‘Do you think you’re a big enough boy not to wet the bed tonight?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He always brought this up to humiliate me. It made me angry.Just as I was clumsy out there in the bush, I was a bedwetter, too.
‘You know, Robert and I are tired of cleaning that up.’
This was a lie. Like with all my messes, like with the broken glass, only Dad would have to clean it up.
‘I know. I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Not to me,’ he said, reaching out and pressing the tips of his fingers into the baby fat that clung to my belly beneath the windcheater. ‘Inside.’
My guts went all hot like they do before you throw up. But then he stood up from the end of the bed and left the room, turning off the light on his way out and encouraging me to go to sleep.
I got onto the mattress with the cat and sat cross-legged in the centre, where I planned to play sentry. I’d wait for dawn. I’d wait for Dad to get back. The demons wouldn’t get me. I wouldn’t wet the bed. Eventually, I’d get to go home.
Beef, Heat and Christmas Treats
When Dad and I drove onto the property in Shepparton, my heart sank. Coming out to the bush was like travelling back in time. For generations Dad’s family had lived together on the expansive grounds of the estate, fronted by its white, weatherboard palatial home. But with the dense forest of peach orchards cleared, the now-dilapidated turn-of-the-century manor stood in stark contrast with the few sparkling McMansions being erected far back across the property development. An ocean of grey-brown soil extended for kilometres all around us, divided by the grid of streets laid down before the first houses started going up. Of the new, gleaming street signs that marked the roads, one read ‘Ford Crescent’ in honour of me.
Just like The Compound, Queenie McCullen’s house had a long driveway, only hers was composed of dirt and gravel. Dad drove the length of it, over the compression hose that sounded the doorbell at the back porch, and to the carport beside the woodshed, where a mid-century Morris Minor sat idle beneath a tarp, its tyres deflated.
I took my time getting out of the Commodore, strapping my pack to my back. It was impossible to do more to delay my approach toward the house, but I always tried. My skin tingled with irritation. I lived every second, every microsecond, in my attempt to avoid the inevitable. But when Dad shut the boot and began to cross the wide lawn between the carport and the back porch, dipping his head as he passed beneath the Hills hoist, I had no option but to follow.
It was the middle of the day and scorching hot. Queenie greeted us at the back door, standing by the sheepskin-covered rocking chair and long deep-freeze that ran the length of the porch, filled with Eskimo Pies and steaks and her homemade sausage rolls. My paternal grandmother was a large woman, matronly, and she always wore a floral dress with an apron over top. She had cut slits into the sides of her black leather shoes to accommodate her bunions, which pushed the shoes out at odd and alarming angles.
I dipped my head as she pulled me into a hug, closing my eyes. The smell of roast meat wafted off her apron.
‘You’re late, Robert,’ she said.
‘We’re not late, Mum. We’re on time.’
‘I’ve been waiting an eternity.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘Don’t tell me you stopped to eat. There’s plenty of food here.’
‘We didn’t eat,’ he lied. ‘Anyway, we’ll eat again and then again later and again and again. There’s always food.’
There was always food. It was obsessional.
We walked through the fly-strips into the house. Coming in from the back meant coming straight into the kitchen, where the lino was sticky like it was melting in the heat. As ever, lunch was waiting for us. Roast beef and potatoes and boiled peas. The wood stove was spewing out monstrous waves of heat, and without air conditioning on an Australian summer’s day, I wondered if I mightn’t just melt into the floor.
My great-aunt Val, Queenie’s sister, was already seated at the table, clutching her knife and fork and awaiting the meal. She didn’t seem bothered at all by the unbearable heat. Like her sister, she was wearing a flower-print dress with apron over top, and a cardigan over the top of both. She greeted me and my father with the surliest of hellos. I wondered how long she’d been sitting there waiting for her roast.
Dad and I filed through the house, left our bags in the front room and came back to dine.
