The walk to prep that day was a normal one, Mum dropping me off at the gate and continuing on with my sister to her kindergarten. As my friend Stephen approached, I walked ahead to greet him, ensuring I was out of earshot of Mum when I told him I had the matches.
That morning I’d risen earlier than everyone and gone to the kitchen and stolen a box of Redheads. They were readily available and, with two smokers in the house, unlikely to be missed. Looking back, it’s clear that what we did was premeditated, although I can’t recall us planning any of it.
As the bell rang for the first break of the day – little play – four of us made a beeline for the toilet block, cramming into one cubicle together. I can’t remember if it was voted upon, but I assume because I had been the one to bring them, I was the man chosen to strike the match. It took a few attempts as I’d never lit one before, but I’d seen it done often enough to understand the basic principle. Dad lit his matches by striking them towards his face, which was way cooler than the normal and safer strike away from the body. It also had the inherent danger and coolness of a burning match flying off into his face.
I managed to get one started and held it under the roll of toilet paper hanging by the toilet. I made a rookie mistake, holding it too close and under the concentrated part of the roll, so while it smoked a little, the paper didn’t catch. Before long the match burned close to my fingers and I dropped it to the concrete floor.
Lighting another one, I made a point of holding it under the loose sheets that dangled from the roll, and that time it went up successfully. There was excitement in the cubicle but, to our dismay, we could hear even more from outside the cubicle. We hadn’t shut the door behind us and law-breaking like that was always going to bring a crowd. But where there’s an audience, there’s a dobber, the words ‘I’m telling Miss Monahan’ enough to force us to abort our mission. Not that I could tell you, even now, what our mission was.
We blew out the flames and bolted from the toilets, trying to blend in with the non-arsonist members of this junior society as casually as we could.
As little play ended we lined up outside the classroom. We could tell from the over-exuberant chatter that word of our deeds had spread. It was only a matter of time before the law caught up with us.
I pressed the matches into someone else’s hand and quickly moved away before they realised what had happened, hoping that with no evidence on me I might be able to talk my way out of it. But before we’d even walked back into the classroom, I was fingered as a co-conspirator, five-year-olds not known for their ability to stand up in the face of pressure. The Firesome Four, as we were soon named (only by me), were made to sit apart in the corners of the classroom, unable to talk to each other and get our stories straight.
It was both cool and terrifying that everyone knew we were in so much trouble. Cool because you couldn’t buy that sort of reputation, and terrifying because I assumed I’d be dead before nightfall.
As we stood in the vice-principal’s office, I knew we’d created a bad situation for ourselves, but even at that age I also understood it was not bad enough to warrant a dressing down from the top dog.
We’d tried to set fire to toilet paper in a wooden toilet block; if the fire had taken hold, the whole block would have gone up in flames within minutes, ensuring an expulsion for us and the best day of every other kid’s life when the fire engines turned up. If that’s not the principal’s jurisdiction, I don’t know what is.
The vice-principal’s belt smashing down onto his desk tore me from that thought. I had never seen rage like that; not even in Dad when the bird threw the nectarine through our neighbour’s window.
The belt to the desk was as bad as it got. We were yelled at, but not struck, and then marched back to our classroom, the rest of the day a blur as I waited for the inevitable. When Mum picked me up, I must’ve seemed like I had the world on my shoulders, waiting to get in the most trouble any young man had ever seen. Nothing came. That wasn’t totally unexpected; she’d hand this one over to the old man.
I was in my bedroom when Dad got home, pretending to clean under my bed in case I had to live out my days under there. He came into the house, asked about dinner, kept chatting to Mum. Then he asked where I was. I took this as the summoning to my execution and slowly made my way out, wondering how it would all end. Could I get smacked to death? Would I be permanently banned from dinner and starve? Or perhaps an ironic fire-based punishment I’d not even considered.
