You Never Met My Father (36 page)

I smiled nervously.

“You're the quiet type, aren't yer? Not like the blokes I normally get to know.” She patted my thigh to console me. “Never mind.”

She sighed, musing, searching in her bag for a cigarette, forgetting why she was with me. “You don't have a smoke, do yer? I'd do anything for a smoke.”

When we reached the mall, I couldn't get out of the car quick enough.

I ducked through an alley, which was little more than a wind tunnel between a couple of rundown stores with their shutters down for the night.

The pungent takeaway joint was an unlikely sanctuary but I was grateful for the fifteen minutes it gave me. When I got back to the car, Suze had already bought cigarettes and was keeping her bum warm on the bonnet while she smoked.

She offered me one and smirked when I declined.

For a moment I imagined she was mocking my naivety. She had figured I was a virgin and was enjoying the tease. But the sensation quickly passed when we got into close confines of the car.

“Gary, you know, I really like talking to yer.”

I turned the ignition until the motor spluttered into action.

“You're a good listener, I can tell. Not like me hubby. He won't never listen to me.'

“You say you've left him?”

“Yeah. But I reckon, him and me, we should be talkin' 'bout the future of our kids.”

“How many kids have you got?”

“There's Tiger, and…'

Suddenly she raised her top and lowered the waistband of her tights to reveal a slightly flabby belly.

“I got another one in the oven. Me hubby reckons it's not his. I tell him o'course it is, who else's would it bloodywell be? I'm not gonna take no accusations from him!”

She had a protruding navel, I noticed, as she began to rub her skin.

“D'yer reckon I look pregnant?”

I gaped at her belly.

“I wouldn't know,” I stammered. “I haven't had much experience in these matters.”

“Yer sister's well on the way, i'n't she?” she countered, reaching for my hand. “Go on, see if it feels pregnant to you.”

It was the first woman's belly I'd ever touched. I rubbed it tentatively and withdrew my hand, despite how pleasant it felt.

“What?” she demanded, offended by my reaction.

“Nothing,” I mumbled. “But the fish and chips are getting cold. My old boy will get wild.”

I grated the gears, trying to find first.

“One good thing about one in the oven,” she said. “You can stop worrying about getting pregnant for the next nine months.”

She chuckled, a practised husky sound.

I drove home fast in silence.

As we stepped from the car she lit another cigarette, eyed me coolly, and sniffed.

“Lots of things get cold if you leave 'em too long, Gary,” she called cryptically, as I headed for the front door. “Know what I mean?”

Pat was embittered. Her voice had a constant flat tone. Harsh lines had formed around her mouth. Her eyes were parched. Her skin was taut and pallid. It was as if a searing resentment was ravaging her. She had endured most of Denny's whims over the years because ‘he wasn't a well man'. But his decision to uproot her from Portland had depleted her reserves of tolerance. She made no effort to befriend any of the neighbours. She rarely went outside. She busied herself with housework, approaching it with a punishing doggedness, like an aggrieved menial. I tried to chat with her as I helped with the dishes or dusting or sweeping, but her responses were uncharacteristically terse and discouraging.

The prospect of being a grandmother didn't lift her spirits either, as I would have expected. With our finances in their usual parlous state, she saw a grandchild as just another mouth to feed. To me her indifference towards the approaching birth was an indication of the depth of her depression. I was concerned she might be heading for another breakdown.

I didn't talk to her about it. I didn't know how. Besides, I tried to remain focused on my studies. I was desperate not to give up on that part of my life.

I attended uni from Monday to Friday and often on weekends. Sometimes I drove the family car, an old blue Holden, which had replaced our Austin after I left Portland, but mostly I caught a bus on the same route I used to take from Fairfield, along Oriel Road and through the industrial estate that surrounded Doherty and Waterdale Roads. La Trobe University was like an oasis, a haven amidst factories, high schools, a cemetery, marshlands and insane asylums.

Most of my time was spent in the library, pawing over journals and books, taking copious notes for tutorials. I was a slow reader and a slow learner. The texts were difficult but they kept my mind off domestic matters.

It had been obvious from week one that tertiary education bore little relation to anything I had experienced at school. There was little support or guidance, no obvious boundaries. I had no idea how to skim over texts, scan for relevant details, answer theoretical questions, and there was no classroom teacher to offer me guidance. I read every word. Reread. I tried to make sense of these marks on the pages. Easy enough when they stood alone, but as soon as they were combined with others they became a conundrum, which I laboured to the point of exhaustion to comprehend. I endured terrible anxiety and bouts of self-deprecation. And when I wasn't ridiculing my own intellectual shortcomings I was feeling sorry for myself.

I found a corral in the library where I could hide behind a pile of books and pretend to be a scholar. I spent long hours there, pawing over Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, Marcuse and a dozen or so sundry luminaries, awestruck by the scope of their ambition.

There had been minds—there still were—that thought society could be explained in one majestic seamless theory. It was a comforting notion and perhaps these formidable intellects were merely acting on a tendency that's in all of us: to find order where there could just as easily be none. But what impressed me most was the lengths to which they had gone ensuring their monoliths were consistent with every aspect of society, which included everything done by all the humans who'd ever traipsed the earth. What incredible audacity. To think they believed they had the answer to that, and then to pursue it doggedly for the rest of their lives.

If I leaned towards any of these seers it was Marx. I wanted him to be right, an orderly progression (at least between revolutions which I hoped in future would be brief and bloodless) towards a more equitable, just society, where nobody was master and nobody servant, and everyone got along amicably and could do any job they turned their hand to.

