HOME, Wednesday, February 19th, Midday . . .
They were love letters, ransom letters. They were letters of complaint and demand. They were, like Dad himself, petulant, obsessive, cajoling and self-centred:
If only you knew how lonely and sad and how full of regrets and remorse I am, you’d be so sorry for me you would not be able to stay away any longer.
They were letters of recall, in which he relived every moment of their marriage, every holiday they’d taken and friend they’d made, every film they’d seen and book they’d read.
Remember, darling, when I came home from work one day in London and you were in tears? You had just finished reading A Farewell to Arms, and you were pregnant with Camilla and very emotional, and you could not stop crying.
Do you remember making love on Sunday mornings, then coming down and having croissants in the kitchen? We were wonderful lovers, weren’t we? Are you really going to never make love to me again – I simply can’t believe it! For my part, I cannot contemplate ever making love to anyone but you.
I visited regularly, but I hated it. Dad had lost weight, and always wore the same clothes – his tracksuit pants and a T-shirt with a crocodile on it. Mum would give me money for him, usually a hundred dollars, but giving my father money felt deeply, irreconcilably strange. And there was the conversation, drearily circular, like a merry-go-round that wasn’t especially merry. What do you think Mum will do? Will she come back? My life is pointless, and the Polaris is broken.
The Polaris was a little mechanical vacuum cleaner that scooted around the bottom of the pool, sucking up leaves and seed pods and dead spiders. It was temperamental at the best of times, but now it became one of Dad’s chief preoccupations, one that he returned to again and again in his letters:
That damned Polaris is broken . . .
Polaris is stuck on the pool steps . . .
The Polaris isn’t fixed yet. It just goes round and round in circles and just stays in one place.
Darling, what should I do about the Polaris?
One day I went around to find the pool had turned murky green, with oily bubbles on the surface. It looked like a swamp. Dad said that it was my fault, that he never wanted the damned pool anyway, that no-one ever used it. Then he told me to leave, which I did, happily, but only after I had collected some dope off my plants.
*
Australia Day was coming up. Usually on Australia Day the family got together at home for a barbecue on the balcony, where we would drink champagne, eat prawns and watch the fireworks over the harbour. But this Australia Day was different, first because of what had happened, but also because it was 1988 – the bicentenary – two hundred years since the First Fleet arrived in Sydney. This Australia Day was going to be an even bigger deal than normal, with a group of Tall Ships staging a First Fleet re-enactment on the harbour.
Dad – or Mum, I can’t remember which – proposed that we all get together in the morning, walk out to the point and watch the ships come in, then go back to the house and have lunch. This plan became like a life raft for Dad: he mentioned it in every letter. (It’s five days until our proposed family outing to the point to see the Tall Ships – five more empty, horrible, sad, lonely days.) The closer it got to Australia Day, the more he regarded it as an opportunity, a circuit breaker that would finally convince Mum to return.
The day came: sunny and warm. When Mum and I arrived at ten, the others were already there. Dad was freshly shaven, and visibly nervous. He had prepared as if for a big party, buying bottles of Veuve Clicquot and two cases of beer, white wine and plenty of mixers. He might not have known where to find toilet paper, but booze, no problem.
We walked out along Cremorne Point, the kids ahead, Mum and Dad behind, walking more slowly. Dad appeared frail. He wore a floppy, wide-brimmed, oddly feminine sunhat, like a boy playing dress-ups.
There were thousands of people at the point, in the trees, lining the street and out on the wharf, making it list worryingly. There were people on the rocks, clinging to the lighthouse and the roofs of buildings, everyone staring at the harbour, its foam-white skin scribbly with boat wakes. Dad sat in the crook of a low tree and looked out to sea. Whatever he and Mum had talked about hadn’t provided him much solace, but he was trying to smile all the same.
I remember turning around and seeing him sitting there, watching the water, grimacing, while small children stood on either side of him, screaming like chainsaws and waving plastic flags.
