Louis was one of the most beautiful men I’ve ever met – owlish, serene and French: hopelessly cultured yet utterly approachable. Gina had told me that he’d fought with the French resistance in World War II. He talked to me as if I were a friend, not a patient. He talked to me like someone who had been to a very dark place and wished to save other people from going there too. He talked to me, I realised, like a father, which felt surprisingly okay. I’d assumed that I’d had it with fathers, but apparently I was wrong.
And yet some of Louis’s advice didn’t make much sense. For instance, he thought I was in the wrong job. At his request, I gave him some articles I’d written, including some features for Playboy (I felt embarrassed about the naked women on the backs of some of the pages), and he said I should consider a career in diplomacy. I had been called lots of things, but never ‘diplomatic’. It was such an odd suggestion that I didn’t know how to respond.
Louis understood pain, though. He had been through a lot. You could see it in his face, which looked staved in, trampled by trauma. Gina, who knew him better than me, said that during the war he had beat a German prisoner to death with his bare hands. I pictured Louis, fists clenched, standing above a man tied to a chair, his face a red mash, like raw meat. I wanted to ask Louis about it. I wanted to ask him if he felt guilty about what he’d done, and how he’d dealt with that guilt. But I never did. It didn’t feel right.
*
People say men don’t talk to other men about their feelings, which is entirely accurate. Dad certainly didn’t. I wasn’t about to go there either, not with John or Andrew, and not, God forbid, with Rob, for a whole lot of reasons, the first of which was that my feelings made me feel weak. I felt vulnerable, which isn’t something you want to feel around other men, even if they’re your friends. Somewhere, deep down, my inner caveman told me that if I admitted to John or Andrew or Rob that I was depressed they would beat me to death with clubs and steal my food.
Also, I was ashamed of being depressed. It’s a malfunction, I thought, and thus, by definition, a failure: simply put, something had gone wrong in my head. But I was also ashamed because it was something I had no right to feel. I was not dying of leukaemia. I was not going blind. The fact that I’d been born white, male and middle class meant that it was unlikely I would ever know real deprivation. Right now, I told myself, millions of people live in slums or in war zones. I had just read that ninety percent of Pakistan’s street kids had been raped. On a trip to India just after I finished uni, I saw a human being, or rather half a human being, just a leathery, sun-blackened lump of torso – no legs, no bum, no crotch – dragging itself face first along a road that was just a hot, sticky layer of compacted excrement.
That guy should’ve been depressed, not me.
I would never go hungry. I would never be raped. Short of paralytic inebriation, I would never drag myself face first along the street. I knew all that. And yet I still felt terrible.
I thought about Dad, how when I was younger I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, scream in his face: ‘What is wrong with you? Why can’t you be happy?’ I began to say these things to myself. Sometimes I even shouted at myself. But just as it hadn’t worked with Dad, so it didn’t work for me.
I talked to Mum about it. I called her all the time, and dropped around. I didn’t bother trying to hide anything. Indeed, rather than feigning stoicism, I went the opposite way: I wanted her to know how awful I felt. I was misery incarnate, and I loved company. I’d call her up and cry on the phone, pour out my pathetic heart, all my third-rate insecurities and trivial miseries. And she never let me down. She said depression was an illness like any other, and nothing to be ashamed of. ‘You wouldn’t feel guilty about having a broken leg, would you?’ she told me.
But Mum was nothing if not practical. One day I told her that I missed Dad, that I wished he were still here. I said I wanted to have someone who could give me fatherly advice in times of trouble.
‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ Mum said, with a hardness that sounded utterly alien. ‘If Dad were here he’d be just like he was before. He’d be jealous and angry and carrying on. You don’t really miss him, I can tell you.’
And she was right. I’d imagined that death would have fixed Dad. But why? That was delusional.
Years later I came across an ancient Chinese proverb which said that headstones aren’t put on graves to commemorate the dead, they’re there to keep them from coming back.
