After my story appeared, I got hundreds of letters and emails. It turns out there are a lot of mentally ill fathers out there. It also turns out that no matter how mentally ill those fathers are or what they do as a result, their children invariably still love them.
There was one particular email. It was from a woman whose father had died at 36 of a heart attack, when she was just a little girl. She wasn’t writing about madness or suicide, but simply about her father, and the ‘captured moments’ she had of him, of ‘lemonade spiders on the front veranda; his very short “business” work shorts and matching walk socks, pulled up to the knee; him drawing a turtle into the strawberry jam on my toast just so I would eat it . . .’
The eternal father, I thought. The eternal, beautiful father.
CHAPTER TWENTY
We’ve got three kids – all girls. Mia, the oldest, then Rosey, and Sunny. When I tell people I have three girls, their most common response is: you better get a shotgun. My response is: I wish I could! Then I could threaten to shoot the girls if they complained about their dinner again.
There is an awful lot of estrogen in our house. Apart from my daughters, there’s Margot, our dog Beani (also a girl) and nine hens. But that’s good. I’ve always preferred women; they make more sense to me. When you hang out with women, you find out what’s really going on in the world. When you hang out with men, you find out what’s really going on in the football. I can read about the football, but I can’t read about how Margaret, the nanny of Rosey’s best friend Bonnie, is about to get fired because she keeps walking in on Bonnie’s mum having it off with her new boyfriend, who Margaret doesn’t think much of and keeps badmouthing to Bonnie’s real dad, all of which Bonnie downloaded the other day when I made her and Rosey some Nutella toast and chocolate milkshakes after school.
Rosey is doing a school project on ancient Egypt. The task is to illustrate one aspect of ancient Egyptian life, accompanied by a short speech. Rosey wants to talk about the ancient Egyptian gods, all twenty-nine of them, but Margot and I convince her to focus on just one. And so Rosey picks Khnum, the most ancient of the ancient Egyptian deities, the ram-headed god of water who created everyone on his potter’s wheel using clay from the banks of the Nile.
As I’ve discovered, it’s perilously easy to get sucked into your childrens’ homework. Rosey wants to do a life-sized poster of Khnum, but I overrule her, insisting we shoot for the sky and make a bas-relief sculpture with air-drying clay and paint. After buying the materials, we get to work, teasing out blobs of clay, rolling them into arms and legs and chest parts. According to the internet, Khnum wears a sarong: I tell Rosey it will be more lifelike if we fashion the legs first, then place a thin layer of sarong clay over them. We do the same for his lapels and headdress. Then comes the face, which is tricky: it’s easy to make a ram god look like a donkey or a dog, or even a dolphin with foetal alcohol syndrome.
At one stage, Rosey rather cannily points out that Khnum’s posture is anatomically impossible, with his torso front on and legs sideways. ‘Correct,’ I say. ‘There was a famous painter called Pablo Picasso who was influenced by this style,’ I add, before realising that I’m not sure if this is true or just something I’ve heard or assumed.
Soon, Khnum is finished. He is surprisingly good. I tell Rosey I’m keeping him, that she has to get another idea. Ha ha, she laughs. I then tell her to do her speech.
I lie on the couch with the newspaper. Normally, within ten minutes of lying on the couch I would feel restless, as if I should be doing something, anything – working in the garden or cleaning out the chook pen or building a wall or tearing down a wall. But today that restlessness doesn’t come: maybe Khnum has exorcised it. Anyway, soon Rosey has returned, bearing a rough draft of the speech.
The writing slants steeply down from left to right, as if there’s a fire at the top of the page and all the words are racing for the exit. She has made Khnum sound like a Depression-era politician, a no-nonsense character who got things done. ‘He provided the water in the Nile so that people could grow their crops.’ ‘He made the egg that became the birth of the sun.’ ‘He protected Ra, the sun god, on his daily trip through the underworld. He is also credited with giving humans the part of the soul called Ka, which is the life source of a person.’
‘You’re my little Ka,’ I say to Rosey.
‘What?’
‘Ka – you know, my life force. You’re my life force.’
‘Oh,’ she says, smiling. ‘Okay.’
I do that a bit nowadays. Sometimes, lying in bed at the end of the night, I’ll tell my kids: ‘You’re the reason I’m alive. Without you, I’d be nothing.’
Now I wonder if that’s not too much for a kid. Maybe. Probably. But there are worse things I could say.
*
People often say parenthood ‘doesn’t come with a manual’. But it does – it’s just that the manual isn’t written down. It’s in your head. You learn it by observing your parents, which is a problem if your parents were really bad at parenting. The other potential problem is when your wife is working from a different manual to yours. What do you do if your manual says: ‘No TV during the week’ and your wife’s manual says: ‘TV during the week is no big deal’?
Luckily, Margot and I are pretty much on the same page. We keep it simple: treat every child equally; no shouting or smoking in front of them; and always present a united front. This last one is important: kids are like mould; the slightest crack in your authority, and they’ll get in. Another rule is: trust Margot. She knows what she’s doing with the mothering caper.
