My Father's Island

by Adam Dudding

  Ten years on, the ceiling was black and peeling once more so a high school friend and I repeated the exercise. Dad moaned for weeks: what was the point of painting the ceiling while there was still a leak in the roof that he had been just about to fix? Why had we bought new brushes when there were some perfectly serviceable ones in the shed that just needed a bit of soaking? Why hadn’t I asked his permission before painting His Ceiling? (He was very clear about the ownership of Sealy Road. Mum once referred to ‘our house’ mid-argument, and he corrected her. ‘It’s not our house,’ he said of the place where she and he raised six children together over a quarter of a century. ‘It’s my house.’)

  He wasn’t incapable of DIY. He could replace a pane of glass and build a set of bookshelves or a chicken coop. He could whittle a champagne cork to the right shape to make a bung for the bath tap’s shower attachment. When we went on a long camping holiday and he nailed the front door shut so the house was safe from burglars, seeing it didn’t have a lock, he didn’t hit his thumb with the hammer. It’s just that every task had to join a queue and be done in the right order, his order, and he was busy right now and Somebody Had Moved His Tools Again.

  He became slightly grumpy most of the time with most people, but, when his free-floating ill-temper focussed enough to find a specific target, it was usually Mum.

  I was frequently outraged on her behalf, and because she was an exceptionally tolerant listener, she’d let me rant on about Dad’s failings with all the indignation a know-it-all teenager can summon: he was an arsehole; he showed no sign of becoming nice again; his most recent tantrum was the last straw; she needed to escape this oppression; she must leave him. She’d never endorse my hectoring out loud, but I could tell she didn’t entirely disagree.

  Yet she didn’t leave. Instead, she read self-help books. Women Who Love Too Much. You Can Heal Your Life. The Inner Game of Tennis. I skimmed the books out of curiosity and some of them seemed sensible enough, but You Can Heal Your Life was particularly offensive – bestselling New Age bullshit which claimed that AIDS, cancer and being born into poverty were actually all your fault. So sometimes, if I was on a roll, Mum would get two adolescent rants rolled into one: Leave Dad! and Stop Reading Louise L. Hay!

  It never occurred to me that it could work the other way round – that perhaps it was Dad who should leave Mum. Sealy Road, with its disregard for fashion and its pathological levels of disorder, was as much an expression of the inner world of Robin Dudding as those magazines he created.

  Dodgy plumbing and holes in the floor; sketches by famous artists Sellotaped to the wall; more books than anyone could ever read; chickens and dogs and cats; plum and peach, tamarillo and guava and loquat, bamboo and cabbage tree and rimu and kowhai and kauri, planted by him; a dark ravine in the crook of the section where water from a small stream trickling through suburban backyards had eaten away at the earth beneath for years until one winter it collapsed – Sealy Road was Robin Dudding.

  Yet he did consider fleeing. My sister Ruth told me that in the early 80s when she was at drama school in Wellington, Dad would ring and write letters, and he said enough that she knew things weren’t good at home, and one time he really shocked her.

  ‘He said to me – and I think he was almost wanting us to take sides somehow – but he said, “I’m thinking of moving to the Hawke’s Bay with Adam, to be with my mother.”

  ‘He wanted to take you away from Mum and live with you somewhere else. I just thought, how on earth could you think about taking Adam away from Mum?’

  Thirty years on, it’s the first I’ve heard of such a plan. I’m astonished, but guiltily pleased that he’d have wanted to take me with him. Not that I’d ever have wanted to go. Exchange Auckland and Mum and my entire life to date for Hastings and my strange, sharp-edged grandmother? No thanks.

  The toxic atmosphere at home was just another reason, on top of the outdoor loo and the double bed in the living room, not to bring friends home. But when I wasn’t physically in the same room as the two combatants, I mainly forgot about it. I had other things to worry about: armpit hair, masturbation, acne, friends, bullies, unrequited crushes, school productions, band practices.

