When I was in year ten, Dad wanted to retire. Work was becoming impossible. The only problem was money. I still had three years left of private school, and Camilla might want at some stage to go to uni or need help to buy a house. (She had, by this stage, moved out and into her boyfriend’s apartment, nearby.) And so Mum and Dad suggested to Nan that she give them Dad’s share of the paintings, his inheritance, in advance. They could then sell them and invest the money. But Nan refused. That would not be fair on Bubby (her nickname for Faye). She couldn’t possibly think of it. No, the paintings would stay where they were, safe and sound on the walls of her penthouse. Dad would have to wait.
*
We began to fear for Mum. Dad had attacked her before, twice, each episode followed by studied remorse and a week or two of abject grovelling. Mum had told him that if he hurt her again, she would leave. And yet this was a huge gamble: another woman she knew had recently left her husband, who then killed himself. ‘I’m not sure I could ever forgive myself,’ she told us.
We talked about having Dad scheduled, but that was not going to work – he was a doctor, he would simply check himself out, or so we thought. Then, after another suicide attempt, in July of my last year of school, Dad agreed to a two-week stay in a psychiatric clinic. Mum and I drove him there – it was close to home, within walking distance. Outside the clinic, lining the path, were severely clipped hedges with tiny shiny leaves and, above our heads, banks of pink cherry blossoms in early bloom: their festive-looking flowers lay everywhere, in the garden, on the footpath, on the bonnets of cars. ‘Aren’t they lovely?’ Mum cooed, almost to herself.
We entered the clinic to check Dad in. The receptionist was calm and polite, just as if we were at a flashy hotel. Dad was assigned a room, an innocuous, hyper-sanitised space, the clinical nature of which immediately underscored the frayed and chaotic nature of Dad’s misery. Would it kill them to put a poster up? I thought. A little colour? I understood that it was important not to set people off, that this was a place for people whose minds were already in a state of ongoing immolation, but by the time I passed through the door of his room even I felt as if a small part of me had shrivelled up and died.
On a table at home in the TV room was a photo of Mum and Dad standing on the beach at Hawks Nest; it had been taken on a recent holiday. It was just the two of them, arm in arm, Mum with her mouth open wide, laughing, Dad smiling. Mum brought this photo to the hospital to leave with Dad. On the back she had written a message: Please try harder than you have ever tried before to get better . . . Dad put the photo on the bedside table, then looked around, as if hunting for a structural weakness, a crack in the wall where he might tunnel out. He had only agreed to this treatment for Mum. He didn’t believe it would work. He said he would never get better, that it was ‘all spot welding’, that his ship would finally crack apart altogether. Mum said that was nonsense. People got better all the time. There were new treatments, new drugs. I told him we loved him, and we all wanted him to be well and happy, and I needed him around. But he didn’t care; he wasn’t listening to me. He never listened to me.
Late that night, I awoke suddenly, sharply, as if someone had yanked my hair. My heart was hammering, my skin was hot; one emotion asserted itself upon me: guilt. It was so urgent I had to get up; my legs wouldn’t stay still. I paced around my room, rubbing my forehead, wringing my hands. I felt hot inside; I had a lake of guilt inside me, a big burning lake of it. Dad was in the hospital, in the dark, in that shitty little room, alone, and I had done nothing to save him. I had let him go. I was here, in his house, under his roof, the puniest kind of traitor.
CHAPTER TEN
One of the most painful aspects of depression is its reductive power, its tendency to reduce the sufferer to an intellectual skeleton of their former selves. It’s like putting a piece of meat in boiling water – gradually the juicy bits flake away, until all you’re left with is bone. This is why depressives are so boring to be around: all the interesting bits have gone.
This is exactly what happened to Dad. He used to love art and could talk for hours about the Heidelberg School – Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder. Not any more. He used to love watching rugby. Not now. Music? Forget it. And words! Dad had the best vocabulary of anyone I’ve known: when I was growing up, if ever there was a word I didn’t know, Mum always told me to ‘ask your father’. But by the time I was in year eleven, he’d long since stopped reading. His concentration was blown. He’d even stopped showing interest in his Porsche. It just sat in the garage, seizing up, a target for local kids who took to chiselling the logo off the bonnet every couple of months. His life had been reduced to two fanatical yet essentially rather bland pursuits: running and working.
