My Father's Island

by Adam Dudding

  By the turn of the decade, though, the Bonus Bonds win was long gone and he was faced with an unavoidable reality: a literary magazine, no matter how well-loved and supported by Arts Council grants and the occasional philanthropic cheque, will seldom cover its own costs, let alone generate enough money to feed the editor and his family, especially an editor as slow and painstaking as Robin Dudding. And Dudding kept getting slower and slower and slower.

  Three months after the death of his father, Dad published Islands 31/32, a desperate double issue designed to make up for years of slippage between intended and actual publication dates.* And then the machine stopped, and Islands died – or rather, slipped into a deep coma, where it would remain for three years.

  Dad was thousands of dollars in debt to printers, and was struggling to pay household bills. He had plenty of material for future editions but could afford neither to produce them nor to call it quits and return everybody’s subscription and his Arts Council grants. He found himself, as he wrote to a friend, ‘unable to earn enough to keep us, even at our smell-of-an-oily-rag level – which I’m heartily sick of’. He had, he wrote, ‘ballsed things up pretty badly [. . .] the range goes from the domestic to the literary I might say’.

  I was 10, and mostly oblivious to the professional and financial disasters around me. For years Mum and Dad had made an oily rag seem a perfectly reasonable basis for a household economy. I thought everyone bought petrol in $5 sips rather than filling the tank. I really didn’t care that my school uniform and satchel were hand-me-downs from my piano teacher’s son, or that Mrs Hungerford gave deeply discounted rates for Anna and my lessons. I remember once looking at the Golden Kiwi lottery ticket magneted to our fridge and asking Dad why he bothered buying them. We didn’t need more money than we had, did we?

  And though Dad may have been in a state of panic as he sat at his typewriter, with me he seemed much the same as ever. We ran up and down Long Bay Beach, training for the Round the Bays fun run along Tamaki Drive according to the daily schedule printed in the Auckland Star. We also paid close attention to the Star’s pseudo-scientific biorhythm charts, noting the days that we were meant to be in optimal Physical, Emotional or Intellectual condition. We wrestled on the couch. I was still small enough for the occasional piggyback. We played balloon soccer up and down the sitting room, occasionally breaking light fittings.

  At intermediate I was learning that having long hair wasn’t all bad. The deputy principal, a clever but thuggish man called Penn McKay, called me Adam Fawcett-Majors, which I chose to take as a compliment. A few months into the year everyone in the school who’d wondered if I was a girl or a boy had already asked me, and the art teacher Mrs Storm said if I ever cut my hair off she’d happily buy it to use on the Victorian-style dolls she made as a sideline.

  I could tell that I was nearing the point when I would no longer let Dad hold my hand when we crossed a road, but I still let him occasionally. I liked being with him. He was still nice to me. What was bothering me, though, was the way he’d started being strangely unpleasant towards my mother.

  * Unlike the unashamedly occasional Mate, Islands followed the rigid nom-enclature of a proper quarterly: four issues a year – Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer – comprising a single ‘volume’ with continuous page numbering across the issues. This makes it easy to track the difference between the intended season of publication printed on each Islands spine (‘Autumn 1974’ etc) and the actual month of publication on the title page. I put both sets of dates into a spreadsheet, with a third column recording the difference – a pitilessly empirical measure of the distance between intention and reality.

  In 1974 the lag is nil. Two years later Islands 15 has ‘Autumn 1976’ on the spine and ‘September 1976’ inside – four months late by the most generous interpretation of seasons. The lag hits eight months in 1977 before edging back to five months in late 1978. In 1979, in a desperate move that must have fooled nobody, Dad redefines the five editions of 1978 and 1979 as a single, two-year volume (an oxymoron, really) and drops the telltale seasons from the spine. With the calendar reset the first two editions of 1980 are on time, but the third is a month late, and there’s no fourth edition at all that year.

