My Father's Island

by Adam Dudding

  All that in your mailbox at once. But there’s also a poem Jenny Bornholdt wrote after visiting us at Sealy Road around Christmas 1988. Jenny had typed the poem out and sent it to Dad with a note saying it was going to be in her next poetry collection.

  Summer

  Driving in the green car. Talking. Summer and he feels he might have bought the shoes before he knew how to tie the laces.

  We go to Long Bay with Adam and meet Robin heading up from the beach to wash sand from his feet. Dad says Adam Dad but Robin takes a while to recognise him without his book. He’ll go home, he says, and put the jug on.

  Surf chunky and water so warm it is no surprise.

  Above us, men with wings hover around the cliffs.

  Tea on the verandah with Robin. New shoots from the kiwifruit vines wave tenderly in the warm air. Babacos dump ripe on the ground (make the baby wear a helmet in the sandpit). Red snap- dragons cluster by the step.

  Feeding the chickens, Robin picks up a small egg. Listen, he says, And I hold it to my ear, warm, and hear the small beak tapping.

  19. Getting better all the time

  FOR ROBIN DUDDING, possibly the best thing about the 1980s was that eventually they ended.

  It was the decade Islands died, his father died, his mother died, and his marriage nearly did too.

  It was when all his children got fed up with him, establishing grudges that would never entirely fade. Near decade’s end we met and co-wrote a letter to him saying we were angry, that we all found his behaviour intolerable, that we were unhappy that he was unhappy, that we didn’t like coming home because of him, that it felt like he was cancelling out all the good things of previous years, that we were sick of tiptoeing around and trying to gauge his moods and seeing his back as he walked away, and that we really hated the way he was treating Mum.

  I have no memory what his reaction to the letter was. It’s quite possible he didn’t give us one.

  It’s also curious, given how clear it seems now that he was suffering from something like depression, that the word doesn’t appear in our letter. Perhaps we were being thick, but I think it’s more to do with the fact that Prozac didn’t reach the market until 1987 and wasn’t mainstream till years after that. Depression wasn’t taboo exactly, but nor was it on everyone’s lips the moment someone became unaccountably grumpy and mean. Urging him to see a shrink wouldn’t have crossed our minds – Dad talking about his feelings at a stranger’s behest was unimaginable.

  If it had even occurred to me to think about Dad in psychiatric terms, whatever it was that ailed him seemed far too energetic – too much shouting and stomping – to be ‘depression’, which I thought of as that thing where you couldn’t get out of bed.

  All the same, as the new decade began, things started, very slowly, to get a little better. Freelance work had come and gone, including stints writing a books-world column for the Listener, but in late 1990, just before I left home, he got a permanent sub-editing job there, working under chief sub-editor Tom McWilliams and alongside his old crony Kevin Ireland. Tom, Kevin and Bob, three grizzled former editors of Mate magazine, reunited four decades later and putting headlines and captions on stories by the likes of Gordon Campbell and Diana Wichtel, Finlay Macdonald and Marion McLeod.

  However, for Dad a regular job like this, especially in journalism, was an admission of defeat. He took the sub-editing seriously and found the usual pleasures in working with words, but he was still back in the wretched, cynical, sensationalising trade he’d escaped when he quit the Auckland Star in 1959.

  A steady, well-paid job was also a capitulation to conformity, and he moaned continually about it – he hated the motorway commute from the Shore and the polluted city air choked his lungs; he was surrounded by sloppy writing and fools; the new editor was a philistine and someone had let accountants into the building.

  I’m not being facetious when I say it bothered him to work for the sake of money. While considering whether to apply to be managing editor at Auckland University Press a few years earlier, he’d told a friend the steady income was a ‘huge attraction’, but this seemed ‘of itself, to be cogent reason for not applying: I mean it is hardly the correct motivation for job-vocation’.

  Yet he enjoyed the novel experience of solvency, buying himself new running shoes and an expensive racing bike, treating himself to a few beers at the London Bar after work. As Kevin would say to him when they slunk out of the Dominion Road offices for a lunchtime curry and a beer, ‘Better than bloody starving in Torbay, eh Bob?’

