Afterwards there was the usual milling around, murmurs and hugs. Nobody mentioned ‘depression’ or ‘suicide’ – not around us, anyway. They were bad words. Too harsh, too real. It would’ve been like saying ‘fuck’ or ‘cunt’. It was as if Dad’s illness, his particular kind of great suffering, was deemed to be somehow shameful, like a curse, and therefore unspeakable.
*
Two weeks later, Margot broke up with me. I say ‘broke up’, but that’s too polite. ‘Dumped’ is a better word. Dumped, as if from a colossal height. Dumped, like a baby off a bridge.
It happened at a fondue restaurant just behind our local library. I wanted to make an impression, though I suspected it was too late for that, and so I asked Cam to help me get dressed. She picked out a cream-coloured cable knit jumper that had a wave of rainbow bands on the front, a garment that was, even by the standards of the time, spectacularly offensive.
At the restaurant, we ate chicken dunked in a pot of melted Gruyere, after which Margot got down to it. She wanted ‘more space’, she said. She needed to ‘grow’, to ‘find out who I really am’. Standard stuff, I guess. The usual dodging and dissembling; the usual clichés. But it sure didn’t feel standard. It felt as if she had dealt me a brand of violence; a blow to the back of the head with a blunt instrument.
I left the restaurant and went straight out to a party at a friend’s house across the city. I wanted to show I was still operational, functional. I also wanted to hurt her. She told me that she thought my going to a party was callous, which pleased me.
Only later did the reality set in: that she was leaving, that she would, inevitably, love other guys. Other men would put their arms around her in public places, press against her, bend down in a crowded bar to whisper in her ear. Have sex with her. The thought made me claustrophobic with anxiety.
I wanted to hate her, but I still loved her. And so I began to hate myself instead. I shaved my head. I avoided people. I was an open wound, walking the streets. I gnawed my nails like never before. They bled from the tips.
In the weeks after the break-up, things started coming back to me, moments when I saw, with horror, how weak I’d been, how completely in her thrall. Such as when, for example, she had told me on a Friday afternoon last winter that she needed some ‘time out’, that she wanted to hang out with her girlfriends. No problem, I said. That night I stayed home, listening to music and fussing over a large pimple that had emerged on my lower forehead, right between my eyes. I squeezed it and washed it and dried it and applied Clearasil to it. Then I squeezed it some more, washed it and dried it again, and applied more Clearasil. Margot wasn’t satisfied with me. She wanted someone else, a different person. I didn’t know who that person was, but I knew that he probably didn’t have a pimple the size of Sydney in the middle of his face.
The next morning I received some intelligence from a mate of a mate that Margot was heading to Paddington Markets with a girlfriend. Excellent, I thought. I’d casually turn up to the markets and surprise her.
I spent the morning getting ready, deliberating over clothes: faded jeans, black T-shirt, suede vest – definitely the vest – something a little bit hippy, a little bit alternative, relaxed and informal yet stylish and, of course, totally unselfconscious.
I was nervous. I sat in the car for a moment before leaving, my heart like a horse, kicking against my ribs. My armpits swam; I’d put on too much deodorant. I looked in the rear-view mirror to inspect the pimple – or, rather, the scab – and when I touched it, it fell off. Underneath, the skin was miraculously clear, not even red. Margot would never know it’d even been there.
This was a good omen. Things would be okay.
The car floated like a hovercraft all the way to Paddington. I parked in a back street and began walking, flapping my T-shirt to dry my armpits. I could run into Margot at any moment, so I reminded myself to relax and breathe, that I had every right to be here, by myself, looking at dress shops and jewellery stores. In truth, I’d never felt comfortable in Oxford Street. Everyone there was genuinely cool – the guys had earrings and leather jackets and sideburns. I had Pseudo Echo hair and my sister’s sunglasses.
I reached the markets and began walking around, but I didn’t see her. I kept going, up and down the rows of stalls, with their Nepalese wooden snake ties and nose-rings and incense sticks, up and down, up and down, until some of the stallholders began to look at me funny.
Then it hit me: she wasn’t here.