*
Perhaps it was because she was so small, or because she had that hump on her back, but people always underestimated Mum. I did it, too. A couple of years after Dad died, I bought her a small radio and installed it at the end of the kitchen bench, near the sink, which I still pictured as her chief habitat. ‘Talkback radio, Mum,’ I said. ‘It’s really good if you’re in the house alone.’
‘Yes, so I’ve heard, pet,’ she replied. ‘But I don’t get lonely.’
Mum was only fifty-six when Dad died, but she never got anywhere even remotely close to seeing anyone. ‘I am a one-man woman,’ she would say. Or: ‘I will never find another man like your father,’ which was intended (I think) as a compliment to Dad. What she meant was: ‘I am a one-husband woman.’ Shortly after Dad died, Mum’s friend Doreen died of cancer. Doreen was married to Bruce Storey, who gave the speech at Dad’s funeral. When Doreen was dying she told Mum that it would be okay by her if she and Bruce got together after Doreen was gone. Mum did, in fact, go on to see quite a lot of Bruce. They were always going to ‘a meal and a movie’ together. He eventually ‘put the hard word’ on Mum – ‘put the hard word’ being Mum’s phrase – to which Mum politely responded that while she very much enjoyed men’s company, and Bruce’s in particular, she had no intention of ever again cooking another man’s dinner or hanging out another man’s underwear or planning another man’s holidays or lying in bed as another man stood in the bathroom brushing his teeth and breaking wind. But this only steeled Bruce’s resolve. ‘Gosh, your Rosie’s one of a kind,’ he’d tell us, whistling through his teeth.
Her friends changed. Some of them dropped her cold after Dad died. She was never sure why, since they never talked again. They just stopped inviting her out. Did they blame her for Dad’s death? Were they embarrassed they hadn’t done more to help? I felt like calling them up and yelling down the phone at them, but Mum approached it with typical equanimity. It had been a difficult situation; she had done the only thing she could. She had a favourite saying that she would invoke when I was young: To thine own self be true.
She changed, too. She listened to a lot of my music. She liked the Hoodoo Gurus, especially ‘My Girl’, and ‘Birthday’, by the Sugarcubes, and the Dire Straits song ‘Romeo and Juliet’. She spent more time with us, and her politics became more left wing. She argued with her old friends over refugees and gay people (both were okay by her), and about the federal government funding private schools, which she thought was absurd and her friends thought was only right and proper. ‘I’m not sure I recognise them any more,’ she’d say.
She became even more clever with money: she saw it as her duty to maximise the investments Dad had worked so hard to accumulate, and she studied stocks and bonds and mortgages. She drank her brandies and dry, never more than two in the evening, and never before six o’clock. She alphabetised her library, and reread some ‘big books’. One day when I was visiting, I went up to her bedroom to get her glasses for her – she was always leaving her glasses at the opposite end of the house – and found a copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex by her pillow.
Dad’s death seemed to trigger a little flurry of departures. First there was Mum’s mum, Nan King, who got pancreatic cancer two years after Dad died. Mum nursed her at home, putting her up in Camilla’s old bedroom, administering painkillers and wiping her bottom. Then Doreen died. Then her sister Joanie (also of cancer). The one person who did not die was Nan Ell.
If anything, she got firmer, harder, stronger; she was obstinately permanent, like petrified driftwood. Mum and Faye shared the load, driving Nan around, dropping her off at the Club, picking her up from the Club, visiting her in hospital when she got shingles once, listening to an endless procession of friends and acquaintances describe how ‘absolutely marvellous Muriel is’. Mum would listen to them on the phone, patiently, dutifully, while turning to me and sticking two fingers down her throat, pretending to vomit.