  In 1981 another calendrical sleight of hand – a double issue that claims simultaneously to complete the previous year’s volume and kick off the current year’s. It’s disastrously late, even with the benefit of dubious labelling. Depending on how charitably you do the maths, when Islands 31/32 is published in June 1981 it’s somewhere between three and 15 months late.

  16. Moving the furniture back

  MUM SERVED dinner and called Anna, Dad and me to the table. I don’t remember what it was, but perhaps it was brown rice with a bit of onion and garlic and some rubbery strips of pan-fried steak, or maybe it was watery mashed potatoes with watery boiled mince and watery overcooked cabbage.

  It wasn’t that Mum was a bad cook. When we had weekend visitors she’d get an apron on and cover the table with a spread of salads from the garden, homemade bread, boiled eggs, sliced cheese, fried rice, vegetable soup, bowls of peanuts and sultanas. But on weeknights her heart wasn’t in it, and who could blame her? The squeezed grocery budget meant there was never anything fancy in the fridge, the stove usually had several broken elements and her own healthy-eating puritanism meant cans, packets and frozen foods were out of the question – as were, for the most part, salt, butter, sugar, white flour, MSG-laden stock cubes and other wicked shortcuts to palatability.

  More importantly, though, Mum would rather be reading a book or sitting in the garden than stuck in our tiny, squalid kitchen, so she’d wander off mid-preparation then scramble to put things right when she remembered she was making a meal. Some dishes suited this approach – an Irish stew, tasty and swimming with bits of spud and carrot and chunks of falling-apart chuck steak, say, or baked potatoes with a casseroled piece of meat.

  The nightmare possibility, though, was if she decided to do anything involving lentils or kidney beans, which would end up in a steaming faecal pile on your plate, desperately under-flavoured except for a strong cindery taint. Without fail she would have put them on to boil and remembered them only when smoke was curling under the door into the sitting room. The incinerated bottom layer would be scraped into the compost bin but the smoky remainder would be salvaged and served.

  Whatever it might have been that evening, we ate it. Then Anna or I cleared the table and Mum reappeared with the next course, which might have been apple crumble, or stewed peaches with a sponge topping, or bread-and-butter pudding, or maybe just a bowl of stewed apple.

  ‘Here you go,’ she said cheerily, handing round the served plates. ‘Dessert!’

  Dad glanced at the bowl then back up at Mum. His face twisted. He scraped his chair back and stood, cheeks suddenly bright red, eyes narrowed.

  ‘It’s not fucking dessert,’ he roared. ‘It’s pudding.’

  He took the bowl and smashed it to the floor. Then he vanished through the double-doors leading to the garden and his office.

  Mum widened her eyes. She bent down and gathered up the pieces of smashed plate and scattered globs of dessert, pudding, what-fucking-ever, and carried them to the kitchen bin. Anna and I soldiered on with our spoons. The food suddenly didn’t taste of much, but we were used to forcing down meals without much appetite.*

  Actual plate-smashing was a rare excitement, so extreme and absurd that Anna and I – the last two kids still living at home – could giggle about it as soon as Dad had stalked from the room. Another explosion, when he threw an egg at Mum and it smashed and dripped down her face, became funny a week after the event but was nasty at the time.

  Far more common, though, was for Dad to sit through a meal in stony-faced silence, seething in anger over God only knows what, filling the room with a sour, buzzing tension, a possibility of violence. He might say nothing at all, or snarl a brief complaint about the toughness of the lamb chops, or just give an angry sigh
. After he’d eaten he’d stand and leave the room.

  I suspect the reason mealtimes in particular were so tense was that they were the one time Dad was forced into close proximity to Mum. The rest of the day he could avoid her, timing his movements so they were never in the same room for long. They’d become like a pair of repelling magnets, able to draw close only with the greatest of effort for brief, unstable moments.

  Sometimes he literally wouldn’t talk to her for months on end, apart from brief pretences for the benefit of visitors. If Mum tried to engage him in conversation he’d make a dash for the door.

  For someone who loved conversation as much as Mum did, silent treatment was especially cruel. Many years later, my sisters and I would find in Dad’s office a letter she’d written him during one of those silences. It’s a short note but there’s a lot there: anger, despair, frustration, hope, flattery, flirtation.