  It helped that other kids at school seemed to have parents whose relationships were just as bad. There were separations and divorces. One day a friend told me that over the weekend he’d pointed a loaded .22 rifle at his dad – a respectable businessman with a big car and a big boat and a secretary he’d eventually leave his wife for – to stop him beating up his mum. There were other stories: about the two teachers who’d left their partners to publicly legitimise the affair their pupils had been speculating about for years; the music teacher who’d recently taken a lesbian lover while her husband had moved into a shed in the garden; the kid whose father had killed himself over the summer break. By comparison I didn’t feel at all sorry for myself.

  Slightly more vexing than tensions at home were the day-to-day hazards of being a teenage boy with long hair at a new school, and a bit of a swot. It didn’t take long to spot who represented the greatest threat – a dozen or so free-wheeling kids from the semi-rural town of Paremoremo, some of whose parents were prison guards at the maximum security prison there.

  Each Monday, news would filter through the form of how they’d spent their weekend: breaking windows or stealing and crashing their parents’ cars perhaps, or chasing the younger brother of one of them – a backward boy called Ozzy – through the bush while hitting him with sticks. One Monday morning they were especially excited because they’d taken the game to the next level by tying a rope around him and hanging him from a tree (by his neck, they said, but given that Ozzy was still alive, I took that part with a grain of salt).

  I kind of liked them – they were funny and reckless, and there was an inspired creativity to their pursuit of violence. They invented a variation on the old tennis-ball ‘branding’ game. The rules were simple: everyone lined up facing a wall and bent over double, then the person with the tennis ball threw it as hard as he could at the row of upraised grey-shorted arses in an act of symbolic buggery/infection (though they didn’t put it that way exactly). They called this game ‘AIDS’, in honour of the newly famous disease.

  This was the era of Pac-Man, so at lunchtime the classroom became the maze and they were Pac-Men, and they’d shuffle around in a crab crawl between the rows of desks, kicking the shit out of each other when they intersected. When they tired of that they attached dart flights to their compass needles and hiffed them at each other across the room, a recreation finally banned after a girl walked through the door mid-game and got a needle lodged deep in her thigh.

  They were so busy hurting each other that their harassment of me was half-hearted at best. I cut off all my hair the summer I turned 13, not because of bullying but because the next school musical was going to be South Pacific and I was in the chorus. I figured I’d still be the second-shortest boy in my year, with an unbroken treble voice, but if I was dancing about the stage dressed as an American GI while singing ‘There Is Nothing Like a Dame’, it would probably be best if I looked nothing like a dame myself. Also, some of my friends were finding girlfriends and I wasn’t. I figured my hair wasn’t helping.

  Even after the haircut there must have been some bullying, because in Fourth Form I remember leading a small deputation of class goodie-goodies to the form dean, to say we were getting kinda sick of compass-stabs, ankle-taps, screwed-up paper missiles and suchlike. Could he make it stop?

  The dean shrugged.

  ‘The thing you need to understand,’ he said, ‘is that these boys will be gone by Fifth Form. Most won’t pass School Certificate. Just wait – in two years they’ll all be panel beaters or something and you guys will be left alone.’

  We were deeply unimpressed by his lack of pastoral care (and if we’d given a shit about the future of the Paremoremo kids, we’d have been appalled at the school’s lack of ambition for them), but with few options left we shrugge
d at the dean and tolerated another couple of years of low-grade sadistic tomfoolery. By the end of Fifth Form they had, as the dean had predicted, all left school.

  When I was 13 Mum started looking for paid work for the first time in 25-odd years. There were some humiliating false starts, like the café that let her go after a week because she was too slow: her idea of carving ham was to meticulously whittle every last molecule of meat from the bone just like she would have at home, when the manager wanted her just to slice the damn thing, fast.

  The saga of the paper run was almost as pitiful. In a rare instance of cooperation, Dad and Mum took on a badly paid contract to drop off bundles of the local paper for paperboys and -girls to deliver. The Transit was long broken down and rusting in the front lawn, but Dad had inherited his father’s horrible little Ford Thames panel-van. Twice a week they’d fill it with North Shore Times Advertisers, then, as Dad swerved through suburban streets, Mum would sit in the back, reading the address labels and lugging the bundles out the back. Prone to carsickness at the best of times and paranoid about the health effects of petrol fumes, Mum was intensely nauseous within minutes of the first run, and the enterprise was abandoned in less than a fortnight.

