They gave me lots of advice, Dad wrote.
They say that I should take my affairs into my own hands, pull the purse strings closed. Cut you and the family off without a cent and sell this house immediately, buy a property in the country or live in the Regent Hotel and be looked after off the interest from the money for the house, and lots of other proposals. Well, what to do? They say that would soon force you and Tim to return to home and me, but I doubt it.
As for tightening the purse strings, I hadn’t thought about doing that but it does seem a bit odd that I sit here waiting for you to ring me up (which you do rarely), while you have our money to live on . . . And how do you get the money that you’ve given me . . .? I haven’t been signing any cheques for it to the best of my knowledge so I presume you are just getting money directly from my bank account. I don’t even know whether I am paying for you to live where you are. Interestingly, for the first time tonight you let drop in our phone call that you are living in a bedsitter, did you realise that? Who is paying for that, you or me?
What a question. Mum never had any money of her own.
Rob and Gina have been useless, Cam only helps because I’m keeping her dog alive, Tim has been no support or comfort to me: he seems quite flippant about the whole situation. I don’t even know where he is living. NO, I am not going to act as caretaker for this house for the rest of my life with all its problems and size just so that the family can sell it and make a great deal of money after I die. Incidentally, it was also suggested tonight that the whole family is aligned against me and is deliberately trying to force me to commit suicide! The suggestion was that the whole family stands to gain greatly from my death, which is true, they do. If I committed suicide, or simply died, and this house was then sold for a million or two (which it would be worth now), then they would all be quite rich very quickly.
Hmm, maybe. But then we’d still have to fumigate the place and fix the Polaris.
John and Faye think I should sell the house and use the money to allow myself to live in a better manner than I am living now, which is like a hermit, a drunken hobo, unshaven, unshowered, in the same clothes day and night, which is not the way I had hoped to end my life.
I’ve done my penance . . . trying to cope alone. Oh yes! This was another suggestion, that plenty of women would love, indeed give their eye teeth to come and live in this house with me or elsewhere on the profits if I sold it. I hadn’t really considered that angle yet.
Apparently Faye had even lined up some women who would be more than willing to move in.
What a great shame it would be if the house and contents were sold and then some time in the future you DID decide to return – everything would be gone, and it would then be too late. Doesn’t that logic have any effect on you? Surely you can summon up the courage to return before I have to sell this house with everything in it.
The next day, he got a call from a man named Charlie, an old family friend who was the son of a couple he and Mum had known in England. Charlie was a bit of a hippy: he owned a motorbike and worked odd jobs. I always liked him. Dad told Charlie that he and Mum were separated.
Charlie was devastated, Dad wrote.
He told me I needed to meditate and think positively and give out good vibrations and then you would come back. I tried to give out good vibrations when we were in the restaurant together with Gina and Rob, but I don’t think it had any effect because your attitude about returning has not changed . . .
PS: Tim was crying when he came here to see me today. After he left I found a note he had left in the kitchen saying: ‘Dad, I love you very much, as you know. Don’t give up, please.’
*
After a time, as Dad sat alone in the house, drinking gin and picking fleas off himself, he appeared to have been assaulted by flashes of lucidity:
It’s quite correct when you say that you don’t know how you stuck it out for so long. You did so because you were a wonderful wife, better than any I’ve ever known. Nobody else would have put up with me for as long as you did.
He began to tell people to stop calling. His friends. Charlie. Even Faye.
I had to get rid of Faye because she and John always tried to influence me against you, and I could not stand that. I told Mum to tell her to stop ringing me. It’s not your fault you’re not here, it’s my fault and even Faye should know that by now – I told her so myself, and I’m certain that Mum has told her the whole story because Faye knows that I cut you with a knife and only Mum could have told her that because I only admitted that, along with all the other terrible stuff I have done, to Mum and your mother, who I feel should know the truth.
He began to reassess:
I was an absentee father, I know. I would come home and there you were watching M*A*S*H. But I regret it because I missed out on their news and happenings, and you took it onto your shoulders and shielded me from it all because you thought I had too much on my plate.