*
About three months after we left, Dad’s behaviour began to deteriorate, along with his health. He looked thinner and appeared to have stopped showering. And shaving.
‘You’re here,’ he said, opening the front door. He had a food stain on his T-shirt – baked beans maybe. It was a Saturday, very hot. The house had a soupy, faintly zoological air.
‘How have you been?’ I asked.
‘How do you think I’ve been? I’ve been terrible. Absolutely awful. Look at me.’ He held out his hands. ‘I shake all the time,’ he said. ‘And look at this.’ He pointed to the corner of his mouth. ‘I have cracks in there, in the corners, because my diet is so bad. I have a vitamin deficiency.’
‘Why?’
‘Because all I am eating is sausages and baked beans!’
This was untrue: I knew that both the grandmothers were bringing him food. I also knew that Gina and Rob had taken him out to dinner recently. But he was a shameless liar, possibly because he didn’t consider it to be lying.
I walked past him, into the kitchen. Empty gin bottles lined the sink; there were some dirty plates. Flies buzzed. I went to open some windows.
‘Don’t open them,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I say so, okay?’ He walked up behind me. ‘This is my house, sport, you got that? My house, not your house. I worked for it, I paid for it. You’ve just been given it, like everything else you’ve ever got in your life, just been given it, handed it on a bloody platter. And if I say don’t open the window, don’t bloody well open the window.’
‘Okay,’ I said. I placed some money – two fifty-dollar bills – on the counter and began walking towards the front door.
‘Oh, and thank you so much for giving me my money,’ Dad said, his voice booming in the confines of the kitchen.
I got to the door and made for the front steps, trying, without running, to put some distance between me and Dad.
Just as I reached the steps, he appeared in the doorway. ‘And you can tell the other kids not to come any more. They don’t cheer me up, not one iota. They’re no good to me, absolutely no good whatsoever. So, I do not want to see them, have you got that?’
I drove away, feeling ill.
He’s sick, I told myself. He’s sick. He can’t help it.
But I still hate him.
But he’s sick.
But I hate him.
But I love him.
I took the corner at the top of the street too fast and almost collided with a car coming the other way. The driver, a middle-aged woman, jammed on her brakes and began beeping hysterically. I leaned forward, my nose on the windscreen. ‘Fuck! Yooouuu!’ I screamed, giving her the finger. She manoeuvred slowly around me, horrified, indignant. I was lucky not to have crashed, and I was shaking. My anger had ambushed me, and now I felt defeated, foolish, in disarray. I drove another twenty metres but my eyes were watering and I could no longer see where I was going, so I pulled over. I had an ache in my chest and was gasping. I turned off the car, put my forehead on the wheel and sobbed so hard that my jaw began to ache.
*
Mum and Dad had by now come to an arrangement whereby she called him every week. Dad keenly anticipated these calls. When they went badly, as they invariably did, he became despondent, even more so than normal. (Well, just got off the phone from another mutually traumatic phone
call . . . he would write.) If Mum neglected to call, he became petulant:
You say you care for me. If you really cared for me, you would have been able to get to a phone. But you didn’t get a phone so I presume you don’t care for me.
The chores made him despondent, too. The cooking, the cleaning, the endless round of plant-watering:
I have kept all your plants alive, darling, but I don’t have the heart to do it for much longer if you don’t tell me at least what you intend to do. Then they will all die.
He particularly resented having to feed the animals, Camilla’s ‘useless bloody dog’ and my cat, which vomited one day, and whose vomit he wiped up with a cloth which he dropped in the sink and which subsequently caused the laundry to flood the next time Camilla put on his washing.