  And when he was playing ping-pong in the Listener lunchroom you’d catch glimpses of the mad joy (and vicious competitiveness) that always overcame him when he had a ping-pong paddle in his hand.

  At home I noted with narrowed eyes that none of Dad’s newfound wealth seemed to make it as far as Mum’s pocket. He was as nasty to her as ever; was still short-tempered most of the time. Some of the black cloud followed him to work, where he’d grunt and sigh about the fatuousness of something Joseph Romanos had written in a sports column, or a particularly conceited sentence in a Gordon Campbell interview. He’d roll his eyes and huff if some uptight colleague asked him to obey the new rules banning smoking at his desk. His default expression was thunderous.

  The ghost of Islands haunted him. He’d tell Listener arts and books editor Chris Bourke that he had all the material for the next edition ready to go, if only he could get the funds together.

  Yet for all his bitching, I think being forced to interact daily with people on the magazine and in the wider office helped pull him out of his deep funk. He became very fond of some of his workmates, and was seen more often as lovable curmudgeon than unapproachable misanthrope.

  There was sometimes a twinkle behind the scowl and he was interested in people. He quietly extracted the life stories of just about everyone in the building, with a level of attention inversely related to their corporate status. He knew the secrets of courier drivers, secretaries and cleaners, yet couldn’t bring himself to use the name of the company accountant, instead referring to him as ‘the poison dwarf’ (and to be fair, the man was very short and quite unpleasant). He talked intently about books and films and music with the writers and other subs, and if someone wanted advice from an old man who’d been around a bit he was happy to give it.

  Chris Bourke, especially, was delighted to find yet another literary legend slumming it in the subbery, and was grateful whenever Robin slipped him a suggestion for the ideal book reviewer, and when he introduced him to Dennis McEldowney, the gentle former AUP editor and walking literary encyclopaedia.

  Soon after Dad got the job I left home and was flatting in the city, playing in bands and living hand-to-mouth. Dad nepotistically set up some sub-editing shifts for me, and I shared none of his qualms about being motivated by money.

  I barely visited home. I presumed he was still being vile to Mum but at least I wasn’t there to see it, and on the days we were in the same office I’d separate Jekyll from Hyde as ever. We’d play ping-pong in the lunchroom, and he’d discreetly coach me so it looked like I knew how to be a sub-editor. I joined him and Kevin for curry and beer, and we observed the usual separation of things we could talk about and things we couldn’t.

  Soon after that I took a plane to London and didn’t come back for three years. My sisters kept me updated about the latest outrages, such as Dad’s refusal to attend Mum’s graduation, but they also reported that lately, when they were out at Torbay, they’d noticed Dad sometimes talked to Mum in a civil tone of voice. He was, it seemed, becoming a little bit less awful.

  The other thing they said was that Dad didn’t seem very well. As ever, he was smoking like a train and coughing like he was on the brink of expelling pieces of lung, but he was also in increasing pain from the arthritis in one of his hips, which probably needed replacing.

  He tried to stare down his illnesses by doing as much swimming, running, cycling and netball as he could bear. The exercise possibly helped o
ffset the decline of his lungs, but it didn’t do much for the hip. His deeply ingrained inability to engage constructively with bureaucrats meant he joined the waiting list for his first hip operation years later than he should have, and in Auckland’s social netball circles he was starting to make a name for himself as that mad old bearded guy from the Listener who could barely walk, but who’d trundle up and down the court, limping and puffing and farting, and occasionally letting out bloodcurdling yelps of pain.

  20. Emails north

  HE GOT OLDER. He got sicker. He got nicer, slowly. I used to think the two things were connected – that he’d looked at his failing body and realised no one was going to nurse him in his dotage if he remained alienated from his entire family. Either that or the illness was robbing him of the energy and breath it takes to be a fulltime arsehole.

  I’m less sure now. I think if he could have stopped being mean and miserable by sheer force of will he’d have done so years earlier. As it was he remained cantankerous and snappy, still exercised his crazed iron grip over every crumbling square inch of Sealy Road, still knew how to win an argument by saying nothing or limping away – but somehow the bitterness, the fury of the 1980s faded away.