  Eventually she found her niche, working at the University Bookshop in the city. She knew books and was good at the job. She made a few friends of her own. She even had a little money for a change – though not much, seeing as Dad reduced his own contribution to her weekly housekeeping by the exact amount she was earning.

  He joked about it in a letter to family friends (‘We struggle on: Lois is breadwinner . . .’), but the shifting power balance clearly bothered him, and when a few years later Mum lifted her sights still further and took a course in teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), he began a startlingly vicious campaign to fuck her up.

  By now I was in my first year of university, still living at home because it was cheap and the path of least resistance. I was the last bird in the nest – even Emma the Labrador-Alsatian had left us, buried in the front lawn under a ‘Whisky’ rose.

  The ESOL syllabus was hardly a stretch for someone as sharp and literate as Mum – the real challenge was finding somewhere to study in peace. Forget a room of one’s own; she just wanted a clear surface to put her books. But Dad’s doctrine of total ownership made that all but impossible.

  Eventually she excavated a couple of square metres in a corner next to the wall of Islands boxes and set up a tiny wooden side table as her desk. But once she was out of the house, Dad tipped her stuff – pens, papers, ESOL texts and all – onto the floor. He’d suddenly needed somewhere to put his tomato seedlings, so when Mum got home her former work desk was out in the garden, covered in punnets of sprouting Moneymakers.

  As the final practical assessment drew near, Dad stepped up the psychological warfare. Like a rogue state playing deafening martial music across the DMZ, he switched to noisier expressions of hostility – stomping feet, slamming doors, shouting. I don’t remember the pretexts for the one-sided fights he’d pick with Mum, but I remember his roaring and his red cheeks and bulging eyes, and the tightness in my chest when I entered the house after a day at uni.

  My sister Melissa was doing the same teaching course as Mum and lived nearby, so the night before Mum was required to teach a practicum class under the gaze of an assessor she fled to Melissa’s house, hoping for one final evening’s prep to make up for the weeks lost to Dad’s sabotage.

  Some hope. I eavesdropped as Dad rang Melissa and gave her a message to pass on to Lois: ‘Tell her if she doesn’t fucking come home now she needn’t come home at all.’

  Mum came home. The next day she failed the assessment. She didn’t have enough money to repeat the course.

  I was always on Mum’s side during our decade of cold war. I had no doubt Dad was at fault. Yet part of me also wondered, with a gut-twist of disloyalty, if the problem was also that she was a bit weak and pathetic; that she should’ve had the courage to stand up to him, or leave. And maybe she failed that exam not because of Dad, but because she wasn’t quite as clever as we’d all assumed. After all, how hopeless do you have to be to get fired from a job making sandwiches in a café?

  But endurance is strength too. Despite the humiliations Mum didn’t curl up and die. Without a teaching certificate she couldn’t get a job at a language school so she took private students at home, a string of tongue-tied Koreans who’d turn up at the front door blinking at the strangeness and clutter of Sealy Road before sidling to a corner of the room to work quietly on their Rs. Dad was unfailingly rude to them and would take strategic strolls through the living room wearing only underpants, but he stopped short of full-scale sabotage.

  Mum committed other small acts of defiance. She resuscitated her maiden name in correspondence, and kept doing it even after Dad took the letters from the bank addressed to Lois Miller Dudding and threw them on the floor, saying ‘This person doesn’t exist.’

  After years of sort-of wanting to be vegetarian, she one day announced that henceforth she really was. For a while she kept preparing the chooks Dad had killed but eventually she drew a line and said she would cook them only if someone else got them ready. Dad said gutting and plucking were Mum’s jobs, so he stopped killing chooks and we stopped eating chicken altogether.