But nothing came. Dad was just asking about my day. Nothing later that night. Not the next day. I ticked off each moment of potential punishment. Not parent–teacher night. Not on my last day of prep, nor my first day of grade one. The consequences of trying to set fire to the toilet block never came and I never spoke of it. Nothing happened to the other boys either. For the rest of my childhood I was too scared to mention it, even to the closest of friends, lest word leaked out and a retroactive punishment kicked in. Though I am expecting a disappointed call from Mum the moment she reaches this section.
It was time for us to head for Berlin, meaning Dad would be leaving his birthplace for the last time ever (unless his life took a seriously wild turn). He embraced the gravity of the moment exactly as you would have expected, by not acknowledging it for a second.
Once we were on the road, Dad chose not to use his monk-like ability to be silent for decades, which I now knew he possessed. Instead he happily pointed out the ‘bloody fantastic’ Autobahn surface every five minutes, in case I had forgotten or moved on. Every roadside sign, he would read out loud, ‘Berlin!’ Like living next to a train line and becoming oblivious to passing trains, he became white noise to me, constant but largely unnoticed.
The monotony only broke whenever we’d pass the golden arches, Dad getting audibly upset, groaning, ‘Bloody McDonald’s!’ I’m not sure why it hurt it him so deeply, aggrieved by its very existence. Surely he would have gotten used to its presence driving around Melbourne. Maybe there was a cold Filet-o-Fish in 1973 he had never recovered from.
It would explain why I could count our childhood trips to McDonald’s in one McNuggets six-pack; Dad ignoring our pleas, which went from when we saw the golden arches appear in the distance until they faded in the rear windscreen.
Fast food was crap; end of story.
Unless it was pizza. Or fish and chips.
BERLIN
My experience of staying in Airbnbs had always been great. The first few times were odd, going through the drawers of a stranger’s house, like a burglar who was paying to be there. It was rare that I stayed somewhere while the owner was home, and once, in a basement in Seattle, I felt like I was in a seventies sitcom and my parents were upstairs. I did have my own entrance, but it made me feel like I was living at home and I vowed never to do that again. Generally, however, I enjoyed the comfort and warmth Airbnbs provided, making it feel like I was staying in my own place. A functioning kitchen was also really convenient.
The downsides were that complaints were much less direct, since you had to wait for the host or Airbnb itself to get back to you. Also, if you made a mess, the room wasn’t reset during the day like in a hotel. No housekeeping meant no one replacing the soaps I didn’t use or tucking the sheets in so tight I had to unmake the bed before I could get in. As I was fast discovering, it also meant no one sweeping up the talcum powder in the bathroom.
And, as was the case with our accommodation in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg, no lifts. Which meant when we arrived, we had to carry our luggage up three flights of stairs. That suitcase of Dad’s, up three flights of stairs. It was a struggle for both of us, Dad at the rear, pushing, me at the front, pulling, in constant fear of tumbling back down over the suitcase and Dad if I lost my footing or overbalanced.
When we finally got inside, I needed to see what else was in his suitcase, because every jumper he’d ever owned couldn’t weigh that much. Strangely, I saw that he’d packed a roll of gaffer tape. You know, the tape mostly used by road
ies and kidnappers. I wasn’t entirely sure what he had planned, but considering we’d come this far, I supposed I was in.
But before I could ask him about the tape, Dad had become fascinated by the windows in the apartment. They had this particular type of window in a lot of the places we stayed in Europe that operated on a hinge system I’d never seen before. They’re confusing to describe, so stick with me.
Known as ‘tilt and turn windows’, the key is that they have two sets of hinges – one set on the side and another on the bottom. The window is operated by a handle, not unlike a door handle. When the window’s shut and locked, the handle points down. If you turn the handle 90 degrees, so it’s parallel to the floor, the hinges on the side engage and the window opens horizontally, swinging all the way into the room. But if you turn the handle 180 degrees, until points skyward, the other hinges are engaged and the window opens vertically, making a small opening at the top.
I know, thrilling stuff. Before this, hinges had been an invisible part of life I rarely considered, like electricity or waiters. But of course Dad was obsessed by them. From here on, in every apartment we entered, he’d rush to the window, trying every hinge configuration, while I stood watching him and wondered if adult-onset autism was a thing.