  Steroid inhalers, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories and painkillers. Drugs to offset the sore guts from the anti-inflammatories, and sedatives because the steroids mucked up his sleep. He left the Listener after six years, aged 61, partly because he didn’t have the stamina for a full day’s work. A couple of years before that, I’d been visiting New Zealand and went in with him to work. As we inched down two long flights of internal staircase, ex-prime minister David Lange was centimetring up the other way, heading for an interview with a Listener writer. Lange was slowly dying of a blood disease; Dad had clogging lungs and a hip joint like broken glass, so the two of them shared the staircase for such a long time it started to feel awkward.

  He got one new hip at 62 and another at 66. He quit the cigarettes but it was way too late for his smoke-brittled lungs. Emphysema, said the specialist. You’re not going to drop dead soon, but when you die this is what it’ll be from.

  I returned to New Zealand then left again. I married. I lived in Newcastle then London. I didn’t feel quite right. I missed Auckland’s summers and the hot pools up at Waiwera, but London seemed too full of promise to leave quite yet. I felt flat. One mid-winter night I woke in a panic from a dream that Dad had died and sort of cried for a bit because it felt interesting to have a strong emotion, even if it was borrowed from a dream, but then stopped because it seemed silly.

  I wondered how long you survived with emphysema.

  Dad asked if I could be with him in New Zealand during his first hip replacement operation, so I came home for a long Torbay summer and we went for faltering walks of gradually increasing length, mostly to the beach. He complained constantly but took pride in ticking off the distance targets on the colour-coded exercise calendar I drew up for him on a piece of A3.

  I enjoyed the time warp of being home and sleeping in my old room. I noted with no surprise at all that Dad was a tyrannical invalid, a ‘grumpy spider in the middle of the room’ as one sister put it, constantly asking people to fetch and carry or do minor DIY repairs to his precise specifications. But I also noticed that, most of the time, he was OK towards Mum. At times he was tender, almost flirty.

  I knew I should be pleased but I actually felt squeamish. It seemed wrong, like he must be pretending. Or maybe it bothered me because it meant all that indignation I’d felt on Mum’s behalf for half my life had been in vain. She was letting him resume affections, just like that. Part of me, still 15 years old, wanted some sort of conspicuous public apology. Still, it didn’t look as if Mum minded being an object of renewed affection. She seemed to have decided to get on with enjoying the good bits of her marriage as they came, and ignoring or forgiving or forgetting the rest.

  I bought an old computer before I left and set up an email address for the two of them – woodspring@xtra.co.nz, in honour of the Woodspring Cottage plaque that was still on the side of the garden shed, termite-ravaged and peeling. By the time I got back to cold London, the first emails from Dad bragging of his distances walked and strokes swum were waiting for me.

  Mum emailed to say she and Dad had recently been dragged to a family get-together by four of her sisters who’d noticed it was their wedding anniversary. It was a lovely day, said Mum, but 40 years of marriage seemed ‘a funny thing to celebrate’.

  Dad emailed much more than Mum: updates on the state of chooks and tomatoes and my sisters’ families, lists of the books he was reading and the beach swims he’d had that week, fondly gruff complaints about Mum’s hopelessness with her newly earned driving licence and her shitty broken-down car (he wouldn’t let her drive his). I replied with my own garden statistics, existential angst, boasts about my latest Fleet Street job or continental weekend jaunt, and what I was reading. When Landfall’s editor asked Dad to do some book reviews he said no but gave her my contacts instead, then gently edited my reviews before I filed them.

  He read a Joe Bennett newspaper column in the Herald and thought it was so good that he typed the entire thing into an email to me, I guess because he wasn’t able to read it out to me over breakfast in person. He said he’d just been to the big Hotere exhibition at the Auckland gallery and found it ‘incredible that the juxtapositions of colours should be so moving’.

  I said I’d been to see the new Planet of the Apes movie and there’d been one character, an elderly chimpanzee with greying facial hair, who was the spitting image of him, and I enclosed an image to prove it.