I’d always gotten the distinct impression that Aunt Val didn’t much care for her sister’s adopted son, and as I took up my customary position not two feet from that roaring stove, I resumed my habit of searching her hands for the place where a scarred knuckle stood in for an absent finger. On the doily-covered tabletop, within her reach, Val’s trusty fly-swatter lay between the meat dish and the gravy boat, as if that plastic death-device, encrusted with the remnants of unfortunate blowflies whose guts had hardened within the square cells of the paddle, were merely another item of cutlery.
I averted my eyes, attempting to shut all of this out as I set to the task of drowning my roast spuds in thick gravy and extra salt. I was accustomed to loading my plate with everything available at the kitchen table; this was the only way I could have something close to an uninterrupted and semi-enjoyable eating experience, because if I didn’t take on the condiments and various food items and available spices, Queenie would not cease her attempts to make me try. She’d ruined entire meals for people because they’d simply refused pepper or salt or gravy, berating them with endless opinions and queries concerning their eating habits.
‘Do you want some gravy?’
‘Try some gravy.’
‘The gravy is very good.’
‘I made the gravy myself, for this meal especially.’
‘The gravy goes with roast beef, you know.’
‘Please, just try some gravy.’
‘I’m worried about you, you look too thin.’
‘The potatoes taste better with gravy, my dear.’
‘I don’t understand how a person can enjoy a meal without gravy.’
And on and on and on and on and on it would go. In the already unbearable heat. In the cramped, awful kitchen. With Val’s swatter in sight.
I poured everything onto my plate in liberal doses and ended the nagging before it could start. Despite the heat and the stomach-turning sight of the bug-encrusted swatter, I crammed the food down my throat in rapid motions, chewing and swallowing back, and chewing and swallowing back, until my gut hurt. I went into some mental sanctuary only me and a handful of Olympic athletes could access. Shut out the world. Just eat.
Dad always got it worst, however.
‘You’re getting fat, Robert,’ Queenie said.
‘Okay, Mum.’
He cut into a roast potato, releasing a small cloud of steam.I wasn’t sure how he was meant to simultaneously handle being overfed while keeping his health in check. Queenie didn’t really have a strategy to achieve this, but she expected the biology-defying feat from her son nonetheless.
‘You really should add a little more salt,’ she said.
Without looking, Dad reached for the shaker.
But of course he’d told untruths, I thought. Who would confess an affiliation with this godforsaken place? With this life?
Shut out the world.
Just eat.
The days in Shepparton followed the same pattern they always did, adhering to a rigorous schedule of feeding – morning teas and roast lunches and afternoon teas and ‘cold’ dinners, where the roast meat leftovers were consumed along with salads and thick slabs of either pickled pork or Stras, cut from a massive Don sausage kept in the vegetable crisper.
Lunch and dinner were paired with various desserts. Usually something warm at lunch, like pudding or crumble with hot custard; at dinner, it was an unchanging menu of cold desserts served in varying combinations. This menu included jellied cherries, fruit salad, trifle, rice pudding or bread-and-butter pudding, all of which w
ere served with cream, ice cream and, sometimes, custard. As with lunch and its many condiments, spices and food items, dessert, along with morning tea, along with afternoon tea, necessitated the consumption of each element of the meal, making it a requirement to ingest vast quantities of sugar and dairy fat. By day’s end, I felt nauseated and could hardly move.
All this eating was a hangover from when the property had been alive with orchard workers and farmhands, but Queenie had never divested herself of the habit of catering for fifteen working men. I’d learned to ride the days out. To stuff my face and not ask questions. To do exactly whatever people expected or wanted from me. Queenie thought I loved jellied cherries. I hated the fucking things. But I must have eaten a million jellied cherries in my lifetime. Sometimes I felt as if there wasn’t a thing anyone knew about me that they hadn’t invented for themselves.
Between the many meals, I would walk around the property in search of a shady place to read. One afternoon I walked from the back porch, past the outhouse, then further back to the woodshed and chicken coop. The chickens looked well. I took a turn at splitting some wood, then walked deeper into the property and back out towards the dam.