Yet, despite my hopes, I harboured doubts. What I saw everywhere was chaos and caprice. Everything seemed pointless, unless its point was private gain, personal ambition, indulgence, greed.

In idle moments I found myself studying the photo of Karl Marx that accompanied his tomes, trying to discover in that stern biblical face what motivated him. There was something about his face, partly his hairline but mainly his eyes that reminded me of my father. Was the old scholar manic? Was he psychotic? Was he schizophrenic? Was he sociopathic?

Once again I find I have retained scant memory of my sisters. I can't remember offering or seeking any moral support. Perhaps we had a fairly normal relationship, with nothing memorable happening… little or nothing that has traversed the next thirty-five years or so.

My little sister Carol began attending a high school adjacent to the university, so I would drop her off whenever I took the car. She soon made friends with several girls from Heidelberg Heights and Rosanna. I think she was happy enough, once she had settled, but her skin, ravaged by acne and nervous rashes, suggested a different story. As for Jean, who had arrived to live with us shortly after we shifted in, she was swelling by the day. She became rather reclusive, preferring her condition to be a private matter, spending as much time as possible alone and reading in the bedroom she shared with Carol, who only went there to sleep. I suspect she resented Denny's move to Melbourne but like the rest of us she had no say in it; she too became dependent upon the pension money he (and Pat since she had stopped working) received. Whatever the case might have been, I don't recall any tension between her and Denny while we were at Boyd Crescent. They seemed to have worked out some kind of truce. I think he was secretly pleased that she was back with us, as if it vindicated his stance on her waywardness.

In his own way Denny was endeavouring to get a handle on his chronic financial shortcomings and maybe he was attempting some rapprochement with his family too.

For a while he seemed to be trying to moderate his gambling. He limited how much he bet in an afternoon. There was money remaining for food and groceries, and less histrionics when his luck ran out. He even seemed aware of Pat's misery, offering to help out around the house, doing the groceries with her, buying her a bunch of flowers on Mothers' Day, endeavouring to chat with her, although she seldom responded.

One Saturday evening he offered to take her to the trots with him. When she declined he invited me. I accepted in the hope he was trying to improve our strained relations. He never went to pubs so he couldn't ask me to join him for a drink. He never went to the football or the movies. I saw the trots as his offer to socialise. It was territory that was familiar to him. I was prepared to take it as an olive branch. And I was happy to meet him halfway. Perhaps he just hadn't liked kids, had never wanted his own, and now I was growing up a new more agreeable phase was evolving for us. Perhaps we would end up friends after all.

He drove to the Showground on the other side of town and led me into the grandstand where I'd have a decent view.

I was surprised by the casual ambience. Even though I had seen TAB agencies full of punters, gambling had always struck me as an aberration, a neurosis, a rather sad and solitary pursuit. Punters often congregated in TABs or betting yards, but most were reluctant companions. I assumed that was why Denny preferred to use a TAB phone account to the agency, even when it was not much further than the phone box.

The scene at the trots was an altogether different affair. It felt like a festival. Whole families seemed to be there together. It was as if they had come to enjoy the spectacle, the silks and horseflesh glimmering in floodlights. Despite periodic overtures of regimentation through the loud-speaker system, it was casual and relaxed rather than sordid or pathological. Many parents brought their youngest in pyjamas and dressing gowns.

“Your mother'd like this,” Denny said ruefully. “I don't know what's got into her lately.”

“She hates Melbourne.”

He didn't get angry, as I half-expected he would, when he felt like he was being blamed for something. “Well, what could I do, with you down here and your sister about to drop her bundle?”

I wanted to remind him that there was no shame in Jean's condition. Even if she was separated she was still married. Besides, when had he ever taken any notice of community mores and opinion? As for me, I would have been happy boarding at Fleur's for the rest of my university days if he had only forwarded my bursary money. But I held my tongue and shrugged. At no stage did he tell me that Barry Wood had been menacing my mother.

When a race was about to start, everyone's attention gradually turned to the track. Horses pulling sulkies milled around, assembled behind a barrier attached to a ute, and began to pace along the track behind it until at a certain point the ute began to accelerate and the barrier folded away, a signal for the harlequin drivers to urge their chargers forward. I remember the sound more than anything—the exertion of the horses, the hard breathing and the slip of hide against tense straps. For a few minutes the atmosphere around the track changed to a singular intensity, which rose to a crescendo and then was over. Cheering and laughter ensued and people's attention returned to more gregarious matters, as if the race had been a diversion.

In the midst of all this Denny came and went, ascended and descended the stadium, like Sisyphus on the mountain in the essay I had been reading by Albert Camus. Had I not been there he probably would have remained in the betting yard all evening. But I figured that by getting him away from the bookies my presence acted as a restraint on his betting and so served some useful purpose, of which he was aware. To bolster our new-found camaraderie, he offered to place bets for me, offers he found easy to make since it was my bursary money he was using. I declined with a tactful wave of the hand. What unsettled me, though, was the smile he gave me each time he returned. It was so full of hope, as if he wished to say
see what fun we can have together, see what our life could be like, if you would only come my way.

It wouldn't have occurred to him to come my way a little. He showed no interest in my studies, despite the attempts I had made to talk about them. He had never asked me if I had a girlfriend, or even given me a sly wink like a normal father would have done, whenever Suze waylaid me at the front gate. He never remarked on it later, man-to-man, or chuckled at my embarrassment. He had never bothered to watch me play football.