  Keyboard to keyboard across 18,000km we were as close as I remember us ever being.

  In 1999, ‘20 years and 5 million cigarettes too late’ as he put it in an email to Bill Manhire, Robin Dudding finally made it to the northern hemisphere – a shoestring tour with Mum of the UK and the continent, with stopovers each way in Buenos Aires, where he felt exhilarated and instantly at home amid the heat, the stink, the terrible slums, the racial mix, the amazing Italian food.

  Inspired by some mad travel guide they’d read, they were fanatical about travelling light, mostly so they would never have to wait for checked-in luggage on arrival at an airport. Given how fast Dad could walk, such haste hardly seemed necessary, but sure enough, when they came into the arrivals hall at Heathrow within minutes of their plane’s touchdown, they each carried just a tiny daypack for the three months ahead: more than enough room for passports, a change of undies and Dad’s extensive medicine cabinet.

  This was midway between hip operations, so he had one goodish leg and one in a manageably early stage of collapse. The real problem was his breathing. The corticosteroids he inhaled bought him several days of tolerable lung function at a time, but they were so toxic to the rest of his body that they had to be rationed. He’d calculate which were the days he really needed to breathe and which days he could busk it, but even a minor cold or the previous day’s over-exertion could mess it all up and he’d find himself at the door of his lodgings in Pisa, faced with a 63-step climb to his room on a day when ten steps was Everest.

  His illness made some days hellish but he was mostly gleeful. He got hooked on Spain’s cheese, olives, red wine and hard bread, was entranced by Venice, Paris, Zurich, Cahors, Bath, London, Madrid and Barcelona, and the people he found there.

  ‘One bonus of being me,’ he told Manhire, ‘is that I don’t rest until I’ve made people talk to me (in whatever language).’

  A few weeks before they arrived, my wife Catriona and I nearly bought a flat in Camden, but as we got closer to making a final offer I felt a sense of rising panic.

  I really hadn’t wanted to come back to England, yet I did it anyway, and now I didn’t like being here. I hadn’t wanted to live in Newcastle or get a newspaper job – but I did both anyway. I sort of wanted to go home but didn’t seem able to do anything about making it happen. House ownership looked like shackles, the long line of zero
s in the price the links of a chain. The voice in my head was screaming Nooooo! again, and this time I decided to listen to it.

  I said we couldn’t buy the flat, then followed my logic to its conclusion. If I was unable to commit to buying a house, maybe that meant I wasn’t able to commit to this marriage either. Didn’t it? Yes? No? Maybe?

  Yes, I decided. It did. Definitely. I was sure.

  I informed my wife that we were doomed but – ahem – as she knew, my parents were about to visit and this was the trip to Europe that Dad had been waiting for for half a century and he was sort of dying so he wouldn’t get another chance, probably. Would she mind terribly if we delayed telling anyone about the marriage implosion I’d talked myself into? It’d only be a few months and then we could split and everything would be fine.

  It’s the most appalling favour I’ve ever asked of anyone. She agreed, presumably for the benefit of my parents rather than me, though I didn’t really want to hear too much detail about what she felt about anything at this point.

  The situation was ridiculous, barbaric. Sadistic almost. I cringe with shame at the memory. The four of us took jolly day trips around London together. We’d spend a convivial evening with my parents then head off to our room to argue briefly, maybe cry, then rigidly share a bed. We went ahead with a plan to rent an apartment in Tuscany for a week, taking not only my parents but also my Scottish mother-in-law. Brilliant.

  I suspect that, just like the time that boy at school swung me around his head by my hair, there are unpleasant moments from the visit to Italy that I’ve quietly blanked, but as I recall it, this covertly tragic week was almost entirely enjoyable, and we overcame the marriage-on-the-rocks problem mostly by ignoring it.

  We were happy idiots. I rented a car at the airport and almost drove us under a speeding oil tanker at the first highway intersection because I was looking the wrong way. A toll-booth attendant lost patience with my total incomprehension and took €75 off me for using 2km of his autostrada (we later calculated we could have driven to France and back for that price). We were kicked off a beach after discovering you had to pay to sit on the sand.