  A few years after the ESOL debacle Mum started taking university papers part time. At the age of 58 she completed the arts degree she’d begun four decades earlier, back when she’d noticed an interesting, nervy young guy with dark hair and an air force uniform up in the front row of her English lectures.

  By the time she graduated in 1993 I was overseas, but Ruth and Rachel and Mum’s mother went to watch her getting capped and to take her to lunch in the city. Dad had something else he needed to do that day.

  When I was younger, my parents would sometimes stand hugging in the middle of the room for long enough that I could clamber aboard, climb up the exterior of the hug and insert myself in its middle. Metaphors for where you want to be in relation to your parents don’t get much more straightforward.

  By the early 80s there weren’t any hugs left to climb into. I was getting too big anyway. Instead I settled for enjoying my parents one at a time.

  With Mum it was mainly talk – about what I was learning at school or university, about the merits of Louise L. Hay, about Dad’s latest outrage, about her ESOL course, about the world. With Dad it was mainly action – we ran, we swam, we gardened, we read proofs.

  Between intermittent issues of Islands he took on freelance copy-editing jobs, so we’d spend weekends and evenings in his study making note of where the commas fell in a history of Auckland University, or a book about Captain Cook’s interpreter Omai, or James Belich’s book about the New Zealand land wars, or a biography of A. R. D. Fairburn (its author Denys Trussell would occasionally visit and play out-of-tune Beethoven sonatas on our piano). One job, copy-editing an exhaustive natural history of dragonflies for Auckland University Press, appalled and fascinated us both with its tender descriptions of the extraordinary variety of ways in which different dragonfly species fuck, often on the wing.

  We were on shakier ground if we moved from doing to talking. Dad’s treatment of Mum was a wiggly tooth I couldn’t leave alone, and most conversations seemed to drift back to my favourite subject: Why are you such a prick to Mum?

  He’d never take the bait. He’d neither deny the accusation nor give me the satisfaction of acknowledging he might indeed be at fault. He’d just endure the niggling, waiting till I grew bored with the subject so we could get back to doing stuff.

  For reasons I never understood, Anna, the last sister to leave home, couldn’t get away with the goading of Dad that I could. If Anna passed comment on Dad’s latest mistreatment of Mum he’d snap back at her with the same sudden, intimidating rage he reserved mainly for Mum. Not that it stopped Anna.

  One dinnertime, when Anna was 17 and I was 14, she announced she was planning to go on the pill
. I suppose she thought that the kind of progressive parents who left copies of The Joy of Sex lying around, and who’d already met and liked her first serious boyfriend, would respect such openness and honesty. Mum possibly did, but Dad flinched, and turned to Anna and snarled: ‘And where will you contort yourselves?’ before getting up and leaving the room.

  Your teenage years are when you’re meant to notice parents aren’t the godlike figures you’d once imagined – it’s your evolutionary programming telling you it’s time to leave the nest – individuate, grow up – isn’t it? Somehow, though, at the same time as I was figuring out the precise composition and dimensions of my father’s flaws, I grew over-fond of the feeling of righteous indignation that went with it. I found myself almost incapable of talking to him except to criticise him, and over time we settled into twin ruts – querulous complaint on my part, mute wounded dignity on his – and we never quite climbed back out of them.

  Except one time. In 1991, not long after I’d left home, and just before I headed abroad for the first time, we met and drank beer at the London Bar in central Auckland, the only time in my life I can recall where both of us were moderately drunk in the same place at the same time.

  Dad hardly ever drank and on the handful of times I’d seen him have more than a couple of beers I didn’t like the result. There was the time he got hammered on a bottle of rum with a son-in-law and started slurrily swearing at Mum with a nasty glint in his eye. Another time he had quite a few beers and became exaggeratedly tender and sweet towards her, which I found equally disturbing.

  When I interviewed Kevin Ireland about the 1950s Queens Ferry days, he talked about how even among the bohemians of the day it was understood that a man mustn’t talk about anything too intimate. Dad’s inability to talk about personal things was something he shared with most men of his generation, said Kevin, but you were allowed to bend the rules with the help of alcohol.

  ‘When we opened a bottle of beer, Bob was open.’