When I was little, I’d solicited the help of one of the neighbour girls in destroying the agapanthus bushes that had bordered the dam, blooming on the verge before the brush. We had hacked down the thick clusters of flowers, which I’d known Callum McCullen prized, because I hated my paternal grandfather. After Dad left, he practically refused to engage with me. This is what I remember. According to Mum, Callum had been fond of me when I was a baby; with his dab hand at carpentry, he’d crafted small objects for me to cradle as he held me in his arms. But after Dad left my family, something changed. I had no recollection of his earlier affections. He may have come to see in me some genetic flaw, a faggy disposition perhaps, that made him ill at ease. Whatever it was, his discomfort around me was obvious. He seemed physically repelled by my very presence.
I could recall only two interactions with my paternal grandfather: the day he’d confronted me in a blind rage, his hands filled with the broken agapanthus stems the neighbour girl and I had savaged; and the day I’d been made to play a series of violin concertos for him, in a hospice, by his deathbed.
This was the main reason why I loathed Shepparton and all of country Victoria, in fact: it sent me back into the past, and I never wanted to go there. Looking into the dam I felt exhausted – the heat, the food, the weight of memory. All I wanted was to lose myself again to those cracked bitumen streets in Coburg, where there was life.
The Bottle-o and the Fold-out
I kept walking in circles around the dam. It was too hot and there wasn’t any shade, but I didn’t want to go back indoors to sit with the noisy old water cooler that Queenie had wheeled into the lounge. Every twenty minutes I’d have to stand up and pour in another jug to keep the chilled air spewing out onto the faces of everyone watching the telly.
I whiled away the time alone until dinner, when the sun started to go down and the heat became tolerable, almost pleasant, as a cool breeze wafted across the plains and the channels dividing them. Soon, the only sounds I could hear were from the cicadas out in the wide expanses of nothing beyond the man-made waterways.
I recalled that as a child I would spend hours walking into the depths of the property along the channels, trawling their waters with my yabbie net. One year, I’d caught more yabbies than I knew what to do with. I’d brought them back to the porch, where Queenie had provided me with a wading pool – a big blue plastic kiddie pool, shaped into a half shell, like what children played with at the beach sometimes. But there was no beach here, no ocean, only endless brown land. I filled the plastic shell with dam water and emptied the yabbies into it.
By the morning the heat had evaporated most of the water, and the yabbies writhed in the sunshine until they stopped moving altogether. The stink coming off their little bodies was enough to make me retch, and so I tied a handkerchief over my mouth, like a stage-coach robber, like a bushranger, and watched them die.
Things died when you interfered with them, when you removed them from what they’d come to know, and I was seized by terrible guilt looking at their tummies upturned to the sun. The thin chitin that covered their bodies was frailer than my fingernails, and when the last of their legs had stopped moving, I reached into the seamy pool and extracted one and broke its body in two to see what was inside. They were made of nothing. Small and defenceless and easily broken. I doubted there was much more in me. One day, a large hand might reach down from the sky, pluck me up as I’d done, and inspect my innards. He would likely be as disappointed.
After dinner, around seven, Dad and I loaded into the station wagon and tore out of the driveway in search of the nearest bottle-o. He wanted a night spent drinking out of earshot from his mother as much as I did, so he’d needed little convincing when I’d made the suggestion we go for ‘a drive’.
‘Whaddaya want?’ Dad asked.
‘I dunno. Beer, probably. What are you gunna have?’
‘I’ve been drinking those little pre-made bottles of Johnnie Walker and Coke.’
‘Yeah? Any good?’
‘They’re not bad, actually, yeah. Can’t find Irish whiskey in a premix, though. I don’t think anyone does that. Dunno why.’
‘I don’t like mixed drinks that much. All my mates drink Woodstock, but I think it’s gross. I don’t mind Scotch-and-Coke or bourbon-and-Coke, but I’d rather mix it myself. Premixes taste funny, I reckon.’
‘That’s what I used to think, but these bottles are okay. You can try one if ya like.’
Dad pulled into a drive-thru. I was curious about the Johnnie-and-Coke bottles he was talking of.
‘What’ll it be, mate?’ The guy working the drive-thru was young, with a silver, four-gauge earring puncturing a hole through his left lobe.
Dougie didn’t like plugs, thought they looked fucked. But I kind of liked them, didn’t mind people who wanted to look fucked.