He’d excitedly move the handle into every orientation, marvelling, ‘Wow, look at this. Bloody amazing! I have to tell Jason about these!’ As though my brother would share this love of hinges. As a carpenter, he’d no doubt appreciate them, but he’d be just as bemused by Dad’s excitement as I was.
Being in such close proximity to Dad made me see for the first time that he was obsessive compulsive. In Berlin I also found him mucking about with the sink in our apartment to check out the water pressure. He pointed to the running water, making the ridiculous assumption I cared, to inform me, ‘That’s bloody good water pressure that.’
Growing up I’d either laughed off his idiosyncrasies or, more to the point, not even noticed them. I was probably too focused on trying to get my acne-ridden face through high school, which was a day-to-day prospect, wrestling with hormones and hierarchy. The only thing I paid attention to were which girls were wearing bras (most of them) and which girls were ignoring me (all of them).
Looking back, our house was always in order, way neater than all of my friends’ places. Having grown up with it, I didn’t know anything different. The surgical cleanliness of the kitchen after dinner seemed normal to me. Dad would start the washing up while we were still eating, then stand over us waiting for the last mouthful to be eaten, swiping the fork from our hands as we chewed it down. Trying to tell him to calm down through a mouthful of food, he’d reply, ‘You don’t need it anymore.’
Nothing was missed when Dad undertook something. He did all the household ironing himself, including underwear. For a long, long time I assumed pressed underpants were commonplace. He also ironed Jason’s work overalls. My brother would always be on the lookout for them coming in off the line, as fights would ensue if Dad got to them first and ironed them. No first-year apprentice wants to turn up to a building site with razor-sharp lines down the front of his overalls. I imagined him on the bus, desperately crumpling his kit, hoping that he’d sufficiently dulled the crease before his workmates spotted him.
Dad mowed our lawns without the grass catcher attached to the mower, even though we had one. Raking up all the clippings created hours of extra work, but he defended the practice by saying it produced a neater finish. The yard always looked good, but at the cost of so much extra work. In my mind, corners were made to be cut.
He always made sure to finish what he started. When we had bookshelves installed in the loungeroom, Dad stayed up all night to stain them. The only thing you should stay up all night to stain is your liver.
The only time he didn’t follow through on something was when, hungover one Boxing Day, he knocked down part of the wall separating the loungeroom from the kitchen. He’d decided on a whim (and without consulting Mum) that he’d had enough of walking through two doors to get from one room to the other, so he created a shorter route. Much to Mum’s anger, it remained a rectangular hole in the wall with no frame for a couple of years. It seemed unlike Dad to leave something unfinished, but in his mind the job was to make an easier path from the loungeroom to the kitchen, which he clearly considered he’d accomplished.
Until the trip I’d largely forgotten about this kind of behaviour. Now that I’d had a reminder, I used the downtime waiting at stations and airports to reflect on my conduct, living in fear I had taken on more of Dad’s habits than I’d realised.
One thing that quickly came to mind was when, having just turned nineteen, Dad suggested I start wearing ‘smart’ jumpers. Knitted numbers with a crew neck that you might see on an 1800s sailor, or at a dad convention. His rationale being that I was a proper adult now and perhaps it was time to dress like one, rather than wearing T-shirts and hoodies all the time. Happy with my look but thinking maybe he knew what he was talking about, I went against my better judgement. Close friends laughing at my outfit showed me how good my judgement actually was.
But clothing was easy to change; I could take off a jumper, untuck a shirt. Reforming your personality and beliefs takes a lot more work. How do you fix something when you don’t even know it’s a problem? Ideally I’d be an amalgamation of the good parts of my parents, with none of the bad. But as I got older I was realising their traits had become mine, like a cocky repeating its owner. I’ve found myself saying to work colleagues, ‘You should buy property; that never loses money.’ Even though it absolutely does, and I know it. But I’ve heard it said so many times that it’s ingrained deep in my psyche.