By the time I was sixteen, even work had become too much. The waiting list in his rooms was untenable. His colleagues had always considered Dad a ‘larger than life’ character – ‘Mad Max’ and all that. Now they suspected he was just plain mad. Dad’s consultations became so long that, as I later discovered, some of his junior doctors began privately questioning his ability to function. There were other things, too. One afternoon he got into a fight with another driver in the hospital car park, and was later caught keying his car. (The police got involved, but they quickly realised Dad was nuts.) For someone who prided himself on his physical bravery, this was an unbearable ignominy.
And so, at the start of my final year at school, Dad retired. Initially, we saw this as a positive development. He would have more time to spend with Mum and us, more time to travel, to go to art galleries, to see old friends. He could play more golf!
Dad and Mum did go on a few holidays: they saw the Twelve Apostles, driving the Great Ocean Road in the newly serviced Porsche; they saw an Old Masters exhibition at the National Gallery in Canberra. (I later learned a psychiatrist had warned Mum not to go on a holiday alone with Dad, but she ignored this advice.) They went to plays. There were also a few weekends away together: I remember them walking up the steps, waving goodbye, bags packed, smiles on their faces; they were really trying.
I loved having the house to myself. I’d lie on the couch by the window in the TV room, reading, with Grey Puss in my lap, occasionally staring up at the oak tree, at its canopy and the leaves and the sun shining through it. Or I would have friends over without worrying that Dad would do something weird.
But most often I would call Margot. She didn’t have a license, so I would drive over and pick her up. We’d buy a couple of bottles of Seaview champagne, and lie by the pool and drink them. Or we’d walk out to Cremorne Point with a picnic blanket and some roast chicken, and sit on the grass and eat the chicken and drink the champagne and watch the sunset. There was a low hanging tree we always sat under. We kissed a lot. Nothing had ever felt so good to me. A couple of weeks later, while sitting under our tree on the point, I told Margot I loved her. She said she loved me too. Then I burst into tears.
Margot’s family owned a farm and sometimes I’d go there with them on weekends. Just away from the main house was a barn where Margot and I would disappear for hours and have sex. Her mother would storm down and stand below the window, hands on her hips: ‘Margot, what are you doing up there?’ she would yell. ‘Come down this minute!’ We would have sex down by the river on a towel, toes grinding in the damp sand, sex on the hot prickly grass, the sun on our bums.
Margot smoked cigarettes all the time. She had a bob haircut, and listened to a song by New Order called ‘Blue Monday’, again and again. She and her girlfriends went to nightclubs, usually The Exchange, in Oxford Street, where she somehow convinced the doormen to let them in, despite the fact that they were only in year ten. She was the youngest of three children: her brother and sister were both gay, which seemed impossibly exotic. Her parents didn’t really get along. Her father smoked a pipe, drank hugely, and spoke in a constant stream of Dickensian aphorisms, such as ‘Any port in a storm’ and ‘Many a mickle makes a muckl
e.’ I never understood what he meant; Margot would have to translate.
She nicknamed me Tim Tam Orangutan, if for no other reason than it rhymed; some of her girlfriends even called me this. It was meant to be cute, but I was not entirely comfortable with the monkey-ish connotations. I could never understand what she saw in me, which made me feel exposed, as if I might be the victim of some elaborate trick. But I would have done anything for her.
One night we went to an Eddie Murphy movie with some friends. It was cold inside the cinema and Margot hadn’t brought a jacket. She asked me for my jumper, which I took off and gave to her. I’ll never forget the way she sat there, conspicuously content, nudging her girlfriends, who would look over and giggle as I sat rubbing my arms, trying to keep warm.