I have another rule, one that pertains just to me, and that is: never let my depression ruin our home. This was what Dad’s depression did: it poisoned everything. He was miserable, and so everyone had to be miserable. I am not going to let that happen. And yet when depression hits, I find it virtually impossible to keep it to myself. I don’t abuse the kids; I don’t yell at them (well, no more than usual); I don’t punch holes in the wall, like Dad, or walk around naked or drink myself into a stupor or chase Margot around the kitchen with a carving knife. And I don’t rant and rave.
But I do become morose and self-pitying. Every part of me becomes structurally weak; I bleed from the seams, I leak gloom. I keep up my end with the kids; I doubt they even know, although it is strange how Rosey will occasionally walk up to me at these times with a pitying look on her face and throw her arms around my neck. And I become impatient. I can’t help it: when you’re depressed, it feels as if you’ve been depressed forever. So I decide to up the dose of my drugs. I find myself taking sixty milligrams of Lexapro, triple the recommended amount. But rather than make me happy, it just zonks me out. I feel smothered and dozy, like I’m walking on the bottom of the ocean, and I can’t keep my tongue in my mouth. I go to sit on the toilet and almost miss. And so I scale back the dose.
Margot cops it – again, no yelling or anything like that, but just the moping, the anguish, the tidal surges of dread and despair. God knows how she handles it. She’s a rock – a rock lashed down with steel hawsers. Secretly, she must want to kill me. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she’ll say, and we’ll go up to a lovely cliff top overlooking the ocean and she’ll call me to the edge and say, ‘Look down there, do you see that?’, and when I look over she’ll push me off. Just a little well-timed hip-bump, that’s all it would take. Whoops! I wouldn’t blame her: it’s what I wanted to do with Dad, when I didn’t want to do the opposite.
*
To give him his due, I did learn things from Dad about how to be a father and a husband. But in his case, the manual he left me was really an anti-manual – things not to do. Don’t infect the house with your madness. Don’t treat your wife as an emotional punching bag. Don’t work seventy-hour weeks. And don’t, whatever you do, call your child a moron. There were other things, too – the little things that aren’t actually that little. Mum used to yell at h
im: ‘You don’t care about me, you never ask how I am!’ And so, no matter how dismal I feel, I’m always careful to ask how Margot is. How was your day? Four words. Just get them out of your mouth. It’s a fig leaf, really, especially compared to the rest of my demeanour. I’m not sure it really counts for much. Sometimes it counts for very little indeed.
One night Margot breaks down on the couch, trembling with pent-up fury. ‘I don’t give a shit any more about how you feel,’ she says. ‘You have no idea of the toll it takes on me.’ She says we need a break, that she’s dreamed of leaving – or, rather, that she’s dreamed of me leaving.
‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her, taking her hand.
‘I don’t want you to be sorry,’ she snaps, pulling it back. ‘I want you to acknowledge the impact you have on me, on us.’
We don’t hug a lot any more. Sometimes it seems as if the illness, not to mention fifteen years of marriage, has bashed all the frills off our relationship, knocked off all the tender shoots. And yet we never give up on each other. In time, to our mutual amazement and relief, those tender shoots grow back. We find ourselves on our deck at sunset on a warm Friday evening, drinking gin and tonics, reading quietly. Peace has broken out. We are happy once more.
*
God knows what Dad would make of my life. He couldn’t possibly have envisaged it. Right now, I’m making sandwiches for the girls’ school lunches. It’s Sunday night, and I’m slapping together a whole week’s worth: fifteen sandwiches, which I will wrap in tin foil and pack in the deep freeze. Margot and I used to fuss about making exotic combinations – poached chicken and celery, vegetable muffins, homemade sushi. Then we would open their lunch boxes and see only half of it eaten. Now it’s plain cheese sandwiches all round.
This is not my favourite job. It’s repetitive and slow, even though I have mastered the production line method: margarine, cheese, bread, foil. Wrap ’em and pack ’em. But there is also something blandly gratifying about it, the kind of satisfaction that Sisyphus might have felt when he got his boulder to the top of the hill, in the instant before it began rolling back down. I like the feeling you get as you put all the sandwiches in the fridge. It appeals to my inner squirrel, to my urge to hibernate. The other day we had a blackout that lasted three days. Three days with no power. I loved it. Sometimes I fantasise about this kind of thing: a cleansing catastrophe that wipes away the world as we know it. I wouldn’t have to write stories any more; instead, I’d collect wood, forage for food, go fishing. Good, honest toil. The blackout wasn’t as bad as that; in the event, all it wiped away was the messages on our phone. Still, it was fun. We had fires every night and played charades, which in the absence of a TV to watch or a light to read by, proved surprisingly hilarious. Then, when the others went to bed, Sunny lay on my stomach, just the two of us, in the glow of a candle, and we played I Spy. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier.