The first thing I’d noticed was my obsession with the Bureau of Meteorology rain radar when storms are about, though I’d say most people do that. But the day that I timed my washing machine’s wash cycle, due to me not believing the countdown displayed on the machine was accurate (it wasn’t), was the day I sadly knew I couldn’t fight becoming him.
My fear was that perhaps, living alone, I was doing lots of things like Dad but didn’t have anyone to point it out to me. Was it weird to have a rain gauge attached to my home-brew kit, itself powered by my home-built windmill? I guess I’ll never know.
As we sat at the breakfast table on our first full day in Berlin, Dad enjoyed a coffee while I worked out our itinerary. Trying to get my bearings while looking at a map, I wondered aloud which way was north.
Dad said decisively, ‘It’s that way.’
Certain it wasn’t in the direction his finger was pointing, but needing to know what made him so confident, I said, ‘Yeah, I don’t think it is. What makes you say that?’
‘Well that’s what I’d say if I was in Australia.’
I can confidently say this was the most flawed logic I’d ever encountered. I was glad we were in a big city where knowing directions wasn’t critical. Had Dad and I been lost in the desert, desperate for water, knowing death was imminent, I wouldn’t want to hear, ‘I think there’s water over there, because that’s where the kitchen is at home.’
I was used to these ‘Dad facts’, having heard them all my life. He always said them with such conviction, as though suggesting you were naive if you didn’t buy them. They were mostly harmless falsehoods, like everyone wears steel-capped workboots on their paper round, until I was called up for jury duty and he told me, for a task as important as that, I had to wear a suit. ‘You’re doing your civic duty. You can’t look like a bum.’
Only when I surveyed the rest of the jury pool, decked out like I was heading to the Birdcage section at the Melbourne Cup, did it dawn on me that Dad had no idea what he was talking about. I didn’t need a suit; I would’ve looked more at home in a tracksuit. Yet again I’d fallen for the advice of someone who had no idea what he was talking about. He acted like he was Wikipedia, but he was full of shit. So . . . Wikipedia.
Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie museum was one of the few things Dad had sho
wn genuine interest in this entire trip. When I listed a few things for us to check out in Berlin, he didn’t respond with ‘What’s that?’ but rather ‘Oh yeah, that sounds good.’ I was pleased he was talking about it, thinking that we might finally start coming across tourist attractions he would be enthusiastic about.
Checkpoint Charlie had been one of the few crossings from West to East Berlin, a narrow street guarded by barricades, barbed wire and tanks. It was a storied place, the physical embodiment of the Cold War, capturing all the paranoia and tension between the West and the USSR. What Dad really wanted to see there was a car.
Dad was amazed at how East Germans had managed to smuggle people into the West in a space hollowed out in the guard of this car, next to the engine and above the front wheel. I’m sure they tried just hiding under a blanket on the back seat, but aside from being easily caught and subsequently executed, it would have made for a less exciting exhibit.
While we’d avoided the summer tourist crowds, our visit to Checkpoint Charlie fell on a Saturday, meaning it was packed. Tourists, families, communists lamenting better days, all fighting their way through the controlled mayhem. As we stood outside the entrance, Dad and I agreed that in case we (he) became separated/lost we’d meet at the guards’ hut that still stood out front.
Knowing exactly what kind of tourists are out there, the Checkpoint Charlie museum had idiot-proofed itself with arrows on the floor indicating which way to travel through the exhibits, which kept the flow moving and manageable, like a historical Ikea. As we walked through we saw the progress of the wall until its eventual fall in 1989 and exhibits of what life was like in both East and West Berlin. Then we came to the exciting section: escape attempts.
As we moved through, I spotted the car and began heading towards it. I stopped as I reached it, but Dad was caught up in the crowd and was swept away from me, caught in a riptide of sightseers. Even though there were arrows on the floor, I was willing to be one of those tourists, ignoring the rules, because I knew how much Dad wanted to see the car. Lowering myself to the level of Australian-overseas-in-a-Collingwood-jumper, I drew attention to myself, yelling over everyone, ‘Tommy! Over here! It’s the car!’
Paris and Other Disappointments Page 10