I realised then, with a short, sharp stab of clarity, how blind I’d been, so vulnerable, and so weak. For years after I looked back upon that day, and every time I felt the same little stab.
*
I started university about three weeks after Dad died. The Board of Studies offered to bump up my HSC mark to compensate for the ‘hardship’ I’d suffered in my final year. I remember a friend of the family saying, ‘Now you can study law!’ as if I’d just awoken from a coma and been told I’d won the lottery.
Instead, I chose arts, which most people considered a perfect waste of time. ‘An arts degree?’ the joke went. ‘Go into the toilets and you’ll find rolls of them hanging on the wall.’ Doing arts made me feel like a dilettante. Most of my friends were studying engineering or science or law. I enjoyed arts, but in a guilty way, slipping into lectures like they were dirty movies. We studied the poems of W.B. Yeats (there’s a man who knew his melancholy) and Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh, about a bunch of terminal alcoholics who spend a seemingly endless night telling lies to one another in a rundown bar. I loved that play. I got a distinction for my essay on it. When I came home and showed Mum, she burst into tears. ‘I knew you could do it,’ she said.
We moved back home in April. Aunty Joanie came over to help us. Dad had really let the place go. The fridge was bare apart from some sour milk and two cans of crusty cat food; in the crisper was a single deliquescing carrot, sitting in a pool of orange slime. There was his dirty underwear and damp towels; his unmade bed, with its big, slightly sallow, Dad-shaped dent. He had flushed the toilet, thankfully, but the sink in the bathroom upstairs still had some of his derelict whiskers in it, adhering doggedly to the porcelain. Outside there were six months’ worth of unraked leaves that had fallen from the oak tree onto the front steps, where they lay rotting into a carpet of lethally slippery humus beneath which hid random piles of camouflaged dog shit.
The sun was out the day we moved back. Considering how disgustingly sad I felt, this seemed like an insult. I wandered about the TV room, rearranging pillows. I was weak, a little dizzy, like a bug pulled out from under a rock, into the light. I looked at the wall, at Dad’s football photos. (I had said I wanted them, a suggestion Rob found ludicrous: ‘What on earth for?’) I walked back into the kitchen, where the message button on the phone flashed hysterically. Lots of people had called: my friends, asking where I was, whether I was driving to so-and-so’s party this Saturday and, if so, could I pick them up – or whether I wanted to see a band ‘tonight’, which was now six weeks ago. Their blitheness offended me, yet how were they to know what was going on when I hadn’t told them? There was also the man from Harold’s Electrical Appliances, wondering if someone, anyone, could come and pick up the Dustbuster that Mum had dropped in to be repaired six months ago, before we left. Most of the messages were from Mum and Dad’s friends, who all sounded touchingly concerned and confused, in that quavering, doddery way that only your parents’ friends can sound. ‘Rosie, darling, call me when you can,’ and, ‘Rosie, dearest, I’m worried about you.’ Mum went through them and wrote a list, making sure to return all calls. Now and then she would cry. She kept a hanky tucked into her sleeve.
There was also the matter of Dad’s life insurance, which he had paid into assiduously his whole working life and which now refused to pay out anything, not one cent, on account of the fact that he had committed suicide. This infuriated me. They were happy to take
the money, alright, but now they didn’t want to pay up. Gina and Rob murmured vaguely about challenging this, but soon concluded that it would be pointless. Arguing that Dad’s suicide was the result of an illness as serious as any cancer never occurred to us. In the 1980s, people didn’t think like that. As far as the insurance people were concerned, Dad had tried to trick them.
One night, Rob and Gina came over to advise Mum about some paperwork. I didn’t understand any of it, but they were lawyers. They had the skills. We all sat in the TV room, having dinner around the small, rickety table on wheels. As Mum talked, Rob became impatient. There was something that Mum didn’t understand, something she didn’t want to sign. The more Rob pushed her to sign, the more Mum resisted – not angrily, more as if there was some hurdle in her mind that she couldn’t leap over. She just sat at the table, staring, and shaking her head.