He lost the house key one day and had to smash the glass pane on the front door to get in; now he didn’t know how to fix it. He was running out of clean clothes. He was running out of money. He was running out of gin, and brandy, and wine. The alarm was broken (It’s flashing red lights and I don’t know what it means, he wrote). There were bills to pay – URGENTLY!!!! (actually, Mum was paying them); all the food had gone off in the fridge, and the dog had introduced a flea plague into the house (Sitting in the TV room, where I picked three fleas off my legs tonight). Then there were their friends to think of (We owe quite a lot of hospitality, as you well know, and I can’t do that myself). People were calling: I had to lie and put on a funny voice and say that it wasn’t me and that I had gone away and that the person on the phone was the caretaker, he wrote. I haven’t told anyone at all that we are separated. I just say you are out or at golf or somewhere but I can’t keep up the secret much longer.
He couldn’t sleep any more, so distraught was he at the thought of Mum not returning – so full of ABSOLUTE TERROR and MORTAL DREAD – that he had to take eight Mogadons a night just to knock himself out, then five Noctec when he woke up three hours later, in the black of night, in a state of abject sorrow, without you by my side. As a result, he had also run out of pills. Do you know where my prescription pads are, darling?
A door knob had fallen off. So had some shingles. He burned a pot, and the handle became loose (Hope it will hold together because it is the only small pot available for boiling an egg or cooking potatoes in the quantities I need). Also, he didn’t know where to park on Military Road. (WHERE THE HELL DO YOU PARK IF YOU WANT TO GO SHOPPING? ANYWHERE????)
Oh, and the Polaris was stuck. Again.
*
In time, his letters became more lawyerly:
I have just been reading the newspaper. The first article I came across was entitled ‘Trying a corpse’, and in it the Green movement stated that ‘detention in isolation cells was illegal under European Conventions’ – I’ve been living in an isolation cell of huge proportions for the past 2-and-a-half months.
The fleas had now made it to the kitchen: they were in the carpet and the curtains.
Don’t you think that this whole thing has gone on long enough now? Don’t you feel just a little bit sorry for me, as well as for yourself?
But Mum did not feel sorry for him. She spent her days either in the flat or on furtive shopping missions, keeping an eye out for friends or acquaintances, anyone who might ask awkward questions, or visiting Gina and Rob, having lunch with them in the city, where they were both working as lawyers.
Her marriage was finished; life as she had known it was over. ‘My heart is broken,’ she would say. This made me angry at Dad, which I found difficult to disguise when I saw him. I didn’t abuse him – I didn’t have the guts – but I did tell him what I thought, something he then complained about in his letters. Tim only comes here to get his pot, he wrote.
He doesn’t spend the time talking to me, and when he does it’s to tell me that in effect I am getting what I deserve by your disappearance. While that is, or was, true, I don’t intend being told that by a boy who has just turned 18 (a man now), who I have just finished paying a great deal of money to educate at a school which I never wanted him to attend anyway and where he took no advantage of any of the facilities except teaching (over the last year). And when he drove here in the car which I provide and which he drives so badly that it is an absolute wreck – just look at it inside and out and see for yourself – dings, dents, bashes all over, both bumper bars crooked, holes in the seats inside from cigarettes, the butts of which together with all manner of other rubbish, including bottles, litter the inside which happens to contain the Gregory’s Map of Sydney which I personally would like to have in my possession.
One day I locked the keys in the car, which he found out about from Camilla (Another example of his total incompetence, he wrote). I was selfish – really the most thoughtless person you could ever meet – and untidy: whenever I came around I left the lights on somewhere in the house, or I ate all his food then left a mess for him to clean up. I was, in other words, a teenager. But he didn’t want a teenager; in fact, he didn’t want any of his kids any more:
I love my four beautiful children, that’s why I worked so hard, to give them all the best possible start in life, but they somehow just don’t give me the same feeling as I have for you. It’s totally different, a different kind of love. I do not want to see them marry or have kids or Tim go to university or anything without you. I suppose that is what keeps you going and what I have given up.
He had a way of blaming Mum for everything. The day my HSC results came in the mail (383 out of 500 – not brilliant, but better than I had expected) I went around to collect them and even had a drink with Dad.