Dad made the order and the kid filled it fast. ‘Anything else ya want?’
‘Crisps. Ya want crisps?’ Dad asked, turning to me.
I nodded.
‘Tell the lad what you want, then.’
‘Do you have Samboy?’ I asked.
‘Nah. Sorry, mate. We’ve got Smith’s and, ah … Smith’s and that’s about it, I reckon.’
‘That’s cool. Salt and vinegar then. Cheers.’
‘Too easy.’ The kid rapped on the roof of the car as Dad handed over a fifty. He came back with the chips and a handful of change. ‘Take it easy, fellas. Have a good night.’
‘Cheers. Same to you,’ said Dad. ‘Hooroo.’
There was something about a bottle-o drive-thru that put me at ease. Something cool and smooth about the lighting, and the moths hovering above the humming fridges in that lighting, and the painted lanes in the driveway. Bottle-os made me feel all warm inside, and my sincere love of chips and booze was about enough to make me weep as we pulled out and navigated the long suburban blocks to the back of the property development.
Dad pulled over where a portable construction office had been set up between two of the houses. He turned off the engine but left the battery on and the parkers, so the headlights illuminated a small stack of plastic lawn chairs. There were cigarette butts in the dirt from where the tradies sat around and smoked. We took two chairs from the pile, placed our drinks on the ground, then sat and drank. For the most part we stayed quiet, just listening to the hum of crickets and the moths smacking against the thick plastic over the car lights.
I asked to pinch a smoke here and there, and Dad let me have them. It didn’t make sense how much I’d come to like smoking after all those allergies. Drinking, too. When I drank, I saw Ken, until I drank enough for the image to go away; and when I smoked, I remembered all those times we’d driven up to the bush with Dad puffing away and me in back with my eyes itchy and sore and swollen.
So, why had I c
ome to smoking? Why had I taken up drink? It was obvious: when you put the grog down your throat or lit up a fag, or even when you downed enough carb-laden food, memories went away, and all kinds of enjoyment was there for the taking. I figured it just went this way for everybody.
‘Whaddaya reckon about all these smoking laws, Mr Motor? They reckon they’re gunna ban it from the pubs. Can’t be done, I say.’
‘Seems like bullshit to me,’ I said.
‘Nobody’ll go for it. You ban smoking first, next day no customers. They’ll be stuffed round here, it ever comes to that.’
I nodded, before grinding another butt into the dirt. I opened the bag of salt and vinegar chips and got stuck in, Dad too. After a few stubbies, we swapped so I could try one of his premixes, which was pretty good.
‘I’ll have to buy that next time,’ I said.
I had nothing to say to my father, but these odd nights were a respite from whatever tension loomed in the bush, and they were blissful when compared to the days he’d lived in Seymour with Ken Mears. Thankfully, that was over. These days, Dad was living in the city, in Southbank, with a man named Craig Downing. Dad and Craig had been together about six or seven years, not that Dad’s living arrangements were ever discussed between us. When he and I chose to divest ourselves of whatever dynamic is supposed to exist between children and parents, especially with regard to dos and don’ts, we could do a decent mimicry of two people who got along. We could at least understand one essential truth: alcohol mattered. We were both there to drink, and there were no lectures given to contrary pros. I was glad of this.
When we got back to the manor, I said goodnight to Dad and left him in the sleep-out, across the lawn on the other side of the Hills hoist by the washroom and outhouse. Dad had it good that he didn’t have to head back inside. I had to go in across the back porch and through the kitchen, where embers were glowing in the belly of the stove, and hold my breath while I tiptoed along the corridor and through to the lounge. Almost everything creaked in the old house, and trying to sneak about after dark was nearly impossible. At a certain point in the passageway, on the floorboards nearest Queenie’s bedroom wall, your foot sank down deep, and when you lifted it back up the ripple effect would journey down the corridor and cause the crystal vases and china crockery to rattle inside the cabinets that lined the eastern side of the house. One wrong move and you could wake someone on the other side of the fucking country, it seemed.
Everything in its right place Page 8