‘But, Mum, you have to sign this,’ Rob insisted. He was tapping with his finger on the bit of paper on the table. ‘You don’t have a choice. That’s the way it is.’
Mum started to tremble, and then her eyes welled up, and she dropped her face into her hands and wept, big, wet, moaning heaves.
Rob said: ‘Ah, come on, Mum, you just have to—’
‘For fuck’s sake, leave her alone!’ I yelled, springing from my seat and rushing to Mum. ‘Jesus Christ, give her a break.’
The others stared at me. They were shocked. It was the first time I had ever interrupted Rob or defied him in any way. I couldn’t believe I’d done it myself. I felt like someone else, someone performing an act of chivalry. It didn’t seem real. But, then, nothing seemed real.
*
I had a job delivering pizzas at night for a place called Pizza Perfecto, a small chain that had a store just up the road from our house. The boss was a squat, heavily bearded man named Peter who spoke in grumbles and scratched his back by leaning against the nearest stable object – a pole, a cupboard, a table edge – and rubbing up and down, like a bear. His wife also worked there; she did the rosters. I imagined her having sex with him, her scratching his back, and him going ‘Errrrrooohhher . . .’
The store was tiny, just a shopfront really, with most of the space taken up by the pizza oven, a clanking matrix of glowing red elements that rattled away like a steamship boiler. It was an awkward space to be in: all that melted cheese and meaty heat, all those yeasty, rash-inducing vapours; I was always turning around and bumping into Peter, or brushing the oven and burning myself. The world, it seemed, was booby-trapped, loaded like a homemade bomb with myriad sources of pain: ex-girlfriends, acne, heartbroken mothers, dead fathers, shitty life insurance companies, hairy-faced pizza delivery bosses.
One hot night – one of those allergenic, skin-itching evenings when you see puffs of cottony pollen eddying in the breeze – it all came to a head. Peter had been going on at me for being too slow. Customers were ringing, complaining. We need those customers, Tim, he said. We can’t piss off those customers, Tim. You got that, Tim? And so I drove faster, and faster, and faster. I cut off other cars, I ran red lights; I weaved and dodged, and when the lights turned green and the car ahead didn’t start moving I leaped on my horn like a wolf on a hare. I was thinking of Mum, of Dad, of Margot, of uni and my useless degree, and of Peter, my boss, back in the store, checking his wristwatch and scratching his back. At one point, on my way back to pick up more pizzas for delivery, I got stuck at the very last set of lights before the store. I hated those lights. They were slow, really, really slow, so that if you got caught by them you were stuck there forever and all your weaving and dodging and breaking of road rules and speed limits might as well have been flushed down the toilet. ‘Fuck,’ I yelled, banging hard on the steering wheel. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’
Just then, the man in the car ahead of me got out and walked back towards me. He was dressed in a white shirt and a tie. When he drew level with my window he bent down, hands on his knees.
‘Hey, buddy,’ he said. ‘What’s up with the driving?’
‘Huh?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I saw you earlier tonight, driving like an idiot. Now you’re beeping me.’
I could see the cross lights on Military Road turning amber, which meant our lights would be turning green any second. ‘I’m in a hurry, man, I’m sorry.’
‘I can see that. But you’re gonna kill someone. You know that?’
‘I know, but I’m like in a big—’
‘I know.’ His voice was firm. ‘But it’s not that important.’
But it was that important. For reasons I couldn’t quite explain, it was so, so incredibly important that I got back to the store right now and picked up another bunch of pizzas and delivered those pizzas as fast as I possibly could and then returned to the store to do it again.
The man shook his head at me and walked back to his car. The traffic pulled away, but because he had been so fucking slow getting back into his fucking car, the lights up ahead were already turning orange, which was when I made a split-second decision to zip around him and gun it. And so I did, but the lights had already turned red, so before I knew it I was speeding through a red light across a four-lane highway with cars jerking to a stop on either side of me and horns bleating, and up ahead a woman and her child were stepping off the kerb to cross the road but I couldn’t stop now so I jammed my foot down hard on the accelerator and swerved around them, missing the poor woman by mere centimetres – my side mirror grazed her dress, which made her jump back with a soundless shriek, which was when I saw my life and her life and the life of her young daughter flash before my eyes in a sickly, frozen moment of fear and shame.