Soon after that, a group of us went to dinner up the road from our place at a restaurant called Mr Chan’s. Mr Chan’s was very cheap – not quite a ‘chew ’n’ spew’, but not far off. Most importantly, it was the kind of place where the owner didn’t bat an eyelid at a bunch of underage kids getting blind drunk, so long as they ordered plenty of Sichuan beef and honey king prawns.
Margot and I were there, and John, plus a guy called Dom, whose dad was a barrister, and Ed, whose dad was some hotshot judge, as well as a friend from school who was also called Tim. Tim played guitar. He was tall and spoke German; he had just come back from a student exchange to Berlin. I used to be intimidated by him, and jealous, too, particularly of his friendship with Andrew Valder, to whom he was close. And yet I knew Tim liked me. He and I had recently gone to see The Breakfast Club, and we got stoned together in the toilets beforehand.
At Mr Chan’s, we ate san choy bow and spring rolls, smoked lots of cigarettes and drank Yellowglen champagne at $4.99 a bottle. I brought a cask of white wine – De Bortoli Premium Chardonnay. I hadn’t learned to enjoy beer yet, so I drank wine by the schooner. Before long I was drunk, and lost in a conversation with John about how to dub music from cassette tape to cassette tape, which I had just figured out how to do. This was good, because there was some really cool music you could only get on cassettes. Soon, however, I noticed that Tim and Margot had disappeared. I got up and wandered outside onto the street, where I found them looking a little startled.
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Hi,’ they replied in unison. Margot was smoking.
‘What are you guys doing?’
‘Just talking,’ Margot said.
Tim nodded, his hands in his pockets. He wasn’t looking at me, but at the ground.
I knew something had gone on. I could feel it. There was something in the air, hanging between us, a little cloud of awkwardness. She’s been kissing him, I thought. That’s it. I can tell. Then I thought: Maybe she hasn’t. Maybe I’m being paranoid.
‘Oh my God,’ I said, apropos of nothing. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and Margot was still smoking her cigarette, so I went back inside, by myself.
The next day, I asked Margot what had happened with Tim on the street. ‘What do you mean happened?’ she said. ‘Nothing happened.’ Apparently Tim had been very upset about his brother, who was a drug addict, and he had cried about it, and she had hugged him. I liked Tim, and I loved Margot, and so I put it out of my mind.
*
Margot did drugs I’d never heard of, like speed. You bought it by the gram, which didn’t look like much, in little plastic snap-lock bags. On speed, you could dance forever, which didn’t interest me in the slightest, and go clubbing all night, which likewise didn’t interest me. What did interest me was keeping up with Margot, and being cool. One day in the kitchen, after school, I mentioned to Mum how I felt daggy and vulnerable around Margot, and we eventually drilled down to the fact that it was about the speed. Margot had tried it and I hadn’t. Halfway through the conversation, Dad walked in and overheard us. ‘Well, we’ll buy you some speed!’ he said. ‘Darling, how do we get some speed for the boy?’
Mum told him to be quiet, firmly but gently, like she was shushing a baby.
*
Dad’s retirement proved, for the most part, a disaster. Sure, he had plenty of free time, but for the depressed person, the concept of free time is meaningless. Their anxiety makes it impossible for them to relax, and all those unchained hours get sucked into the grinding maw of fretful melancholy that defines their condition.
Mum searched for projects to divert him. Dad had always enjoyed short stories – Somerset Maugham, O. Henry – so she encouraged him to write, to describe his medical cases, the Aboriginal woman who’d had the bone pointed at her, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And so he spent hours in the back office, producing reams of spidery longhand. But his writing was hopelessly old-fashioned, and before long he lost interest. Mum then proposed they remake the top garden, that gloomy, sun-starved space with its half-buried cat shit and grass that wouldn’t grow. She had always wanted to do something with it, make it pretty. They bought flowering bushes and small palms, and put in a sprinkler system. I remember Dad out there with a pitchfork, stabbing and churning as if he were digging up a body, or planning to bury one. At one stage, Mum and Dad went through his old rugby photos; they then had the best of them framed and hung them in the TV room. Looking back, this seems a strange thing to do – feeding nostalgia to a narcissist – but it was all we could think of.