You brought them all up. All I did was make the money needed for their schooling and running the house. My contribution to their upbringing was negligible compared to yours. I certainly never did anything to make them love me. But they all say they love me. And Georgie, Rob, Cam and Tim all seem to love me.
You bore four wonderful children and raised them singlehandedly – don’t you think that is a bigger achievement than playing football and passing exams for God’s sake? They are all on the right track and all following their chosen careers.
*
It was now mid-March.
I wonder whether I could stab myself in the heart with a knife, he wrote. But I haven’t got the courage to do that yet.
Then, the next day:
I am going quite mad: I even talk to myself – I say to myself: ‘I must commit suicide, I must commit suicide . . .’ over and again.
*
It was five months since we’d left and I was missing home. I missed my room, and I missed my records, which Dad had been threatening to throw in the bin. But I didn’t want to see Dad; I just wasn’t up to it.
One Saturday afternoon, I drove to the house and parked in the street that overlooked ours, the street where Mum and I used to sit sometimes at night, waiting for Dad to calm down. I got out of the car and walked to the edge, where there was a fence – it was a vertical drop, thirty metres down to our street below. I peered over to make sure Dad wasn’t in the top garden, where he might look up and see me, or by the window or the front door. He wasn’t, so I stood there, staring down at the big black house, at the banana tree where I kissed Jess, and the top garden, covered in mossy grass (it never got enough sunlight), and the oak tree, and the giant jacaranda that stood by the garage, shedding its purple blossoms that became so slimy under my feet when I came home from surfing. For a moment I thought I might cry. I wanted to cry: I wanted to get it out, like a splinter. But then the front door opened and Dad emerged in his running gear. (So much for having given up jogging . . .) I watched as he walked up the front steps then ran along our street and down the steps at the top, into the reserve. This was my chance.
I ran down to the house. The key was in the usual place, hidden in a translucent yellow pill canister in a crevice in the retaining wall. I took it out, unlocked the front door and went inside.
I walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. There was some leftover casserole in a clear plastic container, a stick of broccoli, an almost empty bottle of dry ginger ale, some margarine and full-cream milk. On the table in the eating nook was an A4 pad, the top three pages of which were covered with Dad’s obsessive scrawl – another one of his ‘interminable letters’, as he himself had taken to calling them. On the counter lay a stack of mail, including two items for me. I considered taking them but decided that Dad might notice them gone and realise that someone had been here.
I then went up to my room and looked around. Through the window, I spotted Dad, a tiny figure i
n white trundling along out near the point. That was good: he wouldn’t be coming back any time soon. I debated taking some of my things back to the flat to make it more like my own room – the Bob Marley poster Cam gave me, or some of the surfing pictures – but, as with the letters, I was afraid Dad might notice.
I walked down the hall to Mum and Dad’s room. The bed was unmade; there was a newspaper on it, and a rumpled pair of white cotton underwear. The tiny bedside table was crammed with pill canisters and a container of Johnson’s Baby Powder, which Dad always threw on after a shower, leaving great plumes of white everywhere, like the abominable snowman.
I enjoyed walking around unobserved; I felt invisible. When I was a boy I used to sneak in here and open Mum’s wardrobe and run my hands over her mink stoles, the ones her mother gave her, just to sample that cool, silky, forbidden feeling. Now I had that same feeling, only with an uncomfortable edge of trespass, as if I were spying, or peeking under the sheets at someone sleeping naked. I went back downstairs.
I wandered into the TV room and picked up the program guide. There was a rugby game on – a Five Nations match, Scotland vs England, at Murrayfield in Edinburgh. I loved the crowd at Murrayfield; they were like an army of highlanders going into battle. I switched it on, then lay on the floor with a couple of pillows under my head, just like I used to. Moments later, Grey Puss appeared from nowhere, rubbed herself sideways on me, then hopped up onto my tummy. I tickled her behind the ear, where there was a sharp nub of bone, and she emitted a deep, subsonic thrumming, like a small engine. ‘Come on, Scotland,’ I said to Grey Puss. She licked my knuckles and up along my index finger, her tongue like warm sandpaper.