Back at the store, Peter was out for a moment. I felt as if I might vomit; my legs were shaking. Fat Gary, one of the other drivers, was sitting on a stool, sipping a Coke. ‘The more pepperoni, the better,’ he said, apropos of nothing.
*
It was summer in Sydney. Flat surf and nagging nor’ westers; glinting sun on a tin-foil sea, piss-warm water and long hot cloudless days: relentlessly cloudless days, blue skies, day in, day out, suffocating and featureless. A blue sky says nothing. It has no soul. There’s nothing so bleak in this world as a perfectly cloudless sky.
Winter is better. In winter, storms boil up the Southern Ocean, making it smoke, chiselling it with dagger-like winds, flogging up welts of swell capped with whiteness, plumes of ice and air that are shed in sheets as the waves push on, pulsing north, low breathing and full of intent.
These waves will try to drown you.
These waves will crack you open.
These waves will set you free.
It was the first winter after Dad died. Rob and I were surfing at Curl Curl, a long, open beach backed by low dunes. When I was young, Curl Curl was the ‘adult’ beach, wild and forbidding, the beach where the big kids went. Harbord was the family beach. Now we never went to Harbord; it was too small, too babyish. Curl Curl was where we went to surf, because it gets lots of swell. And yet the ocean there is always wonky and misshapen and unpredictable.
I was sitting on my board, far out, up to my waist in water. My wetsuit was ripped above my bum; whenever I moved rude little fingers of icy water gushed in around my kidneys. So I tried not to move. The trick was to distract yourself. Think warm thoughts. And so I looked towards the beach, which was empty except for one small, dark shape. It was a woman, sitting with her legs up under her chin and her jumper pulled down over her knees, her arms tucked inside to keep warm.
Margot used to sit like that.
I caught a wave then paddled back out, and looked towards the beach again, at the woman. She was still there. She had the same full hips, the same slope of the shoulders, the same bob haircut. I squinted at her and realised that, yes, it was Margot. It was her, definitely. She was on the beach, waiting for me. She knew I’d be here – she must have called and asked Mum – and she had come to tell me som
ething, she had come to be with me.
I looked across and saw Rob waving at me to go in. When Rob wanted to go in, it was important to do so straight away, so as not to keep him waiting on the beach. So I caught one more wave and then dropped to my belly, riding the foam.
When I hit the sand, I told myself not to run, to be cool. I walked towards Margot, wiping water from my eyes, squinting, staring, smiling despite myself. But with every step I took the shape that had been so definitely Margot became less and less like her, until I got close enough to see that it was, indeed, not Margot. It was a stranger. I walked past her, staring, feeling stupid, but also angry, as if this woman had somehow cheated me.
I waited at the car for Rob. I took my wetsuit off and looked at the rip in it, which had definitely got bigger. The seams were coming apart; all the stitching was frayed. I felt like whinging about it, but I didn’t tell Rob. He’d only have said that I hadn’t looked after it properly, which was probably true.
*
I began to have the strangest dreams. I dreamed one night that Dad had me cornered in the back office at home. He was slowly coming at me, and I couldn’t get away.
I woke up yelling.
There was the dream where I ran into him at the shops, out of the blue. He was living around the corner, he told me, in a flat; he had started another life, a fresh beginning, and he was much happier.
There was also a variant on this dream, where he was living nearby and he had started another family. He seemed calmer now, as if he had agreed, rather magnanimously, to put all the unpleasantness of his former life behind him and move on. Again, he was much happier than he had ever been with us. This last dream especially hurt me: I felt as if I should be happy for him, but I wasn’t. I woke up feeling jealous. He’d moved on. He’d left us behind. We’d tried so hard to make it all work out, but he’d finally realised it was hopeless, and so he’d chucked it in and shacked up with someone else – someone who had figured out a way to make him happy.
Farewell to the Father Page 15