Nothing worked. Dad’s depression only intensified. He raged, he ranted, he roared. With every day he entered further into a terminal hinterland of unremitting blackness, mired for weeks in a swamp of misery. He found the side effects of his treatments so unbearable that he abandoned them, and thus for several months he was defenceless, ravaged by the illness, dragged ever deeper into its guts.
So contradictory were his impulses, so maddening his needs. He wanted love but sought out conflict; he craved company but created solitude. Most of all, he wanted to blame someone – and who better to blame than Mum and me? And Cam, too, when she was game enough to drop in. Did we deserve blame? Had we done something wrong? Maybe it was something we hadn’t done. I felt I was standing on a jetty, watching Dad thrashing around just out of reach, on the verge of drowning, but when I looked down for something to throw him – a life ring, a rope – all I saw were my own flat feet.
The saddest thing: dinnertime. Mum would be cooking chops, Dad would be pouring a gin. I would be crouched in the hallway, like a coward, or lurking in the TV room with the volume low so I could hear them. But there was nothing to hear, or no words at least, just the clang of a pan on the stovetop, the clap of a cupboard shut hard, footfalls and exhalations, the loaded silence of a lull in combat, when armies collect their dead.
Dad had taken to eating alone in the kitchen, wedged into the nook, while Mum and I ate in the TV room. I wanted to say, ‘Come be with us.’ But he was scary now, not to mention awful company. The truth was that I wanted nothing more than to get away.
He became agitated, flicking his fingernails together by his side, or pacing around the house, a curdling blend of anxiety and apathy. His only remedy was drink. I became afraid to leave Mum alone in the house with him – not that this stopped me from running away to Margot’s place at the drop of a hat.
It was a Sunday night and I was at Margot’s. Her parents were out. We were lying, naked, on the carpet in the living room. In five minutes, ten maybe, I had to get up and go home. Tomorrow was school, exams, tests and teachers, but the real work was at home, with Mum and Dad, the prospect of which sat like a lump of something indigestible in the pit of my stomach. I tried to explain to Margot how, as I drove down our street, I would look ahead, desperately hoping to spot Cam’s car, or maybe even Gina’s or Rob’s. Sometimes they dropped around unannounced, especially on a Sunday. If they were there, I felt a little burst of hope: I was not alone. But if I couldn’t see their cars I had to quell my panic, wrestle with the urge to turn around and drive away. I also told her about Dad: the suicide attempts, the ranting, the scari
ness. Telling her made me feel vulnerable, but also lighter, aerated almost, like I’d opened a window deep down, somewhere in the basement. She felt flattered to be taken into my confidence, too; I could tell. In return, she explained how her mum had had a nervous breakdown a couple of years before and had to be hospitalised. But she was careful not to hijack my story. She offered her mum only as a cameo, a supporting role. She listened well. I trusted her utterly.
*
One day at school, between classes, I was overwhelmed by an animal instinct to flee, to retreat to somewhere safe, to seek shelter. I went to a quiet place by a railing overlooking the street, with my back to the school so no-one could see me, and began to discreetly weep.
Suddenly a teacher spotted me. ‘What are you doing?’ he yelled from a distance. ‘Get to class.’
But I was unable to move.
‘Did you hear me?’
Still I didn’t move.
He walked up behind me, no doubt preparing to unload, but then he saw my face. I couldn’t talk; my chest hurt, and I was having difficulty breathing. Something inside me had broken, and everything was gushing out. He stood there for some time; he may even have apologised. Gently, he asked me what was wrong. I explained about Dad, requesting that he tell no-one. ‘Of course,’ he said. Then he began talking about mental illness, about how it had to do with brain chemicals and getting those chemicals in the right balance. He made it sound as simple as balancing a seesaw. He also made it sound fixable, which I appreciated. He told me to come to him at any time.
Farewell to the Father Page 11