  I hesitate to write to you as I have a fear of being mis-understood and do not like the thought of you finding signs of arrogance or blind egoism or similar but what the hell – here goes (our lack of ‘meeting’ couldn’t be worse than it is and I feel your opinion of me couldn’t be lower.)

  If you want to have a really good fight we’ll have to make some rules first, because our exchanges do not keep to the point and the irrelevant digs just make things worse.

  You have asked me to make a list of points for discussion. I think I have told you what worries me, often enough, but if I haven’t made it clear here they are.

  Money.

  Work & occupation.

  The thing that bothers me most – (us) is not exactly a matter for discussion as I think it is a state or summat.

  All the other things – the house – travel, chores etc are just daily things to negotiate about – like what to have for dinner.

  But this wasn’t written to make lists about problems but mainly to say hello and to get you to say hello back. If I were to say that I liked your tender and crisp cabbages your luxuriant lettuce and the way you get parsley to grow like nobody’s business you might think I’m a liar.

  You might also say I’ve got an ulterior motive if I say how pretty the bantams are and how elegant your bamboo. Well, too bad! Most of the nicest things between us I don’t like writing down because it immediately becomes just a bit less private. Anyway that’s all for now.

  It’s a love letter really, if a profoundly depressing one, though the sentences about cabbages and lettuce make me laugh: just because she was miserable didn’t mean Mum was going to pass up the opportunity for some alliteration.

  Dad must have seen the note. He could read a text on its surface and underneath. He wasn’t stupid. I’d love to know what went through his head as he read this letter from the woman he lived with. At the time, it looked like he hated her – found her very existence intolerable. I couldn’t understand why, and I still don’t, exactly.

  Certainly she had a handful of irritating qualities. She would tell terminally digressive anecdotes, so exquisitely boring that we’d either beg her to stop or just glaze over, totally forgetting she was even talking (‘. . . so it was on Friday . . . no it can’t have been on the Friday because I had just been to the shops . . . and I was talking to Pat . . . so surely it was Thursday . . . no, perhaps it was Friday after all, because . . .’).

  She was also near-incapable of giving a direct yes/no answer to such tricky questions as ‘Would you like another biscuit?’ (‘Well . . . I’ve already had one. That’s probably enough. Ooh they are good though. Would you like one? Shall I put the kettle on? . . .’).

  She was always, always late leaving the house, so Dad would just leave when he was ready and sit in the car, listening to the radio as she faffed around looking for her shoes or her other glasses for another half an hour or more.

  Yet, as Anna and I reasoned as we tried to solve the Mystery of the Increasingly Unpleasant Father, none of these was a capital crime. Also, she’d been like that ever since we could remember and Dad had only started getting nasty recently, so whether she was annoying or not wasn’t really the point. However we looked at it, Dad was the villain.

  Their marriage had never been equal as such, but there’d been a tacit contract that had functioned for years. Robin brought home the bacon and Lois cooked it. Robin brought fascinating, creative people into the Duddings’ orbit and Lois made them lunch and cups of coffee and took part in the clever conversations. Robin dreamt up fun things to do – camping holidays in Coromandel, a summer barbecue at Long Bay for the entire street – and Lois made the logistics work, minded the kids, cooked the food, had a good time.

  Robin made the decisions, drove the only vehicle, controlled the money. Lois went with the flow, let the driving licence she’d got in her teens lapse and seemed to accept that the only money she’d ever handle was the cash Dad gave her each week for groceries.

  If there was a bit of spare money, Robin might pick out a nice dress from a shop, and Lois would wear it. It never occurred to him that she might want to pick one herself. He liked her hair long, and when she cut it short once he flew into a small rage before apologising with a bunch of flowers. He didn’t like her wearing make-up, though she’d still venture a dab of lipstick for fancy occasions.