*
Mum, then, had no intention of starting a new relationship, but I certainly did. Pretty soon I started seeing a girl called Inez. I’d known Inez for many years, as friends, during which time I worshipped her furtively, in secret. She had a glorious head of long auburn hair that she wore pulled over one shoulder, gypsy-style, smouldering, chocolate-brown eyes, and exceptional legs (she was a cyclist). She was also very sophisticated. She liked foreign movies, especially French and Italian ones (she had Italian heritage). She spoke of the actor Marcello Mastroianni as her ideal man: she had a poster of him in her flat. On one of our first dates, we saw the film Three Colours: Blue, directed by Krzysztof Kie´slowski. Set in Paris, the film starred Juliette Binoche as a woman whose husband and child are killed in a car accident, plunging her into an existential crisis so severe she attempts to kill herself. I found the film a bit boring, but Inez was in raptures.
I was living in a flat in Bondi, a squalid little urban cave that we regularly trashed with large parties. Inez lived around the corner from me in a much nicer, cleaner flat with a view. Consequently I spent most of my time at her place. Despite this, our relationship was rocky. She was very kind, with a touching faith in the power of pasta to heal any wound. (She was always cooking me gnocchi puttanesca, or spaghetti alle vongole.) But she made me feel gauche. I would say something and she would sigh; sometimes I caught her shaking her head at me, or staring wistfully at her Marcello Mastroianni poster. She was also, she said, extremely suspicious of surfers, and let it be known that she was making an exception for me, that I was on probation. She considered sex to be something sacred, a cosmic meeting of souls. I considered sex to be more like a cosmic meeting of genitals. Still, we had fun. She liked reading, so that was good. We went on camping trips up the coast. She was a lot more knockabout than she appeared. Once, on a camping trip up the north coast, she wandered a couple of paces off the path and into the scrub to take what she called ‘a bush dump’, all the while continuing to discuss the true meaning of Tomas’s infidelity in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
*
I relied on Inez a lot, but I relied on Mum more. Indeed, I leaned on her shamelessly. But you can’t spend the whole of your life on the phone to your mother. It’s not dignified. You have to come up with other strategies, which as a twenty-something Australian male amount to a cross between ignoring your feelings, covering up your feelings, and pushing down your feelings: sitting on them, like a bag of cats, until they stop struggling. All of these strategies require – or at least are aided by – drugs and alcohol. Every night I drank lots of beer or wine. On the weekends I drank more. From Friday to Sunday was pretty much a blur, interspersed with lots of vomiting. I vomited down the side of my bed onto the floor, out car windows; sometimes I vomited and shat myself at the same time. I spent whole nights, five, six hours, on bathroom floors, my cheek pressed to the blessedly cold tiles. By Monday I could barely cognate; there was dirt in my brain; thoughts ground against one another like rusty cogs. It took me days to recover.
I was also taking LSD. One weekend, I went up the coast with Inez and some friends, camping on Treachery Headland at Seal Rocks. We drove as close as we could, but then had to carry everything – tents, gear, food, water – hundreds of metres through long, spiky, snake-filled grass and out onto the point, where it was all rocks and scrub and views of the ocean. This, I realised, was where Dad had camped as a boy and watched the whales fighting. Killer whales, killing, all night long.
That night, we lit a fire and took LSD. It was very strong and, before long, mine went bad. I became paranoid, then quietly, adamantly terrified; I lost the ability to talk. Slipping away from the fire, I climbed down the rocks and onto the beach. Inky ocean, glowing sand, the full moon blazing like a ball of dry ice. Clouds crowded the sky; lit from behind they made ghastly shapes, fuming faces with putrescent cheeks, Dad’s face, coming together then dissolving, over and over. I walked down the beach for miles, then, feeling pursued, staggered into the dunes, where I curled up in a bowl of damp sand, hugging myself, feeling like a lizard, feeble and creeping, like a creature in a cave, licked all over by tongues of cold smoke.
On the way back to Sydney, we drove through a bushfire. Bits of burning things tumbled through the sky, embers, twigs, strips of bark, everything on fire, cartwheeling in the thermals, powerless, disintegrating.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I’ve always been terrible at goodbyes. Letting go is not my strong point. I’m a collector; I hang on to things. I’d be an awful Buddhist.