Although I was thrilled for him, he later wrote, the occasion was absolutely ruined for me because you were not here.
Later, he used me as leverage:
The children from broken homes grow up with all sorts of problems, as you know, and surely you can’t allow that to happen to Tim. He needs a home, and his own room, where he can study and play his music. You can’t allow him to float about all over the place. He and you simply HAVE to come home. After all, everyone knows that parents have to make sacrifices for their children. So I reckon you have got to now make the sacrifice of coming home, to get over your fear, and allow everything to return to normal.
*
Reading through the letters years later, I didn’t feel sad; I felt disturbed, properly and profoundly disturbed, as if someone had reached inside me and churned up all the psychic silt, all that noxious sediment that had long since settled where it was meant to, deep down, out of sight.
Why hadn’t I done more to help him? How did we expect him to cope? Maybe we hadn’t expected him to cope. In reading the letters I developed a pointed contempt for his childlike neediness, his carping, his repetitiveness (You MUST come back; I cannot cope; I AM DYING). A lot of the incidents recorded in his letters I could no longer remember: it was as if I had blotted them all out. At one stage, he attacks me for lying about him to Mum, but I have no recollection of lying or even what I might have been lying about. It’s as if it never happened.
His fury towards me wasn’t exceptional: it was domestic. I was messy. I was thoughtless. He had to clean up after me. I had expected some cardinal sin, some ghastly offence, something that might implicate me. But despite all that had happened, we were still just father and son.
*
I didn’t know it at the time, but Mum had made up her mind right from the start never to go back: she had resolved to stay as long as she possibly could with Dad, but then once she had left, she would never, ever return. That was the promise she’d made to herself. She tried to explain this to Dad, in her own way, in their phone conversations: she suggested that he move on, that he pick himself up and start again, that he try to find other interests. She even mentioned the word ‘settlement’ at one stage. But he refused to hear it:
I have no desire to do anything without you. There is no point to living if yo
u do not come back to me. So, you MUST COME BACK.
He got angrier:
Haven’t heard from the kids in days. Nothing to say to them anyway, so it doesn’t matter – must be a conspiracy to isolate me completely, hoping I’ll commit suicide and leave it all to you and them.
He began to mention suicide quite a lot:
I have been reduced to a state of pure, severe panic, with migraines and a tremor and inability to control my drinking to the stage where I have been barely able to walk and as you can see I can only write with difficulty . . .
I would commit suicide tonight if I had enough tablets but I took so many last night that I don’t have enough left to kill myself, and I don’t have the courage to do it any other way. I don’t have the rifle any more . . .
Were we worried that he might kill himself? Yes. I was driving one day with Rob when he told me, matter-of-factly, that he thought Dad’s suicide was ‘a fifty-fifty chance’. He sighed as he said this; the prospect exhausted him, because it was a problem that he – we – would all have to deal with. That’s the way he thought about stuff. Problems, probabilities, resolutions.
But did we do anything about it? Not really. What could we do, apart from keep on visiting him? His mother, Nan Ell, was also visiting, as was Nan King. Mum agreed to go to dinner with him, together with Rob and Gina, and he sat there all night staring at her, looking as if he were about to burst into tears.
By the four-month mark, he had lost about seven kilos and had given up jogging (what an utter waste of time). He was having a terrible time in the top garden – a dog has been there and dug several holes and spread the soil all around. Somebody had stolen the lid of the garbage bin (what do I do about that?), and the fleas had finally made it up to his bedroom.
He had also begun to hear from his sister, Faye – Faye, who drove him to distraction, and whom he couldn’t stand, but who now called every day, inviting him for dinner, asking him to stay at her place. Apparently Faye and her husband John were urging Dad to begin a new life, to forget about Mum and us kids. Then, one night in late February, Faye, Pep and John, who was a money market guy, came over to Dad’s for dinner, along with Nan Ell.
Farewell to the Father Page 13