, adding that she preferred just hanging around the house and reading books and watching videos and sleeping. She said that her idea of a great weekend was sleeping till midday and then lying in bed reading Anna Karenina. I had seen this book on Gina’s bedside table, and thought it looked incredibly long and boring.
‘Have you read it?’ she asked.
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But I really want to.’
She had on a black dress with a close-fitting top that showed off her boobs, which I had to make a Herculean effort not to stare at. Her name was Margot. She made a big deal of formally introducing herself, shaking my hand and leaning up to kiss me on the cheek. It turned out she went to a school just up the road from mine. My bus went straight past her bus stop. ‘I’ll look out for you when you go past,’ she said. ‘Can you wave to me?’
The next morning, on the bus back to Sydney, Bernie came and sat next to me. ‘Hey,’ he said, reaching into his pocket and handing me a scrap of paper. ‘One of her girlfriends who knows my girlfriend gave me this to give to you.’
It was a phone number, and the word ‘Margot’.
*
When I got home, I found out that Dad had indeed attempted suicide while I was gone. It was the same thing: pills and booze. This prompted a renewed discussion among Mum and us kids about what to do. We all agreed that Dad’s behaviour had become worse. His looniness had ratcheted up another level or two: he had been writing abusive letters to my school about how complace
nt and backward it was – ‘benighted’ was the word he used – before Mum convinced him to stop. He’d also been running harder and longer; he would come back looking like he had been dancing on hot coals, teeth bared, hair standing on end. He’d even started a weight-training regime, lying on the dining room floor and pumping iron for an hour or two at night, like an eighteen-year-old. I see now that this was his way of burning off the constant anxiety – those churning turbines, the gyroscopic whirring in your head – that is one of the hallmarks of clinical depression.
‘Sublimation,’ he said to me one day. ‘Do you know what that means?’
‘No.’
‘It means that because I can’t make love to your mother, I have to get rid of my energy some other way.’
The outlandish highs he’d once experienced had also become less frequent. In their place came desolating lows, deep valleys of long, ferocious sorrowing. He cried a fair bit. For the first time he began to look physically sick: he’d lost a lot of weight from all the exercise and was gaunt around the eyes; he started to get that hollow, forsaken expression common to mentally ill people. He would sit at the kitchen table staring at the bay, grinding those big, boulder-like molars of his, and go on about what a failure he had been and how everything was over for him, long, gouging monologues, his mind an open wound, bleeding bile. Then, rising from the table, he would stand unsteadily, banging against the kitchen door, his spatial awareness blitzed by brandy and tranquillisers, and follow Mum or me, or both of us, around the house, yelling and leaning and pointing, a walking avalanche, a pile of rocks set to bury us in anguish.
I wanted to shake him, grab him by the shoulders, scream in his face: ‘What is wrong with you? Why can’t you be happy? Please, God, just be fucking happy!’
Mum had talked to Nan Ell about Dad: she told her he was sick and needed help, that we all needed help. And yet there was something in Nan that prevented her from accepting this and assuming a more constructive role. She would suggest that Mum was exaggerating, that ‘it couldn’t possibly be as bad as all that’. And, true, if you weren’t around Dad all the time, if you only saw him when he was ‘good’, it was impossible to imagine him when he was bad. At other times, though, Nan Ell would hint that Mum was at least partly to blame. And she would always remind Mum of her nuptial obligations: ‘In sickness and in health, Rosie dear,’ she’d say. ‘For better or worse.’
Farewell to the Father Page 10