I’d come in late, and there was just five minutes to go. The Scots were down, nine to six. They were the underdogs. Unfortunately, they were also playing like shit: lots of missed tackles. I felt so sorry for the crowd: sixty-five thousand people, all getting bummed out. But there was still time. I sat up, my bowels tightening, twisting with little adrenal spasms. I looked at the clock ticking off at the bottom of the screen – 79 minutes and 56 seconds, 79 minutes and 57 seconds, 58 seconds, 59 seconds. The referee raised the whistle to his mouth and blew time. They’d lost. Again. It wasn’t as bad as when Australia lost, but still, it gave me that sudden, empty, funereal feeling, that ghastly sense that I’d stepped off a cliff, that I was falling, that everything was over and there was nothing to look forward to. I hated that feeling: I’d been getting it more and more.
I turned off the TV, put the pillows back where I found them, and bent down to rub noses with Grey Puss. I looked out the window: I couldn’t see Dad out on the path, though perhaps he had already run past and was close to home. I went into the kitchen again to make sure I hadn’t left any traces of my visit. Then I walked out the door, slamming it shut behind me, and drove back to the apartment.
*
Three days later, I went around to see Dad and pick up the mail I had left there. He answered the door looking like a corpse: baggy eyes, sunken cheeks. He had that hollow, haunted look, like he’d spent all night running from monsters and finally, just before dawn, found a small dark cave to hide in. I walked in and hugged him. He felt thin, and he was shaking.
‘She’s not coming back,’ he blurted out. ‘She has said that she’s made up her mind and she’s not coming back.’
I asked him when she said this.
‘In our last phone conversation.’ He was petrified, like a small child. ‘I’ve had it now.’
I wanted to help him. I still felt that urge to rescue him, to throw him a line and pull him to safety. But standing there I realised, for the first time, that it was not in my power to do so. There was nothing I could say, nothing I could do.
‘I love you, Dad,’ I said.
I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I went up to my room, lay on the bed, and cried.
*
The cotton-top tamarin, a monkey endemic to Colombia, is known for forming lifelong bonds between mating pairs. Studies of captive cotton-tops have shown that when the male is separated from his mate, he will begin long, plaintive calls, and continue at an increasingly frantic rate until he is reunited.
Dad had been calling out now, in his letters, increasingly frantically, every day for almost five months.
PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME. I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT YOU. I know it was all my fault BUT YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE AFRAID OF ME ANY MORE I’M NOT DANGEROUS OR EVEN MOODY I WANT YOU BACK NOTHING ELSE MATTERS I’M GOING TO DIE I’M VERY NEARLY INSANE WITH FEAR AND REMORSE AND REGRET.
His writing was now virtually unreadable. He was squeezing three lines into one, filling the page from the very top to the last millimetre at the bottom.
I’m not trying to pretend or blackmail you but I really am very ill and probably should be in hospital. Tim came here today and I think he could see that I am ill . . . I have diarrhoea every night after dinner and have to go to the lavatory several times each night just like you had when you were so frightened of me.
Mum and Dad had been married for more than thirty years. Mum had had one previous boyfriend, whom she once confessed to having kissed. But Dad had only ever been with her. Everything he did, he did for her, and to her. Now the reality of their separation was finally apparent to him: he would not see her again. He would not get his life back. Nothing he could do would change that.
*
Looking back, we must have known, on some deep, unacknowledged level, what would happen next. Recently, I have come to regard what we did – leaving Dad in that house all alone – as a species of murder, a type of euthanasia.
It was 23 March 1988, a Wednesday, 10.30am. Nan Ell had been calling Dad all morning, but he hadn’t been answering. She then called Mum, at the flat. I was there too. I saw Mum pick up the phone – ‘Hello, Muriel,’ she said. A short pause, then: ‘He isn’t answering?’ And I knew.