One of Dad’s oldest friends was a man named Peter Broughton. Peter was ironic, dandyish, refined. He went to the theatre a lot, and opera. I liked him: when he came to dinner, he called me ‘old boy’ and asked my opinion of books, records, films. He was married but never had kids. Later, when Dad was sick and alone in our house, it was Peter who had called him the most, persevering even when Dad attempted to fob him off by pretending to be the gardener.
In the absence of children, Peter ploughed much of his energy into a performing arts foundation that he had started in the 1970s. He also collected records. At his home, an old sandstone place in Woollahra where Mum and I went to lunch in the months after Dad’s death, he had a whole room devoted to music, shelves and shelves stacked full of vinyl.
Several years after Dad died, Peter let Mum know that he wanted to give me some of his records. He was converting his collection to CDs, anyway, and he never played them. I didn’t really want his records; they were mostly classical – Herbert von Karajan or Otto Klemperer conducting the London Philharmonic. But at the same time, I didn’t want to say no.
I drove over to Woollahra one Saturday afternoon, and we spent a couple of hours going through his collection, carting out big removalist boxes packed with records as heavy as bullion. The axles on my car squeaked all the way home to my flat, which was on the fourth floor. I couldn’t carry the boxes up there, so I left them in the garage. But then it rained, and water came in under the garage door and wet the boxes. I was afraid the records would get damaged, so I took them all to Mum’s place, where I stored them in the room under the garage on pallets.
A couple of months later, Peter called me: ‘Well, old boy, fancy some more records?’
So back I drove to collect six more boxes. As I packed the car, Peter and his wife, Didi, made me lunch – tinned salmon sandwiches and cold lemonade. I had the feeling they had bought the lemonade just for me; it was not something they would drink. I drank as much as I could.
Finally the car was packed. There were boxes in the front seat, boxes on the back seat and in the boot. I was standing by the driver’s door of my car with Peter when he put his hand on my shoulder. It was a big hand, like Dad’s, and his grip was bony and intent, as if he were climbing a cliff face and I was a handhold.
‘You’re just like your father, old boy,’ he said. ‘He loved music, too, you know.’
I nodded.
‘He had a lovely singing voice. Really marvellous. Did you ever hear him sing?’
‘Sometimes, in the shower.’
‘Despite everything that happened, he loved you very much.’
‘I know.’
‘I phoned him a week before he died, and we talked about you.’
‘Really?’
‘He said how much he loved you.’
This made me uncomfortable, because I wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth or ju
st saying what he thought I wanted to hear. Then he said: ‘I just wish I could’ve done something,’ as if he was apologising. ‘We miss him.’
‘So do I,’ I said, though I wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth or just saying what I thought he wanted to hear.
I took the records over to Mum’s place. It took all day to move them into a safe area, into the room under the garage. I made sure they were above the ground, that they had good ventilation. They were like a pet I’d volunteered to take. I threw some old sheets over them, so they didn’t get dusty, and left them there.
Years later, after carting them around from flat to flat, house to house, having never played a single one of them, I threw them all in the bin.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In 1996, I returned from a year overseas. I’d resigned from the magazine to go freelance and travel with Inez through South America. The idea was that we’d find colourful, exotic, dangerous stories, send them back to Australia, and get paid for it. As it happened, we broke up after a couple of months, while in Peru, sitting hypoxic and trembling on the summit of a mountain we had climbed as part of a mountaineering course that we had paid a fortune for and looked forward to for months. Such bitter, expensive unhappiness.
And so, at the age of twenty-seven, I moved back in with Mum, and washed my clothes for the first time in fourteen months. I also decided to get in touch with Margot. It was nearly ten years since we’d spoken, but some part of me hadn’t been able to let her go – that saying goodbye thing, again.
I tracked her down through her parents. She was living in Point Piper, in an old stone house that had belonged to her grandmother, who had died recently; Margot was minding the place till her family got around to selling it. On the appointed evening, I knocked on the door. I was horridly nervous; when she opened the door, I blurted out, ‘Wow, you’ve lost weight!’
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