This is a successful life, I tell myself. It is not perfect. I am not a doctor. I am not Dad. But Dad is dead, and I have survived.
*
When I was a boy, out of all of Dad’s games, I loved the Chinese burn the best. I loved it the best because it hurt the most. It hurt almost until I couldn’t take it any more. It hurt so much that all I could do was laugh, laugh until I cried. Then Dad would let go. He would stop twisting. He knew just the right moment.
Despite this, I rarely give my girls Chinese burns. I prefer another of Dad’s favourites – squeezy-kneesies. The advantage of squeezy-kneesies is that it leaves their little arms free to struggle, a hysterical lashing-out that inevitably turns to frenzied hugging. They end up hugging me, just as I ended up hugging Dad, my little arms wrapped around him, trying to encompass his tree-like trunk.
I have never caused my kids pain. Not real pain – and not yet, anyway. I long ago swore I would never commit suicide, no matter how bad things got. This is the least I can do. Actually, I see it as my duty as a father, part of the chivalric code of parenthood, one of the few, perhaps the only, ennobling thing I’ve ever done.
In his letters to Mum, when he was close to death and contemplating suicide, Dad said his kids were not enough to keep him going. I cannot understand this. With me, it’s the opposite.
*
Today we live in an old weatherboard, just three minutes from the beach where Rob taught me to surf. It’s got a big garden with a second-hand trampoline and lots of tall skinny palm trees that shake like ragdolls when the storms come through. There’s also a wooden deck out the back, with a roof over it, and a couple of daybeds against the wall. Nailed above the daybeds is the springbok that Dad shot in South Africa. We call it Bok. One of Bok’s ears is mouldy and moth-eaten, but it looks fairly happy, even more so for the addition of a Hawaiian lei which someone slung around its neck for ironic effect. Bok is a good talking point. Whenever someone new comes over, they always ask about it. My dad shot it, I say, in South Africa, while playing rugby for Australia. It’s a cool story. It’s Dad’s story, really, but it has slowly become a part of me. It’s something else that I’ve inherited. It’s my story now.
*
I have escaped Dad. I have outgrown, or maybe just outlasted, him. And yet he is at the same time inescapable. No matter where I go or what I do, how much I drink or how hard I work, no matter how many pills I take or doctors I see, he is always there. He is gone but he is not gone, he is without life but so thoroughly alive. He is the closest thing I have to an Old Testament God, both vengeful and tender. When he chose death, he placed himself beyond us, leaving behind an unbridgeable distance across which he still stares with those big brown eyes, looking at me and for me, asking to be made whole. For twenty-six years I have searched for the key that might have made him so, that would have unlocked him, that would have healed him. But there is no key for people like Dad. There is no answer. There is no peace. This is what he understood and I did not.
I wanted to save him. The pain of failing never goes away. It recedes but never completely disappears, like a man you pass on the beach as you walk the other way, getting smaller and smaller. When you stop and look back, you see how far you have come, further than you thought, and you see that he is still there, but very small, and far, far away.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A special thanks firstly to my wife, Margot, for her diligent reading and editorial suggestions on all the drafts of this book, and also for her patience and constant support. I’d also like to thank the people who kindly took the time to read the manuscript at different stages, including Conrad Walters, Greg Hassall, Lily Brett, my fantastic agent Virginia Lloyd, and editor Ali Lavau.
At The Sydney Morning Herald, I’d like to thank the editor-in-chief Darren Goodsir and Kathryn Wicks, both of whom gave me the time and space to write the book, Ben Naparstek and Stephanie Wood for their encouragement and support, and to Susan Wyndham, for her tips and advice.
Then there is the excellent Pan Macmillan team, including Ingrid Ohlsson, Mathilda Imlah, Emma Rafferty (now at the University of New South Wales), Charlotte Ree and Rebecca Hamilton.
Thanks also to Manly Library, where I wrote much of this book, and which provided a calm space and plenty of books to peruse when I wanted to procrastinate.
And, of course, the deepest thank you to my brother Rob and sisters Gina and Camilla, for their love and understanding throughout the process, and for filling in the memory gaps where required.
Max, about five years old (in the Scots school uniform).
Max as a young man, 1951.
The Wallabies on tour in South Africa, 1953 (Max, top right).
Max at his microscope, Royal Brompton Hospital.
Rosemary Elliott (née King).
The wedding of Dr and Mrs Max Elliott, Sydney, 6 April 1956.
Mum and Dad with Pauline.
Mum and Dad, England, 1964.
Our house from the bay (centre, red roof).
The view down into Mosman Bay.
Mum and Dad at Hawks Nest, 1986.
About Tim Elliott
Tim Elliott is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review, London’s Financial Times and Sunday Times.
His book, Farewell to the Father, first arose from an article of the same name in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine. The article generated one of the largest reader responses in the paper’s history.
Also by Tim Elliott
The Bolivian Times
Spain by the Horns
Some of the people in this book have had their names changed to protect their identities.
First published 2016 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000
Copyright © Tim Elliott 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
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