Mum then called Gina, who called Rob. Rob arranged to meet Mum and me at the house. I drove, Mum looking small in her seat, tight-lipped and silent, as if suspicious of words, their power to make things happen. Rob had arrived just before us, in a cab. He had come from work, and was wearing a suit. I could see him assessing us, auditing our status, anticipating contingencies, being responsible.
Mum said that she would wait up on the street, and that Rob and I should go down first. I remember walking down the steps, preparing myself, past the top garden, past the big stone retaining wall, everything sharp in my field of vision, super-real and at the same time not real at all.
We found Dad dead, slumped face first on the kitchen table. His right hand gripped a glass of gin, very firmly, as if he expected someone to try to take it. Blood had leaked from his nose and mouth, spilling over the edge of the table and onto the floor, where dozens of empty pill canisters lay strewn about. A pool of liquid, probably urine, spread out on the floor beneath him.
Next to him was a letter, which Rob picked up and put in his pocket. From the look on his face, I understood that he had no intention of showing Mum and that I was not to say anything.
I approached Dad and leaned over to look into his face; it would be our last time together. I examined his glassy eyes, the ridge of his nose, and his cheeks, spotted with the ash-white bristles that used to graze my lips when I kissed him as a boy. The spot where his cheekbone met the tabletop was sodden, like blotting paper, as if the blood were seeping through the pores.
Dead.
When I moved away, I laughed out loud, a hand over my mouth, like a child who’s seen something he shouldn’t have. Rob kicked the wall and said, ‘Fuck.’
Then we called for Mum to come down.
She walked in as if entering a minefield. She saw Dad and her face crumpled. But she didn’t cry. Reaching his body, she put one hand on his shoulder. Then we called the police and waited.
PART TWO
CHAPTER TWELVE
If I die i
n summer, I want my funeral to be put off until winter. That’s the time for funerals, amid wet skies and cleansing winds. At summer funerals everyone stands around basting in their business suits and black dresses. It brings into unwelcome proximity all those unsavoury corporeal realities, like rot and decay. It brings death closer, if that were at all possible, not to mention necessary.
Dad’s funeral was in early autumn, a muggy morning at the Northern Suburbs Memorial Gardens and Crematorium, an industrial-scale complex with sunken gardens and pencil pines and a Spanish Mission motif that made you feel you had died and gone to the Alamo. Hundreds of people came: former patients, football types with cauliflower ears, tennis partners, friends from England, hospital staff, his various secretaries, registrars, junior doctors and students – a pliant, shuffling, black-clad herd made docile in their mourning, filling the chapel and spilling out the rear.
Our family entered the chapel first, and sat at the front. Then Faye, doing textbook stoic – she glanced briefly at Mum, as if across a courtroom – came in and sat behind us. Nan Ell joined us at the front, her face riven, chalky. Exhaustion had got its fangs into everyone, sucked us dry, made us woozy. I felt as if I might dematerialise and float away.
What do I remember . . .? Random images. I remember how swollen and wrung out my eyes felt; one more flood of tears, I thought, and they’d be washed right out of my face. I remember the crowd, because the crowd reminded me of Dad, of how he was loved, and all the good he had done. I remember weeping extravagantly and being self-conscious about this, and sitting next to Gina and holding her hand, because it was shaking so much. And I remember Dad’s casket rolling into the furnace, seeing the flames, the actual flames, hissing and leaping, a memory that can’t possibly be right but that is lodged in my mind nonetheless.
Bruce Storey, an old family friend spoke about Dad’s work, his ‘meticulous case histories’, his love of jogging, rugby, art and the beach, his ‘beautiful style of swimming, arm high, flexed elbow and the arm going into the water like a spear’. He talked, obliquely, of how Dad had endured a ‘great suffering’. He also thanked us, ‘Rosie and Max’s gang of four’, on behalf of the congregation, for ‘the way you helped our dear friend during a terrible illness that must have been a nightmare for you all’.
Farewell to the Father Page 14