  During our cheese-quiche lunch, Carol Delaney reminds Mum of the time she’d done Mum’s make-up for her – the full mid-1970s nine yards with plenty of eye shadow and mascara. When Dad saw the transformation he was furious and scolded Carol.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Carol. ‘She wanted to pretty herself up.’

  ‘She doesn’t need prettying up,’ said Dad.

  If Carol’s husband had tried to control her like that she’d have told him where he could shove the lipstick, but Mum wasn’t like that. She knew she’d ceded too much territory to Robin somewhere along the line, but didn’t quite know how to claim it back.

  She sometimes told a story about the time, before they’d had their first child, when Dad had headed off to the Auckland Star and she’d decided to make something of the day and rearrange the furniture in their one-room Herne Bay flat. When Dad got home he wasn’t angry exactly, but he told her she’d made a mistake and the couch and the armchair and the little table must be returned to where they were when he left for work.

  That was the moment, Mum would say 30 or so years after the event, when she should have told him to get stuffed. That’s when she should have pointed out that in a real partnership both people get to make decisions about the optimal angling of chairs. At the very least she should have calmly said: ‘Move them yourself, darling.’ But she didn’t. Instead she smiled bravely and put everything back like he said.

  And now the deal, with its balance between control and kindness, was breaking down. The housekeeping budget had become impossibly small as Dad’s professional life grew more chaotic. The stream of literary visitors had become a trickle and if Mum had the temerity to invite friends she’d made for herself Dad would greet them with the same mix of hostile silence or muttered insults he was perfecting on her. And he was losing his knack for creating fun: a summer camping trip when I was 12 was the last family holiday we took.

  There were better days and worse days, better years and worse years. But if I zoom out enough to see the whole of the 1980s at a glance, it’s all of a piece. This was the decade that Dad stopped being nice.

  Traits that had been mildly irritating, or even entertainingly quirky, took on a darker tone. That early control-freakery about the placement of furniture metastasised into a generalised anger at anyone’s attempts to move or change anything at all in his house. Every pile of two-month-old newspapers, every little mound of shorts and underpants discarded on the dining table en route to his evening bath, every pair of chook-shit-spattered gumboots left just inside the front door, attracting flies – dare to tidy them away and he’d walk about bellowing: ‘Who moved my newspapers/pants/boots?!’ For a couple of decades an entire wall of the living room was ramparted by stacks of cardboard boxe
s containing thousands of misprinted or unsold back issues of Islands, vaguely camouflaged with draped bed-sheets. They weren’t to be touched, moved, or talked about.

  He exerted the same grip over his outdoor domain: if Mum dared plant a few daffodil bulbs alongside a garden path there was every chance Dad would dig them back up the same day. Didn’t she realise that was where he’d been planning to put some dahlias? And why had she moved his gardening fork anyway?

  For several years there was a metre-wide hole in the kitchen floor where the leaking sink had rotted the boards. Dad’s solution was to take a cupboard door that had fallen off its hinges and balance it over the hole. He never did dishes so was in little personal danger, but Mum did, and one day the door wobbled and flipped as she stood on it, and she fell through to the dirt a metre below, hurting her leg. The door was retrieved and rebalanced and the hole remained.

  Eventually Melissa’s boyfriend Brett turned up with a large sheet of chipboard, some nails and a belt of tools and spent a day building a new section of floor. Dad’s reaction was exactly what we all expected – insult and outrage. Hadn’t he said that he was just about to fix it himself? Couldn’t we see that Brett had made a terrible hash of it? Look – the new piece of wood didn’t sit flush with the old boards, and the unsealed chipboard was only going to swell up when it got splashed.

  It was the same reaction he gave to all the acts of guerrilla DIY committed by his children or their partners in the 80s and 90s in the hope of making Sealy Road slightly more habitable. Ruth swooped in to replace a crumbling kitchen sink-top that came away in little chips of stone if you tried to wipe it clean. Natasha’s teenage boyfriend noticed the scrolls of peeling paint, black with mould, that curled like parchment from the living-room ceiling and insisted on stripping and painting it; he was never forgiven by Dad.